The Dish

Brookings' Ben Wildavsky cautions against throwing out the baby with the bathwater:

Ravitch sprinkles a range of “to be sures” throughout the book–yes, testing can be useful if it isn’t relied upon for onerous accountability penalties; yes, some charter schools have been remarkably successful–but she still rejects practically the entire enterprise of test-based accountability and choice. Instead, she says she'd like to see “a substantive national curriculum” covering the full range of subjects. But, while “end it, don’t mend it” seems to be Ravitch’s approach to the reform consensus, couldn’t one take the opposite tack and try to improve today’s top-down and bottom-up strategies rather than abandon them altogether?

Like other critics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Ravitch overstates the extent to which test prep crowds out all other subjects, even in the troubled urban schools whose students are furthest behind. Even if core skills do receive disproportionate attention at disadvantaged schools, one can make the case that this isn’t crazy: Ravitch herself acknowledges that reading, writing, and math are the building blocks for all other learning. Surely it would be possible to come up with an accountability regime that makes sure kids know the basics, exposes them to a broader range of subjects, and improves on the NCLB model, including removing perverse incentives for states to dumb down their standards.

Ravitch replies to Wildavsky.

Johann Hari again goes into the wilderness to find darkness:

Nurame was in her bed when she was woken by an angry mêlée. In her family's hut there were grown men – an incredible number, 10 or more, all in their 30s, all standing over her father, shouting. They reached for her. At night here, where there is no electricity, perfect darkness falls, and everything becomes a shadow-play of barely visible flickers. But even though she was eight years old, she suspected at once what was happening. She had heard whispers that, when a girl is considered ready for marriage, a man will seize her, and rape her, and then she must serve him for the rest of her life. "That was the culture," she says. But it wasn't her culture: like all the other little girls, she didn't want it. "I started screaming and tried to run out of the hut," she says. "I hid in the trees – hah! – but one of the men found me."

She was taken back to his home, held down in front of his family, raped, and taken to be married the next morning. Dazed, she signed the papers, and waited for a moment when she could flee.

Seattle, Washington, 8.30 am

Juan Cole defends it and attacks Goldblog. Jeffrey fires back. Ackerman's take here.

The man with the fax machine has declared that Petraeus' recent comments on Israel "[smack] of blaming the Jews for everything.” Yglesias yawns. Meanwhile, back on planet earth, Josh Marshall highlights the unavoidable truths Petraeus said in his prepared remarks to Congress this week:

The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [CentCom Area of Responsibility]. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.

Josh comments:

In a sense, all of this is no more than commonsense, a given in many conversations about the US position in the world, especially in the arc of Muslim majority nations from the eastern Mediterranean to Indonesia. The continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directly harms the vital interests of the United States. But if this is the consensus view at the highest levels of the US military, that's a very different world we're living in than the one we've been in heretofore.

What remains to be seen is whether this is a statement not to be acted upon or a strategic analysis that will inform Pentagon policy.

Reality is meeting a lobby. In Washington, that usually means the lobby wins. But this time, we are at war and America's vital interests are at stake. This will be a struggle – but that there is a struggle at all is progress in a way. I'd be more worried if no sparks were flying.

"Is there no shame anymore?" – Norm Ornstein on the post-modern GOP leadership, just lying and lying and lying about parliamentary procedure. I feel the same way about their feigned outrage over spending.

Chris Beam brilliantly profiles Andrew Breitbart:

Breitbart likes to think of himself as the big-picture guy. Sure, he can be the doofus who rubs his nipples and snorts red wine powder. But when it comes to substance, every discussion is panoramic. He talks culture as much as politics. Change the way people think, goes his argument, and you'll change the policies they support. "I'm trying to shift the focus of conservative movement from the narrow—the policy—to a much higher elevation, granting them a greater perspective." He's all about unified theory. That's why he can transition naturally from Obama ("a joyless PC freak") to ACORN to Bill Clinton to Clarence Thomas to Hollywood to political correctness to the New York Times before finally settling on why Sarah Palin should skip the presidency and just become "red-state Oprah." It's the upside of Breitbart's ADD.

Chait adds his two cents. I've never met Breitbart but we throw each other emails every now and again. I found the following part of the piece the most revealing:

"You wanna meet downer Andrew?" he said. He was picking at a fruit salad. Every few minutes, a piece of cantaloupe would slide down his fork and fall off. He would reskewer it until it fell off again. "It's a fundamental flaw in my psyche. I don't do well with death."

Breitbart's father, now in failing health himself, once tried to explain death to him. It was 1979, Breitbart was 10, and the Yankees catcher Thurman Munson had just died. "I asked my dad what happened. He said he died. I didn't understand, but he didn't have a way to explain the finality." Later, he said, he remembers being crushed by the death of his dogs. When Breitbart was 24, his best friend was killed in a robbery. Breitbart never really dealt with it. "I think I've created a horrific buttress of protections because I was so devastated by the permanence of death as a child," he said later. "My ability to be emotive and cry … I think I'm so fearful of tapping that that I won't know how to turn it off."

Breitbart, like Drudge, gets the web. He understands its subversive and rhetorical power: the sheer thrill of the direct access to millions, the fuel that ideology brings to everything, the traffic that anger summons like a dog whistle to the alienated. This is an angry time, and the web helps tap our anger, monetize it, leverage it in intoxicating ways. I don't begrudge him one bit his fury at some liberals' smugness, or the p.c. nonsense of the 1990s, or the cant of a lot of academia. I never came from liberalism, so I never felt I had to shuck it off.

But Drudge has kept himself sealed off as a human being for a reason, I suspect. He's public only as an avatar. It is because this transparent, raging, brutal world is too destructive to the soul and the psyche to remain so exposed in such a raw fashion for so long without serious damage. Drudge is smart. Andrew, I suspect, will realize how smart eventually.

Yep, death happens because the Internet has replaced life for some but it hasn't abolished the real thing. And Breitbart's vulnerable moment in the piece shows how even the enraged and always offensive are sad and defensive at times, vulnerable often. The web has not banished these truths. Ideology is false. Labels obscure. Rage eventually undoes the enraged, even if the anger is merited. And no, media isn't everything. The battle isn't everything.

Something else remains.

A reader writes:

I read your quote from Diane Ravitch, and I have to say that while I appreciate her forthrightness in admitting the error of her ways, I find even her admission to be maddening.  I have taught middle school English for the past 8 years, so my entire career has been dominated by the presence of NCLB.  What is so angering to me is that even as a 22 year old rookie, fresh out of college, it was clear to me that NCLB was always about dismantling the public education system. 

The way that proficiency is determined through normed testing (which Ravitch fails miserably to properly explain) means that essentially, all the students in the state take the test, and a mean score is determined.  Proficiency then means achieving at or above that score.  So by definition, a huge section of the state population will always be below proficiency … like, 50%.  Even the best schools or school systems could easily have 20-30% of their population "below proficiency."  Those who designed this bill clearly knew this and cynically set up a system that would lead to failure and a crisis of confidence in public education.  Anyone who claims they did not is either dishonest or not competent to discuss the matter.

On a side note, I saw that you mentioned the disparity between state test scores and performance on NAEP.  A large part of this discrepancy can be explained by the fact that we are dealing with children, not robots.  Unlike a robot, into which you feed a set of commands and out comes some action or another, children stubbornly have minds of their own.  When you tell a kid that today, instead of being with your friends in class, you are going to go to the library and sit with a very nice Test Administrator whom you've never met and will never see again, and who will give you an endless, boring test, that will have no bearing on your grades or your life, and the results of which you will probably never see, let's not fall backwards of shock when the students put forth less than maximum effort…  

Another writes:

I am progressive Democrat, but Diane Ravitch is wrong. Charter schools aren't just a good idea; charters work. I live in Los Angeles and founded the most diverse, high-performing charter school in the city. I can tell you the power of charters.

Urban education is a disaster, driving families with any means to the suburbs and destroying our cities. If we want to rebuild them, we need a decent public school system for middle-class families.  I have seen die-hard liberals rail against charters — until they walked into their local public school to enroll their child and realized why charter schools are saving our cities. Charters are making a difference — for the kids who go there, and for the schools they "leave behind."

In 2005, our local school was failing, overcrowded, and had a year-round schedule. We proposed opening a charter is the neighborhood. Within a year, the district brought in a new principal to the failing school, it was able to switch a traditional calendar, and it was no longer overcrowded. In five years, the test scores went up almost 100 points. Our charter inspired two other community groups to open two more schools, with two more hoping to open next year.

That is competition in action — helping all kids. It's a movement of concerned parents who want diverse, excellent public schools. And it's where liberals meet conservatives; the liberals care passionately about public education, diversity, and serving low income kids; and conservatives believe that competition will force districts to improve. With charter schools, they are both winning.

Diane Ravitch is sorely misguided — she is not on the ground, with kids in school. The idea that we can wait for the system to somehow self-correct is naive. Charters are working and serving low income kids. But they have the power to bring the middle class back into the public school system and keep the middle class in cities, instead of taking all their energy (and money) to the suburbs.