Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Ah, yes, it’s once again that magical time of year when a young man’s thoughts turn to fools. I refer of course to The Higgy – the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian of the Year Award. For the next two weeks, we’ll highlight our (un)favorite inhumanitarians; please join the fun and submit your nominations by email or comment! This year’s most (un)deserving nominee will be (dis)favored with The Higgy on Tax Day, April 15.

The award is named for history’s greatest monster, William Higinbotham.

For reference, here once again are the official criteria for selecting the winner:

“The Higgy” will not identify the worst person in the world, just as “The Al” does not recognize the best.  Instead, “The Higgy” will highlight individuals whose arrogant delusions of shaping the world to meet their own will outweigh the positive qualities they possess.

In other words, we’re looking for PLDD not BSDD.

In that spirit, I’m nominating pointy-headed academic and bloviating edu-blogger Jay P. Greene for The Higgy this year. His arrogant delusions of shaping the world include endorsing Common Core, union corruption, communism and even slavery. Last year, though, he went too far – he took all the fun out of The Higgy by giving it to Plato. He said the Republic could earn The Higgy even if it was actually a satire of irresponsible utopianism. Well, guess who else writes satires of irresponsible utopianism!

April Fool’s, of course! My real nominee will be coming in the next few weeks – as, I hope, will yours. May the best fool win!

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

RealClearInvestigations carries a well reported and persuasive article by Paul Sperry documenting how Broward County has for years been among the most enthusiastic adopters of initiatives to stop the “school to prison pipeline” by . . . not arresting students when they commit crimes.

A surer way to make sure a kid stays in the pipeline to prison would be harder to imagine.

“If you commit crimes, there will be no consequences.” Yes, that’s exactly the lesson we want to teach at-risk youth. That’s going to work out just great for them in the long run.

Not to mention everyone else. The failure of police to take any action against the kid who went on to become the mass shooter, even as he committed crime after crime after crime and was never arrested – so he had a clean record when the time came – suddenly makes much more sense in this light.

What we need to look into now is the extent to which the whole system of having police officers assigned to schools has been subverted to serve purposes other than school safety. The more comes to light about the Broward Coward, Scot Peterson, the more it looks like being a school officer is something other than a legit police assignment. Is it merely a cushy job for lousy cops who want to draw a salary for no real work, which would be bad enough? Or is something more sinister going on – is there an organized system for placing officers in schools who know that they’re not supposed to make arrests?

Why did Peterson refuse to share information with a Department of Children and Families investigator about an incident involving the kid who went on to become the shooter? Is it normal for a cop to withhold information from investigators?

It is when they have something to hide.

HT David French 

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Citizens! You are hereby notified that Mary and the Witch’s Flower, which I reviewed here, is returning to US theaters for two days only next week, due to overwhelming demand.

If you missed it the first time, attendance is mandatory. Otherwise, attendance is merely meritorious.

A theater near me has brought back Darkest Hour, the surprise hit of the Oscar noms – perhaps one near you has done so as well. As I said before, you should see that one on the big screen, too!

End transmission.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

While we’re on the subject of the Arizonan wild west, here’s my latest for OCPA’s Perspective on some very non-wild-west Oklahoma school overregulation:

The more prominent strategy, the one that got the most attention and funding, was toward greater centralized control. If schools are given more inputs and they fail to use them to produce better outcomes, then the schools are clearly working to enrich themselves. They can’t be trusted to carry the ball for fixing education.

Who could be trusted? Why, the reformers, of course.

Some interesting information from a state think tank:

The 1889 Institute’s database of public school regulations is the cumulative legacy of these earlier forces and the dramatic increase of regulations in the last generation. It runs to 610 entries. Schools are required to track every individual student’s progress in financial literacy education and every individual teacher’s professional development “points,” spend at least a certain minimum amount on their libraries, and meet test score targets or be subject to sanctions. They must also master obscure laws governing everything from inter-district transfers to the nutritional value of diet soda…

Very few of the regulations in the 1889 Institute’s database deal with issues that really need to be handled at the district level, never mind the state. I honestly think that the nutritional value of diet soda might not even need to be managed by schools at all. But if it does, why not let the principal hire lunchroom staff who are up to the job?

If you want to let me know what you think, the comment section below is not overregulated!

(Guest Post by Greg Forster)

In OCPA’s Perspective I review Oklahoma’s ESSA plan, and the story will be of interest to those outside Oklahoma. The basic problem with imposing reform on school systems that don’t want it is that the “reforms” become two-faced – they say what they need to say to please the reformers, but the substance of reform is another story:

Throughout the document, the bright, photogenic images and superficial, focus-group-tested buzzwords favored by the professional education reformers who run the ESSA regime collide over and over again with dense, esoteric clouds of opaque legalese, emitted—like ink from an octopus—by education special interests protecting their budgetary turf from scrutiny.

The document even has two title pages. The first is slick and professionally designed: a gorgeous, full-page image of a little girl with her hand over her heart is juxtaposed with the title under which the plan is being marketed—Oklahoma EDGE—in the form of a branded logo, like Pepsi or Google. The second title page is plain white with nothing on it but a little bit of text and the state education department’s logo. This page delivers the plan’s legal (i.e., actual) title, which is: “Revised State Template for the Consolidated State Plan: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act.” Try making a branded logo out of that.

The report’s visual and verbal doublemindedness is reflected in the structure of the underlying plan, which dumps tons of money (the plan is always careful to set minimum goals for spending levels) into programs that don’t tend to improve educational outcomes. This makes both the system and the reformers look bad:

All this indictment of the Old Guard, for putting their own voracious desire for money and power ahead of real educational reform, is also an indictment of the New Guard. The professional education reformers, frustrated by decades of limited results from state activism, got impatient and decided to take a shortcut to power through Washington, D.C. But the Constitution’s federalist system, and the striking Left/Right political coalition suspicious of federal meddling in schools, really will not allow Washington to exercise the level of control the reformers want.

The end result is this ridiculous dance where Oklahoma has to submit a 218-page “eight-year strategic plan” for change and reform … under which it will continue to do the same thing it has done for decades: dump truckloads of money into expensive programs with no proven or even probable relationship to education outcomes. Which is exactly what the professional reformers have spent decades trying to stop the system from doing. Welcome to Wonderland.

Let me know what you think – and dont’ worry, your comments do not have to be accompanied by glossy graphics or popular buzzwords.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Al does not go to people who are already widely recognized. However, I submit that today, in spite of the intense public attention he endured in 1948, Whittaker Chambers is not at all widely recognized. Since I read Witness for the first time early this year, I have begun mentioning him to people and am stunned to discover that almost nobody even knows his name today.

The first thing to understand about Whittaker Chambers is that he allowed his life to be destroyed rather than tell a small lie. He lost his job as senior editor of Time and never held another job in mainstream American journalism; he went home and became a full-time farmer, which is not a life that allows a man like Chambers to do what he was obviously made to do, which is journalism. He couldn’t even make the farm go – it failed.

He made this sacrifice in part to arouse the nation to face a totalitarian threat that its guilty conscience wouldn’t allow it to acknowledge (more about that in a moment) but at least as much to honor the dead whom he had helped kill. Unable to go back and undo his years of work building up Soviet communism, all he could do for its victims was tell the truth about what he had done, no matter what it cost him. And it cost him all.

The second thing to understand about Whittaker Chambers is that all the forces of American civilization were arrayed to destroy him. This is why his testimony cost him everything.

Before the Hiss Case in 1948, virtually no one with any position in American civilization viewed communism as totalitarianism. It is very difficult for us to recapture an awareness of this, in light of subsequent history. But in 1948, the consensus was that communism was illiberal or authoritarian, but not totalitarian. It was not genocidal. There were no gulags, no starving millions in Ukraine who were being put to death intentionally for the sake of the great project. (The New York Times still has not given back the Pulitzer it won for coverage of the glories of communist agriculture, or even run a correction, in spite of the fact that its reporter knew about the mass murder and covered it up intentionally.)

Chambers’ testimony about his work as a Soviet spy implicated high-ranking American leaders. Reading through Alger Hiss’ defense of himself, I’m amazed that it really does all boil down to this: “I helped build the New Deal, negotiate the Yalta agreement and design the United Nations. If even a man like me can be a traitor, American society must be so utterly bankrupt that its entire leadership class would be implicated in bottomless moral corruption. Therefore a man like me could not possibly be a communist spy – and every leading politician, journalist and professor had better get busy testifying in my defense, lest the bankruptcy of American leadership – and hence his own bankruptcy – be exposed.”

He did not put it in precisely those words, but close enough.

The president called Chambers a liar on campaign stops. Two justices of the Supreme Court testified as character witnesses for Hiss. Rumors flew around the Washington press corps that Chambers was a drunkard, that he was mentally ill, that he had slept with Hiss’ wife, that he had sexually abused his own brother as a child and had then abused Hiss’ stepson.

All baseless, of course – but a ruling class believes what it hears from its own. It will believe any lie, however outrageous, about a commoner before it believes any uncomfortable truth about itself.

If you doubt this, consider: James Reston, the legendary DC correspondent for the New York Times, had recommended Hiss for his job as head of the Carnegie Endowment. If Hiss was a traitor, what did that say about Reston? So naturally Reston did all in his power to destroy Chambers, including inventing lies about him.

When Chambers went on the radio show Meet the Press, Reston “moderated” the panel of journalists dedicated to destroying him. Obviously there was no acknowledgement of Reston’s conflict of interest. After the broadcast, Chambers’ son asked him: “Papa, why do those men hate you so?”

Chambers replied: “We are in a war, and they are on the other side.”

Nor was it only journalism that was corrupted. The chair of the Harvard psychiatry department testified in court that he had diagnosed Chambers as a dangerous lunatic, solely on the basis of reading his journalism in Time. Upon cross-examination, however, the good Harvard doctor recanted his testimony and admitted that he had in fact gone around to former co-workers with stories of Chambers’ depravity, and tried to wheedle them into affirming them. (Rules of evidence for “expert” testimony are a little tighter now than they were then.)

Chambers had indeed exposed the corruption and bankruptcy, not of Alger Hiss, but of the entire ruling class of the nation.

He had known this would be the effect of his testimony from the beginning. He had seen how the narrative of inevitable and government-led secular progress, to which the entire ruling class of the nation in both parties was wedded, was not very far removed from the totalitarianism of communism.

The issue was not safety-net programs. The issue was a society that had decided comfort and safety were the only really necessary elements of a good human life. This, not the role of government as such, is the deep corruption of the narrative of inevitable secular progress. It is this materialistic view of life that is the real cause of the endless creeping expansion of government.

As he put it in Witness, the great question in our time is “God or Man?” The communist east had answered “Man,” and embraced totalitarian mass murder because it had the courage of its conviction. The capitalist west has also answered “Man,” but it lacks the courage of this conviction. So far.

Communism is not immorality. Communism is morality without God. It is not a quest for injustice, it is a quest to achieve justice for all people – accomplished by purely human means. Its vision is that “the destiny of man is in the hands of man.” But “without God man cannot organize the world for man; without God man can only organize the world against man.”

Hence the hammer and sickle insignia on Antifa paraphanalia; hence Che Guevara and Fidel Castro on the t-shirts of so many well-meaning moral crusaders seeking justice for all. The neo-Nazis of the alt-right, meanwhile, are non-communist only because they do not strive toward justice for all, but only justice for their own people and causes. The difference between Antifa and the alt-right is that the former is universalistic and the latter parochial, and this is always the difference between communism and fascism.

And today, as in 1948, a morally sick society does not want to see what communism is.

Chambers is also famous for thinking that by defecting from communism to freedom, he was joining the losing side. What is less well known (I found it in his letters to William F. Buckley, published posthumously in Odyssey of a Friend) is the reason Chambers gave for his pessimism about the future of freedom.

There is, he said, no political remedy for spiritual decay in a society.

But to say there is no political remedy is not to say there is no remedy. One of the things we can do to remedy spiritual decay is honor those who do what Chambers did – sacrifice themselves so that others may enjoy freedom.

There is much more to his story, and if you want to know it, you can read the first chapter of Witness, entiteld “Introduction in the Form of a Letter to my Children.” If you read that and don’t then want to read the rest of the book, I don’t know what to tell you.

What matters most for The Al, I think, is the long-term impact of Chambers’ exposure of the threat of communism, which forced the nation for the first time to recognize communism as a totalitarian threat rather than merely just another variation on the old-fashioned authoritarian Great Power game. Without Chambers’ willingness to give up everything for the sake of telling the truth, there would have been no mass mobilization against communism until much later, by which time it may have been too late – or at least it would have been too late for millions who were saved because Chambers forced the nation to wake up when he did.

Yes, Chambers has been recognized in the past. But those recognitions (including the Medal of Freedom given him posthumously by Reagan) have been almost entirely on the political Right. The nation at large has never honored Chambers as it ought.

And now, even the Right forgets. Few of my friends even on the Right are familiar with Chambers’ name. And just recently, George Will blamed Chambers for the success of Donald Trump; one might just as easily blame the doctor who diagnoses a cancer with the madman who seeks to avoid dying of cancer by drinking poison.

Let’s give Chambers his due. Let’s give him The Al.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

OCPA’s Perspective carries an article of mine with a headline I’m particularly proud of: “Teacher Hiring Devastated by Emergency ‘Common Sense Shortage'”:

New moons cause teacher shortages because teachers have accidents driving in the dark without moonlight. Full moons cause teacher shortages because teachers become werewolves.

Claims about the causes are always changing, tailored to whatever is in the news. The claim that there’s an urgent, emergency shortage that we need to address right now never goes away.

News reports about lots of “emergency certifications” in Oklahoma are misleading:

These exceptions are being described as “emergency” certifications. This term has been adopted not only by the old guard but by many others, including some of their critics. I suspect it comes into wide use not only because the old guard and the click-addicted media benefit from public hysteria, but also because the schools seeking permission to make these hires think they’re more likely to get it if their need is described as an emergency. However, the state refers to these simply as “exceptions” to the standard certification requirements. This more neutral description might permit a more careful analysis…

If these exceptions are evidence of a problem, the obvious thing to do is target our response to the particular localities and disciplines where the overwhelming majority of the exceptions are being granted. That way Oklahoma can solve the problem it actually has, not some other, imaginary problem.

Ha, ha! Just kidding. The obvious thing to do is raise teacher salaries across the board, shut down accountability systems statewide, and give the old guard all the other things it wants. Such measures will have only a very indirect effect on the localized and specialized areas where certification exceptions are being granted. But that’s not what teacher shortage hysteria is ever about.

PS: Special guest appearance by Matt Ladner and his Brookings “Super Chart!”

Please help us address our emergency shortage of blog comments by leaving your thoughts below!