It’s “Nobody Draw Mohammed Century”!

April 30, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Today, Mark Steyn posts a letter he recieved from cowardly lioness Molly Norris, along with his absolutely devastating response. Not to be missed if you’ve been following the bru-ha-ha over Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.

Steyn does leave one thing out of his response, though. Asked to explain why he and others are so contemptous toward Norris, he offers a number of unassailable demonstrations that it’s because her behavior is contemptible. But Norris’s betrayal of her own professed principles was not only a missed opportunity, as Steyn stresses. It was a unique kind of missed opportunity.

For one person or one partnership or one organization – like, say, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, or Kurt Westergaard and Jyllands-Posten, or Ezra Levant and his team at the Western Standard – deliberately says something calculated to push back against a violent threat to freedom of speech, that is nothing short of heroic. They take all the risk, and all the rest of us reap the reward of their bravery as parasitic free riders.

But you can’t build a civilization on heroic virtue. Civilization has to be livable for the ordinary person. If a civilization is going to be characterized by freedom, it has to be built in such a way that the ordinary person can enjoy freedom without having to demonstrate heroic virtue.

Kurt Westergaard (Photo by Daily Mail)

Don’t get me wrong – heroic virtue such as has been demonstrated by Parker, Stone, Westergaard, and Levant – and Mark Steyn – will always be necessary. But that’s just another way of saying heroes will always be necessary. And you can’t have a whole civilization populated by nothing but heroes. In other words, heroes are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a free civilization. By all means, let’s affirm that the ordinary person can’t be free unless heroes make his freedom possible – but he also can’t be free if freedom for heroes is the only kind of freedom we have.

So what else, besides heroes, is necessary for the freedom of the ordinary person? A mutual defense pact.

We need a culture in which it is expected that when one person’s freedom is threatened, others will rally to his defense. If it’s everybody for himself, the enemies of freedom can pick us off one by one. Or if nobody but the government is responsible to defend those whose freedom is threatened – well, how well does anything work out if it’s a government monopoly? But if we come to each others’ defense, then defending freedom doesn’t require heroic virtue. It’s hard to be the first person to stand up for freedom – that’s why we need heroes, or nobody can be free. But it’s not so hard to be the tenth, or hundredth, person to stand up for freedom – that’s why those who aren’t heroes can be free, too.

It’s not necessary for everybody in the whole world to come to everybody else’s defense. But it is necessary that those who are morally and culturally proximate to the threatened person come to his defense. By “morally proximate” I mean those who have a special duty toward the threatened, whether by natural relationship (such as being a friend or family member) or for some other reason (such as by professional responsibility – doctors have more responsibility to care for the sick than others, because they are more able to do so and have voluntarily accepted the professional responsibility). By “culturally proximate” I mean those who best understand the social situation of the threatned person because they themselves inhabit a similar social situation.

And that’s what makes Norris’s abdication especially galling. The idea of Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was a fantastic way for all of us who are – as professional producers of social commentary – morally and culturally proximate to those whose freedom is threatened here to exercise a mutual defense pact. Steyn himself has articualted on numerous occasions the imperative for professional producers of news and culture to rally to fight off the threat to free speech from political Islamism. Well, this seemed to be, for a few brief shining moments, a way for some of us to do that.

But not now. Nobody else can make EDMD happen the way Norris could have. Yet it appears that being hip – i.e. not being even remotely associated with anything her elite-lefty social circle finds declasse – was more important to her than striking what could have been one of the most powerful blows for freedom in our generation.

6 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Health Care Wars: A New Hope

April 30, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I recant!

When Obamacare passed, I lost hope. All the arguments that were being offered at the time for the feasability of repeal seemed to run from flimsy to transparently bogus. And Mark Steyn kept raising the question – has a victory like this ever been rolled back?

But since then some better arguments have been made that a rollback, culminating in repeal, could happen. The best of these is Ramesh Ponnuru’s article in the current NRODT, now generously made available to the world on NRO. Long story short, Obamacare has a long lead time before the corrupting influence of its subsidies on the general populace can be expected to take hold (the subsidies don’t even start flowing for years) and there’s a window of opportunity that can be seized – not for repeal immediately, but to set the stage for repeal. Plus, when the rest of the world’s developed countries adopted their big welfare states, most people saw themselves as the winners and only “the rich” as the losers. Today, most people seem to see themselves as the losers.

The clincher for me, though, was Randy Barnett’s article in yesterday’s Journal on the legal merits of the constitutional lawsuit. My argument last month was that if Social Security (mandatory retirement savings) is legal, then Obamacare (mandatory health insurance) must be. I was ignorant of two key factors, one that I didn’t know and one that I forgot. The one I didn’t know is that the legislative language in Obamacare actually makes the Social Security comparison legally problematic – they didn’t realize until too late that they would need to appeal to the tax authority to protect themselves (funny how hard it is to get everything exactly right in a 50,000 page bill that you have to ram through in a hurry to avoid scrutiny).

And the thing I forgot is that court cases are not decided on the merits. There’s no excuse for a voucher supporter to forget that!

Image by FireWire

1 Comment | economics, politics | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

We’ll have what Florida is Having

April 29, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Today is the final day of session in Arizona, and I am thrilled to say that it looks like major pieces of the Florida reform cocktail will be passing. These include grading schools A-F based on student test scores and growth, alternative teacher certification, 3rd grade social promotion curtailment, expanding sources for charter school authorization, and increasing the size, transparency and accountability for our scholarship tax credit program. Arizona lawmakers also passed a provision specifying that school districts cannot use length of service as the sole criteria when laying off teachers during a reduction in force.

Governor Bush and Patricia Levesque spent their valuable time here in Arizona last October in a series of events, and Patricia came back a few months ago to do followup meetings with key players. Key philanthropic leaders stepped up to the plate with both their money and their personal time. Governor Brewer and her staff prioritized Florida reforms in her State of the State address, and the Chairmen of the Senate and House Education committees, Senator John Huppenthal and Rep. Rich Crandall, personally introduced the centerpiece bills. Many of the bills gathered strong bipartisan support.

We have many miles to go in Arizona. Our NAEP scores have been below the national average 36 out of the last 36 exams. We aim to change that, and we know it isn’t going to happen overnight, and that much hard work lies ahead. We’ve taken the first steps to turning our illiteracy crisis around, and I am enormously grateful to all of the many people who helped make this happen!

1 Comment | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

UCLA Civil Rights Project Still Wrong on Charter Segregation

April 27, 2010

How U.S. public schools should look according to CRP analysis

My colleagues, Gary Ritter, Nathan Jensen, Brian Kisida, and Josh McGee, have a piece in the coming issue of Education Next dissecting the recent UCLA Civil Rights Project (CRP) report on charter school racial segregation.  This was their initial take on the CRP report, but now they have taken a more detailed look and still find that CRP is wrong.

The primary error of the CRP report is that it compares charter to traditional public schools nationwide or at the state level.  Comparisons at this high level of aggregation are completely inappropriate because charters are concentrated in heavily minority central cities while traditional public schools are evenly dispersed.  Comparing the racial composition of urban charter schools to traditional public schools statewide or nationwide is like comparing the racial composition of U.S. schools to global schools.  We would shockingly find that U.S. schools are woefully under-representing ethnic Chinese and Indian students.  The fact that those students live half way around the globe is as unimportant to CRP as the fact that all those white traditional public school students live on the opposite side of the state or country from most charter schools.

This type of comparison is so obviously silly that one has to wonder why the CRP did it or anyone believed it.  But of course the answer to that mystery is easy — they just want something to beat up charter schools and especially to scare minority elites away from choice by equating choice with segregation.  If CRP were really concerned with segregation rather than maintaining local public school monopolies, they might have been focused on the issue Greg posted yesterday.

In any event, be sure to check out the new Ed Next piece.  It ends with a particularly strong conclusion:

The authors of the Civil Rights Project report conclude,

Our new findings demonstrate that, while segregation for blacks among all public schools has been increasing for nearly two decades, black students in charter schools are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings.

Our analysis suggests that these claims are certainly overstated. Furthermore, the authors fail to acknowledge two significant truths.

First, the majority of students in central cities, in both the public charter sector and in the traditional public sector, attend intensely segregated minority schools. Neither sector has cause to brag about racial diversity, but it seems clear that the CRP report points its lens in the wrong direction by focusing on the failings of charter schools. As the authors themselves note, across the country only 2.5 percent of public school children roam the halls in charter schools each day; the remaining 97.5 percent are compelled to attend traditional public schools. And we know that, more often than not, the students attending traditional public schools in cities are in intensely segregated schools. If we are truly concerned about limiting segregation, then this is where we should look to address the problem.

Second, and perhaps more important, the fact that poor and minority students flee segregated traditional public schools for similarly segregated charters does not imply that charter school policy is imposing segregation upon these students. Rather, the racial patterns we observe in charter schools are the result of the choices students and families make as they seek more attractive schooling options. To compare these active parental choices to the forced segregation of our nation’s past (the authors of the report actually call some charter schools “apartheid” schools) trivializes the true oppression that was imposed on the grandparents and great-grandparents of many of the students seeking charter options today.

6 Comments | charter schools, civic values | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Public Schools Are Segregation Academies

April 26, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The first image above shows the school districts in Manhattan. The second shows the racial/ethnic makeup of the population; the data are a little old, but the relevant facts for the purpose of this post haven’t changed.

Take a look at the shape of District 2 – it’s the one that encompasses all of Manhattan below Central Park except for a big chunk on the southeast tip of the island.

What occasions this particular illustration? In his e-mail blast today, Whitney Tilson reprints the following correspondence “from a friend”:

Every great DOE school is selective — whether by test score or by Realtor, if you know what I mean. 

Look at the map of Manhattan District 2, one of the best public school systems in America. It could only have been drawn to intentionally ensure that white kids on Upper East Side, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village wouldn’t have to bump shoulders with black and Hispanic kids. 

Try renting a 2 bedroom apartment in that district for less than $3,000. 

Does District 2 cream? Hell yes!  Kids there have benefitted from a double-whammy (which was designed to benefit white kids, but now is increasingly filled by Asian students): they attend a middle school where you have to ace the 4th grade tests to be allowed in.  They also get the best teachers in the city because who wouldn’t want to teach the richest public school families in America? 

Schools filled with rich kids, when the system is rigged in their favor (the education level of their parents, the reality that rich kid schools are able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for teacher aides and books and such at fancy fundraisers, etc.), equals selective schools. 

Then we give them the best teachers and we allow their test scores to mask the city’s low aggregate scores. We create gifted and talented programs for them and give them a much stronger curriculum and higher expectations. We watch their parents spend a small fortune on afterschool tutoring and organized activities for their kids. 

OF COURSE they do well with all that extra learning! 

The NYC ‘system’ is rigged in favor of rich kids. (Joel Klein has tried to unrig it, but the political force is too strong.) 

It is why poor kids need these opportunities that are provided by the 30-40% of charters that are really, really excellent. 

What’s the quickest and easiest way to create a nationwide system of segregation academies? Force people to go to school based on where they live.

How do you make them even worse? Let the district lines be drawn by an unaccountable bureaucracy that claims to care about kids but actually doesn’t care how many children’s lives it has to destroy in order to keep the gravy trains running on time.

What is the only – the only – empirically proven way to successfully smash segregation? School choice.

Images by UNHP and Gotham Gazette

10 Comments | civic values, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

CPS Officials Admit Vouchers Are No Problem

April 23, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The new Chicago Tribune editorial buries the lede in a major way.

The editors praise the Illinois House Executive Committee for passing the voucher bill 10-1. But tucked away in paragraph eight we find this little stick of dynamite:

Chicago schools would wind up with less money, but also with fewer children to educate. CPS officials tell us privately that they could handle that. [ea]

That would certainly be consistent with the large body of high-quality research consistently finding that vouchers improve rather than harm public schools, as well as with the fiscal track record that shows vouchers leave public schools with more dollars per student because their costs fall faster than their revenues.

But I don’t think I’ve ever seen public school officials admit that before, even “privately.” The public school system can handle vouchers, but it can’t handle the truth.

1 Comment | journalism, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

I Can’t . . . It’s Just Too Easy

April 22, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

A charter school founded by Linda Darling-Hammond and overseen by Stanford’s education school is being shut down by the state for persistant abysmal performance.

I can’t do it. The ed-school hacks tried to make their Cloudcoocooland theories work in real life and it came crashing down in humiliating failure. Twist the knife now? C’mon, it’s just cruel. Not even I can do that.

So I’ll quote Whitney Tilson doing it! From his e-mail blast on Monday:

Normally, a low-quality charter school being denied a full extension of its charter isn’t worth of a STOP THE PRESSES, but this isn’t just any charter school: it’s the one started by Stanford’s School of Education (where my father earned a doctorate, by the way) and, in particular, Linda Darling-Hammond, author of the infamous Teach for America hatchet job (my full critique of her is posted at: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007/12/obamas-disappointing-choice-of-linda.html).  LDH (along with Ravitch, Meier, and Kozol) is among the best known of your typical ed school, loosey-goosey, left-wing, politically correct, ivory tower, don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts-my-mind’s-made-up, disconnected-from-reality critics of genuine school reform.  (Forgive my bluntness, but I can’t stand ideological extremists of any persuasion, especially when kids end up getting screwed.)

LDH and Stanford’s Ed School decided to test their educational theories in the real world, starting a charter school in 2001 to serve the low-income, mostly-Latino children of East Palo Alto.  I credit them for this – in fact, I think EVERY ed school should be REQUIRED to start and run, or at least partner with, a real live school.  What they set out to do is REALLY, REALLY hard, so I also credit them for having the good sense to start the school via a joint venture with a proven, first-rate operator, Aspire.  However, their anti-testing ideology soon got in the way of their good sense:

The two cultures clashed. Aspire focused “primarily and almost exclusively on academics,” while Stanford focused on academics and students’ emotional and social lives, said Don Shalvey, who started Aspire and is now with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Five years ago the relationship ended amicably and Stanford New School was on its own.

It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what happened when, freed of Aspire’s rigor and focus on the critical basics (like teaching children to read properly!), the ivory tower theories ran head on into the reality of East Palo Alto kids.  The results were easy to predict: the school fell on its face:

…test results for Stanford New School students are almost uniformly poor. On last year’s Standardized Testing and Reporting Results only 16 percent of the students were proficient or advanced in English and math, an improvement from the previous year. And in a three-year comparison of similar schools in 2007 and 2008 — the most recent state results — the school scored 6, 7 and most recently a 3 out of 10.

LDH cynically tries to explain away this failure by – surprise! – blaming both the evaluation system and the kids:

Ms. Darling-Hammond — who told the board that the school “takes all kids” and changes their “trajectory” — was angered by the state’s categorization of the charter as a persistently worst-performing school. “It is not the most accurate measure of student achievement,” she said, “particularly if you have new English language learners.”

To understand what nonsense this is, see the comparison of Ravenswood to other schools with comparable percentages of low-income and ELL students in Andy Rotherham’s blog post….

This appears to be your classic “happy school”, a phrase coined by Howard Fuller to describe the most dangerous type of school – not the handful of violent, gang-infested high schools, but rather the elementary schools that are safe and appear ok: the students are happy, the parents are happy, the teachers are happy, the principal is happy…  There’s only one problem: THE KIDS CAN’T READ!!! 

There’s one thing in this passage I have to object to. Every education school should start a charter? Good gravy, cripes, and sakes alive, man! Have you no decency? How many children’s lives do you want to destroy?

Whitney Tilson calls down a plague of locusts on America

Kicking the ed-school hacks while they’re down is one thing. But a nationwide epidemic of schools run by them? Now that’s what I call cruel.

8 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Escaping from ‘Awaiting Moderation’ Purgatory

April 21, 2010

end-wall-st-bull-collapsed-slide

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Greg’s post on the UFT elicited a unintentionally humorous response from my Sith Apprentice, Darth Leo, about how “Democracy flows in the life blood” of the teacher union. I asked Leo whether his union would support school districts holding school board and bond elections on the uniform November date. After all, it wouldn’t do to have someone taking advantage of notoriously low turnout affairs and riding on a high horse about “democracy” at the same time.

Leo, like any good egocentric New Yorker began to instantly conflate the goings on in NYC with the interests of the known universe.  New Yorkers can be such hicks. Anyhoo, I wrote a response to Leo in this exchange, which he has left “awaiting moderation” for two days. Since Leo seems too distracted to moderate his blog, I’ll post the comment myself:

Leo-

I have no dog in the mayoral control hunt. Whether or not I would support a move to mayoral control would depend upon the circumstances involved. Mayors are elected officials, even in NYC, so it seems obvious that there is a clear opportunity for the voters to express their displeasure at the ballot box if they wish.

You however are avoiding the broader question by obsessing over your parochial NYC concerns. Speaking only for yourself, shouldn’t someone who claims to have democracy flowing in the life blood of their organization be willing to state that maximizing voter turnout in school district elections is a good idea?

If you want to wrap yourself in the flag of democracy, shouldn’t you practice it? Instead, what I see is an organization supporting hundreds of school board candidates and bond elections every year in embarrassingly low turnout elections held on irregular election dates blowing hot air about “democracy.”

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

5 Comments | teacher union | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Tanning Is Addictive and So Are Class-Action Lawsuits

April 20, 2010

Here’s the formula:  Class-action lawyers find companies that sell products or services that could be harmful, especially if over-used or mis-used.  Then the lawyers establish that the consumer is not at fault for over-use or mis-ise by claiming that the product is addictive.  Since the consumer ceases to be in control of his or her actions if there is an addiction, the company and not the consumer is responsible for the harmful behavior.  Then the lawyers collect large sums of money from the companies for whatever harms are alleged.  Ka-Ching!

The next target for this formula — indoor tanning companies.  According to this LA Times piece, researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York surveyed college students who use tanning salons and found that a large percentage of them met several of the criteria for suffering from an addiction.  That’s right, tanning is addictive.  You can be sure that the class-action lawyers are not far behind.

I actually think that filing class-action lawsuits is an addictive behavior.  Maybe we should file a class-action lawsuit to curtail them.  Here are the criteria for an addiction and my analysis of how filing class-action lawsuits meets those criteria:

(1) Tolerance, as defined by either of the following: (a) A need for markedly increased amounts of the substance to achieve intoxication or desired effect. (b) Markedly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of the substance.

Check! Class-action lawyers seem to need larger and larger settlements to be content.

(2) Withdrawal, as manifested by either of the following: (a) The characteristic withdrawal syndrome for the substance (refer to Criteria A or B of the criteria sets for Withdrawal from specific substances). (b) The same (or a closely related) substance is taken to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms.

Check!  If class-action lawyers don’t get their money they get very cranky.  An alternative substance, like diamonds, seems to alleviate these symptoms.

(3) The substance is often taken in larger amounts or over a longer period than was intended.

Check!  See answer to (1).

(4) There is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use.

Check!  Politicians keep talking about the need to reduce class-action lawsuits to little avail.

(5) A great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to obtain the substance (such as visiting multiple doctors or driving long distances), use the substance (such as chain smoking) or recover from its effects.

Check! Filing these class-action lawsuits consumes an enormous amount of time, as does conducting junk-science research to support them.

(6) Important social, occupational, or recreational activities are given up or reduced because of substance use.

Check!  The class action lawyers work incredible hours on those suits, depriving them of time with family and having fun.

(7) The substance use is continued despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the substance.

Check!  Frivolous class-action lawsuits continue despite societal awareness that this is nonsense and harmful to commerce.

1 Comment | economics, politics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Sun Devils Crushed by Number Six Finish in Playboy Party Rankings

April 19, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

It was bad enough when Arizona scored second to the bottom in the K-12 Race to the Top competition, but Arizona State University officials and students reacted with dismay, shock and outrage as Playboy Magazine named another university “Top Party School.”  The University of Texas at Austin took first place, and ASU placed a shocking sixth place.

“I’m stunned…I really just don’t know what to say,” stated Justin Bongwater, an ASU 8th year sophomore. “I mean sixth place? SIXTH *#@&*!@# PLACE?!? Dude, that just can’t be right. We threw everything we had into this ranking! EVERYTHING!!!! Rock bottom admission standards! Embarrassingly low graduation rates! Hell, the mayor of Tempe bragged that we have the highest beer consumption rates in the world!  A MAYOR said that dude! If the government said it, it has to be true!”

Campus officials promised to redouble their efforts by expanding recruiting among students from the Midwest who like beer, sunshine and universities that do not require the SAT exam. Privately, they admitted that they thought that last year’s Daily Show video should have sealed the competition, and that it may have caused some complacency on campus. “When you get called the ‘Harvard of Date Rape’ you might tend to coast a bit,” a highly placed source explained.

University of Texas roving ambassador Matthew McConaughey will accept the award in a public ceremony at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills Friday night.

8 Comments | higher education | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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