Month: August 2010

by Chris Bodenner

Ambinder gets the scoop from "the most powerful Republican in history to identify as gay."

by Chris Bodenner

Dan Savage called bullshit on the penitent proselytizer last month. His bottom line:

When evangelicals are ready to admit that the bible got homosexuality wrong—just like it got slavery and shellfish and figs and masturbation and burnt offerings wrong—then we can talk.

A Slog reader wrote:

I interviewed Marin a few years ago and in my research prior to the interview found he often dramatically changed his message depending on his audience. To the gay crowd he'd be much more nuanced but when he spoke on Christian radio, etc., he was quite explicit that gays could/should change. I approached him in the interview as a Christian (I grew up in that community and know the language) and he didn't hide the fact that he thought homosexuality was a sin. I think I still have the mp3s of radio interviews w/him I collected prior to the interview. I really hoped he was different as well. I was wrong.

Starting with the fact that Marin named his foundation after himself, he does appear to be a shameless self-promoter (though he's certainly not the only one profiting off the struggle). Still, his approach is a hell of a lot better than protesting outside gay couples' houses or screaming "God hates fags" in people's faces. Perhaps his greatest influence on the culture wars will be a lowering of the temperature rather than anything he does directly, since "homosexuality is a sin" is a pretty intractable and pointless position.

by Patrick Appel

Will Wilkinson continues the discussion:

The great hazards of contracting out incarceration "services" is that private firms may well turn out to be even more efficient and effective than unions in lobbying for policies that would increase prison populations.

When we add to the mix the observations that America already puts a larger proportion of its population behind bars than does any other country (often for acts that ought to be legal), and that the US already spends an insane portion of national income on the largely non-productive garrison state, it is hard to see the expansion of a for-profit industry with a permanent interest in putting ever more people in cages as consistent with either efficiency or justice. 

Another worry is that private prison "efficiencies" often involve sub-par training and salaries for guards – a point prison guard unions are quick to make. But the biggest problem with private prisons is there is no incentive for a private prison to rehabilitate the prisoners in their care. The state incurs the costs of prisoners and recidivism. A private prison only has to worry about the first cost. In fact, higher rates of recidivism means more prisoners and therefore more money for private prisons. I'm not accusing any private prison of actively encouraging recidivism, but I don't like the perverse incentives at play. A reader is on the same page:

Private prisons move incarceration from a pure punishment/rehabilitation regime to a profitable business model based on a continuous supply of inmates. This is probably the biggest issue I have with the privatization of governmental responsibilities. The state has a vested interest in clearing the jails with rehabilitated citizens. The for profit model requires a constant supply of fresh prisoners. Once again, in the private model there is no incentive to rehabilitation. This is a problem I see with American life in general, everything has been reduced to some form of commercial activity. No one does anything anymore without calculating the cost in dollars and cents. We have made the choice to serve mammon, and sure enough, here we are.

by Conor Friedersdorf

All the e-mail I get from Dish readers is a privilege. Below the fold is an especially tremendous letter about a Cal State professor's experience teaching students who often failed out. It's lengthy and fascinating.

I taught mathematics at California State University at Hayward (now Cal State East Bay) about ten years ago. The admissions policy at Cal State was to admit students who had a B average or who graduated in the top third of their graduating class. Unfortunately, this was no guarantee that a student was prepared for college-level academics. A few years prior, the Cal State system had instituted entry level exams for English and mathematics, with the intention that those who failed the exams would not be admitted to the school. In the first year of the exams, two-thirds of incoming freshmen failed one or both exams. It was decided that the school could not function with only a third of its incoming freshmen, so a remedial education was hastily created for those who did not pass both exams. While neither test was designed as a diagnostic, a system was created where a student would take between one and three remedial courses in each failed subject, based on the percentage of incorrect answers on the exam. These courses were not for credit, but were a prerequisite for the entry-level general education courses in those subjects required for graduation.

In the first two years of the new remedial education program, it was decided that far too many students were failing and retaking the courses over and over again, especially in mathematics. It was not unusual for a student to fail and retake the basic mathematics course (middle school mathematics) four to six times before passing or dropping out. A university runs on the course/credit/grade system, and an extensive remedial education system, without credit, is a huge drain on resources and time for the school. My first year of teaching, a new rule was instituted to require that a student pass any remedial course in at most two attempts, or be expelled. This was met with a wave of angry protests, and the claim of some of the protesters was that the rule was racist, since it would affect African-American and Latino students disproportionately (as they were significantly more likely statistically to fail one or both entry level exams, and statistically more likely to fail remedial courses).

There was a program at Cal State Hayward where inner city high school students were targeted during their junior year, and if they agreed to join the program, would receive after-school tutoring. During the summer after their junior year, they would take summer classes and receive extensive tutoring in all high school subjects. The after-school tutoring would continue their senior year, and after graduation, they would have another summer of classes and extensive tutoring. If they completed this program, they got a full scholarship to Cal State Hayward. Unfortunately, these students rarely lasted a year in college before dropping out.

One of my first classes was a math class designed for students who required three full remedial math courses (those who had between 0 and 30% correct answers on the entry level math exam), who were also in the scholarship program described above. It was a half course (it would have been 2 credits instead of 4 if the students had received credit for the course). I was told that I was not allowed to tutor them with their homework, because tutors got paid far less than teachers, and the school could not justify paying teachers wages for a tutoring session. I was told there would be not homework, and no exams. Instead, I was told to work on problems similar to the ones in their homework, and as I was also teaching some of these students in a regular remedial math course, I knew what kinds of problems to work on with them in this special class.

Because class participation was the only thing I could grade them on, I made class participation 100% of their grade. The class met once a week for ten weeks. At Hayward, any grade below 70% was a failing grade, so I told them that more than three absences was an automatic F. I had five students in the class, and only two of them passed the class. All they had to do was show up or have an excused absence seven times to pass. That proved too difficult for three of them.

In the Spring, we saw the first round of students who had failed the first remedial math course twice face expulsion. I was on the phone a lot with sobbing students begging me to change their grades so that they could stay in college. At night, I had colleagues call me at home to demand that I change their favorite students' grades so that they could remain at the school. I went through a lot of emotional pain making the decision to put each F on the report card of a student, knowing that he or she would be expelled as a result. Astonishingly, none of them were expelled. Each found an advocate in the administration to give them a waiver. That Spring, I ended up teaching some students the same remedial subject for the third time.

Hayward was a commuter school, and often we had older students. Some were in school because their company was paying for their education. Some were recent divorcees who decided to finish their educations. A typical student, in her 40s or 50s, would approach me after the first class, or in my office hours the first week, and tell me that they were terrible at math and scared to death of my course, and asked me to help them achieve a passing grade in the course. This student would always get an A ten weeks later. Every time.

That Spring, I had one student who had taken the course in the Fall and Winter, and failed it both times, had found an ally in the administration, and had received special permission to retake the class a third time. Seven weeks later, I looked at her grade in the class thus far, and realized that, even if she were to get 100% in the last three weeks (which was unlikely), it would not be sufficient to give her a passing grade for the course. I told her. She went back to her advocate, who told her that she might have a mathematics learning disability. She called me on the phone during my office hours to discuss that possibility.

"You very well might have a math learning disability. Such disabilities are prevalent and very real, but in your case, I think there might be stronger indicators at play here. Your attendance thus far is 50%, so you might have a showing up disability. You have turned in 30% of the homework thus far, so you might have a doing your homework disability. While I don't discourage you from getting tested for a math disability, I urge you not to discount those other two factors." Because of that comment, I never taught remedial math again.

A year later, I talked to a colleague who was teaching one of the students from the special remedial course I described above. She had failed the first remedial math course three times before getting a passing grade out of pity on the fourth try (her teacher had caved in to pressure after initially failing her), and had failed the second remedial course twice. Because she was the star of the basketball team, she was allowed to stay. I was her teacher for her first and third attempts to pass the first remedial course. I got to know her pretty well, and what I discovered was that she was holding a lot of guilt for going to college. The people in her neighborhood regarded her with hostility for seeking an education, and her friends not at the school had stopped talking to her, and had accused her of abandoning the neighborhood. Since she was a junior in high school, she had been involved in the scholarship program and a voice from a person outside her community was telling her to conform to an academic standard she never really understood, and meanwhile, her support at home and in her neighborhood was nonexistent. I think she was relieved to drop out and return to what she knew and understood.

Before I taught college, I taught at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, CA. I had one student who had a basketball scholarship to UC Berkeley, dependent upon getting a C average her senior year. She was failing my algebra course. We brought her parents in. Her dad told me to give her a C no matter how well she did in my course, because she was the first person in their family to get into college. I told her parents that grades did not work that way, and that she could get free tutoring before or after school, but that she had to pass my course on her own merits. She missed the midterm exam, and her mother called the next day to tell me that her daughter missed the midterm because the daughter was getting her hair braided that day. I told her that she should take the money budgeted to the hair braider and spend it on a private tutor. The parents filed a complaint against me and I was reprimanded for that suggestion as "culturally insensitive". She was a bright, likable girl, and very popular. She had played basketball overseas in youth tournaments, and was a great player. As it became clear she might not pass the class, I had students and other teachers pressuring me to pass her regardless of her grade. I graded her final exam five times, each time being more generous, trying to give her enough partial credit to pass. I was able to work her grade on the exam up to 58%.  I gave her an F and she lost her Berkeley scholarship. It still breaks my heart to hear her sobs when I told her. I still think I did the right thing.

The common denominator in all of these cases is an assumption the students had that education consists of indulgences bestowed upon the student by a more socially privileged teacher or administrator who pities them. These students were uniformly astonished when other considerations, such as merit, trumped pity. When we lower the bar of merit to admit the underprivileged, the message we send is that merit does not apply to them. Then we fail them by failing to disabuse them of this assumption.

by Chris Bodenner

A monkey jockeying a dog and vintage footage of a monkey riding a goat. Carry on.

by Chris Bodenner

Russell Korobkin wades through the details of yesterday's "shocking" court ruling on stem-cell research:

Judge Lamberth surprisingly interpreted Dickey-Wicker to prevent the use of tax dollars to support researchers who do any work using hESC lines as an input. One might at least plausibly argue for this result based on the principle that underlies Dickey-Wicker: that is, if Congress’ goal is to avoid dirtying the federal government’s hands with complicity in the destruction of embryos, perhaps research that relies on embryo destruction somewhere upstream should be ineligible for funding. But Lamberth claims that his result is supported by the unambiguous language of the Amendment. I find this argument utterly unconvincing.

Continued here. Glenn Cohen looks at the political implications:

This ruling is certainly a disaster for the Obama administration.  They have already announced their intention to appeal, and if my own experience in the USDOJ Civil Division’s Appellate Staff (who presumably is handling this case) is any guide, the request for a stay will be filed first with Lamberth, and then a request for an emergency stay with D.C. Circuit by tomorrow at the latest.  This is a disaster for the Obama administration, in part, because even though more and more Americans support ESC research, heading into the November mid-term elections this is not the topic they want to dominate their media time.  Just when the President seemed ably reclaiming message time from the BP disaster, this threatens to again dominate political discourse for a week.

The decision is also a disaster for ESC researchers, who depend not only on this funding stream, but certainty about the rules under which they play. Judge Lamberth is a very able judge, but has also been somewhat aggressive in his injunction practice over the last few years and has had a series of (in my biased view) overreaching injunctions stayed and overturned by the D.C. Circuit.

Liberal activist judges strike again.

by Patrick Appel

It's good to have Daniel Larison blogging again. Catching up on old news, Larison takes on Douthat's worries about Muslim assimilation:

What we’re talking about here isn’t a question of assimilation to the norms of American culture or an[ acceptance] of the principles of constitutional government, but a question of conforming to the limits of approved political discourse. Of course, there is no way for Rauf to satisfy his critics in a way that will not destroy his credibility with most other Muslims, which I have to assume is the point. Anti-jihadists are always lamenting that moderate Muslims are too quiescent, passive and silent, but the moment that one of them says anything that they don’t like they dismiss him entirely. Little wonder that many Muslims here and around the world find anti-jihadists’ professions of common cause with them hard to take seriously.

by Patrick Appel

Stephen Budiansky goes a little far here, but he's right that excessive memorialization has consequences:

It is hard in this age of endless memorialization to even express this view without sounding callous: but Londoners did not turn their entire city into a "hallowed ground" or a shrine for the dead or a monument to British victimhood. They rebuilt, they went on, they rightly saw that the truest memorial to the dead was to show the Nazis that their city would rise again as if the Nazis had never existed on the face of the earth. I have always felt a deep discomfort similarly with the entire holocaust-memorial and holocaust-study industry. As a Jew, I hate the idea that the defining fact of my people's entire history should be what the fucking Nazis did to us.

There is a great Spanish proverb: olvidar la injuria es la mejor venganza: to forget an insult is the greatest revenge.