Conservative Donnybrook

A friend of mine has written a book that deals with educational reform. I have just finished reading it and recommend the book. I wrote the following review on Amazon:

I am not a teacher, a student contemplating teaching as a career, or even a parent. I do not play one on television. Nonetheless, I found Mr. Kaufman’s book, Reclamation: Saving our schools starts from within, to be a compelling read. Indeed, I read the book in one sitting. Furthermore, I believe that teachers, students who are contemplating a career in teaching and parents will all find this book to be, at moments, an eye-opening exposé of the plight of our public schools, and also a prescription for reclaiming them.

Teachers who read this book will fall into one of two camps. The majority of them will be infuriated at having their worldview challenged. Those teachers are likely to vilify Kaufman for his positions, chalking it up to political bias, as his fellow teachers in Los Angeles did after he and a coworker wrote an op-ed piece promoting a merit pay proposal. However, there will be others who have spent time in the trenches and who have seen the biases, laziness, and self-centeredness of a large proportion of their fellow teachers and wish for something better – if not for them professionally, at least for the children who are a third, fourth or even fifth priority. Those teachers, even if they do not ultimately agree with Kaufman’s prescriptions, will recognize a kindred sense of moral outrage and will appreciate Kaufman’s attempt to steer a new course for public education.

Unfortunately, many students may be put off by Mr. Kaufman’s bleak portrayal of the culture in public schools where teachers are more concerned with padding their already bloated paychecks, with escaping responsibility, and with running out the clock before they can retire to a fat pension than they are with educating young men and women. There is an element of Kaufman’s narrative that may work to discourage potential young teachers from entering the profession. If so, that would be tragic, although Kaufman’s experience led him to make the same decision. Nonetheless, teachers-to-be owe it to themselves to read this account and to enter into their chosen profession with their eyes open.

Parents should consider sending their children to private school or homeschooling their children. But first, they should read this book.

Kaufman provides a two-chapter introduction, which probably should have been combined into a single chapter, explaining why he wrote this book and what he hopes to achieve from its publication.

Kaufman then goes about his work by establishing the problems inherent in the current public school culture. Lazy teachers, who are granted tenure after two short years, live in a world divorced from reality, but nonetheless believe that they are mistreated, underpaid, micromanaged, and unappreciated – none of which are true, at least after they achieve tenure. Kaufman shares an anecdote, which would be surprising to any but the most cynical, about one of his coworker’s reactions to the above-mentioned op-ed piece promoting merit pay. His coworker sent him an email agreeing that his reasoning was correct and that she largely agreed with him, but would nonetheless support the union, which strongly opposed merit pay.

Kaufman then convincingly shows the perfidy and moral bankruptcy of the teachers unions. He concludes that if any reform to the public schools is possible, teachers must reject the unions whose policies are positively harmful to students. Indeed one union head’s statement reveals the danger posed by unions to the welfare of children and their education when American Federation of Teachers president, Albert Shanker, said, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, then I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Tragically, in light of that attitude, the vast majority of teachers vote the union line.

Competition, which the teachers unions strongly oppose and fear above anything else, Kaufman proclaims, is the great hope for American public education. Vouchers and charter schools, programs that give parents choices and force accountability on schools and teachers, are the path to reform of public schools.

Kaufman chronicles the hardly surprising liberal bias that inhabits American schoolrooms. From pointless field trips to shameful revision of American history and from eco-brainwashing of our children to outright anti-Americanism, the full pathology of the worst of the Leftist agenda is on display in our children’s classrooms. Moreover, any voice of moderation is shouted down, vilified and made into a pariah, all abetted by the administration of these schools.

Kaufman has a true gift for the use of anecdotes to illustrate his point. It is through the retelling of these stories that Kaufman is at his strongest. The book is sprinkled throughout with articles that he either wrote or co-wrote on the topics discussed in this book. While the writing is excellent, there are spots where a stronger editorial hand might have been beneficial to keep Kaufman’s narrative a bit more focused (for example, he spends a fair amount of time cataloging the evils of the anti-Semitic terrorist group, ANSWER, of which the teachers union is a supporter and perhaps loses focus on the main thesis). Overall, this is an excellent book with provocative content. Kaufman’s voice should be welcomed into any discussion of education reform and his thoughts deserve to be read widely.

I encourage everyone to buy a copy, or better yet, to buy three to give as gifts.

Over the years I have given the education system a lot of thought. I have always thought it would be fun and rewarding to teach. Unfortunately, I have been put off of teaching because of the regulatory overhead that school districts erect as a barrier to entry. Quite simply, I refuse to sit through classes filled with psychological babble about a child’s self-esteem and self-confidence that ultimately results in undermining the fulfillment of the most able students’ potential.

I think about my own childhood education. I was one of those students who never did his homework, but tested very well. I had grades that reflected that – where a class was heavily graded on the homework assignments and less focused on test scores, I did poorly and vice versa. I remember one class in particular – I had an algebra class in 7th grade and the teacher (I wish I could remember his name – Frost Junior High in Schaumburg, Illinois, circa 1982) assigned daily homework assignments. Each day, at the beginning of class, he would walk up and down the aisles and check that each student had completed his homework – it wasn’t actually graded, he just wanted you to do it. And each day, he would pause at my desk, look down and say, “No homework today, Karl?” He would shake his head, mark my failure down in his grade book, and move down the aisle. After each exam in that class, when I scored perfect or nearly so, he would try to talk sense into me, telling me that I could get a great grade in his class if only I would do the homework. I would always respond, “Why should I spend my time doing homework for material that I have down cold?” One day he announced to the class that the math team would be conducting “try-outs” (i.e. take a test filled with tricky math problems) and anyone interested should come to his classroom after school. When I walked into the classroom, his look of disbelief was plain. He even asked me if I was serious. I assured him that I was and proceeded to score second highest on the exam and became one of the math team members. His disappointment that I would not do his homework assignments had caused him not to challenge me, but to dismiss me as a lost cause and he was astonished, I think, when I rose to the biggest challenge with which he could present me.

Teachers would routinely decry my failure to live up to my potential to my parents. The conclusion, according to the educational cognoscenti was that I was bored. Indeed, my nearly daily fist fight during lunch with Brian Brocce was proof of my boredom (either that, or I was a contumacious bastard). That was in the 70s; today I would be diagnosed as ADHD and medicated to treat my behavior problems. The one thing, even then, that never occurred to anyone was to challenge me academically.

If I were to suddenly win the lottery (which would be a miracle since I don’t play – after all, a lottery is only a tax on people who can’t do math), I would want to open a school along the following lines. If I learned anything in my algebra class (other than algebra), it is that capable students will surprise you when they are presented with a challenge. With that in mind I would love to start a school where the student is encouraged to proceed at his own pace. He would not be locked into a single class, segregated by his age peers, all year or semester long. Rather, he would be segregated into classes based upon his ability to master the material. Clearly, some students would master the material faster than others and those students should be passed on to the next level as soon as they demonstrate that mastery. The way the school would be structured would be that teachers would teach a particular subject (say, math) of a certain difficulty level (say, first year algebra). When a student demonstrated mastery of the subject, he would move on to the next level. Teachers would not be Fourth Grade teachers since there would be no such thing as grades based on age group. During the course of a year, a student may sit in three separate math classes while he progressed through the ever-tougher material. At the same time, the same student may only progress one classroom in composition. In the end, it would be the child’s capacity to excel that would determine his studies rather than some rigid age group limitation.

The way schools are set up now, the smartest students are slowed in their progress. The pace of instruction has to be determined by the least capable student in the classroom. To go any faster would be to frustrate that student and cause him undue stress (i.e. undermine his self-confidence and destroy his self-esteem). Meanwhile, the rest of the class becomes bored and perhaps spends its time getting into fights with the Brian Brocces of the world (what did bored girls do?). Under the plan I envision, the slowest student would be challenged, but not pressured by artificial demands to keep up with his age peers, while the brightest students would be encouraged to maximize their progress. Teachers would be chosen, not based on some state credential or possession of a teaching certificate, but on their ability to teach, their mastery over the subject area, and their ability to motivate students. A school such as I envision would serve the needs of the community better in that it would produce the high-flyers who could go on to push the boundaries of mathematical or scientific understanding or who would contribute to the culture through their superior literary development.

Some will say that a student benefits from being kept with his age peers, but I wonder how true that is. All of us of a certain age will have grandparents, especially if they lived in rural areas, who attended one-room schoolhouses where students of varying ages were instructed in a single room. It is not unprecedented to have different ages educated simultaneously. The plan I have outlined would, I think, be an improvement over those schools because every student in a classroom, regardless of his age, would be on the same academic level within that discipline. For instance, look in a college classroom on any commuter campus; one will routinely see a spread of ages present in such a classroom.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

As a service to the hordes of readers of Conservative Donnybrook, I have read the House version of Obama’s $825 billion economic stimulus package so you don’t have to.

General Attributes of the Plan

As mentioned above the current overall price tag (before amendments and the inevitable earmark add-ons) is $825 billion. That is split into two general categories of spending.

The first category is $275 billion in “economic recovery tax cuts.” Presumably this is the “tax cuts for 95% of Americans” that Obama continuously talked about on the campaign trail. If there are 305 million Americans and they split the tax cut evenly, each would enjoy a lessened tax burden of $949.09 each. I’ll take it gladly; indeed, they owe us more of our own money back. Unfortunately, this will almost certainly be offset by the sun-setting of the Bush tax cuts, which there is little doubt Congress and the President will allow to expire.

The second category is $550 billion in “targeted priority investments.” According to the summary from the Committee on Appropriations, “[t]his package is the crucial first step in a concerted effort to create and save 3 to 4 million jobs, jumpstart our economy, and being the process of transforming it for the 21^st century.” The committee summary goes on to state that, “with the passage of this package, unemployment rates are expected to rise to between eight and nine percent this year. Without this package, we are warned that unemployment could explode to near twelve percent.” As such, assuming these numbers are correct and this package would prevent the unemployment rate from experiencing an additional 3% rise, the package will prevent the loss of 3.93 million jobs* through new unemployment claims. This means that by their own numbers, this package will not create any new jobs, as Obama has been touting, but rather would prevent the anticipated loss of 4 million jobs.

* In case anyone is interested, I came up with this number by looking at the increase in unemployment as reported on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (http://www.bls.gov/ces/) for the December report. That report said unemployment rose from 6.8% to 7.2% or by +0.4%. That increase corresponded with a decrease in the number of jobs of 524,000. If 0.4% is equivalent to 524,000 jobs, then 4% would equal 3.93 million jobs.

The summary acknowledges that the plan will result in “a large deficit for years to come.” But, justifies its passage by playing on the fears of not passing it: “Without it, those deficits will be devastating [as though the deficits we invite will not be] and we will face the risk of economic chaos.”

Since 2001, as worker productivity went up, 96% of the income growth in this country went to the wealthiest 10% of society [I assume they are not referring to the government]. While they were benefiting from record high worker productivity, the remaining 90% of Americans were struggling to sustain their standard [sic] of living. They sustained it by borrowing…and borrowing…and borrowing, and when they couldn’t borrow anymore, the bottom fell out. This plan will strengthen the middle class, not just Wall Street CEOs and special interests in Washington [who have already received government welfare in the form of bailouts which took priority over taxpayer relief].

Finally, before getting into the specifics of the “targeted priority investments,” it should be noted that “[t]here are no earmarks in this package.” I guess I don’t really know what an earmark, because I thought it was an appropriation that was targeted to a particular project, or “priority investment,” if you prefer. Oh well. Orwell lives.

One last note before we dive into an examination of the specific spending proposals. We should probably keep in mind that, according to most of the economists I’ve heard speak about the crisis, the overriding problem is that credit is unavailable to consumers and businesses. It is probably helpful to hold this in the forefront of one’s thoughts as he approaches each of these broad spending categories. A thoughtful person would probably ask, “Does this spending help to free up credit to consumers and businesses?” Continue Reading »

Nevermind the smoking ban. Nevermind the ban on handguns in a City where the gun deaths are mounting daily.  A ban on handguns that seemingly runs contrary to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008).  Now the City is proposing a new high school, a new public high school, that will cater to gays.  While the Chicago Public School system is struggling to maintain already low test scores, the City has somehow found the money to open this new school.  The logic behind the new school is that a gay friendly school “would provide a safe, “gay-friendly” atmosphere to combat the high bullying, dropout and depression rate many gay and lesbian students experience nationwide, advocates say.”

There is the obvious argument here that public funds will go to promote a lifestyle that many find inappropriate and immoral.  Forget that for a moment.  What about all of the other straight kids who battle bullying and depression in high school?  Remember high school?  Remember the phrase teenage angst?  All high school students deal with depression in one form or another at one time or another.  I would venture a guess that many of them deal with bullies as well.  Where are their special schools?  Perhaps there needs to be a special high school for overweight students or for students with bad complexions.  Essentially, gay students are being singled out for preferential treatment.

On the flip side, isn’t this an odd form of voluntary segregation?  I guess the thinking is, if these kids can’t cope with a diverse student population, we the government, will shield them.  Won’t these kids have to eventually enter a workforce and a world where they are in the vast minority?  Won’t they have to deal with this damn diversity problem eventually?  These liberal elites are always chiming telling the rest of us that we need diverse campuses but when one of these diverse points of view does not gel with their world view that world view is branded as intolerant.  In this case, rather than tout the merits of diversity in the schools and branding the bullies as intolerant, they have merely chosen to cut themselves off from the world by using tax payer funding.

I saw this story on one of the news channels the other day and thought of LTG. We have had a number of sparring bouts over the role of parents versus the role the of the State. This story is interesting because the State is recognizing the rights of the parent (and every right carries with it a corresponding duty) to provide for his child’s education. Unfortunately for Mr. Gegner, he was found in dereliction of his duty to educate his daughter when she failed the mathematics section of her General Education Development exam. Mr. Gegner was charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” after the court had ordered him to see that his daughter passed the exam. She had a previous history of truancy.

If, as LTG likes to point out, a child’s education is entirely within the purview of the parents, isn’t this an appropriate ruling? With the right, comes the responsibility. Of course, the flipside is: If the onus were on the State to educate the child, would then the delinquency of this minor fall upon her public school teachers? As tempting as it is for me to endorse that outcome, I find both results absurd. After all, the world needs ditch diggers too.

This afternoon my wife and I went to see Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. As one reviewer pointed out, one’s opinion of the film is almost guaranteed to be determined by one’s stance on the Evolutionism v. Intelligent Design “debate.”

The point of the film is not whether ID is superior to Evolutionism, but rather that the mere suggestion that ID might provide some explanation as to the origins of life is strictly verboten in academic and scientific circles. Stein introduces his viewers to several scientists who have been drummed out of their positions because they had the audacity to mention Intelligent Design in their research.

One proponent of evolutionism, William Provine, an avowed atheist science historian at Cornell University, objected to the teaching of intelligent design in part on the basis that it’s “BOOOORING. I can’t think of any topic that is more BOOOORING!” Of course, when asked about the origins of life, Provine posited that aliens might have seeded life on this planet, deftly pushing back the question one generation (How did the seed scattering aliens come to exist, Professor Provine?).

Perhaps no single point shows that Stein was not attempting to advocate for the Intelligent Design position than the fact that Stein did not interview Michael Behe, a microbiologist whose book Darwin’s Black Box I found to provide much evidentiary support for intelligent design. Behe’s argument proceeded by examining the simplest of life forms, a single celled creature, and examined it at the microbiological level. At that level there are mechanisms (Behe uses a flagella as one example) that are incredibly complex structurally and functionally such that they could not have evolved happenstance. He coined the term “irreducible complexity”: Take away any of the structure’s complexity and it would cease to function and therefore would not confer an advantage which would be selected for. Indeed, extra baggage which provided no function would put the organism at a disadvantage, which Darwin predicted would ultimately cause its extinction. Critics of Behe have noted that some of the proteins that make up some of these structures that Behe used as examples occur in other contexts within the cell, however, that still fails to account for their combination into a specific structure which is much more complex than the joining of a few proteins randomly.

Continue Reading »

Mr. Martinez has an excellent article on taking the Catholic out of Catholic colleges and universities.  A number, in fact all, of the authors of this site at some point attended exceptional Catholic educational facilities.  Will the Pope address this concerning issue?  Will American Catholic educational institutions continue their fall from grace?

Find out next time on “The Pope Pontificates” or “Benedict Benefits America!”

SCOTLAND – A large number of preschools have adopted a zero-tolerance policy on the despicable act of toddlers playing with toy guns and pretending to shoot their classmates. In addition, administrators and teachers have discouraged superhero play which, they say, leads to fighting and aggression. However, Penny Holland, a social science experimenter (i.e. she messes with your kids to see what happens), recently concluded, “If children are constantly being told no, we don’t play with guns here’, they absorb the sense that they’re bad. They may seek negative attention and in the end the whole thing becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

“A ban won’t stop them playing violent games. When the guns and swords are taken away they simply do what children have always done – make weapons out of twigs and Sticklebricks.”

Well, of course, the last thing we want to do is to dent these kids’ fragile self-esteem especially when it results in self-perpetuating cycles. Children should NEVER think they are bad. Even when they’re bad.

I think what’s really interesting about these “findings” is that when you outlaw (toy) guns in the classroom, only the outlaw children will turn their fingers into guns. Besides, if you can’t have fake guns, what are you supposed to do with the Indians once you catch them? Talk sternly to them? They’re already onto the whole make-a-treaty-with-them routine. Maybe we should just learn about the environment from them.

Ellen Donald, a nursery school administrator said, “We divert their attention away from this type of fighting and role play which they see on TV, on programmes like Batman and Superman, and provide them with a lot of curriculum activities which include running, jumping, tumbling. Children just want to run and roll about. They just need to play and vent all their energy.”  Well, sure, running and jumping and tumbling, but when they catch up to the bad guy they will want to shoot them or at least beat them up so as to make the world (or at least Scotland) safe for Truth, Justice and the American (or Scottish, in this case) Way.

I have posted this in response to Karl’s post on the recent homeschooling case in California. While I do not agree with Karl’s assertion that this case turns on the 1st Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, I have chosen to analyze the issue from this standpoint.  In all reality, the issue is further muddled by the application of the Free Exercise clause.  I will not attempt to analyze the case as thoroughly as would be required under a claim of religious intolerance as this would require me to discuss the test for religion in the first instance, valid beliefs in the second and so on.  Instead, I will simply tackle the issue from an over simplistic legal perspective accepting Karl’s First Amendment premise.

The free exercise of religion is a right guaranteed by the 1st Amendment.  Many Supreme Court cases have demonstrated the importance of this clause.  In deciding cases based on a claim of free exercise, the Court traditionally applied a compelling interest test.  The Court also has expressed that facially neutral laws will not be subject to heightened or special scrutiny. 

Following the decision in Employment Division v. Smith, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. (P.L. 103-141).  The RFRA required courts to apply strict scrutiny to cases involving government regulation and restrictions on the free exercise of religion.  Both the left and the right sides of the aisle joined hands to sing Kumbaya and celebrate their victory.  Yet the song was not long lived.  The Act was struck down as a violation of the Separation of Powers doctrine.    Continue Reading »