[Note: For the first time and probably not the last time, I am posting my column as a blog on the same day. The issues raised in this column/blog are too important not to "shout" from the highest hill. So, for this "special edition," I also include the message which covers my column when I distribute it to those requesting email distribution of my column.]
Friends,
Because of the pace of developments in Virginia, I had to make changes in my column before its publication. I suspected that McDonnell would cringe to self-protect, but I also suspect that he will be back to the issue and others like it in any office which he occupies. Just as mainstream Republicans did not appreciate the fervor of Tea Partiers (ask John Boehner how it is going with him), so reasonable people have not appreciated the fanaticism of religious zealots. The rule of thumb: do not get on the tiger and think to ride it; it will go where it wants and you will not be able to get off safely. (Study Jeb Bush, who understands and is handling the extremists with adroitness.)
The real political divide today is less the partisan one between the cluster of interests on the Left or the cluster of interests on the Right, but between those who believe in reason and those who do not--I can almost say "respectively," but "almost" is a potent qualifier. The flagrant, unembarrassed dishonesty of those who make false or unsupportable statements threatens to overwhelm the responsible use of free speech for democratic purposes. It is platitudinous, but nonetheless important, to say that indifference to reason is the greatest danger to democracy. No one indifferent to reason can make sensible, not to say, honest, decisions. I am not surprised, but I am still shocked, that Virginia legislators passed and the Virgina Governor announced in advance his intention to sign the ultrasound bill without, so many now claim, knowing what was in the bill. The only possible credit which they can garner is for lying or recklessness of the highest order.
The most obvious is history professor and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's presumptuous pontification that Barack Obama is the most dangerous president in the country's history. I would be interested in knowing what the dangers are and what measures establish the superlative. Such statements have become the common currency on the Right, probably because they serve to fuel the anti-Obama hatred of the racist Right. Which is not to say, of course, that Obama cannot be criticized, for I have criticized more than once over several years, but for reasons and arguments given.
I conclude by congratulating the Sun-News for an editorial policy which permits the use of unvarnished medical language. By contrast, one of my addressees, with a Well Fargo office email, did not receive Wednesday's version because of the words "vagina" and "uterus." Part of the sullying of women is the suggestion that the anatomical terms for female genitalia are "dirty talk." I am no pro in pornography, but the little which I saw as a college boy did not use medical terminology. Perhaps times have changed, maybe such terminology is tres chic in those circles today, but I doubt it.
One final word. It is all very well for this old, white man to be passionately pro-feminist. But it is far more important for women to be passionately pro-feminist. Otherwise, if they allow men to give them their rights, they enable men to take them away. Women must earn the rights which are inherently theirs, and they must remain vigilant when they deservedly achieve them. What we are witnessing now is the slow erosion of women's rights because women have not understood that the culture of equality still lags earlier legislation and that many who disagreed with equality then disagree with it now, and will continue to resist for the same moral, religious, or social motives until, like certain words, all forms of gender and gender-orientation discrimination become, as they should be, politically incorrect in a country professing to be a democracy of "We the People." (The same holds true in matters of race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality.)
Michael
Revised version (now #8) of "Republican Leaders Abandon First Principles to Wage War on Women"
If Republican leaders do not practice what they preach should anyone believe a word they say? They profess first principles about personal freedom, individual responsibility, and small government, not least to prevent government intrusion into the lives and liberties of private citizens. And yet….
Since their 2010 take-overs, Republican governors with Republican-controlled legislatures have pushed gender-related legislation on same-sex marriage, contraception, and abortion. No majorities elected Republicans to enact laws on these issues. Indeed, same-sex marriages are legal in a growing number of states, contraception is legal and practiced by virtually all sexually active women, and abortion, more reluctantly and less frequently used than in the past, is legal and practiced for the usual medical and social reasons: the woman’s life or health, serious fetal defects, and rape or incest. The trend for a half-century has been for government to limit its power and to enlarge personal freedom.
But when personal freedom runs counter to their moral and religious convictions, Republican leaders, mostly male and obedient to religious zealots, defy the consent of the governed and try to deny the majority’s will. Unable to prevail by honest means, they pursue dishonest ones: silence on social issues when they campaign, unpopular legislative efforts when they get elected. The result: Republican leaders using state power to intrude into citizens’ lives
The most egregious example is a law proposed by Virginia Republicans leaders and protested by no Republican leaders anywhere for nearly two weeks, a law requiring a woman seeking an abortion to have an ultrasound probe inserted into and through her vagina and into her uterus against her will shortly before a scheduled abortion. The proposed law makes Virginia Republican legislators a gang perpetrating rape by device.
Like similar laws in seven other states, this proposed law is a Republican effort at legislated terrorism. The purported reason for this politically motivated coercion is informed consent, with the state telling women what they must know to make a decision (and what doctors must do to them beforehand). The real reason is to deter abortion by the threat of abuse, humiliation, and cost. The state takes control of a woman’s body and subjects it to physical penetration. It requires her doctor to perform the procedure or incur a civil penalty of $2,500. It requires the father to support a child not aborted. Because insurance does not cover medically unwarranted procedures, it requires the woman to pay hundreds of dollars in costs and thus deters the poor more than the rich.
Republican hypocrisy is flagrant and indefensible. Republican leaders, vigorously in Virginia, oppose federal health reform legislation because, so they falsely claim, it allows government to intrude into medical decisions properly made only by patients and their doctors, and because it requires people to purchase insurance, regardless of their wishes. But, for political, not medical, reasons, Virginia’s proposed legislation and similar laws elsewhere violate the patient-doctor relationship, require involuntary and violative procedures, and impose significant expense.
The Virginia Governor’s belated effort to repair the political damage caused by this objectionable legislation to his vice presidential prospects does not matter. Despite his proposed revisions for less physical intrusion, the bill remains a travesty of Republican first principles and reveals the weakness of Republican commitment to them.
One note: Virginia’s white men have traveled a long way. Once, as Democrats, they protected the sanctity of white womanhood. They argued that integration would lead black men to deflower white women. Now, as Republicans, they legalize the desecration of all women, white as well as black. Integration has finally come to the Old Dominion.
Everything about Virginia’s governmental abuse of power and Republican leaders’ prolonged nationwide silence communicates contempt for women, whom they regard as both appropriate sex objects and suitable objects of pornographic practices. For only differences in volition and money distinguish inserting an ultrasound probe into an unwilling woman’s vagina and uterus, and inserting a sex toy into a porn star’s genitalia.
Between unconscionable legislation and unconscionable silence, Republican leaders everywhere reveal their party’s attitudes favoring, and beliefs justifying, the sexual subjugation of women. For Republican leaders, deferential to religious zealots, the problem is less that Roe v. Wade standardized and universalized rights already legal in nearly half the states, seven in Dixie, than that it tacitly nationalized the liberation of women.
Hostility to liberated women fuels implacable opposition to contraception and abortion. For these medical advances enable gender-based changes in traditional social roles and personal responsibilities, and thereby threaten paternalistic customs enabling men to control women. Ultimately, Republican leaders care less about protecting the unborn and more about perpetuating male power, by denying women the right to think and act for themselves. Battles over contraception and abortion are part of the Republican war to preserve male supremacy in America’s social order and to promote state power over private citizens.
Believe Republicans’ commitment to their lofty first principles? Shame on you.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
"MATH WARS": ANOTHER FRONT IN THE "CULTURE WARS"
I had thought that the “math wars” were low-intensity conflicts, but I was wrong. My column about a month ago, in response to one by three NMSU experts a few days earlier, in turn, a response to one by a parent two months earlier, provoked many responses. Most of the comments following my opinion column on the Las Cruces Sun-News website and all of the half dozen or so emails from math professors, engineers, parents, and a former school board chair have supported my position. The only dissent came from the authors, first, NMSU Professor Ted Stanford (website exchanges), then, NMSU Professor Karin Wilburg (letter to the editor).
Stanford’s responses to my request for some answers to questions about his column reveal him, on this subject, to be more an ideologue than a pedagogue. He insinuates that I had misrepresented the authors’ statements in order to refute them, but he offers then or later no instance of my doing so. He claims to see no connection between their recommended methods and my example of poor math ability by a college student educated locally by their methods. And he evades my question about his interest in student “understanding” of mathematics and indifference to parent “understanding” about the effects on their children’s competence, by giving an answer which implies that it is a question about their motives about caring for children.
Wiburg’s letter offers the strange notion that “The curriculum one uses is not the major issue; what matters is how well the teachers know mathematics and how to teach mathematics.” She repeats the thesis of the original column: “This includes teaching useful procedures, mathematical fluency, and deeper conceptual understanding of the meaning of these procedures.” Her defense is that “After 30 years of my own published research, some of it based on over 500 hours of classroom observation, what matters for student achievement is the level of implementation of mathematics teaching in the classroom, including the level of student participation, regardless of the curriculum.” I have the grave doubts about teaching any subject undefined by a curriculum; I also have grave doubts about the sufficiency, not to mention the reliability, of just over two days’ worth of classroom observation per year.
Such responses reflect the political, not the educational, nature of the “math wars.” So it will help to understand that Investigations and Connected Mathematical Project are the latest of the evolving re-articulations of a view of, and an approach to, mathematics education which emerged during, and has persisted since, the Vietnam War. The hue-and-cry by the anti-war movement was “Down with the System.” That cry translated into a challenge to, and an undermining of, systems, structures, standards, and authority. In short, the “math wars” are a continuation of the “culture wars” in one field of battle.
In the field of education, the call was for the diminution or abolition of anything in history or literature which smacked of white male hegemony (down with the “canon”); grammar and principles of composition, which presumably repressed individual expression or self-identity (Black English, “ebonics,” and dual-language instruction became wedge issues); fundamentals of mathematics and science; and knowledge and skills in any subject acquired by rote and drills. Teachers became resources; approved instructional techniques became student-centered learning or group-oriented activities and projects. Even school architecture reflected reaction to order and discipline in the craze for the “open classroom.” From the onset, before there were long-term, reliable, peer-reviewed data, educational researchers offered “research” assuring the public that these reforms fostered a better education because it emphasized creativity and curiosity. Entirely consistent with the political motives of this movement was a lack of concern for demonstrable competence. Thus arose the contrast between the authentic and the elite.
A brief digression. The political values of this liberal movement affected other fields. In psychiatry, for instance, the fashion was to think that mental-health institutions were repressive and thus unhealthy. So the movement led to the discharge of many patients in the belief that, if they could be restored to non-institutionalized life, they would at least ameliorate their conditions, if not recover from them. The result of this concept of individual freedom, with its liberation from institutionalization, was the return to the public sphere of thousands and thousands of disturbed, dysfunctional people. Today, there are about 350,000 mentally ill homeless people, the victims of an ideology-, not a reality-, driven approach to mental health.
I digressed to make a point: the political—indeed, the ideological, not the pedagogical—basis of these methods of mathematics instruction. But there are other ways to see the effects of ideology in the advocacy of these methods.
Bad enough is the ideological indifference to results. The authors make a strong claim about benefits of the mathematical methods which they advocate: “Investigations and the other NSF-funded curricula provide rich and rigorous mathematical learning if implemented correctly,” which learning results in “understanding” mathematics. The authors do not support this central claim or even explain what the important terms mean or how they appraise them. I doubt that they can support this claim. Certainly, standardized proficiency test scores in New Mexico do not demonstrate “understanding.”
Worse, the authors protect their unsupported and probably unsupportable claim with a refutation-dodging “out,” the conditional clause: “if [they are] implemented correctly.” The dodge works by divorcing ivory-tower theory from results-oriented practice; the argument makes refutation impossible because it is divorced from results. The authors, on the basis of experience which they do not describe or justify as conclusive, are right; everyone else, with first-hand experience with students in the classroom, children at home, or employers at work, is wrong. According to their theory, poor test scores or complaints by parents or employers indict poor instruction or improper expectations; they do not indicate the inadequacy of the preferred methods. The claim with this condition boils down to a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition. There is little value in methods for teaching mathematics if they care rarely be correctly implemented.
Worst of all, the authors show themselves indifferent to test results, to effects on students, and to concerns of parents and employers. They are content that their ideal methods, for which they make big promises, hold sway in the classroom, whether or not students acquire demonstrable or useful “understanding” of mathematics or competence in mathematical computations.
All of which calls into question what these NMSU professors think about research, teaching, and service—the three missions of a land-grant university. All activities in accordance with these missions depend on the facts in the field, so to speak. In lieu of evidence or argument, however, they rely on appeals to authority: the National Academy of Sciences, some mathematicians and mathematical educators, and a compendium of standards distilling those of 45 states. What is missing is one of many academic jobs: explaining data in terms of theory, not advocating theory in disregard of data.
In their service-oriented involvement with public education, these authors assume a special responsibility in mediating between theory and reality. They provide advice; districts consume it; districts rely on that advice in providing instruction for the benefit of students (and, indirectly, their parents). If a theory cannot be “implemented correctly” in one school after another, as state test results and parental and employer complaints suggest, then any academics dedicated to research, teaching, and service would return to his study or his laboratory to consider the flaws, if not the failure, of their theory. It is counter-academic to find fault with reality in order to save the theory. In their political advocacy of their theory, the authors betray the purposes of the public land-grant institution which employs them while coat-tailing on its academic reputation and their professorial status.
Stanford’s responses to my request for some answers to questions about his column reveal him, on this subject, to be more an ideologue than a pedagogue. He insinuates that I had misrepresented the authors’ statements in order to refute them, but he offers then or later no instance of my doing so. He claims to see no connection between their recommended methods and my example of poor math ability by a college student educated locally by their methods. And he evades my question about his interest in student “understanding” of mathematics and indifference to parent “understanding” about the effects on their children’s competence, by giving an answer which implies that it is a question about their motives about caring for children.
Wiburg’s letter offers the strange notion that “The curriculum one uses is not the major issue; what matters is how well the teachers know mathematics and how to teach mathematics.” She repeats the thesis of the original column: “This includes teaching useful procedures, mathematical fluency, and deeper conceptual understanding of the meaning of these procedures.” Her defense is that “After 30 years of my own published research, some of it based on over 500 hours of classroom observation, what matters for student achievement is the level of implementation of mathematics teaching in the classroom, including the level of student participation, regardless of the curriculum.” I have the grave doubts about teaching any subject undefined by a curriculum; I also have grave doubts about the sufficiency, not to mention the reliability, of just over two days’ worth of classroom observation per year.
Such responses reflect the political, not the educational, nature of the “math wars.” So it will help to understand that Investigations and Connected Mathematical Project are the latest of the evolving re-articulations of a view of, and an approach to, mathematics education which emerged during, and has persisted since, the Vietnam War. The hue-and-cry by the anti-war movement was “Down with the System.” That cry translated into a challenge to, and an undermining of, systems, structures, standards, and authority. In short, the “math wars” are a continuation of the “culture wars” in one field of battle.
In the field of education, the call was for the diminution or abolition of anything in history or literature which smacked of white male hegemony (down with the “canon”); grammar and principles of composition, which presumably repressed individual expression or self-identity (Black English, “ebonics,” and dual-language instruction became wedge issues); fundamentals of mathematics and science; and knowledge and skills in any subject acquired by rote and drills. Teachers became resources; approved instructional techniques became student-centered learning or group-oriented activities and projects. Even school architecture reflected reaction to order and discipline in the craze for the “open classroom.” From the onset, before there were long-term, reliable, peer-reviewed data, educational researchers offered “research” assuring the public that these reforms fostered a better education because it emphasized creativity and curiosity. Entirely consistent with the political motives of this movement was a lack of concern for demonstrable competence. Thus arose the contrast between the authentic and the elite.
A brief digression. The political values of this liberal movement affected other fields. In psychiatry, for instance, the fashion was to think that mental-health institutions were repressive and thus unhealthy. So the movement led to the discharge of many patients in the belief that, if they could be restored to non-institutionalized life, they would at least ameliorate their conditions, if not recover from them. The result of this concept of individual freedom, with its liberation from institutionalization, was the return to the public sphere of thousands and thousands of disturbed, dysfunctional people. Today, there are about 350,000 mentally ill homeless people, the victims of an ideology-, not a reality-, driven approach to mental health.
I digressed to make a point: the political—indeed, the ideological, not the pedagogical—basis of these methods of mathematics instruction. But there are other ways to see the effects of ideology in the advocacy of these methods.
Bad enough is the ideological indifference to results. The authors make a strong claim about benefits of the mathematical methods which they advocate: “Investigations and the other NSF-funded curricula provide rich and rigorous mathematical learning if implemented correctly,” which learning results in “understanding” mathematics. The authors do not support this central claim or even explain what the important terms mean or how they appraise them. I doubt that they can support this claim. Certainly, standardized proficiency test scores in New Mexico do not demonstrate “understanding.”
Worse, the authors protect their unsupported and probably unsupportable claim with a refutation-dodging “out,” the conditional clause: “if [they are] implemented correctly.” The dodge works by divorcing ivory-tower theory from results-oriented practice; the argument makes refutation impossible because it is divorced from results. The authors, on the basis of experience which they do not describe or justify as conclusive, are right; everyone else, with first-hand experience with students in the classroom, children at home, or employers at work, is wrong. According to their theory, poor test scores or complaints by parents or employers indict poor instruction or improper expectations; they do not indicate the inadequacy of the preferred methods. The claim with this condition boils down to a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition. There is little value in methods for teaching mathematics if they care rarely be correctly implemented.
Worst of all, the authors show themselves indifferent to test results, to effects on students, and to concerns of parents and employers. They are content that their ideal methods, for which they make big promises, hold sway in the classroom, whether or not students acquire demonstrable or useful “understanding” of mathematics or competence in mathematical computations.
All of which calls into question what these NMSU professors think about research, teaching, and service—the three missions of a land-grant university. All activities in accordance with these missions depend on the facts in the field, so to speak. In lieu of evidence or argument, however, they rely on appeals to authority: the National Academy of Sciences, some mathematicians and mathematical educators, and a compendium of standards distilling those of 45 states. What is missing is one of many academic jobs: explaining data in terms of theory, not advocating theory in disregard of data.
In their service-oriented involvement with public education, these authors assume a special responsibility in mediating between theory and reality. They provide advice; districts consume it; districts rely on that advice in providing instruction for the benefit of students (and, indirectly, their parents). If a theory cannot be “implemented correctly” in one school after another, as state test results and parental and employer complaints suggest, then any academics dedicated to research, teaching, and service would return to his study or his laboratory to consider the flaws, if not the failure, of their theory. It is counter-academic to find fault with reality in order to save the theory. In their political advocacy of their theory, the authors betray the purposes of the public land-grant institution which employs them while coat-tailing on its academic reputation and their professorial status.
Friday, February 10, 2012
EXORCISING OR EXERCISING RELIGION--OR NEITHER OF THE ABOVE?
With Catholic Rick Santorum screaming about the guillotine of the French Revolution, I am surprised that Jewish Charles Krauthammer is not screaming about the ovens of the Holocaust. The purported onslaught—the attack on religion, religious freedom, the First Amendment, the end of America as we know it, the triumph of godless something-or-other—is the Administration’s extension of insurance provisions for contraception to religiously affiliated institutions like hospitals and colleges.
This self-righteous indignation, full of sound and fury, is entirely contrived, thus contemptible.
First, the regulation does not apply to the Catholic Church (or any other church or temple or mosque; or seminaries, monasteries, nunneries, etc.)—institutions whose purposes are entirely religious. It applies only to religiously affiliated institutions like hospitals and colleges which serve the public, are non-denominational in their staffing, and receive public money. All talk about the regulation as an attack on religious freedom is deliberately irresponsible and inflammatory, for a purpose.
Second, 22 states already have laws requiring such religiously affiliated institutions to provide insurance coverage for contraception to their employees. The Catholic Church has not cared about these legal requirements for years and years. Now comes the federal government to make such a requirement uniform across all states, and the Church suddenly invokes religious liberty, etc. However, from a doctrinal perspective, there is no doctrinal difference between such requirements at the state level and such requirements at the federal level. The entire issue is an after-the-fact attempt by the Catholic Church to rally political support for its parochial interests in an election year.
Third, the requirement for such insurance coverage merely extends labor law to institutions already required to obey labor law. Were such not the case, the Catholic Church could have children or even slaves to do some of its work in its churches and in these institutions. After all, the Bible sanctions child labor and slave labor. The Church raises the issue because it is trying, once again, to find a way to exempt itself from the rule of civil law (while, as in the case of gross misconduct by sexually predatory priests to excuse itself from enforcing any kind of law, even its own.)
Fourth, 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use contraceptives (oddly, by comparison, only 97 percent of sexually active non-Catholic women use them). The all-male leadership of the Catholic Church is not only completely out of touch with its laity, but is completely indifferent to their practices which deviate from doctrine. What Catholics, priests or parishioners, do in matters of sex is of no concern to the Catholic Church or beyond its control; what matters is what the Church pretends are threats to doctrines about which no one in the Church otherwise cares.
The larger issues concern the Church’s loss, not only of moral authority, but also of political power. Many Catholics have left the Church; others remain observant of ritual but have become selectively obedient or entirely indifferent to its teachings. The Church itself no longer concerns itself with this disparity; it no longer focuses on the moral or spiritual life of its priests or parishioners. It pays more attention to imposing doctrines without meaning within the Church on those outside it. And, as in the present controversy of its own creation, it tries to prop itself up with such contrivances to persuade its adherents that the Church still protects their interests. But the Church no longer knows or cares what they are. It cares about power and views its parishioners as its troops, exploitable and expendable in such controversies.
As for the national politicians and columnists as well as Catholic Church officials haranguing the Obama administration for its purported attacks on free exercise of religion, I have only one question: when does the love begin?
This self-righteous indignation, full of sound and fury, is entirely contrived, thus contemptible.
First, the regulation does not apply to the Catholic Church (or any other church or temple or mosque; or seminaries, monasteries, nunneries, etc.)—institutions whose purposes are entirely religious. It applies only to religiously affiliated institutions like hospitals and colleges which serve the public, are non-denominational in their staffing, and receive public money. All talk about the regulation as an attack on religious freedom is deliberately irresponsible and inflammatory, for a purpose.
Second, 22 states already have laws requiring such religiously affiliated institutions to provide insurance coverage for contraception to their employees. The Catholic Church has not cared about these legal requirements for years and years. Now comes the federal government to make such a requirement uniform across all states, and the Church suddenly invokes religious liberty, etc. However, from a doctrinal perspective, there is no doctrinal difference between such requirements at the state level and such requirements at the federal level. The entire issue is an after-the-fact attempt by the Catholic Church to rally political support for its parochial interests in an election year.
Third, the requirement for such insurance coverage merely extends labor law to institutions already required to obey labor law. Were such not the case, the Catholic Church could have children or even slaves to do some of its work in its churches and in these institutions. After all, the Bible sanctions child labor and slave labor. The Church raises the issue because it is trying, once again, to find a way to exempt itself from the rule of civil law (while, as in the case of gross misconduct by sexually predatory priests to excuse itself from enforcing any kind of law, even its own.)
Fourth, 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use contraceptives (oddly, by comparison, only 97 percent of sexually active non-Catholic women use them). The all-male leadership of the Catholic Church is not only completely out of touch with its laity, but is completely indifferent to their practices which deviate from doctrine. What Catholics, priests or parishioners, do in matters of sex is of no concern to the Catholic Church or beyond its control; what matters is what the Church pretends are threats to doctrines about which no one in the Church otherwise cares.
The larger issues concern the Church’s loss, not only of moral authority, but also of political power. Many Catholics have left the Church; others remain observant of ritual but have become selectively obedient or entirely indifferent to its teachings. The Church itself no longer concerns itself with this disparity; it no longer focuses on the moral or spiritual life of its priests or parishioners. It pays more attention to imposing doctrines without meaning within the Church on those outside it. And, as in the present controversy of its own creation, it tries to prop itself up with such contrivances to persuade its adherents that the Church still protects their interests. But the Church no longer knows or cares what they are. It cares about power and views its parishioners as its troops, exploitable and expendable in such controversies.
As for the national politicians and columnists as well as Catholic Church officials haranguing the Obama administration for its purported attacks on free exercise of religion, I have only one question: when does the love begin?
Sunday, February 5, 2012
THE PRE-ELECTION RESURGENCE OF REPUBLICAN RACISM
Racists do not like to discuss the influence of race in politics. When the subject arises, they respond by denying its influence or claiming that its influence pervades both sides equally. Their claim pretends that race in politics does not matter or the historical record is wrong. Whatever stance racists take, their racism, because it is a prejudice, judgment in advance of facts and arguments, is the denial of them. I begin with history.
Republicans respond to charges that their party is racist in one of two ways. Either they simply deny it—whom do they think they can con with this denial?—or they claim that they are no different from Democrats. The latter response adduces the racism of Southern Democrats since Reconstruction ended in 1877 through the passage of major civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. During those years, when most Americans were more or less racist, Southern Republicans were less so than Southern Democrats, who favored segregation and Jim Crow laws. Although Southern Democrats fought civil rights legislation, most Democrats elsewhere, joined by many Eastern liberal and moderate, and a few Midwestern and Western conservative, Republicans, favored it.
As integration proceeded, those more racist Southern Democrats switched parties. Truman’s initiative integrating the armed forces prompted Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond’s 1948 States Rights Party run for the presidency. Opposition to school desegregation (“massive resistance”) and civil rights legislation (integration—“never”) reversed party affiliations along racial lines. State Republican parties attracted white Democrats by promoting states rights to protect the Southern way of life and, of course, white women; in response, black Republicans became Democrats. Resistance to civil rights legislation fueled Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican run for the presidency. This “white flight” empowered Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy in his 1968 Republican run for the presidency. Reagan continued these Southern and Western conservative Republican leaders’ attacks on Eastern Republicans because of their liberal views on civil rights and anti-poverty legislation.
Obama’s campaign for the presidency raised the issue of race to unprecedented levels. Pre-election commentary analyzed the relative strengths of racism and economic self-interest especially in conservative populations in northern industrial “swing” states. Obama won because the electorate wanted a change from Republicans, whom it held responsible for the worst recession since the Great Depression, not because race had disappeared as an issue. Although economic self-interest won, Republicans demonized Obama as someone non- or un-American—foreign-born, Muslim-bred, socialist, radical—code-words covering the un-PC racism and xenophobia underlying them—and then, by association, smeared traditional Democratic approaches and policies as also foreign and socialist—non- or un-American.
Understandably so. Obama’s blackness—black being whites’ color symbolizing evil—has a fearsome aspect for Republicans. Reflecting that fear is their steady stream of insults and indignities directed at Obama, which would be inconceivable if he were other than black and if he did not represent the emerging majority of a non-white minorities. His face—that is, its color—represents the growing numbers of minorities, soon to be a majority, of the American populace. Within decades, whites will have become merely the largest minority in America. By then, Republicans will be unable to win elections by racist appeals unless their current efforts to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning cohorts of voters—minorities, young adults, and seniors—not only succeed in the 2012 election, but also suppress these voters in subsequent elections. Republican legislation using fraudulent claims of voter fraud and disempowering public unions signifies an anti-democratic insurgency by Republican bigots first, ideologues second.
Past Republican appeals to racism continue not only unabated, but possibly more desperate today, as the campaign oratory of its leading rivals suggest. Newt Gingrich, a former Representative from Georgia, is a man raised in the nuances of code-word racism. His derogatory remarks that blacks should seek jobs, not welfare checks, and that Obama is the nation’s greatest “food-stamps president” play to the stereotypes that blacks are lazy and dependent on welfare. Republicans applauded their approval. Despite his racist appeals, Gingrich knows the facts: a larger proportion of blacks than of whites are poor and jobless, and need welfare, but a far larger number of whites than of blacks are poor and jobless, and need welfare. One question for analysis in the 2012 election repeats the question in the last election: will racism trump economic self-interest?
A digression. In dark moments, I almost, but not quite, hope that Republican racism trumps self-interest. Rough justice would be served if bigots have federal welfare spigots to them, their family, or their friends shut off, and have someone tell them that they or their children should get jobs scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets in public schools or other public buildings. When they fail to find work and cannot get unemployment benefits and food stamps, perhaps they will realize that the national color is green.
Mitt Romney cannot compete with Gingrich as a racist, but he can compete with him with a despicable policy both implicitly racist and explicitly xenophobic. Romney recently opined that a suitable policy to deal with the country’s eleven million or so illegal Hispanic immigrants is “self-deportation.” Invented as a satirical joke opposing an anti-immigrant initiative in California—Republicans then and there, and Romney now, have no ear for satire or irony—“self-deportation” is a euphemism for something truly ugly. Question: why would millions who wanted to be here, came here, and established themselves with families and in jobs here, some for decades; why would their children, born, raised, and also established here—why would they “self-deport” to lands long since left or unknown? Answer: Republicans or other “real Americans,” by law or vigilantism, would harass them until they left. Anywhere else in the world such state-supported or -sanctioned “self-deportation” would be called “ethnic cleansing.” What the Nazis tried before they settled on their “final solution,” Romney wants to imitate.
Another digression. Ironically, this devout, practicing Mormon advocates a policy which would lead to practices resembling those experienced by his earlier co-religionists, who were harried, hounded from homes and communities, and hurried off to remote territories. Republicans support this or other policies calling for expelling established ethnic populations on legal technicalities of little consequence; indeed, of low cost and high benefit to the country. So another question for analysis is whether Republican racism and xenophobia portends purges, pogroms, and expulsions.
But a greater justice than the fulfillment of my half-hopes and unkind thoughts is grinding the Republicans to ground. All by themselves, they are once again resorting to racism and xenophobia as engines to political power. Their primal-scream hatred of Obama, reflected in their 3-years’ reflexive efforts to oppose anything and everything advocated by, or associated with, him, has become the only plank of their platform which is not merely a repetition of rotten wood about smaller government and less regulation, and, above all, lower taxes and free markets as solutions to all problems.
For Republican racism along with xenophobia is having baleful effects on the party. By regarding this black president as evil incarnate, Republicans have made Obama’s defeat their first priority and opposition to his proposals, even those which they once initiated, an obligatory means to that partisan end. By making their campaigns about a person, not policy, their candidates for the presidency have let their racism contaminate, or create confusion about, their positions and cause conflict among their candidates.
Obama-hatred is driving Republicans to the right, as if extreme ideological purity, which can enhance prospects for primary victories, can also increase chances of his defeat. Yet the quest for purity is forcing Republican candidates to adopt rigid stances which increase conflict within the party between materialists on economic issues and moralists on social issues, and which move them farther from mainstream views on both kinds of issues. Obama-hatred is also driving Republicans to exploit the rhetoric of personal attacks, which they use in on each other in preparation for the winner’s attacks on Obama. Thus, Republican candidates have let their campaigns for the presidency degenerate into compulsive contentiousness and ideological incoherence.
Racism is a potent influence in politics, but it is not omnipotent. Yes, in many quarters, racism trumps democratic or Christian values; but, no, in most quarters, it does not trump homes and jobs. For the past 3 years, Republicans have pursued a strategy of race-based obstruction to impede an economic recovery which, they rightly believe, would redound to Obama’s and the Democrats’ credit. Their reflexive opposition shows Republicans putting party politics above the national interest and refusing to make a constructive contribution to government. In difficult economic times, Republicans have let racism along with xenophobia distract them from, or ignore, the daily concerns of most Americans. Republicans are thus enabling their own defeat, Obama’s re-election, and Democratic gains. Racism, it turns out, is strong enough to hoist Republicans on their own petard.
Republicans respond to charges that their party is racist in one of two ways. Either they simply deny it—whom do they think they can con with this denial?—or they claim that they are no different from Democrats. The latter response adduces the racism of Southern Democrats since Reconstruction ended in 1877 through the passage of major civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. During those years, when most Americans were more or less racist, Southern Republicans were less so than Southern Democrats, who favored segregation and Jim Crow laws. Although Southern Democrats fought civil rights legislation, most Democrats elsewhere, joined by many Eastern liberal and moderate, and a few Midwestern and Western conservative, Republicans, favored it.
As integration proceeded, those more racist Southern Democrats switched parties. Truman’s initiative integrating the armed forces prompted Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond’s 1948 States Rights Party run for the presidency. Opposition to school desegregation (“massive resistance”) and civil rights legislation (integration—“never”) reversed party affiliations along racial lines. State Republican parties attracted white Democrats by promoting states rights to protect the Southern way of life and, of course, white women; in response, black Republicans became Democrats. Resistance to civil rights legislation fueled Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican run for the presidency. This “white flight” empowered Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy in his 1968 Republican run for the presidency. Reagan continued these Southern and Western conservative Republican leaders’ attacks on Eastern Republicans because of their liberal views on civil rights and anti-poverty legislation.
Obama’s campaign for the presidency raised the issue of race to unprecedented levels. Pre-election commentary analyzed the relative strengths of racism and economic self-interest especially in conservative populations in northern industrial “swing” states. Obama won because the electorate wanted a change from Republicans, whom it held responsible for the worst recession since the Great Depression, not because race had disappeared as an issue. Although economic self-interest won, Republicans demonized Obama as someone non- or un-American—foreign-born, Muslim-bred, socialist, radical—code-words covering the un-PC racism and xenophobia underlying them—and then, by association, smeared traditional Democratic approaches and policies as also foreign and socialist—non- or un-American.
Understandably so. Obama’s blackness—black being whites’ color symbolizing evil—has a fearsome aspect for Republicans. Reflecting that fear is their steady stream of insults and indignities directed at Obama, which would be inconceivable if he were other than black and if he did not represent the emerging majority of a non-white minorities. His face—that is, its color—represents the growing numbers of minorities, soon to be a majority, of the American populace. Within decades, whites will have become merely the largest minority in America. By then, Republicans will be unable to win elections by racist appeals unless their current efforts to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning cohorts of voters—minorities, young adults, and seniors—not only succeed in the 2012 election, but also suppress these voters in subsequent elections. Republican legislation using fraudulent claims of voter fraud and disempowering public unions signifies an anti-democratic insurgency by Republican bigots first, ideologues second.
Past Republican appeals to racism continue not only unabated, but possibly more desperate today, as the campaign oratory of its leading rivals suggest. Newt Gingrich, a former Representative from Georgia, is a man raised in the nuances of code-word racism. His derogatory remarks that blacks should seek jobs, not welfare checks, and that Obama is the nation’s greatest “food-stamps president” play to the stereotypes that blacks are lazy and dependent on welfare. Republicans applauded their approval. Despite his racist appeals, Gingrich knows the facts: a larger proportion of blacks than of whites are poor and jobless, and need welfare, but a far larger number of whites than of blacks are poor and jobless, and need welfare. One question for analysis in the 2012 election repeats the question in the last election: will racism trump economic self-interest?
A digression. In dark moments, I almost, but not quite, hope that Republican racism trumps self-interest. Rough justice would be served if bigots have federal welfare spigots to them, their family, or their friends shut off, and have someone tell them that they or their children should get jobs scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets in public schools or other public buildings. When they fail to find work and cannot get unemployment benefits and food stamps, perhaps they will realize that the national color is green.
Mitt Romney cannot compete with Gingrich as a racist, but he can compete with him with a despicable policy both implicitly racist and explicitly xenophobic. Romney recently opined that a suitable policy to deal with the country’s eleven million or so illegal Hispanic immigrants is “self-deportation.” Invented as a satirical joke opposing an anti-immigrant initiative in California—Republicans then and there, and Romney now, have no ear for satire or irony—“self-deportation” is a euphemism for something truly ugly. Question: why would millions who wanted to be here, came here, and established themselves with families and in jobs here, some for decades; why would their children, born, raised, and also established here—why would they “self-deport” to lands long since left or unknown? Answer: Republicans or other “real Americans,” by law or vigilantism, would harass them until they left. Anywhere else in the world such state-supported or -sanctioned “self-deportation” would be called “ethnic cleansing.” What the Nazis tried before they settled on their “final solution,” Romney wants to imitate.
Another digression. Ironically, this devout, practicing Mormon advocates a policy which would lead to practices resembling those experienced by his earlier co-religionists, who were harried, hounded from homes and communities, and hurried off to remote territories. Republicans support this or other policies calling for expelling established ethnic populations on legal technicalities of little consequence; indeed, of low cost and high benefit to the country. So another question for analysis is whether Republican racism and xenophobia portends purges, pogroms, and expulsions.
But a greater justice than the fulfillment of my half-hopes and unkind thoughts is grinding the Republicans to ground. All by themselves, they are once again resorting to racism and xenophobia as engines to political power. Their primal-scream hatred of Obama, reflected in their 3-years’ reflexive efforts to oppose anything and everything advocated by, or associated with, him, has become the only plank of their platform which is not merely a repetition of rotten wood about smaller government and less regulation, and, above all, lower taxes and free markets as solutions to all problems.
For Republican racism along with xenophobia is having baleful effects on the party. By regarding this black president as evil incarnate, Republicans have made Obama’s defeat their first priority and opposition to his proposals, even those which they once initiated, an obligatory means to that partisan end. By making their campaigns about a person, not policy, their candidates for the presidency have let their racism contaminate, or create confusion about, their positions and cause conflict among their candidates.
Obama-hatred is driving Republicans to the right, as if extreme ideological purity, which can enhance prospects for primary victories, can also increase chances of his defeat. Yet the quest for purity is forcing Republican candidates to adopt rigid stances which increase conflict within the party between materialists on economic issues and moralists on social issues, and which move them farther from mainstream views on both kinds of issues. Obama-hatred is also driving Republicans to exploit the rhetoric of personal attacks, which they use in on each other in preparation for the winner’s attacks on Obama. Thus, Republican candidates have let their campaigns for the presidency degenerate into compulsive contentiousness and ideological incoherence.
Racism is a potent influence in politics, but it is not omnipotent. Yes, in many quarters, racism trumps democratic or Christian values; but, no, in most quarters, it does not trump homes and jobs. For the past 3 years, Republicans have pursued a strategy of race-based obstruction to impede an economic recovery which, they rightly believe, would redound to Obama’s and the Democrats’ credit. Their reflexive opposition shows Republicans putting party politics above the national interest and refusing to make a constructive contribution to government. In difficult economic times, Republicans have let racism along with xenophobia distract them from, or ignore, the daily concerns of most Americans. Republicans are thus enabling their own defeat, Obama’s re-election, and Democratic gains. Racism, it turns out, is strong enough to hoist Republicans on their own petard.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
NO PUBLIC IN THE "PUBLIC" SCHOOLS
When the grades came out, the Las Cruces Public School District demonstrated once again its consistent less-than-mediocre performance. Nearly half of its schools received below-average grades of D or F. The same was true of the public schools, taken as a whole, throughout the state. This poor report card is consistent with the results of other evaluations such as the state’s reading and mathematics proficiency tests and National Education Assessment Program tests. All of them agree: public education in New Mexico ranks in the lowest five percent of all states.
When the report card is poor, state “educrats” invariably complain about flaws in the methodology underlying the results. And they are right, up to a not-very-distant point; all evaluations have imperfections. But no one needs to pursue educrats’ obfuscatory, specious, or tendentious nit-picks to know that when all methods indicate the same mediocre or worse results, they are likely collectively and reliably reflecting a truth. In response to which, local school boards and superintendents do little more than issue press releases.
Thus, the LCPS District responded with typical hypocrisy and implicit blame-sharing, if not blame-shifting. Superintendent Stan Rounds stated that the district was “today asking every parent, every parent of every child to step up with us in a partnership here to move our kids forward, to accelerate them. This is a good wake-up call for all of us to hold hands and do that, to recommit ourselves.” The hypocrisy is the pretense of wishing parental participation in public education. Rounds neither stated nor promised specifics for this process of stepping-up or partnering or committing. Step up to what and how? Partnership how and with whom? Commit to what?
The record shows that the District does not want parental or citizen participation in District affairs. The exceptions have been the two redistricting committees, both of which performed admirably. Yet neither the School Board nor the Superintendent has seen their success as urging a continuing, constructive role for parents and other citizens to help the District and improve public education. Indeed, on the Superintendent’s watch, the School Board reformed its policy on standing committees, which had lapsed, by eliminating them altogether. His advisory committee is a compliant construct of no consequence.
But parental and citizen participation can support high-quality education. I have extended experience with superior public school systems in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Fairfax County, Virginia. Both graduate most of their students; both send most of their graduates to colleges, many among the best in the country. Both expect, encourage, and welcome support from community residents in addressing the full range of educational issues. I know that both communities enjoy socio-economic advantages which Las Cruces lacks. But I believe that communities lacking them like Las Cruces should make even greater efforts to involve residents to overcome these disadvantages.
One of the obvious advantages of inclusion is better decisions on educational issues because of more and better information about the education actually provided by the District. As a founder of what became the country’s largest employee-owned company used to say, “all of us are smarter than some of us.” A District noted for its educational mediocrity disagrees; it prefers a priesthood of pedagogues to the experience of parents.
In my recent sortie into the “math wars,” I noticed once again that parents have no effective way of involving themselves in the education which their children receive in school. Eketrina Moore, a parent concerned about mathematics instruction, wrote a guest column for the local daily paper because she had no better place to address her concerns and those of other parents. School personnel are expert in deflecting parental concerns or complaints about curriculum or instruction. So, too, School Board and District staff in ignoring them. Ms. Moore could have spoken for three minutes at a School Board meeting; had she done so, Connie Phillips, its chair, would have kindly thanked her, and the Board would have ignored her. Steven Sanchez, the Assistant Superintendent for education, would have listened but neither responded to, nor had any exchange with her about, her concerns.
When NMSU experts on mathematics or mathematics instruction wrote a column dismissing Ms. Moore’s concerns because she lacked the “big picture,” I learned that when they talk, the District—that is, Sanchez—listens. The District values controversial theories of experts to the clear and continuing record of mediocre academic results. It does not respect parents who are concerned about their children’s education, does not care that test scores justify their complaints, and ignores businesses’ criticisms that LCPS graduates lack basic knowledge and skills, and have poor work habits.
Since public participation can benefit public education, I wonder at the effective exclusion of parents and other citizens from participation—I do not even need the qualifier “meaningful”—in District affairs relevant to public interests: curriculum, instruction, athletics, health and safety, budgets, and facilities. Indeed, I worry that, given the recent conduct of the four women School Board members in the high school redistricting, the exclusion of the public from District affairs enables them to serve their private interests and those of their friends, as they intend, not the interests of the public.
Moreover, these four School Board members are personally fearful of allowing any public participation which might involve controversy or criticism however constructive. Recently, when some members of the redistricting committee criticized Rounds’s change in transfer policies, Bonnie Votaw complained that they made the redistricting decision more difficult! Obviously, these four members cannot handle opinions different from theirs, especially when, in this case, they wanted to advance private rather than public interests. Earlier, when they considered a suggestion to have open public meetings to listen to residents in their districts, they decided instead to go to some schools and meet with students. This decision makes clear that they can cope only with children and subordinates, and are fearful of dealing with adults.
It is worth noting that members Maria Flores, Barbara Hall, and Votaw were teachers and represent teachers. Anyone concerned about public education needs to remember that fact when teachers complain about the failure of parents to involve themselves in their children’s education. Teachers and principals rebuff parents, and School Board members, the Superintendent, and other District staff do likewise—and then complain about the lack of parental involvement and ask parents to bail them out when they fail. The District deserves the blame for the lack of public participation by parents and other citizens. It is late and lame for Rounds to ask for their participation when the District has flunked again after long going it alone.
There are ways forward, but they can work only if the District first mends its ways. I offer one way, with the following steps: Revise District policies to encourage and enable public participation by parents and other citizens. Terminate the Superintendent’s advisory committee. Encourage PTAs and booster organizations to form an independent, District-wide organization open to PTA and booster organization representatives, other parents, and other citizens; and charter advisory committees on a range of educational (curriculum and instruction), health and safety, and educational management issues (budget and facilities), among others. Initially, until the organization is widely recognized, require teachers and principals to report parental concerns to the District administration and require the District administration to report them to the leadership of this organization.
The important thing is to put the public back in “public” education. Increasing public participation would better inform parents and other citizens, encourage more support from them in student education, improve academic performance, enable better decision-making, and develop future leaders in the District and the city. The alternative is a continuation of the status quo, which disserves students, parents, and businesses.
When the report card is poor, state “educrats” invariably complain about flaws in the methodology underlying the results. And they are right, up to a not-very-distant point; all evaluations have imperfections. But no one needs to pursue educrats’ obfuscatory, specious, or tendentious nit-picks to know that when all methods indicate the same mediocre or worse results, they are likely collectively and reliably reflecting a truth. In response to which, local school boards and superintendents do little more than issue press releases.
Thus, the LCPS District responded with typical hypocrisy and implicit blame-sharing, if not blame-shifting. Superintendent Stan Rounds stated that the district was “today asking every parent, every parent of every child to step up with us in a partnership here to move our kids forward, to accelerate them. This is a good wake-up call for all of us to hold hands and do that, to recommit ourselves.” The hypocrisy is the pretense of wishing parental participation in public education. Rounds neither stated nor promised specifics for this process of stepping-up or partnering or committing. Step up to what and how? Partnership how and with whom? Commit to what?
The record shows that the District does not want parental or citizen participation in District affairs. The exceptions have been the two redistricting committees, both of which performed admirably. Yet neither the School Board nor the Superintendent has seen their success as urging a continuing, constructive role for parents and other citizens to help the District and improve public education. Indeed, on the Superintendent’s watch, the School Board reformed its policy on standing committees, which had lapsed, by eliminating them altogether. His advisory committee is a compliant construct of no consequence.
But parental and citizen participation can support high-quality education. I have extended experience with superior public school systems in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Fairfax County, Virginia. Both graduate most of their students; both send most of their graduates to colleges, many among the best in the country. Both expect, encourage, and welcome support from community residents in addressing the full range of educational issues. I know that both communities enjoy socio-economic advantages which Las Cruces lacks. But I believe that communities lacking them like Las Cruces should make even greater efforts to involve residents to overcome these disadvantages.
One of the obvious advantages of inclusion is better decisions on educational issues because of more and better information about the education actually provided by the District. As a founder of what became the country’s largest employee-owned company used to say, “all of us are smarter than some of us.” A District noted for its educational mediocrity disagrees; it prefers a priesthood of pedagogues to the experience of parents.
In my recent sortie into the “math wars,” I noticed once again that parents have no effective way of involving themselves in the education which their children receive in school. Eketrina Moore, a parent concerned about mathematics instruction, wrote a guest column for the local daily paper because she had no better place to address her concerns and those of other parents. School personnel are expert in deflecting parental concerns or complaints about curriculum or instruction. So, too, School Board and District staff in ignoring them. Ms. Moore could have spoken for three minutes at a School Board meeting; had she done so, Connie Phillips, its chair, would have kindly thanked her, and the Board would have ignored her. Steven Sanchez, the Assistant Superintendent for education, would have listened but neither responded to, nor had any exchange with her about, her concerns.
When NMSU experts on mathematics or mathematics instruction wrote a column dismissing Ms. Moore’s concerns because she lacked the “big picture,” I learned that when they talk, the District—that is, Sanchez—listens. The District values controversial theories of experts to the clear and continuing record of mediocre academic results. It does not respect parents who are concerned about their children’s education, does not care that test scores justify their complaints, and ignores businesses’ criticisms that LCPS graduates lack basic knowledge and skills, and have poor work habits.
Since public participation can benefit public education, I wonder at the effective exclusion of parents and other citizens from participation—I do not even need the qualifier “meaningful”—in District affairs relevant to public interests: curriculum, instruction, athletics, health and safety, budgets, and facilities. Indeed, I worry that, given the recent conduct of the four women School Board members in the high school redistricting, the exclusion of the public from District affairs enables them to serve their private interests and those of their friends, as they intend, not the interests of the public.
Moreover, these four School Board members are personally fearful of allowing any public participation which might involve controversy or criticism however constructive. Recently, when some members of the redistricting committee criticized Rounds’s change in transfer policies, Bonnie Votaw complained that they made the redistricting decision more difficult! Obviously, these four members cannot handle opinions different from theirs, especially when, in this case, they wanted to advance private rather than public interests. Earlier, when they considered a suggestion to have open public meetings to listen to residents in their districts, they decided instead to go to some schools and meet with students. This decision makes clear that they can cope only with children and subordinates, and are fearful of dealing with adults.
It is worth noting that members Maria Flores, Barbara Hall, and Votaw were teachers and represent teachers. Anyone concerned about public education needs to remember that fact when teachers complain about the failure of parents to involve themselves in their children’s education. Teachers and principals rebuff parents, and School Board members, the Superintendent, and other District staff do likewise—and then complain about the lack of parental involvement and ask parents to bail them out when they fail. The District deserves the blame for the lack of public participation by parents and other citizens. It is late and lame for Rounds to ask for their participation when the District has flunked again after long going it alone.
There are ways forward, but they can work only if the District first mends its ways. I offer one way, with the following steps: Revise District policies to encourage and enable public participation by parents and other citizens. Terminate the Superintendent’s advisory committee. Encourage PTAs and booster organizations to form an independent, District-wide organization open to PTA and booster organization representatives, other parents, and other citizens; and charter advisory committees on a range of educational (curriculum and instruction), health and safety, and educational management issues (budget and facilities), among others. Initially, until the organization is widely recognized, require teachers and principals to report parental concerns to the District administration and require the District administration to report them to the leadership of this organization.
The important thing is to put the public back in “public” education. Increasing public participation would better inform parents and other citizens, encourage more support from them in student education, improve academic performance, enable better decision-making, and develop future leaders in the District and the city. The alternative is a continuation of the status quo, which disserves students, parents, and businesses.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
MOVING THE DISTRICT FORWARD TO MEDIOCRITY
There are many reasons and even more excuses for the poor overall performance of the Las Cruces Public School District according to the state’s new A-to-F grading system. The Superintendent’s response that the district’s report card was not so bad because some of the Ds were close to Cs sounds as if the district aspires to, or would be satisfied with, mediocrity.
And there is a mix of non-surprise and surprise. The non-surprise: an A for Desert Hills Elementary School, located in a culturally and socio-economically advantaged area. The surprise: Bs for Las Cruces and Onate High Schools, and D for Mayfield High School. MHS came to everyone’s attention—it thinks itself the flagship of the district, apparently—because of the redistricting ruckus created by its parents and others, including many music-lovers with an MHS-uber-alles mentality. They were aided and abetted by three school board members who worked hard during the high school redistricting process to advance the parochial interests of MHS at the expense of the district as a whole.
Which facts focus attention on these three: Maria Flores, Barbara Hall, and Bonnie Votaw. All three are teachers. All three have personal or professional links to MHS. All three touted their background as teachers when they were candidates or applicants for the school board. The record of their performance in bringing their experience as teachers to bear on improving the academic performance of students in this district is unknown and probably non-existent. Indeed, their attention to special interests probably distracts them from the larger responsibilities of their job.
Ideas for education reform by the district have come to their attention. They have chosen to ignore them. What are those ideas? I can think of two: public participation, which they advocate in campaigns and ignore afterwards; and curriculum reform, which they oppose in defense of present staff and former colleagues. In short, they have made themselves isolated, insulated, and special-interest-oriented.
Their failed leadership in the redistricting process was simply the most obvious manifestation of their unfitness for educational leadership. A televised example occurred when the remaining board members had to replace a vacated position. They made the ability to work well with them a major criterion. Barbara Hall, assuring them that she wanted to do what they wanted to do, won. Other applicants stating their commitment to the public and public education, and the benefits of their non-teaching perspectives, not subservience to other board members, lost.
These three board members and the board chair, who aligns herself with them, have betrayed the public and disgraced themselves. The only public service left to them is to replace themselves with younger, community- and education-minded citizens who are not teachers, and then to resign.
And there is a mix of non-surprise and surprise. The non-surprise: an A for Desert Hills Elementary School, located in a culturally and socio-economically advantaged area. The surprise: Bs for Las Cruces and Onate High Schools, and D for Mayfield High School. MHS came to everyone’s attention—it thinks itself the flagship of the district, apparently—because of the redistricting ruckus created by its parents and others, including many music-lovers with an MHS-uber-alles mentality. They were aided and abetted by three school board members who worked hard during the high school redistricting process to advance the parochial interests of MHS at the expense of the district as a whole.
Which facts focus attention on these three: Maria Flores, Barbara Hall, and Bonnie Votaw. All three are teachers. All three have personal or professional links to MHS. All three touted their background as teachers when they were candidates or applicants for the school board. The record of their performance in bringing their experience as teachers to bear on improving the academic performance of students in this district is unknown and probably non-existent. Indeed, their attention to special interests probably distracts them from the larger responsibilities of their job.
Ideas for education reform by the district have come to their attention. They have chosen to ignore them. What are those ideas? I can think of two: public participation, which they advocate in campaigns and ignore afterwards; and curriculum reform, which they oppose in defense of present staff and former colleagues. In short, they have made themselves isolated, insulated, and special-interest-oriented.
Their failed leadership in the redistricting process was simply the most obvious manifestation of their unfitness for educational leadership. A televised example occurred when the remaining board members had to replace a vacated position. They made the ability to work well with them a major criterion. Barbara Hall, assuring them that she wanted to do what they wanted to do, won. Other applicants stating their commitment to the public and public education, and the benefits of their non-teaching perspectives, not subservience to other board members, lost.
These three board members and the board chair, who aligns herself with them, have betrayed the public and disgraced themselves. The only public service left to them is to replace themselves with younger, community- and education-minded citizens who are not teachers, and then to resign.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
EDUCATION REFORM IN NEW MEXICO: IMPEDIMENTS AND ONE PROPOSAL FOR NOW
It is a very good thing that New Mexico is a land of cultural and scenic enchantment, because it is unlikely to be a land of economic or educational enrichment. Without the benefit of military bases and two national laboratories, it would probably be the poorest state in the union. With the benefit of its public schools and colleges, it is one of the worst educated states in the union.
The record is clear. Fifty percent, plus or minus, of fourth- and eighth-grade students fail to demonstrate proficiency in reading and math. One-third of eighth-grade students drop out of school before graduation. Fewer than ten percent of enrollees at Dona Ana Community College and fewer than fifty percent of enrollees at New Mexico State University graduate within 3 and 6 years, respectively. This record reflects academic performance for decades—a persistent mediocrity which, one must conclude, satisfies the people and their leaders, though almost all of them pretending otherwise.
Elected officials understand the necessity of this pretense and the importance of catering to constituencies with vested interests in the status quo, and thus have done nothing effectual to reform education for results. But, at the same time, they lack the knowledge of education which would enable them to distinguish the effectual from the fashionable. Recent efforts under the banner of education reform—among others, to improve testing, evaluate student and teacher performance, hold teachers and schools accountable (now, giving them A-F grades), shrink class or school size, and hire specialist teachers or educational consultant—do nothing to educate anyone. Every one of these efforts is a management gimmick unrelated to the transfer of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values from those who know more to those who know less. These gimmicks cost money and often create constituencies to vote for those who legislate for and fund them.
Ignorance in matters of public education begins at the top. When I interviewed Diane Denish and Susan Martinez, and attended their Albuquerque debate on education, I was stunned less by their ignorance than by their incomprehension of their ignorance. I was not stunned that Martinez appointed as Secretary of Education, not an educator, but an ideological politico inimical to public education from a state with a different economy and different demographic and educational issues. But the Senate, signaling legislative indifference, has not rejected this nominee not qualified under the state constitution.
Closer to home are elected legislators who patronize public education but have, as the record shows, nothing to show for it. These solons of Santa Fe, like their colleagues, spend about five percent of their time and energy on about fifty percent of the state budget. Typically, the longer-serving legislators from Las Cruces and environs, polished in the pieties and platitudes of good politics, have voted for spending money on the potholes of public education to no effect.
They and other legislators are reluctant to consider alternatives to the educational fads and fashions which perpetuate educational mediocrity because they are ignorant about education, embrace conformity, and desire approval. I speak from my experience with State Senators Stephen Fischmann and John Arthur Smith, both of whom have chosen to carry water for Martinez and Skandera in advancing elements of the “Florida Plan,” a dubious and deceptive approach to public education. But I am only one, and perhaps the least, of many sources providing them not only sustained criticism of this ideology-driven approach to public education, but also alternatives to the conventional wisdom. Indeed, neither has considered the views of such national experts as Diane Ravitch, who knows from her work on both sides of most of today’s educational issues.
I discussed alternatives and their rationales with both senators; I sent or gave them materials, or references to materials, on many alternatives on many educational issues. When Fischmann defended his vote on an element of the Florida Plan, he claimed that he had not received other ideas for improving education. I took this lie, not as a slight to me, but as a necessity to him to cover a lack of courage because of a lack of conviction in reforms not in the mainstream. After a discussion with Smith, throughout which he said “yes, yes” to my comments and suggestions, he said, as we walked to our cars, that his wife was a teacher. I immediately realized that each “yes, yes” meant “no, no,” many teachers being among those most opposed to education reform. I am not surprised that Smith is sponsoring legislation to support Martinez’s politically motivated, punitive, and discriminatory proposal for retaining third-grade students not proficient in reading.
Both senators are typical of most elected state and local officials. Lacking expertise in the subject, they follow the politically powerful, “educrats,” and special-interest agents who sustain the status quo—sheep following goats. Unable to distinguish good from bad advice, they accept the conventional wisdom and avoid the responsibility to think and speak for themselves, and to consider possibly effective alternative educational reforms.
Paradoxically, the last place from which to expect initiatives to reform education is schools of education. When I met with Michael Morehead, Dean of the NMSU School of Education, we rehearsed the record of poor academic performance and high dropout rates in Las Cruces. When I asked him why he thought that his school had well prepared its graduates for teaching, especially at the elementary school level, he answered that it sends principals a client satisfaction survey and receives uniformly favorable replies. When I asked what incentive respondents had to reply otherwise, if otherwise was the case, he had no answer. When I asked him why the low proficiency scores and high dropout rates over decades did not provide a better measure of the preparation of NMSU School of Education graduates, he answered by blaming everyone else, mainly parents. I replied that it seemed odd that the School of Education, with a faculty doing educational research and many students native to the city, county, or state had failed, over decades, to find ways to teach New Mexico students effectively—a comment not well received and urging my departure.
Notwithstanding, there really are low- or no-cost means to improve public education. I am going to discuss one in detail now and others later.
One no-cost proposal addresses the training of elementary school teachers. Everyone avoids this subject because, as these teachers tell us, they try so hard and have good intentions—and because they are politically potent. It is not cynical to say that trying hard and having good intentions are not the stuff of education or the reasons why taxpayers pay for public education.
A symptom of the establishment’s unwillingness to consider these teachers as a major factor in poor student performance is the shift in perceptions of the problems. A few years ago, the perceived problem was dropouts, and the solutions were programs to prevent them. But such programs are too late, costly, and ineffective. For, if students had not learned to read by the end of fourth grade, they would be unable to read to learn thereafter and would and did drop out to avoid continued frustration and failure. Then the perceived problem was the poor preparation of preschoolers. Early childhood reading programs may do some good, but initial gains will be lost from the moment their students enter kindergarten because elementary school teachers, the first to teach—or fail to teach—them cannot sustain the benefits of an early start on literacy. (Such, by the way, has been the record of Head Start.) The shift from one perceived problem to another perceived problems skips over the problem.
The first problem—one elephant in the room—is the failure of elementary school teachers, who are responsible for teaching reading—or were. When it became evident that large percentages of students were not learning to read, students were blamed as the problems and reading specialists were hired as the solution to do what regular teachers had once done. But the large percentages of students still not learning to read persist. Obviously, students were not the problem, and reading specialists were not the solution. But, by avoiding the first problem and adopting a non-solution, legislators everywhere created an ineffective, special-interest constituency now permanent at great expense to the state—another elephant in the room.
The following proposal, if implemented, promises better results at virtually no cost. The proposal is a simple one: require schools of education to ensure that their graduates have mastery of the subject matter which they will have to teach in conformity to state-mandated curriculums. The truth is simple; for example, if students must know grammar, then teachers must know it to teach it.
The concept of curriculum alignment is known to the state. It studied the alignment of high-school courses with college requirements to serve purposes educational and not. But it has not studied the alignment between schools of education course requirements and state-mandated curriculums. Until it does, it will not understand how serious the misalignment is, how much teacher training is misdirected, and how harmful to students the results are; and it will be unable to document the need for reforms.
The gap between what schools of education require of prospective elementary school teachers and what state curriculums require is great, greatest perhaps in English. At NMSU, prospective elementary school teachers select a concentration in one of four academic subjects: English, history, science, or math. About nine in ten pick English. All but two of the required English courses are in literature. The exceptions are composition courses in college writing at the 100 and 200 levels. These courses wrongly assume undergraduate competency in the fundamentals of grammar and the principles of composition. If prospective teachers lack this competency when they enroll, they have no way to acquire it. The NMSU School of Education does not ensure that its students who will become elementary school teachers have or acquire the knowledge and skills which the state curriculums require.
Obviously, one way to improve teaching by elementary school teachers is to require courses ensuring their mastery of the knowledge and skills which the curriculums imply that they must teach to their students. Requirements for this alignment are modest: have schools of education revise their course requirements in these four subjects; have the appropriate academic departments develop state-curriculum-based courses for teachers; find teachers to teach those courses, and reduce requirements for methods courses, which crowd out subject-matter courses and cannot compensate for ignorance.
There are problems: schools of education might not know what state curriculums require, and their faculty members and perhaps those in other academic departments might be unable to teach such courses. Likely impediments to this suggestion are less these practical difficulties, but attitudinal resistance. The lesser is a faculty belief that graduates going into elementary school teaching know or can quickly learn what they need to teach. The greater is a faculty mindset which discounts intellectual development and academic mastery, and overrates emotional and social development—in a word, disconnects the interplay among them in student development and disregards the public interest in competent graduates. A result of this institutionalized anti-intellectualism is mediocre state scores in reading and math proficiency—proof of just how successful school of education deans, faculty members, and their graduates can be in acting free of accountability to the public.
More, later.
The record is clear. Fifty percent, plus or minus, of fourth- and eighth-grade students fail to demonstrate proficiency in reading and math. One-third of eighth-grade students drop out of school before graduation. Fewer than ten percent of enrollees at Dona Ana Community College and fewer than fifty percent of enrollees at New Mexico State University graduate within 3 and 6 years, respectively. This record reflects academic performance for decades—a persistent mediocrity which, one must conclude, satisfies the people and their leaders, though almost all of them pretending otherwise.
Elected officials understand the necessity of this pretense and the importance of catering to constituencies with vested interests in the status quo, and thus have done nothing effectual to reform education for results. But, at the same time, they lack the knowledge of education which would enable them to distinguish the effectual from the fashionable. Recent efforts under the banner of education reform—among others, to improve testing, evaluate student and teacher performance, hold teachers and schools accountable (now, giving them A-F grades), shrink class or school size, and hire specialist teachers or educational consultant—do nothing to educate anyone. Every one of these efforts is a management gimmick unrelated to the transfer of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values from those who know more to those who know less. These gimmicks cost money and often create constituencies to vote for those who legislate for and fund them.
Ignorance in matters of public education begins at the top. When I interviewed Diane Denish and Susan Martinez, and attended their Albuquerque debate on education, I was stunned less by their ignorance than by their incomprehension of their ignorance. I was not stunned that Martinez appointed as Secretary of Education, not an educator, but an ideological politico inimical to public education from a state with a different economy and different demographic and educational issues. But the Senate, signaling legislative indifference, has not rejected this nominee not qualified under the state constitution.
Closer to home are elected legislators who patronize public education but have, as the record shows, nothing to show for it. These solons of Santa Fe, like their colleagues, spend about five percent of their time and energy on about fifty percent of the state budget. Typically, the longer-serving legislators from Las Cruces and environs, polished in the pieties and platitudes of good politics, have voted for spending money on the potholes of public education to no effect.
They and other legislators are reluctant to consider alternatives to the educational fads and fashions which perpetuate educational mediocrity because they are ignorant about education, embrace conformity, and desire approval. I speak from my experience with State Senators Stephen Fischmann and John Arthur Smith, both of whom have chosen to carry water for Martinez and Skandera in advancing elements of the “Florida Plan,” a dubious and deceptive approach to public education. But I am only one, and perhaps the least, of many sources providing them not only sustained criticism of this ideology-driven approach to public education, but also alternatives to the conventional wisdom. Indeed, neither has considered the views of such national experts as Diane Ravitch, who knows from her work on both sides of most of today’s educational issues.
I discussed alternatives and their rationales with both senators; I sent or gave them materials, or references to materials, on many alternatives on many educational issues. When Fischmann defended his vote on an element of the Florida Plan, he claimed that he had not received other ideas for improving education. I took this lie, not as a slight to me, but as a necessity to him to cover a lack of courage because of a lack of conviction in reforms not in the mainstream. After a discussion with Smith, throughout which he said “yes, yes” to my comments and suggestions, he said, as we walked to our cars, that his wife was a teacher. I immediately realized that each “yes, yes” meant “no, no,” many teachers being among those most opposed to education reform. I am not surprised that Smith is sponsoring legislation to support Martinez’s politically motivated, punitive, and discriminatory proposal for retaining third-grade students not proficient in reading.
Both senators are typical of most elected state and local officials. Lacking expertise in the subject, they follow the politically powerful, “educrats,” and special-interest agents who sustain the status quo—sheep following goats. Unable to distinguish good from bad advice, they accept the conventional wisdom and avoid the responsibility to think and speak for themselves, and to consider possibly effective alternative educational reforms.
Paradoxically, the last place from which to expect initiatives to reform education is schools of education. When I met with Michael Morehead, Dean of the NMSU School of Education, we rehearsed the record of poor academic performance and high dropout rates in Las Cruces. When I asked him why he thought that his school had well prepared its graduates for teaching, especially at the elementary school level, he answered that it sends principals a client satisfaction survey and receives uniformly favorable replies. When I asked what incentive respondents had to reply otherwise, if otherwise was the case, he had no answer. When I asked him why the low proficiency scores and high dropout rates over decades did not provide a better measure of the preparation of NMSU School of Education graduates, he answered by blaming everyone else, mainly parents. I replied that it seemed odd that the School of Education, with a faculty doing educational research and many students native to the city, county, or state had failed, over decades, to find ways to teach New Mexico students effectively—a comment not well received and urging my departure.
Notwithstanding, there really are low- or no-cost means to improve public education. I am going to discuss one in detail now and others later.
One no-cost proposal addresses the training of elementary school teachers. Everyone avoids this subject because, as these teachers tell us, they try so hard and have good intentions—and because they are politically potent. It is not cynical to say that trying hard and having good intentions are not the stuff of education or the reasons why taxpayers pay for public education.
A symptom of the establishment’s unwillingness to consider these teachers as a major factor in poor student performance is the shift in perceptions of the problems. A few years ago, the perceived problem was dropouts, and the solutions were programs to prevent them. But such programs are too late, costly, and ineffective. For, if students had not learned to read by the end of fourth grade, they would be unable to read to learn thereafter and would and did drop out to avoid continued frustration and failure. Then the perceived problem was the poor preparation of preschoolers. Early childhood reading programs may do some good, but initial gains will be lost from the moment their students enter kindergarten because elementary school teachers, the first to teach—or fail to teach—them cannot sustain the benefits of an early start on literacy. (Such, by the way, has been the record of Head Start.) The shift from one perceived problem to another perceived problems skips over the problem.
The first problem—one elephant in the room—is the failure of elementary school teachers, who are responsible for teaching reading—or were. When it became evident that large percentages of students were not learning to read, students were blamed as the problems and reading specialists were hired as the solution to do what regular teachers had once done. But the large percentages of students still not learning to read persist. Obviously, students were not the problem, and reading specialists were not the solution. But, by avoiding the first problem and adopting a non-solution, legislators everywhere created an ineffective, special-interest constituency now permanent at great expense to the state—another elephant in the room.
The following proposal, if implemented, promises better results at virtually no cost. The proposal is a simple one: require schools of education to ensure that their graduates have mastery of the subject matter which they will have to teach in conformity to state-mandated curriculums. The truth is simple; for example, if students must know grammar, then teachers must know it to teach it.
The concept of curriculum alignment is known to the state. It studied the alignment of high-school courses with college requirements to serve purposes educational and not. But it has not studied the alignment between schools of education course requirements and state-mandated curriculums. Until it does, it will not understand how serious the misalignment is, how much teacher training is misdirected, and how harmful to students the results are; and it will be unable to document the need for reforms.
The gap between what schools of education require of prospective elementary school teachers and what state curriculums require is great, greatest perhaps in English. At NMSU, prospective elementary school teachers select a concentration in one of four academic subjects: English, history, science, or math. About nine in ten pick English. All but two of the required English courses are in literature. The exceptions are composition courses in college writing at the 100 and 200 levels. These courses wrongly assume undergraduate competency in the fundamentals of grammar and the principles of composition. If prospective teachers lack this competency when they enroll, they have no way to acquire it. The NMSU School of Education does not ensure that its students who will become elementary school teachers have or acquire the knowledge and skills which the state curriculums require.
Obviously, one way to improve teaching by elementary school teachers is to require courses ensuring their mastery of the knowledge and skills which the curriculums imply that they must teach to their students. Requirements for this alignment are modest: have schools of education revise their course requirements in these four subjects; have the appropriate academic departments develop state-curriculum-based courses for teachers; find teachers to teach those courses, and reduce requirements for methods courses, which crowd out subject-matter courses and cannot compensate for ignorance.
There are problems: schools of education might not know what state curriculums require, and their faculty members and perhaps those in other academic departments might be unable to teach such courses. Likely impediments to this suggestion are less these practical difficulties, but attitudinal resistance. The lesser is a faculty belief that graduates going into elementary school teaching know or can quickly learn what they need to teach. The greater is a faculty mindset which discounts intellectual development and academic mastery, and overrates emotional and social development—in a word, disconnects the interplay among them in student development and disregards the public interest in competent graduates. A result of this institutionalized anti-intellectualism is mediocre state scores in reading and math proficiency—proof of just how successful school of education deans, faculty members, and their graduates can be in acting free of accountability to the public.
More, later.
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