Category: reason

At Soko ya Nadhif market in Garissa, Kenya, the ones who come to buy the drugs are men. They arrive early in the morning, sometimes before dawn, waiting in the hot dark air for a good deal. New white Land Cruisers pull into the market, kicking up clouds of red dust behind them. The ones who rush to offload the cargo are men, too. They toss heavy bags of leaves over their shoulders before sorting them into sections: Sareye, Khadija, Fatuma. Each bag is marked with a woman’s name. Because although almost everyone who comes to Soko ya Nadhif market is a man, the ones who sell the drugs are women.

Sareye Budul Shafat, 52, is a soft-spoken mother of 10 who favors neon technicolor hijabs. While she calls herself a businesswoman, her gold jewelry and poker face hint at something more illicit.

Shafat is the founder of the Al-Amin Women’s Group, a collective organization of 10 women—mostly single mothers and grandmothers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s—who dominate Garissa’s khat industry. Attacks on the industry come from all sides, so women in the khat business are evasive about how much money they make. Shafat claims to bring in 20,000 Kenyan shillings (about $193) per month. But her shoes, her accessories, and the size of her house, as well as the number of men and women who call her “boss,” suggest much higher earnings.

Khat—a stimulant leaf from the Catha edulis plant that is criminalized in the United States and most of Europe but wildly popular in East Africa—has somehow become women’s work. Khat leaves are usually chewed, sometimes with bubble gum or peanuts to mask the herbal taste. Although the vast majority of khat users are men, women play an unmistakably dominant role in its production and sale. The Al-Amin Women’s Group dominates the Garissa market, but women’s influence in the khat (also called miraa) industry has deep roots throughout the region. In Somaliland, a self-declared breakaway state in the Horn of Africa, an estimated 72 percent of khat vendors are women. In Ethiopia, one of the country’s richest people, Suhura Ismail, turned a roadside miraa stand into an international business empire with its own fleet of charter planes that transport the drug between Jijiga, a city in the Somali Regional State of eastern Ethiopia, and Somalia itself. (Like a boss, Suhura named the airline after herself.)

In Kenya, the economic power of khat is so huge that in 2016, when Somalia banned imports of the drug for a single week, it cost Kenyan farmers millions of dollars. Today, the khat trade brings the latter country an estimated $400,000 every day.

Shafat got into the business for the same reasons any other good entrepreneur does: instinct and need. In 1997, her husband, a former truck driver, was left unable to work by advancing glaucoma, the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide. Desperate to support their children, Shafat tried selling secondhand clothes. But business wasn’t good, and Shafat couldn’t even make enough to pay back her family’s 5,000 shillings ($48) in debt.

“I might stay in the [clothes] emporium and not sell anything for three days,” Shafat recalled. “I decided I would rather have a quick loss or profit than wait three, five, seven days for nothing.”

During the months she languished at the clothes market, Shafat noticed that some women would regularly come in with no husbands but an endless supply of money to spend. She decided to ask about the secret to their independent success. The industry she discovered would change her life.

Criminalization

Khat is an enigma: People can’t seem to agree whether it’s dangerous or not. It has been likened to everything from coffee to cocaine. In Hong Kong, the leaf is regarded as so risky that traffickers risk a fine of up to HK$5 million ($623,411 in U.S. dollars) and life imprisonment. Even the Netherlands, famous for its permissive drug use policies, banned khat in 2012. But in Canada, where the substance is illegal, a young woman who brought 34 kilograms of khat into the country in 2012 was able to successfully appeal her arrest on the grounds that the drug is not harmful.

“This is an important ruling, because it recognized that while khat is illegal in Canada, there is no empirical evidence that this drug is harmful to the individual or the community at large,” defense lawyer Mark Halfyard, who argued the appeal, told Toronto’s The Star at the time. “There is a body of scientific literature that suggests khat is significantly less harmful on an individual level and in terms of the social costs than alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana.”

But prohibition has addictive qualities, and the war on miraa is self-reinforcing. In his 2007 book The Khat Controversy, author David Anderson recounts the story of how a businesswoman named Yasmin moved from Somalia to Kenya in the 1970s and became one of the first people to export the drug to the United Kingdom. After the 2012 Dutch ban, the British government announced its own plans to criminalize the leaf. That move came despite a 2013 report from the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that found “insufficient evidence” that khat caused health problems and “no evidence” that the leaf was linked to serious or organized crime.

“On the basis of the available evidence, the overwhelming majority of Council members consider that khat should not be controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971,” the report concluded. “Although there may be a correlation or association between the use of khat and various negative social indicators, it is not possible to conclude that there is any causal link.”

Opponents of the ban argued that, since khat was almost exclusively popular with East African and Yemeni immigrant communities, the criminalization of khat would be, in effect, the criminalization of specific ethnic minorities. But members of the British-Somali diaspora had mixed feelings about the ban: Some supported it, saying a prohibition would promote health and cultural integration.

“Khat has been slowly killing our community, but no one has paid any attention,” a U.K.-based former khat user named Abukar Awali told The Christian Science Monitor. “It’s no exaggeration to say it is preventing us from integrating. When you chew, you don’t work or meet anyone apart from Somalis.” Awali later traveled to East Africa to campaign for the British ban to be adopted elsewhere.

But the comparisons between khat and clearly legal substances such as alcohol, tobacco, and coffee were hard to ignore. One survey of British Somalis in London found that 90 percent would prefer their children use khat than alcohol, and 77 percent would prefer they use khat than cigarettes. There were also concerns that the British ban would be an economic blow to East Africa: In 2013, a group of Kenyan lawmakers led by Florence Kajuju, a member of the Parliament of Kenya, urged the British government not to “condemn” the Kenyan farmers and exporters who relied on the trade.

Prohibition

Nevertheless, it became a criminal offense to buy, sell, or chew khat in the U.K. on June 24, 2014. The loss of tax revenue has been estimated at 150 million pounds ($182 million) over 10 years, on top of the blow to jobs and businesses.

The British decision had an immediate impact on Kenya’s khat export market. Before the ban, an estimated 20 tons of the drug arrived at London’s Heathrow airport each day, most of it from Kenya. Khat had been a huge boost to that country’s economy. In 2010 alone, it was responsible for 12.7 million pounds ($15.4 million) of remittances to Kenya from the United Kingdom. For the people and communities that had relied on the British market, such as small towns in the picturesque highlands near Meru, the sixth-largest city in Kenya, the effect of the ban was devastating. One exporter told The Guardian that his monthly income plummeted from 2,100 pounds per month to 250.

The creeping criminalization of khat has become a political issue on the African continent as well. “What happens in the Somali diaspora does cycle back to East Africa,” says Neil Carrier, a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Bristol and expert in the Kenyan khat industry. “Those debates weren’t isolated to the U.K.” In Uganda, efforts to criminalize khat—known there as mairungi—have been a source of heated debate since 2014. In Kenya, criminalization campaigns have largely happened at the local level. Lamu, a town northeast of Mombasa, for instance, has been an epicenter of attempts to ban the sale of the leaf since 2001. In May 2019, Nyandarua County Governor Francis Kimemia announced plans to prohibit sale and consumption in his county.

Drug prohibition tends to hit women who work in the industry harder than it hits men. A report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that, globally, the proportion of women who are in prison for drug-related crimes is higher than the proportion of men—possibly because it is easier for police to target workers in lower-level stages of the drug industry, such as cultivation, who are more likely to be female. It may also be that women in the drug industry are less able to afford fines or bail.

Prohibition’s particularly insidious effect on women is evident in Kenya, too. Although khat is legal right now, a staggering 64 percent of women in the country who are currently in prison are there for brewing and selling alcohol without a license. So when local politicians call for banning khat, women in the industry worry.

“We are very concerned about prohibition,” says Isabela Gacheri, 52, who grows khat on a quarter-acre farm near Meru. The plant is so important to the economic survival of the region that even schools and churches there support themselves on the proceeds from small gardens. “They say miraa is a drug, but you cannot compare miraa to a drug like marijuana or cigarettes. It’s more like coffee or tea,” she says.

Gacheri theorizes that calls to ban khat are a specific attack on the women, like her, who support their families with the leaf. “They are jealous of the money we are getting,” she says. “They have a problem with women in the business. It scares them.”

Condemnation

Shafat, the founder of the Al-Amin Women’s Group, lives in a house that is furnished a lot like your grandmother’s house—if your grandmother were a Kenyan-Somali drug tycoon. The throw pillows are soft, the color palette is warm, and the cardamom tea is mouth-puckeringly sweet.

Shafat isn’t scary at all. But she has some scary stories. 

“We always hear threats from al-Shabab,” she said, referring to the Al Qaeda–linked terrorist group that prohibits khat under its own harsh interpretation of Sharia law. “The day before yesterday, we had to run away from the market because we heard a rumor they were going to attack.” (In 2018, five people were killed and another 10 were wounded when al-Shabab attacked a khat market 55 miles north of Mogadishu.)

Two days before the rumored attack at the Garissa market, Shafat says, one of her distributors, a middle-aged man named Abdi Hirig, was abducted by the terrorist group in Somalia. “My phone rang, and they said: ‘Don’t bother sending his miraa today. He has been taken.'”

In some ways, those terrorist threats are less worrying to women in the khat industry than are standard religious objections to the drug—and to the subverted gender roles that the women who sell it represent. Many influential Islamic leaders regard the leaf as makruh (detested or discouraged) or haram (forbidden). That stigma trickles down to women in the industry. In Eastleigh, Nairobi’s predominantly Somali neighborhood, there is a rumor that when a woman who had made her fortune in the khat business tried to make a charitable donation to the local mosque, she was turned away.

“Women involved in crime are more stigmatized than men in society,” says Heidi Grundetjern, an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Villanova University who specializes in women’s roles in drug markets. “We often say that they are doubly deviant: Not only are they breaking the law and receive stigma related to that, but they also break with society’s normative expectations of what it means to be a woman.” In Kenya, that often means that miraa money is considered “dirty,” and so are the women who support their families with it.

“Islamically, [the drug] is haram,” said Halima Haji, 53, a mother of six and anti-khat activist in Garissa. “The women who work in that business don’t even care that they’re spoiling other people’s kids, so long as they get the money. Nobody likes them.” This year, Haji successfully campaigned to get a popular Garissa khat garden called “The Shade” shut down. The garden had previously hosted roughly 50 customers a day in a beer garden–like atmosphere.

To an extent, Haji is correct to assume that some of the women in the khat industry don’t worry about the drug’s effect on kids. “Miraa doesn’t spoil anything,” says Shafat, scoffing at the implication. “I’ve got five boys and five girls, and none of them chew. It’s all about how you raise them. Miraa doesn’t spoil people—people spoil themselves.” Shafat says she is proud of the way khat has enabled her to provide for her family, including paying for a university education for all of her kids, without needing to rely on her disabled husband.

“I hail single mothers who work in this business and take care of their children,” she says. “We do everything. We pay the kids’ school fees. We cook their food. We do everything.”

Regional politics also pose a threat. In 2019, as disputes between Kenya and Somalia over their maritime boundary escalated, the Kenyan khat export industry took a hit. According to a statement from Kimathi Munjuri, the spokesman for the Nyambene Miraa Traders Association, khat flights from Kenya to Somalia dropped to a low of four per day from the usual 20. He added that new Kenyan tax laws have provoked a shift in the Somali market toward khat exporters in Ethiopia.

Competition

In addition to competition from Ethiopian farmers and exporters, in recent years muguka—a different variety of the Catha edulis plant—has emerged to challenge khat’s formerly unquestioned dominance as Kenya’s social drug of choice. Muguka is cheap, strong, and trendy—so trendy, in fact, that the mostly middle-aged and senior women who sell miraa say they can’t diversify into muguka. People just won’t buy it from them.

“It’s not a job for elderly women,” says Khadija Dabar, 52, another mother of 10 and the current chairwoman of the Al-Amin Women’s Group. “Muguka has taken Garissa by storm, but it’s a job for youth.”

But Shafat, the businesswoman who built an empire from nothing, refuses to fail. She has already launched a new collective of female entrepreneurs, called the Upendo Women’s Group. This time, they specialize in soap, bleach, and disinfectant. Every month, Shafat reinvests 10,000 Kenyan shillings ($96) of her khat profits into the soap business—just in case.

“You know what women are like,” she says. “Even if miraa goes down, we won’t.”

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Additional reporting was provided by NASIBO KABALE, a reporter with the Nation Media Group, the biggest media house in East and Central Africa. This article was reported in partnership with the Fuller Project.

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Last week, Oregon’s state liquor control board banned the addition of an increasingly popular ingredient to the alcohol beverages it regulates. The Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC), which regulates both alcohol and cannabis in Oregon, announced it would ban the sale of alcohol drinks containing cannabidiol—commonly known as CBD—a substance found in cannabis.

The ban, which takes effect next week, was unexpected.

“Up to now, Oregon has been relatively permissive in its approach to CBD consumption,” the East Oregonian reports. “In 2015, the state Legislature said hemp and marijuana could legally be added to foods.”

In a September column, I reported on Washington State’s decision to ban CBD sales by any retailer that’s not a licensed cannabis shop. I noted Washington’s move was just the latest example of a growing crackdown on CBD sales. And I laid the blame for the increasing regulatory pressure on CBD sales squarely at the feet of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). States may be cracking down on CBD, but the FDA is providing directions. 

For example, last year, the FDA ordered Long Trail, the Vermont brewer, to stop adding CBD to its beer. And just last month, the FDA announced it had sent warning letters to more than a dozen companies that make health claims about the CBD products they produce. For example, the FDA alleges that Daddy Burt Hemp of Kentucky, which the agency says markets CBD oils and gummies through its website, claimed CBDs may be used to treat autism, a claim the agency questions.

Just as Washington State’s crackdown on CBDs may have been spurred by the FDA, Oregon’s move last week also appears to have been inspired by the FDA’s aggressive stance. “To some degree, [the OLCC] is following in the footsteps of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” the East Oregonian reported.

The OLCC isn’t done yet, either. While the agency says it will begin penalizing anyone who continues to sell CBD-infused alcohol sellers in February, the agency is already looking to close a loophole that allows bars to add CBD oils to mixed drinks they serve.

“We’re considering just outright saying that [CBD is] an adulterant for alcohol so you wouldn’t just be able to mix the cocktails,” OLCC chief Steve Marks told the East Oregonian.

Coalition Brewing, based in Portland, introduced its Two Flowers IPA, billed as the first CBD-infused beer produced and sold in Oregon, in 2016. If unscrupulous marketing lies at the heart of the growing pushback against CBD, then Coalition Brewing’s marketing approach seemed to reside at the opposite end of that spectrum.

In an excellent piece in October, a site dedicated to beer journalism, Diana Hubble described Coalition Brewing as “careful not to overstate the effect [Two Flowers] might have on consumers” and unwilling to position its CBD-infused beer as “some sort of miracle panacea.” (I reached out to Coalition but learned the brewery closed last month. Reports suggest Coalition may have been the only brewer of CDB-infused beers in the state.)

Despite Oregon’s crackdown and the demise of Coalition Brewing, CBD-infused beer is having a moment. Last year, craft beer giant Lagunitas introduced Hi-Fi Hops, a sparkling water that contains CBD or THC—the latter of which is the thing in cannabis that gets you high.  Earlier this year, “Libertarian iconoclast” Mason Hembree sold his Colorado brewery to a cannabis company that also now owns Hembree’s “patent-pending process for infusing… CBD into beer in a cost-effective way.” Last month, Hop & Hemp Brewing, a London-based brewer, introduced a very low (0.5%) ABV, CBD-infused beer. Also last month, a cannabis website touted CBD-infused beer as “the next BIG thing.”

As I wrote in September, I have no problem with the FDA moving to crack down on fishy claims made by a few CBD sellers. But while targeting of CBD foods should be the exception, it’s increasingly becoming the rule.

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12/28/1856: President Woodrow Wilson’s birthday. His administration would initiate the prosecutions under the Sedition Act that gave rise to Schenck v. U.S., Debs v. U.S., and Abrams v. U.S.

 

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Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work, by Alex Rosenblat, University of California Press, 271 pages, $26.95

Mariana, a Dominican mother of four in New York, says being an Uber driver is the best job she’s ever had. “I love it,” she enthuses to Alex Rosenblat, an ethnographer at the Data & Society Research Institute. “You can have your own schedule. You met many different people.”

On the other hand, the ride-sharing company has been careless with its customers’ personal data and made misleading income promises—claiming, for instance, that New York drivers were earning a median $90,000 a year—a practice that got the company slammed with a $20 million fine from the Federal Trade Commission.

The rhetoric in Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work, Rosenblat’s interview-rich but analysis-thin book, is designed to make readers think concerns about privacy and corporate governance are more important than the increased work opportunities that Uber brings to the lives of people like Mariana. Rosenblat got direct insights from over 500 Uber drivers, through both formal interviews and informal conversations. She also logged lots of time on online message boards where hundreds of thousands of those drivers gather to communicate and kvetch. Needless to say, not everyone earns as much, or loves the experience as much, as Mariana does.

That immersion gave Rosenblat plenty of evidence that different people and different constituencies rate Uber differently. But while drivers have their legitimate complaints, we meet many who see the flexibility and the lack of supervision as far superior to the factory or call-center work they’d previously done; who value Uber’s cashless nature for leaving them less open to armed robbery than a previous gig; who find other options for their level of education just nowhere near as satisfactory; or who deeply appreciate that they end up with money to spend by the end of every shift. We meet a single mom whose kids have chronic health problems requiring attention at unpredictable times as well as recent immigrants from war-torn lands speaking of how Uber has added value to their lives they could find nowhere else.

Rosenblat honestly presents such positive details, yet her book’s dominant attitude toward the company is suspicious, carping, negative. The style and content of her discontent reveal a peevish but common disdain for innovations when they are based on privately chosen market transactions rather than the disinterested pursuit of social betterment.

Drivers rightfully find many of Uber’s practices annoying and in some cases potentially criminal. Among them: suspiciously large numbers of “computer glitches” preventing full pass-throughs of money they earned, tips that get lost between customer and driver, and the system’s inherent need for workers to drive lots of uncompensated dead miles and wait for lingering customers, to build up the brand’s overall reputation for reliability. In conflicts between drivers and passengers, drivers frequently find the company difficult to communicate with—and prone to siding with paying customers over just one of an apparently endless pool of willing drivers. (The book also points out that Uber essentially sloughs off middle management tasks on its customers, whose ratings discipline drivers.)

Rosenblat spends an inordinate amount of time worrying over whether Uber drivers are “entrepreneurs,” as the company sometimes claims. She makes a convincing case that they are not. Uber drivers don’t set their own prices, can be punished for being selective about the jobs they take, and are not provided with sufficient information to make such decisions ably anyway. That said, the complaint that drivers aren’t real entrepreneurs because they can’t refuse to take passengers to certain neighborhoods rings hollow from Rosenblat—destination discrimination isn’t usually something progressives favor.

Indeed, Uber bugs Rosenblat for reasons beyond an objective, reasonable bill of indictment. Mostly, in language she repeats many times, she is peeved that Uber is “playing” us as a society with promises and rhetoric that she thinks don’t hold up. She complains that the company sells a young-hip-white-millennial image, which she associates with the HBO series Girls, that doesn’t reflect the actual drivers she meets. That might be something to make jokey-snide tweets about, but it seems curiously ancillary to any real driver, rider, or public concern such that she should devote so much space to it in a serious book.

Rosenblat also finds it worth noting, in regard to Uber’s alleged techno-hip aura, that “drivers…don’t game search-engine-optimization results to boost their presence on the internet…they aren’t ‘happiness engineers’ or ‘code ninjas.'” No, they provide low-cost rides to strangers. And that’s far more important to passengers than is Rosenblat’s cultural-studies style of critique.

At one point she complains that “the company’s marketing emphasizes the trendy idea of driving for a tech -company, which somehow is more desirable than if the same job were branded more bluntly as a taxi job for immigrants.” If in fact Uber is mostly “a taxi job for immigrants”—and many of the drivers she meets are indeed foreigners without a lot of other opportunities—why isn’t that alone enough of a reason to like Uber?

When it comes to larger social threats, the only even half-concrete example that Rosenblat presents is in her subtitle: She believes Uber is “rewriting the rules of work,” most damagingly by undermining the legal status of “employee.”

Uber treats drivers as independent contractors. The drivers are thus compensated entirely by a portion—constantly fluctuating—of their total fares. They are responsible for their own expenses and taxes, including Social Security (which, Rosenblat finds, makes many of them unaware of their true net earnings). They get no paid sick leave or vacation days, no employer-provided health insurance. On the other side of the ledger, they have complete flexibility as to when they work, and they have access to millions of potential customers without having to make any effort beyond activating an app.

In April, the U.S. Labor Department declared that most people who drive for ride-sharing services are independent contractors under federal law. But in September California codified via state law that Uber and similar companies must treat drivers legally as employees, with all the cost and bureaucracy that implies. According to a 2018 study from the National Employment Law Project, that change could add 30 percent to the company’s operating expenses in that state, where it claims to have 200,000 active drivers. Uber, for its part and against the clear intent of the law, is claiming both that even under the new standards their drivers should not be classified as employees, and that it intends to sponsor a ballot initiative down the line to upend the new law, which doesn’t go into effect until January 2020.

In any case, Uberland presents no evidence Uber’s algorithms are upending everything about work and society. The company isn’t even upending everything about its own contractors. For most drivers, the service seems to function as a stopgap option to make quick money. Rosenblat’s data show that more than half of Uber drivers are active for fewer than 15 hours a week and that 86 percent either have or are actively seeking more traditional full-time work. One in six drivers are new in any given month, and 68 percent of drivers last no more than half a year. Driving for Uber doesn’t seem to be too many people’s idea of a great career, but it remains a great option for some people sometimes.

Rosenblat frames this very openness as a problem: It creates tensions, she says, between “labor rights” (the right of those who have a job to keep others out in order to increase their income) and “civil rights” (the right to have access to the work). She thus ends up criticizing Uber for what, under other circumstances, might be seen as corporate social responsibility. When the company builds stakeholder coalitions with “women who code,” or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or the NAACP, Rosenblat accuses it of trying to leverage those groups’ political power to the business’s benefit. All that, she writes, is just “emotional ransom” and “part of its hustle.” Even providing reliable service to customers comes under suspicion, as it has tended to make those customers unpaid grassroots activists in Uber’s political fights.

There are legitimate reasons to criticize Uber, and Rosenblat covers them. But if you base your analysis on the idea that a company can be criticized for anything that helps it profit or survive, you will miss most of the positive things that business does for the world. On Rosenblat’s own evidence, it would be difficult to argue that drivers, passengers, or the culture at large would be better off without Uber.

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Increased academic pressure and testing in kindergarten is bringing everyone to tears—including the teachers.

When Dr. Peter Gray wrote a piece for his Psychology Today blog about kindergarten teachers in Brookline, Massachusetts, protesting dwindling recess time and mandated 90-minute reading and writing blocks, he received a virtual cubby full of comments from kindergarten teachers across the country at just about the end of their jump rope.

“I had to retire in 2017 because I could not take the pressure of having to force my 5- and 6-year-old students to sit with books…no talking allowed,” wrote one. “I taught for 18 years and in the last three years…I heard students cry, talk about how they didn’t understand, say they hated reading time.”

Gray is a professor of psychology at Boston College and a co-founder, along with me, of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence. He writes often about how kids need to play—that this is how they learn how to get along, be creative, make things happen, and grow up. Playtime isn’t wasted time: It’s intensely educational, just not in a standardized test kind of way. When administrators replace play with academics, the gains are short-lived, but the damage is not.

The teachers writing Gray were in heated agreement—and despair. He curated about a dozen comments, which could almost be used to illustrate Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief.

“I have taught kindergarten for nearly 40 years,” wrote one. “Common Core expectations for kindergarten seem to have trickled down from the top, and the people who wrote it thought that they could legislate quicker child development.”

Another teacher wrote that she was appalled to hear these words coming out of her own mouth: “‘We do NOT play in kindergarten. Do not do that again!’ (to a student building a very cool 3D scorpion with the math blocks instead of completing his assigned task to practice addition.)”

Despite the requirements and testing, “I foolishly thought I could sneak art and play in, but I was wrong,” wrote another disillusioned educator. “The Curriculum Cops showed up in the class I was doing my student teaching in, and that was the beginning of the end for me. Now I just sub and sneak in fun for the kids whenever I can.”

The problem is that kindergarten has been dumbed up to first grade. That is, the kids are being taught a curriculum once reserved for older kids. This isn’t making them smarter. It’s just making them more miserable. You too would be ready to throw in the towel (and perhaps a couple of stuffed animals), if you were being prepped with materials like this teacher describes: “Last week I gave my 5-year-olds a reading assessment that required them to infer the meaning of ‘bifocals’ after hearing a 5-paragraph story about Ben Franklin (the story had no pictures). This is the kind of madness that permeates curriculum design for kindergarten. I’m retiring earlier than I had planned because I just can’t be a part of this any longer.”

The teachers can quit. The students have a 12-year-stretch ahead of them.

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