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natural disaster
Thousands Dead as Twin Earthquakes Devastate Syria and Turkey
Thousands of buildings flattened with the death toll certain to rise as rescue crews attempt to reach those trapped in the rubble.
Feb 06, 2023
Thousands of collapsed buildings, widespread destruction, and deep anguish were reported alongside over 2,300 dead and thousands more injured after a pair of earthquakes—an initial 7.8 tremor on the Richter scale in the early morning and another that measured 7.5—devastated Syria and Turkey on Monday.
Amid dozens of aftershocks—and the quakes being also felt in Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories—the full scale of the destruction and the ultimate death toll remains unknown, though early estimates of the dead and wounded were rising by the hour.
According to Turkey's Hurriyet Daily, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described the quakes as the most severe in the nation since 1939.
The first quake occurred just after 4:00 am local time in Kahramanmaras province, north of Gaziantep, near the Syrian border, while the second took place in the southeastern Turkey.
One television crew was reporting on the first quake in the city of Malatya, when the second one hit:
\u201cThis TV crew was broadcasting live when a second magnitude 7.5 earthquake hit Turkey \u2935\ufe0f\u201d— Al Jazeera English (@Al Jazeera English) 1675678564
According to Al-Jazeera:
Rescuers were digging through the rubble of levelled buildings in the city of Kahramanmaras and neighbouring Gaziantep. Crumbled buildings were also reported in Adiyaman, Malatya and Diyarbakir.
The death toll in government-held areas of Syria climbed to 339, according to Syrian state media, with deaths reported in the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Latakia and Tartous.
Around the globe, human rights champions and political leaders offered sympathy to those impacted by the disaster and vowed emergency assistance to both Turkey and Syria.
\u201cThinking about all who will be impacted by this devastating earthquake.\u201d— Rashida Tlaib (@Rashida Tlaib) 1675650440
Agnes Callamard, head of Amnesty International, said her organization was "in deep sorrow" following news of the disaster.
"We extend our deepest condolences to all those who have lost loved ones, and call for the Governments and international community to provide speedy search and relief," Callamard said.
Filippo Grandi, High Commissioner for Refugees at the United Nations, said, "We at UNHCR stand in solidarity with the people of Türkiye and Syria affected by today's devastating earthquake and are ready to help provide urgent relief to the survivors through our field teams wherever possible."
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Katrina and Conservative Failure, Ten Years Later
Aug 19, 2015
Ten years later, the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina is a heartrending example of the consequences and human cost of conservative failure.
Ten years after the poorest and most vulnerable in the areas hit by Hurricane Katrina were left to fend for themselves, the George W. Bush administration's response to the natural disaster stands as the archetypical conservative failure. The city of New Orleans became a crucible of suffering and a searing example of the flesh and blood consequences of people who disdain government gaining control of government and ensuring that government cannot function when it is most needed. After being hit by Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a conservative ideology designed to leave it and its poorest, most vulnerable citizens in ruins.
Katrina represents both conservatism's most devastating failure and its most catastrophic success. Conservatism promises small government, widespread prosperity, irreproachable morality, increased liberty, and security. Conservatism fails to fulfill these promises because it cannot. Nor does it intend to.
Even now, some conservatives cheer Katrina and its aftermath as a catastrophic success to be exploited as an opportunity to implement conservative policies. Even as thousands suffered the consequences of a failed government response in the aftermath of Katrina, now former Rep. Richard Baker (R, Louisiana) was overheard telling lobbyists, "We finally cleaned out public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
Ten years later, Chicago Tribune conservative columnist Kristen McQueary was almost gleeful about Katrina and the impact of the failed federal response. McQueary wrote that she is "envious" because "Hurricane Katrina gave a great American city a rebirth." The devastating losses suffered by most poor people of color in the Gulf region were just "what it took to hit the reset button in New Orleans." McQueary openly wishes for "an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury" to hit Chicago, creating an opportunity to accomplish several conservative agenda items: slashing the city budget, forcing unpaid furloughs, and trashing labor contracts. Never mind that thousands will have to die, and hundreds of thousands will be displaced to make it happen.
McQueary has been excoriated on Twitter, but her remarks merely reflect the conservative ideology that led to the federal government's abandonment of Katrina's poorest, most vulnerable victims, when conservatives slash government budgets, whether municipal or federal, programs that serve low-income Americans are usually subject to the deepest cuts.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is a prime example. Long before Katrina was even a tropical depression, conservative disdain for government led to the defunding and mismanagement of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). As FEMA shrunk, its ability to help those in need during national emergencies and natural disasters shrank with it.
By 2001, FEMA had been captured by conservative ideologues. George W. Bush's first FEMA director, Joseph Allbaugh, told a Senate appropriations subcommittee, "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management." The agency was downgraded from cabinet level and subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security. In 2005 came the death blow when it was announced that FEMA would "officially" lose its disaster relief function. Conservatives still have FEMA marked for extinction; 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney told CNN's John King that he would effectively gut FEMA and "give it back to the states."
And if the poor suffer as a result of conservative policies? So what. Even as images of the human suffering in New Orleans caused outrage around the world, conservative pundits declared it was no more than what the poor, largely black and brown, people left behind in the city deserved.
- Fox News host Bill O'Reilly called the tragedy a "teachable moment" and declared that students should be required to watch videos of the poor people abandoned in Katrina's aftermath and that teachers should pose two questions: "Do you want to be poor? And do you believe the U.S. government can protect you if you are poor?"
- Columnist George Will suggested that then-Senator Barack Obama note some simple rules for avoiding poverty: "Graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal."
O'Reilly and Will were responding to Obama's effective critique of the conservative worldview, which he repeated at the 2006 Take Back America conference:
Now, let me say this - I don't think that George Bush is a bad man. I think he loves his country. I don't think this administration is full of stupid people - I think there are a lot of smart folks in there. The problem isn't that their philosophy isn't working the way it's supposed to - it's that it is. It's that it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
The reason they don't believe government has a role in solving national problems is because they think government is the problem. That we're better off if we dismantle it - if we divvy it up into individual tax breaks, hand 'em out, and encourage everyone to go buy your own health care, your own retirement security, your own child care, their own schools, your own private security force, your own roads, their own levees...
It's called the Ownership Society in Washington. But in our past there has been another term for it - Social Darwinism - every man or women for him or herself.
It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford - life isn't fair. It allows us to say to the child who didn't have the foresight to choose the right parents or be born in the right suburb - pick yourself up by your bootstraps. It lets us say to the guy who worked twenty or thirty years in the factory and then watched his plant move out to Mexico or China - we're sorry, but you're on your own.
It's a bracing idea. It's a tempting idea. And it's the easiest thing in the world.
But there's just one problem. It doesn't work. It ignores our history. Yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on individual initiative, on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, of mutual responsibility. The idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity.
The levees weren't the only thing that failed in New Orleans ten years ago. Conservatism failed the city's poorest, most vulnerable citizens in their darkest hours. The difference is that nobody planned for the levees to fail. They weren't intentionally designed to fail the way that conservatism seems to be.
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Lessons To Be Learned From New Orleans-Style Education Reform
Jun 26, 2015
As the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, you can count on seeing a lot of glowing stories about the great education progress made in New Orleans since a natural disaster killed nearly 2,000 people, emptied a beloved city, and gave public school reformers what they always wanted: a "clean slate" to have their way unencumbered by the messiness of school boards, local politics, and the voices of teachers and parents.
It really was the "best thing that could have happened," to use Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's now infamous quote, if you were a fan of creating something that would have little to no consequence for your family.
You'll also hear many more politicians and pundits touting the NOLA model of education reform for school districts everywhere else.
You should be very suspicious of this marketing campaign.
Advocates for the NOLA model claim it has gotten "results," but what passes for results is subject to a mad game of interpreting data in a way to make a case rather that to reveal any real truth. Reform advocates like to say they've created a better system, but it is a system that seems void of democracy and deaf to the voices of teachers, parents, and students who have to live with the system. And to those people who initially backed the plan for NOLA school reform - but who demurred from becoming blatant propagandists for it - there now appears to be a sense of frustration and disappointment with a realization that there's a long way to go before this product should go to market.
A Top Down "Solution"
First, a refresher ...
After Katrina, as NPR reported recently, "an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed," and in "a series of quick decisions," all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city's schools were handed over to a state entity called the "Recovery School District" which is governed by unelected officials. Only a "few elite schools were ... allowed to maintain their selective admissions schools."
One reason this action was able to take place so quickly is because it was planned in the immediate aftermath of the storm while the city was in complete disarray. As an article in The Times-Picayune reports, a "lost bit of history" recently surfaced revealing a hidden chain of events that sealed the fate of New Orleans public schools.
After the storm, Mayor Ray Nagin was reluctant to open schools "anytime soon," and the state education department told local school officials there would be no state funding available for locally run schools.
This essentially made charter schools the only early option, which Sen. Mary Landrieu could help make possible with federal funds. The U.S. Department of Education had money to start charter schools, but nothing to reopen traditional schools. So, the School Board opened the first charter schools, and by the beginning of 2006, "the structure that still holds today was set," with an elite group of selected admission schools, privately operated independent charter schools, and the vast remainder of schools operated by the state-run Recovery School District, which would convert those schools to charter management.
What's wrong with this of course is that the people of New Orleans - especially those most chronically disempowered and underserved - had little voice in the remaking of their schools and are still virtually without democratic representation in their schools today.
As NOLA public school parent activist Karran Harper Royal explains, in an interview with the journal Rethinking Schools, "I'm no defender of the status quo; before Katrina we had problems, but there were also successes. Having an elected school board created ways for the public to participate. When Katrina hit, I was serving on the search committee for a new superintendent. For years I served on the disciplinary review committee. ... Charters purport to give parents and teachers greater power ... But you have little real voice."
This is where advocates for the NOLA education model interrupt to say, "But this is about the kids ... Look at the results!"
Data Obscura
In addition to the glowing rhetoric about "progress" in New Orleans since the storm, you should get ready to be hit by an onslaught of data, lots and lots of data, "proving" the case.
But engaging in an analytic discussion about that data can be like arguing with your teenager about whether or not he cleaned his room - it depends on how you look at it.
On any given day in the ongoing narrative about New Orleans schools, you see a headline "New Orleans school changes worked" alongside another "The New Orleans Model: Praised But Unproven." Often such contrasting articles will make their case using the very same statistics.
When you get past the headlines though, you find you're lost in a maze of evidence that could lead to multiple conclusions. For instance, in the article praising what's happened in New Orleans, you learn that some of that "progress" in NOLA RSD is associated with student demographics in the city have changed, significant amounts of critical data have been left out, and huge gaps in achievement between low-income kids and their more well-to-do peers remain.
The second, more skeptical appraisal finds "there are positive signs," but at the expense of some really disturbing outcomes, including a recent report that "found one-third of principals acknowledged trying to exclude certain students and woo others to boost test scores."
Engaging with a NOLA RSD official, as I have, can be an excruciating exercise in disassembling a Rube Goldberg contraption to see if you can refit the parts into something that goes straight from point A to B.
For instance, claims about increases in percentages of students on grade level in NOLA RSD have to be held in light of the fact the state changed the formula and scale for measuring grade level performance from 2012-2013, which artificially inflated the district's performance. Declarations about the schools scoring better on state A-F report cards should be recast with the understanding that State Superintendent John White changed the scoring system to help engineer that "improvement."
Classroom teacher and historian John Thompson goes through this frustrating exercise as well on the popular blogsite Alexander Russo's This Week in Education. Responding to an article "How New Orleans Made Charter Schools Work" for Washington Monthly, Thompson calls out the article's claims that charter schools in the district receive less per student funding. Turn out, what they failed to include in their calculation is the "additional $3,500 per student funding provided for post-Katrina schools."
Even a statistic as seemingly simple as high school graduation rates becomes a slippery eel in the hands of NOLA-style reform propagandist, as researcher Adam Johnson found when he looked into the matter. On his blog, he painstakingly recounts his personal quest to find the source of an often-cited "fact" that NOLA RSD graduation rates improved 50 percent, from 54.4 percent to 77.8 percent, from 2004-2013. His search led him to the discovery that "graduation rates date back to 2005 only." The 54 percent is a complete fabrication that got passed around, like in a game of telephone, from a dubious source through a series of politicians and media folks wanting to tell their version of the New Orleans story.
Louisiana schoolteacher and author Mercedes Schneider took this search further. She finds, that the "50 percent improvement in graduation rate," based on the erroneous pre-Katrina metric, masks the fact New Orleans RSD graduation rates experienced a steep drop between 2011-12 and 2012-13. Further, the gap between graduation rates for NOLA RSD and Louisiana in general is widening.
Don't Buy It
In the Politico article cited above, reporter Caitlin Emma finds, "Mayors and governors from Nevada to Tennessee have sought to replicate the New Orleans model by converting struggling public schools into privately run charters."
The latest state to buy the NOLA snake oil is Georgia, where Governor Nathan Deal has pushed through an initiative to create a new state agency to take over struggling school districts and do to them what Louisiana did to New Orleans. An op-ed in a Georgia news outlet sounds a word of caution about this.
J. Celeste Lay, an associate professor of political science at Tulane University, explains that the great sucking sound you hear from NOLA is the siphoning up of public tax dollars into private pockets. "The principal at my nearby charter school makes over $300,000 per year, a 246 percent increase from her salary before the school was chartered. For-profit management companies charge schools 15-20 percent of school revenue. Taxpayer dollars go into hefty administrator salaries and corporate profits instead of reducing class sizes, upgrading facilities, or recruiting and maintaining high-quality teachers."
And about those "great results?" "The average ACT score of NOLA RSD's class of 2014 was 15.7," she notes, "far lower than the minimum entrance requirements at LSU and other public universities. Reform advocates tout growth in these scores, but such growth is neither entirely linear nor significant."
"Education reform in New Orleans," she concludes, "provides more of a model of what not to do."
Other cautious observers of the NOLA model highlight the pitfalls of a top-down takeover model that too often leaves the interest of poor and working-class families behind.
Speaking at a recent conclave for researchers and policy mavens focused on the New Orleans education story, Marquette University professor and school choice advocate Howard Fuller remarks (on video) that the "positive things" that have happened have "happened at a cost." The "cost" he describes includes a general sense of community disempowerment in which parents and kids feel they lack control over some decisions being made about their education destinies. "There's no uniform opinion," he states, about what has been accomplished in New Orleans and how the schools district should go forward from here.
Another school choice advocate and former New Orleans charter school operator, Professor Andre Perry, who had some involvement in forming the New Orleans school district we see today, is harsher in his assessment. In an interview with freelance writer and education commentator Jennifer Berkshire, he says, "The improvements - and I do think there are some improvements - are so marginal when you consider the investment ... And by the way, the improvements may not even necessarily be because of the reforms."
Perry also sees the "many nefarious ways" that advocates for the NOLA model present their case for closing gaps and showing gains, and he questions whether those statistical measures are over-emphasized compared to other important values - including community empowerment, democratic engagement, inclusion, and racial diversity.
His conclusion is, "You don't ever want to oversell something ... When you're constantly saying 'now is better than the past,' or 'now is worse for the future,' it's just not a helpful argument if you're really sincere about making change."
So what are the lessons to be learned from New Orleans style education reform?
- When even the most ardent school choice advocates are disappointed with what's been accomplished in the American school system offering the ultimate in choice, you have to be skeptical about making choice a remedy for education problems.
- When you realize the many ways statistics such as test score results, school grades, and graduation rates can be bent and distorted to make an ideological argument, you have to wonder whether those data points are adequate, even worthwhile, measures of something as complex as children's educational development.
- When you see a way of doing school impressed on a community by strident outsiders, you have to be concerned whether the cost of usurping democracy is worth whatever gains are being promised.
- And when someone comes to your community to sell you on the education reform model created for New Orleans, don't buy it.
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