Here’s my new cartoon for the Nashville Next altie-weekly newspaper. Tennessee has a number of commissions that are passionately reviewing the Common Core standard that conservatives in this red state just can’t stand.
COVID California
Here are my three most recent cartoons! I just finished this one on the Republicans’ 40th vote against Obamacare and their recent attempt to shut down the government over Obamacare. They will be run over each time. They don’t learn.
Since you folks like to see my messy, rough sketches, here you go …
The next one is the Arab Spring in Egypt. Here is the line art that most people will see in the newspapers.
I try to do enough line work in these that I get some dark and medium areas to anchor the composition. I wouldn’t worry so much about that if I knew it would only run in color. The color version is below. I’m trying to use more texture in my color now, mostly with a rubber stamp pattern in Photoshop that looks like a sponge.
And I did this cartoon about teachers, then and now …
This is a refurbished oldie which has been a big seller in pay-per-use. I noticed another nice book sale on this one in our system last week, and I thought the cartoon needed to be freshened up. Here’s the original …
I always tell cartoonists not to put the year in their cartoons. For some reason artists like to put the year after a copyright circle ©, which just makes the old cartoons, that should sell as evergreens, suffer for their age. Now this cartoon isn’t dated, and I think it is greatly improved with the black and white in the first, 1960 panel.
I noticed after I posted this last week that almost every newspaper subscriber was downloading it, even though I marked it as a revision. Some cartoons strike a chord. I got this idea from my Israeli cartoonist buddy, Uri Fink. Thanks again, Uri.
Congress is busy working on leaving “No Child Left Behind” behind. Teachers hate that “teaching to the test” stuff, so I drew this today.
The Bush era law mandated that all school kids should be reading and doing math at their grade level by now – well, that won’t happen – the solution? Throw out the law requiring such crazy stuff. But keep all the crazy testing. hmm. I draw something like this every couple of years when this topic gets hot, as it does bi-annually. Here’s a nice one on standardized testing and employment that I drew back in 2007.
Things don’t change much. President Bush just loved the standardized testing. I drew this when “No Child Left Behind” passed …
Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, love standardized testing just as much as George W. Bush.
We’ll surely get rid of “No Child Left Behind” but we won’t be rid of standardized testing. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I suppose I’ll draw this again in a couple of years.
Here’s my weekly blog about my latest cartoons! The last two are about the drop in the stock market and rise in interest rates after remarks by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Here’s another take on the Wall Street bull.
And here is Bernanke, trimming rates, only to see a little sprout of the economy bloom.
Bernanke, and Greenspan before him, have been trimming rates for a long time. This cartoon adds sprouts to a three year oldie (right). This one amuses me because it is the kind of thing our editorial cartooning professional organization will be discussing next week – whether to ban editorial cartoons that consist of alterations to previously drawn cartoons. The cartoon police may come down on me for ethical infractions like this one. Cartoonists are a humorless bunch, when it comes to “cartoon ethics.”
The previous cartoon was about the NSA eavesdropping scandal. Presidential ears tend to grow over the years in editorial cartoons, and Obama’s big cartoon ears have become absurdly huge among my colleagues. I once met Obama’s buddy, Susan Rice when she was UN Ambassador, and all she wanted to talk about was why I draw Obama’s ears so big. I didn’t have a good answer, except for “peer pressure.” I may keep drawing Obama’s ears small. Maybe the cartoon police will cite me for a small ears infraction too.
The next cartoon is about “Value Added” testing of teachers. This cartoon is just a list of the bad things value added testing encourages teachers to do. There have been lots of testing scandals around the country featuring these abuses, among others. I got an interesting response to this cartoon from defenders of teachers, who saw the cartoon as “teacher bashing” rather than testing bashing.
Our very own talented cartoonist, Bob Englehart of the Hartford Courant, has been suspended for a week without pay over a cartoon and blog post he filed criticizing Connecticut’s plans for inner city schools.
In a blog post accompanying the cartoon to the right, Englehart’s target was Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy’s school-reform drive, which he gave good marks overall, but questioned how much help any government can offer if parents aren’t doing a good job raising their kids.
“Inner-city poor and minority-filled schools aren’t going to change until we can somehow change the pervasive core of the problem: dysfunctional inner-city poor minority families,” Englehart wrote in a blog post. “Sure, we hear of an occasional winner come out of the ghetto. Movie stars, athletes, business people, we know their stories, but they are the very rare exception. For the most part, losers raise losers. Somehow we’ve got to get to these families and teach them how to respect education. Till then, nothing will change.”
It was the “losers raise losers” line that caught the eye of New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, who saw the blog post prior to it being removed by the Hartford Courant.
“I don’t think it was inner city schools, I think it was particularly kids of color, quite honestly, that he was focusing on, you know, let’s be honest about it, that’s what he was doing and again, I say that only in the sense of it sounded like to me like a not particularly well thought out remark,” said DeStefano.
Englehart issued an apology for the post. Many have come to his defense, including Courant columnist Colin McEnroe, who agrees with the sentiment of what Englehart wrote, just not his choice of words.
“Kids in Simsbury and Wilton are born on second base, and they spend their school years rounding third and barreling for home as their parents pace the sidelines with stopwatches,” McEnroe wrote. “So slapping on a bright coat of of the trendiest education reforms or pumping in a modest amount of extra money — while not terrible ideas — are not going to fix the problem. And suggesting, as Malloy seemed to do, that education could be considered separately from its context seems equally wrong. I mean there’s a reason why the 20 to 25 worst schools are all in cities.”
McEnroe also criticized the Courant for pulling down Englehart’s cartoon and blog post.
“Newspapers are all about the examined record. We scream loudly when somebody else tries to obliterate a record. We spend our careers chasing down stuff that somebody wanted to take back or wipe away.. Newspapers should never, never, never get into the business of squelching.”
Here’s a news report from WTNH News 8 about the incident: