I Recant! Common Core for All!

June 27, 2013

Greg loves CC cropped

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Just like Jay did a little more than a year ago, I am recanting my opposition to Common Core. I’m all for it! Never mind everything we said about how there’s no one best way to teach children, and even if there were, we don’t know what it is yet; never mind everything we said about how unions would inevitably get control of the standards or how they would reignite the culture wars; never mind everything we said about how the standards are already being set too low, how they’re being put together by people with conflicts of interest, how they’re being illegally pushed from Washington.

Never mind all that. I’m all for Common Core. Why? Because Common Core is good for school choice!

Yes, I just wrote a big post about why Common Core is bad for school choice. I take it all back. Every word of it.

As Matt has just pointed out, 2013 is turning out to be the third big year in a row for school choice. Now here’s the thing. Back when 2011 was a big year for school choice, you heard about it everywhere. I mean every-frikkin-where. And don’t get me wrong, that was sweet. But 2012 and 2013 have been good years for choice, and for some reason, nobody’s noticing.

What gives? Well, for years we’ve been saying that “vouchers make the world safe for charters.” Whenever vouchers get on a roll, the unions have to train all fire on vouchers – leaving charters to slip through with less opposition. Meanwhile, mushy-middle politicians, academics and journalists can triangulate by opposing vouchers but supporting charters. It was Jay’s idea originally, but I wrote about it at some length in the Freedom and School Choice book a while back.

It would appear that just as vouchers make the world safe for charters, Common Core makes the world safe for vouchers. Everyone is so busy running around fighting over Common Core – especially the unions – that voucher supporters seem to have a freer hand. A while back, Jay wrote that one reason Common Core is a problem is “because it is a gigantic distraction from other productive reform strategies….Common Core is consuming the lion’s share of reform oxygen and resources.” But it’s also consuming the anti-reform oxygen and resources!

And when money and muscle cancel out, there’s nothing left to determine the outcome but the merits – a debate we’ve already won.

So lock the government collar around my neck and break out the Gates Foundation checkbook, because starting now I’m all for Common Core.

PS Yes, that is St. Milton watching over me in the background.

6 Comments | National Standards, politics, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

FEE Proves My Point

June 3, 2013

High Standards Poker

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Foundation for Excellence in Education has recently been blasting out a series of emails denouncing “myths” about Common Core. Guess it’s not so inevitable after all!

Ironically, the email that just came over the transom proves the point I was making Friday. Then, I wrote that Common Core is bad for school choice where single-state movements for high standards were not because the drive to create common standards across many states implies a one-size-fits-all mentality that’s hostile to parental control. I wrote:

Consistently, CC advocates have used adjectives like “national” and “common” as if they were synonyms for “better.”

And sure enough, here comes FEE cheerleading for Common Core with an email under the subject heading:

Support for High Academic Standards Builds Across the Nation

You see the presupposition behind this? Support for national standards is identical with support for high standards; those who oppose nationalization are for low standards.

Remember, kids: Diversity is weakness!

As I wrote this week, there are two worldviews at war here – one that wants to see more diversity in education because children have unique needs, parents know best, and parents can be trusted more than experts and bureaucrats; and one that wants to see less diversity because there’s one best way, we know what it is, we can get the bureaucracy to do it and we won’t be corrupted.

5 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Common Core Hurts School Choice

May 31, 2013

octopus

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In his post yesterday, Jay mentioned that the imperatives behind Common Core are hostile to school choice:

Pushing it forward requires frightening reductions in parental control over education and expansions of federal power.  These are not the unnecessary by-products of a misguided Obama Administration over-reach.  Constraining parental choice and increasing federal power were entirely necessary to advance Common Core.  And they were perfectly foreseeable (we certainly foresaw these dangers here at JPGB).

But back in the day, Jay and I were both supporters of Jeb Bush’s A+ program, which combined standards and choice. So why is Common Core anti-choice where Florida’s standards were choice-friendly?

The answer lies in the imperative to expand standards. As Jay and I have both pointed out, the whole CC project is centrally built on the assumption that there is a positive relationship between the geographic scope of standards and their academic quality. Consistently, CC advocates have used adjectives like “national” and “common” as if they were synonyms for “better.”

Why would we expect standards to be better if they are set at a higher geographic level? The implicit educational worldview behind this is a technocratic scientific progressivism: there is one best way to educate children, and an elite class of technocrats can be trusted to know what it is and get the bureaucracy to carry it out successfully (and without corruption). Consequently, we should want more uniformity across schools. If parents have diverse opinions about what is best for their children and wish to choose diverse schools, we must not permit ourselves to think that this may be because 1) there is no “one best way” because every child is unique; 2) the technocrats’ knowledge of the one best way is fallible; 3) the technocrats’ ability to get the bureaucracy to do its will is severely limited; or 4) power corrupts, and the technocrats and the bureaucracy alike are not to be trusted with monopoly power. Diverse parental desires are to be interpreted as a sign that parents can’t be trusted.

By contrast, A+ did not seek to expand standards; it only sought to impose them on one school system. The implicit logic of A+ ran as follows: if the state is going to run a school system, it ought to set standards for what that system should be doing. However, we have no illusions that the standards we are setting for our own system represent the “one best way,” so parents ought to be free to choose whether our school or some other school is best for their child. With this logic, as Jay used to say, standards and choice are like chocolate and peanut butter – two great tastes that taste great together.

(Of course, it is a comparatively recent development that all the public schools in a state are effectively one school system. Over the past half century or so, America has dramatically shifted from having many thousands of local school systems to having just fifty state systems. And that has been a bad development because it has reduced choice and thereby reduced pressure for improvement. But that’s a discussion for another day; it doesn’t change the fact that the logic behind A+ was non-expansionary.)

Now, it is logically possible for a person to favor both CC and school choice. But the arguments in favor of CC that you have to construct in order to get to that result are the intellectual equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine. It’s like that court case a few years ago over teaching intelligent design in public schools, where the expert called to testify in favor of ID said that you don’t need to believe in God to believe in ID. That is true, at the level of logical possibilities; you can construct an argument that simultaneously affirms ID and atheism. But there is no one who actually believes that, because the intellectual contortions necessary to get there are absurd. In fact, ID is intuitively theistic even though it does not logically require theism. That fact is not an argument against its truth (unless you begin by begging the question and assuming atheism is true) but it is relevant to the consideration of how students encounter ID in public schools.

In the same way, CC is intuitively anti-choice even though it does not logically require opposition to choice.

32 Comments | National Standards, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The End of the Beginning for Common Core

May 30, 2013

The folks at Pioneer have landed another blow against Common Core in the mainstream Conservative press.  This time Jim Stergios and Jamie Gass have a lengthy piece in the Weekly Standard detailing the start of troubles for Common Core, both substantively and politically.  This follows on a piece by Gass and Charles Chieppo in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.  A central part of the strategy for Common Core was to create the impression that it was inevitable, so everybody might as well get on board.  That aura of inevitability has been shattered.

My reasons for opposing Common Core are slightly different from those articulated by the folks at Pioneer, but we agree on the political analysis of its fate.  To become something meaningful Common Core requires more centralization of power than is possible under our current political system.  Pushing it forward requires frightening reductions in parental control over education and expansions of federal power.  These are not the unnecessary by-products of a misguided Obama Administration over-reach.  Constraining parental choice and increasing federal power were entirely necessary to advance Common Core.  And they were perfectly foreseeable (we certainly foresaw these dangers here at JPGB).

There is something either disingenuous or shockingly naive about the Fordham Institute’s horror at discovering federal involvement in the push for Common Core.  And it is equally disingenuous or naive for conservative curriculum backers of Common Core to suddenly discover that the new regime may be more progressive nonsense rather than their fantasy of the triumph of E.D. Hirsch.  We warned folks that federal coercion was central to the success of Common Core.  And we warned folks that national standards would ultimately advance the preferences of entrenched education special interests rather than those of reformers.

Rather than heeding these warnings or hedging their bets, these “conservative” backers of Common Core have doubled down in their support.  Checker in his customary high-handed style has tried to dismiss critics as crazy so that their legitimate objections need not be taken seriously.  The opponents just consist of “tea party activists, a couple of influential talk-radio hosts and bloggers, some disgruntled academics, several conservative think-tanks, and a couple of mysterious but deep-pocketed funders.”

Well, there’s no mystery about the deep-pocketed funder behind Common Core as the Gates Foundation continues to hand the Fordham Institute large bags of cash.  And to help solve the mystery of who is funding the opponents, I confess that I personally paid for the K12innovation.com web site.  But because my pockets are not quite as deep as the Gates Foundation, I just let the registration for that web site run out.

Here’s a pro-tip for Checker and Common Core’s deep-pocketed backers… As opposition to Common Core grows in state legislatures and schools around the country, don’t dismiss those critics as crazies from your perch in DC.  The federal takeover of education has not yet been completed, so local and state politicians and educators still control the fate of Common Core.  Right now it appears they have no stomach to implement Common Core in any meaningful way.  Some may pause it.  Some may repeal it.  And some may leave it on the books but promptly ignore it just like a host of previous reform fads.  You can’t win these people over and successfully implement Common Core with a strategy that funds DC think-tanks to denounce the folks in the hinterland as a bunch of hicks and boobs who believe in crazy black helicopter conspiracies.

And here’s another pro-tip… If you don’t want people to believe in crazy black helicopter conspiracies, you shouldn’t fly around in black helicopters.  Local and state politicians and educators might have reason to suspect federal power grabs as the federal government grabs power to expand Common Core.  Saying that this was unnecessary and unfortunate and that states continue to control education does not change the reality of what is happening.

Reality exists outside of DC receptions and the words we use.  And the reality is that the backlash against national standards is real and gaining momentum.  It is inevitable that the Common Core bus will drive over a political cliff, just as previous failed efforts to nationalize education standards have.  Because true conservatives believe in personal responsibility, let’s hope we all remember who was driving the bus and cheering it forward.

43 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Common Core Culture War Intensifies

May 14, 2013

psychic-octopus-culture-war

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In today’s Journal, Sol Stern and Joel Klein attempt to sell conservatives on national standards by 1) misleading them about the federal government’s role, both in ramming the standards through and in continuing to shape them going forward, and 2) portraying the national standards as a patriotic way to patriotically patriotize our vulnerable young patriots, who are now at the mercy of the eeeeeeeeeeeevil progressives and their social justice agenda.

Now, what do you think the major Democratic party effort to support national standards thinks of that?

Paul the psychic octopus looks more right every month – national standards are built on an anti-school-choice, one-size-fits-all worldview and are therefore a one-way ticket to the worst kind of culture war.

Update: I wonder what Stern and Klein would say about Heather Mac Donald’s warning that the national “science” standards endorse an unscientific and anti-human environmental agenda?

8 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

DFER and the Miniature Machiavellis

April 29, 2013

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) has done much to advance progress in education, but I am disappointed to report that in a recent series of events DFER has acted as if they have no shame.  I literally mean NO SHAME in the sense that they are not ashamed of doing something that is wrong, that they know to be wrong, and that they persist in doing anyhow.

I am referring to the series of blog posts and mass emails in which DFER Indiana is attempting to support Common Core by demonstrating that some of the opponents of Common Core hold positions on non-educational issues, like abortion, that DFER’s target audience might find objectionable.  These posts make no effort to defend Common Core substantively.  In fact, they contain virtually nothing about education policy.  The essence of their argument is that you should support Common Core because you really wouldn’t like some of the people who oppose Common Core.

When I wrote a post last week mocking DFER Indiana director, Larry Grau, for making this type of argument I assumed that he had acted without the knowledge and support of the national DFER organization.  So I contacted a long-time friend at DFER national to alert him to Grau’s actions and to see if he could convey to Grau the foolishness of this type of non-substantive, ad hominem attack.

I was shocked to discover that DFER National was not only aware of Grau’s campaign, but was fully supportive of it.  Sure it is wrong, I was told, but this is the sort of thing that works.  Stating the case and arguing the merits doesn’t carry the day, I was told, you need to engage in this type of manipulative trick.  Relying on logical arguments, evidence, and research is just naive.  The only regret DFER National expressed is that Grau’s attack didn’t gain enough attention.  My DFER contact wanted more critiques of Grau to get more people talking about it.

I’ve never seen so much cynicism so candidly expressed.

I wish I could say that this cynical embrace of shallow, non-substantive, and ad hominem attacks is unique to DFER, but it is actually wide-spread in the education policy world.  Advancing one’s political agenda with a callous indifference for the truth is the operating principle of most organized interest groups, including the teacher unions.  But you can also see it when the Gates Foundation makes non-falsifiable claims and spins their own research.  You can see it when Diane Ravitch repeatedly and falsely claims no academic benefits of choice in Milwaukee or DC.  You can see it in the obsession among attention-starved education policy advocates with Twitter.  You can see it when folks abuse language with weasel words, passive voice, and mindless jargon for supposed marketing advantages.

In fact, I have heard several Foundations candidly express disinterest in funding education research because they would rather invest those dollars in more advocacy.  Systematic analysis of 990 tax forms shows that Foundations actually are shifting more and more money toward advocacy.  I’ve been forced to endure sessions with marketing consultants at ed reform conferences where these charlatan Svengalis tell us that it is all about “messaging.”

It isn’t all about “messaging.”  Ultimately, it’s about understanding the truth as best as we can perceive it.  We need honest and high-quality research to improve our understanding of the truth about effective policy.  Yes, we need to communicate our understanding of the truth clearly and concisely, but it does no one any good to make stuff up, distort the truth, or cynically distract people from substantive arguments with ad hominem and “guilt by association.”

These Miniature Machiavellis may think they can twist the truth tactically to achieve a  greater policy objective, but they have no appreciation for how long-term policy change actually happens.  Real and enduring change happens because people come to a new consensus about facts and evidence.  This is achieved with substantive arguments and quality research, not by manipulative tactics.

The advance of Civil Rights occurred because of eloquent and substantive arguments by people like Martin Luther King, Jr about human dignity and equality.  It was helped by social science research about how separate could not be equal, which informed the Court’s reversal in Brown v. Board of Education.

Even the progress that’s been made in expanding choice in education has been achieved to a large degree because of a growing consensus among researchers that choice is generally effective and desirable, which has then influenced elite opinion to the point where both party’s platforms embrace the notion of parental choice.  This research took place over the last two decades before the rise of “The Twidiocracy.”  It took patience.  It took discipline on the part of funders and the earlier generation of advocates to stay focused on the search for solid evidence.

It is not too late for education reform to return its focus to substantive arguments and quality research.  The first step is for funders to scale back significantly on their giving to advocacy groups.  Most of these groups are completely ineffective anyway, consuming virtually all of their resources to engage in manipulative tactics noticed only by other advocacy groups inside some tiny and inconsequential bubble.  Second, Foundations need to increase funding for quality research.  Yes, research has sometimes over-promised, under-delivered, and cost too much.  But we can work on controlling inefficiencies there while advancing the search for truth.  Of course, the effective marketing of research findings and substantive arguments is important, but at the core there has to be a grounding in truth.  Messaging without truth is the same as having no real message.

In sum, Foundations need to step back from the focus on prevailing in the next session’s legislative battle and start taking a longer term view of what it really takes to win.  That requires the courage and patience not to expect quarterly or annual metrics of progress, which only encourage the shallow and near-sighted tactics of the Miniature Machiavellis.   If Foundations only wished to reproduce the scheming and superficiality of 18th century French courtiers, then they have succeeded.  If they wish to produce real educational progress, then they need to change course.

7 Comments | National Standards, politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

If I Woke Up With Larry Grau, I’d Really Hate Myself

April 24, 2013

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) supports Common Core.  I don’t for reasons I’ve explained on numerous occasions in the past, but most recently here.  Reasonable people can disagree, so I am not particularly perturbed by DFER’s position.  It’s fine.

What’s not fine is how DFER Indiana director, Larry Grau, tries to support Common Core in a blog post that was mass e-mailed today. It’s provocatively titled, “Are you going to hate yourself in the morning?”  He answers saying that if you “have spent the night canoodling with far-right opponents of the Common Core State Standards… we can almost guarantee the answer will be yes.”

His argument, such as it is, in support of Common Core standards is that a number of Common Core opponents are the kinds of people you wouldn’t want to wake up next to: “Before you decide to get into bed with extremist right-wing critics of the Common Core, we highly recommend that you get to know them better.”  He then goes on to profile State Senator Scott Schneider and Eagle Forum founder, Phyllis Schlafly, to show that they oppose abortion and other policies that DFER folks might like.  In sum, Larry Grau’s case for Common Core is that its opponents are people with whom you may strongly disagree on other matters.

By Grau’s brilliant reasoning, of course, you should also oppose charter schools, which DFER strongly supports.  As it turns out, Sen Scott Schneider was given the Charter School Warrior of the Year Award in 2012 by School Choice Indiana.  So if you should recoil at the thought of agreeing with Sen. Schneider, you should also oppose DFER on charters.

Unfortunately, this type of non-substantive, ad hominem argument is becoming the norm in education policy discourse.  Even people with whom I generally agree, like DFER, think this is how you are supposed to make arguments in education policy.  It’s disgusting.

Well, if Grau wants to go down this path of ad hominem in defense of Common Core, he might consider how it could be used against Common Core.  After all, I’m hard pressed to think of a single pro-Common Core organization that has not received money from the Gates Foundation.  And at least if folks get in bed with Sen. Schneider to oppose Common Core they are doing it for love, not money.  So when Grau or other Common Core supporters wake up in the morning to find Gates money on the nightstand, they can at least take comfort in the thought that they are carrying on the traditions of a venerable profession — some say the oldest profession.

5 Comments | National Standards, politics | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Common Core Debate on Choice Media TV

April 16, 2013

The folks over at Choice Media TV put together a very productive discussion about Common Core.  Check it out!

It features the following participants:

3 Comments | National Standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Let the National-Standards Culture Wars Begin!

April 12, 2013

psychic-octopus-culture-war

Paul the psychic octopus sez: “Did I tell you so? Let me count the ways.”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

And so it begins! Over on NRO, Heather Mac Donald is stirring up a culture war over the new national science standards:

One doesn’t need to be a global-warming skeptic to be appalled by a new set of national K–12 science standards. Those standards, developed by educrats and science administrators, and likely to be adopted initially by up to two dozen states, put the study of global warming and other ways that humans are destroying life as we know it at the very core of science education. This is a political choice, not a scientific one. But the standards are equally troubling in their embrace of the nostrums of progressive pedagogy.

I’m sure Mac Donald is right – I certainly trust her more than I trust the cronies who are writing the standards. But the larger picture here is the dramatic increase in the politicization of school curricula that national standards inevitably creates. Of course, the very existence of the school monopoly is itself a neverending geyser of political headaches and occasional massive warfare over the curriculum. But nationalization multiplies the problem a hundredfold.

4 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Why Common Core Doesn’t Matter (and Why It Does)

March 25, 2013

I tried taking a break on the blog from writing about Common Core, but the issue keeps popping up.  I tried avoiding writing about Common Core because in most ways it just doesn’t matter.  Let me try to describe why I think this annoying but persistent issue doesn’t matter (and after that I’ll suggest why it still does matter ):

1) Common Core doesn’t matter because standards mostly don’t matter.  Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution illustrated this point simply and convincingly in the 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education.  Loveless examines variation in the alleged quality of existing state standards to see if higher quality standards are related to academic performance on the NAEP.  They aren’t.  In fact, the correlation between the Fordham Institute’s rating of state standards and NAEP performance is -.06.  Somehow that fact never seems to come up when Fordham is invoked in defense of the quality of Common Core.  Loveless also demonstrates that there is no relationship between “performance standards” (the rigor of cut scores on state tests) and NAEP performance.  Loveless concludes:

Don’t let the ferocity of the oncoming debate fool you. The empirical evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on American students’ achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to improve its schools.

Standards mostly don’t matter because they are just a bunch of vague words in a document.  What teachers actually do when they close their classroom door is in no way controlled by those words.  Changing the words in a standards document is very unlikely to dramatically change what teachers do.  As Loveless puts it:

Education leaders often talk about standards as if they are a system of weights and measures—the word “benchmarks” is used promiscuously as a synonym for standards. But the term is misleading by inferring that there is a real, known standard of measurement. Standards in education are best understood as aspirational, and like a strict diet or prudent plan to save money for the future, they represent good intentions that are not often realized….

The intended curriculum is embodied by standards; it is what governments want students to learn. The differences articulated by state governments in this regard are frequently trivial. Bill Gates is right that multiplication is the same in Alabama and New York, but he would have a difficult time showing how those two states—or any other two states—treat multiplication of whole numbers in significantly different ways in their standards documents…. The implemented curriculum is what teachers teach. Whether that  differs from state to state is largely unknown; what is more telling is that it may differ dramatically from classroom to classroom in the same school. Two fourth-grade teachers in classrooms next door to each other may teach multiplication in vastly different ways and with different degrees of effectiveness. State policies rarely touch such differences.

Common Core standards, like other standards reforms, are unlikely to have much of an effect on this enormous variation in what teachers actually teach, how they teach it, and how effective they are.  That variation in actual practice is what causes variation in performance, not a bunch of vague words in a document.

2) The Common Core folks hope to address the ineffectiveness of standards by linking those standards to newly designed assessments and then attaching consequences for individual teachers to those standards-based assessments.  But the level of centralized control over teaching practice to make this work is a political impossibility.  The PLDD crowd  may have gotten almost all states to embrace Common Core standards by dangling federal money and regulatory relief in front  of them in the midst of a financial crisis since, again, those standards are just a bunch of vague words in a document.  But getting states to adopt the newly designed assessments is proving more difficult.  And attaching any meaningful consequences for individual teachers to the results of those new assessments is proving virtually impossible.

The success of Common Core depends on building a centralized machine of assessment and consequences linked to the national standards.  There is no significant political constituency supporting this effort to make sure it is adopted and sustained over time.  Teachers and their unions hate it.  Advantaged parents (the ones with political power) also hate it as they see the the schools and teachers they love lose their autonomy and become cogs in a centralized machine unresponsive to the particular needs and interests of those advantaged parents.  Other than the PLDD crowd in their alphabet soup of reform organizations, who will advocate for and sustain meaningful performance pay for teachers where performance is defined as compliance with centralized mandates?  No one.  And that’s why Common Core will be a political loser.

————————————————————————————

If Common Core is largely unimportant because it is just a bunch of vague words that can never impose the centralized political control to make those words meaningful, why is it still important?

1) Common Core is important because it is a gigantic distraction from other productive reform strategies.  It will probably take about a decade for the failure of Common Core to become obvious to its most important backers.  Until that time Common Core is consuming the lion’s-share of reform oxygen and resources.

2) Common Core is inducing reformers to ignore and even denigrate choice-based reforms because they have to deny one of the central arguments for choice — that there is a legitimate diversity of views on how and what our children should be taught that choice can help address.  If Common Core folks have any support left for choice it is to allow parents to choose the school that can best implement the centrally determined education content.  You can choose which McDonalds franchise you frequent so that they can compete to make the best Big Mac for you, but you are out of luck if you prefer pizza.

3) Common Core enthusiasts support granting dramatically more power to the federal government over education to improve the odds that their centralized machine can be built and implemented.  Even after that fails, the precedence for greater federal involvement will remain, further eroding our decentralized system of education that has long produced benefits through Tiebout choice.

4) Common Core is providing license to all sorts of crazy and contradictory local policies.  Districts are cutting literature, pushing back Algebra, increasing constructivist approaches, reducing constructivist approaches… all in the name of Common Core.  When parents and local voters complain, the schools  dodge accountability by claiming (perhaps falsely) that Common Core made them do it.  A big danger of trying to build a centralized system of controlling schools is that local education leaders will blame the central authority for whatever unpopular thing they choose to do.  It’s like the local Commissar blaming shortages on the central authority rather than his own pilfering.  It shifts the blame.

5) Common Core is bringing out the worst in many of its advocates — people who are not naturally inclined to be hypocrites, sycophants, and dissemblers, but who cannot resist becoming so because of the lure of power, money, and the need to remain relevant.  If you need examples of this, well, you probably haven’t been reading this blog.

30 Comments | National Standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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