Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it.
Irving Berlin
Common Core, CSCOPE, and Stealth Education Centralization
The firestorm in Texas over CSCOPE has been triggered by notorious examples of clearly ideological lesson plans:
- students are asked to look at the Boston Tea Party as an act of terrorism from the British perspective
- students were told to design a flag for a new socialist government
- there is disproportionate, sympathetic coverage of Islam.
In the early 1990s, Massachusetts was an above average but unremarkable performer on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and SATs. After enactment of the Bay State’s landmark 1993 education reform law, SAT scores rose for 13 consecutive years. In 2005, Massachusetts students became the first state ever to score best in the nation in all four categories on the NAEP’s fourth and eighth grade reading and math assessments. The next three times the tests were administered—in 2007, 2009, and 2010—this feat was repeated.
The impact on English classrooms in Massachusetts, which adopted Common Core in 2010, has been to reduce the amount of classical literature studied by more than half. Goodbye Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
Rather than learn from leading states like Massachusetts, Common Core draws from the so-called “21st century skills” movement, which elevates soft skills like global awareness, media literacy, cross-cultural flexibility and adaptability, and creativity to equal footing with academic content. This less academic approach has, in fact, been road tested in places like Connecticut and West Virginia. Predictably, the results have been dismal.This is just another example of soft tyranny. Obama thinks that he's being clever--that he can simply adopt the nomenclature of legitimate reformers. (If there's one thing Obama knows, it's symbolism.) Obama has tried to co-opt the language of conservatives-in this case the states as the laboratories of democracy. Unlike the case of RomneyCare, which served as a precursor for ObamaCare (note this was never a good prototype because Massachusetts had a much smaller gap of uninsured than nation-wide, plus Massachusetts' policies are among the highest-costing in the nation: anyone with a modicum of common sense, intelligence, and integrity knew it was infeasible from the start), the Common Core was not based on what Massachusetts had done well in its education reforms; this bogus "21st century skills" claptrap is little more than pushing-on-a-string progressive hubris: worse yet, it lowers, rather than raises academic expectations and rigor to the point a prominent mathematics professor, James Milgram, refused to sign off. It has zero to do with why student performance has flat-lined over the past few decades, despite throwing huge sums of money at teacher unions and bloated administrations.
Stanley Kurtz has done a good job of exposing the smoke and mirrors of the operation with Education Secretary Duncan doing what all progressives do under scrutiny of domestic policy--set up a straw man of Tea Party critics. This is hardly "state-led"; the Administration, as usual, tries to work around Congress, and tries to manipulate governors into doing a back-door nationalization of education policy using federal education slush fund dollars; I have to admit that governors have to be naive not to understand federal dollars come with strings attached. Then, just like unaccountable healthcare officials shape ObamaCare policies, we have a layer of unaccountable education bureaucrats. And we have a system lacking transparency (e.g., of lesson plans) and where parents find themselves shunted aside in having a voice in what their kids are taught.
Any familiar reader knows the criticisms I've made as a former professor: I had a lot of students with unrealistic expectations, poor work/study habits, bad attitudes, and/or abysmal communication skills. I also had to deal with colleagues with minimal expectations and sometimes running their own agendas (e.g., not teaching data structures in a data structures course). I often had to cover remedial material, spend more time in office hours, etc.; I had to deal with hostile students whom thought I held unfairly high standards. I didn't personalize it; it comes with the job. But there's only so much one person can do. I think I resented more the pandering administrators whom don't deal with rogue colleagues and don't back you up (I'm particularly thinking of certain academic honesty issues I had to deal with in terms of students).
As someone who believes in the free market of ideas, I don't have an issue with students knowing about the perspective of Britain and loyalists. But I want American school kids to know what was behind the Boston Tea Party. Colonists were fine with paying local taxes for a government accountable to them; they were not okay with paying taxes to a British government that used that revenue to pay for Crown-appointed administrators. The British also were also restricting the flow of goods into the colonies, favoring English (versus, say, Dutch) vendors, which meant the colonists were having to pay artificially higher prices for tea. Eventually the British allowed the East Indian Company to sell tea directly to the colonies making it price-competitive but kept the Townshend tax on as a matter of imperial prerogative. Unlike other colonial governors, Massachusetts Governor Hutchinson, whose own sons sold British tea, refused to let the still-loaded ships return to Britain; his priority was collecting taxes for the Crown.
Comparing the political protest to the actions of modern terrorists is outrageous. The British knew the position of the colonists whom had objected when the British started taxing the colonists directly during the 1760's to pay for Crown-accountable officials and judges, previously paid by and accountable to local colonists. Lord North was specifically warned that he was playing with fire keeping the tax on tea in related legislation. Whether the effect of the mental exercise is to smear our Founding Fathers or unduly give moral standing to rogue movements, it is fundamentally unacceptable.
I went into the Tea Party item in some detail because I'm certain there's a hidden agenda: the "Tea Party" stemming from the 2009 protests to the excesses of the 111th Congress has become a pejorative term in the progressive media.
The defenders of the education centralization movement respond like all wrongdoers with their hands caught in the cookie jar: they quickly jettison problematic lesson plans, insist that these were mere "isolated incidents", and all the problems have been identified and remedied. If you are gullible enough to believe that, Barry Obama has a high-speed Railway to Nowhere he wants to build using your tax dollars. I guarantee this is just the tip of the iceberg.
It reminds me of students whom engaged in academic dishonesty; I had to have compelling evidence before taking action. Without fail, rogue students want to know how you caught them. You know their real motivation; they want to know so they won't be detected next time and can work around your detection. (In the cases I detected, I may have read the original sources a few years earlier or there's something distinctive about the response, like somebody duplicated an unusual misspelling of a surname. In other cases, I know enough about the student's performance or writing style to recognize the work is inconsistent. I never went into grading papers with the expectation that students are cheating. I'm sure others did cheat and I didn't detect it, and there were times I suspected something, but it was difficult to prove.)
But when lesson plans are inaccessible or scrutinized items disappear off websites, it's a red flag. There are, of course, courses where you can expect progressives to try to influence content--English, civics, history, economics and sex education immediately come to mind. What's probably harder to detect are things like watered-down standards.
Spain is Finally Getting Serious About Labor Policies
(HT Carpe Diem) Ideologues like 'Cherokee Lizzie' Warren and Barack Obama promote infeasible, counterproductive policies like the so-called 'living wage' or yet another increase in the minimum wage, seemingly oblivious to the law of supply and demand. Business is not a charity; unlike the government, it can't survive by losing money and printing money. It has to attract paying customers through attractive prices, convenient service, etc. It's not a question whereby a manager has a Scrooge moment and decides to double low-worker pay for purposes of fairness. Consider labor at a fixed cost per widget; if a worker now is able to produce 20 vs. 15 widgets per hour, you can pay the worker more per hour, because that increase can be spread among the additional widgets; that's what we refer to as increased productivity. But raising the worker's pay by a third while he's still producing 15 widgets an hour basically means our cost of widgets has gone up, and we need to pass along our costs in the long run; what we know if we sell fewer widgets at higher prices, we'll have to cut work hours and workers. The response will vary, but it could result in offshoring production. It's not personal: it's business.
Wages depend on a number of factors, including work-readiness and demand-supply. For lower-skill positions where minimal training is required, there are large numbers of potential workers and we would expect the market-clearing rate to be lower, with workers willing to bid the price lower to get the work. As workers become more experienced and productive, it makes sense to increase wages or risk losing the worker and spend time and effort recruiting and training a replacement.
When you talk about raising the minimum wage, it particularly hurts the lesser-skilled/experienced, particularly teenage workers in densely-populated areas. Mark Perry points out that black teenage unemployment is in the 40's% level--at the EXISTING MINIMUM WAGE. And yet Obama, who got over 90% of the black vote in 2 consecutive elections, talks about increasing the wage. How many teens would be willing to work, say, $5/hour versus no job at any price? I use to make about $1 a day to deliver 90 newspapers daily; I couldn't find other work. That was probably about half the minimum wage at the time. Would I have preferred taking a job working 4 hours a day at $1/hour to rolling up newspaper and riding a few miles under a broiling Texas sun delivering them? In a heartbeat. I didn't need Ted Kennedy or other progressives "helping me" when almost no jobs were available at any price. I remember one of my fellow high school student's dad was a customer, and the son openly coveted my route. (My siblings were luckier; my Dad closed out his military career in a different Texas suburb, and the nearby main street leading to the base gate was lined with fast food outlets and other businesses.)
The Bank of Spain, dealing with an even worse youth unemployment problem, has proposed suspending minimum wage regulations and expediting the increase in retirement age to 67; when's the last time you ever heard the Federal Reserve say or do something similarly constructive?
Kevin Williamson, "The End is Near"
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Gary Varvel and Townhall |
Simon & Garfunkel, "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her". I have a beautiful niece named Emily. The song's pretty arrangement and Art's angelic vocals remind me of her. According to one source, it's not really a conventional love song, but about idealism--feeling passionate in a belief. Another less commercial song, "Overs", is the flip side: becoming disenchanted with that belief.
