The Dish

Part of your paycheck goes to religious schools:

Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies. Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment.

Public debate about science education tends to center on bills like one in Missouri, which would allow public school parents to pull their kids from science class whenever the topic of evolution comes up. But the more striking shift in public policy has flown largely under the radar, as a well-funded political campaign has pushed to open the spigot for tax dollars to flow to private schools. Among them are Bible-based schools that train students to reject and rebut the cornerstones of modern science.

Decades of litigation have established that public schools cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. But private schools receiving public subsidies can — and do. A POLITICO review of hundreds of pages of course outlines, textbooks and school websites found that many of these faith-based schools go beyond teaching the biblical story of the six days of creation as literal fact. Their course materials nurture disdain of the secular world, distrust of momentous discoveries and hostility toward mainstream scientists. They often distort basic facts about the scientific method — teaching, for instance, that theories such as evolution are by definition highly speculative because they haven’t been elevated to the status of “scientific law.” And this approach isn’t confined to high school biology class; it is typically threaded through all grades and all subjects.

Check out several “science lessons from the Bible” here.

(Image via Stallion Cornell)

More readers sound off:

Regarding your posts on sticks and stones, and the difficulty of pronouncing LGBT, I suggest LUGBUT. Works for men, women, and transexuals. And it has a plural: LUGBUTS.

Another variety:

I’m sort of fond of the name my wife’s college pro-tolerance came up for themselves: The Giblets (from GBLT, because why not). OK, I’m not fond of it, but at least it rolls off the tongue, and it sounds potentially lewd besides, which is a plus.

Another adds, “I prefer GQ BLT – it sounds like a delicious designer sandwich, which is incredibly meta.” A more serious take from our Facebook page:

Homosexual has an important place in our lexicon; I frequently use it to describe people who have sex with (mostly) men, but do not identify a gay. Gay implies homosexual orientation with self-acceptance. I’m gay, but Ted Haggard is homosexual.

A fussbudget notes:

Your reader speaks imprecisely and you reinforce the imprecision. “LGBT” is not an acronym; it is an initialism. An initialism is a word made up of the first letters (usually) of other words, like an acronym, but unlike an acronym, not pronounced as a word itself. RADAR, SCUBA, NATO and SNAFU are acronyms. CIA, LGBTQIA and USA are initialisms. There are many explanations out there – here’s one. The several print dictionaries I have lying around my university library office do not make the distinction, but it is important to those of us who were toilet trained by the age of one and who like things just so. Picky-picky.

Update from a pickier reader:

Excuse me for out fussbudgeting the fussbudget, but radar, scuba, and snafu are no longer acronyms. Dictionaries now define them as nouns. They have morphed from acronyms into words over the years. That’s why they are no longer spelled in all caps. Your reader is correct that NATO is an acronym. NASA, NAFTA, UNICEF, POTUS, TARP, and OPEC are also acronyms. They are written in all caps and pronounced as if a word.

Jonathan Mahler says “an earthquake has just rocked the shaky edifice of the NCAA”:

Peter Sung Ohr, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, ruled that Northwestern University’s football team can unionize. This is a big, big deal.

If the ruling is upheld by the NLRB in Washington, and the various courts to which the university and NCAA would then appeal, it will be a revolution. As members of a union, the Wildcat players could, for example, insist on having independent concussion experts on the sidelines during games. They could demand that Northwestern cover medical expenses related to sports injuries, as well as pay the full costs, including expenses, of attending college. And now that the NLRB has certified Northwestern’s union, you can expect plenty of other college athletes to follow suit. The ruling might already apply to all private FBS schools, including major ones such as Notre Dame and Stanford. The logical next step would be for college athletes at such schools to join together to form a single players union — much like those for professional athletes.

McArdle weighs in:

It’s long been an open secret that football players at schools with major sports programs are something closer to an employee of the athletic department than to a member of the student body. Many of them aren’t capable of college work, and those who are aren’t necessarily encouraged to do any. The fiction that they’re students is maintained only by NCAA rules that forbid outright compensation of players, and “gifts” that are just compensation in disguise. You can argue, and I would, that these rules mostly benefit the colleges, not the “students.” I understand that the players get something out of the deal. But they would get a lot more if it weren’t for a legalized cartel that’s actively suppressing their wages. Given these realities, it’s hard not to cheer the NLRB. But it isn’t clear how much allowing football players to unionize will accomplish, as long as the NCAA is still allowed to make rules against paying them.

Erik Loomis takes the long view:

Now, this is far from the end of the road. Northwestern is going to appeal and the NCAA is going to back them up all the way. After all, the free labor they take from athletes is at stake. So who knows what is going to happen. But a couple of quick key takeaways. First is the speed of the decision. Usually, these cases are a long, drawn-out process (often a problem of the NLRB, making it an increasingly ineffective agency for workers operating in real time with house payments and such). This case began only two months ago. This means that for the regional director, it was an obvious and easy decision. He declared these athletes workers because they received compensation, even if did not receive a paycheck Second, this continues to chip away at the NCAA. Every time players sue or argue for rights, the NCAA cartel weakens. Every time they win or even gain a partial victory, NCAA power declines even more.

But in the short term, questions remain:

Ivan Maisel, of ESPN, raises a smart series of concerns. There is, for example, a potential problem of scope. Ohr’s decision covers only scholarship players on the football team. What about athletes who play other sports? “The workload of the college athletes in non-revenue sports is also extreme,” he writes. “They also sign that contract to perform services. They are subject to the control of the coaches, and in return for payment. By these criteria, they deserve to join the union, too.” And the decision covers only men. Women’s sports often lose money. Does that mean that the female athletes in these sports are students, rather than employees, and thus undeserving of union protection?

Meanwhile, Bloomberg editors urge schools to give their athletes “union-busting scholarships”:

[T]he ruling was based on the fact that an athletic scholarship can be withdrawn if a player opts to quit a team. This gives the school too much leverage – whether or not courts ever decide that it makes the student an employee.

The NCAA should solve this by making a simple change that would be good for students and schools alike: Require that all athletic scholarships be granted for four years. Then, if a student-athlete lost interest in a sport, or decided the team requirements were too demanding, he or she could quit and still finish college on scholarship. Incredibly, the NCAA began allowing such multiyear awards just two years ago, and while some schools have begun offering them, few do – and only to a small number of high-level prospects.

Alyssa mulls over commercialism and sports more generally:

The idea that elite college athletes are amateurs who devote their college careers to playing sports for nothing but love is of a piece with a larger contradiction in the way American audiences approach athletic competition. Professional sports are an absolutely giant business. In 2012, Major League Baseball signed three television deals covering eight years of broadcasts for $12.4 billion, bragging that the figure represented “more than a 100-percent increase in annual rights fees to MLB over the current arrangements.” But when athletes themselves dare to follow the examples of their owners and their leagues and prioritize their contracts over loyalty to any given city, fans can go ballistic: Witness the frustration vented at Robinson Cano when he left the New York Yankees for the Seattle Mariners.

If we make sports the embodiment of American ideals, it makes a certain amount of sense, however irrational it is, that we want athletes to focus on something other than money. It would be too uncomfortable to acknowledge that the games we set up as objects of worship are really just a way for us to venerate a few talented people for extracting the highest possible compensation in exchange for their gifts.

America’s urban populations are on the rise:

New Census data released Thursday further suggests that within the last year (from July 1, 2012, to July 1, 2013), virtually all of the country’s population growth took place in metropolitan areas, with a significant chunk of it even further clustered in and around the largest cities. Over that year, the number of people living in metropolitan America increased by 2.3 million, a figure that reflects both natural growth and in-migration. The population in what the Census calls “micropolitan statistical areas” – smaller population centers with a core of fewer than 50,000 people – grew by a mere 8,000 souls. As for the rest of the mostly rural country, the population there dropped between 2012 and 2013 by 35,000 people. Those areas are neither attracting new residents nor producing many of their own, a sign of the exodus of young adults who might be having their own children now.

But, as Ben Casselman notes, some cities have been more fortunate than others:

Eighteen US metro areas had unemployment rates of 12 percent or higher in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and all but three of them saw a net decline in migration – that is, they saw more people move out than move in. These cities are overwhelmingly in inland California, where the collapse of the housing bubble left deep and lasting scars. … Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, cities in regions with strong job markets are gaining residents. Oil and gas states dominated the list of fastest-growing cities: Six of the top 10 were in Texas, North Dakota or Wyoming, where an oil and gas boom has brought unemployment rates below 5 percent.

Meanwhile, geographer Jim Russell reminds readers that population decline doesn’t have to signal doom:

[The conventional wisdom is that] negative net migration is bad, always bad. To say otherwise makes you a blind civic cheerleader guilty of moving the goalposts in order to gild a turd. Pittsburgh is dying. Seriously, how could outmigration be a good thing? That means 10,000 more people left than arrived. Almost certainly, people did move to a dying city. In this case, 20,000 young adults with college degrees moved into the urban core. Meanwhile, 30,000 suburban residents without a high school diploma retired and moved to Phoenix. The workforce grows and gets younger. The workforce gets smarter and per capita income increases. … Just because the net migration number is negative doesn’t mean there is brain drain. A shrinking population doesn’t always indicate a dying city.

Earlier this week, we gave an Yglesias Award nomination to Richard Stearns, president of World Vision U.S., one of the largest evangelical aid organizations in the world. He had taken a stand that a married gay person could be employed by the organization as long as they followed the same guidelines for fidelity as heterosexuals. The decision lasted two days:

The initial decision faced heavy backlash from the evangelical community—including Al Mohler, Russell Moore, John Piper, and Franklin Graham—with few voicing open support for the decision. The day after the initial policy change was made, the Assemblies of God, one of America’s largest and fastest-growing denominations, urged its members to consider dropping their financial support from World Vision and instead “gradually shifting” it to “Pentecostal and evangelical charities that maintain biblical standards of sexual morality.”

And so Stearns reversed his position. The dispute is really about what is central to Christianity:

“They were not taking a position supporting same-sex marriage or homosexuality,” said Tim Dearborn, director of Fuller Seminary’s Lloyd John Ogilvie Institute of Preaching, who previously oversaw how World Vision’s Christian commitments were implemented across its international partners. Instead, he said World Vision, which has a “deep commitment to live and serve in ways that are consistent with Scripture,” was attempting to do three things.

“First, to focus on the aspects of the biblical mandate that are non-negotiable: caring for the poor, victims of injustice, and especially children,” said Dearborn. “Second, to contribute to the unity of the church around those things, at a time when the church is fractured. And third, to contribute as a result of that to the credibility of the gospel and the church in the eyes of American society.”

It was a calm and beautiful moment. While it lasted.