Is the U.S. on the wrong side of history in Bahrain?

Posted By Josh Rogin Tuesday, December 6, 2011 - 12:27 PM Share

President Barack Obama's administration has sided with Bahrain's ruling regime over its domestic protest movement more clearly than in any other country affected by the Arab Spring. But that position is unwise and unsustainable, according to one of Bahrain's leading human rights activists, who visited Washington last week.

Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, came to Washington to receive the Woodrow Wilson Center's 2011 Ion Ratiu Democracy Award for his work documenting human rights abuses conducted by the Bahraini ruling family's security forces since protesters took to the streets in the capital of Manama in February. He was not invited to the State Department for any meetings whatsoever. He did visit the National Security Council, and met with senior director for democracy Gayle Smith, but wasn't given time by any official who works directly on Bahrain.

Rajab sat down on Dec. 4 for an exclusive interview with The Cable. His main message was that the Obama administration's defense of the Bahraini government, including a new push to sell it more weapons, is sowing seeds of distrust and resentment of the United States among the Bahraini people. He urged the Obama administration to use its influence in Bahrain to press the regime for improvements on human rights.

Rajab said that the United States was repeating the mistakes of the past by siding with a minority regime that has brutalized its Shiite majority population. Here are some excerpts:

JR: What is your main message to the Washington foreign policy community?

NR: What I have realized is that there's a difference between the way the American government and the American people look at the Arab uprisings or the Arab revolution. I have received great support from American civil society, human rights groups, etc., in support of the Bahraini revolution. But that is totally different than the position of the United States government, which has disappointed many people in the Gulf region. And they have seen how the U.S. has acted differently and has different responses for different countries. There is full support for revolutions in countries where [the U.S. government] has a problem with their leadership, but when it comes to allied dictators in the Gulf countries, they have a much softer position and that was very upsetting to many people in Bahrain and the Gulf region. This will not serve your long strategic interest, to strengthen and continue your relations with dictators and repressive regimes.... You should have taken a lesson from Tunisia and Egypt, but now you are repeating the same thing by ignoring all those people struggling for democracy and human rights.... Those dictators will not be there forever. Relationships should be maintained with people, not families.

JR: The Obama administration says they are encouraging both sides to work together toward reform. Do you not see that as helpful?

NR: The U.S. is more influential in Bahrain than the United Nations. If they are serious about something, they could do it. They have lots of means to pressure the Bahraini government but so far they are soft. They act as if both sides are equal. You have people fighting for democracy and human rights and struggling for social justice. Then you have a repressive government with an army. You can't speak as if they can be treated in an equal manner. It's the government that is killing people. It's the government that is committing the crimes. The pressure should be put on the government. All of the statements by [Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton and [President] Barack Obama have no impact on the ground because the government was not really being forced to listen to it.... This government has to be told that their relationship with the United States is not a green light to commit crimes, because that's how it is understood by the government. And no one in the United States has told them, no, it's not like that.

JR: What do you say to those who argue that revolution in Bahrain risks instability and the rise of anti-Americanism?

NR: This is the image of the United States in our country: that this superpower supports dictators and doesn't want democracy in our region, because they [are] told that democracy would not serve their interests. They were misled by governments in our region that democracy will bring extremists to power who will fight against U.S. interests. Democracy is not against anybody's interests. Democracy is about living together, sharing together, tolerance, working together, and that's what we are fighting for.

JR: What's the significance of the report of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, which was released last week?

NR: It was not perfect, it was not an independent group, it was a group made by the government. But a big part of the report is good and talks about the abuses we have been talking about... It needs to be implemented and I don't see so far any positive reaction from the government. They appointed a commission to implement the report, a big part of which is made up of people who were part of the problem. Here is where the United States needs to speak, to tell them not to waste this opportunity to create real reform.

JR: What does the U.S. sale of $53 million worth of new weapons say to you and your fellow activists?

NR: This is the hypocrisy, this is the double standard. You can't ask Russia to stop selling arms to Syria at the same time you are selling arms to Bahrain while they are killing their own people. How do you convince the Bahraini people this is for their own benefit? What message are you trying to send to the Bahraini people when you try to sell arms? Even now, there are people in the State Department who want to push this sale. Rather than this, there should be more sanctions on the Bahraini government.

JR: The Bahraini foreign minister told us in an interview that the police, not the military, have been dealing with the protests. Is it true?

NR: The military has taken part in suppressing the protests. They have killed people, they have tortured people, they have arrested people, they have detained people. They have established checkpoints and humiliated people at checkpoints, raided houses, robbed houses, demolished mosques. They have taken part in every crime committed in the past months.

JR: You are not seeking total regime change, so what is the end state you want to see in Bahrain?

NR: When the people of Bahrain came out on Feb. 14, they didn't want to overthrow the government, they wanted to reform the government. They want elected government. We've had a corrupt prime minister for over 40 years. We want to separate the government from the royal family. We want a parliament that has power... We want to have an end to the corruption, we want human rights violations to stop, we want sectarian discrimination to be stopped. But the resistance of the government has created a movement to overthrow the government. And if they will continue to resist reforms, that movement to overthrow the government will increase.

JR: What has the government done to you to try to silence you?

NR: They have attacked my house on a weekly basis, you can see it on YouTube. They attacked me, 25 masked men kidnapped me from my home last March. They blindfolded me, handcuffed me, beat me, then took me back home. This has happened a few times. My house is targeted, my mother's house is targeted, all because of my work. But I am better off than the others, because I am free and not dead, because there are people who have been killed and who are behind bars now.

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EXPLORE:ARAB WORLD, DIPLOMACY, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, SAUDI ARABIA, STATE DEPARTMENT

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ILOVEKNOWLEDGE

4:34 AM ET

December 7, 2011

The fact is..

Bahrain would not be free, it would become a satellite for the Islamic Republic of Terror.

ZAINABNAVEED11

1:09 PM ET

December 7, 2011

This is the fact.

Yes this is the fact that US is going on the wrong side of history.
Marc Tucker is someone I recall being a major disinformation source for education deform. He just released a report for NCEE titled “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” that shows a lot of crippled logic but at least describes the issues fairly accurately. Compared to the stuff we get from Gates, Broad and Duncan that is totally clueless, Tucker at least seems to have been in a few classrooms.

The problem is that his “report” is basically polemic with no reference to research or reality. Still he looks at what occurred in several top scoring nations and compares it with what is happening in the U.S. and is fairly blatant in saying what the U.S. is doing is crazy.

Toward the end of his “report” Tucker proclaims “It turns out that neither the researchers whose work is reported on in this paper nor the analysts of the OECD PISA data have found any evidence that any country that leads the world’s education performance league tables has gotten there by implementing any of the major agenda items that dominate the education reform agenda in the United States. We include in this list the use of market mechanismssuch as charter schools and vouchers, the identification and support of education entrepreneurs to disrupt the system, and the use of student performance data on standardized tests to identify teachers and principals who are then rewarded on that basis for the value they add to a student’s education or who are punished because they fail to do so.”

Even closer to the end Tucker concedes “The government of Ontario did not predicate their reform program on replacing its current teacher workforce with a new workforce. They did not think they needed to. They asked themselves how they could get much better results from the workforce already in place. The answer they came up with was to make peace with the teachers unions that had been demonized by the previous administration and with the teachers that had been so badly demoralized and they invited them to join them in thinking through a reform program that would improve student performance.”

While describing ventures taken by countries such as Singapore, Shanghai, Finland, Canada, and Japan he interjects “It is important to point out that the United States has, in this realm, something that these other countries do not have, and it is not entirely clear that it is a good thing. The idea of grade-by-grade national testing has no takers in the top-performing countries.”

Tucker then notes “The federal government now requires tests in English and mathematics at many grade levels and has tied important consequences to student performance on those tests, thus heavily biasing the curriculum toward the teaching of these subjects and away from the teaching of other subjects in the curriculum that these other countries view as critical.”

He describes the Common Core program as mostly irrelevant and states “The two consortia are betting heavily on the ability of computer-scored tests to measure the more complex skills and the creativity and capacity for innovation on which the future of our economy is likely to depend. No country that is currently out-performing the United States is doing that or is even considering doing that, because they are deeply skeptical that computer-scored tests or examinations can adequately measure the acquisition of the skills and knowledge they are most interested in.”

Tucker focuses a lot of attention on the poor working conditions and the low status of teachers in the U.S. compared to these other countries, “At the International Summit on the Teaching Profession convened by Secretary Duncan in New York City in March 2011, the Minister of Education of Singapore offered the observation that the goal of compensation policy ought to be to ‘take compensation off the table’ as a consideration when able young people are making career decisions. There was wide agreement on that point among the ministers of the other top-performing countries around the table.”

Tucker essentially dismisses the Teach For America program and harps on the practice in the U.S. of not requiring teachers to have a good background in the subject they teach. He suggests “There is no clearer sign of society’s lack of respect for teachers and teaching than its view that, in the end, what really matters is having a warm body in front of their children, irrespective of that person’s qualifications to teach. The best performing nations do not do this.” Noting later “We behave as if we believe that only a few weeks of training is needed to do what they have to do, a sure sign that we do not believe teaching is a profession at all.”

Tucker seems to understand that teaching involves more than just spewing information. He notes “The Japanese use an approach to instruction that can reasonably be described as whole
class instruction or large group instruction but is definitely not lecturing.” And later “Finland, on the other hand, has been pressing hard in recent years toward a teaching and learning style in which the student takes increasing responsibility for the learning process.”

Tucker describes the U.S. system as stuck in the old sorting model and suggests that if we expect ALL students to reach some level of excellence: “As we have already noted, this means that financial resources are allocated so that students who need more help are allocated more financial resources so they can get that help.”

Tucker repeatedly points to the reduction of teacher oversight in these excelling countries and the importance of respecting the professionalism of teachers who have been trained to exercise this authority. Tucker says many of the things about professional development and collaborative teaching that I have suggested on EDDRA2.

He notes: “In Japanese schools, the faculty work together to develop new courses or redesign existing courses to make them more engaging. Once developed, that course is demonstrated by one of the teachers and critiqued by the others and revised until the faculty is happy with it. Then a particularly capable teacher will demonstrate it for others and critique their practice when they in turn teach it. Throughout, the development process calls on the latest research. Teachers who get very good at leading this work are often called on to demonstrate their lessons to other schools and even to teachers in other districts and provinces. In this way, instructional development and professional development are merged and professional development becomes an integral part of the process of improving instruction in the school, informed by the latest and best research. In fact, Japanese teachers are provided with research skills in their pre-service training, so that this local, teacher-led development process is supported by the kind of research skills needed by teachers to make sophisticated judgments about the effectiveness of their local development work. In the United States, teachers are generally the objects of research rather than participants in the research process itself. The topics for professional development are often chosen by administrators in the central office rather than by teachers seeking to improve their own practice on terms of their choosing. Because the topics chosen for professional development are typically not the topics the teachers would have chosen, they often perceive the professional development they get as not particularly helpful.”

He recognizes that the U.S. system has been deformed by the accountability imposed on it, stating “Teachers who teach complex skills to their students that are not measured on the standardized test they must give are sometimes penalized because they are not sticking to the schedule for teaching much lower basic skills. These are all examples ofperverse incentives, that is, positive incentives for lowering, not raising, achievement. Our education system is rife with such perverse incentives.”

Tucker also echo what I have written here in EDDRA2 several times about the structure of education being the primary problem. Tucker states that the U.S. is always coming up with new programs that rarely accomplish anything and concludes “The one thing that could have a very large effect-the design of the system itself-is no one’s responsibility.”

I hesitate to recommend the essay because of its polemic nature but I was impressed that Tucker was not the standard idiot that seems to be a fundamental requirement of the Broad/Gates/Duncan groups. He presents a list of recommendations that he calls an “agenda for individual states” that struck me as being somewhat rational. Having observed the totally insane litany of “reforms” over that past few decades that were totally divorced from the reality of schools, it was somewhat shocking to read something rational. It is largely a rational approach to upgrading the status quo, one can find much to argue with but that is what I found most shocking: it is rational enough to argue with.

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