The $100,000 Question

TOM Scocca reads that NAS Bowdoin vanity study so I don't have to:

A search of the report indicates that the National Association of Scholars included the words "sex" or "sexual" 244 times. "Western civilization" appears twice.

Also, no course in Spenser!  At great personal risk of an exploding aneurysm I am avoiding any Faerie Queene jokes, and will just ask if anyone would like to cover my bet that that Klingenstein guy couldn't pick Spenser out of a line-up that included Hulk Hogan, James Madison, and Dame May Whitty. 

Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From The Byline

Amity Shlaes, "What Parents Don't Know About Bowdoin". April 3

THE other day I went to Barnes & Noble, or as it's known in Indiana, Barnes and Noble's, for some peace and quiet. I needed a book. I figured they still had some. I wouldn't have gone to Barnes and Noble's except it's the last bookstore standing. The place has been Wingnut Book Central for over a decade now. Remember the days of Hillary Hate Book of the Week? Every last one of them was on display just inside the front door. Now, for a public spitter I'm relatively phlegmatic about seeing intentional bias everywhere. I'm barely exaggerating here. The Current Events section was practically a Rush Limbaugh portrait gallery. You could chalk that up to sales, I suppose, but I went there specifically to check on Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot when it was on the Times Bestsellers List, and found three copies, there in the back, spines out.

So it wasn't really a surprise that, while hunting for the remains of the once-thriving Computer section I stumbled on Shlaes' Coolidge.  Something like fifteen dour copies, two columns face-out and several copies on either side. Which is one for every person in northern Marion county who could identify the man in a multiple-choice quiz.

A few years ago, an alumnus of Williams College in Massachusetts, Thomas Klingenstein, took the opportunity of a golf game with the president of Bowdoin, a Maine college similar to Williams, to suggest that diversity received too much emphasis at Williams and that Western civilization received too little. “Common American identity,” where race and class matter less, is lost.

Yes, why can't academia be more like The Claremont Institute, where Mr. Klingenstien is chairman of the board of directors, and where only one race and class matter?

Bowdoin’s president, Barry Mills, slapped back in a 2010 convocation speech…Mills also dropped in a few remarks about “loyal supporters,” which probably had a chilling effect because the words suggested that any Bowdoin alum who might side with the Williams man might be disloyal.

A chilling effect. Amity Shlaes, master of ironic understatement.

Rather than fulminate, however, Klingenstein funded a study by the National Association of Scholars to see whether his perception of Bowdoin was warranted. He picked Bowdoin, not Williams, to examine, perhaps out of pique.

Oh, perhaps. Or perhaps out of ideological assholery.

I guess we don't have to ask why he picked the National Association of Scholars:

Yet once the work got going, he says, “curiosity replaced anger.” The 360-page study, released this week, suggests that the quiescent Maine college is fundamentally different, more radical, than it was 25, and certainly 40, years ago.

Attention, white people with English or Business Degrees from wealthy private colleges: by and large, this is what happens, as something called "Time" does something typically described as "passing".  The academy in 1960 was considerably different from its 1920 version, too. This was probably even true in your day for the Great Books curriculum, or Screwing Widows and Orphans Studies. So maybe you noticed.

And the reason Dead European White Guy Studies have been largely supplanted is scholarship. Not Commies. Dead European White Guy Worship--there's still plenty of them, and their followers, around, by the way--lost their monopoly. In the marketplace of ideas. Which I thought was something you two understood. In fact, I thought it was the only thing you understood. Why don't you spread a little honey over at the NAS on the condition they get off their tenured asses and change scholarship with, you know, scholarship?

The researchers, Peter Wood and Michael Toscano, commenced by defining their goal: to describe the penetration of what they call “identity emphasis” -- a philosophy that looks at the world in terms of race, sex, ethnicity or other groupings. The National Association of Scholars also looked at green education, because environmental classes are often explicitly anti- capitalist.

It cannot be stressed enough: one of the necessary tools of cultural literacy in the 21st century--as it was in the 20th--is the ability to understand what constitutes a scientific study, and how to understand its limitations. This is not one. It's a 400-page hit piece some ideologues with degrees sold to some ideologue with money. "Identity emphasis" isn't an empirical category; it's a argument. "Green studies are explicitly anti-capitalist" isn't an hypothesis. It's a tell the size of Mr. Klingenstien's greens fees.

Although the report reviews Bowdoin’s history, its real starting point is the 1960s, when the college was both turning away from its religious roots and preparing to admit women. Bowdoin still required four semester courses in each of three areas -- humanities, math and science -- and in social studies. One could say 1960s students had a common education. 

Soon, however, this changed. 

If we all just dream hard enough, some day there'll be a Department of Evil Sixties Studies. And these people will have nothing to say about it.

In 1970, in the name of liberating students from “forced exposure” to certain academic areas, the college dropped requirements unrelated to a major. Like many other colleges, Bowdoin introduced official identity studies through what was then called Afro-American studies. In the 1980s, women’s studies was added as a minor. Gay and lesbian studies came along at some point, as well.

Your point?

All these shifts affected campus life. To many, they seemed a warranted expansion at a stodgy institution. And the undergrad who sought traditional general classes such as “Survey of English Literature” could find them. Bowdoin could claim it offered the best of old and new worlds. This Bowdoin of the 1980s and early 1990s is the Bowdoin that most parents tell themselves still exists.

Dear me, "most parents" are sending their children to Bowdoin in order to prepare them for 1960?

Yet, as Wood and Toscano show, Bowdoin itself didn’t freeze in the 1980s. It shifted further, with the identity classes proliferating to the present day. Where once there was only one true identity program, Afro-American studies, now there are five: Africana studies, Asian studies, gender and women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, and Latin American studies.

Your point?

One in five courses offered to undergraduates in fall 2011 was either about a distinct identity or “green,” relating to the environment. Surveys, including coursework on Western civilization, faded: Today, 4.4 percent of Bowdoin’s classes are surveys versus 14.2 percent in 1964.

Klingenstein paid a couple of academics to produce a 400-page dissertation on the Bowden course schedule?

In 2012, about 10 of the 35 first-year seminars emphasize the difference in identity groups and affiliate with identity-studies programs: “Africana Studies 12: Affirmative Action and United States Society,” “Anthropology 13: Beyond Pocahontas, Native American Stereotypes,” “Gay and Lesbian Studies 17: The Sexual Life of Colonialism.” Students are getting a common education of a sort -- in political correctness -- not one fostering color-blind citizenship.

Well, you know what they say: The fuck didn't you emphasize a color-blind society when you ran all of it?

Sheesh, an Africana Studies course studies Affirmative Action. An Anthropology course surveys Native American stereotypes (the sort of thing which, back before the Evil Sixties, Anthropology sometimes helped perpetuate). And tell me, which do you object more to hearing about: Sex, or Colonialism?

“Identity studies is the one most inescapable part of Bowdoin education,” Wood says. “The student can avoid anything else, but not this.” A student can get a humanities education there that isn’t based on identity, but not easily. This, in turn, warrants discussion.

Okay. A student at Bowdoin can get a humanities education that isn't based on identity. And nothing is easy. End of discussion.

Dirt Is Trumps

For the individual termite, the greatest freedom is the termitary. 

--Thomas Huxley

FAR be it from me to ignore a summons from on High. Ed Kilgore takes on this Michael Gerson bit of April flummery. I had seen it. I look in on Fred Hiatt's Home for Pathological Liars every day, God help me. It's true, it's always summer there, and the fish are jumpin', but some days I'd rather pass. I suppose that even the Suquamish got tired of salmon every now and then.

So, for starters:

Though Gerson cannot bring himself to use the words “charter schools” or “public school choice,” he does allude elliptically to “limited choice” options in education, which are bad because they don’t directly take on the satanic forces of education unions and bureaucrats. The other word he doesn’t use is accountability, once the favorite word of conservatives when it came to education policy, but now a complete no-no. Accountability to the public for the use of public funds, the very definition (along with full and equal access) of what makes a public school “public,” would exclude vouchers that just shuffle taxpayer subsidies to private schools to keep on doing what they do, whether it’s good education or bad, or evangelical madrassa-style instruction in the evils of science and secularism—not to mention public schools.

In the education biz we call that "Tuesday".

Gerson’s too smart not to know that he is deliberately telescoping the education policy debate and in the name of his own definition of “choice” creating a false choice between backpack vouchers with zero accountability for results (other than to parents, sometimes under the divinely-appointed servant-leadership of Father Frank or Pastor Bob) and the worst stereotypes of old-style public schools with poor funding bases in the most troubled neighborhoods. What really infuriates me, though, is to see conservatives who fought so long for high-stakes testing and educational quality measurement throw it all away at the very moment America is about to undertake the most sweeping accountability reforms in history, the “common core standards” initiative, just so they can get taxpayer subsidies for religious schools, and/or strike a mindless blow against teachers unions.

Let's note, here, that one may be as disingenuous as a cuckoo and still make an intelligent argument; it is, after all, the cuckoo's uncanny ability to mimic the eggs of the nest it invades that closes the sale. But Gerson's used to hoodwinking a different sort of birdbrain.

I honestly do not know whether he's "too smart" not to realize he's being disingenuous. I haven't seen any evidence of this mattering in right-wing circles since before Gerson was born. If he recognized disingenuity as something to be avoided, for intellectual or ethical reasons, he wouldn't have the career arc he's had. Th' fuck is anyone still being nice about this? Taking the disingenuousness out of Michael Gerson would be like taking the air out of a marshmallow. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.

Good Lord, there's never been any intention of holding charter or private schools "accountable". We've known that since at least the second time Neil Bush avoided prison time, haven't we? Is there some way these liars could be more transparent?  We've seen it in action. Charters and vouchers were the panacea for "failing" public schools, right up until the time they were enacted. Now it's "Hey, they're no worse."

Alternately, if you're Gerson, you can quote the American Enterprise Institute, or link a study none of your readers can see without a subscription, in which nine "leading educational researchers" note the "modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both."  Be careful not to mention all nine are proponents of school "choice". If there was unequivocal evidence that charters were superior, and vouchers improved education, these bastids would be screaming it from every church steeple. Hell, if there was equivocal evidence they'd be producing it, instead of the learned opinions of learned mouthpieces and cherry-picked "trends".

In the case of children in failing public schools, this argument gains moral urgency. Choice may not be a system-wide panacea. But it remains a disturbing spectacle when teachers unions count as a legal “victory” when disadvantaged children are returned to troubled, unsafe institutions.

That's not disingenuity. That's Who Lost China, sixty years on.

Let us speak of Indiana, if we must. The Supreme Court decision was about as suspenseful as a last minute stay of execution request in Texas a week before an election.

This has all played out against the increasingly obvious backdrop of  money buying legislation. Over the past twenty years Indiana ended its prohibition on exclusive beer distributorships, causing beer prices to skyrocket, ended the prohibition against fireworks, then ended the freedom-killing prohibition against fireworks powerful enough to kill small children and medium-sized pets, gave out-of-state big box stores the right to drive local liquor stores out of business, prevented out-of-state liquor distributors from competing with the in-state distributors' lobbyists, and did just about everything the gun lobby asked without waiting for it to ask. Almost all of the measures involved got voted down or tabled in the first year, and returned (Freedom!) after the concern over campaign coffers had eased some.

The Charter school industry was savvy enough to bypass the General Assembly and get itself a governor, the previous one, and his henchsuperintendent. Hell, they didn't even have to hide it; Tony Bennett's wife was on the payroll when he was elected, and she stayed there for months after. The legislature did Daniels' bidding, because, hey, genius. So legislation was written targeting the two large urban districts (Indianapolis Segregated Schools, and the Gary Human Disaster of Capitalist Rapine District) for takeover by people who know nothing about education, a few things about letting employees know their place, and a lot about itchy palms.

The mayor of Indianapolis has had to power to create his own charter schools for almost a decade now. Where are the results? Well, we made miraculous claims the first year in, but that was when voters still remembered what sort of promises had led to their tax dollars going to private enterprises. Since then the claims have been relegated to "amorphous". The mayor makes a point, every year or two, of canceling the charter of one or two "underperformers", which doesn't accomplish anything, but is, at least, easier than accomplishing anything. Our young people have never been more educated. Really, sometimes I imagine I'm in Paris between the Wars.

Public schools in Gary and Indianapolis have been turned over to roving privateers, who now get more access to taxpayer bucks to expand their markets. Expect to hear little of test scores, and a lot more about the plight of the disadvantaged and educationally disabled in coming years. (This has already happened, in fact; one of the two syndicates which took over some of Indianapolis' Failing Schools, and immediately ran into trouble, replied that it had had "no idea" things were so awful in the schools whose Failure it had been promoting for years previous.)

Vouchers? Bullshit. The Indiana Supreme Court already knew that the program was sending taxpayer dollars to schools which were teaching that Adam and Eve were white Europeans who rode dinosaurs. No appeal to Everson v. Board of Education makes that Constitutional. No argument about public good entitles active breeders to everyone else's money.

And no fucking phony statistics will make it work.

more than half a million low- and middle-income Hoosier students — and about 62 percent of all families — are eligible for state aid to help pay for a private or religious school.

Eligible! Yes, and you're all up for a Peabody, into the bargain. And a Lotto Jackpot. And Michael Gerson can start making space for that Pulitzer.

If you think 62% of Hoosier families are gonna get themselves a fat state check, you're due for a little remedial math. If you think that families below the poverty line are gonna suddenly be sending their droopy-pantsed progeny to white suburban academies, there to flourish under proper care, you're hallucinating. If you've got a child with severe disabilities, you probably already know how your luck's gonna run.  But congratulations! You're now eligible, thanks to the same people who want to keep you out of the healthcare system.


School reform is the War on (Some) Drugs. It's targeted the poor and minorities, and the Democratic party which was supposed to the beneficiary of its voting blocs. It preceded from upper class distain (paging Mrs. Reagan), announced its rhetorical victory a priori, convinced people with specious arguments which were never challenged until long after the fact, and helped itself to piles of public money. Results? Accountability? I believe you already have that answer.

The War On Drugs On Schools

NIXON'S the One, Reagan's the Beard:

Indiana could be first to require armed employee in every public school

This thing passed out of the Indiana House Education Committee almost before the NRA's armed press conference announcing the template was over.

“This is a common-sense approach to a horrible situation,” said Rep. Jim Lucas, a freshman Republican from Seymour who led the effort to add the protection-officer mandate to Senate Bill 1. 

An armed employee, he said, could have prevented the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in December that killed 20 students and six adults.

And if pi was a rational number God would still be in His Heaven thanks to the Indiana General Assembly.

“Basically, these people were defenseless,” Lucas said. “We know for a fact that Sandy Hook, they did everything by the book. The school was locked down, the shooter came in, broke dozens of laws and shot his way into the school.”

Yeah, and Nidal Malik Hasan killed thirteen people at Ft. Fucking Hood, where they also do everything by the book and are armed to the gills. That Navy Seal-ish dude got gunned down at a gun range.

I'm married to a public school teacher. It ain't like we don't take school security seriously. It ain't like we don't bleed into our collective chest cavity here about all these little 2nd amendment displays.

It's not like, since she's an urban public school teacher, we aren't already familiar with putting armed law enforcement in the hallways.

Security is security. Danger is danger. Life is untidy, unwieldy, and often less than pleasant. And bullshit is bullshit. Especially when it's bullshit at the service of a well-oiled gun manufacturer's lobby, from its eager mouthpieces and willing sycophants, eager to insist that the obvious is not true.

Maybe this should be the big education issue in this country: the current idea that the soul of wisdom lies in not listening to anybody you don't already agree with.

I broke the news of the bill to my Poor Wife yesterday. Her response was immediate. "We have an armed guard now. He goes to the bathroom. He gets lunch. He patrols, or gets called, outside. He gets called to every disturbance. He files reports. He's got a handgun. There are three main entrances to the school. I could get the drop on him."

There is, for now, the ready estimate of "$10 million" to implement the law (in a state which happily cut 20% from its education budget a few years ago because Mitch Daniels is an entrepreneurial genius). It's almost assuredly low, almost assuredly bogus. And almost assuredly predicated on the idea these people have that there's always a willing weapons fancier ready and able to do the job, so we won't be spending money on salaries.  "Students, continue reading Chapter 7. I'll be back as soon as the shootin' stops."

Listen, I don't know about you, but I went to public schools, and there were teachers there I didn't think should be trusted with chalk. Or dodge balls. Particularly dodge balls. I had a science teacher once who was later fired for lifting a student off the ground by his neck. A move which he'd already gotten a reputation for. The guy was fully capable of winging somebody over an untucked shirttail. Come to think of it, he probably was better suited to Door Patrol than teaching. Provided you don't mind a little collateral damage.

Yeah, they did everything by the book at Newtown. Including leaving that woman alone to arm her crazy hothouse son like he was a forward observation post. Yes, a trained sniper aiming at the front door could'a brought Adam Lanza down, assuming he'd shot first, assuming Lanza didn't know to expect him. If you're absolutely serious about this (answer: you aren't), then put a SWAT team in every school in Indiana. Maybe they can help change test answers in their down time.

Which, oh, what th' fuck, Slate:

A March 29 grand jury indictment details the shockingly sick culture of adult cheating that existed within the Atlanta public schools under former superintendent Beverly Hall, who resigned in disgrace two years ago.

Shocking? Sick? What effing country do you hail from? If that's not a description of unfettered capitalism going back to the 14th amendment, you find me a better one. Atlanta's just the largest and most blatant example we know of. Unless you want to count Michelle Rhee, who was fortunate that her rabbi got tossed by the voters before she ended up in stir. In fact, the only shocking thing to me in all this is that Beverly Hall isn't running her own billion-dollar slush fund now, and advising Los Angeles schools on how to get in on the scam before the marks get wise.

A one-time “Superintendent of the Year” who earned $580,000 in performance bonuses, Hall...

Here's what's Sick, Ms Goldstein, though, unfortunately, it won't shock anyone. We just blithely assume that of course a professional educator, who had sought the superintendent's position for the Failing Atlanta Schools™ system, should pull down half a mil in "performance bonuses".  While her charges make do with whatever the taxpayers begrudge them this year. Of course she should pull down a few hundred thousand extra shekels because test scores improved miraculously. Not because anyone gives a shit about what inner-city children in Atlanta are being taught. Because she's a walking fucking advertisement for the people who want to dismantle public education just to scorch a union. Beverly Hall shouldn't by facing prison just for running a enormous scam on the willingly scammed. She should be facing hard time for selling out a sacred trust. If we ever decide to judge the sickness of that we'll be well on our way to understanding just how unshocking cheating and lying are out there in the Marketplace. And Slate will be out of, you should pardon the expression, business.

Really, is it possible this country has learned nothing whatsoever from the War on Drugs? It's just, like, a four-decade Iraq War?

One In The Head

George Eff Will, "The Pop-Tart terrorist". March 8

JUST so we all understand each other right from the start, the only bit of public stupidity I hate worse than bureaucratic stupidity is stupid public grousing about bureaucratic stupidity. Maybe it's just me, but there you are, and I've always been like that. To me it's like someone squawking about how stupid diplomatic language is while ignoring the fact that it just prevented open warfare.

[And this goes double for the sub-genre of Current Events commentary which explains why some particular Sequester-required cut is so much worse, or less intelligent, or inherently evil than some other cut the commentator proposes. Fuck you. As though the great service the Republican party can provide is demanding cuts, so that it's incumbent upon the proponents of good government to make it work to everyone's satisfaction. Either you believe in cutting government services drastically, or you oppose it. If you believe in it, take what you get; the Sequester is just the first wobbly baby step with those people.  Otherwise you're insisting on intelligent action designed to make a total piece of shit taste more like a Tootsie Roll. I hope the President personally ordered an end to White House tours. If he's not gonna (and not s'posed to) make a point about such things, why's he President?]

Complaints about stupid bureaucracy being stupid is something like 10% of our coverage of Education, innit? Down from 25, and only because of high-stakes testing and sideshow hucksters like Michelle Rhee? And 9 in 10 stories are absolute bullshit: the teacher fired for displaying a picture of George W. Bush, the one fired for passing out copies of the Constitution, students expelled for wearing flag teeshirts or Support the Troops bracelets. You'd think we might make a special effort after that to get things right, doncha?

And let us remind ourselves, before we go any further, that our current imbroglio over public education is now in its seventh decade, that it is almost entirely the result of right-wing agitation which followed Brown, and which reached maximum Dunning-Kruger Effect velocity half a decade after, when two Court decisions eliminated coerced prayer in public schools. And has remained at that level ever since. This is where crap like the Pop-tart Gun comes from. The right doesn't give a fuck about student rights. If that kid had nibbled himself an image of Khalid Sheik Mohammed he'd be getting death threats from the same people who are so concerned about his "rights" and "political correctness".

We've fought for fifty years with people who insist that what the First amendment actually does is enshrine the right to impose majority doctrine, so long as you don't openly burn heretics, just give 'em directions to the bus station. Maybe it's time we tried correcting that to see if it has a palliative effect on education.

Anyway, so here we are again at the confluence of Snopes and Principled Discussion of Educational Policy, as Told from the Perspective of Someone Who Hates Public Education, Teachers Unions, and a Wide Swath of Germ-y Proles, a place where George Eff Will provides the occasional guided canoe tour.

Rodney Francis is insufficiently ambitious. The pastor of the Washington Tabernacle Baptist Church in St. Louis has entered the fray over guns, violence and humanity’s fallen nature with a plan for a “buyback” of children’s toy guns. And toy swords and other make-believe weapons. There is, however, a loophole in the pastor’s panacea. He neglects the problem of ominously nibbled and menacingly brandished breakfast pastries.

"…ignores the profound ramifications of holiday-theme cocktail napkins." "…glosses over serious portent of printed messages on articles of clothing." "disregards the acute disquiet…"

Joshua Welch — a boy, wouldn’t you know; no good can come of these turbulent creatures — who is 7, was suspended from second grade in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County last week because of his “Pop-Tart pistol.” While eating a rectangular fruit-filled sugary something — nutritionist Michelle Obama probably disapproves of it, and don’t let Michael Bloomberg get started — Joshua tried biting it into the shape of a mountain but decided it looked more like a gun. So with gender-specific perversity, he did the natural thing. He said, “Bang, bang.” 

But is this really natural? Or is nature taking a back seat to nurture, yet again? Is Joshua’s “bang, bang” a manifestation of some prompting in our defective social atmosphere, and therefore something society could and should stamp out?

Or should schools enforce rules an' stuff?

The school did not sentence little Joshua to Life at Gitmo, nor Wal*Mart. It responded because a seven-year-old boy pointed a "gun"--leave us, arguendo, ignore the "nibbled pastry" origins of the weapon, as well as the debatable classification of a Pop-Tart as a product of the baker's art, and join in thanking the Lord for once this gun wasn't real--and said--allegedly--"Bang Bang!" at another student.

We can, of course, debate whether the policy is intelligent, or efficacious; we can, while we're at it, debate whether Pop-Tarts constitute child abuse. But let's first see if we can take out of the situation what's actually there, shall we?

ITEM: The matter plays out against a backdrop of an epidemic of real school violence, and we expect schools to respond. This is not a matter of some anti-consumerist, Ur-feminist crusade against corn syrup and toy machine guns on Saturday morning teevee in the Sixties.

That is to say, Mr. Eff Will, that your outrage could stand a little upgrade after forty years. Me, I'm willing to let the people who actually work there decide what does and doesn't constitute a threat. When loopy assholes start shooting up box seats at Nationals Park you can help decide what to do about it.

ITEM: Presumably the impish lil' scamp was disciplined for the act of imitating a weapon pointed at another person, not for Thoughtcrime in Food Sculpture. Further, let's assume that his actions violated an establish rule which was at least written down somewhere, and probably--knowing, as you and I do, the Liberal Statist Hivemind--drilled into his head over and over and over again.

So you're taking the position that schools shouldn't enforce rules, so long as someone out there could ridicule them for doing so. If that's not a fair characterization, tell us where the line should be drawn. At least before we arm every teacher in America.

By now, Americans may be numb to such imbecilities committed by the government institutions to which they entrust their children for instruction. Nothing surprises after that 5-year-old Pennsylvania girl was labeled a “terroristic threat,” suspended from school and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation because she talked about shooting herself and others with her Hello Kitty gun that shoots bubbles.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get all my important news from Michelle Malkin, too. I've yet to see the "terrorist threat" tag come from anyone at the school, mostly because the school has said very little about the incident because it is legally precluded from talking in public. How convenient for y'all. It did release a statement saying that news reports were not necessarily accurate, but to hell with listening to bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo when there's a story to be told, fed by the completely objective report from her litigious parents.

And so fucking what? So we're keeping young children from threatening violence, even cartoon violence, these days. We've kept 'em from much sillier stuff. Saddle shoes and hair over the collar, to name two. So someone overreacts, even. Zero tolerance and school discipline are trademarked slogans of the American Right, so long as white middle-class children aren't being punished.

But looking on the bright side, perhaps we should welcome these multiplying episodes as tutorials about the nature of the regulatory state that swaddles us ever more snugly with its caring. If so, give thanks for the four Minnesota state legislators whose bill would ban “bullying” at school. 

Yeah, "bullying". What crap.

They define this as the use of words, images or actions that interfere with an individual’s ability “to participate in a safe and supportive learning environment.” Bullying may include, among many other things, conduct that has a “detrimental effect” on a student’s “emotional health.” Or conduct that “creates or exacerbates a real or perceived imbalance of power between students.” Or violates a student’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Or conduct that “does not rise to the level of harassment” but “relates to” — yes, relates to — “the actual or perceived race, ethnicity, color, creed, religion, national origin, immigration status, sex, age, marital status, familial status, socioeconomic status, physical appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, academic status, disability, or status with regard to public assistance, age, or any additional characteristic defined” in another Minnesota statute.

I'm sorry, but what exactly is it you object to in this?

If this becomes law, it will further empower the kind of relentless improvers and mindless protectors who panic over Pop-Tart pistols and discern terrorism in Hello Kitty bubble guns. Such people in Minnesota will be deciding what behavior — speech, usually — damages a “supportive learning environment.”

I daresay anyone who ever attended public school at any time is aware that school administrators have always had the power to decide what behavior damages a learning environment, and it's the rare one who's applied that judiciously. This codifies a certain type of prohibited behavior; codification is necessary precisely because every goddam suburban parent sues the district when little Jayden or Chloe is disciplined. It's the fucking faux-Fifties macho code some people feel should not be threatened, and you, George Eff Will, ought to be about the last person to object to that. "Relentless improver and mindless protector" is, in fact, the sort of thing the public clamors for in a public education establishment, so maybe these poor victims of PC Run Amok should be in charter schools, where they're allowed to act out when and as they please.

Government is failing spectacularly at its core functions, such as budgeting and educating. Yet it continues to multiply its peripheral and esoteric responsibilities, tasks that require it to do things for which it has no aptitude, such as thinking and making common-sense judgments. Government nowadays is not just embarrassing, it is — let us not mince words — inappropriate.

Y'know, George, it doesn't help the cause when a beneficiary of the most expensive education available in the US of A utters something so remarkably stupid.

The Default Setting Is Now "Effing Liar". Sorry.

Rick Reilly, "Manti Te'o wondered in 2010 if Lennay Kekua situation was 'a prank'". January 19

Frontline: The Education of Michelle Rhee  Check Local Listings

ODDS are that you're a good deal smarter than me, and on the question of sanity no one will even lay the bet. So let me bring you up to date on the Manti Te'o story.

First, the haters at Deadspin reveal to the world that the inspiring story of Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend was a slight exaggeration, in that she wasn't his girlfriend, had not, in fact, died, and was slightly non-existent. As luck would have it, this was revealed just before Te'o, his agents, and/or the University of Notre Dame was set to fess up, publicly.

This inspiring Story for the Ages had been promulgated throughout the college football season by Sports Illustrated, ESPN, the cable sports megalith, and ESPN, the online heaping mess, despite the fact that, in each instance, the reporters who cover the story (now) report that they couldn't find a trace of Lennay Kekua.

Since the story broke, ESPN has been your go-to source for news, if by "news" you mean "a collection of successive spin attempts from Te'o, his agents, his family, the University of Notre Dame, and, basically, anyone who saw the opportunity to grab a stick of the refreshing chewing gum of American media fame." ESPN's Jeremy Schaap agreed, essentially, to sit down with Te'o and his attorney for a No Recording Devices Allowed interview, or, in other words, as practice swing for Te'o's agents. Then Shelley Smith "broke" the "story" that a friend of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the man Deadspin had already identified as a central figure in the hoax, had revealed that Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the man Deadspin had already identified as a central figure in the hoax, admitted to being a central figure in the hoax.

Now Reilly confirms the latter non-story while actually naming his source. Naming her, in fact, "a former Miss South Pacific."

Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o was completely and cruelly fooled in a fake girlfriend hoax, and clearly not in on the con, one of his childhood friends said Friday. 

Tessi Tolutau, a former Miss South Pacific, grew up five doors from Te'o in Hawaii. She has Facebook messages from Te'o as far back as September 2010, checking on the legitimacy of the fictitious Polynesian beauty Lennay Kekua, who would become his "girlfriend." Te'o even wondered out loud if Kekua might be "a prank."

And just in case there's still someone out there wishing God would send him a sign, this comes in the exact same motherfucking week that Rick Reilly broke off his decades-long mancrush on Lance Armstrong. Yes, Rick Reilly was still defending--vociferously--the World's Ugliest Sports Thug until a sennight ago, or, roughly, five years after the next last person on earth.

I tuned into Sportscenter at some point this weekend and was astonished to learn that somehow the entire episode now revolves around the question of whether Manti Te'o can be proven, as of this minute, to've masterminded the entire thing. Otherwise he's completely innocent, apodictically, no tag backs. A victim. And one of the few Notre Dame actually gives a shit about.

You people have zero credibility. None. Jack Swarbrick is not a "responsible spokesman" because he's got the weight of Notre Dame behind him. He's automatically suspicious, for precisely that reason. From the moment the Virtual Girlfriend Is Virtual story was confirmed, Manti Te'o was revealed as a public liar, or else a confabulating head case. We can debate the seriousness of his crime, his complicity in the creation of Lennay Kekua, his motive, his intent, the accuracy of his post-revelation stories. What we cannot argue is whether Manti Te'o was telling the truth when the national sports spotlight was turned on him. He wasn't.

And, sorry, but you people are stuck with this world. The rest of us don't need to be, but to free ourselves we have to assume everything you ever say is a fucking, self-serving lie unless proven otherwise. If you don't care for this maybe you should have considered that twenty years ago or so. If by chance you give a shit, and would rather see a generation raised where credibility is something which could be assumed until it is irrevocably lost--say two generations from now, considering how much shit the last two or three generations have left for someone else to remove--then you can begin working, right now, to atone.  And yes, that is me you hear chuckling softly to himself.

Speaking of pathological pocket-lining, I missed taping that Frontline piece on Michelle Rhee when it first aired, caught it the following weekend, and finally watched it yesterday. The woman had cameras following her around from the moment she shut her car door on her first day at work. Perhaps this is not enough to've convinced the average voter, or councilman; but it should have convinced Frontline who, or what, it was dealing with.

It was not question of a news organization smelling a story, or objectively gathering "facts". Michelle Rhee was already proven a liar, her "education miracle" during her six weeks in a Baltimore kindergarten as real and substantial as a tissue-paper chrysanthemum. Not only was that information readily available, it was patently obvious. But Frontline played it straight; Rhee was seen walking into D.C. schools as a hard-nosed education reformer tackling the most difficult school system in America, not as a self-promoting serial liar with a PR agenda, no experience, and not much of anything else.

And it's true: you can't shine a light on Rhee, or a late-night kitchen sink, without noticing something unsavory skittering away. Rhee had a list of clay pigeons she was going to down before tackling anything real. Early on she (and the mayor, and the teevee cameras) marched through the district's central supply depot so she could point at pallets of sorely-needed supplies just sitting there. Rhee was allowed to portray this as a culture of bureaucratic neglect (and is given the right by the D.C. council, to fire at whim and en masse, upon which--wait for it!--she does.) Did this solve a problem? Was there even a problem? No school district loads its trucks with goodies and drives around letting teachers help themselves. Schools operate on budgets, and teachers requisition materials within those budgets, a semester or a year in advance. Is that why there were supplies in a warehouse? No one bothered to look. After all, this was education reform! Down with PATCO!

Rhee had a program: attack easy targets first, consolidate power and PR, and put the rank-and-file in fear of their jobs so they "saw the light". Which they did. By cheating, mostly, so the Rhee Miracle could make more headlines.

Principals were the first to go, then teachers, then masses of teachers. The game was given away early (to those who hadn't been paying attention all along) when it was leaked that she planned to close dozens of schools, and Rhee admits that she kept that information secret while awaiting a propitious time to spring it on everyone. Parents from those schools erupt, and Rhee lies to them. Natural born leader.

The reports of high wrong-to-right erasures on the tests of nearly all Achiever Schools prompts Rhee to hire a firm to investigate. It doesn't diagnose the test results, but it does give the district the Big Thumbs Up. (Who bought this at the time?) To this revelation Rhee--who ordered, paid for, and, presumably, received the results--is shocked! Shocked! to learn the job was less than thorough. Or competent. Or adequate.To the larger revelation that the miracle-performing schools were all cheating, Rhee claims she can point to "dozens and dozens" of shoals where the gains were real, and sustainable. Unfortunately, she seems to've left her pointer at home.

It's bullshit. It's plain and simple bullshit. If Rhee had a magic formula she should have been able to produce it, in writing, not cough up that combination of facile platitudes and warmed-over rightist entrepreneurial heroism. She should have been able to say something about what education means. She should have been able to, if not silence, at least contribute to the debate over high-stakes testing. She did none of that. She cheated, she promoted herself, and she landed on a pile of tax-free dollars.

We're smarter than this. Yes, it's rare that we show it, but we are, collectively. We don't have to give charlatans like Rhee the time of day, or a "fair" hearing. Shit still floats, but since the 19th century it's been flushable, too.

Michelle Rhee Is Not The Lance Armstrong Of Education

SHE'S the BALCO of Education.

And look, this stuff was known some time ago. Not only that, but the Theory of Zero-Cost Lunch was disproven in the 19th century. But Rhee has gotten away with claims of miraculous (and instantaneous) improvement both as Teacher for a Fortnight and then as Chancellor of D.C. schools. In both cases those students remained in the system; their further progress was of no interest to anyone. The fact that there were suspiciously-, make that impossibly-, high levels of wrong-to-right answer changes was spotted a short time later. The fact that D.C. schools then undertook a completely phony "review" which didn't actually look for cheating before giving the system ten thumbs up for honesty was known right away. When she was voted out by proxy in 2010 she landed with her own tax-exempt slush fund, which noted skeptic Oprah Winfrey helped launch. (Then, sadly, unqualified fluffing from Colbert while she was helping peddle Waiting for Superman and waiting for her closeup. With her new sinecure came her sudden support of school vouchers, a Jim Rockford 180º as the last piece of the Rich Guy Wingnut Education Invasion she hadn't previously endorsed.

Any single bite of this crap salad should have been enough for anyone to cast a wary eye at Michelle Rhee and the rest of the "reform" movement. Very few did. There's your evidence for the shortcoming of American education. Unless it's something else entirely.

A Modest Proposal

DR. Tony Bennett, you're about to join the ranks of the unemployed in Indiana; I'm not sure what your wife has been doing since unfair publicity and the liberal media drove her to resign her sinecure with the charter school industry. 

If there's one thing the education reform movement has been clear about, it's that the single key to improving education, the sine qua non of student achievement, is having great teachers. In fairness--I'm trying, seriously, to be fair to you, but I didn't lose my mind overnight--you reformers have been as unclear as to what constituted greatness in a teacher, let alone how this could be quantified, cultivated, and installed in every classroom, as you have been about the evidence for the claim. But even unreasonable people can agree to disagree. 

You're a smart man, a Doctor; I think you might see where this is headed. Unlike Joel Klein, now supervising Rupert Murdoch's textbook wing, or Michelle Rhee, luxuriating in tax-free cash and (I suspect) waiting for Hollywood to call, it's time you showed that reformers are serious, not pocket-stuffing opportunists and laughing cynics. Hoosier values. Personal responsibility. Service.

It's time you--and your wife--went to work as school teachers.

Not administrators. Not celebrity volunteers. Teachers.

And don't worry. My Poor Wife says that after the first couple months, spending every weekend doing meaningless "reform" paperwork which will never be seen again gets to be second nature. 

Back Home Again

ONE of the small pleasures of the Indiana political season--there aren't any large pleasures, unless you count Richard Mourdock's moment in the national limelight--is the campaign of Dr. Tony Bennett, Ed.D, State Superintendent of Public Instruction and Union Busting. This was, by the way, an appointed position until Mitch Daniels came along and improved everything. For people who sell ad time.

Bennett is Just Another 21st Century Public Education huckster. He's got ads everywhere; his opponent has none. He's not only raked in boatloads of "campaign contributions" from every Reform Pirate out there, his wife was puling down large green consulting with the charter school industry until they decided that looked bad when people exposed the fact. He's a transparent liar and a bureaucratic bully who, unlike most public education "reformers", actually taught school, and administered one, and so knows just how full of shit the whole thing is.

Bennett came to town yesterday to inspect the schools he took over a year ago. The occasion was the state handing out its phony Letter Grade to Schools bushwah. (Which, by the way, is now causing Indianapolis' suburban school superintendents to howl like the wind about the unfairness of the system. Those're the same superintendents who were absolutely silent while that system was used to muscle local control away from inner-city schools two years ago.)

My Poor Wife's Failing School miraculously received a B, and Bennett was on hand to stage a pre-election photo op congratulate them on suddenly educating our youth. She was heading to the auditorium for his appearance when she was passed by a colleague headed the other direction.

"You're not going to hear Dr. Bennett?" she asked, fully enjoying the "doctor" part.

"Don't have to. I already have a dick," he said.

Maybe You Gotta Live Here

BUT trust me; I've been watching Indiana politics since Dick Lugar was Nixon's favorite mayor. I watched the eight year governorship of Kindly Doc Bowen, the Bremen Physician, who oversaw a scandal in every major department of state government and still retired as Everybody's Good Old Gramps. I remember when Dan Burton was a philandering state legislator with several screws loose. I remember election night, 1988, when Birch Bayh's kid turned into Ronald Reagan at his own victory party. Hell, I've chronicled a lot of the sports-shirt-wearin', tendeloin-eatin'-RV-ridin' governorship of Mitch "Jes Folks" Daniels, including that kabuki Presidential Non Campaign which was the most laughable dishonest thing I've seen since the Reagan Library opened. So trust me, this is the funniest thing to hit Indiana politics since we tried to legislate the value of pi:

Indiana's foray into school takeovers continues to be fraught with confusion, bickering and accusations of dirty tricks.

But the latest back-and-forth involving Indianapolis Public Schools, the Indiana Department of Education and the two private operators hired by the state to take over four IPS schools has taken things to a new level.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett thinks IPS' lack of cooperation with the turnover operators is such that it could warrant withholding state money from the district.

No, that's not the funny part, but it does explain the eagerness of the General Assembly, and the Daniels administration, to have the state take over funding of public education a few years back.

In short, it's a mess -- and one created, at least in part, by the lack of any strict rules in Indiana governing what is an unprecedented process in the state: transferring schools from a school district to private operators.

"Our goal was to be as flexible as we could be," said Stephanie Sample, a spokeswoman for Bennett's office. "We've never done this before, and the law is ambiguous."

No, that's not it, either, although it is funny, in a "Well, who th' fuck wrote the law, and who enacted it in such a big fucking hurry so they'd have time to throw around the repercussions and the largess on their watch?" sorta way. Not to mention the fact that Bennett has had a little difficulty previously following black letter law. Leave us just mention that the "flexibility" Bennett was looking for in this case was his opponents', and it involved the ease with which they could grab their ankles.

Bennett and the private operators, as well as some others, contend that IPS is taking full advantage of those ambiguities -- and not always in the best interest of students. Almost since the outset, the operators -- Florida-based for-profit Charter Schools USA and local nonprofit EdPower -- have complained that IPS has withheld information such as student disciplinary records and contact information, recruited current students to transfer to other IPS schools and mischaracterized the private operators' programs.

Funny, really, since all of them have had nothing but good things to say about the public schools. But not funny ha-ha.

This was supposed to be a transition year, Sample said, in which the takeover organizations spent time at the schools, evaluating the staff, getting to know the community.

"Unfortunately, it turned into a situation where (the operators) have to fight for everything they need," Sample said. "It allows the district some flexibility to obstruct instead of allowing the turnaround school operators and the community to adjust."

The legal doctrine established by S'pose ta Be v. Kiss My Ass, pure comedy gold. But that's not it.

It's to a point, Bennett said, that he is ready to order that the district follow the rules or face sanctions, which could include withholding state money.

"The state board will act if the requirement to provide for children is not met by IPS," he said. "Our interest is never litigation; it's education. I hope IPS has the same attitude."

Sample, however, declined to say whether IPS is considered out of compliance with any state law or how the state will respond if it is.

"It's not in our best interest," she said, "to share our legal strategy to adversaries who are working to obstruct the process."

Concern for students being so six paragraphs ago.

After the April 4 state board meeting, an incensed White sent a four-page letter disputing complaints aired about the district to the board. He has since followed with a letter from an IPS attorney demanding explanations for 11 specific charges made against IPS in the state board meeting.

White said the state board hasn't heard the whole truth, and he aims to set the record straight Wednesday when the board meets again.

"I think the state board is getting bad information," he said.

More broadly, IPS' main contention is that it is now officially in competition with the takeover operators -- both of whom have announced plans to open new charter schools in the community, as well -- and feels no obligation to benefit them.

White said, given those circumstances, that the district has only been practical and that it must protect its competitive interests, such as the contact information for elementary school families.

There ya go. Who's been goin' on about the sacred benefits of Competition for the last three decades? And, look, I have very little use for Eugene "Cufflinks" White; he spent five years burnishing his personal image, which anyone who'd paid the slightest attention to his career could have predicted. It's taken him until about a month ago to notice that his district is the second poorest in the state; when he ascends that pulpit he's so comfortable in to denounce the selective disenfranchisement of the IPS voter--the same people Lugar disenfranchised forty-five years ago--I'll let you know. But: Competition! though it probably won't be a winning hand--although there's not much left of IPS to take away, and then the state and its profiteering and "not for" profiteering pals will have to actually work miracles, not just demand them of some voting group they don't like--but it is, somehow, the single work of political genius this state has seen since Wendell Willkie decided to keep his mouth shut in 1940.

Don't Worry. Some Wealthy White People Are On Their Way To Help You.

OUR story so far: in the 1920s the Indiana Klan took over state government. It's often noted that the Indiana Klan--which separated itself from the national Klan, probably so it wouldn't have to remit 10% of its rape victims to the home office--was more anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant than anti-black. (In my youth I would occasionally hear this factlet recounted as though the speaker was convinced they'd had a recruitment office on Indiana Avenue.)

Around this time, but no doubt wholly coincidental to the Not Racist, Just Religiously Bigoted Klan's bribery program for every local official who preferred legal tender to going to prison on trumped-up charges, Indianapolis segregated its schools, beginning with high school, and gradually working its way back. After the Second World War de jure segregation was replaced by quieter de jure segregation, until a Federal court ruling in the early 70s desegregated Indianapolis Public Schools by transferring some of its students, along with a lot of its cash, to the white suburban districts where the sons and daughters of the original segregators had fled.

Meanwhile, in the late 60s, faced with the terrifying prospect of enough African-Americans voting that the Party of Lincoln would itself become a Minority, Dick Lugar, Spanish-American War veteran and "Nixon's Favorite Mayor"--an honorarium he sadly no longer lists on his c.v.--together with the Republican majority on the City Council and a GOP-controlled Statehouse, annexed all the white suburbs out to the county line. The three political vestiges of the old boundaries which were allowed to remain in place were 1) the Indianapolis police and the Marion county sheriff, plus local fire departments; 2) the eight or twelve or fifteen hopeless tangles known as Township governments, and a couple of autonomous town governments; and 3) nine separate school districts. I'll bet you already guessed that one.

It, of course, had nothing to do with racism. Or at least no more to do with racism than the Indiana Klan did.

That little trick lasted thirty years, assuming you imagine electing a Republican who called himself a Democrat, and a Democratically-controlled City/County Council, closed a chapter. Bart Peterson, elected in 2000, immediately set out to rectify eighty years of overt racism in local education got himself the right to found charter schools the way soft drink producers create new and exciting brands. He also created, in 2006, something called The Mind Trust, a non-profit organization which, and I quote "is taking a bold, new approach to education reform. Driven by results, we are strategically building a network of the nation’s best education reform organizations here in Indianapolis. Together, these organizations, led by visionary education entrepreneurs, are already putting their ideas into action and working to transform our schools." [bold emphasis of "bold" in original]

Now, if you're as big a fan as I of our nation's results-driven, visionary education entrepreneurs and the dozens of metaphorical new and exciting soft drink flavors they dream up every day--backed by results!--you will already realize that Indianapolis Public Schools are failing. Because, otherwise, what's an educational entrepreneur supposed to sink his teeth into? And, no doubt, you'll have tumbled to the idea that the solution to this problem lies in Better Test Scores, Higher Graduation Rates, and the sort of Entrepreneurial expertise which can't manage to accomplish anything unless unions are broken, benefits cut, and working conditions run through the Dreadfulizer 3000. Because only then will we be able to attract the highest-quality applicants.

(It's interesting, isn't it, how much time Our Nation's Entrepreneurs spend solving every problem except giving people decent, meaningful jobs at living wages? Based on this model, I guess we need a tax-exempt consortium of acrobats, beekeepers, or gerbil enthusiasts, to figure out how to solve our economic woes.)

Of course, The Mind Trust being a savvy, well-connected, and going concern, it doesn't actually say "End Socialist Union Socialism" in its Mission Statement, since the sort of people who pay it to work toward that end don't really want it publicized that that's what they're up to. In fact, when they came out with their Big Plan a couple days ago, about which the whole town is artificially buzzing, because the local news outlets have devoted every non-Super Bowl-related minute to it--that is, about one minute--the We Need Great Teacher thing was mostly boilerplate. The two Big Ideas were 1) reducing the administration by 80%, and using the proceeds to give everyone free pre-school; and 2) eliminating the elected School Board, and replacing it with a committee appointed by the mayor and the City-County Council.

In other words, African-Americans, say goodbye to the last vestige of your voting power in Indianapolis. [By the way, school reform is such a vital, pressing problem that The Mind Trust will be waiting until 2013 to press its agenda with the (then safely ensconced for two years) state legislature. The suggestion that voters in the IPS district be given a referendum before becoming the only public entity in the state denied the right to choose its own school board was met, predictably, with something short of enthusiasm.]

Listen, I'm no fan of the school board, nor its superintendent Eugene "Cufflinks" White (in what we in the IPS extended family have come to expect from White, he issued a statement yesterday that the Plan wouldn't work. "And besides," he added, "I'm already doing all those things.") There's no question that the Administration building is full of functionaries, supernumeraries, flunkies, and associate flunkies.

But if you're looking to clean house from the top down, do you really call in a charity golf outing's worth of entrepreneurs? People who can't function without six secretaries and a private jet?

The Mind Trust site lists the following on its Staff page:

Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Executive Vice President
Vice President of Education Initiatives
Education Initiatives Associate
Vice President of Strategic Growth Initiatives
Individual Giving Manager
Vice President and Director of CEE-Trust [where the job of Vice President is to "oversee The Mind Trust’s efforts to support education entrepreneurship nationwide through his work as director of the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust). So he's the liaison to himself.]
CEE-Trust Associate

And they're currently looking for a Manager of Operations.

There's also thirteen people on the Board of Directors (shame on you, Jane Pauley), a veritable Who's Who of Eli Lilly/Gates Foundation/Mitch Daniels Crony/Corporate Consortium to Fuck Public Education.

My favorite bit, though, is the capsule bio of Founder and Chief Executive Officer (and former Peterson Director of Charter Schools) David Harris:

"David Harris is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Mind Trust. Under his leadership, The Mind Trust has raised $25 million to advance the work of education entrepreneurs in Indianapolis and accelerate positive change. Since its launch in 2006, The Mind Trust has supported the Indianapolis launch of 11 high-impact entrepreneurial education ventures, supported critical research and policy work designed to improve the climate for education innovation, and garnered widespread attention from local and national media, with The Indianapolis Star declaring that The Mind Trust is 'at the center of the reform movement in Indianapolis.'"

Yup. Half a decade of sweet-talkin' the Gates Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and helping make the anti-public school/Republican war on unions sound reasonable and caring. Guess maybe it's time to start thinking about education some now.

For My Next Trick I Will Attempt To Break Out Of Handcuffs I Made Myself Before My Lovely Assistant Can Escape From A Water Tank While Upside Down

Jesus, is this a primary election or a reality show?

-Callyson, "Jonathan Alter launches Chris Christie Presidential bid" at Wonkette
MY Poor Wife reports, ten days into the new school year, that she is now spending more time filling out paperwork, both palpable and electron-based, than actually working with students, a situation which obtains even though, as she has for the past several years, she acquiesces to teaching one more class per day than she is contractually required to.

But contracts don't seem to mean much nowadays, as anything and everything which can be ignored is (this is not particularly new to Indianapolis Public Schools in general, nor to the reign of Dr. Eugene White in particular).

"The 'core subjects' teachers have it a lot worse," she said. "They're sending reports in triplicate which have to be entered into three different web pages. Everyone's lost a prep period to attend mandatory meetings. All this stuff is going into a file somewhere that no one will ever open."

If you got here late, realizing that his time was short to actually profit on awarding private contracts to operate public schools, Mitch Daniels and educational henchman Dr. Tony Bennett rushed into the nuclear option this year, without being able (surprise!) to actually elucidate actual standards and actual responses when those actual standards weren't met. They're poised to take over Indianapolis Failing Public Schools, auction them off to some room deodorizer manufacturer, and declare the problem solved. But they couldn't get ready by the actual start of the actual school year so, like that Iraq War: The Sequel that Mitch financed for us, they went in with the troops they had. Hearings, and more hearings, and the fate of the schools left hanging (for one thing, in order to get the power to do this shit they had to write the law so that the results were entirely arbitrary, lest poor scores at some exoburban system trying to educate large number of farm children with thresher injuries trigger a takeover that white people wouldn't like).

So while we wait for them to sell everything to Edison, or maybe that consortium that runs the Toll Road, the administrative weight of the Indianapolis Public School system has been thrown behind some sort of headless chicken dance designed to ward off death by axing. Not of the teachers, staff, or schools. Of the administrators.

Who fucking works for two weeks in this country and doesn't understand how things work? Who really imagines that handing over employment regulations to local administrators so they can act like the franchisee of some fast-food bunker is going to improve education? Or, for fuck's sake, manage to do anything in any way shape or form except make things worse?

Two more things: these same educational "reformers" made sure to lower the standards for incoming teachers, in the name of Improvement. "Oh, this way the retired industry chemist or idealistic math whiz can give teaching a shot, and we automatically get better teachers, because Business." And in return they get four classes in a row, out of six total, to a roomful (and more) of surly teenagers, with the five minute's passing time between classes to prepare for the next lesson and attend to life's fecal necessities. Welcome, Idealists!

The second is that my Poor Wife, known to some people who read this blog just to get a feel for the sort of thing she goes through, is not the source of these complaints. I am. She--a Teacher, in every good sense of that word--still goes beyond what she's asked for, legal or no. I try not to think about how I wound up with a good woman with a moral code, since when I do I usually go straight to the "how many reincarnations as a pilonidal cyst am I gonna get for this deal?" But for cryin' out loud. All the working conditions shit in the labor contract are the product of long years of everyone involved working together for the common good, not labor union banditry; would you rather have a teacher or a politician hold your wallet while you disappeared for ten minutes? We know it is no good to chain people to class after class, deprive them of prep time, or bury them in the after-action report detritus of the bureaucratic mind. But we're doing it. We're requiring even more work out of the people who do the actual work in the first place, because that way the people who are really responsible look like they're the ones doing something.

In four years time--after IPS has been auctioned off--you're going to hear 1) "Test scores are almost as good as they were before, a remarkable achievement when we had to come in and start from scratch." 2) 'There hasn't been enough time to really evaluate the new system. Please come back after you've forgotten all about it." or 3) "We are beginning to look at whether high-stakes testing is really in the best interest of students. Perhaps we need a wider-based approach to acquiring the necessary skills to compete at some level in the modern, global economy."

You talk about stealing from future generations….

Nobody Could Have Predicted That, Vol. MMCDXXXII

Scott Elliott, "Good schools fearful of bad grades: Critics say rating system may unfairly penalize high-achieving schools". July 7

OUR story so far: beginning with the egregious No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (enthusiastic, and later regretful, co-sponsor: Ted Kennedy), plausible, or "plausible" deniability that right-wing education "reform" was aimed at poor urban districts and teachers' unions has been supplied by the requirement that all schools show improvement under the act, a legislative beard Indiana cheerfully donned when the Daniels administration began its own offensive. (It's always instructive, and frequently touching, when the Republican party demonstrates a vague understanding that the law is required to be fair, at least while the cameras are rolling. Innit?)

Well, Time, as is its wont, evidentally, has continued marching, and the Piper, as usual, has turned up with an invoice. And guess what? We didn't really mean it!

Munster High School in Lake County has been ranked one of the nation's best high schools by Newsweek magazine.

Sorry to butt in, but that means shit. Literally.

So why is Principal Steve Tripenfeldas worried? So worried, in fact, he sent a letter to the Indiana Board of Education?

Because under the state's rules, his school is about to receive its "letter grade" state rating -- and it's, gulp, a C.

"Don't let a school that has an (end-of-course exam) passing rate well over 90 percent for Algebra 1 and just under 90 percent in English 10 with large gains be labeled as a C school," he wrote. "Before the letter grades are published, please work to make sure that those letter grades are accurate."

"Accurate", in this instance, means "flattering to well-off Republican districts with no tradition of the Gentleman's C".

For years, Indiana has laid down a tough penalty on schools that failed to make "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) under the federal No Child Left Behind law. When the state rates schools, flunking AYP means a two-step demotion on the state's five-category rating scale.

The state board now wants to move away from counting AYP against schools, but new state rules won't come fast enough to help schools this year.

"Can we give ourselves a waiver?" board member David Shane asked at Wednesday's board meeting.

The answer is "maybe."

Maybe. That's education administration jargon for "Definitely, soon as no one's looking".

Indiana's move to A to F letter grades this year when ratings are released July 22 has raised the stakes for the AYP penalty. The goal of the letter grades is to make state ratings more understandable than the current categories of exemplary progress, commendable progress, academic progress, academic watch and academic probation.

Tripenfeldas' letter expresses the concern of many Indiana educators -- people understand that C means "average." State board members agreed letter grades have changed the landscape.

It's interesting that not only does much depend on who owns the ox, and who does the goring, but how often the people complaining now were the ones holding the pike when the whole thing started.

"I understand the rationale, but at the same time we're working on a flawed system out there," state board member Mike Pettibone said. "Our public is going to think Munster High School is a C high school."

When the public is only supposed to believe that every urban school deserves an F.

AYP, as it was originally designed, was supposed to force schools to focus attention on groups of students that often were overlooked. "Subgroups" whose test score growth is tracked under AYP include ethnic minorities, such as blacks and Hispanics, but also students in special education classes, kids with disabilities, poor children and those learning English as a second language.

For schools with lots of qualifying kids, there can be many subgroups. Tripenfeldas, for example, complained that Munster has 33 subgroups and only one -- a subgroup with 41 special education students -- fell short of the required test gains. Lawrence's Harrison Hill has taken a rating hit in the past when just one of its 29 subgroups didn't make AYP.

Right. It's absolutely unconscionable to penalize Munster schools when they bear the burden of educating almost 90% of the state average number of special education students, or as they struggle to overcome a poverty rate almost 31% of the Indiana average or cope with half the English language learners of the average school district.

Jesus Christ. If we could just figure a way to make cars run on nausea and bullshit we'd be fixed.

Peak Snake Oil

Amy Chua "Tiger Mom: Here's how to reshape U.S. education". May 10

FULL Disclosure: 1) I am married to a high school teacher, and an excellent one, according to peer review, not my biased opinion. "Dedicated teacher" is a redundancy. You're nowhere near as dedicated to your craft as she is to hers. God knows I ain't. To find greater dedication you need to reference, e.g., the dedication Amy Chua has for self-promotion. 2) All I know about Oprah Winfrey is forced into my head despite my trying to turn it when I see something coming. If Amy Chua isn't an Oprah creation she should be. I probably should add, in the spirit of disclosure, that I also "know", in the metaphysical sense, that Ms Winfrey will spend her next six lifetimes, at minimum, as a mutant amphibian squashed on the roadway by the increasingly rusted hulk of one of those cars she gave away, just after mating with Dr. Phil and his barbed penis. No, I don't mean the reincarnated Dr. Phil. 3) It's good to get educational advice from a professional woman who is now known by the sort of nickname we used to give Lady Rasslers. 4) It's also good that the Ivies now have a noble successor to Erich "Love Story" Segal. 5) As a bloggo-American, I will admit that my concern with the average test scores of the average middle-school student in America pales in comparison to my concern over what long-term effect reading the opinions of law school professors is having on my colon health. You'd think that Amy Chua might consider recent graduates of Patrick Henry School of Law running the Justice Department with minimal guidance from Republican toadies and torture enthusiasts to be worthy of the occasional Op-Ed piece, wouldn't you?

But that wouldn't help the franchise. Professor Chua doesn't engage in teacher-bashing here. Thank Heaven for small favors. She remains mostly positive, which is to say she comes across as one of those Liberals who's internalized the partisan gripes of the Right without seeming to notice where they came from or what they serve. PISA scores! Teen pregnancy! Drug use! It's like we're suffering from a Strategic Sunday Sermon shortage or somethin'.

The secret to America's global success has always been its ability to attract the best human capital from around the world.

The secret to our domestic success? Cheap labor and smallpox.

We won the race for the atomic bomb by harnessing the genius of scientists fleeing Europe, such as the Hungarian Edward Teller, the Italian Enrico Fermi, and, of course, the German Albert Einstein.

Oh for cryin' out tigermotherfucking out loud, we go right to the A bomb? Isn't this a corollary of Godwin?

Listen, just for the record: The Bomb is not exactly the best choice of a cliché to begin with, and that's before we mention that using it as touchstone at all relies on swallowing two pieces of quasi-propaganda. First, the idea that because there was a race to develop an atomic bomb that the competitors ran neck-and-neck; the Germans, in fact, were headed the wrong way out the stadium. Of course we didn't know that at the time, but we know it now. Second, that dropping two atomic bombs on Japan caused the Japanese government to recognize the awesome power of science unleashed by America's Innate Superiority and surrender. It didn't. What realists there were in the Japanese government already knew the war was lost, and were clinging to the wild hope of the Soviets re-signing their neutrality pact and brokering a peace. The Soviets did the opposite. They renounced the treaty, and declared war on Japan the day after Nagasaki.

As for the rest of that mythology, it's true that in face of the enormity of Hitler many scientists became weapons manufacturers who unquestionably would not have otherwise; all except Strangelove Teller, pretty much. (A lot of 'em went to England first; once the US entered the war it subsumed the British program.) Einstein later called signing that famous letter to Roosevelt the biggest mistake of his life. Fermi denounced the development of the H-bomb. For chrissakes, if The Bomb isn't the perfect example of how Education has to mean something more than Math and Science proficiency, desperately has to mean something like Human proficiency, I don't know what does.

By the way, it's interesting that we destroyed Japanese war industry, and hundreds of thousands of the people who worked there, with conventional bombing, but nobody ever says Thank God America developed napalm! Okay, hardly anybody.

But now more than ever, intolerance is the wrong mind-set. Our children will inherit a world of fierce global competition, and we need to do our best to prepare them. Like it or not, child-rearing is inextricably intertwined with our nation's future. At stake is not just our children's well-being but the durability of the American Dream. Instead of ripping into each other, we should follow America's traditional formula for success: building on what we do well while being open to what works elsewhere and bringing it to America.

I thought we were an immigrant magnet? I thought our strength was that evergreen superiority of our own system, and the pools of money available to hire tech-savvy foreigners? Sure, maybe The American Dream is tied to GDP, somewhat, but I'd like to know when the two became congruent.

Can we divorce this from the Retail Parenting Advice crapola? (Or not; mass-marketed anxiety epidemics are one of the things we do really well.) You want your children to succeed, as defined by Money; you believe the key to this, ten or fifteen years down the road, will be math, science, and reading proficiency.

But who says? If the idea of America as a meritocracy is anything more than wishful thinking that idea is being seriously challenged by the erosion of the middle class. Getting a degree--perhaps, now, an advanced degree--in math or the sciences is probably a good entree to finding high-paying employment. Assuming that's what you want to do, and assuming that Money is the accepted Gold Key to Paradise. But it ain't. If you wanna make money in America, inherit some. Or write some piece of popular self-help trash.

The average American child spends 66% more time watching television than attending school.

Then we really should be trying to make television smarter.

In the recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, American high school students ranked 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math — with Asian nations taking top marks.

Thank God we still lead the world in Imagining Everything Is Quantifiable.

Listen, Professor: two generations ago states across the South responded to Brown by shuttering their public schools. That continued a centuries-long tradition of the worst sort of racism imaginable. It was, in much of this country and for much of our history, against the law to teach a colored person to read. Any who managed to get an education in spite of it all did not "succeed" in any absolute sense. This is the fucking reality of circumstances still faced by African-Americans in this country. Yet in the (still) most economically stratified country in the developed world, self-satisfied American Exceptionalists now object to paying for the improvement in minority education we've only begun to effect in the past couple decades. We don't have an homogenized population, and we don't--to our continuing shame--have an educational system offering equal opportunity for every citizen. The refusal to acknowledge this--the refusal to acknowledge it above all--is odious, no matter how good you imagine your for-profit intentions to be.

And if we're going to take the PISA results as something they aren't, then let's do so. In the 2009 PISAs the United States, one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet, one with a pretty deplorable history regarding education, but one which is also the birthplace of the idea of universal education, scored higher than, for example, Liechtenstein, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, France, Chinese Taipei, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Portugal, Macao-China, Italy, Latvia, Slovenia, Greece, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

I'd say that's a damn fine record. Improvable? Maybe, but that shouldn't come at the expense of turning public education into one-dimensional parrot farms. We need musicians and writers and painters and dancers, too, and we need people to teach the next generation of them. Bombs, lady, we already got enough of. Though if you'd really like us to move up seventeen places next year…

Flunkies

WaPo Editorial Board, "Cheating allegations can't mask real gains in D.C.'s schools" March 30

I GUESS it's one of those things I'll always remember: "Where where you when you wondered where was Michelle Rhee when the entire house of cards that is her nascent anti-union empire crashed to the ground under the pressure of some good investigative journalism and basic diligence?" (Ans: In Indianapolis, same place where she was playing second-fiddle to the recorded voice of Mitch Daniels at an anti-union rally. Daniels could not personally attend the rally, supporting what he recently called the centerpiece of his 2008 campaign, "because he was traveling in Southern Indiana", which is a good sennight's drive from the state capital.)

(Say this for Daniels' handlers: they recognized fairly quickly that their man handles heckling about as well as Michael Richards does. As does Rhee, apparently--there's a shocker--since when she finally responded to USAToday it was to accuse them of "not believing test scores for poor children could improve without cheating".)

Somehow the Washington Post, which, of course, has been a major pom-pom shaker for Rhee, along with every other bad fucking idea in American public life for the past twenty years, got wind of the story, and responded with the editorial ("Yes, Cheating Appears To Have Occurred, But You Must Admit That Scores Went Up") excerpted and ridiculed below. (Full disclosure: The Post made $2.6 billion last year off Kaplan, Inc., the country's major peddler of test prep materials. Fuller disclosure: the Post doesn't bother to disclose that.):

ANYTIME THERE is a suggestion a school may have cheated its way to showing improved student achievement, there is reason for serious concern.

Y'know what? No. A serious concern exists when there is the potential transfer of large sums of public money or other forms of remuneration which might encourage people to cheat; see Cadillac, Legendary Welfare. What you have here in D.C. is reason for suspicion of felonious activity, which can only be described merely as "serious" by those who aren't facing incarceration themselves. Michelle Rhee is in Indianapolis right this minute helping to fuck with the livelihoods of several hundred thousand people; she's here through the grace of the serial misrepresentations of her accomplishments as a second-grade teacher and the Chancellor of D.C. schools. That is, by anyone's definition, beyond serious. Even if one believes that high-stakes testing tells us something about public education one is obliged to recognize the potential for gaming the system, and the far-reaching consequences that result. Not only was cheating going on under Rhee, there was no effort being made to watch for it.

That’s why D.C. school officials hired a high-priced outside expert to investigate what appeared to be anomalies on a number of student test sheets.

Who just happened to clear them.

It’s also why it is prudent for the system to take another look at the schools where tests were called into question.

That, and the fact that the whole program got caught with it pants down, its wiener rampant, and with a couple dozen nearby ewes wearing hipboots.

But to use the issue of erasure marks at a handful of schools to disparage the very real improvements made in recent years by D.C. schools is irresponsible.

Then call me irresponsible. (Is this the Obama Doctrine in action, by the way? We shouldn't let a few examples of the massive corruption underlining our every action dissuade us from the serious business of making headlines?)

Acting Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson on Tuesday asked the city’s inspector general to determine whether there were any improprieties at eight schools on standardized reading and math exams in 2009. Her request follows disclosures by USA Today of suspicious rates of erasures in which wrong answers were changed to right ones. The report centered on Crosby S. Noyes Education Center in Northeast Washington, credited with dramatic boosts in student achievement. There were extraordinarily high numbers of erasures for three years at the school. One Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on a 2009 reading test when the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than one.

Y'know, first, there's a difference between being a whistleblower and turning state's evidence, and part of that is in whether they're entitled to the hosannas of the crowd. Henderson calls for an investigation after a little leg work by USAToday turns up a stinking pile of cess. That's not leadership, or responsibility, its the human instinct for covering an exposed body part being worried by a pack of hounds.

Second, the fact that there are four schools with cookie crumbs all over their collective face doesn't exonerate anyone else. It condemns the whole fucking system, like it or no. Anyone who was trying to obey the rules--despite the best efforts of Miracle Michelle--should have seen the high potential for abuse and responded accordingly, and in public. Otherwise, they're no better than Dönitz.

Experts caution against any simplistic reading of erasure rates;

Just as we would caution against listening to any experts willing to mouth that sort of flummery in public. Provided we had names.

there are many innocent explanations for changed answers.

And at 13 per student--all changed from wrong to right--you're gonna need all of 'em. Repeatedly.

Indeed, it was the finding of Caveon Consulting Services, the testing security firm hired by D.C. schools, that there were plausible explanations and no evidence of misbehavior at Noyes and the other schools investigated.

Five words: Arthur Andersen, Limited Liability Partnership.

John Fremer, president of Caveon, described the investigations — which included interviews with school personnel and data analysis — as “a thorough job working with credible data.” He told us that if there were reason to believe something was amiss, the company would have advised further action. Further scrutiny will show whether the city got its money’s worth on this investigation.

Yes, it would be premature at this juncture to jump to any conclusions based on the fact that a simple erasure test caught everyone red handed.

That the schools were cleared by an outside firm seen as premier in its field

"So Good We're Insured By The American International Group, Inc.!"

or that they represent just 2 percent of the system’s total testing,

And a mere 100% of what USAToday looked at,

hasn’t stopped critics of the reforms begun by then-Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee from seizing on the situation as evidence that the improvement in D.C. schools is a myth.

Well, whaddya expect from a bunch of racists, anyway?

Other tests — including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, about which there are no questions — showed significant gains in reading and math by D.C. students between 2007 and 2009. That’s evidence of progress that can’t be erased.

There's much to admire about the NAEP, but that doesn't allow it to confer blanket integrity to every test it's lumped with in an editorial. Nor does it make it systematic. Those figures are not actually available on the NAEP site, where the fourth-grade results are listed as "not available" and the eight-grade results show improvement in line with that nationwide--an ongoing improvement among African-American students which never gets mentioned as part of our National Trail of Shameful Public School Failure, by the way--but ex-Mayor Fenty and ex-Miracle Worker Rhee did announce those results last spring. So it's gotta be true, right?

Rah Rah Rah

I'M busy shoveling shit, literally for a change, but mention should be made of yesterday's comments concerning high school athletics, especially as it gives me the chance to use something that pissed me off at the time, but I passed on as too parochial even for this blog. And, yes, I realize that's like Mike Huckabee keeping his mouth shut for fear of sounding too small-minded.

If you'd like to raise howls of protest in suburban public school districts--okay, one way among thousands--just opine in public that extramural athletics are a poor use of taxpayer dollars. You needn't bother suggesting they therefore be cut, or rated as a low priority, or even be placed on a list to be considered; just saying you don't think they should come before academics would be sufficient.

Meanwhile, if you'd prefer the sound of crickets chirping in those same suburban districts, just become superintendent of (60% African-American, 30% below poverty line) Indianapolis Public Schools in, oh, let's say 2008, and slash athletic programs because of budget restraints. Well, maybe not crickets; a few snow-pure individuals will probably share their opinion that kids in failing schools have better things to do, anyway.

At any rate, aside from some disgruntled IPS parents the whole thing went over without a peep. It got a little more attention when the actual superintendent, Eugene "Cufflinks" White--a man who got to college in the Jim Crow South because he could hoop--tried to create an Athletic Magnet school so talented athletes could attend a school that still had a program, the same way artists and musicians can still find one. However this, as, apparently, everyone but Eugene "Cufflinks" White realized, violated Indiana High School Athletics Association eligibility rules unless he declared the thing a religious school at the same time. I actually applaud the attempt, but it betrayed the same close attention to contractual detail Cufflinks has displayed in his decade of interaction with the teachers' union, state education law, and probably the Laws of Supply and Demand, Diminishing Return, and Finder's Keepers. At any rate, if you are a good, even a great quarterback, say, and an A+ student, but you happen to attend a school which has no football team, you are Shit Out of Luck. This according to the same IHSAA which destroyed the great Indiana state basketball tournament (see Hoosiers) by instituting class basketball so more small schools could get trophies, too. One could argue that the old white guys who make the rules are merely making sure that poor urban kids understand them, and aren't confused by the fact that if they'd been born in a flood plain, and got flooded, it would be a natural disaster, but if they were born in a ghetto it's their own goddam fault. Although, somehow, I suspect they already know.

Oh, hey, we're still rolling. This went by almost unnoticed by the local news, and certainly without anyone raising the fairness issue. But a couple months ago an IPS school's wrestling team missed a meet because the bus didn't show, and evidently not for the first time. This they're all over. For one thing the Assistant Coach twitterated or Facetimed his complaints, and the locals love the opportunity to show they're down with the latest technology. How could such a thing have happened? they demanded to know, in solidarity with some of the few remaining IPS students who didn't have their athletics program yanked out from under them while the teleprompters remained silent. Outrage!

And in case you're not ahead of me at this point, guess what: you have to schedule those things in advance (usually handled by the athletic director) and someone at the school had dropped the ball. IPS tried to rush a bus there once the mistake was realized, but it arrived too late. So it, essentially, was guilty of Having a Policy; the coach was guilty of letting a mistake happen for at least the second time without taking any preventative actions, then public blaming the people who weren't responsible for the problem, and the talking hairdos broadcast what was, and what they should have at least been suspected of being, essentially some guy complaining that someone else used the last sheet of copier paper without refilling it. YouTube at Eleven.