Musing's musings

Why our children isn't learning good

(Apologies for the atrocious grammar in the post title: It was deliberately done to make the point.)

It is a regrettable truism in textbook publishing that as Texas goes, so goes the nation. With so many schools needing books, the biggest states like Texas and California have a disproportionate influence on what is, and is not, available from textbook publishers. No publisher wants to come out with a book that school districts in mega-states won't buy, so they tend to tailor their materials to what they know they'll be able to market in the biggest markets they have available to them.

This should be a textbook illustration of why unfettered capitalism is not always a good thing. But of course, such an opinion would be highly unlikely to pass muster with the Texas Education Agency, which recently released a draft of its new standards (PDF link) for the teaching of U.S. history since the Reconstruction. The standards were revised with the advice of what the TEA terms expert reviewers, though I would argue that their definition of that term is considerably looser than most historians would probably be comfortable with. Of the six individuals listed, two are professors of history, two are tied to evangelical ministries and have absolutely no academic background in history whatsoever, one is a lawyer whose academic background is not clear, and one is a professor of education with no discernible training in history.

I don't recognize the name of either of the two historians on the panel, but that is not in and of itself significant, since I'm a Europeanist by trade. According to his bio page at Texas State University, Jesus Francisco de la Teja holds a Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Texas at Austin. How this qualifies him to address U.S. history is not precisely clear to me. Lybeth Hodges' biography page at Texas Woman's University does not explicitly address either her academic background or her research interests, which is somewhat unusual in academic history. It does seem to me that both of the historians on the panel were chosen primarily for having done all of their academic work in Texas, rather than having the academic background to be able to address questions of American history.

Don't even get me started on having two evangelical Christians empaneled as "expert reviewers." Both David Barton and Peter Marshall appear to have an interest in history, but "having an interest" in a subject is not the same thing as having the necessary background and training to be able to evaluate how it is taught--not to mention the fact that the majority of both men's interest in history appears to involve removing from the teaching of history anything of which they personally disapprove (and they disapprove of quite a bit). If it were not such a serious issue, it would be hugely ironic to see, in Mr. Barton's review of the current standards (PDF link), his disgust that so few American high school graduates can, among other things, find Iraq on a map, name even one Cabinet-level agency in the federal government, or state the freedoms protected by the First Amendment. I agree with Mr. Barton that this lack of what I would consider elementary knowledge is appalling--but I would also argue that it is precisely the inclusion of people like Mr. Barton on review committees that explains why so few of our students come out of high school in possession of such elementary knowledge. They are too busy being force-fed blind patriotism and religious dogma in the guise of education to have the time needed to learn and remember things that are truly important.

It is also ironic to see that the draft standards include (p. 13) an expectation that students will be able to "use standard grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation" (an expectation which Mr. Barton derided as belonging more to language arts than to social studies or history), when, in one of the comments (A47, on page 5), the reviewers or the staffer who put together their recommendations into final form described Chester Nimitz as the "navel [sic] commander in the Pacific theater." (I should also note that, while the note in question says that Nimitz was added to the list of significant military leaders in World War II, his name does not in fact appear on the list of such leaders that students are expected to know about.) And while I agree that Nimitz played a significant role in WWII as CinCPac (and would argue that he was far more significant a military leader than Douglas MacArthur was), I suspect that his being a Texan might also have an impact on why the TEA wants students to learn about him.

It is not too much to ask, I believe--and particularly in an era when we are trying to get back to the idea that before someone can be certified to teach a particular subject, s/he should have to have received some academic training in it--that anyone asked to review educational standards should have to have the relevant academic background to be able to address whatever standards s/he is being asked to evaluate. If we're talking about the standards for teaching history, then we should be asking historians. If we're talking about mathematics, then it should be mathematicians on the panel--and not megachurch ministers, even if they're very good at counting to large numbers. Parents would rightly be outraged to learn that their children were being taught by people who had no real training in the material they were trying to teach. Why should they be satisfied to have "experts" reviewing the curricular standards that their children's teachers will be forced to follow (and which will likely have a disproportionate impact on the kind of textbooks get published for the next five to ten years) who lack such training?

"How many years..."

"...can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?"

Bob Dylan penned those words the year before I was born, but they ring just as true today. But it's the next couplet from "Blowin' in the Wind" that's on my mind today:

Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?

That's what I'd like you to tell me, President Obama. How many times are you going to keep turning your head and pretending that you don't see the signs telling you that your silence on gay rights has gone on far too long? How many times are you going to send insincere notes of condolence to soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that you sat idly by and let be discharged from the military under a policy that you promised to end? How many times are you going to suck up to the forces of hatred and bigotry and division, in the misguided hope that you might be able to gain their support?

And how long, gay and lesbian and bisexual Americans, are we going to sit idly by and let him get away with this kind of crap? This man came to us, time and again, for money and for support during his two-year campaign for the presidency. And we showed up, time and again. He promised us that he would be a "fierce advocate" for our rights. Can we honestly say that he has even tried living up to that promise? No. For proof, I invite you to examine the White House web site. Can you find any page there, or even a bullet point, that speaks to a single gay rights issue? I've looked and looked, and I can't.

UPDATE: OK, taylormattd at Big Orange caught a boo-boo. There is actually some language on that page about gay rights issues. Not much, however, as he pointed out, and not that the president has actually gotten around to doing anything about any of the issues he listed there.

We have, yet again, been used and tossed aside by a politician who has cynically calculated that we will just swallow the outrage and come crawling back in two or four years when he will again ask for our time, our talent, and our treasure. In all likelihood, he will again cynically promise to do better on our issues this time. Many of us will believe him.

I, however, will not be among them. Because unless I see some concrete action on one or more of the following, Barack Obama will not even get my vote in 2012, much less any more concrete forms of my support:

Mr. President, I need your voice

The following is an e-mail I sent to the White House last night:

To quote your recent e-mail to me, Mr. President, I need your voice. You wanted me to speak up in favor of your health plan. Well, Mr. President, I want you to start speaking up on gay rights. You and your staff keep telling me how fierce an advocate you are on gay rights. When were you planning to start proving those repeated assertions? Vermont legalizes gay marriage--you say nothing. Iowa legalizes gay marriage--you say nothing. The Department of Defense fires an Arabic linguist because he's gay--a policy you promised to do away with--and you say nothing. The California Supreme Court twists itself (and the law) into a pretzel to uphold an amendment saying that only marriage between one man and one woman is valid, but the 18,000+ marriages that don't fit that definition and that took place before the amendment was enacted are still valid. And you say nothing.

Are you starting to see a pattern here? I sure am.

Now, I'm not surprised at the shape of that pattern. I was never under the impression that you were a liberal or a gay-rights supporter. But an awful lot of your supporters kept telling me that you were both, and that if I'd only wait a little while longer, you'd show me how wrong I was.

Well, Mr. President, I've been waiting for forty-five years thus far. Just how much longer do you think I'm going to have to wait? Because, as happy as it makes me to be able to rub the noses of those people who told me you'd be a great president for gay rights in your failure to live up to that promise, I would be far happier to have them rubbing my nose in my epic fail after you stepped up to the plate and proved me wrong.

A common excuse that's offered in your defense is that you've just started your term and there are plenty of huge problems on your plate to handle, so gay rights will just have to wait. My answer to those people is one I'm sure you're familiar with, because it's from Martin Luther King's famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease .... For years now I have heard the words [sic] "Wait!" ...This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

I'm not waiting any longer, Mr. President. And if you expect to keep my vote in 2012, you won't, either. Show me some concrete progress on those issues you campaigned on, and we're OK. But keep putting me off with empty words and insincere promises, and I'll be looking for a better candidate to support in 2012.

I'm not expecting any reply, directly or indirectly. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

"Go and make disciples of all nations"

That's not an exact quote from Al Gore's address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting this evening, but that's the take-home message I'm distilling from his remarks.

This will be a short post, as I'm meeting friends for dinner in half an hour, but I'll either come back and update it later or do another one. I'm going to make one brief remark about politics and history, and then it's on to Gore's address. That remark is this: If he had been able to display the level of conviction and engagement during the 2000 presidential campaign that he displayed in front of this audience tonight, the last eight years would have looked considerably different. Quel dommage!

The gist of Gore's remarks is that we are facing a historic moment: not just for our nation, not just for a coalition of allies, but rather for the whole human race. We have three interconnected and interrelated crises going on at the moment: one is economic, one involves national security, and one involves the environment. That's the bad news. The good news is, we have three interconnected and interrelated crises going on at the moment: economic, national security, and environment.

(Again, those weren't Gore's exact words, that's my spin on them.) We have, to quote The American President, serious problems and we need serious people to solve them. But the magnitude of the crises facing us, and the literally global consequences of the decisions we make in response to those crises, are rapidly moving toward a critical mass such that we can find the political and social will to do the very hard things that need to be done very quickly if there is, literally, to be a tomorrow.

And that's where the "Go and make disciples" quote popped into my head, as Gore started his concluding remarks. The facts are known, by and large, and the science behind them is, again by and large, irreproachable and conclusive. What we need now is for scientists, and people who work with scientists, to blend their working lives and their social lives more effectively and completely. There can't be an "office mentality" and a "home" or "cocktail party mentality" that are virtually wholly separate and distinct from one another. Gore quoted an African proverb that says if you want to go quickly, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together. And the problem, as Gore himself pointed out, is that we have to go very far very quickly. So all of us who work in or around science have got to do our part to get the word out and to help combat the propaganda (my word) coming from those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

An interesting tidbit from Gore's remarks, made as he was showing a slide of one of the Apollo 11 astronauts standing on the surface of the moon facing an American flag. Cheers went up, he said, in Mission Control in Houston when that image was beamed back from the moon's surface. But the average age of the engineers in that control room in Houston in 1969 was 26. That means that when President Kennedy issued his call to put a man in that very position within a decade, the average age of those engineers was 18. That's a hell of a lot of talent developed and deployed in not a long period of time. Surely we can do it again, even given that the world is a far more complex place, and the state of knowledge is both greater and far more complex and interconnected than it was in 1961.

I think we can. And I'm going to do what I can to help that happen.

No, no, no, a trillion times no!

So the talking heads were out in force this morning. All over the media, I'm sure, but I heard more than my fair share on NPR as I was getting ready for work. And most of them were all hyping some variation on the same theme: "We've got to fix this thing right this instant or all hell will break loose."

To which I say, get real.

If we don't take our time and get this right, we won't get a second chance to fix it. There's no way on earth we'd be able to find anybody stupid enough to lend us another trillion dollars to throw after the first one we pissed away.

Yes, I saw the stock market took another tumble today. And that the price of U.S. crude had its biggest-ever single-day jump as well. Bound to happen.

But the simple and sad fact of the matter is, this mess took a generation to get into. It isn't going to be anything we can reasonably expect to fix in a week. And certainly not this week, when Congress will be busy trying to write up either an omnibus funding bill or a batch of continuing resolutions to keep the government running until after the elections. (Here's a thought: how about instead of coming home to kiss babies for the next month and a half, y'all stay in Washington and do what we sent you there to do, but do it properly this time?)

If we've learned anything from the Bush administration, it should be that it's always in a hurry when it thinks it can pull a fast one. At all other times, "glacially slow" is too fast a speed for them, but when they see a chance to push another unpopular item from their agenda over on an unsuspecting public, watch out--they'll make the Blitzkrieg look like the proverbial molasses in January.

So I'm absolutely not buying this "the sky is falling" hype. At this point, we don't even know what the true magnitude of the problem is. Shouldn't we be figuring that out before we try and find a solution for it? Today it's $700 billion; tomorrow it could be twice that. Or half. And do we really think the idea of handing over Phenomenal Cosmic Power (untroubled by pesky things like oversight, rules, courts, public scrutiny, transparency, etc.) to a guy who's going to be out of a job in five months' time is a good one? I'm leery about it--and I'm betting that the next treasury secretary is going to be a Democrat. I still don't think s/he should have that kind of power.

Before we bail out Wall Street, perhaps we ought to pay a little more attention to Main Street, just like Obama said over the weekend. In the meantime, let's let the dust settle a bit, take our time, and do this right. Or else we're really going to have a problem.

Not in my name, nor with my money

Not even the fertile brain of Samuel Beckett could have imagined the course of events that have transpired over the past week. (Or if it could have, I suspect it would only have been while under the influence of psychotropic substances.)

In the space of a single week, the Republicans have thrown away every last fiscal principle they ever even claimed to stand for. (Never mind that they actually stopped standing for them--or applying them--at least a decade ago.) Any Republican who claims to represent the party of fiscal discipline should hereafter be laughed out of the room--and preferably pelted with rotten vegetables to hasten his exit. Any Republican (or so-called conservative) who has the temerity to refer to a "free market" should be beaten about the head and shoulders with a copy of The Wealth of Nations until he can no longer utter the phrase "invisible hand" without cringing.

The week started with the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by means of federal loan guarantees. There followed the biggest plunge in global equity indices since the first time the Hedgemony fell asleep at the switch, seven years ago this month. That was followed by John McCain's insistence that "the fundamentals of our economy are still sound." (You couldn't hear the jaws dropping onto tables and floors around the nation over the noise of falling stock prices and the howls of anguish from people who were watching their retirement savings or their children's college tuition being flushed down the toilet.)

And now, at the end of the week, the same people who broke the economy in the first place, who fell asleep at the switch and allowed Osama bin Laden to strike our nation with impunity, who instigated and prosecuted a pointless war that has done nothing to make us any safer than we were before it was started, who have scrapped the very Constitution they all took an oath before God to "preserve, protect, and defend," these same people want us to hand them a blank check. Right now. Or else something really, really bad will happen to us and the terrrists will win.

I have two words for you, Mr. Bush. Fuck, and No.

It's time we said "No" to "Just say no"

For my money, one of the worst legacies of the 1980s is the phrase "Just say no"--and everything it stands for. It was a stupid idea when it was launched (and was rightfully mocked), and it certainly hasn't gotten any better with age.

The problem with "Just say no" (and with so many other nostrums that the tighty-righties have come up with over the years) is that it attempts to reduce an irreducibly complex issue to a slogan. Worse, the tighty-righties and their allies-cum-enablers in many a Republican administration since the days of Nancy Reagan have clung for dear life to that slogan and the perniciously ignorant attitudes it fosters toward serious problems like drug and alcohol abuse, teen-age sex, and HIV/AIDS. I can't help but notice that none of the gleeful crowd of finger-waggers has ever tried to apply the same philosophy to, oh, I don't know, anything like manufacturing pointless and illegal wars, bending over backwards to assist the rich in getting richer while simultaneously rogering the working class, or trampling on the Constitution. Nor has it escaped my notice than many of the most egregious finger-waggers (see, e.g., Ted Haggard, Rush Limbaugh, and others) have quite spectacularly failed to practice for themselves what they so often and so vociferously preach to others.

Somewhere, the Framers are smiling

I don't know who's responsible for it, but I would very much like to take him or her out for a drink--and then plant a big sloppy wet one right on his/her lips. The First Freedom First campaign, a joint effort of the Interfaith Alliance and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, has put together an amazing ad campaign of television and print media ads urging (largely presidential, but the principle applies up and down the electoral chain as far as I'm concerned) candidates to protect Americans' religious freedom--including their right to be free from religion in their day-to-day lives, and their right not to have their government co-opted by people of one particular (and particularly narrow) faith.

There are three spots at the YouTube link provided above. Two feature Jack Klugman, and one features James Whitmore. Whitmore's spot and one of Klugman's come in both 30-second and 60-second varieties. The ads will be running in South Carolina ahead of their primary election later this month.

It's things like this campaign that make me think this nation might be worth saving--and that there are still a few people left in it who want to make the effort. It's things like this campaign that let me know the internet is a positive force in society and isn't just a convenient vehicle for endless spam about breast or penis enlargement, casino gambling, every possible variety of pornography, and how to get rich quickly by buying a diploma from a "prestigious online university" or getting in touch with the confidential agent for a relative of some fabulously wealthy deceased dictator who needs a convenient place to launder some ill-gotten gains.

This is what the First Amendment means. It means that I cannot be prevented from practicing my religious faith as I feel called to do, and neither can I be forced to worship in any way that I consider to be invalid or improper. But neither can I insist that everyone else practice either my faith, or in exactly the same way I do. My atheist neighbor has the right not to worship at all. He can't force me to convert to his beliefs, and neither can I force him to convert to mine. That's the sheer beauty of the system the Framers put in place when they drew up the Constitution. It gives everyone living within the borders of this nation the freedom to make his or her own choices about what to believe in and how to live in accordance with those beliefs.

It is an outright lie, and worse, one intended to deceive people, that the United States was founded as a "Christian" nation. Want proof of that? It's right there in black and white in the Treaty of Tripoli, which was signed November 4, 1796, approved by President John Adams, and unanimously ratified by the Senate on June 10, 1797. Article 11 of that treaty, as translated from the Arabic original, reads:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The Christianists, and their dupes or masters (I'm not sure which term is most appropriate) in Congress behind the infamous H. Res. 888 [PDF link], would have us believe that this treaty is of little importance and that yes, indeed, Virginia, the United States was most definitely founded as a "Christian nation." The problem with that argument (if such a thin, paltry thread can legitimately be called by that name) begins with the fact that nowhere in any of our foundational documents is anything said about our allegedly Christian roots. There are only a handful of references to God in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, and those that are present are vague, euphemistic, and almost certainly not intended to refer to the god worshiped by the Christianists. But the bigger problem for their line of rhetoric can be found in the second clause of Article VI of the Constitution:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land...

Oops.

It might work

As I was driving home from work tonight, I caught a commentary piece by Robert Reich (formerly Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, now teaching public policy at California-Berkeley) on NPR's nightly business report. Reich, riffing on the Supreme Court's decision to gut one of the key provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law the other day, fired up the Wayback Machine and pulled out an idea that seems to have been floated for the first time about 10 years ago in the Stanford Law Review.

The paper, by Jeremy Bulow, presently of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford and formerly of the Federal Trade Commission (also during the Clinton administration), and Ian Ayres, presently of Yale Law School and himself a regular commentator on NPR's "Marketplace," calls for all campaign contributions to be funneled through blind trusts (PDF link). In that way, as Reich observed in his commentary tonight, the (alleged, in my estimation) free speech rights of the contributors will be protected, but nobody gets an unfair advantage by getting to brag about the timing or the magnitude of their support for a given candidate or party as a means of getting enhanced access or other forms of political leverage.

Given that the paper appeared in 1998, it was likely a revolutionary idea at the time--and had it been implemented when it was first proposed, it might have spared us a few of the other things I heard about on the news today, like fallout from the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal of a few years ago. In a nutshell, contributors would no longer be able to give money--in any amount--directly to a candidate, political party, or political action committee. All contributions would have to be processed (in check form, according to the original article, but given that one of the other stories I heard on the business report tonight involved a decision by the Federal Reserve to close all but four of its check-processing centers around the country due to a huge decline in the use of checks, that will almost certainly have to be revisited) through blind trusts. The trusts would be statutorily prohibited from communicating either the identity of contributors, or the amounts of their contributions, to the parties for whom the money was designated. They could certify that a donor had given at least $200, but nothing further than that.

That's the part of the idea that I liked. The first part of it I had trouble with was ensuring that contributors wouldn't simply find another way of communicating their magnanimity to candidates or organizations, in an attempt to buy access or influence policy. Given that the original article called for contributions to be made by check, that could be as simple as bringing one's cancelled check to a meeting with a candidate. And even if the check itself couldn't be produced (many banks no longer return them to their customers), how on earth would we be able to stop contributors from bragging about the size or the number of their contributions? Candidates would probably do well to discount most of the more extravagant claims since they could no longer verify them independently through a quarterly funding report or some other vehicle, but short of muzzling contributors or prosecuting them for spilling the beans, I don't see any realistic way of keeping at least some of them from flapping their jaws in an attempt to trade money for influence, and thus vitiating the whole process. Further, I suspect that the Supreme Court, even under a far more liberal regime than the one presently in power, would have at least a few problems with either muzzling or prosecuting people who simply chose to tell someone about giving money to a political campaign.

Another sticking point is the checks-only system. One of the hallmarks of recent political fundraising, as Reich noted in his commentary as well, has been the explosion of contributions from small online donors--people using PayPal or other online services such as ActBlue to make contributions of $5 or $50 or $150 to the campaign(s) of their choice. Since those transactions have to be verified in order to be processed at all, it would make the blind trust mechanism a little harder to implement, it seems to me, since there might be traces of the verification process associated with the electronic records of the funds--and if that is in fact a possibility, I think there can be little doubt that astute campaigns would have smart programmer-types working on how to crack that code as quickly as humanly possible.

Help homeless kids go to college

I was in a meeting this afternoon at work when I heard something that I figured my band of faithful readers can help out with. There's a bill sitting in Congress that would make it easier for homeless kids to apply for financial aid so they can get a college education and get off the streets.

Obviously, this is not a particularly "sexy" issue, so it hasn't been getting a lot of attention. But a couple of people from the university where I work have been going around interviewing homeless kids all across the country, and they're heading to Washington this week or next to see if they can't light a fire under Congress to do something about the problem.

And that's where I figure y'all come in. Follow me below the fold for some details.