Month: May 2009

A reader writes:

If I may make a suggestion, all of the politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, philanthropists, think-tanks, bloggers, and pundits weighing in on teachers' unions and their relative worth to our system of public education should consider asking teachers what they think.

First, I've taught in four school districts, and not a single one has been forced to keep a bad teacher.  Every one of my prior labor contracts had a specified system by which ineffective teachers could remediate deficits in their teaching or be removed.  And in each district that language was utilized for that purpose at one time or another.  The fact is, administrators and school boards want teachers' unions broken for labor reasons, like any other business.  They're looking for increased revenue and/or lower expenses just like everyone else. 

 

I ask you to look further, deeper, at the fundamentals of this system, and you'll find a snowball effect: Governmental mandates are pushing complex curriculum downward, onto younger and less-developed brains each year.  And regardless of whether or not the students are developmentally and neurologically capable of performing these increasingly complex tasks, the standards rise and so we must teach.  When the public learns that these curricular requirements are not being mastered, no one asks why, they just raise the standards and further increase the pressure on teachers.  A politician steps up to champion the cause of our youth, sets the problem on the backs of those who must be careless incompetents in front of their classrooms, writes mandates in some legislation, calls it a win for kids and himself and our nation, ad nauseam. Yes, when kids fail in school, we all do.  But politics driving curriculum, not neuroscience, developmental research, is a recipe for students' and teachers' perpetual failure.

When government standards are aligned with scientifically-researched and developmentally-appropriate curriculum, and utilizing funding sources which are as malleable and expansive as the needs schools have, educational progress, teacher salaries, and retention of quality teachers can be addressed, and not before.  Parroting that unions of the professionals in this system are somehow to blame for its relative quality while ignoring the archaic mechanism by which our schools are run is little more than a naive and politically expedient shell game.

Keeping the American beacon alight on Fox. A journalist who will get these public officials on the record about the rule of fricking law:

Chris Orr notes the level of viciousness at NRO's Corner after one Jerry Taylor committed heresy by opining that Rush Limbaugh may actually be a problem for the GOP rather than a solution. He meant in terms of actually persuading non-base Americans of the validity of conservative ideas. I cannot for the life of me see how that is an illegitimate argument – but the bollocking the poor guy got suggests the level of doctrine now required to be a part of the conservative movement, its herd mentality, and its eager pursuit of heretics rather than converts. As I said, it will get worse before it gets better.

As for my new fellow heretics on the right: hang in. If you tense up less, it doesn't hurt so much after a while.

The online giant is getting into publishing, they are letting all bloggers on the Kindle but setting the terms (Amazon is taking 70 precent of revenues), and they are selling Kindle books at a loss to build up market share:

Obama's drug czar is going to stop calling drug prohibition the "war on drugs." Radley Balko thinks this is significant:

The change in rhetoric obviously isn't an end to the federal prohibition on drugs. But it isn't mere symbolism, either. Rhetoric matters.

The drug war imagery started by Nixon, subdued by Carter, then ratcheted up again in the Reagan administration (and remaining basically level since) has had significant repercussions on the way drug policy is enforced, from policymakers on down to street-level cops. It's war rhetoric that gave us the Pentagon giveaway program, where millions of pieces of surplus military equipment (such as tanks) have been transferred to local police departments. War imagery set the stage for the approximately 1,200 percent rise in the use of SWAT teams since the early 1980s, and has fostered the militaristic, "us vs. them" mentality too prevalent in too many police departments today.

Matt Welch won't give in:

…by lacking confidence to air this publicly, the U.S. missed an opportunity to send a powerful message to the world: Not only do we no longer torture (in both word and deed), we take that notion seriously enough to withstand a public relations hit as we fully exhume the ghosts of a dishonorable seven-year policy. In a region of autocratic, torturous governments, I daresay such a message could have surprising resonance among the people alleged to hate us most.

Perhaps if the courts force the president's hand, it will be an even demonstration of how democracy works. Meanwhile, Greenwald takes on the anti-American sentiment excuse:

We're currently occupying two Muslim countries.  We're killing civilians regularly (as usual) — with airplanes and unmanned sky robots.  We're imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years.  Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people — virtually all Muslim — ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind.  We're denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a "state secret" and that we need to "look to the future."  We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza.  Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions "inflame anti-American sentiment" is impossible to overstate.

And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government's abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would "inflame anti-American sentiment." 

Bristol Palin is bucking the trend in some respects: a new CDC study (PDF) shows that teens comprised 50 percent of mothers in 1970 compared with only 23 percent today. But 40 percent of children in America are born to unmarried moms.

"Some people on the right have faulted me because in that column that you cite I conceded that waterboarding is torture. Actually, I personally don’t think it is cause it’s an absurdity to have to say the United States of America has tortured over 10,000 of its own soldiers because it's, you know, it’s had them waterboarded as a part of their training. That’s an absurd sentence. So, I personally don’t think it is but I was willing to concede it in the column without argument exactly as you say to get away from the semantic argument, which is a waste of time and to simply say call it whatever you want. We know what it is. We know what actually happened. Should it have been done and did it work? Those are the only important questions," – Charles Krauthammer.

Tom Ricks is surprised that Obama deferred to Gen. Odierno over the release of the torture photos.

The Dish got a lot of great feedback from readers today. On my willingness to give Obama the benefit of the doubt over torture photos, one reader backed me up, another totally disagreed, another insisted we protest regardless, and another parsed his intentions even further. On hate crimes, a reader argued for the necessity of federal reach. On bike helmets, a reader recalled a brutal experience.

In the news, even more evidence emerged today pointing to a direct connection between the torture program and the casus belli in Iraq. And despite the reluctance of the White House, there appeared to be an emerging consensus for a Truth Commission. On the marriage front, the outlook was good in New Hampshire but questionable in New York.

Among the bloggers, Megan and Posner suggested that green shoots may not mean much in the long run. Matt Steinglass made the case for the carbon tax and C&T. Dan Savage thwacked Obama over gay rights. We also did a reax on both McChrystal and Obama's photo reversal.

Between the debates, we looked at boobs and pondered happiness. Yes, they may be connected.