The War Over The Core, Ctd

The country’s second-largest teachers’ union has withdrawn qualified its support for the Common Core:

After years of battling conservative groups opposed to Common Core, supporters of the testing standards discovered Friday morning that one of their most avid allies, the American Federation of Teachers, is bailing on them too. … [The AFT’s] decision to distance itself from its once-avid support for the Common Core marks a major – and, some say, even potentially lethal – blow to the standards, which the White House has emphasized as its key priority in education. The real danger is not that the Common Core will be thrown out entirely, but that state policy directors in charge of implementing the standards will be cowed by what they see as a groundswell of anger from teachers, said Michael Brickman, the national policy director at Fordham Institute, which supports the standards.

Update from a reader and a “lead author of the math standards” who objects to characterizing the AFT’s move as a “withdrawal of support”:

The Time article you cited was from last Friday; the union actually adopted its resolutions over the following weekend. Here is the actual result:

What does the resolution actually do? It says that the AFT will “continue to support the promise” of the common standards, “provided that a set of essential conditions, structures, and resources” is in place. Among other measures, the AFT will advocate that states create independent boards of teachers to monitor the implementation of the standards, and will support teachers’ having input into the “continuing development, implementation, evaluation, and as necessary, revision of the CCSS.”

One could say, then, that the AFT qualified its support. But one can’t accurately say that the union withdrew its support.

Fair point. The resolution in question reads, “[T]he AFT believes in the promise and potential of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) but is deeply disappointed in the manner in which they have been implemented” – far from a blanket condemnation.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the AFT passed another resolution that stopped just short of calling for Education Secretary Arne Duncan to resign:

[The resolution] calls for Obama to set up and implement an “improvement plan” for Duncan to hold him accountable for his job performance. It says the plan should, among other things, require Duncan to enact specific school funding equity recommendations in a report issued by a congressionally charged bipartisan Equity and Excellence Commission, and end the “test and punish” accountability systems of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. If an accountability plan is not put in place and Duncan does not “improve,” then he should resign, the AFT resolution says.

The country’s largest teachers’ union, the NEA, called for Duncan to resign earlier this month. Stephanie Simon considers the significance of these recent events:

[P]olicy analysts see this weekend’s moves as an escalation – a stark signal that union opposition has switched into high gear, potentially threatening an initiative that both conservatives and liberals have supported for years and that has become one of President Barack Obama’s key education priorities. Advocates of national standards have been working for more than two decades toward their goal “and now that it’s coming close to implementation, it’s all blowing up,” said David Menefee-Libey, a political scientist at Pomona College.

Meanwhile, Stephanie Grace sees former standards supporter Bobby Jindal’s reversal on the Common Core as emblematic of Republicans’ acceptance of a new political reality:

As anger [over the Common Core] grew, Jindal gradually ratcheted up his professed concern until he finally renounced his earlier position this spring. From there, he was off and running, trumpeting his defiance in speeches to GOP groups, declaring on Twitter that Louisiana wouldn’t be “bullied by fed govt.”, and issuing rhetorically loaded statements like this: “Let’s face it: centralized planning didn’t work in Russia, it’s not working with our health care system, and it won’t work in education.”

And after he failed to convince the Louisiana Legislature to follow his lead, Jindal went unilateral, announcing in mid-June that “we want out of Common Core,” and ordering his staff to invalidate the contract being used to pay the multi-state testing consortium called PARCC. The move set off chaos in schools, which suddenly didn’t know which tests they’d be using in the new year, and open warfare with Jindal’s longtime allies in reform, including the state’s top business leaders, a media-savvy education superintendent and a state education board that’s now mulling a lawsuit – all of whom accuse him of playing politics at students’ expense.

Despite the ostentatious flip-flop, Jindal’s underlying agenda hasn’t changed; he’s still fixated on positioning himself for national GOP prominence, just as he’s always been. The landscape, though, has shifted dramatically, and potential candidates eyeing the party’s 2016 presidential nomination – from Jindal to U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz to Marco Rubio – are recalibrating accordingly.

All of the Dish’s coverage of the Common Core is compiled here.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Metropolitan Police Passing Out Parade

So I broke down and today carefully took the Pew political typology quiz to determine which segment of the electorate I fit into. I can’t say I found the process that easy. To pick between two ideals, when you really fall somewhere in between both, doesn’t capture quite where you are. But maybe the cumulative weight of 23 answers balances that out. I don’t know. But here’s where I am, according to Pew:

Screen Shot 2014-07-14 at 1.36.19 PM

I’m a “Young” Outsider. Here’s how Pew describes them:

This relatively young, largely independent group holds a mix of conservative and liberal views. And while more lean toward the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, Young Outsiders generally express unfavorable opinions of both major parties. They are largely skeptical of activist government, as a substantial majority views government as wasteful and inefficient. Yet many diverge from the two conservative typology groups – Steadfast Conservatives and Business Conservatives – in their strong support for the environment and many liberal social policies.

I’m only going to endorse one aspect that seems completely apposite to my particular case: “relatively young.”

Today, I made the case that Greater Israel is a permanent thing, and that all diplomacy that rests on a two-state solution has become largely pointless. I also assume that this fact will perhaps never be conceded by an American president, let alone the American Congress. So our traditional kabuki dance on this question is fast becoming an eternal one. And the deaths – almost entirely Palestinian – will simply mount and mount.

If you read one summary of the legal arguments for and against the Boehner lawsuit against Obama, check out this one. If you still believe that Iraq is a country, then check out the latest rift between Shi’a and Kurds, even as the Sunni revolution knock on Baghdad’s door. A classic Dish thread on under-tipping has started with gusto; and we covered a rare but real phenomenon – people who die of grief. Plus: a window view from a drone operator Dishhead in Afghanistan.

The most popular post of the day was Understanding the Permanence Of Greater Israel, followed by The Revenge Doctrine, Ctd.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 14 18 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish, including our recently released Matthew Vines podcast – for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Not a sketch from Monty Python. Police cadets who have completed their training take part in their ‘Passing Out Parade’ in the grounds of West Ham United Football Club on July 14, 2014 in London, England. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Face Of The Day

BRITAIN-RELIGION-ANGLICAN-WOMEN

Reverend Kat Campion-Spall weeps as she celebrates outside the venue after members voted to approve the creation of female bishops at the Church of England General Synod in York, northern England, on July 14, 2014. The Church of England overcame bitter divisions on July 14 to vote in favour of allowing female bishops for the first time in its nearly 500-year history. The decision reverses a previous shock rejection in 2012 and comes after intensive diplomacy by Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. By Lindsey Parnaby/AFP/Getty Images.

Dissent Of The Day

A reader takes a stand:

There are a lot of great things about The Dish, and I was happy to be part of the initial subscription wave. But you just reminded me again why I refuse to re-subscribe. It is your persistent, deplorable habit of using terms like “Baby Boomer”, “Gen X”, and “Millennials”.  These terms are utter nonsense. They are preposterous, deeply-misleading sweeping generalizations, grotesque caricatures of reality. There is no such thing as a so-called “generation” except in the strictest biological/anthropological sense, within kinship lines. The use of such terms as social descriptors has been a disaster for our discourse. (One need only look at the wave of idiotic “generation” articles pouring out of Salon for confirmation of this.)

You say every issue is discussed on The Dish? This one evidently can’t be. I have never seen any discussion challenging the ludicrous concept of “generational traits”. That seems to be strictly off-limits.

These so-called “generations” you assert the existence of cannot be defined coherently.

Each “generation” is wildly diverse and contains tens of millions of individuals, saints, sinners, and everyone in between. Yet certain people seem to think – wrongly – that they “know all about” others because they know what year these people were born in!Moreover, each “generation” contains tens of millions of individuals with unique biographies. (And yes I do need to emphasize that.) These individuals have interacted with a whole host of other humans, very many of them of other so-called “generations”, in deeply complex patterns of reciprocity. These individuals have been shaped by the whole of the human biological and cultural inheritance. They did not grow up in some sort of generational isolation box. Please stop slapping labels on them, as if they were figures in a bad editorial cartoon.

As a former history teacher and (minor) historian, it almost makes me grimace when I see such terms used to explain the nature of human society. Nothing could be more misleading. It’s as if we asked a 10 year-old how we can explain human history and society and he replied, “Well, it all depends on what year you were born in. That’s what makes you what you are. People born in 1944 are WAY different than people born in 1946. People born in 1957 are WAY different than people born in 1965.” We’d smile at such childishness – and then watch as a lot of adults make exactly the same childish arguments. It’s time to put away this childish nonsense.

I guess since I was born in 1952 and am routinely lumped together with 76 million other Americans as a so-called “Baby Boomer” that I am more sensitive to this phenomenon. In Esquire magazine, Paul Begala called people like me “locusts”. (I’d like to see Begala call my 59-year-old wife, a woman who has borne inconceivable burdens in her life and shown heroism on many occasions, a locust to my face. He would regret it.) The Atlantic said that people like me “ruined everything”, thus casually negating the lives and careers of millions of dedicated individuals. (Let’s Dick Cheney, born in 1941, off the hook, too.)  Imagine such descriptions being made about a group other than the so-called “Baby Boomers”. What kind of speech would they be considered? (BTW, I’m sick and tired of insults, not by you, directed toward the so-called “Millennials”. A lot of my 20-something former students are my friends.)

I want to be judged for my own successes and failures. Please stop assuming you know me, Andrew: you don’t. Please stop assuming that I’m just like everyone else in some mythical, arbitrarily-defined group that supposedly encompasses everyone born between 1946 and 1964. I’m not. OK? When you’re ready to do that, I’ll be ready to come back.

The South-Of-The-Border Crisis

In a must-read counterpoint to the media narrative that the Central American children pouring across our border are fleeing gang violence, Saul Elbein argues that the problems in Guatemala are far more extensive. He paints a picture of a failed state offering a veneer of legitimacy to a corrupt, feudal “deep state” that maintains itself through violence and exploitation:

The only model of power that exists in Guatemala is … terroristic, extra-legal, and dominated by violence. So is it any surprise that after the war, on the streets—where people grasped for the scraps that weft, where children grew up with no chance at wealth and less at respect—pirate organizations like the MS-13 grew? What we’re seeing in Guatemala is not quite, in other words, a crime wave. It’s simply the way things have been there for a long time, pushed to the next level. If you are a civilian there, beneath the labels—soldier; gangster; policeman; army; cartel—is but one underlying reality: men with guns who do what they want and take what they want. Your options are to buy your own security and gunmen; to join a gang yourself; or to leave.

And so many leave.

Meanwhile, Central American migrants are now being barred from Mexican cargo trains:

On Thursday, a freight train derailed in southern Mexico. It wasn’t just any train, though:

 It was La Bestia—”the Beast”—the infamous train many Central American immigrants ride through Mexico on their way to the United States. When the Beast went off the tracks this week, some 1,300 people who’d been riding on top were stranded in Oaxaca. After years of turning a blind eye to what’s happening on La Bestia, the Mexican government claims it now will try to keep migrants off the trains. On Friday, Mexican Interior Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong said in a radio interview that the time had come to bring order to the rails. “We can’t keep letting them put their lives in danger,” he said. “It’s our responsibility once in our territory. The Beast is for cargo, not passengers.”

In light of the situation, Keating advocates a major rethink of how we respond to chaos in Latin America, not to mention our own role in creating it:

I don’t claim to have an immediate fix for Central America’s ills, but surely there are more creative strategies out there than pouring money into a failing drug war and then walling ourselves off from the victims. Latin American issues tend to get shortchanged in the U.S. foreign policy conversation relative to more remote regions. I suspect this is part of the reason why Central America’s instability is only garnering attention now that the consequences of it have quite literally arrived at our doorstep.

On a broader level, the crisis should be a reminder that the U.S. is not immune from events to its immediate south. We’re an American country—in the regional sense of that word—and it’s time to start thinking like it.

(Photo: Central American migrants boarding the “La Bestia” train. By Pedro Ultreras.)

On Immigration Reform: Republicans vs Republicans

Noah Rothman flags a survey by a Republican polling outfit that finds large majorities of Republican voters in key states in favor of immigration reform:

86 percent of self-described Republicans and 79 percent of independents in those 26 states said that the immigration system is in need of fixing. Moreover, 79 percent of Republican respondents said that it was “important” for Congress to act on immigration reform this year. … In worse news for opponents of immigration reform, voters do not believe that the argument that President Barack Obama would not enforce border security provisions in an immigration bill is a valid reason for opposing reform. 72 percent of all respondents said did not believe that concerns over enforcement of border security was a good reason for rejecting immigration reform, including a majority of Republicans and 69 percent of independents. The Harper survey found that nearly two-thirds of all voters and 54 percent of self-identified Republicans support a pathway to legal status for illegal immigrants.

And yet Republicans in government remain committed to stonewalling. Vinik takes them to task:

If Republicans object to [Obama’s request for $3.7 billion in emergency funds], what exactly do they propose instead? How should we move through the huge backload of cases? Where should we hold the unaccompanied minors in the meantime? And how should we pay to transport them to their home countries?

Reforming the 2008 law, as Republicans want, could help relieve pressure on the immigration system, but it could cause children who qualify—or who should qualify—for asylum to be turned away. Even so, there are more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody. Tweaking the law will not suddenly alleviate the problem.

But Tomasky knows exactly why they are doing this:

We’ve all seen this movie way too many times. I don’t know what the Republicans will end up doing here, but it will be dictated by the usual two factors. First, the outrage of the base. It’s cranking up already—oppose Obama here, or you will get a primary. That’s what drives nearly everything in the congressional GOP now. (By the way, what might Lindsey Graham be saying if his primary, rather than having turned out favorably for him already, were next week?) And my it’s heartening, isn’t it, to think that the House Republican caucus is going to follow the moral lead of the Texas delegation on this?

The second factor will be their internal polls. … If the polls now tell them very clearly that most voters—let’s refine that; most likely 2014 voters—are going to blame them for the irresolution of this problem, they’ll compromise. Otherwise, they will oppose. That’s the extent of it.

Previous Dish on the Republican response to the border crisis here and here.

A Bullet With A Mind Of Its Own

It exists:

[I]magine if you could transform a dumb bullet into a guided missile? That’s what the Pentagon did earlier this year, successfully firing .50-caliber bullets that steered themselves in mid-flight. It has just released a video [above] trumpeting the tip-top targeting of its Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program.

The technology could make our sharpshooters that much more deadly:

Current sniper rifles can regularly hit trucks at 2,000 meters, but not bad guys. (The record kill is 2,430 meters, just over 1.5 miles. It was charted by Canadian army corporal Rob Furlong against a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan’s Shah-i-kot valley during Operation Anaconda in March 2002—but his first two shots missed.) “There’s no limit as far as I can see so long as the bullet’s stable—I think 2,000 or 2,500 meters is very attainable,” [Keith Bell, former commander of the Army sniper school at Fort Benning, Ga] said. “Right now, anything past around 800 meters is an extremely tough shot.”

Duncan Geere adds a few more details:

The bullets are the size of a large pen and can be used in both sniper rifles and machine guns. The full EXACTO system comprises of both bullets and a real-time guidance system that tracks and delivers the projectile to the target. They’re still some way from the battlefield, however. This live fire test is likely just the first of many.

American Teens And Common Cents, Ctd

The Economist examines the challenges facing efforts to improve high-school students’ financial literacy:

First, boosting financial literacy is hard. Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, an American non-profit organization, has surveyed high-school seniors every other year since 2000. These surveys consistently show that students who have taken a full-semester course in personal finance do no better on a standard financial literacy test than those who have not taken such a course. Similarly, a study by Tzu-Chin Martina Peng and her co-authors found that having taken a personal finance course in school is unrelated to investment knowledge.

Second, and perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behavior.

As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

Juan Cole’s list of recent “disturbing” news items from Iraq begins with some major developments regarding the Kurds:

1. Last Wednesday Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki angrily lashed out at the Kurds, accusing them of harboring the terrorists of the so-called ‘Islamic State.’ Since the Kurds have in fact fought the IS radicals, al-Maliki’s charge is hard to take seriously. Rather, it appears to be a sign of how angry he is that Kurdistan president Massoud Barzani is pressuring him to step down. I don’t think al-Maliki can get a third term without Kurdish support.

2. Barzani responded that al-Maliki is “hysterical.” The Kurds then withdrew from al-Maliki’s cabinet, in which they had been his coalition partners. The ministries will likely go on running all right, but the move is symbolic of the break between al-Maliki and his erstwhile backers. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, one of those who suspended participation, says it will be hard for the Kurds to work with al-Maliki unless he apologizes.

3. On Friday, the Kurds seized two important oil fields in the Kirkuk region. Since their willingness to supply Turkey with petroleum seems to be one of the reasons Ankara has increasingly made its peace with Iraqi Kurdistan becoming independent, the Kurds are now in a position to remunerate Turkey even more generously for acquiescing in their national aspirations.

By seizing these oil fields, Keith Johnson fears, the Kurds risk antagonizing the Iraqi government and further escalating tensions between Baghdad and Erbil:

The big questions now are:

How much more will the move strain the unity of an Iraqi government still struggling to push back against a spring offensive by Islamist insurgents? And how will the Kurds actually sell the additional oil they now control? As a solely regional government, the KRG has hit major obstacles in finding international buyers for its crude since it began trying to sell abroad earlier this year — largely because of Baghdad’s threats and diplomatic pressure.

The Kurdish seizure will aggravate U.S. goals of getting Iraq’s Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish populations to work together to fight the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS. Coupled with strident talk of an independent Kurdish state, it further complicates efforts to broker a truce between Baghdad and Erbil, especially regarding international oil sales. “

Luke Harding provides a glimpse of what life is like in Kirkuk these days:

Iraq’s disintegration has affected the city in multifarious ways. It has, for example, touched on the fortunes of Kirkuk’s football club. Nowzad Qader, the head of Kirkuk’s FA, said Iraq wasn’t able to complete its league this year, with players unable to travel to Baghdad. It was too dangerous, he said, since Isis controlled the road. “Isis doesn’t like humanity much, let alone football,” he observed. “If Iraq still exists next season we’ll resume.” Nearby, youths kicked a ball around in the early evening heat.

Qadar said the local FA reflected Kirkuk’s tradition of coexistence, at odds with the sectarian mayhem in the rest of the country. He was a Kurd, his deputy a Turkman and the secretary an Arab. “It’s like a microcosm of Iraq. We work together in brotherhood,” he declared. Maureen Nikola, a volleyball coach, said girls who played on her team came from all of Kirkuk’s ethnic groups. Some of her Christian players had emigrated with their families after 2003, she said. Nikola, a Christian herself, added: “If the peshmerga weren’t here, we would have had to flee, like Mosul.”

Previous Dish on the prospect of an independent Kurdistan here.