Pete The Elder

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March 09, 2006

Been Busy

I have been really busy the past few days with work and the house closing. I hope to close next Wednesday.

So here are some links I found interesting. Ed at Captains Quarters writes about the continuing decline of Salon.com. Salon refuses to publish the pictures of the Muhammed cartoons that have been part of one of the biggest news stories of the year. Meanwhile, if you give Salon $35 you get to look at even more Abu Ghraib pictures.

I can think of no better reason to avoid Salon like the plague, and no better example of its twisted editorial policy. The Abu Ghraib story is over two years old now. The press on this story gave it hysterical treatment in 2004 when Mary Mapes and 60 Minutes first published the photos and the story, while neglecting to mention that the Army had already launched extensive investigations into the abuse at the prison. The scandal got months of coverage as the media used the abuses as a template for the entire management of the war, even though it involved a small number of undisciplined idiots that received jail sentences for their crimes.

Now, two years later, Salon proposes to run "hundreds" more of the pictures. Why? Certainly not to enlighten its readers; the Abu Ghraib abuses have received an overwhelming amount of attention already. While Salon refuses to publish the Prophet cartoons that might actually clarify and provide context to a story that happened within the last few weeks, it insists that dredging up more pictorial depictions of the actions of a few depraved individuals from over two years ago -- who have all been tried for their offenses -- has actual value.

And here are three good articles on problems in schools I got from real clear politics. The first is on the case of Jay Bennish a teacher who spent time he was supposed to be using to teach geography to compare president Bush to Hitler and say that stewardesses on airplanes and workers in office buildings are legitimate military targets. I had high school teachers who would make occasional quips at the expense of Perot or H. W. Bush or Clinton, but nothing as bad as this (one English teacher liked to rhyme: Perot - not).

In the recording, there is an exchange between Allen and Bennish that illustrates his inadequate approach to teaching. Bennish points out that there are sometimes innocent victims to American military action. He then is asked if there isn't a difference between the accidental killing of innocents and the targeting and intentional killing of innocents by terrorists.

Bennish several times refuses to deal with the moral issue and instead prattles on about Cuba, the CIA, the military-industrial complex and the plight of the American Indian. He then repeats the canard that the Sept. 11 terrorists were merely attacking legitimate military targets.

In that response, Bennish shows he is not so much interested in education as he is in political indoctrination.

The next one is on how a lot of the failure of American students in our schools is because they are lazy and lack discipline. That is not always why kids fail as sometimes they do have bad teachers or other probelms, but it often is the case that kids watch TV or other forms of relaxing instead of doing homework. In my own experience the bad grades I got in the case of my foreign language classes were from me not studying enough, but my other bad grades were the fault of bad teachers. Still, if a kid does not want to learn or does not want to put the effort into learning, then there is not much any teacher or textbook can do to fix the problem.

What many of the American kids I taught did not have was the motivation, self-discipline or work ethic of the foreign-born kids.

Politicians and education bureaucrats can talk all they want about reform, but until the work ethic of U.S. students changes, until they are willing to put in the time and effort to master their subjects, little will change.

A study released in December by University of Pennsylvania researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman suggests that the reason so many U.S. students are "falling short of their intellectual potential" is not "inadequate teachers, boring textbooks and large class sizes" and the rest of the usual litany cited by the so-called reformers but "their failure to exercise self-discipline."

Sometimes students not learning is the fault of teachers and as John Stossel points out below, more money is not the solution.

-- The constant refrain that "public schools need more money" is nonsense. Many countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do. School spending in America (adjusted for inflation) has more than tripled over the past 30 years, but national test scores are flat. The average per-pupil cost today is an astonishing $10,000 per student -- $200,000 per classroom! Think about how many teachers you could hire, and how much better you could do with that amount of money.

-- Most American parents give their kids' schools an A or B grade, but that's only because, without market competition, they don't know what they might have had. The educators who conduct the international tests say that most of the countries that do best are those that give school managers autonomy, and give parents and students the right to choose their schools. Competition forces private and public schools to improve.

-- There is little K-12 education competition in America because public schools are a government monopoly. Monopolies rarely innovate, and union-dominated monopolies, burdened with contracts filled with a hundred pages of suffocating rules, are worse. The head of New York City's schools told me that the union's rules "reward mediocrity."

And finally here is a liberal at Slate pointing out how inept the Democrats leaders are and how they lack a coherent vision outside of 'we hate George Bush'. My only fear is that right now the Republican Party does not have much of a vision of its own and may get beaten by the three stooges mentioned in the article. If the Republican Party gets it act together and remembers why voters elected them in the first place, then the Democrats are in trouble. My favorite part is the Merlot section below:

Howard Dean is smarter than either Pelosi or Reid and clearly stands for something. Unfortunately, what he stands for in the minds of most people is incandescent rage and upscale socialism. Dean has an unfortunate knack for making himself the issue, even when, as lately, he's trying to maintain a low profile. His injudicious comment about the GOP being the party of white Christians was followed by his statement that "the idea that we're going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong." Such gaffes lead to endless debate about how Howard Dean is screwing up, rather than about how Bush is screwing up. Building on the work of a DNC pollster, Dean a few months ago took to referring to his party's base as "merlot Democrats." With him and Pelosi in charge, this threatens to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But more important than what the three stooges do wrong is what they can't seem to do at all, namely articulate a positive agenda for reform and change. Voters have grown disenchanted with Bush's mishandling of the war in Iraq and the country's finances, and with the evangelical tilt of many of his policies. But there remains a baseline mistrust of Democrats on security, the economy, and values issues. For a sweep big enough to recover both houses of Congress, the party will almost certainly need an affirmative message as well as a negative one. Democrats need to demonstrate they won't just cut and run from Iraq, that they see security as more than a civil liberties issue, and that their alternative to tax cuts isn't just more spending on flawed social programs and unchallenged growth in entitlements.

Thus far, Pelosi, Reid, and Dean have been literally unable to develop such a national message for the party's congressional candidates. Not just a good message any message. Their "legislative manifesto," originally promised for November, has been delayed more often than a flight on Jet Blue. When it eventually arrives, expect something benign and insipid. In 1994, Gingrich had the Contract With America. In 2006, Democrats will have another glass of merlot.

Posted by Pete at March 9, 2006 05:12 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Jeff at March 15, 2006 01:32 PM