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Making Little Monsters
Indoctrination - Part 1
``Now,
however, the educational system has become the weapon of choice for modern
liberals in their project of dismantling American culture.''
-Judge Robert Bork in Slouching Toward Gomorrah
Let me make one thing perfectly clear at the
outset: reducing class size is bad for education. There is a finite
supply of skilled and effective lecturers, and reducing class size reduces the
number of students who can benefit from those lecturers. Ideally, the
university model wherein lecture and recitation are separated, should be
extended to primary and secondary education. Moreover, students should act as
recitation instructors for younger and less advanced students, just as they do
in the university system.
For
continuing detailed coverage of zero-tolerance lunacy in education, see ZeroIntelligence.net.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Jan-13,
p.A12, by Terry M. Moe:
No
Teacher Left Behind
The teachers unions have more influence over
the public schools than any other group in American society. They influence
schools from the bottom up, through collective bargaining activities that shape
virtually every aspect of school organization. And they influence schools from
the top down, through political activities that shape government policy. They
are the 800-pound gorillas of public education. Yet the American public is
largely unaware of how influential they are -- and how much they impede efforts
to improve public schools.
The problem is not that the unions are
somehow bad or ill-intentioned. They aren't. The problem is that when they simply
do what all organizations do -- pursue their own interests -- they are
inevitably led to do things that are not in the best interests of children.
To appreciate why this is so, consider the
parallel to business firms. No one claims that these organizations are in
business to promote the public interest. They are in business to make money,
and this is the fundamental interest that drives their behavior. Thus,
economists and policy makers fully expect firms to pollute the water and air
when polluting is less costly (and more profitable) than not polluting -- and
that is why we have laws against pollution. The problem is not that firms are
out to destroy the environment. The problem is simply that their interests are
not identical to the public interest, and the two inevitably come into
conflict.
Teachers unions have to be understood in much
the same way. Their behavior is driven by fundamental interests too, except
that their interests have to do with the jobs, working conditions, and material
well-being of teachers. When unions negotiate with school boards, these are the
interests they pursue, not those of the children who are supposed to be getting
educated.
The resulting contracts often run to more
than 100 pages, and are filled with provisions for higher wages, fantastic
health benefits and retirement packages, generous time off, total job security,
teacher transfer and assignment rights, restrictions on how teachers can be
evaluated, restrictions on non-classroom duties, and countless other rules that
shackle the discretion of administrators. These contracts make the schools
costly to run, heavily bureaucratic, and extremely difficult for administrators
to manage. They also ensure that even the most incompetent teachers are
virtually impossible to remove from the classroom. The organization of schools,
as a result, is not even remotely the kind of organization one would design if
the best interests of children were the guiding criterion.
Exactly the same can be said about the design
of government education policy, which is tilted toward teacher interests
through the unions' exercise of political power. The sources of their power are
not difficult to discern. With three million members, they control huge amounts
of money that can be handed out in campaign contributions. More important, they
have members in every political district in the country, and can field armies
of activists who make phone calls, ring doorbells, and do whatever else is
necessary to elect friends and defeat enemies. No other interest group in the
country can match their political arsenal. It is not surprising, then, that
politicians at all levels of government are acutely sensitive to what the
teachers unions want. This is especially true of Democrats, most of whom are
their reliable allies.
When the teachers unions want government to
act, the reforms they demand are invariably in their own interests: more
spending, higher salaries, smaller classes, more professional development, and
so on. There is no evidence that any of these is an important determinant of
student learning. What the unions want above all else, however, is to block
reforms that seriously threaten their interests -- and these reforms, not
coincidentally, are attempts to bring about fundamental changes in the system
that would significantly improve student learning.
The unions are opposed to No Child Left
Behind, for example, and indeed to all serious forms of school accountability,
because they do not want teachers' jobs or pay to depend on their performance.
They are opposed to school choice -- charter schools and vouchers -- because
they don't want students or money to leave any of the schools where their
members work. They are opposed to the systematic testing of veteran teachers
for competence in their subjects, because they know that some portion would
fail and lose their jobs. And so it goes. If the unions can't kill these
threatening reforms outright, they work behind the scenes to make them as
ineffective as possible -- resulting in accountability systems with no teeth,
choice systems with little choice, and tests that anyone can pass.
* * *
If we really want to improve schools,
something has to be done about the teachers unions. The idea that an
enlightened "reform unionism" will somehow emerge that voluntarily
puts the interests of children first -- an idea in vogue among union apologists
-- is nothing more than a pipe dream. The unions are what they are. They have
fundamental, job-related interests that are very real, and are the raison
d'etre of their organizations. These interests drive their behavior, and this
is not going to change. Ever.
If the teachers unions won't voluntarily give
up their power, then it has to be taken away from them -- through new laws
that, among other things, drastically limit (or prohibit) collective bargaining
in public education, link teachers' pay to their performance, make it easy to
get rid of mediocre teachers, give administrators control over the assignment
of teachers to schools and classrooms, and prohibit unions from spending a member's
dues on political activities unless that member gives explicit prior consent.
These reforms won't come easily because the
unions will use their existing power, which is tremendous, to defeat most
attempts to take it away. There is, however, one ray of hope: that the American
public will become informed about the unions' iron grip on the public schools
and demand that something be done. Only when the public speaks out will
politicians have the courage -- and the electoral incentive -- to do the right
thing. And only then will the interests of children be given true priority.
Mr. Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution, a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, and a
professor of political science at Stanford, is the winner of this year's Thomas
B. Fordham prize for distinguished scholarship in education.
from The Chronicle of Higher Education,
2004-Nov-12 (V51N12), p.B6, by Mark Bauerlein:
Liberal
Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual
Conservatives on college campuses scored a
tactical hit when the American Enterprise Institute's magazine published a
survey of voter registration among humanities and social-science faculty
members several years ago. More than nine out of 10 professors belonged to the
Democratic or Green party, an imbalance that contradicted many liberal
academics' protestations that diversity and pluralism abound in higher
education. Further investigations by people like David Horowitz, president of
the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, coupled with well-publicized cases
of discrimination against conservative professors, reinforced the findings and
set "intellectual diversity" on the agenda of state legislators and
members of Congress.
The public has now picked up the message that
"campuses are havens for left-leaning activists," according to a Chronicle
poll of 1,000 adult Americans this year. Half of those surveyed
-- 68 percent who call themselves "conservative" and even 30
percent who say they are "liberal" -- agreed that colleges
improperly introduce a liberal bias into what they teach. The matter, however,
is clearly not just one of perception. Indeed, in another recent survey, this
one conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of
California at Los Angeles, faculty members themselves chose as their commitment
"far left" or "liberal" more than two and a half times as
often as "far right" or "conservative." As a Chronicle
article last month put it: "On left-leaning campuses around the
country, professors on the right feel disenfranchised."
Yet while the lack of conservative minds on college
campuses is increasingly indisputable, the question remains: Why?
The obvious answer, at least in the
humanities and social sciences, is that academics shun conservative values and
traditions, so their curricula and hiring practices discourage non-leftists
from pursuing academic careers. What allows them to do that, while at the same
time they deny it, is that the bias takes a subtle form. Although I've met
several conservative intellectuals in the last year who would love an academic
post but have given up after years of trying, outright blackballing is rare.
The disparate outcome emerges through an indirect filtering process that runs
from graduate school to tenure and beyond.
Some fields' very constitutions rest on
progressive politics and make it clear from the start that conservative
outlooks will not do. Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist
theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of
knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies
rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative
action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that
the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from
women's studies.
Other fields allow the possibility of
studying conservative authors and ideas, but narrow the avenues of advancement.
Mentors are disinclined to support your topic, conference announcements rarely
appeal to your work, and few job descriptions match your profile. A fledgling
literary scholar who studies anti-communist writing and concludes that its
worth surpasses that of counterculture discourse in terms of the cogency of its
ideas and morality of its implications won't go far in the application process.
No active or noisy elimination need occur,
and no explicit queries about political orientation need be posed. Political
orientation has been embedded into the disciplines, and so what is indeed a
political judgment may be expressed in disciplinary terms. As an Americanist
said in a committee meeting that I attended, "We can't hire anyone who
doesn't do race," an assertion that had all the force of a scholastic
dictum. Stanley Fish, professor and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, advises, "The
question you should ask professors is whether your work has influence or
relevance" -- and while he raised it to argue that no liberal
conspiracy in higher education exists, the question is bound to keep conservatives
off the short list. For while studies of scholars like Michel Foucault, Michael
Hardt, and Antonio Negri seem central in the graduate seminar, studies of
Friedrich A. von Hayek and Francis Fukuyama, whose names rarely appear on
cultural-studies syllabi despite their influence on world affairs, seem
irrelevant.
Academics may quibble over the hiring
process, but voter registration shows that liberal orthodoxy now has a
professional import. Conservatives and liberals square off in public, but on campuses,
conservative opinion doesn't qualify as respectable inquiry. You won't often
find vouchers discussed in education schools or patriotism argued in American
studies. Historically, the boundaries of scholarly fields were created by the
objects studied and by norms of research and peer review. Today, a political
variable has been added, whereby conservative assumptions expel their holders
from the academic market. A wall insulates the academic left from ideas and
writings on the right.
One can see that phenomenon in how insiders,
reacting to Horowitz's polls, displayed little evidence that they had ever read
conservative texts or met a conservative thinker. Weblogs had entries
conjecturing why conservatives avoid academe -- while never actually bothering
to find one and ask -- as if they were some exotic breed whose absence lay
rooted in an inscrutable mind-set. Professors offered caricatures of the
conservative intelligentsia, selecting Ann H. Coulter and Rush Limbaugh as
representatives, not von Hayek, Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, Thomas Sowell,
Robert Nozick, or Gertrude Himmelfarb. One of them wrote that
"conservatives of Horowitz's ilk want to unleash the most ignorant forces
of the right in hounding liberal academics to death."
Such parochialism and alarm are the outcome
of a course of socialization that aligns liberalism with disciplinary standards
and collegial mores. Liberal orthodoxy is not just a political outlook; it's a
professional one. Rarely is its content discussed. The ordinary evolution of
opinion -- expounding your beliefs in conversation, testing them in
debate, reading books that confirm or refute them -- is lacking, and what
should remain arguable settles into surety. With so many in harmony, and with
those who agree joined also in a guild membership, liberal beliefs become
academic manners. It's social life in a professional world, and its patterns
are worth describing.
The first protocol of academic society might
be called the Common Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers
in the room at professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities
meetings serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science
assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct often
enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial events. A
fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds without worrying
about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions.
The Common Assumption usually pans out and
passes unnoticed -- except for those who don't share it, to whom it is an
overt fact of professional life. Yet usually even they remain quiet in the face
of the Common Assumption. There is no joy in breaking up fellow feeling, and
the awkward pause that accompanies the moment when someone comes out of the
conservative closet marks a quarantine that only the institutionally secure are
willing to endure.
Sometimes, however, the Assumption steps over
the line into arrogance, as when at a dinner a job candidate volunteered her
description of a certain "racist, sexist, and homophobic"
organization, and I admitted that I belonged to it. Or when two postdocs from Germany at a nearby university stopped by my office to talk
about American literature. As they sat down and I commented on how quiet things
were on the day before Thanksgiving, one muttered, "Yes, we call it
American Genocide Day."
Such episodes reveal the argumentative
hazards of the Assumption. Apart from the ill-mannered righteousness, academics
with too much confidence in their audience utter debatable propositions as
received wisdom. An assertion of the genocidal motives of early English
settlers is put forward not for discussion but for approval. If the audience
shares the belief, all is well and good. But a lone dissenter disrupts the process
and, merely by posing a question, can show just how cheap such a pat consensus
actually is.
After Nixon crushed McGovern in the 1972
election, the film critic Pauline Kael made a remark that has become a
touchstone among conservatives. "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have
won," she marveled. "I don't know anybody who voted for him."
While the second sentence indicates the sheltered habitat of the Manhattan intellectual, the first signifies what social
scientists call the False Consensus Effect. That effect occurs when
people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the
larger population. If the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely
encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the
same way.
The tendency applies to professors,
especially in humanities departments, but with a twist. Although a liberal
consensus reigns within, academics have an acute sense of how much their views
clash with the majority of Americans. Some take pride in a posture of dissent
and find noble precursors in civil rights, Students for a Democratic Society,
and other such movements. But dissent from the mainstream has limited charms,
especially after 24 years of center-right rule in Washington. Liberal professors want to be adversarial, but are
tired of seclusion. Thus, many academics find a solution in a limited version
of the False Consensus that says liberal belief reigns among intellectuals
everywhere.
Such a consensus applies only to the thinking
classes, union supporters, minority-group activists, and environmentalists
against corporate powers. Professors cannot conceive that any person trained in
critical thinking could listen to George W. Bush speak and still vote
Republican. They do acknowledge one setting in which right-wing intellectual
work happens -- namely, the think tanks -- but
add that the labor there is patently corrupt. The Heritage Foundation, the
American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover
Institution all have corporate sponsors, they note, and fellows in residence do
their bidding. Hence, references to "right-wing think tanks" are
always accompanied by the qualifier "well-funded."
The dangers of aligning liberalism with
higher thought are obvious. When a Duke
University philosophy professor implied last February that
conservatives tend toward stupidity, he confirmed the public opinion of
academics as a self-regarding elite -- regardless of whether or not he was
joking, as he later said that he was. When laymen scan course syllabi or search
the shelves of college bookstores and find only a few volumes of traditionalist
argument amid the thickets of leftist critique, they wonder whether students
ever enjoy a fruitful encounter with conservative thought. When a conference
panel is convened or a collection is published on a controversial subject, and
all the participants and contributors stand on one side of the issue, the
tendentiousness is striking to everyone except those involved. The False
Consensus does its work, but has an opposite effect. Instead of uniting
academics with a broader public, it isolates them as a ritualized club.
The final social pattern is the Law of
Group Polarization. That law -- as Cass R. Sunstein, a
professor of political science and of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, has described -- predicts that when
like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts
toward extreme versions of their common beliefs. In a product-liability trial,
for example, if nine jurors believe the manufacturer is somewhat guilty and
three believe it is entirely guilty, the latter will draw the former toward a
larger award than the nine would allow on their own. If people who object in
varying degrees to the war in Iraq convene to debate methods of protest, all will emerge
from the discussion more resolved against the war.
Group Polarization happens so smoothly on
campuses that those involved lose all sense of the range of legitimate opinion.
A librarian at Ohio State University who announces, "White Americans pay
too little attention to the benefits their skin color gives them, and opening
their eyes to their privileged status is a valid part of a college
education" (The Chronicle, August 6) seems to have
no idea how extreme his vision sounds to many ears. Deliberations among groups
are just as prone to tone deafness. The annual resolutions of the Modern
Language Association's Delegate Assembly, for example, ring with indignation
over practices that enjoy popular acceptance. Last year, charging that in
wartime, governments use language to "misrepresent policies" and
"stigmatize dissent," one resolution urged faculty members to conduct
"critical analysis of war talk ... as appropriate, in classrooms."
However high-minded the delegates felt as they tallied the vote, which passed
122 to 8 without discussion, to outsiders the resolution seemed merely a
license for more proselytizing.
The problem is that the simple trappings of
deliberation make academics think that they've reached an opinion through
reasoned debate -- instead of, in part, through an irrational social
dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be
logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and
extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants
left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to
the beliefs of others. But with the conferences, quarterlies, and committee
meetings suffused with extreme positions, they're stuck with abiding by the
convictions of their most passionate brethren.
As things stand, such behaviors shift in a
left direction, but they could just as well move right if conservatives had the
extent of control that liberals do now. The phenomenon that I have described is
not so much a political matter as a social dynamic; any political position that
dominates an institution without dissent deterioriates into smugness, complacency,
and blindness. The solution is an intellectual climate in which the worst
tendencies of group psychology are neutralized.
That doesn't mean establishing affirmative
action for conservative scholars or encouraging greater market forces in
education -- which violate conservative values as much as they do liberal
values. Rather, it calls for academics to recognize that a one-party campus is
bad for the intellectual health of everyone. Groupthink is an anti-intellectual
condition, ironically seductive in that the more one feels at ease with
compatriots, the more one's mind narrows. The great liberal John Stuart Mill
identified its insulating effect as a failure of imagination: "They have
never thrown themselves into the mental condition of those who think
differently from them." With adversaries so few and opposing ideas so
disposable, a reverse advantage sets in. The majority expands its power
throughout the institution, but its thinking grows routine and parochial. The
minority is excluded, but its thinking is tested and toughened. Being the lone
dissenter in a colloquy, one learns to acquire sure facts, crisp arguments, and
a thick skin.
But we can't open the university to
conservative ideas and persons by outside command. That would poison the
atmosphere and jeopardize the ideals of free inquiry. Leftist bias evolved
within the protocols of academic practice (though not without intimidation),
and conservative challenges should evolve in the same way. There are no
administrative or professional reasons to bring conservatism into academe, to
be sure, but there are good intellectual and social reasons for doing so.
Those reasons are, in brief: One, a wider
spectrum of opinion accords with the claims of diversity. Two, facing real
antagonists strengthens one's own position. Three, to earn a public role in
American society, professors must engage the full range of public opinion.
Finally, to create a livelier climate on the
campus, professors must end the routine setups that pass for dialogue. Panels
on issues like Iraq, racism, imperialism, and terrorism that stack the dais
provide lots of passion, but little excitement. Syllabi that include the same
roster of voices make learning ever more desultory. Add a few rightists, and
the debate picks up. Perhaps that is the most persuasive internal case for
infusing conservatism into academic discourse and activities. Without genuine
dissent in the classroom and the committee room, academic life is simply
boring.
Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English
at Emory University and director of research at the National Endowment for the
Arts.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Jan-21,
p.A8, by Ruth R. Wisse:
Gender
Fender-Bender
Last week, the president of Harvard, Lawrence
H. Summers, inadvertently provided further evidence of the opposition to free
inquiry that currently governs our institutions of higher learning. Invited to
speculate off the record on the "underrepresentation" of women in
science, President Summers threw out some hypotheses, including one about
innate differentials in aptitude between men and women, that may account for
the phenomenon. At this point in his remarks, an MIT female professor of
science quit the room, declaring to the press that she couldn't breathe because
"this kind of bias makes me physically ill."
"What better proof than she of Summers'
thesis?" quipped a friend of mine -- and, indeed, what better evidence of
underprofessionalism than a scientist who becomes nauseated at the mere hint of
a theory that differs from hers? But this woman had artfully framed her
outrage. Her claim of "bias" was intended not simply to discredit the
male who had asked whether there may be substantive differences between men and
women, but to define the permissible terms of discussion. Her show of outrage
and the ensuing media attention it elicited were designed to reinforce the
claim that "bias" alone is responsible for the situation President
Summers addressed.
This accusation of bias, advanced by
feminists and often accepted at face value by the academic community, attempts
to transform guarantees of equal opportunity into a demand for equal outcome.
Thus, a huge majority of female professors at Harvard recently formed a Caucus
for Gender Equality to protest the drop in senior job offers to women since
President Summers came into office. Offering no evidence of discrimination in
hiring and not a single example of a superior female applicant overlooked in
favor of a less qualified male, the Caucus charged the president with having
reduced "diversity" by failing to hire enough female professors.
Although the university denied these unsubstantiated charges, it nonetheless
instituted new rules for departmental searches that now require every committee
to provide quantitative proof of how many women it has considered for a
position at each stage of the screening and selection process.
Ironically, President Summers himself has on
occasion advanced the view that affirmative-action procedures for women are
necessary because of men's unconscious bias. That particular unsubstantiated
assumption, however, satisfies feminist dogma, whereas there mere possibility
of other differences between the sexes offends it. The true character of the
campaign against President Summers was corroborated when the same Harvard
women's group that is lobbying for more female professors reproached him for
"speaking his mind as an individual" last week rather than toeing
what they believe should be the university's party line. Lobbying for women in
the name of greater diversity, they used the club of gender to silence
diversity.
Shamefully, they appear to have succeeded.
Sounding more like a prisoner in a Soviet show trial than the original thinker
that he is, President Summers recanted his error, has apologized at least three
times for his insensitivity, and will no doubt hasten to appoint and to promote
as many females as he can. The casualties of this exercise are genuine
discussion of why women excel faster in some fields than in others, and the
kind of intellectual independence that universities were once expected to
promote.
The slogan "gender equality"
reduces diversity on campus still further by pretending that all women share
the same set of views. Protesting that there are currently only 85 tenured
female professors at Harvard, about one-quarter of the faculty, the Women's
Caucus boasts that almost all of them agree with its politics. Meanwhile, in a
country that has just elected a Republican president and a Republican Congress,
one could not find, among Harvard professors, a quarter of a quarter who hold
conservative views. Divergent thinkers are driven out of the universities to
the think tanks where intellectual initiatives are encouraged rather than
suppressed. On the campus, intimidation; beyond the campus, the democratic
arena where better ideas can contend and prevail.
Had he been allowed to go on speculating
about gender differentiation in the academy, President Summers might have taken
up related issues, such as the effects of seeking parity in a marketplace of
unequal resources. Given the far lower number of women in the sciences, one
unacknowledged consequence of female preference in hiring may be the
compensatory pressure to hire and promote women in the humanities and social
sciences. The "feminization" of some branches of these "soft"
disciplines has been a palpable byproduct of this strategy -- feminization
referring not just to the numbers but to what and how women who ostensibly
share the ideological disposition of the Women's Caucus tend to teach. Does
this not necessarily reshape the nature of higher learning in ways that we
would be wise to scrutinize?
Unfortunately, the problem President Summers
addressed will persist despite the attempts to silence him. No one doubts that
women seeking careers in science face greater challenges than those in other
academic and research fields. At a recent forum of Harvard graduate students, a
succession of budding female scientists expressed their anxieties about having
chosen careers that will conflict, more than most, with their no less strong
desires to raise and nurture a family. More than one young woman present felt
that a job with reduced pressure during her childbearing years might better
suit her needs than competition at the very highest levels. The good news is
that most of the young women acknowledged that their dilemma was one of choice
rather than a product of discrimination against them.
The very notion of
"underrepresentation," based as it is on the implicit goal of
numerical parity, greatly prejudices our ability to understand why women make
the choices that they do. If women gravitate to the hard sciences less than to
other fields, we ought to grant them the intelligence of sentient creatures,
recognizing the potential loneliness of such choices while trying to understand
why groups and individuals act as they do. It is not President Summers who owes
women an apology; it is the complainers and agitators who owe both him and all
of us an apology for trying to shut down discussion of an
"inequality" that is not likely to disappear.
Ms. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor
of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard.
from The Pittsburgh State Collegian,
2005-Jan-21, by Devon
Trolley:
Penn State professors are signing a petition to voice
their disagreement with the McGraw-Hill textbook company after alterations were
made to health books distributed in Texas high schools.
The health textbooks receiving criticism define marriage
as a union between a man and a woman. Some members of the Penn State community
are offended by the influential textbook company's decision to get involved in
current social debates.
Sam Richards, senior lecturer in sociology, said he
was going to use a McGraw-Hill textbook, but decided not to after signing the
petition.
"I very strongly oppose allowing politicized
interest groups to determine what is put into textbooks, whether it's on the
right or the left," he said.
Allison Subasic, director of lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender student development, said she signed the petition to show
McGraw-Hill textbooks that she disapproves of their decision to adjust material
to conservative or religious pressures.
"I hope that we will send our message
economically," she said.
The petition was created by Sean Massey, assistant
professor of human development at SUNY Binghamton, who wanted to give
colleagues the opportunity to show their disapproval of McGraw-Hill's decision.
Currently, there are two similar petitions available; one
pledges the boycott of the textbooks with 263 signatures, while the other
pledges the disagreement with the text changes and has 235 signatures. Most of
the signatures are names of professors or staff associated with universities.
The issue originated when conservative pressure from
the Texas Board of Education caused McGraw-Hill texts to clarify the
"ambiguity of marriage."
When questioned, the textbook company said the information
should be consistent with the Texas law, which says marriage can only take
place between a man and a woman.
Massey said he thinks the idea is
"ridiculous" because Texas students should be educated beyond their own
state's borders.
He said that although the alterations are minor, they
have larger implications.
"There are explicit definitions and implicit
definitions, but marriage itself is where the current debate is in our
society," Massey said. "This action has significant political
implications."
Students are being taught the book's lessons according
to a law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which has yet
to be challenged by the Supreme Court, he said.
from the Wall Street Journal, 2004-Dec-15, p.A20:
The future of the world economy may lie in Finland. Or
Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. As a new study on education standards
world-wide shows, unlike in the U.S. and much of Europe, high school students
in these countries actually learn something.
In this country, the study's findings grabbed
headlines for how poorly American students score. The report, conducted by the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, tested the math,
science, problem-solving and reading skills of 15-year-olds in 41 countries.
Only a generation ago, U.S. high school students ranked No. 1. Today their
performance has fallen below the OECD average -- except in reading, where
Americans manage to eke out an "average." In a Boston College study
released yesterday, American fourth- and eighth-graders performed better -- and
eighth-graders showed gains -- but still nowhere near East Asian levels in math
and science.
Less publicized has been why U.S. scores are so low.
The OECD researchers identified several key characteristics that most
successful school systems share -- namely, decentralization, competition and
flexibility. These aren't exactly the hallmarks of your typical American school
system, where choice and accountability aren't usually on the curriculum.
- The recipe for success, as project director Andreas
Schleicher explained at a recent briefing in Brussels, is a decentralized
system where schools are given a large degree of autonomy over curriculum and
budget decisions. Whether schools are public or private is not as important as
whether they "operate like a private one," Mr. Schleicher said.
- Another important element is an open, flexible
education system. In Germany, where the abysmal results of the 2000 study
caused much public debate, the system is very rigid and often predetermines a
child's future at an early age. As early as the age of 10, teachers decide
whether a student will attend a school that ends with a university
qualification or one where the diploma only opens the opportunity to learn a
trade or to enter a low-level university.
- Last but not least, successful schools have teachers
who have a large degree of autonomy and responsibility, which leads in turn to
a high degree of professionalism. It is not simply a matter of remuneration.
Teachers in Finland get paid relatively little, but according to Mr. Schleicher
there is a strong professional ethos and teachers routinely exchange experience
to improve their skills.
U.S. dominance in technology, science and business has
largely been carried on the shoulders of the generation of workers who went to
high school when the Beatles were still together. With an ever-higher
percentage of the work force expected to be employed in knowledge-based
industries, school reform is a question of U.S. economic survival.
This is also a reason to keep welcoming immigrants and
foreign students. America's elite universities and research labs remain the
destination of choice for many of the brightest and most talented minds in the
world -- many of whom join the U.S. work force after graduation.
The OECD results are also ammunition for President
Bush's proposal to expand the accountability standards of the No Child Left
Behind Act to high schools. The 50% drop-out rate of our inner-city public
schools continues to be a national scandal, but even our suburban high schools
don't perform as well as they once did. If we want to maintain our standard of
living, we'd better change that.
from the Newton
Tab, 2005-Jan-12, by Tom Mountain:
Math
curriculum doesn't add up
The school department was recently forced to
publicly admit that the sixth-grade MCAS math scores have steadily declined
over the past three years to the point where 32 percent of sixth-graders are
now in the "warning" or "needs improvement" category. This
means that if we were to attach a letter grade to these sixth-grade MCAS math
results it would be a D-plus, with only 68 percent of the students passing.
Brown Middle School fared so poorly that it is now subject to be placed under
the federal No Child Left Behind Act for failing to keep pace under the minimum
"adequate yearly progress guidelines."
The school department offered no tangible
explanation for these declining scores other than to admit that they have no
explanation, as articulated by Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and
Instruction Carolyn Wyatt (salary $106,804), "[The results] have
decreased, incrementally, each year and continue to puzzle us." She went
on to admit that this downward trend is peculiar to Newton and "is not
being seen statewide." Again, she offered no explanation, but she did
assure the School Committee that her assistant, Math Coordinator Mary Eich
(salary $101,399), is currently investigating the problem.
Unless the current decline in the sixth-grade
math MCAS scores is reversed, within four years the rate of passing for sixth-graders
will dip below 60 percent. Since the school department has neither an
explanation nor a solution to the problem, and since it's likely that these
same highly paid administrators will still be in their positions overseeing
this problem for which they have neither an explanation nor a solution, there
is every reason to assume that this downward trend will continue.
The School Committee, those elected overseers
of the school department, offered no instructions, challenges, or demands to
those administrators under whose watch this downward trend occurred. The
committee members, who are on a first-name basis with these bureaucrats,
apparently have an unspoken rule against demanding explanations from their
school department friends. Besides, Superintendent Young would never permit his
School Committee to publicly challenge his school administrators. So no one was
subjected to scrutiny, no one was held accountable, no one was put on notice.
The members sat passively and did nothing, just as these bureaucrats expected.
But why have the sixth-grade MCAS scores
plummeted in just three years? What mitigating circumstances, such as
demographic or economic factors, could have contributed to this downward
spiral?
Since Newton has been curiously alone in this
decline, surely we can't blame the MCAS itself, especially since the test has
hardly changed in just three years. The demographics of the city haven't
shifted in so short a period. The socioeconomic level of the population has
risen steadily. The school budget has dramatically increased - most notably
with an unprecedented override in 2002 - to the point where the budget is at a
record high, despite an actual decline in the number of students.
Class size has only recently increased, but
mostly at the high schools and only sporadically at the lower grade levels.
Since the turnover rate in the school department has always been low, the
teachers and principals are roughly the same. We still have the same School
Committee, superintendent and mayor.
So then, after eliminating any potential
mitigating factors, what could possibly account for the steady decline in the
sixth-grade math MCAS scores?
The only logical and remaining explanation is
change that occurred in the Newton math curriculum itself - the subject matter
of what is taught and how, what is emphasized and what is not, what has been
omitted and what is new. In short, what has changed in the elementary and
middle school math curriculum to have affected such a dramatic decline in the
MCAS scores?
Answer: the new math curriculum, otherwise
known as anti-racist multicultural math.
Between 1999 and 2001, under the direction of
Superintendent Young and Assistant Superintendent Wyatt, the math curriculum
was redesigned to emphasize "Newton's commitment to active anti-racist
education" for the elementary and middle schools. This meant that no
longer were division, multiplication, fractions and decimals the first priority
for teaching math. For that matter, the teaching of math was no longer the
first priority for math teachers, as indicated by the new curriculum
guidelines, called benchmarks, which function as the primary instructional
guide for teaching math in the Newton Public Schools.
In 2001 Mr. Young, Mrs. Wyatt and an
assortment of other well-paid school administrators, defined the new number-one
priority for teaching mathematics, as documented in the curriculum benchmarks,
"Respect for Human Differences - students will live out the system wide
core of 'Respect for Human Differences' by demonstrating anti-racist/anti-bias
behaviors." It continues, "Students will: Consistently analyze their
experiences and the curriculum for bias and discrimination; Take effective
anti-bias action when bias or discrimination is identified; Work with people of
different backgrounds and tell how the experience affected them; Demonstrate
how their membership in different groups has advantages and disadvantages that
affect how they see the world and the way they are perceived by others..."
It goes on and on.
These are the most important priorities that
the school department has determined for teaching math from grade one through
eight, as documented in the Newton Public Schools Benchmarks.
Nowhere among the first priorities for the
math curriculum guidelines is the actual teaching of math. That's a distant
second. To Superintendent Young and his School Committee, mathematical
problem-solving is of secondary importance to anti-racist/anti-bias math.
Meanwhile, the sixth-grade MCAS math scores
keep going down. Yet the architects of this PC lunacy will sit there with a
collective straight face and whine to us that they have no idea why these
scores have declined since 2001.
It's interesting that the math curriculum
guidelines for Weston, Wayland and Winchester are devoid of any mention of anti-racist
math. But then again, those public schools have consistently ranked higher on
the MCAS than Newton.
When a school department determines that
ideology should take priority over academics, standardized test scores
gradually decline and educational standards suffer. It doesn't happen
overnight. It takes time for the decline to take its inevitable course.
And inevitable it was. Since 1999,
coincidentally the year that Jeffrey Young became superintendent, our schools
have plummeted from seventh to 35th in the overall state MCAS rankings. Thus,
with the implementation of Mr. Young's ludicrous anti-racist/anti-bias math in
2001, the current dismal scores on the sixth-grade math MCAS should come as no
surprise.
from The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2004-Dec-11, by
Susan Snyder:
Scissors
get girl in legal trouble
The 10-year-old was handcuffed and taken to a police station after scissors
were found in her book bag.
A 10-year-old fourth-grade girl at Holme Elementary
School in the Far Northeast was pulled out of class, handcuffed, and taken to
the local police station in the back of a police wagon earlier this week after
a pair of 8-inch scissors were found in her book bag, according to authorities
and her angry mother.
School district and police officials said
yesterday that they were following state law and procedures in dealing with
students who have weapons on school property. They say that those rules demand
police be called and that procedures call for handcuffing suspects regardless
of age or crime.
Porsche Brown's mother, Rose Jackson, was
outraged.
"My daughter cried and cried,"
Jackson said yesterday. "She had no idea what she did was wrong. I think
that was way too harsh."
Jackson said principal Ethel M. Cabry had
known Porsche for four years and should have called her home.
"I want something done to that principal
and that teacher. They didn't notify me about my baby. They called the
police," Jackson said.
District spokesman Fernando Gallard acknowledged
that Cabry had not called Jackson but said that school police called her when
they phoned city police.
School district officials acknowledged that
the girl was not using the item as a weapon or threatening anyone with it. The
scissors were found Thursday morning during a search of students' belongings
after something was discovered missing from the teacher's desk area, Gallard
said.
The scissors, however, qualified as a
possible weapon under a long-standing state law, and the school followed proper
procedure by calling city police, he said.
Porsche will be suspended for five days, and
the district will then decide whether to expel her to a disciplinary school or
allow her to return to Holme, he said.
City police, meanwhile, decided not to charge
her with a crime because they determined that she had no intent to use the
scissors as a weapon, said Inspector William Colarulo, a police spokesman. In
fact, police believe she had the scissors to unwrap a new CD, Colarulo said.
He defended the police officers' decision to
handcuff the child and take her to Eighth Police District headquarters. All
suspects, regardless of age or crime, are handcuffed, he said. "The
officers acted in good faith," he said.
Jackson, who maintained that her daughter had
the scissors for a previous school assignment, said that if the district acted
based on state law, the law must be changed.
"This should be done per case,"
based on circumstances. She said her daughter did nothing to warrant police
intervention: "She's like, 'Mom, we use scissors in school.' "
from the Wall Street Journal via
OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Dec-3:
A
Chill in the Classroom
Liberal professors routinely harass conservative students.
Most Journal readers over a certain age can
remember going all the way through college without politics intruding in the
classroom. Until the Vietnam War, for instance, few students knew their
professors' views, and even then most politicking took place on parts of the
campus where participation was voluntary. That is no longer true--and, as a new
survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA)
documents, it is making many students uneasy.
The ACTA survey was conducted this fall by
the Center for Survey Research & Analysis at the University of Connecticut,
among students at 50 top U.S. universities and colleges. It sought to ascertain
the perceived levels of classroom politicization and of intellectual
intolerance among faculty members. The results were striking.
|
Academic
Freedom
Some
student responses at Yale:
- "My
professor mocked conservatives constantly."
- "Professors
in Biology were extremely anti-religion and mocked it openly. Pro
left-wing jokes/anti-Bush jokes abound."
- "I
feel intimidated."
- "My
Spanish teacher only presented readings against Bush's trade policy in
Latin America. . . . Also actively silenced people who
disagreed with her."
- "Professors
often have a slant in the readings they choose. As long as you're
aware of it, you can prepare against it."
|
|
For instance, nearly half
said that their professors "frequently comment on politics in class even
though it has nothing to do with the course" or use the classroom to
present their personal political views. In answers to other questions, the
majority acknowledged that liberal views predominate. Most troubling, however,
were the responses to the survey item "On my campus, there are courses in
which students feel they have to agree with the professor's political or social
views in order to get a good grade"--29% agreed.
ACTA's president, Anne Neal, is alarmed.
"One case of political intolerance is too many," she says. "But
the fact that half the students are reporting [some] abuses is simply
unacceptable. If these were reports of sexual harassment in the classroom, they
would get people's attention."
A recent informal survey at Yale, where
students answered questions about academic freedom posed by the Yale Free
Press, the conservative/libertarian student paper, also deserves attention.
Although the entire first run of its November issue containing the study was
stolen on campus, it can be downloaded at www.yale.edu/yfp. To sum up: While
some Yalies said that politics either didn't arise in class or caused no
problem because they shared the professor's views, others recounted unpleasant
experiences. One example:
"My teacher came into class the day
after the election proclaiming, 'That's it. This is the death of America.' The
rest of the class was eager to agree, and twenty minutes of Bush-bashing ensued.
At one point, one student asked our teacher whether she should be so vocal,
lest any students be conservatives. She then asked us whether any of us were
Republicans. Naturally, no one volunteered that information, whereupon our
teacher turned to the inquisitive student and said, 'See? No one in here would
be stupid enough to vote for Bush.' "
Some students undoubtedly find such banter
fun. But for others it can be chilling. And just as teachers' freedom of speech
must be protected, so must students' freedom to learn, if it is threatened.
After all, as ACTA's Anne Neal points out, "The inability to benefit from
a robust and free exchange of ideas--intellectual harassment if you will--goes
to the very heart of the academic enterprise."
from the Wall Street Journal via
OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Jan-5, by Eric Adler and Jack Langer:
The
Intifada Comes to Duke
A university plays host to anti-Semites and terror advocates.
A new ritual on the American academic scene
is the annual conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement. The PSM is an
umbrella organization that connects various U.S. and Canadian groups; its
yearly gathering offers an opportunity for the constituent elements to
establish a visible presence on a prestigious university campus and plan strategy
and tactics for a movement dedicated to delegitimizing the state of Israel.
Over the past several years, the convocation has been held at Ohio State, the
University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley. In
October, it was the turn of Duke University.
Duke's president, Richard Brodhead, had only
just assumed office last summer when the university announced that it would be
hosting the PSM conference in the fall. Because the organizers had followed the
proper procedures for mounting such an event, Mr. Brodhead explained, the
decision to grant approval was an "easy one." After all, the
university was only reaffirming "the importance of the principle of free
expression."
Easy or not, the decision immediately
provoked criticism. Some of it came from Duke alumni and others off campus, and
some of it came from a student group, the Duke Conservative Union. Altogether,
some 90,000 signatures were gathered for an online petition denouncing the
university's move.
Among the targets of protest was the PSM's
fifth official "guiding principle," which decrees the group's refusal
to denounce any terrorist act committed by Palestinians. Condemnation was also
directed at the PSM's amply documented history of anti-Semitism and incitement
to violence. One scheduled speaker, Charles Carlson, had openly called for
lethal attacks against Israeli youth, declaring that "every young Israeli
is military--they are all proper war targets," and that "each
wedding, Passover celebration, or bar mitzvah [in Israel] is a potential
military target."
Another scheduled participant, Abe
Greenhouse, had been arrested in 2003 after smashing a pie in the face of
Israeli minister Natan Sharansky as he was about to give a lecture at Rutgers.
An organizer of the 2002 PSM gathering, Fadi Kiblawi, had written that the
Palestinian plight made him "want to strap a bomb to [his] chest and kill
those [Zionist] racists," while an erstwhile PSM speaker, Hatem Bazian,
had called for "an intifada in this country" (i.e., the U.S.) and
asserted that the sacred texts of Islam require its adherents to "fight
the Jews." Prominently active in the movement was Sami al-Arian, who in
2003 was indicted on racketeering and terrorism charges and is currently
awaiting trial in Florida.
These and other unequivocal statements and
deeds of PSM activists were detailed in letters to the editor and in
advertisements that the Duke Conservative Union placed in the Chronicle, Duke's
student newspaper. In response, the university administration was largely
silent. But Mr. Brodhead himself, moving beyond his previous stance of avowed
neutrality in the name of free expression, issued what amounted to an outright
endorsement of the conference. Declining to criticize any aspect of the PSM, he
asserted only that a great deal of inaccurate information was circulating on
the Internet and that the "deepest principle involved [in hosting the
conference] is not even the principle of free speech. It's the principle of
education through dialogue." How this "dialogue" would proceed under
the PSM's practice of prohibiting recording devices and reporters from many of
its sessions was never made clear.
Following a month or so of debate on and
around the Duke campus, the conference itself opened on Oct. 15. Its hundreds
of participants were treated to a series of lectures, panel discussions and
workshops. There were also a variety of "cultural events," including
a "sing-in" and a reading of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel poetry.
Affiliated groups like the International Solidarity Movement and Jews for a
Just Peace set up tables at which they distributed leaflets and sold such wares
as "Free Palestine" T-shirts.
One keynote speech of the PSM's exercise in
"education through dialogue" was delivered by Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Yale
professor of genetics, who presented a short history of what he portrayed as
the virulent Zionist "disease." There was also a lecture by the PLO
legal adviser Diana Buttu, a polished speaker whose theme was that Palestinians
under Israeli occupation have suffered a fate worse than blacks under apartheid
in South Africa, and that Israel is today "the greatest abuser of human
rights" in the world. Nasser Abufarha, a doctoral candidate in cultural
anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, spoke of Israel's "racist
ambitions" and defended the terrorist activities of Hamas and the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine in combating Zionist
"aggression." Brian Avery, an activist for ISM, explained that both
George W. Bush and John Kerry were "on auction to the Jewish lobby."
Although the Duke administration stoutly
maintained both before and during the conference that the PSM and ISM were
"distinct and separate" organizations, at least a dozen ISM activists
led conference workshops. The ISM specializes in sending European and American
students to the West Bank and Gaza to work on behalf of the radical Palestinian
cause. The group's co-founder George Rishmawi has candidly explained its
purpose in recruiting these foreign students: "When Palestinians get shot
by Israeli soldiers, no one is interested anymore. But if some of these foreign
volunteers get shot or even killed, then the international media will sit up
and take notice." That was certainly the case with the ISM activist Rachel
Corrie, a 23-year-old student at Evergreen State College who was accidentally
killed in 2003 while attempting to block Israeli bulldozers from uncovering
terrorist smuggling tunnels in Gaza.
One of the two ISM-led workshops at the Duke
conference was "Volunteering in Palestine: Role and Value of International
Activists." A last-minute addition to the schedule, the workshop was
conducted by ISM co-founder Huweida Arraf. Acknowledging during her talk that
the ISM cooperates with the terror organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Ms.
Arraf encouraged students to join the group and instructed them on how to enter
Israel surreptitiously and how to deal with possible arrest and deportation.
The Duke administration never commented publicly on the inclusion in the PSM's
program of a workshop recruiting for a group with self-professed ties to
terrorists and an openly avowed interest in generating casualties.
Another, less practical
workshop--"Segregation, Apartheid and Zionism Are Crimes Against
Humanity!"--was led by Bob Brown, a veteran of the Black Power movement of
the 1960s. Mr. Brown's theoretical discourse consisted mostly of
unsubstantiated personal anecdotes and random invective. Thus, he reminisced
about meeting Saddam Hussein's spokesman Tariq Aziz in Baghdad in 1974; alleged
that Condoleezza Rice's father had tried to force him to marry her some years
back; and referred to the Six Day war, in which Israel fought off the armies of
Egypt, Jordan and Syria, as "the Jew war of '67."
Still other sessions were devoted to such
subjects as "Jewish dissent" and the ethics of suicide bombing and
kindred forms of "resistance." Charles Carlson's workshop, "The
Cause of the Conflict: How Judaized-Christians Enable War," was
inexplicably canceled.
After three days of meetings, the conference
came to a close. "It's a good thing we did here," announced the
university's vice president for public affairs, John Burness, setting the tone
for a chorus of self-applause. In its own post-mortem roundup, the student-run
Chronicle, which had endorsed the PSM's official refusal to denounce
Palestinian terrorism, lauded the university administration for
"masterfully" handling the affair and reported with great
satisfaction that the "overall tone of the weekend was one of discussion
and learning." Looking to the future, the paper urged upon Duke a positive
responsibility "to continue the dialogue the Palestine Solidarity Movement
conference initiated."
And indeed the close of the conference did
not mark the end of Duke's experiment in "discussion and learning."
To appreciate what happened next, it helps to know that, unlike the Duke
Conservative Union, the university's two Jewish organizations, the campus
Hillel (known as the Freeman Center) and a student group called Duke Friends of
Israel, had opted from the beginning to refrain from criticizing the university
for agreeing to host the conference. In fact, in a demonstration of their own
commitment to free expression, the groups publicly praised the decision. At the
same time, and in the same spirit, they formulated a "Joint Israel
Initiative." This was a resolution pledging that both they and the PSM
would conduct a civil dialogue, would together condemn the murder of innocent
civilians, and would work toward a two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the eve of the conference, the Jewish groups
also staged a "rally against terror."
But whatever hopes the Jewish campus
organizations held out for civil dialogue were rapidly dashed. Representatives
of the PSM refused to sign the Joint Israel Initiative, objecting in particular
to its condemnation of violence. Not only that, but in the aftermath of the
conference, even as the open anti-Semitism on display there was going entirely
without censure, Duke's Jewish organizations themselves--and Jews in
general--became the object of furious attack.
The first salvo was an article in the
Chronicle by one of its columnists, a Duke senior named Philip Kurian.
Headlined "The Jews," it denounced Jews as "the most privileged
'minority' group" in the United States and in particular bemoaned the
"shocking overrepresentation" of Jews in academia. Replete with
references to the "powerful Jewish establishment" and
"exorbitant Jewish privilege in the United States," the article went
on to characterize Jews as a phony minority that can "renounce their
difference by taking off the yarmulke."
Mr. Kurian's column was followed by an even
more intense anti-Semitic outpouring on the Chronicle's electronic discussion
boards. "I am glad you have the courage to stand up to the Jews,"
wrote one correspondent. Another said he "was thrilled to read Mr.
Kurian's belligerent critique of that long-nosed creature sitting squarely in
the middle of the room that nobody is allowed to talk about. Yes--that elephant
Mr. Sharon . . . and his treasonous cousins in America."
One posting, beside providing a link to an
online article blaming the Jews for the outbreak of World War II, called for
"an investigation into the Jewish community's practices and leadership
during the past 150 years." "Whenever anyone says anything negative
about the Jews," expostulated still another writer, "they go after
them with Mafia-style ruthlessness. . . . This is the reason Jews are the most
hated people on earth and why they have always been kicked out of every
country."
Having welcomed known anti-Semitic agitators
onto its campus, how did the Duke administration react when the aftereffects of
the agitation began to play themselves out before its eyes? Responding to Mr.
Kurian's article in a letter to the Chronicle, President Brodhead first
condemned the "virulence" of some of the PSM's critics. He
then pronounced himself "deeply troubled" by Kurian's sentiments,
while offering assurances that Mr. Kurian "probably did not mean to . . .
[revive] stereotypical images that have played a long-running role in the
history of anti-Semitism." Reverting to his by now standard mantra, Mr.
Brodhead stressed again that the central issue was the importance of
"education through dialogue." "I am grateful," he wrote, "to
the many individuals and groups who helped turn last week's Palestine
Solidarity Movement conference into a peaceful and constructive event" and
"proud to be at a school where difficult matters are dealt with in such a
mature and constructive way."
It is all but impossible to imagine the
president of Duke offering a similar encomium to, say, a conference of neo-Nazi
rabble-rousers on his campus, or defending a parade of speakers dilating on the
"diseased" history of, say, black Americans. It is in fact impossible
to imagine Duke agreeing to host such debased goings-on in the first place. In
that sense, the administration's appeals to free expression and dialogue were
the purest disingenuousness.
Moreover, and whether or not a university has
a duty to license the unfettered expression on its campus of every venomous
notion under the sun, the real issue at Duke was always the refusal of the
licensing authorities to call such notions by their proper names--in this case,
bald anti-Semitism and incitement to the murder of innocents. That refusal on
the part of the university and its president, a mark not of
"constructive" liberality but of cowardice and complicity, is what
led infallibly to the postconference outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred. Once the
guardians of the citadel granted permission to open the gates, is it any
surprise that the marauding hordes came storming through?
Mr. Adler is a Ph.D. candidate in
classical studies, and Mr. Langer is a Ph.D. candidate in history, at Duke
University.
from The Economist, 2004-Dec-2:
America's
one-party state
If you loathe political debate, join the faculty of an American university
[Lexington] -- TOM WOLFE'S new novel about a
young student, “I am Charlotte Simmons”, is a depressing read for any parent.
Four years at an Ivy League university costs as much as a house in parts of the
heartland—about $120,000 for tuition alone. But what do you get for your money?
A ticket to “Animal House”.
In Mr Wolfe's fictional university the
pleasures of the body take absolute precedence over the life of the mind. Students
“hook up” (ie, sleep around) with indiscriminate zeal. Brainless jocks rule the
roost, while impoverished nerds are reduced to ghost-writing their essays for
them. The university administration is utterly indifferent to anything except
the dogmas of political correctness (men and women are forced to share the same
bathrooms in the name of gender equality). The Bacchanalia takes place to the
soundtrack of hate-fuelled gangsta rap.
Mr Wolfe clearly exaggerates for effect
(that's kinda, like, what satirists do, as one of his students might have
explained). But on one subject he is guilty of understatement: diversity. He
fires off a few predictable arrows at “diversoids”—students who are chosen on
the basis of their race or gender. But he fails to expose the full absurdity of
the diversity industry.
Academia is simultaneously both the part of
America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the
country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority
professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning
bureaucracy of “diversity officers”. Yet, when it comes to politics, they are
not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.
Evidence of the atypical uniformity of
American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics
notes that this year two universities—the University of California and
Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry
campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et
al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as
to George Bush. Meanwhile, a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics
by Daniel Klein, of Santa Clara University, shows that Democrats outnumber
Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. And
things are likely to get less balanced, because younger professors are more
liberal. For instance, at Berkeley and Stanford, where Democrats overall
outnumber Republicans by a mere nine to one, the ratio rises above 30 to one
among assistant and associate professors.
“So what”, you might say, particularly if you
happen to be an American liberal academic. Yet the current situation makes a
mockery of the very legal opinion that underpins the diversity fad. In 1978,
Justice Lewis Powell argued that diversity is vital to a university's
educational mission, to promote the atmosphere of “speculation, experiment and
creation” that is essential to their identities. The more diverse the body, the
more robust the exchange of ideas. Why apply that argument so rigorously to,
say, sexual orientation, where you have campus groups that proudly call
themselves GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and
questioning), but ignore it when it comes to political beliefs?
This is profoundly unhealthy per se.
Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of
the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It
is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous
disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as
George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this
monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual
culture. In John Kennedy's day, there were so many profs in Washington that it
was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days,
academia is marginalised in the capital—unless, of course, you count all the
Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because
they thought it was rigged against them.
Bias in universities is hard to correct
because it is usually not overt: it has to do with prejudice about which topics
are worth studying and what values are worth holding. Stephen Balch, the
president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, argues that
university faculties suffer from the same political problems as the “small
republics” described in Federalist 10: a motivated majority within the faculty
finds it easy to monopolise decision-making and squeeze out minorities.
Ivy-clad propaganda
The question is what to do about it. The most
radical solution comes from David Horowitz, a conservative provocateur:
force universities to endorse an Academic Bill of Rights, guaranteeing
conservatives a fairer deal. Bills modelled on this idea are working their way
through Republican state legislatures, most notably Colorado's. But even some
conservatives are nervous about politicians interfering in self-governing
institutions.
Mr Balch prefers an appropriately Madisonian
solution to his Madisonian problem: a voluntary system of checks and balances
to preserve the influence of minorities and promote intellectual competition.
This might include a system of proportional voting that would give dissenters
on a faculty more power, or the establishment of special programmes to promote
views that are under-represented by the faculties.
The likelihood of much changing in
universities in the near future is slim. The Republican business elite doesn't
give a fig about silly academic fads in the humanities so long as American
universities remain on the cutting edge of science and technology. As for the
university establishment, leftists are hardly likely to relinquish their grip
on one of the few bits of America where they remain in the ascendant. And that
is a tragedy not just for America's universities but also for liberal thought.
from the Washington Post, 2004-Nov-28, p.B7,
by George
F. Will:
Academia,
Stuck To the Left
Republicans Outnumbered
In Academia, Studies Find
-- The New York Times, Nov. 18
Oh, well, if studies say so. The great
secret is out: Liberals dominate campuses. Coming soon: "Moon Implicated
in Tides, Studies Find."
One study of 1,000 professors finds that
Democrats outnumber Republicans at least seven to one in the humanities and
social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades
ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than
the older cohort that is retiring.
Another study, of voter registration records,
including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine
Democrats for every Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger
professors, there were 183 Democrats, six Republicans.
But we essentially knew this even before the
American Enterprise magazine reported in 2002 on examinations of voting records
in various college communities. Some findings about professors registered with
the two major parties or with liberal or conservative minor parties:
Cornell: 166 liberals, 6 conservatives.
Stanford: 151 liberals, 17 conservatives.
Colorado: 116 liberals, 5 conservatives.
UCLA: 141 liberals, 9 conservatives.
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive
Politics reports that in 2004, of the top five institutions in terms of
employee per capita contributions to presidential candidates, the third, fourth
and fifth were Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. The top two were the
University of California system and Harvard, both of which gave about 19 times
more money to John Kerry than to George W. Bush.
But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at
Berkeley, denies that academic institutions are biased against conservatives.
The disparity in hiring, he explains, occurs because conservatives are not as
interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like
that? "Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good
and social justice." That clears that up.
A filtering process, from graduate school
admissions through tenure decisions, tends to exclude conservatives from what
Mark Bauerlein calls academia's "sheltered habitat." In a dazzling
essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bauerlein, professor of English at
Emory University and director of research and analysis at the National
Endowment for the Arts, notes that the "first protocol" of academic
society is the "common assumption" -- that, at professional
gatherings, all the strangers in the room are liberals.
It is a reasonable assumption, given that in
order to enter the profession, your work must be deemed, by the criteria of the
prevailing culture, "relevant." Bauerlein says that various academic
fields now have regnant premises that embed political orientations in their
very definitions of scholarship:
"Schools of education, for instance,
take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in
matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural
studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of
affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If
you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being,
stay away from women's studies."
This gives rise to what Bauerlein calls the
"false consensus effect," which occurs when, because of institutional
provincialism, "people think that the collective opinion of their own
group matches that of the larger population." There also is what Cass
Sunstein, professor of political science and jurisprudence at the University of
Chicago, calls "the law of group polarization." Bauerlein explains:
"When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general
opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs." They
become tone-deaf to the way they sound to others outside their closed circle of
belief.
When John Kennedy brought to Washington such
academics as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, McGeorge and
William Bundy and Walt Rostow, it was said that the Charles River was flowing
into the Potomac. Actually, Richard Nixon's administration had an even more
distinguished academic cast -- Henry Kissinger, Pat Moynihan, Arthur Burns,
James Schlesinger and others.
Academics such as the next secretary of state
still decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has
marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have
something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called
"smelly little orthodoxies."
Many campuses are intellectual versions of
one-party nations -- except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is,
of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses
have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have
become more intellectually monochrome.
They do indeed cultivate diversity -- in
race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.
from the Wall Street Journal via
OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Dec-3, by Roger Kimball:
Meet
the Newest Member of the Faculty
Clinton pardons a terrorist, and now she's teaching in Clinton, N.Y.
At Hamilton College--an elite liberal arts
institution in Clinton, N.Y.--you can take courses in Roman civilization,
Shakespeare and the "Emergence of Modern Western Europe, 1500-1815."
All well and good. You can also take something called "Resistance Memoirs:
Writing, Identity and Change." That last course--a month-long, half-credit
seminar--is scheduled to begin next month. Its teacher is Susan Rosenberg,
formerly of the Weather Underground.
Remember the Weather Underground? Its
self-described revolutionaries, mostly middle-class, dedicated themselves to
supporting radical black causes and tearing apart American society in the 1970s
and early 1980s. In 1970, they blew up a townhouse when a bomb detonated
prematurely and killed a few of their troops. Kathy Boudin, Bill Ayers,
Bernardine Dohrn and other high-profile members of the group spent the next
decade or so running from the police and, some of them, continuing to pursue
careers in criminal violence.
Ms. Rosenberg did her part. In October 1981,
in an operation code-named "The Big Dance," several black radicals
and members of the Weather Underground held up a Brinks armored car in Nanuet,
N.Y. In the course of that act of domestic terrorism, they murdered Peter
Paige, a Brinks guard, and police officers Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown,
the only black officer on the Nyack, N.Y., force. Ms. Rosenberg, then still at
large, was indicted as an accessory.
According to John Castellucci's "The Big
Dance," an account of the Brinks robbery, Ms. Rosenberg's role in the
Brinks job was performing surveillance, driving a getaway car and transmitting
orders. "Any white who had taken part in the robbery," Mr.
Castellucci writes, "would have received orders from her."
Mr. Castellucci reports that the Brinks
robbery was only one of several violent episodes that Ms. Rosenberg was
involved with in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was finally apprehended in
November 1984 while unloading a cache of weapons--including 740 pounds of
explosives--at a storage facility in Cherry Hill, N.J.
As it happens, a key witness in the Brinks
case refused to testify as the trial approached. Prosecutors dropped their
earlier charges against Ms. Rosenberg, figuring that she could serve a long
prison term anyway for weapons possession. At the time, she was quoted in the
New York Times saying: "We're caught, but we're not defeated. Long live
the armed struggle!" When she was indeed sentenced to 58 years, she
announced that "we were busted because we vacillated on our politics. . .
. Our own principles were not strong enough to fight to win." According to
Mr. Castellucci, one of the officers who apprehended her interpreted this
statement to mean that "she regretted not shooting them." Given the
context, Mr. Castellucci notes, "he was probably right."
So why isn't Susan Rosenberg still in prison?
Because in January 2001, Bill Clinton commuted her sentence. The outcry at the time was loud and
furious. And no wonder. Just as important: Why is Hamilton College opening its
doors to her?
Ms. Rosenberg is coming to Hamilton under the
auspices of the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture,
a left-wing enclave run by Nancy Rabinowitz, a professor of comparative literature
(and, incidentally, the daughter-in-law of Victor Rabinowitz, of the radical
law firm Rabinowitz, Boudin, et al., which defended, among others, Kathy
Boudin). It was Ms. Rabinowitz who invited Ms. Rosenberg. And it was she who
rechristened an "artist/scholar-in-residence program" as an
"artist/activist-in-residence program." According to Ms. Rabinowitz,
Ms. Rosenberg is "an exemplar of rehabilitation" whose "story is
about how you can make something productive out of something that was really
awful."
It is by no means clear that Susan Rosenberg
is "an exemplar of rehabilitation." In an interview on Pacifica radio
soon after she was released, she tentatively renounced individual violence. But
nowhere in her evasive circumlocutions did she renounce collective violence,
what she described in 1993 as "the necessity for armed self-defense"
in the pursuit of "revolutionary anti-imperialist resistance." She
still denies having taken part in the Brinks job and likes to call herself "a
former U.S. political prisoner."
And what is Ms. Rosenberg going to teach
students? In a statement, Hamilton administrators described her as "an
award-winning writer, an activist and a teacher who offers a unique perspective
as a writer." In fact, her "writings" consist of political
doggerel and radical exhortation, while her awards are PEN commendations for
prison writing. Here is a representative passage from her poem "To Mumia
Abu-Jamal," the convicted cop killer now on death row:
Their message so clear
Do not be Black
Do not be radical
Do not be a political prisoner
There is still time to
SHAKE IT LOOSE."
As for offering a unique perspective--well,
so might Osama bin Laden. Robert Paquette, a professor of history at Hamilton,
was quoted by the Post Standard of Syracuse, N.Y., saying: "If you're
going to bring Susan Rosenberg here . . . why not bring in David Duke on race
or O.J. Simpson on the sociology of sports?" Mr. Paquette is not the only
unhappy faculty member. Steven Goldberg, a professor of art history, noted that
"there are nine children today who will never see their father . . . three
women who are widowed" because of the crimes with which Ms. Rosenberg is
associated.
Edward Moore, the Saratoga Springs, N.Y.,
chief of police, is the father of a Hamilton student. He recently e-mailed Joan
Hinde Stewart, Hamilton's president, to express his distress that "a
convicted terrorist having a violent criminal background is welcome at Hamilton
College."
Under fire, Hamilton administrators have
wrapped themselves in the mantle of free speech. "As long as public safety
and the rights of others are not compromised," they stated, "the
college does not normally put limits on which voices can be heard and which
cannot."
Well, that depends. In 2002, it is true, when
Annie Sprinkle, a pornography star and performance artist, came to Hamilton to
regale students and members of the local community about the proper use of
sexual appliances, Hamilton administrators stood high on the pedestal of free
speech. But when Brendan McCormick, a Hamilton alumnus and official class
representative, sought to alert his classmates to the Rosenberg appointment,
the college's development office refused to send out a letter from him, as it
normally would. "I pointed out the hypocrisy of sending out a press release
claiming that you do not censor speech and then turning around and doing just
that," Mr. McCormick later said.
Ah yes: Free speech for me, but not for thee.
Hamilton College is set to kick off an ambitious capital campaign today in New
York. Mr. McCormick suggests that alumni consider withholding contributions.
Call it the right kind of resistance.
Mr. Kimball is the author of "The
Rape of the Masters" (Encounter).
from the Wall Street Journal via
OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Jan-28:
There
They Go Again
Hamilton College welcomes a cheerleader for the 9/11 attackers.
It's déjà vu all over again. Less than two
months after Hamilton College tried to hire a former Weather Underground
activist who was indicted in the 1981 Brinks murders, the Clinton, N.Y., liberal-arts
college plans to showcase a cheerleader for the 9/11 attacks. Just the sort of
thing parents pay nearly $40,000 a year in tuition and board to have their
children hear.
At issue now is a panel set for Feb. 3 on
"Limits of Dissent?" to be hosted by the college's Kirkland Project
for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture. Among the invited panelists is
Indian activist Ward Churchill, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. While Mr. Churchill has caused controversy in the
past--founders of the American Indian Movement denounced him as a
"white" and a "fraud"--his screeds usually attract little
notice outside obscure Marxist Web sites and the like.
On Sept. 12, 2001, however, Mr. Churchill
performed an act of extraordinary crepitation, even for him. In "Some
People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," he saluted the
"gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck the
Pentagon and World Trade Center, asserting that the people who worked there
("braying . . . into their cell phones") and died that day deserved
what they got.
Here's part of a key passage (full version
available at darknightpress.org):
The [Pentagon] and those inside comprised
military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center: Well,
really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a
sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very
heart of America's global financial empire--the 'mighty engine of profit' to
which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved--and they
did so both willingly and knowingly. If there was a better, more effective, or
in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation
upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers,
I'd really be interested in hearing about it." Reached by phone Wednesday
by Debra Burlingame--whose brother Charles was the pilot of American Airlines
Flight 77, which terrorists crashed into the Pentagon--Hamilton President Joan
Hinde Stewart said she wasn't aware of Mr. Churchill's odious remarks about
9/11 until recently. But academic freedom is at stake, she added. The chairman
of Hamilton's board of trustees, Stuart Scott, e-mailed Ms. Burlingame to say
that the decision to invite Mr. Churchill was "a bad one" that made
him "angry." However, "many who despise him feel he must be
allowed to speak as a matter of principle. We have insisted that a person who
opposes his rantings be on stage and empanelled with him."
Now that sounds like an edifying debate: 9/11
was good vs. 9/11 was bad. In a way, it's almost pathetic to see little
Hamilton, with its at least 77% Caucasian student body, pretend to teach
students about "diversity" and the real world by carting in
rent-a-radicals to indoctrinate them in the theater of outrage. Except that it
goes on all the time, at campuses everywhere, and the perpetrators are counting
on normal people not to have the energy to constantly push back.
What Hamilton alums, now the targets of a
$175 million capital campaign, will make of the latest stunt is anybody's
guess. But this is a case where pushing back would be an effortless matter of
not writing a check.
from DanielPipes.org, 2004-Nov-24, by Daniel
Pipes:
Spreading
Islam in American Public Schools
Not only do Islamists want to censor the
handling of Islamic topics at U.S. universities, as I noted
in "Islamists Police the Classroom [at the University of South
Florida]," but they also wish to do the same at grammar schools. More
ominously yet, they wish to transform public schools at all levels into venues
for spreading Islam.
An undated posting at www.SoundVision.com
posts a page titled "18 Tips for Imams and
Community Leaders." The 15th tip, "Establish a parents'
committee to monitor public schools," has special interest. It starts by
asking if the local public school is teaching 10-year-olds that Muslims are
terrorists and misogynists? If so, parents are advised to set up a committee
"to monitor public school curriculum and developments" and arrange
for Muslims to deliver talks about Islam and Muslims. For instance, as Ramadan
approaches, a parent should explain the holiday to the school or in a social
studies class. When a high-profile "incident of terrorism where Muslims
are the perpetrators" takes place, the committee should ask to discuss
Islam and terrorism. More broadly, the committee should lobby on behalf of
Muslim concerns.
Another website points to a far deeper
agenda, that of da‘wa, or using taxpayer-funded schools to proselytize
for Islam. www.DawaNet.com's
goals are summed up by an article it hosts: "How to Make
America an Islamic Nation." But what concerns us is a page, "Dawa in public schools," that portrays
public schools as "fertile grounds where the seeds of Islam can be sowed
inside the hearts of non-Muslim students. Muslim students should take ample
advantage of this opportunity and present to their schoolmates the beautiful
beliefs of Islam." This, the website asserts, is best achieved through
both direct and indirect steps. Direct means overt da‘wa:
- Host
Islamic exhibitions.
- Start
an Islamic newsletter.
- Set
up "Dawa tables" offering Islamic literature.
- Carry
"Dawa flyers" from the Islamic Circle of North America and pass
them out to non-Muslims.
- Place
advertisements in the school paper with a toll-free telephone number for
non-Muslims to call to learn more about Islam.
- Establish
one-to-one contacts with non-Muslim students (along gender lines: "It
is advised that brothers work with non-Muslim boys and sisters work with
non-Muslim girls").
Indirect partially means creating a good
image for Islam:
- Found
Muslim groups that portray Islam "in a positive way," such as a
Muslim Students Association, Islamic Circle, or Quran Study Group.
- Engage
in "simple actions that reflect living Islam," such as saying
"Insha Allah" (God willing), praying, and wearing Islamic-style
clothing.
- Take
advantage of disasters to set up a disaster relief assistance booth to
give "a very positive picture of Islam and Muslims."
Or indirect means increasing consciousness of
Islam:
·
Make use of the
school newspaper: "Being a writer will give you ample opportunity to
provide Islamically oriented articles which will Insha Allah [if God wishes]
open the hearts and minds of readers." Ideally, an article on Islam should
appear in each issue. If the school does not allow overt preaching,
"Alhamdu lillah, there are ways to circumvent this problem," such as
reporting on Islamic events or writing about Islamic holidays. "This way,
you are still presenting an aspect of Islam without coming across as a
preacher." DawaNet.com also coyly instructs its adepts "to have a
good rapport with the editor and the writing staff of the paper."
·
Lobby to include
Islamic dates on the school calendar.
·
Add books and
magazines on Islam written by Muslims to the school library; if the library
does not purchase them, raise the money to donate them.
·
Incorporate Islam
into class projects. For example, "for a speech class, if there is freedom
to choose a topic, an Islamic topic should be selected. Similar opportunities
can be created in history, social science, writing and other classes."
DawaNet.com concludes by reminding Muslims
that the will of Allah, faith, and Muslim creativity combined to win victories
in the past and can again in the future:
Schools and campuses are no exceptions as
places where Islam can be victorious. … We should use every opportunity to
sensitize non-Muslim peers and school staff to Islam and to establish an
environment in which everywhere a non-Muslim turns, he notices Islam portrayed
in a positive way, is influenced by it and eventually accepts Islam.
Comments: (1) This is a total perversion of the American public space, a
blatant effort to suborn it to serve Islamic missionary purposes.
(2) Such an attempt by Islamists hardly comes
as a surprise but rather complements their already in-place campaign to exploit
textbooks
and curricula
supplements for da‘wa purposes.
(3) The "multikulti" spirit so
prevalent in American schools today means that too many parents, teachers, and
administrators find themselves virtually helpless to stand up to this assault
on the traditional values of the public school.
from the Associated Press, 2004-Dec-7:
Jello
treat gets Jefferson Parish 4th-grader suspended
GRETNA, La. A Jefferson Parish fourth grader
has been suspended for taking what's being described as a look-alike drug to
school.
Eight-year-old Kelli Billingsley brought
homemade Jell-O cups to school at Boudreaux Elementary. Her mom says the school
tested the Jell-O and determined it didn't have any alcohol in it. But the
school suspended the girl for having a look alike drug.
The girl's mom says her daughter was just
trying to make a treat for her friends.
The superintendent of Jefferson Parish
schools says she will investigate the case.
(From: Curt Sprang, WGNO-TV, New Orleans)
from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune via the Lakeland
Ledger (New York Times Regional Newspapers), 2004-Dec-3, by Tiffany Lankes:
Schools
Setting Rules for Politically Correct Holidays
BRADENTON -- Baby Jesus and obvious religious
references left public school holiday celebrations long ago, but now even
snowflakes are being blown out of some Southwest Florida schools.
Instead of Santa and snowmen, students at
Freedom Elementary School in East Manatee will be singing about America and
patriotism at this year's winter concert.
The switch from Nativity scenes to
nationalism is the epitome of the new politically correct seasonal celebration.
"There's a lot of rules and regulations
out there," said Freedom Principal Gary Holbrook. "You're trying to
be respectful of everyone."
While it may seem extreme, Freedom
Elementary's elimination of all holiday and seasonal references is becoming
more common as school administrators struggle to balance political correctness
and a desire to celebrate the holidays with their students.
Across the region, school officials are
scrambling to ensure no one gets offended. They're setting rules that ban
religious symbols, and in some cases, most seasonal references in the
classrooms.
The guidelines for "recognizing"
the holidays ("celebrating" is against the rules) are so stiff that
some administrators don't even want to talk about their school's traditions.
"You won't see any Christmas trees
around here," said Anthony DiBello, principal of Braden River Middle
School in East Manatee County. "We keep it generic."
But across the parking lot at Braden River
Elementary School, administrators aren't questioning whether to get a Christmas
tree. They're deciding whether it will be real or fake. "You don't want to
take it away," said Principal Chuck Fradley.
The two principals' different approaches to
celebrating the holidays reflect how the rules are being interpreted
differently from school to school.
Though the rules in most districts ban
teachers from displaying holiday symbols in classrooms, they allow them to use
the symbols in a lesson.
Teachers argue that all holiday symbols have
cultural or historical significance that can be included in lessons.
"If you want a Christmas tree you should
be able to have it," said Haile Middle School teacher Susan Darovec.
"It's kind of ridiculous to be treating it as a religious item."
At Lakewood Ranch High School, students set
up a "holiday tree" and decorate it with ornaments reflecting all of
the season's celebrations, from Hanukkah to Kwanzaa. The history club plans to
display holiday traditions from around the world.
In past years, fourth-grade students at
Bashaw Elementary School in East Manatee County spun dreidels, sipped mulled
cider and made Christmas cards and wreaths during lessons about holiday
traditions around the world.
In some cases, being too careful can
backfire.
Parents Ben and Sherry Burkhart complained to
the Sarasota School District that Glenallen Elementary School didn't have
enough Christmas in its holiday program. The Burkharts said if students sing
about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, they should be allowed to sing about Jesus, too.
Tiffany Lankes writes for the Herald-Tribune
in Sarasota.
from TownHall.com, 2004-Oct-25, by Jeff
Jacoby:
The
ignorant American voter
Not long after Dr. Johnson's landmark
"Dictionary of the English Language" appeared in 1755, a woman
demanded to know why he had defined "pastern" as the knee of a horse.
Johnson's reply was refreshingly candid: "Ignorance, madam, pure
ignorance."
We should all be so ignorant. Johnson may not
have known a pastern from a fetlock, but he knew enough to write an entire
dictionary -- all 2,300 pages and 43,000 entries of it -- single-handedly.
Alas, our own ignorance is of an entirely different order. Consider, as Ilya
Somin has been considering this election season, what Americans don't know
about politics and public policy.
Somin, a law professor at George Mason
University, observes in a new study for the Cato Institute that voters tend to
be "abysmally ignorant of even very basic political information."
This may not be news to scholars, who have documented it in depressing detail,
"but the sheer depth of most individual voters' ignorance is shocking to
observers not familiar with the research."
He offers some recent illustrations.
According to polls taken this year, nearly 65 percent of the public doesn't
know that Congress has banned partial-birth abortion. Seventy percent is
unaware that a massive drug benefit has been added to Medicare. At least 58
percent say they have heard "nothing" or "not much" about the
Patriot Act, notwithstanding the enormous amount of coverage the controversial
law has drawn.
This is not a new problem. As Cold War
tensions bristled in 1964, only 38 percent of the public knew that the Soviet
Union was not a member of NATO. In 1970, only 24 percent could identify the
secretary of state. In 1996, The Washington Post reported that 67 percent of
Americans couldn't name their congressman and 94 percent had no idea that
William Rehnquist was the chief justice of the United States. Only 26 percent
knew that senators serve six-year terms and 73 percent didn't know that
Medicare costs more than foreign aid.
Gallup found in January 2000 that while 66
percent of the public could name the host of "Who Wants to be a
Millionaire?" only 6 percent knew the name of the speaker of the House.
Last year, a Polling Company survey found that 58 percent of Americans could
not name a single federal Cabinet department.
The ignorant can be found in the highest
reaches of academe. Of more than 3,100 Ivy Leagues students polled for a
University of Pennsylvania study in 1993, 11 percent couldn't identify the
author of the Declaration of Independence, half didn't know the names of their
US senators, and 75 percent were unaware that the classic description of
democracy -- "government of the people, by the people, and for the
people" -- comes from the Gettysburg Address.
With so many Americans so clueless when it
comes to government and public affairs, is it any wonder that political
campaigns are so shrill and shallow? Or that candidates speak to voters
primarily through TV spots intended to malign the other candidate's reputation?
Or that presidential "debates" limit answers to 90 seconds and bar
the contenders from engaging in actual discussion? When voters are unwilling to
put any effort into learning about the issues of the day, it should come as no
surprise that campaign discussions rarely move beyond vacuous soundbites --
"tax breaks for the rich," "freedom is on the march," "wrong
war, wrong place, wrong time."
Somin suggests that widespread political
ignorance may be, in one sense, "rational:" Since no individual's
vote is ever likely to be decisive, no voter has an incentive to work hard at
acquiring enough knowledge to make an informed choice. But by that argument,
voters shouldn't bother showing up on Election Day, either. Many don't, of
course, and we hear endlessly about the need to increase voter turnout. But
more alarming than the tens of millions of non-voting adults are the tens of
millions of adults who do vote despite knowing next to nothing about the
candidates and the issues.
It was not ever thus. A century and a half
ago, ordinary Americans grappled with public controversies at a level of
sophistication that would be unthinkable today.
In 1858, tens of thousands of Illinois
voters, many unschooled, crowded fairgrounds and public squares to watch
Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas debate his Republican challenger, former
Congressman Abraham Lincoln. The topics they wrestled with were among the
weightiest in US history -- the expansion of slavery, the authority of the
Supreme Court, the limits of popular sovereignty. The candidates spoke not for
90 seconds at a time, but for 90 minutes at a time. There were no spin
doctors, no instant polls, no TV talking heads -- only thoughtful candidates
and serious voters and the clash of ideas in the public arena.
The dumbing-down of our politics is no small
thing. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of
civilization," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, "it expects what never
was and never will be." Widespread political ignorance poses a potentially
lethal threat to our democratic freedoms. If we were smarter, we'd be worried.
from the Wall Street Journal via
OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Oct-25, by Ruth R. Wisse:
John
Kerry U
At Harvard, a few of us stray from the "herd of independent
minds."
Last spring, I was surprised by a call from a
reporter at the Harvard Crimson asking me to comment on my contribution to the
Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. His inquiry was prompted by the disparity
he'd discovered in donations by Harvard faculty of about $150,000 for Kerry to
about $8,000 for Bush. (The figures have since changed but not the
percentages.) I could have filled the whole issue of his paper with reasons for
supporting Bush over Kerry, but as we both knew, the real story was the
"herd of independent minds"--the image is Harold
Rosenberg's--charging through the American academy.
The Federal Election Commission could not
have foreseen that when it required employment information on political
donations of over $200, it would expose scandalous uniformity in a university
community that advertises its diversity. The Sacramento Bee reported that the
University of California system gave more to the Kerry campaign than any other
single employee group, and that Harvard was second, with only 15,000 employees
to UC's 160,000. Campus bloggers computed the percentages of Kerry
contributions over Bush: Cornell 93%, Dartmouth 97%, Yale 93%, Brown 89%.
Personally, I greatly enjoy being in the
conservative opposition. My colleagues are cordial, and since I'm not looking
for promotions I willingly sustain an occasional snub for the greater advantage
of being able to speak my mind. Students making the transition from liberal to
conservative are often wounded by their first exposure to the contempt that
greets their support for the war in Iraq or opposition to abortion or whatever
else separates them from the liberal campus. I suggest to them that, as opposed
to living in constant terror of offending some received idea, they relish their
freedom of expression. The self-acknowledged conservative never experiences
intellectual constraint.
But this enviable autonomy doesn't extend to
graduate students or untenured colleagues. Recently, I had two encounters with
sobering implications for the academy. A junior professor told me that when she
began teaching at Harvard she resigned from several organizations that would
have betrayed her conservative leanings. She hadn't wanted to give colleagues
an easy excuse for voting her down when she came up for tenure; but now that
the prospect of tenure was before her, she didn't know whether she wanted to
stay on in such a repressive community. My second conversation was with a rare
pro-Israel Muslim whose contract as lecturer hadn't been renewed, very probably
because he was critical of the way his subject was being taught. This young man
was in a great mood. He was leaving for Washington, where he could make a
greater contribution to national security.
All groups tend to a measure of homogeneity,
but the ideological pressures driving these two dissidents from the university
affect even those at the highest level of authority. At a Commissioning
Ceremony for the Harvard officers of ROTC, President Lawrence Summers praised
the noble work of the graduating soldiers. "Our strength as a nation rests
upon our freedom. . . . [All] of us who cherish and pray for that freedom must
also support those who contribute to the strength that maintains our
freedom."
These sentiments were exceptionally welcome
from the president of a school whose faculty has denied ROTC an official
presence on campus for 30 years, and shows no signs of modifying its opposition
to the military. When he speaks to the faculty, however, the president doesn't
air his patriotic zeal. He rather reports on his protection against the Patriot
Act, the commitment of Harvard to affirmative action, and such other liberal
pieties as bringing more women into the study of science. I recognize that the
president may sincerely support both sets of issues, and I sympathize with his
reluctance to be stampeded by the herd. But in trying to avoid offending the
liberal-left hegemony he--and everyone else who makes this
calculation--intensifies the regnant culture of pusillanimity.
One of the most refreshing things about
President Bush is his immunity from intellectual intimidation. More than his
decision to go to war in Iraq, more than the religious values I share with him
(though I do not share his religion), I appreciate that, though he has to
struggle for language, he expresses unapologetically his commitment to the
strength of our nation. By contrast, through their opposition to the military,
my clever colleagues have done everything they could to make America
indefensible.
Ms. Wisse is a professor at Harvard.
from the Wall Street Journal via
OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Nov-22, by John Fund:
High
Bias
It's time to bring some intellectual diversity to America's colleges and
universities.
Much of this election year was taken up by a
debate over media bias, with charges and countercharges flying over how CBS,
the New York Times, Fox News Channel and National Public Radio covered the
campaign. Now a series of studies may shift the debate to another form of bias:
the lack of intellectual diversity on university campuses, whose faculties are
overwhelmingly liberal.
Some moderate voices are raising the alarm
over the problem. A Nov. 9 staff-written editorial in the Columbia Spectator,
the mainstream student newspaper at New York's Columbia University, called for
a greater range of views on campus. "In all other areas of campus life,
students do not hesitate to call for diversity," the editorial said in
pointing out the complete absence of conservatives from history, philosophy and
humanities departments. "It should be self-evident that a faculty that
speaks with unanimity on some of the most divisive issues of the day is not
fulfilling its duty. Students across the ideological spectrum must demand that
Columbia address this need."
The Spectator editorial comes at a time when
several Jewish students are charging that they have been intimidated by
anti-Israel professors. Several of the students told their stories in a new
25-minute film, "Columbia Unbecoming," produced by the Boston-based
David Project. Student Ariel Berry says that Prof. Joseph Massad told students
that "the Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the new Nazi."
Columbia alumna Lindsay Shrier said Prof. George Saliba told her, "You
have no claim to the land of Israel. You have no voice in this debate. You have
green eyes. You're not a Semite. I have brown eyes. I am a Semite."
Such incidents have led both the New York Sun
and Rep. Andrew Weiner, a Brooklyn Democrat, to call for dramatic reforms on
Columbia's campus. This month, Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president, asked the
university's provost to investigate the claims made in the film, partially
backpedaling from a statement he had made in May supporting the findings of a
university committee that found no evidence of "systematic bias" in
Columbia classrooms.
Conservatives contend that assurances by
liberals that the professional ethics of professors will keep them having their
politics dominate the classroom and smothering alternative views just doesn't
pass muster. A forthcoming study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College looked at
a random sample of more than 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183
institutions of higher learning. He found that across all faculty departments,
including business and engineering, academics were over five times as likely to
be liberals as conservatives.
Mr. Rothman used statistical analysis to
determine what factors explained how academics ended up working at elite
universities. Marital status, sexual orientation and race didn't play a
statistically significant role. Academic excellence, as measured by papers
published and awards conferred, did. But the next best predictor was whether
the professor was a liberal. To critics that argue his methodology is flawed,
Mr. Rothman points out that he used the same research tools long used in courts
by liberal faculty members to prove race and sex bias at universities. Liberals
criticizing his methods may find themselves hoist by their own petard.
Furthermore, a
new national study by Swedish sociologist Charlotta Stern and Santa
Clara University economist Daniel Klein found that in a random national sample
of 1,678 responses from university professors Democratic professors outnumber
Republicans 3 to 1 in economics. 28 to 1 in sociology and 30 to 1 in
anthropology. Their findings will be published in Academic Questions, the
journal of the National Association of Scholars.
A separate study by the Center for the Study
of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, run by conservative activist David Horowitz,
looked at voter registration records of faculty members in six academic
departments in 32 top schools. It found there were 10 Democrats for every
Republican. Mr. Klein says a second study he co-authored looked at voter
registration records for faculty at Stanford and the University of California,
Berkeley. It found that among assistant and associate professors, there were
183 Democrats and only six Republicans. Since many of the Republicans were full
professors close to retirement, Mr. Klein concluded that "in the coming
decade the lopsidedness must become even more extreme. At Berkeley and
Stanford, the Republican is an endangered species."
Robert Brandon, a Duke University philosophy
professor, is one liberal who has at least made an effort to explain why
conservatives are seldom seen in academia. "We try to hire the best,
smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are
generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never
hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the
Republican Party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in
academia."
But Mr. Klein says a better explanation of
liberal dominance is the theory of "groupthink," which holds that
insular groups tend to adopt a set of uniform beliefs and then act to exclude
anyone who doesn't hold those views.
One way to combat groupthink would be if
donors to universities and regents began pressuring faculties to adopt an
Academic Bill of Rights that would forbid university faculties from hiring,
firing, and granting or denying promotion or tenure on the basis of political
beliefs. When Mr. Horowitz suggested the idea be adopted at Colorado's public
universities, he was accused of advocating "quotas" and
"McCarthyism." He calmly explained that his plan eschews quotas and
only requires universities to judge professors on their merits, not ideology. After
several legislative hearings, Colorado university officials voluntarily adopted
a variation of his Academic Bill of Rights to ward off a more muscular one the
Legislature was considering.
Colorado has also gone further and adopted a
reform that could serve as a model for how to make higher education more
accountable to students and the taxpayers which pay its bills. Starting next
year, the state will start shifting its higher-ed dollars from direct payments
to universities to vouchers that will go directly to students. The idea is
hardly radical. It is taken from the GI Bill of Rights, which is widely
credited with giving returning veterans a chance at college through a program
that won universal acclaim.
Debating such reforms is perfectly legitimate
given that about half of the budget of public university systems come from
taxpayers. Private universities derive about 35% of their budgets from public
money, largely research grants. In addition, much of the student loan and grant
money used to pay college tuition flows from taxpayer sources.
Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio
University, argues that its time to scale back taxpayer subsidies to
universities and move towards a voucher plan so that schools would have to
compete for students as paying customers. That might also end the punishing
double-digit tuition increases many schools have been imposing. Our colleges
and universities would benefit not only from some intellectual diversity, but
also some diversity and competition in how they pay their bills and how
students and taxpayers hold them to account.
from the New York Times, 2004-Nov-18, by John
Tierney:
Republicans
Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find
BERKELEY, Calif. - At the birthplace of the
free speech movement, campus radicals have a new target: the faculty that came
of age in the 60's. They say their professors have been preaching
multiculturalism and diversity while creating a political monoculture on
campus.
Conservatism is becoming more visible at the
University of California here, where students put out a feisty magazine called
The California Patriot and have made the Berkeley Republicans one of the
largest groups on campus. But here, as at schools nationwide, the professors
seem to be moving in the other direction, as evidenced by their campaign
contributions and two studies being published on Nov. 18.
One of the studies, a national survey of more
than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by
at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more
than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely
to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently
Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate
professor of economics at Santa Clara University and a co-author of the study.
In a separate study of voter registration
records, Professor Klein found a nine-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans
on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford. That study, which included
professors from the hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well
as the humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided
among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats
versus 6 Republicans.
The political imbalance on faculties has
inspired a campaign to have state legislatures and Congress approve an
"academic bill of rights" protecting students and faculty members
from discrimination for their political beliefs. The campaign is being led by
Students for Academic Freedom, a group with chapters at Berkeley and more than
135 other campuses. It was founded last year by the leftist-turned-conservative
David Horowitz, who helped start the 1960's antiwar movement while a graduate
student at Berkeley.
"Our goal is not to have the government
dictate who's hired but to take politics out of the hiring process and the
classroom," said Mr. Horowitz, who called the new studies the most
compelling evidence yet of hiring bias. "Right now, conservative students
are discouraged from pursuing scholarly careers, because they see very clearly
that their professors consider Republicans to be the enemy."
Academic leaders have resisted his group's
legislative proposal, saying that discrimination is rare and already forbidden,
and they dispute the accusations of faculty bias. Robert J. Birgeneau, the
chancellor of Berkeley, said that he was not sure if the new study of his
faculty accurately reflected the professors' political leanings, and that these
leanings were irrelevant anyway.
"The essence of a great university is
developing and sharing new knowledge as well as questioning old dogma,"
Dr. Birgeneau said. "We do this in an environment which prizes academic
freedom and freedom of expression. These principles are respected by all of our
faculty at U.C. Berkeley, no matter what their personal politics are."
Professors at Berkeley and other universities
provided unprecedented financial support for the Democratic Party this
election. For the first time, universities were at the top of the list of
organizations ranked by their employees' contributions to a presidential
candidate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan
group.
In first and second place, ahead of Time
Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, were the University of California system
and Harvard, whose employees contributed $602,000 and $340,000, respectively,
to Senator John Kerry. At both universities, employees gave about $19 to the
Kerry campaign for every dollar for the Bush campaign.
One theory for the scarcity of Republican
professors is that conservatives are simply not that interested in academic
careers. A Democrat on the Berkeley faculty, George P. Lakoff, who teaches
linguistics and is the author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and
Conservatives Think," said that liberals choose academic fields that fit
their world views. "Unlike conservatives," he said, "they
believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge
and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences
are about."
Some non-Democrats prefer to attribute the
imbalance to the structure of academia, which allows hiring decisions and
research agendas to be determined by small, independent groups of scholars.
These fiefs, the critics say, suffer from a problem described in The Federalist
Papers: an autonomous "small republic" is prone to be dominated by a
cohesive faction that uses majority voting to "outnumber and oppress the
rest," in Madison's words.
"Our colleges have become less
marketplaces of ideas than churches in which you have to be a true believer to
get a seat in the pews," said Stephen H. Balch, a Republican and the
president of the National Association of Scholars. "We've drifted to a
secular version of 19th-century denominational colleges, in which the
university's mission is to crusade against sin and make the country a morally
better place."
Dr. Balch's organization of what he calls
traditional scholars is publishing the two new faculty studies in its journal,
Academic Questions (online at www.nas.org). In one study, Professor Klein and
Charlotta Stern, a sociologist at the Institute for Social Research in Sweden,
asked the members of scholars' professional associations which party's
candidates they had mostly voted for over the previous decade.
The ratio of Democratic to Republican
professors ranged from 3 to 1 among economists to 30 to 1 among
anthropologists. The researchers found a much higher share of Republicans among
the nonacademic members of the scholars' associations, which Professor Klein
said belied the notion that nonleftists were uninterested in scholarly careers.
"Screened out, expelled or self-sorted,
they tend to land outside of academia because the crucial decisions - awarding
tenure and promotions, choosing which papers get published - are made by
colleagues hostile to their political views," said Professor Klein, who
classifies himself as a libertarian.
Martin Trow, an emeritus professor of public
policy at Berkeley who was chairman of the faculty senate and director of the
Center for Studies in Higher Education, said that professors tried not to
discriminate in hiring based on politics, but that their perspective could be
warped because so many colleagues shared their ideology.
"Their view comes to be seen not as a
political preference but what decent, intelligent human beings believe,"
said Dr. Trow, who calls himself a conservative. "Debate is stifled, and
conservatives either go in the closet or get to be seen as slightly kooky. So
if a committee is trying to decide between three well-qualified candidates, it
may exclude the conservative because he seems like someone who has poor
judgment."
The students' magazine, The California
Patriot, has frequently criticized Berkeley for the paucity of conservative
views and for cases of what it has called discrimination against conservative
students.
"I'm glad to get the liberal
perspective, but it would be nice to get the other side, too," said Kelly
Coyne, the editor of the magazine and a senior majoring in political science.
"I'm really having a hard time finding courses my last year. I don't want
to spend another semester listening to lectures about victims of American
oppression."
from the New York Sun, 2004-Oct-20, by Jacob
Gershman:
Columbia
Abuzz Over Underground Film
At a history class, a professor mockingly
tells a female Jewish student she cannot possibly have ancestral ties to Israel
because her eyes are green.
During a lecture, a professor of Arab
politics refuses to answer a question from an Israeli student and military
veteran but instead asks the student, "How many Palestinians have you
killed?"
At a student meeting on the topic of
divestment from Israel, a Jewish student is singled out as responsible for
death of Palestinian Arabs.
Those scenes are described by current and
former students interviewed for an underground documentary that is causing a
frisson of concern to ripple through the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia
University, where the incidents took place.
The film, about anti-Israel sentiment at the
school, has not yet been released to the public, but it has been screened for a
number of top officials of Columbia, and talk of its impact is spreading
rapidly on a campus where some students have complained of anti-Israel bias
among faculty members.
"The movie is shocking," one
Columbia senior, Ariel Beery, said.
"It is shocking to see blatant use of
racial stereotypes by professors and intimidation tactics by professors in
order to push a distinct ideological line on the curriculum," Mr. Beery,
who was interviewed for the film, said.
The film is the creation of the David
Project, a 2-year-old group based in Boston that advocates for Israel and is
led by the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, Charles Jacobs. The
David Project, which is refusing to make the film public, has screened it for
Barnard College's president, Judith Shapiro, and Columbia's provost, Alan
Brinkley, according to sources.
Neither Ms. Shapiro nor Mr. Brinkley would
return calls seeking comment about the film, though at a meeting in Washington
this week with women active in Jewish charitable work the Barnard president is
said to have spoken of how emotionally affected she was by the film.
With versions at 11 minutes and 25 minutes in
playing time, the film consists of interviews with several students who contend
that they have felt threatened academically for expressing a pro-Israel point
of view in classrooms.
One of the scholars discussed most in the
film, according to a person who has seen the film, is Joseph Massad, a
non-tenured professor of modern Arab politics, who is teaching a course about
Middle East nationalism this fall. Mr. Massad, a professor at Columbia's
department of Middle East and Asian languages and cultures, has likened Israel
to Nazi Germany and has said Israel doesn't have the right to exist as a Jewish
state.
In the film, a former Columbia undergraduate,
Tomy Schoenfeld, recalls attending a lecture about the Middle East conflict
given by Mr. Massad in spring 2001. At the end of the lecture, Mr. Schoenfeld
prefaced a question to the professor by informing Mr. Massad that he was
Israeli, Mr. Schoenfeld told The New York Sun. "Before I could continue,
he stopped me and said, 'Did you serve in the military?'" Mr. Schoenfeld,
who served in the Israeli Air Force between 1996 and 1999, recalled. He said
that he told Mr. Massad he had served in the military and that Mr. Massad asked
him how many Palestinians he had killed. When Mr. Schoenfeld refused to answer,
Mr. Massad said he wouldn't allow him to ask his question.
Mr. Massad did not return phone calls for
comment yesterday. Mr. Schoenfeld told the Sun that his encounter with Mr.
Massad was not representative of his dealings with Columbia professors and that
the Middle East-Asian department is "usually balanced."
Mr. Beery, the senior at the school, told the
Sun that anti-Israel bias is prevalent in the department and said the
documentary film demonstrates how many students at Columbia have been affected
by it.
"You would be surprised," Mr. Beery
said, "to find the number of students who were willing to stand up and be
counted as members of the student body who oppose the intimidation of students
in the classroom, especially on topics related to the Middle East."
In 2003, Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger,
convened a committee of six Columbia professors to investigate the possibility
of the school's declaring stricter boundaries between academic expression and
political activism. But the credibility of the investigation came into doubt
among those following the issue seriously when Mr. Bollinger told the New York
Daily News that the committee found no claims or evidence of bias or
intimidation in the classroom.
Mr. Beery said the committee did not look
hard enough for bias and said Jewish students at Columbia have no avenue for
pressing complaints about anti-Israel prejudice among faculty members.
"Because Jews are seen as this
overrepresented ethnic group and not prone to protests, they sweep it under the
rug," he said.
Columbia is looking to raise money for an
endowed professorship in Israeli studies to make up for what Mr. Bollinger has
said is lack of contemporary Israel scholarship at the school.
That effort comes at a time when the
university is under a cloud for having accepted money from the United Arab
Emirates, one of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East and a
country hostile to Jews and Israel, to help finance a chair named for the late
professor Edward Said, who was a writer and anti-Israel Palestinian activist.
Harvard University returned money from the UAE after complaints were raised
about the propriety of taking money from that source.
The situation of Jewish students on
anti-Israel campuses like Columbia is an issue that is coming into focus only
slowly among a Jewish communal leadership whose attention has been elsewhere.
The isolation of Jews on campuses has been recognized for decades.
One of the most famous letters ever written
by a Jewish figure was penned in 1918 by the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky and
sent to a South African university student. Jabotinsky had heard that in the
face of campus anti-Semitism the student was contemplating suicide. Jabotinsky
advised him that it would be cowardly for the student to take his own life and
that, instead, he should take heart from the Zionist stirrings, which were then
just beginning.
The letter, which is reproduced in facsimile
form in the "Encyclopedia Judaica," says: "I think, in a very
conservative estimate, that the next ten years will see the Jewish state of
Palestine ... a reality; probably less than ten." He said it would be
"foolish to forego all of this" because of anti-Semites at the
university.
Jewish students interviewed by this reporter at
Columbia suggest that they perceive their situation in a different light than
the student to whom Jabotinsky wrote. The Columbia students do not charge that
they are facing anti-Semitism on campus. They attach an importance to what they
see as a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments.
"They teach everything in the context of
one special, small struggle, when there are 23 countries out there where
minorities are being oppressed, where women are bound to their homes, where
homosexuals are being put in jail. They're ignoring the rest of the Middle East
in favor of a small dimension of it," Mr. Beery said.
from WorldNetDaily, 2004-Jul-6:
Teachers
union to screen Moore film
Convention showing of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' angers GOP members
Michael Moore's strongly anti-Bush film
"Fahrenheit 9/11" will be shown at the National Education Association
convention today in Washington, D.C., angering Republican members.
On Sunday, union officials distributed 10,000
fliers to individual state caucuses informing them the film would be screened
in the main convention hall immediately after a speech by presumptive
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, the Washington Times
reported.
Republican members, who comprise more than
one-fourth of the union, reacted angrily to the announcement and the sharp
anti-Bush tone of the convention.
Sissy Jochmann from the Pennsylvania
delegation, called the Moore film "vicious," the Times reported, and
said she would publicly call for "a timeout" if union leaders and
members continued "bullying us with all their anti-Bush and
anti-Republican rhetoric."
Defending the showing of the film, NEA
President Reg Weaver said Moore donated it to help the union raise more
political funds.
The union is asking delegates to contribute
$20 to the NEA PAC to see the film.
"Some delegates from Wisconsin were
sitting around at dinner the other night and said, 'Wouldn't it be great to
have [the film] at the NEA Representative Assembly,' Weaver said, according to
the Times.
"People contacted members of the
California delegation. The next thing I knew, we got it. It's voluntary. If
people don't want to watch it, they don't have to," the union president
said.
Weaver led off the convention July 4 with a
speech blasting the Bush administration for refusing to accept NEA positions
and "the expertise that this organization brings to the table."
As WorldNetDaily reported, Moore's film got a
rave review last week in the Communist Party USA's newspaper People's Weekly
World. The paper noted the controversial film was packing theaters across the
country. The Communist Party USA is fielding no candidate for president, as it
usually does, in favor of forming a "united front" for unseating
President Bush.
"The movie is a documentary that the
American people themselves are a part of," explained the paper. "It
follows the dark history of the Bush administration, hatched from the rotten
egg of a stolen election. It shines a light on the dark corners of the Bush
family's brazen disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of African American
voters in Florida, the Bushes' early -- and oily -- alliance with the ruling
Saudi families, including the Bin Ladens, and the unspeakable toll on America'
working-class families."
from The
Daily Princetonian, 2004-Sep-13, by Melisa Gao:
Professors
fund liberal candidates
More than 90 percent of
donations from University employees this election cycle have gone to liberal
causes, as Princeton joins peer institutions in reinforcing the image of a
left-leaning ivory tower.
After effectively clinching the Democratic
nomination on Super Tuesday, Sen. John Kerry secured $40,950 from donors
identifying themselves as employees or affiliates of Princeton University.
President Bush received a sole donation of $250, according to FEC records
through June.
One of the most active donors is physics
professor Chiara Nappi, who together with her husband, a professor at the
Institute for Advanced Studies, has given $13,000 to liberal candidates and
causes. Another $6,000 is on the way this week.
"I'm extremely worried about the current
situation in the United States," Nappi said Friday. "America will not
survive the way it is if we let President Bush continue."
Nappi, who is particularly concerned about
the environment and the war in Iraq, often writes to local papers and emails
friends and relatives about her views.
"If I could, I would go work against
him, but I can't," she said. "The only thing I can do is give
money."
Across the aisle, the only donation to Bush
came from Office of Government Affairs official Christopher Carter, a former
Republican legislative assistant.
Carter, like several professors, declined to
comment, saying, "The political donations that I give are a personal
decision of my own, and I separate that from my professional actions."
In addition to donations made directly to the
candidates, the Democratic National Committee has raised $53,351 from
University donors for the 2004 election cycle, while the Republican National
Committee has received only $500. Liberal political action committees such as
Moveon.org have raked in thousands more from University affiliates.
Kerry and Bush stopped accepting private
donations after their respective nominating conventions because they both elected
to take federal matching funds.
Liberal academia?
The University's results were in step with
those of Yale and Harvard, both of which had 95 percent of donations going to
Kerry. Harvard employees donated $213,045 to Kerry, representing the largest amount
given by the employees of any institution or company, according to the Center
for Public Integrity.
To computer science professor Andrew Appel,
who has given $4,000 to Kerry this year, the imbalance is not unexpected.
"Does it surprise me that smart people
should be supporting Kerry?" Appel said. "No."
But Appel, who is teaching a freshman seminar
this fall titled "Election Machinery," emphasized that personal
political preferences should not affect what goes on in the classroom.
"I do my best to make class be
scholarship and learning, and not influenced by partisan ideas," he said.
Some conservative students wonder, however,
whether professors' opinions might filter through in more subtle ways such as
the topics they choose to discuss.
"That a professor gives to Kerry over
President Bush does not mean they're going to be slanted or biased," said
Evan Baehr '05, president of the College Republicans. "But it should lead
you to start asking questions."
In March, Baehr started a Princeton chapter
of Students for Academic Freedom, a group dedicated to increasing conservative
thought in academia.
Who gives and who gets
Through June, University employees have
donated a total of $170,494 to candidates and political action committees. Of
that, only $13,600 has gone to Republican causes, primarily Congressional
candidates such as Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.).
Not surprisingly, support has been strong for
Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a former physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory. Holt has received $23,550 from University employees during the
election cycle.
The largest donors recorded by the FEC were
former Wilson School visiting professor Barbara Blumenthal and anthropology
professor Alan Mann, each giving $25,000 to the DNC.
All other contributions were for $2,000 or
less, though some professors were repeat donors. Under the Bipartisan Campaign
Reform Act of 2002, individuals are limited to giving $2,000 to any candidate,
$25,000 to a political party and $5,000 to a political action committee per
year.
The law was designed to eliminate the role of
soft money in elections, but critics argue the money is simply being redirected
to so-called 527 organizations ? independent nonprofits that can accept
unlimited donations.
Those contributions are not monitored or
recorded by the FEC, but a few wealthy political activists are getting
attention for the large checks they're writing.
Topping that list is University trustee and
billionaire philanthropist Peter Lewis '55. Lewis and close friend George Soros
have each pledged $10 million to America Coming Together, a 527 dedicated to
defeating Bush through get-out-the-vote efforts in swing states such as Lewis'
native Ohio.
Lewis, the former chairman of Progressive,
Inc., has already donated more than $11 million to other anti-Bush groups,
according to the Center for Public Integrity. His current total is $14.3
million, making him the single largest donor for any election cycle.
Lewis is also the University's single
greatest contributor. His donations, which total $116 million, have funded the
Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Gehry science library
currently under construction.
from the Los Angeles DailyNews.com,
2004-Sep-13, by Alan Bonsteel:
With
teachers, don't do as they do ...
Educators sending their children to private school more and more
It's hard to imagine a better expert on the
quality of Los Angeles' public schools than the teachers who work there. It may
come as a shock, therefore, to discover that Los Angeles' public school teachers
are abandoning those government-run schools and sending their own kids to
private schools at a far higher rate than the general public.
According to a new study based on the 2000
Census by educational researcher Denis Doyle of Chevy Chase, Md., 24.5 percent
of Los Angeles' public-school teachers are sending their own children to
private schools, versus only 15.7 percent of the general public.
If Los Angeles were exceptional, it might be
easy to shrug off the numbers. But throughout the state and throughout the
nation, the numbers tell the same story. In six of 11 California metropolitan
areas studied by Doyle -- including four of the five largest -- public-school
teachers send their kids to private schools at a higher rate than the public.
In these California metropolitan areas, 14.5
percent of public-school teachers are sending their children to private
schools, versus 12.3 percent of the general public. Throughout the nation's
cities, 21.5 percent of public-school teachers are sending their kids to private
schools, versus only 17.5 percent of the general public.
Debate is the lifeblood of a democracy, and
hardly any issue today is more hotly debated than school choice, with reformers
anxious to build on school-choice successes and the old guard pleading for one
last chance to fix our broken government-run schools. But hardly anything will
get a debater laughed off the stage faster, and end the debate quicker, than
proof that the debater's private life doesn't square with the public posturing.
Congress this year enacted the nation's
newest school-choice program in Washington, D.C. What tipped the scales toward
passage was the revelation that not one congressional opponent of the program
was willing to enroll his children in Washington's public schools, with the
vast majority of those kids sent to private schools. Actions do, after all,
speak louder than words.
We've long known that school-choice opponents
Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson sent all of their kids to
private schools. So do many of the children of teachers' union bosses, among
the bitterest opponents of school choice because their paychecks depend on
holding children captive in their schools. Now, we have the most telling data
of all -- the actual numbers of how many of the inside experts on the quality
of our public schools, the teachers themselves, are rejecting those schools for
their own children.
Hardly any aspect of American society is more
divisive than the monopoly our public schools have on the education of our
children. Wealthier families have the financial means to send their children to
higher-quality private schools, or to be able to buy a house in a fancy
neighborhood with relatively good public schools. Meanwhile, poorer and mostly
minority families are Balkanized into dysfunctional, racially segregated public
schools, turning our low-income Latino and African-American families into a
permanent underclass. That's especially true here in California, where the
shockingly high dropout rates of these kids have led them to gangs and guns,
and crammed our prisons to the point of overflowing.
When Doyle released his last results in 1994,
there was only a single school-choice program in the United States, in Milwaukee,
and it enrolled only about 2,500 students. Most observers didn't expect it to
survive the legal onslaughts of the National Education Association. But survive
it did, and there are now five publicly funded K-12 school-choice programs
throughout the United States.
We have now reached a critical mass, where
the success of school choice will be obvious to all. As Will Rogers once said,
"People don't change their minds because of arguments. They change their
minds because of observation." The debate on school choice is over. The
end is near for the monopoly.
Alan Bonsteel, M.D., is president of
California Parents for Educational Choice.
from the New York Post, 2004-Jul-2, by Jay P.
Greene and Marcus A. Winters:
THE
PUBLIC SCHOOLS' DIRTY LITTLE SECRET
July 2, 2004 -- MORE money for public
education? Like apple pie and the flag, everyone's for it.
But, it turns out, only because most
Americans don't know how much cash the schools already get. And, a new survey
found, when they hear how much public schools now spend per pupil, a clear
majority think schools already have enough to do the job.
The survey, whose results were reported this
week, was sponsored by the Education Testing Service, the same people who
administer the SAT and GRE.
Most people have no idea how much money
public schools spend per child. Almost half of those surveyed (48 percent)
estimated that public schools spend less than $5,000 per pupil. Nearly 3 in 10
Americans think that public schools spend between $5,000 and $10,000; only 14
percent believe that schools spend over $10,000 per student.
Not even close to the mark. The U.S.
Department of Education says total spending was actually $9,354 per student in
2001-02. Given the pace of increases in previous years, this year's per-pupil
spending undoubtedly approached if not exceeded $10,000.
So: Almost 86 percent of the public
underestimates how much money public schools get. And the average American is
off by a factor of two.
To be fair, most Americans would also
probably be unable to guess the amount spent on sewers or roads. But that
ignorance isn't driving a huge artificial demand for needless increases in
sewer and road spending. In education, however, ignorance of actual spending
explains a large part of the push to spend more and more.
When people are confronted with the reality
of how much we spend on education, the near-universal support for bigger
outlays crumbles.
The pollsters, using a conservative figure
for spending (leaving out capital costs like construction), told people in their
survey that that public schools spend between $7,000 and $9,000 per student.
Once they heard that, 62 percent said that amount should be enough.
Only ignorance makes taxpayers think that the
public schools need more money.
The canard that public schools are
under-funded is less a function of an uninformed public than of a misled one:
The teacher unions and their allies have convinced taxpayers that schools need
more money partly by failing to mention how much they already have. They parade
around to the media some disadvantaged students and a few carefully selected
run-down schools and then simply assert to an unsuspecting public that more
funds are necessary.
Never mind that taxpayers can provide
enormous sums to schools and it's still possible for students to be poor and
schools to be run-down -- if the money is being wasted.
And there's good reason to believe the money is
being wasted, given that per-pupil spending has doubled over the last three
decades while student achievement has remained stagnant.
For public schools to cry poor like they do
is a bit like Warren Buffett disguising himself in disheveled clothes and
walking the streets of Omaha, cup in hand, begging unsuspecting passersby for
change: Quite a few people would reach down deep in their pockets for this
seemingly homeless stranger. But if they ever caught wind that the man on the
corner with the "Homeless Vet" sign was really one of the world's
richest men looking for another way to make a buck, they'd not only stop
giving, they might just kick him in the shins.
America's public schools spend more than $400
billion each year -- more than we spend on national defense (even with the War
on Terror) and more than all federal domestic programs except Social Security
and health-care programs.
For those who argue that the vast sums
devoted to public education are insufficient in the face of even larger
educational challenges, here's a challenge: Tell the American people how much
you think it would cost to produce what you believe is an adequate education.
Name the price. Then, once we reach that amount, adjusting for inflation, we
can stop the endless calls for spending more.
But we suspect that advocates for increasing
spending never will name the price of an adequate education. If they did, the
American people would finally become aware of the true price tag -- and refuse
to pay.
Jay P. Greene is a senior fellow and
Marcus A. Winters is a research associate at the Manhattan Institute's
Education Research Office.
See Jim Peacock's ZeroIntelligence.net
for running coverage of the school rule infraction zero tolerance policies.
from the Associated Press via ABCNews.com,
2003-Sep-9:
Group
Assails Schools on U.S. History
Story of U.S. Accomplishments Gest Short Shrift in Nation's Schools, Report
Says
WASHINGTON -- The story of America's heroes,
accomplishments and ideals is getting surprisingly short shrift in a place of
great influence: the nation's public schools.
That's the theme of a provocative report
about U.S. civics and history education that is drawing praise from leaders and
groups whose views span the ideological spectrum.
Produced by the nonpartisan Albert Shanker
Institute and released Tuesday, "Education for Democracy" is the
latest effort to try to strengthen the nation's grasp of its own past and
present. Authors hope it will lead to curriculum changes and stir debate about
social studies lessons as people reflect on the terrorist attacks of two years
ago.
Based on studies of text books, research by
authors and other reviews, the report contends students get a distorted account
that their country is irredeemably flawed. Schools should offer a more positive
tone but should avoid propaganda or patriotic drills, the report says.
"We're not conveying to young people
forcefully enough the American heritage, the American way of life," said
Lee Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "This report puts a
strong emphasis on the inadequacy of our civic knowledge and our civic
engagement."
Over the past 30 years, the percentage of
people under 25 who vote has dropped 15 percentage points, the report says. It
cites other signs of apathy and disengagement, such as when children touring
Washington said they knew Memorial Day as "the day the pools open."
"Vietnam, Watergate, impeachment
hearings, the rottenness of campaign finance, rising cynicism about politicians
in general we've gone excessively in our society ... toward cynicism,"
said Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
"It's important that students understand
not only our flaws and failings, but also the degree to which the United States
was really the first modern democracy and the degree to which it has inspired
democrats around the world," Diamond said. "It's a call for balance;
it's not a call for purging from the history books honest criticism of our
failings."
The report has drawn support from Republicans
and Democrats, left-leaning and right-leaning think tanks, teachers unions and
school administrators. Those who have signed on include former President
Clinton and Jeane Kirkpatrick, senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute and U.N. ambassador under President Reagan.
"We definitely have had terrible
problems as a nation, but we also have a society that is totally different than
that of a totalitarian society. Children need to understand and value what has
been built here," said Sandra Feldman, president of the Shanker institute
and of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second largest
teachers union.
The report accompanies an earlier
institute-sponsored study, which contended that history and civics are lost in
the national emphasis on reading and math. The new report says recent studies
of text books confirm a "strong negative bias" about the story of
America.
But text books are nothing more than tools,
and experienced, knowledgeable teachers can ensure balance is provided, said
Peggy Altoff, an active member of the National Council for the Social Studies,
an umbrella organization for teachers of history, political science and other
fields.
Altoff has not seen a classroom imbalance in
her career as a social studies supervisor, formerly in Maryland and now in
District 11 of the public schools in Colorado Springs, Colo.
"I can't imagine anyone intentionally
emphasizing the negative in curriculum for children," Altoff said.
"As professional social studies educators, we are trained to recognize our
responsibility to present a balanced view."
The report criticizes a lack of teaching
about undemocratic societies, saying the comparison could extol the brilliance
of America's system. It urges broader history and social studies requirements
in schools and suggests a tighter focus on morality in lessons.
Civics education already is on the agenda of
Congress. The majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate, along with
Alliance for Representative Democracy, will hold a three-day conference on the
subject starting next week.
from the Boston Globe, 2004-Aug-23, by Naomi Aoki:
Harshness
of red marks has students seeing purple
When it comes to correcting papers and
grading tests, purple is emerging as the new red.
"If you see a whole paper of red, it
looks pretty frightening," said Sharon Carlson, a health and physical
education teacher at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Northampton. "Purple
stands out, but it doesn't look as scary as red."
That's the cue pen makers and office supply
superstores say they have gotten from teachers as the $15 billion
back-to-school retail season kicks off. They say focus groups and conversations
with teachers have led them to conclude that a growing number of the nation's
educators are switching to purple, a color they perceive as
"friendlier" than red.
As a result, Paper Mate introduced purple to
its assortment of blue, red, and green X-Tend pens and increased distribution
of existing purple pens this school year. Barry Calpino, Paper Mate's vice
president and general manager, estimated that the Bellwood, Ill., company
boosted production of purple pens by at least 10 percent. He said purple will
now be a standard color in all its new product lines.
Office superstores such as Staples and
OfficeMax also are making a splash with purple pens, stocking more of them,
adding purple to multicolor packs, and selling all-purple packs. By comparison,
Staples did not stock any exclusively purple pen packs last year and it hardly
had any purple pens in its stores two years ago, said Robert George, the
Framingham chain's senior vice president of general merchandise. Now, he said,
sales of purple pens are growing at a faster clip than pen sales overall.
A mix of red and blue, the color purple
embodies red's sense of authority but also blue's association with serenity,
making it a less negative and more constructive color for correcting student
papers, color psychologists said. Purple calls attention to itself without
being too aggressive. And because the color is linked to creativity and
royalty, it is also more encouraging to students.
"The concept of purple as a replacement
for red is a pretty good idea," said Leatrice Eiseman, director of the
Pantone Color Institute in Carlstadt, N.J., and author of five books on color.
"You soften the blow of red. Red is a bit over-the-top in its
aggression."
For office supply stores, color and fashion
trends spell opportunity and risk. The trends allow them to freshen up staid
old categories such as pens and markers, fueling sales. But getting a trend
wrong -- betting on purple pens when teachers and students are buying green,
for example -- can cost them sales during a critical retail period.
Red's legacy as the color used in correcting
papers and marking mistakes goes back to the 1700s, the era of the quill pen.
In those days, red ink was used by clerks and accountants to correct ledgers.
From there, it found its way into teachers' hands.
But two or three decades ago, an anti-red
sentiment began surfacing among teachers. Since then, no one color had emerged
as red's replacement.
Is purple here to stay?
"I do not use red," said Robin
Slipakoff, who teaches second and third grades at Mirror Lake Elementary School
in Plantation, Fla. "Red has a negative connotation, and we want to
promote self-confidence. I like purple. I use purple a lot."
Sheila Hanley, who teaches reading and
writing to first- and second-graders at John F. Kennedy Elementary School in
Randolph, said: "Red is definitely a no-no. But I don't know if purple is
in."
Hanley said a growing contingent of her
colleagues is using purple. They prefer it to green and yellow because it
provides more contrast to the black or blue ink students are asked to write in.
And they prefer it to orange, which they think is too similar to red.
But aside from avoiding red, Hanley said she
is not sure color matters much. At times, she uses sticky notes rather than
writing on a child's paper. What's important, she said, is to focus on how an
assignment can be improved rather than on what is wrong with it, she said.
Ruslan Nedoruban, who is entering seventh
grade at his Belmont school, said red markings on his papers make him feel
"uncomfortable."
His mother, Victoria Nedoruban, who is taking
classes to improve her English, said she thinks papers should be corrected in
red.
"I hate red," she said. "But
because I hate it, I want to work harder to make sure there isn't any red on my
papers."
Red has other defenders. California high-school
teacher Carol Jago, who has been working with students for more than 30 years,
said she has no plans to stop using red. She said her students do not seem
psychologically scarred by how she wields her pen. And if her students are
mixing up "their," "there," and "they're," she
wants to shock them into fixing the mistake.
"We need to be honest and forthright
with students," Jago said. "Red is honest, direct, and to the point.
I'm sending the message, 'I care about you enough to care how you present
yourself to the outside world.' "
from the Wall Street Journal via
OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Sep-16, by Robert Maranto:
No
Class
Why are "public" schools closed to the public?
LOWER MERION, Pa.--It's back-to-school time.
Unfortunately, despite school report cards and mandates like No Child Left
Behind, many public schools still treat parents like mushrooms: feed them guano
and keep them in the dark.
This occurred to me when, like any good
parent, I called the principal's office at my local public elementary school to
check it out before sending my son. Alas, despite spending $20,000 per child,
our school had trouble returning three phone messages left during normal
business hours. On my fourth try I reached a live person, and had a brief
conversation:
"Hi, I'm Bob Maranto. I'm a parent who
lives in [your school's] attendance zone. My son will be old enough for
kindergarten next fall. He's actually right on the edge, so he could go next
fall or the following fall, and I was wondering if I could come visit the school
sometime."
"We don't have any visiting this
year," the administrator replied. "We're doing construction and a lot
of things are going on."
"Could I watch a class in session?"
"No, even when there's no construction
you could not watch a class."
"Well, could I meet my son's
teacher?"
"No, the teachers are busy teaching all
day and then they go home."
As we used to say when I was in government,
this is customer service worthy of the Internal Revenue Service. It also
corresponds to playground gossip about this school, which has test scores lower
than nearby schools.
A mere five months and 22 phone calls, faxes,
and e-mails later--to the superintendent, school board, principal, and various
other "public servants"--I was allowed to visit my son's likely
school. Someday, I hope to watch a class.
But must it be so hard? Why not open public
schools to the public?
In fairness, as my local school
administrators complain, parents are a pain. Some have a "gotcha"
mentality, some are rude, and many try to get a special deal for their kids.
Yet parents are not the only ones to blame.
Traditional public schools view parents less as partners than as ATMs. Only 4%
of American education schools offer courses on working with parents. Journalist
Elinor Burkett estimates that the typical principal must comply with 470,000
federal, state, and local regulations. After all that bureaucracy, principals
have no energy left over to work with parents--better to distract them with
bake sales.
But some public schools do better. Last year
I led an accreditation visit to an Arizona charter school, Tucson's Academy of
Math and Science. I slipped away from the guided tour, roaming the parking lot
as school let out to question parents about how school staff treated them.
Thirteen of 14 parents said their school welcomed their input. As one put it,
"if you complain about something, they let you act on it to fix the
problem." Parents designed the dress code and sports program, and helped
evaluate teachers. Half the parents had watched classes. As one lady assured
me: "it's easy--you just talk to Mrs. Shannon at the front desk, tell her
which class you want to go watch, and she'll tell you which room it's in."
Why can't all public schools work like that?
After seven years of research, I'm convinced
that Arizona public schools cater to parents because of school choice combined
with heavy reliance on state funding rather than local property taxes. Unlike
most states, Arizona has open enrollment across district lines as well as 500
charter schools--many started by teachers--so parents unhappy with one school
can easily find another. In addition, state funding means that education
dollars follow enrollment, so schools that alienate parents lose money--which
in turn alarms school boards and makes principals unemployed.
In response to competition, particularly
competition from charter schools, Arizona public schools increasingly offer
Montessori options, back-to-basics programs and a wide range of other
innovations to keep parents from going to other public schools and taking state
dollars with them. And they do all this on budgets far less than in my state.
But until my state's politicians get their
act together, parents like me will have to make a nuisance of ourselves just to
see the inside of a public school--never mind influence its policies. How
public is that?
Mr. Maranto teaches political science and
public administration at Villanova University.
from TPDL 2003-Sep-15, from the Washington
Times, by Bruce Bartlett:
Tuition
plus tilt
This is the time of year when millions of
parents send their children off to universities. Unfortunately, one price of
getting one's children into a top school these days is that they may be
subjected to four years of liberal propaganda.
Those in academia like to call the liberal
orientation of most college faculty a red herring. But objective research
continually shows it is not. The latest data appear in the Aug. 29 issue of the
Chronicle of Higher Education. A solid majority of those teaching at both
public and private universities described themselves as being either liberal or
far left. Less than a third considered themselves middle of the road and just
15 percent said they were conservative. Not surprisingly, 50 percent of the
general public considers college professors to be more liberal than they are.
Interestingly, this puts most faculty members
well to the left of their students. According to the same source, less than 28
percent of them would be classified as liberal or far left. More than half
consider themselves to be middle of the road and 21 percent say they are
conservative. A new Gallup poll suggests that this may even understate the
case. It found that 29 percent of those age 18 to 24 consider themselves
conservatives, with just 30 percent saying they are liberals.
The Chronicle is not the first to document
the leftist orientation of most university faculty. A survey by pollster Frank
Luntz last year found just 3 percent of Ivy League professors called themselves
Republicans, with 57 percent belonging to the Democratic Party. Among those
voting in the 2000 election, Al Gore captured 84 percent of their votes. Just 9
percent voted for George W. Bush, barely more than the 6 percent who voted for
Ralph Nader. Among the population as a whole, the presidential vote was almost
evenly split between Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore.
The irony here is that unlike almost all
other workers in society, university professors are granted tenure — a lifetime
job from which it is almost impossible to be fired — precisely in order to
guarantee freedom of expression. But in practice, the tenure process has become
the means by which the left rigorously weeds out conservatives. In many
university departments, opposition from a single faculty member is all that is
necessary to deny tenure. These days, such a blackball is most likely to be
used against a conservative, especially in disciplines such as sociology,
history, English and government.
Professor Robert Maranto of Villanova
discussed this insidious practice in the Baltimore Sun on July 31. "While
colleges strive for ethnic diversity," he wrote, "they actively
oppose ideological diversity." The result is a lack of meaningful debate
on campuses that makes corporate boardrooms a model of give-and-take. The
reason is that in business, those who keep out new ideas lose market share to
competitors. "But within the ivory tower, professors can hold dumb ideas
for decades with no accountability," Mr. Maranto notes.
Recently, there has been an effort in
Colorado to bring some accountability to the state's public universities and
break the left-wing stranglehold over them. Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, has
publicly complained about the lack of political diversity on state campuses:
"I think that if you're in a political science department, we ought to
strive to make sure that there are people who understand and who can explain
political philosophy from the left as well as from the right."
According to the Denver Post, of the 78
political science professors at state colleges in Colorado, 45 are registered
Democrats and just nine are Republicans. This means it is very unlikely a
political science student will ever hear the subject taught by a Republican. In
math, science and many other subjects, this doesn't matter. But in political
science it does. Students are simply not getting a complete education in the
field if they only hear one side to every political issue.
Predictably, the universities scream bloody
murder at any suggestion of adding conservatives to their faculties to improve
diversity of opinion. They are all for quotas when it means admitting
unqualified minority students, but allowing students to be taught by a
conservative would somehow be a violation of everything the university stands
for, it seems.
Of course, universities are right when they
say quotas are no answer to the problem of liberal bias on campus — just as
they are not the answer to improving minority enrollment. On the other hand,
the taxpayers of Colorado are within their rights to demand accountability for
the $817 million they will generously give the state's public universities this
year. It is reasonable for them to ask that they be more than subsidiaries of
the Democratic National Committee.
from Legal Affairs, 2004-Jan/Feb, by Richard
Posner:
SMOOTH
SAILING
Democracy doesn't need Deliberation Day. If
spending a day talking about the issues were a worthwhile activity, you
wouldn't have to pay voters to do it. By Richard Posner The proposal by
Professors Ackerman and Fishkin for a Deliberation Day, on which citizens lured
by federal financial incentives would engage in collective deliberation over
issues and candidates in the forthcoming national election, seems to me to
misunderstand what modern political democracy is and should be.
The remote inspiration for Deliberation Day
is Athenian democracy, in which the citizenry as a whole was both the
legislature and the principal court, and the appointment of most executive
officials by lot prevented a distinct governing class from emerging (or at
least impeded its emergence). It was a genuine and in many respects progressive
and attractive system of self-rule, but one utterly irrelevant to a vast and
complex modern polity such as the United States or, for that matter, a small
and complex polity such as Belgium.
Modern democracy, for reasons of efficiency
and feasibility, is representative democracy, which involves a division between
rulers and ruled. The rulers are officials who are drawn from--to be
realistic--a governing class consisting of ambitious, determined, and
charismatic seekers of power, and the role of the citizenry is to vote
candidates for officialdom in and out of office on the basis of their perceived
leadership qualities and policy preferences. The system exploits the division
of labor and resembles the economic market, in which sellers and consumers
constitute distinct classes. In the marketplace, the slogan ``consumer
sovereignty'' signifies that the essentially negative power of the consumer--the
power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose though not to
create--constrains the behavior of sellers despite the vast gulf of knowledge
and incentives that separates sellers and consumers. The same relationship
exists between politicians and voters.
There is no Deliberation Day on which
consumers engage in collective deliberation over competing brands of toasters
or about whether to use microwave ovens instead. Consumers economize on their
time by responding to alternative sales pitches and using their experience of
particular sellers and products to guide their evaluation of the pitches. It is
the same in the political marketplace. Voters are guided by their reactions to
the presentation of issues and candidates in political campaigns and by their
experience of living under particular officials and particular policies.
As we recently learned in the California
recall election, the wrath of a disappointed electorate can be mighty. And so
can the power of an alienated, ``turned-off'' electorate. The fact that only
about half of all eligible voters (and often even fewer) actually bother to
vote in most political elections is commonly taken as a failure of democracy.
Not at all. The decision not to vote may reflect equal satisfaction with the
candidates, equal dissatisfaction, or rational indifference between them. It is
as important that citizens not be forced to vote as it is that the barriers to
new parties and to insurgents like Arnold Schwarzenegger be kept low so that
our two-party system does not degenerate into duopoly.
Under democracy, presidents and other
political big shots have to listen to their underlings, who might otherwise
rally public opinion against them. Some of the greatest errors and atrocities
of nondemocratic regimes are committed because no one dares to stand up against
the tyrant, who becomes progressively isolated from the criticism and feedback
that would enable him to correct his course.
Despite the undoubted mediocrity of many of
our politicians and the ignorance and apathy of many of our citizens, our
system of representative democracy has served us well. Has there been, all
things considered, a more successful nation in world history than the United
States?
I AM UNCLEAR ABOUT WHAT COLLECTIVE
DELIBERATION WOULD ADD to our political system, but I am pretty clear about
what it would subtract. It would subtract from the time that people have for
their other pursuits--personal, familial, and commercial. Most people work
fewer than 250 days a year after the deduction of weekends, holidays,
vacations, and sick leave. Adding another national holiday would represent a
small but not trivial reduction in the amount of productive work.
Unlike Hannah Arendt, and perhaps Ackerman
and Fishkin as well, I do not believe that private concerns are petty and that
people are fully human only when they are deliberating about the ``common
good.'' I do not even think such deliberations are productive of much except
sound and fury. Widespread deliberation by citizens at large on issues of
politics would mainly just reduce the civility of our politics by raising the
temperature of public debate, making our politics more ideological and
therefore more divisive.
It is one of the glories of a two-party
system that by focusing the parties' attention on the swing voter, the system
tends to draw the parties together ideologically, since the swing voters are
the least likely to be drawn to ideological extremes. Multiparty systems tend,
in contrast, to spawn ideological parties, because in such systems a minority
party organized around an ideology can achieve influence or even dominance. It
seems to me that the last thing we need in order to solve the problems of our
country is ideological strife.
I will be called cynical for doubting the
value of political debate among ordinary citizens, for casting them in the role
of passive onlookers of a struggle among ambitious politicians, and for
questioning the possibility of meaningful reform of policy. I am merely being
realistic. Reform does not well out of deliberation, but reflects passions and
interests. Abolitionism, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the
opposition to the war in Vietnam, the rise of free-market ideology, welfare
reform, and the gay-rights movement were not the product of discussion among
voters debating on the model of the academic seminar (the implicit model,
naturally, of academic reflection on the political process by the proponents of
deliberative democracy, academics all). They were the product of moral and
political entrepreneurs tapping into wells of discontent among minorities and
eventually getting the attention of the politicians.
People are intelligent and engaged about
issues that concern them directly and that do not require abstract analysis to
understand. The more local and concrete the issue, the more meaningful
deliberation by average citizens is; the more remote and abstract, the less
meaningful such deliberation is. People know when they are hurting, and the
knowledge motivates and engages them in political struggle. They have no
interest in debate. That interest resides in the articulate class. Rights are
seized; they are not bestowed by average citizens enticed into deliberative
conclaves weeks before a national election.
I have difficulty suppressing the uncharitable
thought that there may be an element of bad faith in the deliberative-democracy
movement generally (I do not mean in Ackerman and Fishkin particularly). I
think that what motivates many deliberative democrats is not a love of
democracy or a faith in the people, but a desire to change specific political
outcomes, which they believe they could do through argument, if only anyone
could be persuaded to listen, because they are masters of argumentation. I
infer this secret agenda from the fact that most proponents of deliberative
democracy advocate aggressive judicial review, which removes many issues from
democratic control; are coy about indicating what policies they dislike but
would accept; and are uncommonly fond of subjecting U.S. citizens to control by
international organizations of questionable, and often of no, democratic
pedigree. I sense a power grab by the articulate class whose comparative
advantage is--deliberation.
Richard Posner is a judge on the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the
University of Chicago Law School. He is the author most recently of Law,
Pragmatism, and Democracy.
from the Forum of Fargo, North Dakota, 2004-Mar-25,
by Amy
Dalrymple:
Smoker
banned from Hillsboro prom
An 18-year-old Hillsboro, N.D., girl will
miss her senior prom because administrators say she violated school policy when
she smoked a cigarette off school grounds.
Leona ``Oni'' Fitzpatrick had a dress picked
out and a date lined up, but she is banned from the dance because the
principal's wife saw her smoke at a local bank.
Her parents appealed the decision, saying
their daughter did nothing illegal.
But School Board members unanimously stuck by
the policy, which suspends students from extracurricular activities for using
alcohol, tobacco or narcotics.
``Everyone's talking about prom,''
Fitzpatrick said. ``I really want to go. It's my senior year.''
Fitzpatrick said she started smoking at age
15, but quit after her grandfather died last month from a smoking-related
disease.
In February, the principal's wife, who works
as a teller for a Hillsboro bank, reported to administrators she saw
Fitzpatrick smoke on two separate occasions, Fitzpatrick said.
Also that month, Fitzpatrick gave a speech
for a class about smokers' rights, in which she admitted being a smoker.
Principal Kevin Coles said he could not
comment about circumstances surrounding a specific student.
But he said any student who is caught using
alcohol, tobacco or narcotics is suspended from extracurricular activities,
according to North Dakota High School Activities Association rules.
In 2002, the Hillsboro School Board extended
that policy to include prom and other dances as extracurricular activities.
That rule is an effort to encourage students
who are not involved in sports or other activities to evaluate their
destructive behaviors, Coles said.
``Prior to this rule, a kid who is not out
for a sport, music, speech, and they were smoking across the street, there
would never be a penalty for them,'' he said.
This is the first time the policy has
prevented someone from attending prom, Coles said.
School Board President Paul Fossum said even
though Fitzpatrick is legally old enough to smoke, she still needs to comply
with school rules.
Fitzpatrick's parents attended the last
School Board meeting to appeal the decision. But Fossum said board members were
unanimous when they stuck by the policy.
``We view prom as a privilege,'' Fossum said.
``Just like our activities are privileges. It's a school function.''
Charles Fitzpatrick said the way his daughter
has been treated is cruel and unusual punishment.
She has been suspended from extracurriculars
for 18 weeks, or the remainder of the school year. Her participation in pep
band and choir have also been affected.
``She did nothing illegal,'' Charles
Fitzpatrick said. ``She's a nice girl, she's a great kid.''
Oni Fitzpatrick said she's received a lot of
support from her peers and she's hoping they'll petition for her to attend prom
on April 3.
``Welcome to Hillsboro,'' Charles Fitzpatrick
said. ``Set your watch back 500 years.''
Readers can reach Forum reporter Amy
Dalrymple at (701) 241-5590
(The following item also appears in the Manufacturing Madness chapter.)
from Reuters, 2003-Dec-8:
ADHD
drugs' long-term effects examined
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Drugs given to children
to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder could have long-term effects
on their growing brains, studies on rats suggest.
Several studies published on Monday show that
rats given a popular ADHD drug were less likely to want to use cocaine later in
life, but also often acted clinically depressed and behaved differently from
rats give dummy injections.
While rats are different from humans, the
studies suggest that doctors should watch children for long-term effects, too.
In the United States between 3 percent and 5
percent of children are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, marked by
reduced ability to concentrate, difficulty in organizing and impulsive
behavior.
Patients are commonly prescribed stimulants
but the practice is sometimes controversial.
William Carlezon of McLean Hospital and
Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues raised two groups of rats. One
was given Ritalin, known generically as methylphenidate, during the rat
equivalent of pre-adolescence, while the other was given a salt water
injection.
When they matured, the rats were tested for
"learned helplessness" -- how quickly they gave up on behavioral
tasks under stress.
"Rats exposed to Ritalin as juveniles
showed large increases in learned-helplessness behavior during adulthood,
suggesting a tendency toward depression," Carlezon said in a statement.
But rats, which generally like cocaine, were
less likely to eat it if they had been give Ritalin.
Carlezon said he did not believe the effects
were specific to Ritalin, made by Swiss drug giant Novartis. It could instead
be a general effect of stimulant drugs, many of which act by increasing the
activity of a key message-carrying chemical called dopamine.
Higher dopamine levels could affect the way
brain cells cement their connections during development, Carlezon wrote in the
December 15 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry.
A team at the University of Texas
Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas found that adult rats were less
responsive to rewarding stimuli and reacted more to stress if they had been
given methylphenidate as youngsters.
A third study done by a team at Finch
University of Health Sciences/The Chicago Medical School found changes in how
dopamine neurons responded to methylphenidate.
"These three studies remind us how
limited our knowledge is of the neurochemical and functional characteristics of
the human brain during childhood and adolescence and on the effects of
psychotropic drugs on brain development," Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of
the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote in a commentary.
from The Independent, 2004-Jul-12, by Jerome
Burne:
Why
teens are born to be wild
Narcissistic, lazy, impulsive and rude - adolescents can be infuriating. But
it's just the way their brains are wired, doctors now believe
Teenagers, parents endlessly moan, seem
designed to infuriate any sane person condemned to live with them. Diva-scale
sulks, rooms in which the floor is invisible, an inability to remember anything
that involves anyone else, and a refusal to get out of bed until lunchtime are
just a few familiar symptoms. And the anti-social behaviour is not limited to
the home. Truanting children between the ages of 10 and 16 are said to be
responsible for 40 per cent of street crime, 25 per cent of burglaries and 33
per cent of car thefts.
"When they shout, you want to shout the
same thing back," says Kate Figes, the journalist and author of The
Terrible Teens, a book on raising teenagers. "When they are out having
a good time with their friends and complain that home or family commitments are
boring, parents easily feel rejected, unloved and misunderstood."
Of course, patience and humour and good
communication skills on the adult side can do much to reduce the conflict, but
for those of us not blessed with saintly virtues, science has been coming to
our aid recently. Whereas it was once thought that the brain was fully formed
by late childhood, latest research suggests this is far from true.
By and large we handle the outbursts of
smaller children more effectively because we know they are children, they are
not mature. Teenagers can be so infuriating and hurtful because both sides
assume they are virtually adults. But what if much of classic teen behaviour is
because their brains still aren't wired up properly? "If we understand the
way that the adolescent mind works, we stand a better chance of understanding
why teenagers can be so sensitive and irrational. We are then less likely to
overreact or blame them when they appear to be unreasonable or
contradictory," according to Figes.
A report out in May described how the brain
matures in a gradual wave of development that travels from the back of the head
to the front. The last bit to be fully wired up are the frontal lobes, the part
that decides to hold off sex tonight because you don't have a condom or finish
your homework before going to the party. But the job isn't completed until
you're age 20 or later.
"One could speculate that some of the
more immature aspects of adolescent behaviour," says lead scientist Judith
Rapoport of the American National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland,
"may be due to the lack of maturity of some parts of the frontal lobes of
their brains." This research is just the latest of a series of findings in
the last few years showing that teenage brains are far more plastic than we
used to think.
This can be seen as a great opportunity.
"The research shows just how hopeless we are at giving teenagers what they
really need," says Figes, whose novel What About Me? Diaries and
e-mails of a Menopausal Mother to her Teenage Daughter (McMillan) has just
been published.
"Just at the time when the finishing
touches are being put to the control of their motor skills and they are at
their most passionate and vulnerable, what do we do? We warehouse them all
together in schools and cram them full of second-hand facts. Instead they could
be doing much more active learning, be much more involved with adults. We
should also be much better at handling their need for risk and rites of
passage."
So what exactly is this research that seems
to have the potential to transform the stereotype of teenagers for ever? For
the last 13 years Dr Jay Giedd has been peering into the brains of teenagers,
using an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner at the National Institutes of
Health in Bethesda. Taking neural snapshots every two years, he is building up
a library of how the brain changes and grows.
"We started out trying to find out if
there were brain markers for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive
Disorder)," he says, "but we soon found we knew so little about how
the brain developed normally that it was impossible to figure out where things
might be going wrong." Before Dr Giedd started his research the general
view was that brain growth was over by the age of 12. Some academics even
claimed that adolescence was a cultural phenomenon that only emerged in the
wake of the industrial revolution.
What has become clear, however, is that adolescents
repeat a process that they went through in the period immediately before and
after birth. Babies emerge from the womb with their brains only half finished.
Over the first three years the brain continues to wire itself up at a furious
pace, forming hundreds of thousands of new synapses a second. A two-year-old
has more neural connections than an adult. Then between about three and five
comes the purge. Circuits that aren't used are ruthlessly excised.
Giedd's remarkable discovery was that far from
being finished at 12, the process of brain consolidation has an Act II. Between
about six and 12 there is not much change in the number of neurons, but a big
increase in the number of connections between neurons, which shows up as a
thickening of grey matter on the scans.
Then as you enter adolescence the brain
embarks on a second round of pruning, only this time it is the connections
rather than brain cells that go at the rate of about 0.7 per cent a year until
the early Twenties. At the same time there is a thickening of the white matter
(the myelin sheath) that insulates the fibres linking nerve cells, speeding up
transmission. "The result of all this," says Giedd "is that you
get fewer but faster connections in the brain."
The new "wiring" theory could well
help parents and others to become more understanding. "If you know all
this is going on," says Figes "it makes it easier to step back and
not become quite so infuriated at the narcissistic, self-obsessed behaviour of
your children. Instead, you can concentrate on how to help them through it. Our
culture has a tendency to abandon teenagers, to assume they don't want anything
to do with "wrinklies", but actually the new picture of more hormones
and less control means they need our support and love even more."
Suddenly, the inability of teenagers to plan
to get their homework done before settling into an hour-and-a-half-long phone
call seems more comprehensible. The executive functions that make those kinds
of choices aren't fully complete. The apparently wilful refusal to solve simple
organisational problems - how to book cheaper train seats for a trip as well as
getting clothes for the weekend party - doesn't look quite so hopeless either.
One of the brain parts that doesn't completely connect till later is the corpus
callosum - the bridge that links the two halves of the brain - which is
involved in creativity and problem solving.
The ability to ignore obvious risks - from
smoking to unsafe sex - begins to make more sense, too. Sex hormones, the usual
culprits responsible for teenage bad behaviour in the past, still play a major
role. But in the new model, while hormones provide the engine, the problems
arise because the wiring for the control systems is still not in place. Take
the feel-good brain chemical dopamine. The hormonal rush increases its levels
and so feelings of pleasure become more intense. Without fully developed
neuronal brakes, why put off the pleasures of sex, drugs or risk taking?
Even the business of endless lazing in bed
turns out to have a biological basis. One of the less appreciated effects of
the rise in sex hormones is the effect it has on the rhythm of the sleep
hormone melatonin. Teenagers go to bed and get up later because that is what
their body clocks are telling them to do. A society that requires them to turn
up at school at 8am or 9am in the morning may be a recipe for mass teenage
sleep deprivation.
However, these brain scans studies fit into a
wider social picture, as shown in a review of scientific theories of teen
behaviour conducted by researchers at University of Wisconsin in 1987. They
found that in times of war and employment booms, scientists pronounced
adolescents as being "capable and adult-like" but during peacetime
and economic downturn they characterised them as "psychologically
incapacitated and slow to develop".
We may have got it right this time around,
but its worth considering whether our simultaneous demonising and infantilising
of adolescents tells us more about our society's need for good consumers than
it does about the true nature of our children.
from USA Today, 2003-Aug-28, by an
unattributed USA Today opinion writer:
Girls
get extra school help while boys get Ritalin
At last June's graduation at Franklin High
School just outside of Milwaukee, three of the four students who tied for
valedictorian were girls. Among the National Honor Society members, 76% were
girls. And girls comprised 85% of the students on Franklin's 4.0 honor roll.
The superintendent of schools for this
upper-middle-class suburb, Gerald Freitag, investigated those numbers after the
parents of a boy filed a complaint. He found that the skewed performances by
gender at Franklin pretty much mirror the imbalances across the state — and the
nation.
This week, teachers at the middle school feeding
into Franklin received training on how to reach out to boys. And high school
teachers will continue the gender-sensitivity classes they began last school
year.
But reversing the trend will not be easy. In
classrooms nationwide, girls are pulling ahead of boys academically. Recent
federal testing data show that what starts out as a modest gap in
elementary-level reading scores turns into a yawning divide by high school. In
12th grade, 44% of girls rate as proficient readers on federal tests, compared
with 28% of boys. And while boys still score slightly higher on federal math
and science exams, their advantage is slipping.
Most startling is that little is being done
to correct the imbalances. All of the major players — schools, education
colleges and researchers — largely ignore the gender gap. Instead of pursuing
sound solutions, many educators merely advocate prescribing more
attention-focusing Ritalin for the boys, who receive the drug at four to eight
times the rate of girls, according to different estimates. "Too often the
first reaction to an attention problem is 'Let's medicate,' " says
Rockville, Md., child psychologist Neil Hoffman. "Some schools are quick
to recommend solutions before they've fully evaluated the problem."
Playing to girls' strengths
One reason boys are losing academic ground to
girls appears linked to a shift by schools to more word-based learning for
which girls' brains are believed to have an advantage. Over the years, even
math problems have become more word oriented, according to education
researchers. But because schools are doing little to help boys adjust, males
risk becoming second-class academic citizens. Already the academic success
girls enjoy in high school translates into more college acceptances — 56% of
the students on campuses are female.
The full impact from this shift is something
society has yet to discover. But a drop in earnings for males is one likely
result. Workers with only a high school diploma earn $20,000 a year less than
those with a bachelor's degree.
One fact explains why educators are ignoring
boys' needs: You can't address a problem that you don't admit exists. The U.S.
Department of Education concedes that no serious research is available
comparing different instructional methods that might help boys. In fact, many
education researchers are hostile toward research aimed at exploring gender
differences in learning.
Last April, when Kenneth Dragseth,
superintendent of schools in Edina, Minn., presented a paper describing his
district's gender gap at the American Educational Research Association's annual
meeting in Chicago, he says the reception ranged from chilly to hostile. Female
education researchers in the audience questioned whether helping boys would
mean hurting girls.
Their attitude follows years of lobbying by
groups such as the American Association of University Women, which alerted
educators to the fact that girls were being shortchanged academically in the
fields of math and science. The extra attention helped focus schools on girls'
difficulties, but it has made it too easy for educators to overlook the
problems of boys. Among them:
•Boys and girls learn differently. The
best research on boy-girl learning differences is produced more by accident
than by design. The lack of data in this field can hurt girls as much as boys.
For instance, as part of an ongoing 20-year dyslexia study focusing on
Connecticut schools, Yale neuroscientist and pediatrician Sally Shaywitz
discovered that schools were identifying four times as many dyslexic boys as girls.
Yet when her team entered schools to screen children, it diagnosed just as many
dyslexic girls as boys. Shaywitz found that the mostly female teaching staff
was quicker to identify rambunctious boys than quiet girls.
The results are just one example of what
might be learned about the role gender plays in education, especially in
elementary school, where 85% of teachers are women.
• Future teachers aren't trained to deal
with learning differences. Therapist Michael Gurian, author of Boys and
Girls Learn Differently!, has visited more than 100 education colleges. But
he has not found one that offers courses on male-female brain differences. His
discovery explains why many new teachers arrive in classrooms clueless about
what teaching techniques might work best for boys' learning styles.
• Boys lack advocates. The special
efforts made by schools to steer more girls into advanced math and science
classes came after powerful advocacy groups embraced the problem. But Gurian
and other advocates for boys say they run into resistance from educators who
point to males' success in the workforce as proof that advocacy for boys is
unnecessary.
In spite of the lack of research, anecdotal
evidence shows that far more effective strategies are available for teaching
boys than plying them with Ritalin. Patricia Henley runs a boy-friendly charter
school in Kansas that hires many male teachers. It also recognizes boys'
natural tendency to favor active learning by conducting more class work on the
chalkboard and allowing more student movement within the classroom. And the
school trains teachers to deal with boys' particular styles. For instance,
because boys volunteer answers more slowly than girls do, teachers are told to
count to 10 before calling on a student.
Beginning in the early 1990s, groups such as
the American Association of University Women performed an important service by
alerting the public to an educational failing. Their persistence helped
convince educators that schools were ignoring important problems plaguing
girls, such as the loss of self-esteem among middle school girls who had been
successful students throughout elementary school.
Today's education system fails many boys.
They deserve the same kind of attention to address why they are losing ground.
from the Houston Chronicle, 2003-Dec-11, by
Claudia Marquez Linares:
In
Cuba, the price of education is indoctrination
What has happened to freedom of thought in
Cuba today? Let me tell you a story.
When my son's kindergarten teacher asked him
to bring a plastic gun to school, I was surprised. I asked Cristian, then 5,
why the teacher wanted this toy, but he didn't know. I went to the classroom to
ask and found the teacher distributing plastic weapons and shouting, "Go!
Shoot! Boom, boom! We are killing imperialism!" All the children,
including my son, were shooting in the air and shouting "Boom, boom!"
against this invisible specter the teacher told them was imperialism.
This was one of those exercises that Cuban
teachers are expected to put their students through, and we, the parents, have
no say in. If we oppose it, we may be branded as counterrevolutionaries and
sentenced to jail for "acts against the normal development of a
minor."
Powerless, I stood speechless in the corner
and soon left.
Education in Cuba is free and obligatory
until age 16, but it is infused with the ideology that rules our island.
Cristian is now 6 years old and learning to
read and write. Recently one of his assignments was to write letters to the
five Cuban agents jailed in the United States on charges of spying. In Cuba
they are known as "the five heroes, prisoners of the empire." The
teacher told my son that the men were in prison for defending the homeland.
When I told Cristian that his father, Osvaldo Alfonso Valdes, leader of the
Liberal Party and lifelong dissident, was in jail under an 18-year sentence for
demanding freedom for all Cubans and defending his homeland, he answered:
"No, Mummy, you are wrong. It is the five heroes who are jailed for
defending the homeland." This is what the teacher had said.
I have labored to make sure that my son is
not ashamed of his father. The school principal has informed me that those
children whose parents are in prison need special treatment -- hinting of some
sort of retaliation if the children do not toe the line.
Since his father was detained in March as
part of the crackdown on dissidents that landed 74 other courageous Cubans in
jail for an average of 20 years, my son has been restless and confused. It's no
wonder. He cannot explain to the teacher or his schoolmates that his father is
a good man who is jailed for defending freedom and democracy. He speaks of his
father only with close relatives. When I told him that his father was in jail
on orders from our president, he answered: "Ah, Mummy, don't you speak
evil of Fidel: They will take you away too, and I will be crying a lot!"
From primary school to university, we Cubans
learn that to dissent against the Communist Party line means our
marginalization. Sometimes merely voicing one's hopes is taken as offense.
Larri Rodriguez Reyes, a 21-year-old computer science student, is awaiting the
disciplinary commission's decision on whether he will be dismissed from his
university. He has been suspended since Nov. 6 for "making public and notorious
remarks of counterrevolutionary character" -- speaking critically of the
revolutionary process in Cuba. He told his colleagues that "freedom better
come to our island sooner rather than later."
Rodriguez Reyes' parents insist that he
repent to avoid being dismissed permanently. He does not want to take back his
comments. He feels betrayed by those who denounced him in a public academic
tribunal (a kind of court of peers) although, he said, they often agreed with
him in private. Later, these same colleagues confessed to him that they had to
go after him or they would get in trouble. Rodriguez Reyes vows to fight for
reinstatement because "nobody can deny me education for the simple fact of
expressing dissenting opinions."
According to the official propaganda, the
Cuban people are the most educated in the world, but what use is education if
we have no freedom, what use is education when it turns into a weapon of mass
indoctrination?
Marquez Linares is vice president of an
independent association of Cuban journalists and co-editor of its samizdat
review, De Cuba.
from the San Francisco Chronicle,
2003-Aug-31, by Alison Biggar:
The
Selfish Child
A new book on kids questions modern parenting methods, from day care to
self-esteem building
Child and family psychiatrist Robert Shaw
says he wrote the latest book in the child-care advice genre because he had to.
After the teen shootings at Columbine, he asked himself, "How would you
have to raise your kids for them to do this?" His answer lay in the past
three decades of books on child rearing. Although he admits there have been
some stellar examples lately - Carol Eagle's "All That She Can Be: Helping
Your Daughter Maintain her Self- Esteem," Michael Gurian's "The Good
Son" and Audrey Ricker and Carolyn Crowder's "Backtalk: Four Steps To
Ending Rude Behavior in Your Kids" - the majority have pushed a
child-centric view that elevates the child to head of the household.
Shaw's book, "The Epidemic: The Rot of
American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague
of Joyless, Selfish Children," (with Stephanie Woods; ReganBooks, $24.95)
is a primer on how to raise an empathetic kid who will benefit society. It
takes the reader on a detailed, instructive journey through a child's life, and
is filled with concrete examples from patients Shaw has treated in his more
than 45 years of practice. Shaw founded and serves as director of the Family
Institute of Berkeley.
The book may not be welcomed, especially in
the Bay Area-Shaw is a firm believer in children being raised by their parents,
not by day-care providers. He agrees there are ways to be a working mother and
still bond with and nurture your children, but he also stresses what a strain
it will be. Parents should approach parenthood with eyes wide open and once on
the path, keep the kids in line and out of trouble. The book can be as
inspirational as it is frightening as a reader vacillates between "Is it
too late for my kids?" and "That's it, we're cracking down tonight on
those tantrums."
Shaw admits to a nagging fear of being
"lynched in his hometown," but soldiered on anyhow; he's under the
impression the public is now ready to hear how to fix our kids. He lives in the
Bay Area with his wife, Judith, and practices in Berkeley. He has four grown
children.
Following is an excerpt from the first
chapter of the book, which hits bookstores in October.
Alison Biggar, Editor
We are in crisis. Large numbers of children,
even including those who could be considered privileged, are no longer
developing the empathy, moral commitment and ability to love that is necessary
to maintain our society at the level that has always been our dream. The
emotional, psychological and moral well- being of the current generation of
children has reached a frightening low point, and it's going to require a
powerful shift in thinking to save them. A few short years ago, we were in
serious denial that there was such a problem, but recent catastrophic events in
our society are forcing us to face the inevitable: Our culture no longer offers
what children need to truly thrive. While happy families were once the norm,
more and more we see parents and children rushing frenetically from one task to
another; children whining, bickering, tantruming, pouting; parents nagging,
complaining and trying to ignore their unruly, surly offspring. Can you go to
stores, restaurants or libraries without seeing these joyless children
screaming, throwing food or pulling packages or books off shelves? Are you
comfortable seeing such scenarios-or tempted to look the other way?
We can no longer turn a blind eye: There is a
mountain of evidence now telling us what's truly good - and really bad - for
kids.
When you hold a baby in your arms and see her
sweet face looking up at you, you hope and expect that she will naturally grow
up to be a well-developed, compassionate person. However, it doesn't happen
naturally - children can be trained to a variety of outcomes. As a culture, we
need to start noticing that the path to severe dysfunction is often subtle.
Like termites, the epidemic of problem behavior silently burrows into your life
and does great damage before it's discovered. If we as parents don't
"train" our children in constructive, safe and expressive ways of
operating in our society, their natural drive to connect with someone or some
idea may well lead them toward some of the most destructive behavioral
manifestations. They'll be "trained" all right, but perhaps by
wayward peers, gangs, media or radical religious cults.
Teachers and grandparents have been complaining
for years that today's children are out of control. The day of reckoning has
arrived: We simply can't afford to raise our children this way.
We Determine Our Children's Future
Children are extremely malleable and plastic,
and how we rear them is the major determinant of their outcome. I believe the
parenting trends that have evolved over the last 30 years promote the
development of unattached, non- communicative, learning impaired and
uncontrollable children. We are experiencing an epidemic of school problems,
both learning and behavioral. Teachers everywhere report that children are
arriving ill-equipped to engage in school because they lack focus, purpose,
connection, an ability to fit into a rules system and a desire to learn. At the
extreme, our current culture may well be breeding a generation of unattached,
predatory children who may be cognitively smart but who lack the capacity to
appreciate the feelings and positions of other people.
This epidemic seeps like a fog into all of
our culture. Parents find themselves enslaved by a materialistic, overachieving
society that leads them to spend so many hours and so much money that they
can't make the time to do the things necessary to bond with their children.
They are worried that they might crush their children, stifle their self-esteem
or kill their creativity, to the extent that all sense of proportion is lost
about the role of a young child in a family. Their children are rarely given
limits or permitted to experience frustration, and their moral and spiritual
development are overlooked. As a result, essential values like empathy, effort,
duty and honor do not develop. And on top of that, children are abandoned to
the influence of the media - so much time is wasted on mind-numbing electronic
entertainment such as television and video games that literacy, social
development and creativity are all inhibited. These unbonded, untrained
children agitate in ever-widening circles of problem behavior until they
finally bump up against real limits - which all too often have to be supplied
by institutions such as schools or, eventually, the law.
What are the chances that this will happen to
your child? The answer lies within the lifestyle choices you make. Each
decision that moves your family away from what we know is good for children -
secure attachment to a primary caregiver; a safe, structured and ordered
environment; lots of free time to exercise creativity and imagination -
increases the level of risk to the child's development. The choices are tough
ones, and with each decision, you set the odds, one way or the other.
The Roots of the Epidemic
Where does it all begin? The epidemic of
which I'm writing cannot be imagined as a function of poverty, of the inner
city or of a minority race. It is occurring in the homes of comfortable,
educated parents. Its symptoms can be observed in every classroom, every
playground, every supermarket and restaurant-in more and more households across
America. The evidence begins early, and can be observed anywhere, in both
parental and childhood behavior:
-- The parents of an 18-month-old leave her
with a baby-sitter while they work all day. The sitter, in turn, plops her in a
high chair to watch an endless parade of Barney videos. The child's response:
She enters meltdown mode the minute Mommy arrives to take her home. Naturally
Mommy can't wait to escape back to the office the next morning.
-- The two-career parents of a 3-year-old,
too tired to cook, drag him out to yet another restaurant at the end of his own
long day. The child tosses his food on the floor, whines incessantly that he
wants to leave and then climbs off his seat, under the tables, and around the
chairs of other patrons, ruining their meals as well. The parents pretend not
to notice so they can finish their conversation.
-- A father goes to pick up a 4-year-old from
a play date. The child spits in the face of his father, then screams all the
way out the door. The father, clearly not used to being in control of his son,
begs and cajoles ("we'll stop for ice cream on the way home") in a
desperate effort to end the embarrassing scene.
-- Parents on the way to a friend's child's
birthday party make a stop at the toy store with their own 5-year-old in tow.
They explain that they are here for a present for Suzy, not her. The child
throws a fit in the toy store until her parents give in and leave with two
purchases. One can only imagine the scene at the party when the other child
opens her presents.
As parents, our lives are filled with these
critical moments. They may seem insignificant at the time, when you just need
to get through that restaurant dinner or trip to the toy store, but how they're
handled sends a vitally important message to your children about the nature of
their relationship with you. From that sleep-deprived decision in the wee hours
that it's easier to let a toddler come into bed with you than not, to that
evening when you're too tired or lazy or even afraid to stand up to a
rebellious teen, by not acting you are acting - and potentially in a harmful
way. The parents of the younger children in the previous examples who tolerate
public meltdowns now will likely be the same ones who have underachieving,
disrespectful, vandalizing teens later.
Today's parents seem to have absorbed the
notion that a child's life should be totally serene, totally self-expressive
and totally free from frustration. But creating an atmosphere that feels
satisfactory to the child all the time does her a disservice.
When you look at it this way, it's easy to
see how the breeding ground of the epidemic goes all the way back to infancy.
Of course, a newborn still adapting to her overwhelming new world needs and
deserves immediate and constant attention. But by six months of age or so, a
baby should have developed the capacity to doze off on her own and sleep
through the night, or entertain herself with a toy for brief periods while a
parent goes about the everyday tasks of life, such as cooking or making a phone
call. Yet more and more often we see high-demand older babies who react
intensely the minute they are put down and who continue to awaken their now
zombie-like parents hour after hour throughout the night demanding complicated
soothing routines. These infants grow into temperamental toddlers who refuse to
accept routines and resist toilet training well past the age when they are
capable (the manufacturing of a totally new product - large-size disposable
diapers for preschoolers - is but one example of this trend). As 4- and
5-year-olds who should be evolving into happy, eager-to-please little people,
they continue to react with tantrums when limits are set and suffer emotional
collapse in the face of frustration.
It is totally human and expected that
children are going to test out their parents and other authority figures - not
to do so would also be abnormal. Rather than seeing all limit-testing as a bad
thing, we must recognize its merits in helping the child safely determine what
it expected of him in the world. The trouble is, indulging and distancing
parents have allowed it to go beyond an acceptable level. When parents don't
teach their children acceptable behavior, defiance becomes the norm. Of course
a 1-year-old tries to pull hair or bite; he needs to be taught not to or he
will continue to do it. Of course a 2-year-old will throw a tantrum; he must
learn that such behavior is not permitted and will not get him his way, or he
will continue to do it. Of course a 2- or 3-year-old will feel reluctant to
share her toys; she must be taught that it's a nice thing to do, or she will
continue to refuse to. Of course a 3- or 4-year-old may try to run into a
dangerous street; he must learn that he can't. Not enforcing appropriate limits
is neglecting the teachable moments that will ultimately civilize and protect
your child.
Many of today's children have gotten the
message that their frightened, guilt-ridden parents will give in if they put up
enough of a fight. So rather than trying to please them, they oppose, resist
and irritate; their parents, in turn, cringe and cower and cave in. Control has
come to replace attachment and love, skewing development in an abnormal
direction that has become accepted. Palatable labels ranging from
"high-energy" to "hyperactive" to "temperamental"
to "oppositional" are bandied about like personality traits that must
be tolerated. Parents are lulled into believing these behaviors are the norm by
the parenting gurus who preach child-centric theories: never let your baby cry;
he'll use the potty when he's ready; discipline is disrespectful; the child's
feelings should come first (well before yours, of course).
The media are part of this problem. In one
recent issue of a popular child- rearing magazine I saw the following query
from a reader: "My 3-year old is a delight in most ways, but if I ask her
to do something, she'll say no, throw herself on the floor, and tell me I'm not
her mommy anymore. I've raised her to express her feelings, but have I gone too
far?" The answer from a noted pediatrician: "Her behavior is perfectly
normal for a 3-year-old."
It is extremely sad to me to think of the
children whose parents are being influenced by statements like this. If this
were normal, why would anyone want to have a child? Children like this are
being injured in their emotional development every day by being allowed to
behave in totally inappropriate ways.
That a pediatrician is alleged to have
accepted this as normal indicates to me how far this epidemic has penetrated
into the fabric of child-rearing. Yes, a child might do something like this on
a rare occasion, with provocation and stressful circumstances. But one time
should be enough. It is possible to make clear that you will not bargain under
duress. Children are very bright and learn the rules rapidly. The problem is
that we are teaching them the wrong rules.
Those children who progress down this
distorted developmental track are much more likely to become angry and
alienated and assume a cold or contemptuous attitude toward others, especially
authority figures. At home, they are secretive, sullen, broody presences. In
school, behaviors such as distractibility, indifference, overdiagnosed
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), disdain for adults, whining
and nagging detract from their ability to learn. Well-intentioned parents then
take them to psychiatrists, who prescribe the latest medications to calm them
down, help them focus in school and become more manageable.
To the parents of these out-of-control
children, the daily indignities are frustrating but easy to rationalize:
"She'll grow out of it," "I'm too tired to deal,"
"He's a high-spirited kid," "It's probably just puberty."
But the saddest fact is undeniable: family life for many has become too much
work, too little fun. Sheer lack of time and performance pressure on both
adults and children have diminished the importance of seemingly less productive
pursuits like playing peek-a-boo with a gurgling baby, sitting down to a family
board game or chasing twinkling lightning bugs under the summer stars. Instead
we find ourselves slaving after children who laugh in the face of our weak
attempts at discipline, demand to be amused all day, and stay up late because
we're too exhausted to put up the struggle it takes to get them to bed. These
kids are fully in charge. No wonder they have piles of untouched toys - the
real live playthings that are their parents are far more entertaining.
Meanwhile, modern moms and dads are
encouraged by a culture in overdrive to push and prod and force their children
onto an endless track of achievement, desperately squeezing one more enriching
activity into their already too-tight schedules. The not-so-subliminal message:
If Johnny doesn't do it all, he'll never keep up with the multitalented
majority, he'll go the state university route instead of Ivy League, he may
never discover his true calling and reach his potential. Driven by such
superficial goals and constant consumerism, parents abdicate their children's
day-to-day routines to others so they can work longer, while the beautiful home
sits forlornly, the dining room table goes unused, the long family weekend away
gets postponed when work calls. They feel regret, but they can't mobilize
themselves to stop and relax and enjoy this family life that they so carefully
cultivated.
Never before has the degree of dysfunction I
have described afflicted privileged families in the numbers we're seeing today,
nor has it begun so early. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry estimates that about 5 percent of children and adolescents suffer
from depression, and suicide has risen to the third leading cause of death
among teens.
These stricken children are proving
ill-equipped to cope in the more demanding world beyond their homes. A recent
study of more than 13,000 college students seeking psychological counseling
revealed that their emotional difficulties are far more complex and more severe
than in the past. Researchers at the counseling center at Kansas State
University found that the percentage of students treated for depression or suicidal
tendencies doubled in the 12 years from 1989 to 2001. More than twice the
number of students was taking some type of psychiatric medication. Problems
related to stress, anxiety, learning disabilities such as attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder, family issues, grief and sexual assault also rose.
I find it painful but no surprise that these
constantly placated children are growing into adults who are unable to take the
rough-and-tumble of life. They have not been given the inner resources to deal
with the stresses of responsibility and accountability. Then they land in the
college counseling office, leaving the school responsible for their mental
health.
-- Failing to establish a strong emotional
bond with your child by not spending the necessary time and attention.
-- Not reading to, talking to or playing with
young children to provide the experiences we know help them acquire literacy.
-- Accepting the idea that excessive
non-parental care will be an adequate substitute for your relationship with
your child.
-- Not having firm rules and routines that
you administer calmly, fairly, assertively and without guilt or hesitation.
-- Not conveying to your child - through both
actions and words - the moral, ethical, and spiritual values you believe in (or
not having moral, ethical, and spiritual values in the first place).
-- Allowing your child inappropriate control
over his life. A certain amount of control, doled out as a child is ready to
handle it, is wonderful; too much control when your child is ill-prepared for
it is disastrous.
-- Yelling at and threatening your children.
You can be firm and reliable in reinforcing rules without resorting to these
tactics. When you lose your temper, it says that you have delayed handling an
issue until your frustration and impotence have become overwhelming. You can
act firmly right away; you don't have to wait until you get angry.
-- Over-identifying with your child, to the
extent that you assume he wants what you want, will fulfill your own
aspirations, or will perform in a way that will enhance your self-image. In
short, expecting your child to build your ego and solve your doubts.
-- Expecting too much while demanding too
little. For instance, letting him loll around playing video games all day, then
expecting him to win honors at school.
-- Not allowing your child to experience the
rewards of earning and achieving on his own.
-- Overexposure to media.
-- Not giving your child the type of
activities and experiences that promote his ability to sit quietly, concentrate
and listen, then expecting schools to "fix" him. Not even the very
best private schools or stellar public education systems can accomplish the
same goals with underdeveloped children as they do with those who are
well-adjusted and ready to learn.
-- Failing to talk things through. Direct,
honest, complete communication should be the constant characteristic of your
relationship with your child.
When parents commit these all-too-common
mistakes in an effort to suit their own needs and concerns or through their own
ignorance or lack of energy, they thwart their child's natural course of
development. When you put off toilet training because you're too busy to deal
with it, or allow your 6-year-old to keep crawling into your bed at night
because you're too tired to put up a fight, or dole out money on demand instead
of insisting on an allowance, or let curfews slide, you will cripple your child
in the long run. These developmental tasks can feel endless at times, but it's
naive to think that children will turn out fine if you just leave them alone.
Values are not instinctual; they are passed on to your children day after day,
in your every interaction with them. That is why, with effort, even very
deviant children can be helped to gain the values they need.
From the book "The Epidemic," by
Robert Shaw. To be published in October by ReganBooks, an imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers Inc. Copyright © 2003 by Robert Shaw.
Page 13
Shippensburg University, part of the State
of Pennsylvania's higher education system, has as of this writing (2003-May-13)
become the poster child for oppressive, doctrinaire student rules of conduct.
Here, from their 2002-2003 handbook (source URL
http://www.ship.edu/~deanstu/Swataney/2002swataney.pdf), are the annotated
lowlights - to appreciate their impact, just imagine these rules being applied
to you, in your own home, as it is for students at this school:
SHIPPENSBURG
UNIVERSITY
Proudly Presents
the
2002-2003
Student Handbook
Swataney
p.18, "Preamble":
Students, as members of the academic
community, are encouraged to engage in a sustained, critical, and independent
search for knowledge. The University community supports this endeavor by
developing policies and procedures that safeguard the freedoms necessary for
the pursuit of truth and knowledge. The University will strive to protect these
freedoms if they are not inflammatory, demeaning, or harmful toward others. It
is therefore expected that students will exercise these freedoms in a manner
that does not infringe upon the rights of others in the community. Behavior
that interferes with the living conditions, co-curricular activities, working
environments, teaching mission, research activities, study conditions, and/or
administrative functions of the University is unacceptable. Acts of intolerance
directed toward other community members will not be condoned. This is
especially true, but not limited to, acts of intolerance directed at others for
ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, physical, lifestyle, religious,
age, and/or political characteristics.
p.21, "Proprietary
Regulations":
8.0 External antennas for TV or radio and
tampering with the cable TV system are prohibited. Misuse or redirection of
cable TV for personal use is a criminal offense.
[...]
14.0 Only university provided beds are
allowed in student's rooms. Waterbeds, lofts, and hanging or suspended bed
frames are not allowed.
[...]
22.0 No items, e.g., posters, flags,
tapestries, shall be hung on/from room, suite or apartment ceilings, out
windows, or in front of exit doors.
[...]
28.0 Students are responsible for any damage
that occurs within the confines of their rooms, suites, or apartments. Students
are also responsible for any damage they create, or help create, on the campus.
[...]
33.0 Students shall not operate any computer
network servers from any residence hall, suite or apartment location. This
includes, but is not limited to, chat, file, print, web, ftp, and unix shell
servers.
p.22-23, "Community
Regulations":
Secondary rights, especially for University
housing residents are those that, while protected, shall not infringe upon the reasonable
exercise of others' primary rights. These include:
[...]
B. The right to express a personal belief
system. The expression of one's beliefs should be communicated in a manner that
does not provoke, harass, demean, intimidate, or harm another.
[...]
The following regulations comprise those
related to community living. They apply equally to all students and visitors,
regardless of their place of residence.
1.0 Individual Responsibilities and Community
Rights
[...]
1.7 No person shall interfere with others'
freedom of speech.
1.8 No person shall engage in lewd, obscene,
or indecent conduct.
p.23, "Safety of the Individual
and Community"
2.4 No person shall possess or use dangerous weapons.
This includes, but is not limited to, guns, knives, martial arts' devices,
percussion weapons, bow and arrows, ammunition, clubs, or any other devices
used aggressively.
2.5 No person shall set a fire or attempt to
start a fire. No person shall engage in behavior that potentially could start a
fire, e.g., burning candles, lighting aerosol propellants. No person shall
falsely report a fire, bomb, or similar emergency.
2.6 No person shall demonstrate behavior or
engage in activities that endanger the safety or well-being of oneself or
others.
p.24, "Harassment, Intimidation
and Disruptive Conduct"
3.2 No person shall exhibit behavior that
harms or threatens to harm another person or another person's property. This
includes, but is not limited to, harassment, intimidation, threats, physical
harm, and property damage.
3.3 No person shall threaten, intimidate,
harass, or physically harm a University employee related to the performance of
his or her job.
3.4 No person shall threaten, intimidate,
harass, or physically harm any party or witness involved in a judicial case, or
cause damage to his or her property, with the intent of influencing outcomes or
for retaliation.
3.5 No person shall participate in acts of
intolerance that demonstrate malicious or demeaning intentions toward others.
3.6 No person shall engage in hazing
activities or intimidating practices toward other persons.
3.7 No person shall engage in conduct that is
disorderly, unnecessarily disturbs others, and/or is disruptive to the normal
practices, processes, and functions of the University or the local
municipalities.
p.27, "General Regulations",
"Computing and Telecommunications":
3.2 No person shall use University computing
or telecommunications equipment, facilities, and/or services for commercial
purposes or non- University related activities without official authorization.
3.3 No person shall access, use, alter,
destroy, or transfer any information resources without authorization from the
data owner.
[...]
3.5 No person shall use computing services or
facilities to harass another, send obscene materials/messages, or to interfere
with the work of others, including the University.
3.6 No person shall make or assist the making
of unauthorized telephone calls.
3.7 No person shall use communications
equipment to leave annoying or harassing telephone messages.
3.8 No person shall engage in any activity
that infringes on the operation of any University computing network.
p.27, "4.0 Student
Organizations"
4.2 No person or persons shall misappropriate
or misuse student organization funds or property.
p.38, "Shippensburg University
Judicial Sanctioning Guidelines for Violations of Drug and Alcohol
Policies"
Use and/or Possession of Alcohol on Campus;
Underage Use and/or Possession of Alcohol; Possession of an Open Container of
Alcohol:
- 1st
Time - Censure for minimally the equivalent of one academic year.
- 2nd
Time - Probation for minimally the equivalent of one academic year and
possible relocation to another residence hall if an on-campus housing
resident.
- 3rd
Time - Suspension for minimally the equivalent of one academic semester.
Hosting a Disruptive Social Gathering Where
Alcohol is Being Consumed Only by People Who are 21:
- 1st
Time - Probation for minimally the equivalent of one academic year.
- 2nd
Time - Suspension for minimally the equivalent of one academic semester.
- 3rd
Time - Suspension for minimally the equivalent of one academic year.
p.46-47, "Policy on Hazing"
B. Hazing is defined as an action or situation,
on or off the campus, with our without consent that:
1. Recklessly or intentionally or
unintentionally endangers the physical health, mental health, safety, or
dignity of a person.
2. Creates risk of injury, or causes
discomfort, embarrassment, harassment or ridicule.
[the relationship between these is a logical
or - either one by itself qualifies -AMPP Ed]
[...]
E. The term hazing shall include any activity
of a non-educational or "silly" nature that is inconsistent with
academic achievement or the purpose, ritual, or policy of the organization and
would subject an individual to embarrassment, stress, or fear, including but
not limited to:
1. Scavenger hunts, treasure hunts, or
quests.
2. Pranks or ordeals.
3. Requiring or expecting the completion of
"busy work" tasks/projects in a short amount of time and/or outside
of the accepted association/affiliation time frame.
4. Requirement or expectation of being in a
specified place when not in class (other than those activities pre-approved by
the Office of the Dean of Students/Director of Greek Affairs).
5. Mandatory memorization (unless
sanctioned).
6. Blindfolding (unless as part of a
sanctioned ceremony).
7. Random or rapid fire quizzing on
organizational/member information.
8. Morally degrading or humiliating games and
activities.
9. Mandatory, formal member interviews
(unless sanctioned).
10. Any activity (not previously stated in E:
1-9) which is inconsistent with organization principles and policy, the regulations
and policies of Shippensburg University or Pennsylvania Law.
p.64, "Computing and Information
Network Usage Policy"
3. Attempting to disguise the identity of the
account or machine you are using is prohibited.
[...]
6. Attempting to modify in any way a program
or diskette which the University supplies for any type of use at its sites is
prohibited.
7. No person shall knowingly run or install
on any of the University's computer systems, or give to another, a program
which could result in the eventual damage to a file, computer system, or
information network, and/or the reproduction of itself. This is directed
towards, but not limited to, the classes of programs known as computer viruses,
Trojan horses, and worms.
8. No person shall attempt to circumvent data
protection schemes or uncover security loopholes.
[...]
10. Deliberate acts which are wasteful of
computing/information network resources or which unfairly monopolize resources
to the exclusion of others are prohibited. These acts include, but are not
limited to, sending mass mailings or chain letters, creating unnecessary
multiple jobs or processes, obtaining unnecessary output, or printing or
creating unnecessary network traffic. Printing unnecessary multiple copies of
any document including resumes, theses, and dissertations is also prohibited.
11. The following type of information or
software cannot be placed on any University-owned computer system:
a. that which infringes upon the rights of
another person.
b. that which may injure someone else and/or
lead to a lawsuit or criminal charges; examples of these are: pirated software,
destructive software, pornographic materials, libelous statements.
c. that which consists of any advertisements
for commercial enterprises.
12. No person shall harass others by sending
annoying, threatening, libelous, sexually, racially, or religiously offensive
messages. This includes all materials deemed offensive by existing University
code of conduct statements.
[...]
14. Use of the University's microcomputers,
workstations, or information networks must be related to a Shippensburg
University course, research project, work- related activity, departmental
activity, or for inter-personal communications. Use of these resources for
personal or financial gain is prohibited.
p.66, "Policy for Religious
Observances for Students"
To foster and advance the precepts of an
inclusive environment, students desiring to participate in the religious
observances of their particular faiths, creeds or beliefs will be granted an
excused absence from scheduled classes.
[included for comparison with the Hazing
definition -AMPP Ed.]
from the Associated Press, 2003-Apr-23, by
Joann Loviglio:
Group
sues over school 'speech codes'; promises suits nationwide
PHILADELPHIA - A civil liberties watchdog
group has filed a lawsuit against Shippensburg University, alleging that the
south-central Pennsylvania school's speech policies are among the most
unconstitutionally restrictive in the nation.
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
filed the lawsuit late Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, said Thor
Halvorssen, the group's chief executive officer. The Philadelphia-based
nonprofit, which focuses on civil liberties issues on college campuses, said
the suit was the first of many it would file across the country.
"Too many colleges and universities
attempt to outlaw free speech and expression that does not conform to a
specific orthodoxy, and we are challenging that," he said. "We've
done research at hundreds of universities and we're starting with Shippensburg
because their speech codes are the worst."
The complaint cites what it alleges is
unconstitutionally vague or overly broad language in the schools' catalog and
student handbook, including admonishments regarding "unconscious attitudes
toward individuals which surface through the use of discriminatory
semantics," as well as barring "presumptive statements" and
conduct or "attitude" that "annoys" another person or
group.
"Does that mean that if I'm a student, I
can't wear a T-shirt that might annoy someone, or I can't have an attitude that
might be offensive to someone?" Halvorssen said.
Named as defendants are the university and
its president, Anthony F. Ceddia. The plaintiffs, named John Doe and Jane Doe
in the suit, are political science majors and members of campus political
organizations who find that the speech codes "have a chilling effect on
plaintiffs' rights to freely and openly engage in appropriate discussions of
their theories, ideas and political and-or religious beliefs," the
complaint states.
"As an institution of higher education
we encourage and promote free speech among and between individuals and
organizations," Shippensburg said in a written statement in response to
the lawsuit.
"The university is also committed to the
principle that this discussion be conducted appropriately. We do have
expectations that our students will conduct themselves in a civil manner that
allows them to express their opinions without interfering with the rights of
others," the statement said.
The complaint also alleges that the
university supplemented its speech policy in March with a stipulation that
limits demonstrations, rallies and all "collective opinions outside the
classroom" to certain spaces on campus.
"With this Orwellian termed 'free-speech
zone' policy, now they're trying to censor not only what you say on campus but
where you say it," Halvorssen said.
The plaintiffs want the court to render the
speech code and speech zones invalid and to reward unspecified monetary
damages.
Starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
schools began to institute codes prohibiting certain forms of offensive speech,
according to the California-based Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Since
then, thousands of colleges and universities across the country have adopted
speech codes, also sometimes called tolerance statements or diversity codes,
Halvorssen said.
FIRE is working with an "ideologically
diverse" group of public interest law firms and litigation groups on a series
of pending lawsuits against colleges and universities nationwide, Halvorssen
said.
"We plan to file lawsuits in every
(federal) circuit court and every district court in the country over the next
12 months," Halvorssen said. He declined to name the schools being
targeted in future suits but said there would be at least four more within the
next six months.
Shippensburg University is one of
Pennsylvania's 14 state-owned universities, with about 6,200 undergraduates. It
is located about 35 miles southwest of Harrisburg.
---
On the Net:
Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education: http://www.thefire.org
Shippensburg University: http://www.ship.edu
from the Philadelphia Inquirer, 2003-Apr-24,
by James M. O'Neill:
Group
takes aim at campus speech codes
Court complaints and a Web site grading college policies will combat
perceived rights violations.
A Philadelphia-based free-speech group has
launched the first phase of a national attack on controversial campus speech
codes by filing a complaint in federal court against Shippensburg University,
calling its restrictions on campus speech unconstitutional.
The group, cofounded three years ago by a
University of Pennsylvania professor, says it plans to file similar complaints
against other public universities across the country in coming months. It also
is launching a Web site in May to list the speech codes of every university in
the country and to give each code a grade based on how restrictive it is.
"We're seeking to end the absolute
scandal" against free speech that speech codes have become, said Alan
Charles Kors, a Penn history professor and cofounder of the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education.
The nonprofit group previously published a
series of guides for students that outline their religious, legal, speech and
other rights. The guides were edited by a politically diverse group that
included a former Reagan administration attorney general and the head of the
American Civil Liberties Union.
In the brief filed Tuesday in U.S. District
Court in Harrisburg, Kors' group argues that the language governing speech in
Shippensburg's student code of conduct is so vague and sweeping that it creates
"a chilling effect" on students' rights "to freely and openly
engage in appropriate discussions of their theories, ideas and political and/or
religious beliefs."
The group's chief executive officer, Thor L.
Halvorssen, a Penn graduate, said that because the Shippensburg code prohibits
students from expressing their views in a way that could "demean" or
that "annoys" or "alarms" others, it would preclude a
student from holding up any number of signs on campus that carry phrases
commonly used in debates over contentious issues in America.
He said, for instance, that it would preclude
a student from holding up a sign that read, "Take your rosaries off my
ovaries," a phrase that has been used by abortion-rights advocates.
Halvorssen said the Shippensburg code is
overreaching because the terms it uses are so vague. "What is 'demeaning'
to you might not be demeaning to me," he said by way of example.
"Universities should be places with
unfettered debate, but instead they have adopted speech codes that limit the
flowering of the mind," he said.
Shippensburg, one of Pennsylvania's 14
state-run universities, responded yesterday with a formal statement. It argued
that the school "strongly and vigorously defends the right of free
speech" but is also committed to the principle that "this discussion
be conducted appropriately. We do have expectations that our students conduct
themselves in a civil manner that allows them to express their opinions without
interfering with the rights of others."
The university has 20 days to file its legal
response.
Penn's Kors has been fighting speech codes
since the 1980s. He calls them the "infantilizing of students." He
said the irony is that college administrators who enjoyed the free-speech
movement of the 1960s during their own college years have turned around and
imposed restrictions on today's students.
"It's the generational swindle of all
time," he said.
A decade ago, Kors was involved in a speech
code case at Penn that became known as the "water buffalo" incident,
cited by critics nationally as a prime example of political correctness run
amok.
Kors defended the student, who was charged under
Penn's speech code because he yelled a phrase that included the term
"water buffalo" at black female students.
Kors and a colleague later thought Penn had
unfairly been singled out for national ridicule over its speech code, since the
code was actually symbolic of a trend at colleges across the country. He and a
colleague wrote a book about that trend, called The Shadow University.
After the "water buffalo" incident,
Penn trustees scrapped the speech code. And last spring, when a graduate
student posted a message on a Penn Internet news group calling for the death of
Palestinians, the issue was handled very differently.
Instead of sanctioning the student, Penn
encouraged more campus discussion of the incident. Kors applauds the approach,
noting that the student was subject to intense public criticism. The answer to
offensive speech, he said, "is more speech."
Contact staff writer James M. O'Neill at
610-313-8012 or joneill@phillynews.com.
from WorldNetDaily, 2002-Apr-20, by Joel
Miller (column "Random Fire"):
'Freedom'
banned in school?
A music teacher in an inner-city Michigan
grade school is getting an earful from the higher-ups about the type of songs
she can use in her classroom.
According to the April 17 issue of the Rutherford
Institute's Insider, the teacher isn't in trouble for having the
children sing lines from the latest Snoop Dogg rap album or even getting the
tykes to trot out with something as strictly verboten as "Jesus Loves
Me."
No, said the Insider, "school
administrators informed her that she could not use any songs in class that
contain the words 'freedom' or 'liberty.'" Why not, you might wonder.
Simple: "Because some children in the school are not U.S. citizens."
I won't bother raising my hand before asking
the following questions:
- Since
when did freedom and liberty become exclusively American?
- Since
when did they become so offensive to foreigners? Immigrants used to doff
their digs and come here for those things.
- What's
more, since when do we give a rip if they are offensive to foreigners?
As imperfectly as we protect and defend our
liberties, Americans should be proud of them. We should exult in the providence
that took Hebraic legal tradition, hundreds of years of English common law, the
guts, wits and wisdom of a few pasty, colonial landholders and distilled it
into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
While Rutherford is looking to take a whack
at the offending educrats in Michigan, we should use this example as a
temperature reading of how chilling the atmosphere is to traditional American
values the nation over.
Beyond that, we need to reflect upon the fact
that as traditionally American as those values may be, they are not exclusively
American. Championing freedom around the globe is just as important as it is in
the classrooms - which also provides a nice comparison with which to judge the
public-school establishment:
The people most opposed to the propagation of
freedom abroad are typically the dictators and strongmen who stand everything
to lose if liberty should prevail in their countries. They value their power
and pelf more than others' freedom.
So, dispensing with the hypersensitive
hogwash, it's clear that the reason teachers are being forbidden to utter the
words "freedom" and "liberty" has little to do with
offending foreigners, as was suggested, and a lot more to do with the fact that
educrats simply don't put a high value on freedom and liberty.
For these mini dictators, freedom and liberty
are all well and good so far as they go, but they're not so important that we
can't shut up about them if a few kids and their parents get flustered over the
fact.
Back to reality for a moment: Even if people
are so sensitive they break out in rashes over use of the words, gagging a
pedagogue in this manner is hardly defensible.
This isn't as simple as some misguided
separation-of-church-and-state argument, where folks quickly concede to a
position at which the founders would have laughed out loud. This is like
separating government from government:
We
hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the
Consent of the Governed. ?
Governments are instituted to secure liberty.
So keeping a public school teacher from using the word
"liberty" in a song is tantamount to the separation of the government
and its very purpose for existing. As the founders were well-aware, this is
precisely the junction at which tyranny arises in a society.
When the government values other things above
the life, liberty and property of its citizens, the citizens had better watch
out - you can read the rest of the Declaration
to see what happens next.
Forbidding a teacher from chirping choruses
with "freedom" won't roll us into a dictatorship tomorrow. But when
public school officials - the people entrusted with your children's education -
don't value freedom and traditional American liberties, you can rest assured
that plenty of kids coming out of those propaganda mills won't either, and
creating a few generations of children that don't respect basic liberties is
the surest way to lose them.
from the San Francisco Chronicle, 2003-Sep-9,
by C.W. Nevius:
One
5-year-old's allergy leads to class peanut ban
Dozens of parents at PTA meeting question lunch searches, nurse
An East Bay elementary school's ban on peanut
butter sandwiches and other nut products in its kindergarten classes has some
parents questioning whether school district administrators overreacted to
concerns for one allergic child.
At the center of the storm is a 5-year-old
boy enrolled at Valle Verde Elementary School in Walnut Creek. He suffers from
"peanut and tree nut" allergies that his mother says are
life-threatening.
As a result, school officials have taken
extraordinary steps in Pod C, a group of kindergarten classrooms at Valle Verde
that share a common central area.
The parents of other kindergarten students
were informed of the situation in a letter from school officials, who decreed that
"all kindergarten students will begin the day by washing hands with soap
and water . . . supervised by classroom staff."
Then they learned that a licensed vocational
nurse has been hired to monitor the student. On the first day of school,
parents said, their kids' backpacks and lunch boxes were searched for peanut
butter sandwiches and such.
District spokeswoman Sue Berg acknowledged
that "the principal said the first day they did have to confiscate or set
aside" some food.
That was enough to get the petitions out and
by Monday night's PTA meeting more than 70 people had signed their names to a
demand that school officials explain what steps have been taken and why they
were necessary.
The PTA session, which drew between 150 and
200 people and was the largest turnout PTA President Kim Moore had ever seen,
produced few answers from school officials who declined to discuss specifics.
Many of those attending questioned why the
boy couldn't be schooled at home if his condition is so severe.
"My son is allergic to dust mites,"
said one woman. "Can we get rid of dust mites on campus?"
The allergic boy's mother, Leora Cope, didn't
speak at the meeting and later flatly rejected suggestions from others in the
audience that the school was overreacting to her son's condition.
"My child's allergies are
life-threatening," she said. "If he contacts peanut oil, it could
threaten his life. This is a lot different than dust mites."
She said with the measures taken by the
school, her son faces no threat. "This is nothing new. This is a situation
of parents who are not informed."
For years, schools across the nation have
struggled with how to balance the needs of severely allergic child -- like the
one in Walnut Creek -- with the desires of children who love peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches. But the question remains: How far should schools, airlines
and other institutions go to accommodate people with severe allergies?
Moore, the PTA president, said she initially
questioned the steps taken by the Valle Verde officials, but after researching
allergies on the Internet came to agree with their position.
"Allergies vary on a spectrum," she
said. "Here we have a child who reacts very violently to the touch of even
peanut oil. What we are talking about is life or death."
Although the allergic reaction to peanuts is
not rare, and the 5-year-old is not the first student with it to attend the
school, experts say the severity of the reaction can vary.
Walnut Creek allergist and immunologist Dr.
Nancy Mozelsio earlier in the day told The Chronicle that it is not unusual for
schools to create a "nut- free zone" for allergic students. Children
are asked not to bring nut products to class, and even items like coconut
sunblock are checked.
"That works quite well," says
Mozelsio. "I would say that in most cases having the child in a nut-free
zone, being careful not to share food, and not eating anything not packed by
mom or dad should be fine."
It's possible that this 5-year-old's
reactions might be so severe as to be a threat, but that would be very unusual,
Mozelsio said.
"I would say having someone (a nurse) go
around with that person and searching lunch boxes is a bit excessive, in my
opinion," she said. "There have been a couple of cases written up of
reactions from people who experienced a reaction just touching or breathing
peanut dust. But I think there's a little hysteria involved. That's not typical
of what we see."
Alicia McCormack, chair of the school safety
committee and first vice president of the Valle Verde PTA, worries that the salary
for the nurse is the reason that the school, financially strapped like most in
the state, has lost an instructional assistant.
"We made a real effort not to let the
budget cuts affect our school," McCormack said. "But all I know is we
are down one IA and up a nurse."
Valle Verde Principal Carolyn Kreuscher said
hiring the nurse would not siphon funds away from other school programs.
Some parents say that rather than impose
restrictions and search lunches, the matter could have been handled with less draconian
measures.
"Look," says Kathryn Stewart, a
clinical psychologist who works with special education high school students,
"my son (now 15) is allergic to peanuts and an alumni of Valle Verde. This
kind of nonsense makes me crazy.
"By kindergarten, and certainly by first
grade, my son was able to say, 'What is in that?' " she said.
"Searching a lunch box is insane. This goes to personal responsibility not
changing the rest of the world to fit you."
from the Times of London, 2002-Aug-6, by Adam
Sage:
Rude
French pupils face prison
FRENCH schoolchildren can be sent to prison
for up to six months under a new law for insulting their teachers.
The move, approved as part of an attempt to
curb juvenile offences and unruly behaviour, sparked fierce controversy
yesterday. Some head teachers welcomed the law as a tool in the fight against
classroom violence, but teachers' unions denounced it as ``bizarre and
worrying''.
In theory the measure could apply to children
as young as 13, although officials said that almost certainly it would be
limited to lycéens, the equivalent of sixth-formers.
Under the legislation approved by the
National Assembly, the State Prosecution Service can begin proceedings against
children who ``attack the dignity or respect due'' to their teachers - or
police and fire officers, gendarmes and railway guards. The maximum penalty is
six months' imprisonment and a fine of €7,500 (£4,700).
Although prosecutors can and do step in when
teachers are physically attacked by their pupils, they have been unable to take
action with regard to verbal violence.
President Chirac has denounced what he called
the ``culture of impunity'' that has developed among youth rarely punished for
incivility or petty offences. By the time that the criminal justice system
stepped in, he said, they had often committed serious crimes.
The number of youngsters under 18 involved in
crime rose by 79 per cent between 1992 and last year. They were responsible for
177,017 offences last year.
Supporters said that the law would
re-establish the notion of respect for authority. The National Union of Lycées
said it was ``highly satisfied'', although the Magistrates' Union said: ``This
law attacks the fundamental principles of our legal system . . . the existence
of laws to protect minors.''
from City Journal, 2003-Winter, by Joshua
Kaplowitz:
How I
Joined Teach for America--and Got Sued for $20 Million
what?
Well, when push came to shove, I didn’t want
to devote my life to helping the rich get richer or crunching numbers to see
what views were most popular for the vice president to adopt. This wasn’t what
my 17 years of education were for.
My doctor parents had drummed into me that
education was the key to every door, the one thing they couldn’t take away from
my ancestors during pogroms and persecutions. They had also filled me with a
strong sense of social justice. I couldn’t help feeling guilty dismay when I
thought of the millions of kids who’d never even tasted the great teaching—not
to mention the supportive family—I’d enjoyed for my entire life.
I told the Al Gore guy, “Thanks, but no
thanks.” Weird as he might have thought it, I had decided to teach in an
inner-city school.
Five weeks later, I found myself steering my parents’
old Volvo off R Street and into a one-block cul-de-sac. There it was: Emery
Elementary School, a 1950s-ugly building tucked behind a dead-end street—an apt
metaphor, I thought, for the lives of many of the children in this almost
all-black neighborhood a mile north of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. I had
seen signs of inner-city blight all over the neighborhood, from the grown men
who skulked in the afternoon streets to the bulletproof glass that sealed off
the cashier at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. This was the “other half” of
Washington, the part of the city I had missed during my grade-school field
trips to the Smithsonian and my two summers as a Capitol Hill intern.
I parked the car and bounded into the main
office to say hi to Mr. Bledsoe, the interim principal who had hired me a few
weeks before. As he showed me around the clean but bare halls, my head filled
with visions of my students happily painting imaginative murals under my
artistic direction. I peered through windows into classrooms, where students
were bent over their desks, quietly filling out worksheets. I smiled to myself
as I imagined the creative lessons I would give to these children, who had
never had a dynamic young teacher to get them excited about scholarship the way
I knew I could. Their minds were like kindling, I reflected; all they needed
was a spark to ignite a love of learning that would lift them above the drugs,
violence, and poverty. The spark, I hoped, would be me.
As the tour ended and I was about to leave,
Mr. Bledsoe pulled me aside. “The one thing you need to do above all else is to
have your children under control. Once you have done that, you’ll be fine.”
Fine. But as I learned to my great cost, that
was easier said than done.
Iwas supposed to pick up that skill over the summer
from Teach for America (TFA), an organization, affiliated with AmeriCorps, that
places young people with no ed-school background, and usually just out of
college, in disadvantaged school districts suffering from teacher shortages. Applicants
request placement in one of over a dozen rural and urban school districts
around the country that contract with TFA, and I got my first choice, in the
city I hoped to live in for the rest of my life.
Teach for America conducts an intensive
five-week training program for its inductees during the summer before they
start teaching. My year, this “teacher boot camp” took place in Houston. It was
there that I quickly figured out that enthusiasm and creativity alone wouldn’t
suffice in an inner-city classroom. I was part of a tag team of four recruits
teaching a summer-school class of low-income fourth-graders. Even in one- to
two-hour blocks of teaching, I quickly realized that my best-planned, most
imaginative lessons fell apart if I didn’t have control of my students.
In the seminars we attended when we weren’t
teaching, I learned the basics of lesson planning and teaching theory. I also
internalized the TFA philosophy of high expectations, the idea that if you set
a rigorous academic course, all students will rise to meet the challenge.
But the training program skimped on actual
teaching and classroom-management techniques, instead overwhelming us with
sensitivity training. My group spent hours on an activity where everyone stood
in a line and then took steps forward or backward based on whether we were the
oppressor or the oppressed in the categories of race, income, and religion. The
program had a college bull session, rather than professional, atmosphere. And
it had a college-style party line: I heard of two or three trainees being
threatened with expulsion for expressing in their discussion groups politically
incorrect views about inner-city poverty—for example, that families and
culture, not economics, may be the root cause of the achievement gap.
Nothing in the program simulated what I soon
learned to be the life of a teacher. Though I didn’t know it, I was completely
ill equipped when I stepped into my own fifth-grade classroom at Emery
Elementary in September 2000.
The year before I taught, a popular veteran principal
had been dismissed without explanation. Mr. Bledsoe finished out the rest of
the year on an interim basis, hired me and four other Teach for America
teachers, and then turned over the reins to a woman named V. Lisa Savoy. Ms.
Savoy had been an assistant principal at the District’s infamous Anacostia High
School, in Washington’s equivalent of the South Bronx. Before the start of
school, she met with her four first-year TFA teachers to assure us that we
would be well supported, and that if we needed anything we should just ask.
Most of my veteran colleagues, 90 percent of them black, also seemed helpful,
though a few showed flickers of disdain for us eager, young white teachers. By
the time school opened, I was thrilled to start molding the brains of my
children.
My optimism and naiveté evaporated within
hours. I tried my best to be strict and set limits with my new students; but I
wore my inexperience on my sleeve, and several of the kids jumped at the
opportunity to misbehave. I could see clearly enough that the vast majority of
my fifth-graders genuinely wanted to learn—but all it took to subvert the whole
enterprise were a few cutups.
On a typical day, DeAngelo (a pseudonym, as are
the other children’s names in this and the next paragraph) would throw a wad of
paper in the middle of a lesson. Whether I disciplined him or ignored him, his
actions would cause Kanisha to scream like an air-raid siren. In response,
Lamond would get up, walk across the room, and try to slap Kanisha. Within one
minute, the whole class was lost in a sea of noise and fists. I felt profoundly
sorry for the majority of my students, whose education was being hijacked.
Their plaintive cries punctuated the din: “Quiet everyone! Mr. Kaplowitz is
trying to teach!”
Ayisha was my most gifted student. The
daughter of Senegalese immigrants, she would tolerantly roll her eyes as
Darnetta cut up for the ninth time in one hour, patiently waiting for the day
when my class would settle down. Joseph was a brilliant writer who struggled
mightily in math. When he needed help with a division problem, I tried to give
him as much attention as I could, before three students wandering around the
room inevitably distracted me. Eventually, I settled on tutoring him after
school. Twenty more students’ educations were sabotaged, each kid with specific
needs that I couldn’t attend to, because I was too busy putting out fires.
Though I poured my heart into inventive lessons and activities throughout the
entire year, they almost always fell apart in the face of my students’
disrespect and indifference.
To gain control, I tried imposing the kinds of
consequences that the classroom-management handbooks recommend. None worked. My
classroom was too small to give my students “time out.” I tried to take away
their recess, but depriving them of their one sanctioned time to blow off steam
just increased their penchant to use my classroom as a playground. When I
called parents, they were often mistrustful and tended to question or even
disbelieve outright what I told them about their children. It was sometimes
worse when they believed me, though; the tenth time I heard a mother swear that
her child was going to “get a beating for this one,” I almost decided not to
call parents. By contrast, I saw immediate behavioral and academic improvement
in students whose parents had come to trust me.
I quickly learned from such experiences how
essential parental support is in determining whether a school succeeds in
educating a child. And of course, parental support not just of the teachers but
of the kids: as I came to know my students better, I saw that those who had
seen violence, neglect, or drug abuse at home were usually the uncontrollable
ones, while my best-behaved, hardest-working kids were typically those with the
most nurturing home environments.
Being a white teacher in a mostly black
school unquestionably hindered my ability to teach. Certain students hurled
racial slurs with impunity; several of their parents intimated to my colleagues
that they didn’t think a white teacher had any business teaching their
children—and a number of my colleagues agreed. One parent who was also a
teacher’s aide threatened to “kick my white ass” in front of my class and received
no punishment from the principal, beyond being told to stay out of my
classroom. The failure of the principal, parents, and teachers to react more
decisively to racist disrespect emboldened students to behave worse. Such
poisonous bigotry directed at a black teacher at a mostly white school would of
course have created a federal case.
Still, other colleagues, friendly and supportive,
helped me with my discipline problems. They let me send unruly students to
their classrooms for brief periods of time to cool off, allowing me to teach
the rest of my class effectively. But when I turned to my school administration
for similar help, I was much less fortunate.
I had read that successful schools have chief
executives who immerse themselves in the everyday operations of the
institution, set clear expectations for the student body, recognize and support
energetic and creative teachers, and foster constructive relationships with
parents. Successful principals usually are mavericks, too, who skirt stupid
bureaucracy to do what is best for the children. Emery’s Principal Savoy sure
didn’t fit this model.
To start with, from all that I could see, she
seemed mostly to stay in her office, instead of mingling with students and
observing classes, most of which were up at least one flight of stairs, perhaps
a disincentive for so heavy a woman. Furthermore, I saw from the first month
that she generally gave delinquents no more than a stern talking-to, followed
by a pat on the back, rather than suspensions, detentions, or any other
meaningful punishment. The threat of sending a student to the office was thus
rendered toothless.
Worse, Ms. Savoy effectively undermined my
classroom-management efforts. She forbade me from sending students to other
teachers—the one tactic that had any noticeable effect. Exiling my four worst
students had produced a vast improvement in the conduct of the remainder of my
class. But Ms. Savoy was adamant, insisting that the school district required
me to teach all my children, all the time, in the “least restrictive”
environment. This was just the first instance of Ms. Savoy blocking me with a
litany of D.C. Public Schools regulations, as she regularly frustrated my
colleagues on disciplinary issues.
Some of Ms. Savoy’s actions defied
explanation. She more than once called me to her office in the middle of my
lessons to lecture me on how bad a teacher I was—well before her single visit
to observe me in my classroom. She filled my personnel file with lengthy memos
articulating her criticisms. I eventually concluded that Ms. Savoy tended
similarly to trouble any teacher, experienced or novice, who rocked the boat.
And in November I really rocked it. By then, despite
mounting tension with Ms. Savoy, and despite the pandemonium that continued to
ravage my teaching efforts, I had managed—painstakingly—to build a rapport with
my fifth-graders. I felt I was turning a corner. I thought that my students
(and their parents) would completely shape up once they saw their abysmal first
report cards. D.C. Public Schools grade kids on a highly subjective 1 to 4
scale, 4 being the highest. Most of my students entered fifth grade with grave
academic deficiencies, yet their cumulative records revealed fair to excellent
grades, making clear that social promotion was standard practice at Emery. I
wasn’t playing along. I had given regular tests and quizzes that first
semester, and most of my students had earned straight 1s by any rational
measure. True to the credo of high expectations, I would give them the grades
they earned.
I submitted my report cards to Ms. Savoy, who
insisted that my grades were “too low” and demanded that I raise them
immediately. I offered to show her all of my students’ work portfolios; but she
demurred, informing me that the law obliged me to pass a certain percentage of
my students. I paid no attention, gave my students the grades they deserved,
and patiently explained to every parent that their child’s grades would improve
once he or she started behaving in class and doing the assigned lessons. For
this, Ms. Savoy cited me for insubordination.
Just after the New Year, Ms. Savoy informed
me that she was switching me from fifth grade to second grade; the veteran
second-grade teacher would then take over my fifth-graders. Her justification
was that I would be able to control younger students more effectively—though I
assumed she thought that I could wreak less disruption with the younger kids,
who were relatively flunk-proof.
From the start, I tried my best to combat
understandable parental resentment that their experienced teacher was being
yanked out and replaced by me, a first-year teacher with notoriously poor
classroom-management skills. I wrote letters home describing my ambitious
plans, called parents with enthusiastic words about their children, and walked
my students home after school to increase my visibility in the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, I never got a chance to show
that I was in control. Unbelievable as it sounds, my second-graders were even
wilder than my fifth-graders. Just as before, a majority of kids genuinely
wanted to learn, but the antics of a few spun my entire class into chaos. This
time, though, my troublemakers were even more immature and disruptive, ranging
from a boy who roamed around the room punching his classmates and threatening
to kill himself to a borderline–mentally retarded student, who would throw
crumpled wads of paper all day. I was so busy trying to quell anarchy that I
never had the chance to get to know my new students, let alone teach them
anything.
Ms. Savoy had abandoned all pretense of
administrative support by this point. Nearly every student I sent to the office
returned within minutes.
This lack of consequences encouraged a level of
violence I never could have imagined among any students, let alone second-graders.
Fights broke out daily—not just during recess or bathroom breaks but also in
the middle of lessons. And this wasn’t just playful shoving: we’re talking
fists flying, hair yanked, heads slammed against lockers.
When I asked other teachers to come help me
stop a fight, they shook their heads and reminded me that D.C. Public Schools
banned teachers from laying hands on students for any reason, even to protect
other children. When a fight brewed, I was faced with a Catch-22. I could call
the office and wait ten minutes for the security guard to arrive, by which
point blood could have been shed and students injured. Or I could intervene
physically, in violation of school policy.
Believe me, you have to be made of iron, or
something other than flesh and blood, to stand by passively while some enraged
child is trying to inflict real harm on another eight-year-old. I couldn’t do
it. And each time I let normal human instinct get the best of me and broke up a
fight, one of the combatants would go home and fabricate a story about how I
had hurt him or her. The parent, already suspicious of me, would report this
accusation to Ms. Savoy, who would in turn call in a private investigative firm
employed by D.C. Public Schools. Investigators would come to Emery and interview
me, as well as several students whom the security guard thought might
tell the truth about the alleged incident of corporal punishment.
I had previously heard of three other
teachers at Emery that year who were being investigated for corporal punishment.
When I talked to them—they were all experienced male teachers—they heatedly
protested their innocence and bitterly complained about Ms. Savoy’s handling of
the situation. Now that I had joined the club, I began to understand their
fears and frustrations.
To define as “corporal punishment” the mere physical
separation of two combatants not only puts students at risk but also gives
children unconscionable power over teachers who choose to intervene. False
allegations against me and other teachers snowballed, as certain students
realized that they had the perfect tool for getting their teacher in deep
trouble. As I began to be investigated on almost a weekly basis, parents came
to school to berate and threaten me—naturally, without reprisals from the administration.
One day, a rather large father came up to me after school and told me he was
going to “get me” if he heard that I put my hands on his daughter one more
time. Forget the fact that I had pulled her off of a boy whom she was
clobbering at the time.
With such a weak disciplinary tone set by the
administration, by late February the whole school atmosphere had devolved into
chaos. Gangs of students roamed the halls at will. You could hear screaming
from every classroom—from students and teachers alike. Including me, four
teachers (or 20 percent of the faculty) were under investigation on bogus
corporal-punishment charges, including a fourth-grade instructor whose skills I
greatly respected. The veteran teachers constantly lamented that things were better
the previous year, when the principal ran a tight disciplinary ship, and the
many good instructors were able to do their job.
It was nearly March, and the Stanford-9 standardized
tests, the results of which determine a principal’s success in D.C. Public
Schools, were imminent. Ms. Savoy unexpectedly instituted a policy allowing
teachers to ship their two or three most disruptive students to the computer
lab to be warehoused and supervised by teachers’ aides. My classroom’s behavior
and attentiveness improved dramatically for two weeks. Unfortunately, Ms. Savoy
abandoned this plan the instant the standardized tests had passed.
After that, my classroom became more of a gladiatorial venue than a place of
learning. Fights erupted hourly; no student was immune. The last three months
were a blur of violence, but several incidents particularly stand out. One
week, two of my emotionally disturbed boys went on a binge of sexual
harassment, making lewd gestures and grabbing girls’ buttocks—yes, seven-
and eight-year-olds. On another occasion, three students piled on top of
one of their peers and were punching him with their fists before I intervened.
My students were not even afraid to try to hurt me: two boys spent a month
throwing pencils at me in the middle of lessons; another child slugged me in
the gut.
But for Ms. Savoy, apparently I was
the problem. It seemed to me that she was readier to launch investigations when
a student or parent made an accusation against me than to help me out when my
students were acting up.
Faced with a series of corporal-punishment charges, no
administrative support, and no hope of controlling my second-grade class in the
foreseeable future, I should have packed up and left midyear. Surely there were
other schools, even inner-city ones, where I could have developed and succeeded
as a teacher.
Why did I stay on? Part of the answer lay in
my own desperate desire not to fail. I felt that if I just worked harder, I
could turn my children around and get them to learn. Another part of the answer
was Teach for America’s having instilled in each corps member the idea that you
have made a commitment to the children and that you must stick with them at all
costs, no matter how much your school is falling apart. Because of this
mentality, my TFA friends and I put up with nonsense from our schools and our
students that few regular teachers would have tolerated.
The three-person TFA-D.C. staff was stretched
too thin to support any of us. When I told them about the debacle at Emery, the
D.C. program directors told me to keep my chin up and work harder. They
wouldn’t transfer me to another TFA-affiliated elementary school, and
pooh-poohed the idea that I had it worse than anyone else in the program. So I
was stuck at Emery, unwilling to incur the disgrace that came with quitting.
Fate made the decision for me.
Four days before the end of my first year, I
was still planning to return to Emery in the fall. The rumor was that Ms. Savoy
would be replaced. With her gone, I thought, I could start fresh and use my
hard-won battlefield experience to make a positive difference in
underprivileged children’s lives.
The afternoon of June 13 started with the
usual mixture of disorder and disrespect. This time, a boy named Raynard, a particularly
difficult child, whom I had seen punch other students and throw things in the
past, was repeating over and over, “I got to go to the bathroom. I need some
water.” The rest of the class tittered as I told him in my sternest teacher
voice that we would be having a class bathroom break once everyone was quiet
and in his seat.
“I got to go to the bathroom. I need some
water.”
Frustrated, I led him to the classroom door
with my hand on the small of his back. I nudged him into the hall and closed
the door. He would probably spend the remainder of the day roaming the halls
with the rest of the troublemakers at Emery, but at least he would be out of
sight, so I could get the rest of my class under control. I had given up on
teaching for the rest of the day; my class was slated to watch a movie with Ms.
Perkins’s first-graders across the hall.
Once Raynard left, I guided my students
through a characteristically raucous bathroom break and filed them into Ms.
Perkins’s room, where they lapsed into a rare TV-induced calm.
After 15 minutes, the school security guard
appeared at the door and beckoned for me. My stomach hit the floor, as I
guessed what this meant: yet another corporal-punishment charge. But this time
was different. Chaos reigned in the main entranceway as police officers swarmed
into the building. Raynard’s mother, I was told, had been in school for a
meeting to place her son in a class for emotionally disturbed children. Raynard
had told her that I had violently shoved him in the chest out the door of my
classroom, injuring his head and back. His mother had dialed 911 and summoned
the cops and the fire department. The police hustled me into the principal’s
office, where I sat in bewilderment and desperately denied I had hurt Raynard
in any way.
In the blink of an afternoon, my search for the perfect
lesson plan gave way to my search for the perfect lawyer. I was lucky that my
parents could afford Hank Asbill, a highly regarded Washington defense
attorney.
Two months later, Raynard’s mother filed a
$20 million lawsuit against the school district, Ms. Savoy, and myself—and the
D.C. police charged me with a misdemeanor count of simple assault against my
former student. Thus ended my first and last year as a public school teacher.
After I was charged, Hank Asbill chose a day
in early September for me to turn myself in at the District 5 police station
near Emery and receive a trial date. The whole ordeal was supposed to take
about six hours—but five minutes after I was admitted into custody, the two planes
hit the World Trade Center. After the third plane crashed into the Pentagon,
the D.C. courts shut down. It was only after 33 hours in jail that I saw
daylight again, on September 12.
My criminal trial spanned six days in early March of
2002. It was agonizing watching several former students testifying against me,
not to mention facing the very real prospect of spending time in the D.C. jail.
The children’s stories as to what happened on June 13 were wildly
inconsistent—not surprising, considering that the layout of my classroom
precluded them from witnessing anything Raynard had alleged. Hank Asbill
countered with a string of character witnesses, friends who attested to my
peaceful nature and law-abiding ways, as well as other teachers at Emery who
reported on the brutal atmosphere of the school. Hank then brought me to the
stand to explain what had actually happened, and he also brought to light
Raynard’s medical records from June 13, which showed that the emergency-room
doctors had found no evidence of any injury. Fortunately, we drew a rational,
deliberative judge, unswayed by the case’s racially charged nature: a poor
black kid against a rich white Ivy Leaguer. He found me not guilty, touching
off an outpouring of relief from my friends and former colleagues and—not
least—me.
My elation was short-lived. As I had
surmised, this whole case finally came down to money. Even after my acquittal,
even after the accuracy of Raynard’s story had been seriously undermined, his
mother and her big-firm lawyers aggressively pursued multi-million-dollar
damage claims on the civil side. Yet even as the lawsuit dragged on and the
legal cloud over me caused me to lose a job opportunity I really wanted, I
refused to entertain Raynard’s mother’s offers to settle the case by my paying
her $200,000—a demand that ultimately diminished to $40,000. The school system
had no such scruples; it settled the mother’s tort claim in October 2002 for
$75,000 (plus $15,000 from the teachers’ union’s insurance company—chump change
compared with the cost of defending the litigation). It wasn’t $20 million, but
it was still more money than I imagine this woman had seen in her life—a pretty
good payout and hardly deterrence to other parents in the neighborhood who felt
entitled to shanghai the system.
I stayed in touch with several of my more
supportive colleagues and parents, who have told me that Emery, although it has
a new principal, is just as out of control two years after I taught there.
Veteran teachers with nowhere else to go, they say, are giving up all pretense
of teaching; their goal is to make it through the end of each year. Young
teachers like my TFA colleagues are staying for a year or two and moving on to
private, charter, or suburban schools, or to new careers.
In all the reading and talking I’ve done to try to make
sense out of what happened to me, I’ve learned that Emery is hardly unique.
Numerous new friends and acquaintances who have taught in D.C.’s inner-city
schools—some from Teach for America, some not—report the same outrageous
discipline problems that turned them from educators into U.N. peacekeepers.
I’ve learned that an epidemic of violence is
raging in elementary schools nationwide, not just in D.C. A recent Philadelphia
Inquirer article details a familiar pattern—kindergartners punching
pregnant teachers, third-graders hitting their instructors with rulers.
Pennsylvania and New Jersey have reported nearly 30 percent increases in
elementary school violence since 1999, and many school districts have
established special disciplinary K–6 schools. In New York City, according to
the New York Post, some 60 teachers recently demonstrated against
out-of-control pupil mayhem, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho; violent students must
go.” Kids who stab each other, use teachers as shields in fights, bang on doors
to disrupt classes, and threaten to “kick out that baby” from a pregnant
teacher have created a “climate of terror,” the Post reports.
Several of my new acquaintances in the
Washington schools told me of facing completely fabricated corporal-punishment
allegations, as I did. Some even faced criminal charges. Washington teachers’
union officials won’t give me hard numbers, but they intimate that each year
they are flooded with corporal-punishment or related charges against teachers,
most of which get settled without the media ever learning of this disturbing
new trend. It is a state of affairs that Philip K. Howard vividly describes in
his recent The Collapse of the Common Good: parents sue teachers and
principals for suspending their children, for allegedly meting out corporal
punishment, and for giving failing marks. As a result, educators are afraid to
penalize misbehaving students or give students grades that reflect the work
they do. The real victims are the majority of children whose education is being
commandeered by their out-of-control classmates.
I’ve come to believe that the most unruly and
violent children should go to alternative schools designed to handle students
with chronic behavior problems. A school with a more military structure can do
no worse for those children than a permissive mainstream school, and it spares
the majority of kids the injustice of having their education fall victim to the
chaos wreaked by a small minority.
I know for sure that inner-city schools don’t have to
be hellholes like Emery and its District of Columbia brethren, with their poor
administration and lack of parental support, their misguided focus on
children’s rights, their anti-white racism, and their lawsuit-crazed culture.
Some of my closest TFA friends, thrilled to be liberated from the D.C. system,
went on to teach at D.C. charter schools, where they really can make a
difference in underprivileged children’s lives. For example, at Paul Junior High
School, which serves students with the same economic and cultural background as
those at Emery, the principal’s tough approach to discipline fosters a serious
atmosphere of scholarship, and parents are held accountable, because the
principal can kick their children back to the public school system if they
refuse to cooperate. A friend who works at the Hyde School, which emphasizes
character education (and sits directly across a field from Emery), tells me
that this charter school is quiet and orderly, the teachers are happy, and the
children are achieving at a much higher level—so much higher that several of
the best students at Emery who transferred to Hyde nearly flunked out of their
new school.
It should come as no surprise that students
are leaving Emery in droves, in hopes of enrolling in this and other
alternative schools. Enrollment, 411 when I was there, now is about 350. If
things don’t change, it will soon be—and should be—zero.
from the New York Times, 2003-Apr-19, by
Emily Eakin:
The
Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn't Matter
These are uncertain times for literary
scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through
humanities departments in the 20th century ? psychoanalysis, structuralism,
Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism ? have lost favor or been abandoned.
Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have
traditionally been associated have taken a beating.
In the latest sign of mounting crisis, on
April 11 the editors of Critical Inquiry, academe's most prestigious theory
journal, convened the scholarly equivalent of an Afghan-style loya jirga. They
invited more than two dozen of America's professorial elite, including Henry
Louis Gates Jr., Homi Bhabha, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, to the
University of Chicago for what they called "an unprecedented meeting of
the minds," an unusual two-hour public symposium on the future of theory.
Understandably, expectations were high. More
than 500 people, mostly students and faculty, squeezed into a lecture hall to
hear what the mandarins had to say, while latecomers made do with a live video
feed set up in the lobby.
In his opening remarks, W. J. T. Mitchell,
the journal's editor and a professor of English and art history at Chicago, set
an upbeat tone for the proceedings. "We want to be the Starship Enterprise
of criticism and theory," he told the audience.
But any thought that this would be a gleeful
strategy session with an eye toward extending theory's global reach, or an
impassioned debate over the merits of, say, Derrida and Lacan, was quickly
dispelled.
When John Comaroff, a professor of
anthropology and sociology at Chicago who was serving as the event's moderator,
turned the floor over to the panelists, for several moments no one said a word.
Then a student in the audience spoke up. What
good is criticism and theory, he asked, if "we concede in fact how much
more important the actions of Noam Chomsky are in the world than all the
writings of critical theorists combined?"
After all, he said, Mr. Fish had recently
published an essay in Critical Inquiry arguing that philosophy didn't matter at
all.
Behind a table at the front of the room, Mr.
Fish shook his head. "I think I'll let someone else answer the
question," he said.
So Sander L. Gilman, a professor of liberal
arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, replied instead.
"I would make the argument that most criticism ? and I would include Noam
Chomsky in this ? is a poison pill," he said. "I think one must be
careful in assuming that intellectuals have some kind of insight. In fact, if
the track record of intellectuals is any indication, not only have
intellectuals been wrong almost all of the time, but they have been wrong in
corrosive and destructive ways."
Mr. Fish nodded approvingly. "I like
what that man said," he said. "I wish to deny the effectiveness of
intellectual work. And especially, I always wish to counsel people against the
decision to go into the academy because they hope to be effective beyond
it."
During the remainder of the session, the only
panelist to venture a defense of theory ? or mention a literary genre ? was Mr.
Bhabha. "There are a number of people around the table here and a number
of people in the audience, in fact most of you here are evidence that
intellectual work has its place and its uses," he insisted. "Even a
poem in its own oblique way is deeply telling of the lives of the world we
exist in. You can have poems that are intimately linked with political oppositional
movements, poems that actually draw together people in acts of
resistance."
But no one spoke up to endorse this claim. In
fact, for a conference officially devoted to theory, theory itself got very
little airtime. For more than an hour, the panelists bemoaned the war in Iraq,
the Bush administration, the ascendancy of the right-wing press and the
impotence of the left. Afterward, Mr. Gates, who arrived late because he had
been attending a conference in Wisconsin, said: "For a moment, I thought I
was in the wrong room. I thought we would be talking about academic jargon.
Instead, it was Al Qaeda and Iraq ? not that there's anything wrong with
that."
Finally, a young man with dreadlocks who said
he was a graduate student from Jamaica asked, "So is theory simply just a
nice, simple intellectual exercise, or something that should be
transformative?"
Several speakers weighed in before Mr. Gates
stood up. As far as he could tell, he said, theory had never directly liberated
anyone. "Maybe I'm too young," he said. "I really didn't see it:
the liberation of people of color because of deconstruction or
poststructuralism."
If theory's political utility is this
dubious, why did the theorists spend so much time talking about current events?
Catharine R. Stimpson, a panelist and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and
Science at New York University, offered one, well, theory. "This
particular group of intellectuals," she said, "has a terror of being
politically irrelevant."
from FrontPageMagazine.com, 2002-Mar-21, by
David Horowitz:
Horowitz's
Notepad: Behind the Iron Curtain in Michigan
ALTHOUGH my appearance at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor on Tuesday night, was picketed by the members of the ``Defend
Affirmative Action Party,'' a thousand students -- 600 in the
hall and 400 in the overflow outside the hall -- showed up to hear me speak.
About 300 of them were black. (One in fact was the leader of DAAP, Agnes
Angebou, who stood up during the question and answer period, oblivious to the
fact that she had called for a boycott of the event. She attempted to give an
election speech for her candidacy for student body president until I shut her
up.) The Black Student Union had evidently decided in a late bout of second
thoughts to come in force and be a presence at the proceedings. Another
thousand or so people ``attended'' via the Internet.
Three vice presidents of the University sat
in the balcony. None deigned to introduce themselves to me, or to appear on the
platform with me and suggest to their students that spouting hate and calling
for pickets of academic speakers might be incompatible with the spirit of
learning that an institution like the University of Michigan is supposed to
foster. There were also twelve armed police with dogs in attendance who had
been assigned to keep things in order and protect me from physical harm.
Welcome to the American university campus, circa 2002.
I talked for a little over an hour. My
speeches always begin with a little autobiography since I am the target of a
national smear campaign by leftwing hate groups who are ubiquitous on college
campuses across the country. Indeed I have encountered only a very few campuses
where they are not a visible and intimidating force. At Michigan they regularly
steal the newspapers and the newsstands of my conservative hosts and the Young
America's Foundation, tear down their posters and at times physically attack
them. University administrations look the other way -- a telling contrast to
the way they will leap on the slightest incident that offends the sensitivities
of the left. This collusion is essential to the survival of what can only be
described as a kind of campus fascism.
I began, as I always do, by reminding my
student audiences that I was fighting for civil rights before they were born,
and that I am still doing so. Because of the circumstances of my appearance and
the makeup of the audience I altered my subject (``How the Left Undermined
America's Security'') and spoke a lot about reparations, about the bankruptcy
of the so-called civil rights movement and about the oppression of America's
inner cities by Democrats and progressives who run all the political
institutions that govern and affect them. This threw my numerous opponents in
the audience so thoroughly off guard that I was able to get through my remarks
without incident.
I did manage to talk briefly about the left's
role in undermining America's security by pointing out that the reparations
campaign is really a campaign of the hate America left whose intention is to
paint America as a slave-owning, segregationist and racist nation and thus to
alienate black Americans from their own country, while making other Americans
ashamed to defend it. In the midst of a war that is taking place on American
soil and that may soon involve biological and chemical weapons of mass
destruction, the rest of us can no longer afford to take such a complacent and
tolerant attitude towards this kind of internal ideological attack.
During the question and answer period at
Michigan the discussion got somewhat heated as one would expect. Issues came up
-- like affirmative action or whether American business investments ``destroyed
the economies'' of African countries -- which showed the success of the Marxist
indoctrination process at this once great university. Ideas that the 20th
century has shown to have dangerous consequences and which are tantamount to
flat-earthism are obviously flourishing in a university environment which
provides no competition from conservative viewpoints.
During the Q&A, my most frequent
responses were those starting with, ``Look, I can't remedy four years of
mis-education in one hour, but ...'' And then I would attempt to provide a
verbal reading list of conservative authors they had never heard of like Thomas
Sowell and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, who have provided the irrefutable
evidence that could have succeeded -- and did -- without affirmative action).
The rank ignorance of questioners who argued that ``the Constitution said
blacks were only 3/5ths of a human being,'' fueled the righteous rage of the
Black Student Union members in attendance and for a moment I thought it was
time to end the evening. But the boiling point wasn't reached and the evening
ended if not amicably then at least without a total breakdown. Two cheers for
what remains of the learning environment. The hundreds of students who were
either neutral, curious, or conservative enjoyed the evening immensely and some
of them undoubtedly took away new thoughts. (Check out the accompanying article from the very
liberal Michigan Daily for example.)
In my discussions with my conservative hosts
before the speech I learned among other things, that the Black Studies
Department had previously paid $10,000 to Randall Robinson -- the pro-Castro,
America-hating, race-baiting proponent of reparations to come to Michigan to
speak, but had refused to invite me (or pay me a dime), even though reparations
would appear to lie within the field of black studies and I am the author of
the only book on the other side of the issue. The immense subsidies to
destructive leftwing ideologues like Robinson and the lack of resources to
bring conservative views to the campus only add to the already colossal
intellectual imbalance and the ongoing perversion of the academic process.
I also learned that out of a faculty of
perhaps 2,000 professors, there is not a single professor available to sponsor
the conservative students' newspaper (The Michigan Review) and club.
This does not mean there are no conservatives on the faculty at Michigan, a
taxpayer-funded school in a state with a Republican governor; my hosts actually
thought there might be as many as six, albeit four in the engineering
department. What it does mean is that conservatives are such an endangered
species on the Michigan faculty that they are afraid to let anyone know that
they are conservative lest their lives be made miserable by leftists who
masquerade as liberals. (I was told by one conservative professor at a previous
school I had spoken at, that because he had ``made the mistake'' of letting his
views be known he had not been given a raise in 15 years, and by another -- a
scientist -- that he was punished in petty (or not so petty) ways as for
example by denying him lab space he needed for his work.
It is things like this that leave me with an
aura of sadness even when an evening at a university goes as well as this one
did. It is as though when I leave the campus I am leaving students behind an
Iron Curtain where they will have no adult to stand up for them or educate them
in histories and ideas that would make them proud of their country, that would
help the blacks among them to march towards a positive future, or that would
give them a reasonable understanding of the world around them. The students I
leave behind have no access to professors, books, or ideas associated with the
conservative viewpoint -- which is to say a viewpoint that celebrates the
progressive aspects of this country and progressive role it has played as a
``beacon of freedom and opportunity to the rest of the world.'' What they have
instead are the prejudices, rancors and delusions of a discredited past.
David Horowitz is the
author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has
been described as ``the first great autobiography of his generation,'' and
which chronicles his odyssey from radical activism to the current positions he
holds. Among his other books are The Politics of Bad Faith and The Art of
Political War. The Art of Political War was described by White House political
strategist Karl Rove as ``the perfect guide to winning on the political
battlefield.'' Horowitz's latest book, Uncivil Wars, was published in January this
year, and chronicles his crusade against intolerance and racial McCarthyism on
college campuses last spring. Click here to read more about David
from TownHall.com, 2002-Aug-23, by Michelle
Malkin:
Crusading
to keep kids clueless
The public education monopoly can't stand the
thought of "unqualified" parents teaching their own children.
That is why they are cracking down on home
schooling, even as a new study shows that thousands of public school teachers
themselves are shamefully unqualified to educate the nation's students.
In California, the state's hostile education
department is tightening the screws on enterprising parents who have taken the
initiative and turned their family rooms into classrooms. State Deputy
Superintendent Joanne Mendoza wrote in a July 16 memo to all school employees
that without official teaching credentials, these parents no longer can file
required paperwork that would authorize them to home school their children.
Thus, Mendoza concludes, home-schooled
children not attending public schools would be considered "truant" by
local school districts -- making their parents vulnerable to arrest and
criminal charges.
The education department's Nanny State view
is that parents may be allowed by the government to "supplement"
their own children's education with tutoring at home, but "not substitute
the education with uncredentialed home instruction." Local districts are
following the cue. Sonoma County and San Diego school officials are
distributing memos that declare home schooling illegal.
As I've said many times before, there's
nothing like stiff competition to bring out the worst in government. Nowhere
does this prove more true than in the battle between home-schooling parents and
public school bureaucrats. More than 1.2 million children now call mom and dad
their controlling educational authorities. Their overwhelming success -- in
academic competition, on national tests, and in college -- poses a mounting
threat to the government-run education monopoly and to the public school
teachers' unions.
Despite abominably low test scores, enormous
waste, unsafe classrooms and administrative incompetence, the public schools
have remained a hallowed and untouchable fixture. How dare
"uncredentialed" parents rise up in revolt? How dare they demand
excellence, discipline, and a curriculum that reflects their values and love of
country?
Mocking home schoolers as fringe radicals and
religious extremists, meddling with their teaching materials, and forcing them
to beg public school officials for permission to educate their own children
wasn't enough to defeat the growing movement. So now California's educracy has
adopted a new motto: If you can't beat 'em, criminalize 'em.
These bully tactics are bound to backfire in
California and the rest of the country as the public school system's
incompetence continues to be laid bare. As California wages its war on
"unqualified" parents, a new report by the Washington, D.C.-based
Education Trust reported this week that one-fourth of all secondary school
classes are taught by public school teachers untrained in the class subject.
It's a problem that hasn't improved for nearly a decade.
The researchers examined whether classes in
four core subjects -- English, math, science and social studies -- were
assigned to a teacher who lacked a college major or minor in that field or a
related field. Nationally, 24.2 percent of classes were taught by such
unqualified teachers. In California, 27 percent of classes were taught by the
untrained. Twelve states had more than 30 percent of classes fitting that
category. Five states -- Arizona, Delaware, Louisiana, New Mexico and Tennessee
-- averaged more than one-third.
Among those hurt the most by this trend: poor
and minority students. In schools that serve mostly poor students, the study
found, nearly twice as many courses are taught by out-of-field teachers as in
schools with few poor students. In schools that mostly serve minority students,
29 percent of classes were taught by unqualified teachers, compared with 21
percent for schools that have low minority enrollments.
Our public schools are filled with
substandard math teachers who never took math in college, French teachers
lecturing about biology, art teachers masquerading as history teachers, and
other instructors who have absolutely no expert knowledge or intellectual curiosity
about the subjects they've been assigned to teach. This is a system whose first
priority is self-preservation of its tax-subsidized employees, not academic
enlightenment of its captive charges.
And they dare to accuse home-schooling
parents of educational malpractice?
Contact Michelle Malkin
from FrontPageMagazine, 2001-Apr-25, by
Lowell Ponte:
Illegitimocracy
(or The Mommy Wars)
"IS THERE AN IDEOLOGICAL SIDE TO THE
WHOLE ISSUE?" writes Boston
University Journalism Professor Caryl Rivers, one of many feminists who have
rushed to attack a major new study on the effects of day care on children.
This study of more than 1,100 toddlers by the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHHD) made public
last week found that 17 percent of 4-1/2 to 6 year old kids in day care for 30
hours or more each week scored significantly worse in such evaluation
categories as "gets in lots of fights," "bullying
behavior," "cruelty," and "explosive behavior."
"There is a constant dose-response
relationship between time in care and problem behavior, especially those
involving aggression," says Dr. Jay Belsky of Birkbeck College in London,
one of the study's main investigators. And this link between day care and
aggression, he says, was evident whether the child was rich or poor, male or
female, and held true whether the quality of the day care center was low or
high.
"Belsky is a doomsayer," snarled
feminist Jennifer Foote Sweeney in Salon.com, giving more evidence that
Rivers was right. There is an ideological side to this intersection
where feminism collides with the traditional family -- and that ideological
bias is almost entirely Leftist.
Dr. Jay Belsky was once a hero to feminists.
Until 15 years ago the then-Penn State University Associate Professor was
lionized for his scientific studies that supported day care. But "a slow,
steady trickle of evidence" of its harm led him in 1986 to publish an
analysis titled "Infant Day Care: A Cause for Concern?" This sparked
wide public discussion and blew a gaping hole in Marxist and feminist dogmas
about letting Hillary's collectivist "village" raise our children so
their mothers could pursue careers.
Almost overnight, as Dr. Belsky told reporter
Sheryl Gay Stolberg in the April 21 New York Times, "I was a
pariah, a phantom." He was shunned by colleagues, and now teaches in
England. A publisher removed his name as co-author of a textbook. He was
denounced by critics as a "misogynist." The Leftist hatred grew so
intense that at one New York speech he wondered if someone in the audience
might shoot him. It was, he now says, "my lesson in the science of
political correctness and the Mommy Wars."
Now Dr. Belsky is back, backed up by a study
from the prestigious NICHHD so large and sophisticated that feminists find it
hard to refute. Most critics have retreated to sniper positions, noting that
children cared for by their fathers are almost as assertive as those in day
care; that six percent (about one-third as many) of those with moms at
home exhibit anti-social tendencies like those in day care; and that
toddlers in day care tested higher on language skills and short-term memory.
Belsky agrees, concluding that raising toddlers in day care could produce a
generation of "smart but nasty kids."
"Thirteen million preschoolers,
including six million infants and toddlers, are in child care in this
country," writes Stolberg. "Nearly 30 percent of American children
are in child care centers, while 15 percent are with family child care
providers and five percent are with in-home caregivers," such as
baby-sitters. "Another 25 percent are cared for by relatives, which was
defined as child care in the N.I.H. study," writes Stolberg. "Roughly
one-fourth are cared for by their parents."
A lot is at stake here. More than half of
America's married women now work. Some do so because their income is needed.
The advent of two-income families means that almost twice as many dollars are
now chasing the same amount of goods -- and by the law of supply and demand
this means that things cost twice as much as during the "Father Knows
Best" era when the husband's income alone typically supported a family.
Sending women to work became a dead-end trap. In 1950 the income tax took only
three cents out of the average family's dollar of income, but today with the
highest taxation since World War II direct and hidden taxes devour almost half
of everything working families earn -- meaning that a wife often must go to
work just to pay the family's taxes.
But many women now work to buy
"luxuries" -- a bigger house, newer car, expensive clothes, and the
like. And as feminism taught them, many women now pursue a career out of
ambition or to gain the power, equality, and independence that comes with being
co-breadwinner in the household. They are not in a subservient position to any
husband. But this new study threatens them with guilt. If it is right, then
they may be failing as mothers by selfishly pursuing their careers while
leaving their children in the hands of low-paid day-caring strangers.
This latter group of women -- promised by
feminists that they could "have it all" and succeed as professionals,
wives, and mothers -- now have a powerful vested interest in believing
that this new scientific study is wrong. You can smell the desperate
self-delusion in the frenzied prose of feminist attacks against it.
"Studies of children raised in Israeli
kibbutzes found these children quite the opposite of aggressive," writes
Rivers. "They were more cooperative and peer-oriented than other children.
And these kids spent more hours away from their mothers than most kids
anywhere." Such kibbutzes, founded on the Zionist socialist model, had as
much motivation and intelligence behind them as any utopian effort in history.
But in Israel today many kibbutzes are laughed at; given large
government subsidies, descendants of their idealistic founders now hire Arab braceros
at low wages to do the work. (They remind us of those utopian communes of
America's past, Oneida and Amana, whose wealthy un-utopian grandchildren today
own joint stock companies famous for silverware and microwave ovens.) Did these
kibbutzim children grow up to be "quite the opposite of aggressive?"
Has Israel ever lost a war for lack of assertiveness?
"Is it possible that kids are born
aggressive, defiant, raring to talk too much at the first opportunity?"
Sweeney rationalizes. "Is that a bad thing? Is it better to be smart and
cheeky than dim and placid?" Translation: being with mom makes kids dumb
and weak.
Remember that many Leftist fems now
frantically defending collectivist day care are also quick to eject kids from
school for drawing a paper gun, throwing a spitwad, or playing dodge ball. Many
applaud violent demonstrators in Seattle or Quebec City. Many have been happy
to cheer for Fidel Castro, the Soviet Union, Ho Chi Minh, and Hillary Clinton.
According to their ethical values: aggression in the cause of socialist
collectivism, good; aggression in the cause of capitalism,
individualism, or the United States, bad. And since the collective is all and
the individual nothing, it makes no difference whose breast feeds your baby or
which commissar implants the official Leftist party line in its young mind. You
are just an interchangeable part, a replaceable cog.
Truth be told, if you take toddlers starved
for attention from their own mothers and throw them into a group of 30 others
trying to get attention from one day care surrogate mother, there will be
competition, frustration, and conflict. In Darwinian terms, that competition
probably does sharpen skills and elbows. But what else does it do to tender,
formative children forced into that struggle?
"Maybe the future's going to be a world
of everyone out for themselves," Dr. Belsky told the Financial Times.
"Maybe putting kids in child care is a great preparation for that society.
You are creating kids who will be smart, advantage-taking aggressors who will
break rules and not get along." (Hillary must have been in day care.)
Everybody sing "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," which he will do after
he has thrown everyone else overboard. But are not these selfish values what
the Left pretends to be against? If so, why do Leftists worship collectivist
day care that creates such behavior?
Complicating this issue is another study
published last week. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that in
1999 fully one third of American babies were born out of wedlock. Statistics
make my eyes glaze over too, but ponder a few important numbers.
In 1958 only 5 percent of all babies in the
U.S. were born to unmarried women. That number rose to 10 percent in 1969, to
18.4 percent in 1980, and to 33 percent in 1999. Among women aged 20-24, nearly
one out of every two births -- 48.4 percent -- happened out of wedlock.
Differences exist among groups. In 1950 about
20 percent of African-Americans were born to single mothers -- but the other 80
percent grew up in stable two-parent homes. By 1999 fully 68.9 percent --
nearly 7 out of 10 -- African-American babies were born out of wedlock. Among
Black women aged 20-24, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births was above 80
percent.
For Hispanics in 1999, 42.2 percent of babies
were born to unwed mothers, up from 36.7 percent in 1990.
Among non-Hispanic whites, in 1999 fully 22
percent of babies were born out of wedlock, a 30 percent increase since 1990.
Who is the father to all these babies? You
are, at least in paternal responsibility. Despite welfare reform, your taxes
will play a role in bringing up these babies, who are six times more likely to
grow up in poverty than children with a mother married to a father.
Welfare reform signed by President William
"Safe Sex" Clinton pressures these young single mothers to take jobs
(often government make-work jobs, providing the same taxpayer-funded check
without calling it "welfare"). These mothers are thus prodded to put
their toddlers into -- you guessed it -- day care centers, where they learn
aggression.
Millions of these babies, especially the
males, grow up in inner city environments with no father in the home and no
male role models except the pimp, the drug pusher, the street gang leader, and
the demagogic Democrat politicians who plotted to hook their mothers on
government dependency as a way to maintain their own socialist power.
These young men will grow up in a world where
the government has assumed the role of husband and provider for women. They
will deliberately be kept uneducated by Democrat teacher unions -- 65 percent
of such kids today cannot read at even the most basic level -- because if
educated they would turn against the Democrat bosses and hucksters who have
kept them, generation after generation, as slaves on the government plantation.
So these young black men will have only two social roles -- as rent-a-mobs for
breeders of love children like the Reverend Jesse Jackson in crusades like that
demanding reparations, and as occasional sperm donors to breed the next
generation of fatherless Democrat slaves for their Illegitimocracy.
These millions of unwed mothers serve as a
vanguard for the socialist goal of radical feminists. They have freed
themselves from the phallocentric domination of men, needing no husband but
only the collectivist government. For them socialism is here now. And, as
Sister Souljah was made a non-person for daring to say, having been separated
from a stable relationship with men these women are now available for a variety
of uses and predations by feminist leaders. And radical feminist leaders look
forward to a day when sperm banks and biotechnology will make males virtually
unnecessary, much like short-lived drones in a beehive.
Dan Quayle was scorned, of course, for
denouncing the depiction of single motherhood in the fictional character
"Murphy Brown," a wealthy media star who viewed having a baby sans
husband as "just another lifestyle choice." A cover story in The
Atlantic Monthly would later proclaim that "Dan Quayle Was
Right." And now, as columnist Joseph Perkins notes, the cover story on the
latest issue of Us magazine celebrates "The New Single Moms,"
among them Today Show host Katie Couric, "Ally McBeal" star
Calista Flockhart, Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster, and co-star of ABC's
"The Practice" Camryn Manheim. All are wealthy media stars choosing
single motherhood not in fiction but in fact. The social stigma associated with
this is all but gone.
Singer and actress Madonna, after two
out-of-wedlock babies, did wed again. She had roused feminist fury years ago
with her song "Pappa Don't Preach," in which she portrayed an
unmarried girl who refused to abort her baby. Roughly as many babies are
aborted each year in America as are born out of wedlock, about 1.3 million.
What positive facts can be found about
today's parenthood, families and daycare? If 17 percent of kids in daycare
display aggressive tendencies, that means 83 percent do not, and even those 17
percent do not cross over into dangerously violent behavior.
Nearly half of American marriages end in
divorce, but this is slightly lower than in 1981. Most divorced people still
remarry, practicing serial polygamy [he means serial monogamy -AMPP
Ed.], and married people are generally healthier and live longer than singles.
As this column has discussed previously, 43 million American women
are currently single -- more than 40 percent of all adult females. But the
illegitimacy rate among teens and African-Americans has declined slightly, and
the overall rate has increased little since 1991. As few as one child in four
lives from birth to age 18 in a home with the same two parents, but between
1991 and 1996 the percentage of American children living in nuclear families
with both biological parents increased from 51 to 56 percent. To
strengthen the marriage bond, Arkansas, Arizona, and Louisiana have created the
option of "covenant marriages" for
couples who want a wedding contract stronger than can be dissolved by today's
"no fault" divorces. One house of the legislatures of Oregon,
Georgia, Texas, and Oklahoma have passed "covenant marriage" bills,
and at least 19 states plus Australia have such legislation under
consideration. (Imagine being the man who says: "Honey, I'll love
you forever, but let's have a second class, easy-exit marriage.")
And we are producing enough children to
sustain our population, unlike Japan, Russia, or European nations. Italy, e.g.,
produces 1.4 children per couple and is depopulating rapidly. Soon too few will
remain to pay benefits for its retiring baby boomers. The Italian village of
Vastogirardi has considered a special tax on men who remain bachelors, and
Milan offers poor women one million lire (about $520) per month if they keep
their babies rather than have an abortion. And on the bright side, if one third
of American babies are born out of wedlock, then two-thirds are being born into
married families. As the old Doobie Brothers song asks, "Without love,
where would you be now?"
Mr. Ponte hosts national radio talk show
Monday through Friday Noon-2 PM Eastern Time (9-11 AM Pacific Time) as well as
on Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and on Sundays 9 PM-Midnight
Eastern Time (6-9 PM Pacific Time) on the Talk America network . Internet Audio
worldwide is at TalkAmerica.com. The show's live call-in number is (888)
822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's
Digest.
from TPDL 2002-Jun-6, from the Wall Street
Journal:
Harvard
still hates America
Twenty-four years ago the book "Harvard
Hates America" gave a vivid description of elitism run amok, an academic
institution that held American values in contempt. Unfortunately, it appears
that not much has changed since then.
Today is Harvard's graduation day. Many
universities want controversial graduation speakers, but Harvard has outdone
itself. Zayed Yasin, '02, is the former head of the Harvard Islamic Society. In
2000, he was one of the organizers of a campus fund-raiser for the Holy Land
Foundation (HLF), a front for the terrorist organization Hamas. When the Holy
Land Foundation had its funds frozen after September 11, Mr. Yasin said, the
HLF's aid to families of suicide bombers was justifiable. His graduation speech
— originally titled "American Jihad" — drew attention because of Mr.
Yasin's past activities, his characterization of jihad as a "righteous
struggle," in this speech, and because it was selected by a committee that
has its own extremist views.
As Harvard Business school student Pat
Collins told it on the op-ed pages of this newspaper on Monday, the chair of
the selection committee, Richard Thomas, supports divesting Harvard's
investments in Israel. Another committee member, Dean Michael Shinagel, told
Mr. Collins in a meeting that, "It is not a black and white issue that
Hamas is a terrorist organization. Hamas has done more good for the people of
Palestine than their own government." Mr. Shinagel should read this newspaper
once in a while. If he did, he'd know that Hamas is probably the bloodiest of
the Palestinian terror groups and has claimed "credit" for about 60
of the worst terrorist attacks in the last two years, including the Passover
Massacre in March.
Harvard has not condemned Hamas and other
terrorist organizations for what they obviously are. University President
Lawrence Summers has, so far, only sidestepped the issue by saying that,
"Members of our community are free to express their diverse views on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the conduct of the parties involved." One
might strongly doubt the veracity of that statement — just imagine the uproar a
pro-Israeli speech would cause.
Harvard University tuition costs about
$35,000 a year. Parents should ask what Harvard is giving them for their money.
The answer is only more bad news. While many colleges offer Reserve Officer
Training Corps (ROTC) programs, which earn their members college credit and a
commission in the military, Harvard does not even allow ROTC units to meet on
campus and refuses to give credit for ROTC classes. Michael Segal's letter —
which appeared on this page Wednesday — admitted that the "Vietnam-era
restrictions remain in place" but concluded that "Harvard is the destination
of choice for top-notch students doing ROTC training." Who does he think
he's kidding? Apparently, Harvard still hates America.
from TPDL 2002-Jun-3, from the Washington
Times, by Pat Collins:
Harvard's
Islamic embrace
In the wake of the September 11 attacks,
President Bush asked the nations of the world to decide if they are "with
us" or "with the terrorists." He might consider asking the same
question of Harvard University.
Despite the current war, Harvard continues to
ban ROTC from its campus. Alone among student groups, ROTC is not permitted to
use university facilities or advertise on campus. At the same time, radical
Islamic student groups operate freely, have held on-campus fund-raisers for
terrorist front groups and had one of their leaders selected as a commencement
speaker.
Harvard's faculty voted to exile ROTC from
campus in 1969, at the height of Vietnam-era unrest. The university maintained
funding for the program until 1994, when the faculty voted to cut off financial
support to protest the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy
regarding homosexuals. Alumni now independently provide annual funding of
approximately $135,000.
Students participating in the program are
subject to a variety of indignities. They must travel to Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) to participate in ROTC classes and activities. Unlike
students at schools like MIT with full ROTC programs, Harvard students receive
no academic credit for ROTC classes. Unlike all other Harvard student groups,
they cannot distribute flyers or participate in student club fairs.
Students in the program end up feeling like
second-class citizens. Charles Cromwell, student commander of Harvard's ROTC
battalion, told the Wall Street Journal that he feels "uncomfortable
walking around in uniform" at the school.
In fairness, Harvard's new president,
Lawrence Summers, has taken some positive steps. He has praised the cadets for
their willingness to sacrifice to defend our country and called the funding
arrangement "uncomfortable." He also convinced the Harvard yearbook
to acknowledge ROTC for the first time in many years. But there have been no
changes in underlying policy.
In contrast, Islamic student groups are under
no restrictions, despite their use of campus facilities to raise money for
terrorist front groups. The school has given them privileged status by
selecting one of their leaders as one of this year's commencement speakers.
In November 2000, the Harvard Islamic Society
(HIS) and the Society of Arab Students (SAS) sponsored a well-publicized
fund-raising dinner on campus to support the Holy Land Foundation and the
Palestinian Red Crescent.
President Bush recently froze the assets of
the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) because of its direct financial support for
Hamas and the families of suicide bombers. The Red Crescent, while still linked
to the Red Cross and considered somewhat more legitimate than HLF, has also
been implicated in terrorist activity. In the West Bank, Red Crescent vehicles
have been used in actual attacks. Except for the freezing of assets, these
facts were known at the time of the fund-raiser.
Under criticism, HIS and SAS eventually
decided only to give funds to the Red Crescent. But the on-campus fund-raiser
was held for both groups and the university did nothing to stop it. At the
time, the former HIS president, Zayed Yasin, vocally defended HLF's support of
the families of suicide bombers and lavishly praised the organization for its
"incredible work." Mr. Yasin will be one of three student speakers at
this week's commencement.
According to Harvard's associate dean of
extracurricular life, David Illingworth, there are no specific regulations
prohibiting student groups from using campus facilities to raise money for
terrorist front groups. Though, for most fund-raisers, student groups must
obtain his approval. Mr. Illingworth explained that, in the future, he would
"probably" not approve a fund-raiser for a group like HLF, which has
had its assets frozen. He said that he would still likely approve fund-raisers
for groups that have not had their assets frozen, which would include the Red
Crescent, the HLF at the time of the fund-raiser and a variety of other
objectionable groups.
Allowing students to host fund-raisers for
groups that are tied to Islamic extremist groups, whether their assets are
frozen or not, makes a mockery of Harvard's anti-discrimination policy, which
is the basis for the university's ban on ROTC. These groups engage in terrorism
and espouse Nazi-like anti-Semitism and hate against a variety of groups,
including homosexuals, clearly far worse than any "don't ask, don't
tell" policy. Going further and elevating radical Islamist students at
commencement shows the school's real priorities: the promotion of
multiculturalism at the expense of Western and American values.
Harvard alumni should demand that groups
linked to terrorists be kept off campus whether their assets are frozen or not
and that terrorist sympathizers not be selected as commencement speakers.
Furthermore, the government should actively enforce the Campus Access Act,
passed in 1996, which states that universities, which fail to maintain and
support ROTC programs, will become ineligible for lucrative Defense Department
grants.
Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger
believes Harvard may not be in compliance with the law and is "putting at
risk a great deal of federal money." The university is certainly violating
the spirit of the law. One way or the other, given the school's misbehavior, it
is time for the government to call Harvard to account. This is especially
important in this time of war, when we all must come together as Americans and
show support for our brave soldiers and stand up against Islamic extremism.
Pat Collins is a second-year student at
the Harvard Business School.
from TPDL 2002-Jun-11, from the New York
Post, by Daniel Pipes:
HARVARD
LOVES JIHAD
IMAGINE it's June 1942 - just a few months
after Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States. At Harvard University, a
faculty committee has chosen a German-American to give one of three student
orations at the festive commencement ceremony. He titles it "American
Kampf," purposefully echoing the title of Hitler's book, "Mein
Kampf" ("My Struggle") in order to show the positive side of
"Kampf."
When this prompts protests, a Harvard dean
defends it as a "thoughtful oration" that defines the concept of
Kampf as a personal struggle "to promote justice and understanding in
ourselves and in our society." The dean promises, "The audience will
find his oration, as did all the Harvard judges, a light of hope and reason in
a world often darkened by distrust and conflict."
Then the student turns out to be past
president of the Harvard German Society, a group with a pro-Nazi taint - but
the administration still isn't bothered. Nor is it perturbed that he praised a
Nazi front group for its "incredible work" as well as its
"professionalism, compassion and dedication to helping people in dire
need," then raised money for it.
Far-fetched? Sure. But exactly this scenario
unfolded last week at Harvard. Just replace "German,"
"Nazi," and "Kampf" with "Islamic,"
"militant Islamic" and "jihad."
Faculty members chose Zayed Yasin, 22 and the
past president of the Harvard Islamic Society, to deliver a commencement
address. He earlier had sung the praises of and raised money for the Holy Land
Foundation for Relief and Development, a militant Islamic group closed down by
President Bush.
Yasin titled his talk "American
Jihad," echoing Osama bin Laden's jihad against the United States. Yasin
declared an intention to convince his audience of 32,000 that "Jihad is
not something that should make someone feel uncomfortable."
Hmm. The authoritative "Encyclopaedia of
Islam" defines jihad as "military action with the object of the
expansion of Islam," and finds that it "has principally an offensive
character." The scholar Bat Ye'or explains for non-Muslims through history
this has meant "war, dispossession . . . slavery and death." That
does indeed sound like "something that should make someone feel
uncomfortable."
Sadly, this episode is no aberration, but
indicative of two important developments.
Apologizing for militant Islam: Hiding
jihad's awful legacy is standard operating procedure at Harvard. A professor of
Islamic history portrays jihad as "a struggle without arms." The
Harvard Islamic Society's faculty adviser defines true jihad as no more
fearsome than "to do good in society." All this is part of a pattern
of pretending Islam had nothing to do with 9/11.
Neutral in wartime. Harvard appears neutral
in the current war, as Harvard Business School student Pat Collins pointed out
in a scathing Washington Times op-ed. Take the example of Hamas: While
President Bush has called it "one of the deadliest terrorist organizations
in the world today," a Harvard spokesman replies "no comment"
when asked if it is a terrorist organization and the university has allowed
fund-raising on its premises on behalf of Hamas.
Even today, militant Islamic groups have full
access to university facilities and the right to advertise their activities.
Yet the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), a training program for the U.S.
armed forces, is the only student group at Harvard to be denied access to
university facilities and disallowed from advertising its activities.
Unfortunately, Harvard's stance is typical of
nearly all North America universities. Almost every Middle East specialist
hides the truth about jihad and (as shown by a chilling report from the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Defending Civilization) almost every
campus drips contempt for the U.S. war effort (typical statement: "The
best way to begin a war on terrorism might be to look in the mirror").
"You are with us, or you are against
us": Harvard and other universities need to look hard into their soul and
decide on which side they stand.
from the San Francisco Chronicle,
2002-May-10, p.A27, by Tanya Schevitz:
Cramped speech at UC Berkeley
Teacher warns 'conservative thinkers'
At UC Berkeley, birthplace of the Free Speech
Movement, a graduate teaching instructor who is a leader in the pro-Palestinian
movement on campus has incited a nationwide controversy by trying to control
the tenor of discussion in his class.
Snehal Shingavi, 26, a fifth-year graduate
student in English, who will be teaching an undergraduate English class on
"The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," in the fall
included in his class description a "warning" that "conservative
thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Students who are required
to take the reading and composition course can choose from a menu of classes
covering different themes.
The class description also says that the
right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination is not up for
debate. The course is already full with 17 students and has a waiting list.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl rushed
Thursday to declare a "failure of oversight" by the English
Department in reviewing course descriptions and said the class will be
monitored to ensure that it does not exclude or discourage qualified students
from participating.
"It is imperative that our classrooms be
free of indoctrination -- indoctrination is not education. Classrooms must be
places in which an open environment prevails and where students are free to
express their views," Berdahl said in a statement.
But the issue had attracted a deluge of
criticism, bringing Shingavi national attention and a Thursday television
appearance on Chris Matthews' "Hardball."
Civil rights and free speech advocates
reacted strongly, calling his statements "chilling," and saying that
such restrictions do not belong in a university, especially one supported by
public funds.
Shingavi, who is a leader in the Students for
Justice in Palestine group on campus, said Thursday that instructors have the
right to frame the course, limiting the themes of the class to its purpose --
in this case, a literary examination of the Palestinian narration of their
resistance movement.
"You can have a series of debates about
Israel's right to destroy Palestine,
but those are not germane to the questions
about how Palestinians understand themselves and how they understand
resistance," Shingavi said. "I'm not restricting the class, it is merely
a warning that the course has certain kinds of themes that are at its
core."
Thor Halvorssen, executive director of the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia civil rights and
civil liberties organization, said it is easy to see how "outrageous"
the statement is if you replace "conservative" with any other group.
"A professor teaching the African
American diaspora cannot say that any student who comes to this course has to
accept my views of the struggle of blacks in America," Halvorssen said.
"You would have Jesse Jackson there leading a candlelight vigil."
Sophomore Daniel Frankenstein, 20, said that
he has problems with the "litmus test" imposed by Shingavi but that
Jewish students would have felt excluded from the course anyway.
Shingavi has been at odds with the university
administration over its crackdown on Students for Justice in Palestine for the
occupation of an academic building April 9. The group was temporarily banned
from campus.
"I can gather he is simply trying to get
a think tank of people together who all think the same way on an issue. That is
not academic freedom," said Frankenstein, a student senator at UC
Berkeley.
Shingavi, who is writing his dissertation on
pre-independent Indian fiction from 1917 to 1947, said he has included the same
phrasing discouraging conservative thinkers in courses he has taught for the
past two years without drawing criticism or attention.
The university has been lax about oversight
before. Last February, the campus admitted that a student-run male sexuality
class -- in which some students visited a strip club -- could have used more
supervision.
The ACLU of Northern California, which has
publicly denounced UC Berkeley's reaction to the pro-Palestinian sit-in, on
Thursday criticized Shingavi's course description as undermining academic
freedom.
"It would be interesting for students
from all political perspectives to read that poetry," ACLU attorney
Margaret Crosby said. "A political speaker can address what he or she
chooses, but they have no right to say there should be no hecklers. We all
learn more when we are challenged."
UC Regent Ward Connerly said it is an example
of the growing intolerance of contrary views on college campuses.
"There are a number of things you can be
in the university but conservative is not one of them," he said.
from TPDL 2001-Dec-23, from the New York
Post, by George F. Will:
Forgotten
America
TWO hundred twenty-five Christmases ago,
history was being made around here. And recently Lynne Cheney - no disrespect
to Dick, but she is the really indispensable Cheney - came here to advocate
teaching history more extensively and more wisely than we currently do.
She spoke at the new James Madison Program in
American Ideals and Institutions, named after the Princetonian who was the most
acute thinker among the Founders. Cheney stressed that events around Christmas
1776 demonstrate "that this nation was not inevitable."
Gen. Washington, commanding ill-fed, ill-clad
and barely trained forces against the world's mightiest power, had been in
retreat, as he would be much of the war. By Christmas Night 1776, he
desperately needed a victory and got one with the surprise attack on Trenton.
After the battle, he recrossed the Delaware
River into Pennsylvania, but returned to near Trenton Dec. 30. Three days
later, Gen. Cornwallis (who would surrender to Washington at Yorktown in 1781)
advanced with superior numbers from Princeton toward Trenton. Washington
circled around to Princeton, where he won a second victory, largely by the
example of his personal bravery in the teeth of enemy gunfire.
When history is taught at all nowadays, often
it is taught as the unfolding of inevitabilities - of vast, impersonal forces. The
role of contingency in history is disparaged, so students are inoculated
against the "undemocratic" notion that history can be turned in its
course by great individuals.
Such a portrayal of history cannot survive
acquaintance with the American Revolution, or indeed with Washington's life:
The human story would have had different contours if the bullets that sliced
through his clothing during the French and Indian War had struck him.
Cheney recalled a 1999 survey of college
seniors at 55 elite colleges, from Princeton to Stanford, which revealed that
only 22 percent knew that the words "government of the people, by the
people, for the people" are from the Gettysburg Address. Forty percent
could not place the Civil War in the second half of the 19th century. Only 44
percent could place Lincoln's presidency in the period 1860-1880.
Fifty-nine percent thought Reconstruction was
about repairing the physical damage done by the Civil War. Twenty-five percent
thought the pilgrims signed the Magna Carta on the Mayflower. More than half
thought John Marshall was the author of Dred Scott decision (1857), or Brown
vs. Board of Education (1954), or Roe vs. Wade (1973). Sixty-three percent did
not know the Battle of the Bulge was in World War II. To the question of who commanded
American forces at Yorktown, the most frequent answer was Ulysses S. Grant.
Such questions should not be difficult for
high school seniors. But at the time of the survey, none of the 55 colleges and
universities required a course in American history. And students could graduate
from 78 percent of them without taking any history course.
One result of this is the ongoi