Quid Nimis

Bob Novak carries the standard this week for the "Come On Down!" Republican crowd.  I really like Bob's political analyses, so it is disappointing to see him fall back on the disingenuous, tired, half-baked comparisons to the past.  Take this quote:

When I asked [Sen. Lindsey] Graham, he quoted from a federal government report on the new arrivals to this country, "largely unskilled laborers" and heavily illiterate: "The new immigration has provoked a widespread feeling of apprehension as to its effect on the economic and social welfare of the country." The report, by the U.S. Immigration Commission, was dated 1911.

This charming blast from the past is supposed to illustrate that our xenophobic bleating is the same ol', same ol' and should be ignored.  I mean, it does sound the same, right?  And we are all agreed that America became the world's great power in the decades since 1911: unparalleled military might, industrial economy, prosperity (mostly), and freedoms that the rest of the world could only dream of.  So allowing "largely unskilled" and "heavily illiterate" immigrants to pour over our borders unchecked to take advantage of all of the government-funded social services, health care, social security, public education, etc.  is a recipe for success, right?

Uh, helloooo, Bob: the illegal immigration to the United States was negligible in 1911: real laws restricting immigration weren't passed until 1924.  And strangely, the country did very well indeed in the subsequent decades with enforced immigration laws.  There were no social services to speak of, except public school where reading, writing and arithmetic was taught in English (Neanderthals!).  Additionally, even among native Americans, graduating from high school wasn't nearly as common as it was soon to become, so there was much less of a disparity in education than there is now between illegal immigrants and the native population.   Bob, we expect better.  You and Fred Barnes need to stop sniffing about the "strong anti-immigrant strain" that you detect in the Rule of Law wing of the Conservative/Liberal Coalition of the American People.

• Read here Robert Rector's report on the economic cost of importing an underclass.  
• Read the Educational Testing Service Policy Research Center's report, America's Perfect Storm about the  socioeconomic changes that are putting an unprecedented strain on our public school system and threaten our entire economy and our competitiveness.  Click on the Executive Summary (pdf) and go to page 5 for some jaw-dropping stats on the immigrant educational profile.  Page two has a breakdown of prose literacy by ethnicity as well.
  

I was very pleased to see this get coverage in the politics blog of the Washington Times:

More than 70 universities across the country will participate in “Islamo Fascism Awareness Day” teach-ins on April 19. Senator John Kyl and former Senator Rick Santorum have agreed to host showings at Arizona State and Georgetown. Former Cincinnati Reds pitcher and current radio talk show host Frank Pastore will host a showing at UCLA, and “Battlelines” talk show host Alan Nathan will do the same at George Washington U. Bay Area radio personality Melanie Morgan will host the showing at San Francisco State University, and Atlanta talk show host Martha Zoller will do the same at the Georgia Tech.

The event will consist of showings of “Obsession,” a documentary about the terrorist threat from Islamic militants. The film uses interviews with authorities on the Middle East, former jihadists, and experts on terrorism to take the viewer inside the worldview and plans for world domination of radical Islam. Following the film, there will be town hall-style dialogues about terrorism, the U.S. response in Iraq and elsewhere, and other issues. Some campuses will mark the event by other activities, including panel discussions by writers and thinkers on the terrorist threat.

Columbia University, Duke, Dartmouth, the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, University of Texas, Notre Dame, Boston College, Ohio State, and the University of California at Davis are among the campuses that will participate in Islamo-Fascism Awareness Day on April 19.

Obsession was aired on Fox five times the weekend before the November elections, but I'm not sure anyone noticed.  I've only seen a 27 minute version, but it is excellent and chilling.  It should be required viewing in every grade of every high school in the country.

Anyway, I'll go to the UT  event.  They had a Palestinian Awareness Weekend a couple of weeks ago, complete with a performance of "I am Rachel Corrie," know here at Quid as "I am Pancake."  I had the flier here somewhere...workshops on how to get that bomb belt for your body type..."Kefiyehs: Political Statement as Indispensable Fashion Accessory"...."Just Blame the Jews: One Rule for Highly Successful Palestinians,"  and the list goes on.

Just so everyone is up to date and more depressed than ever, the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) shows that, on average, seniors failed to make any gains in reading and math on 2005 assessment exams.  These are the highlights:

• All but the highest level students showed declines in reading compared to 1992 (baseline)
• Less than 25% of high school seniors are proficient in math.
  

This is horrible.  Can we fire the unions now? Can we have school choice now? 

Well, perhaps the title of this post should be "American Education, etc." I've been collecting articles and clippings over the last few weeks, sharing anecdotes and learning about the many facets of educational dysfunction in these United States. Here are some of the highlights:

Steve Jobs was a guest speaker at a statewide education forum sponsored by the Texas Public Education Reform Foundation. He caused quite a stir by being critical of the unions that control public education. He looks at the way schools are run, and asks what kind of enterprise can run well if the CEO can't hire the people he wants, fire the poor employees or pay better workers more. It's a rhetorical question. A letter to the editor provided the classic, now long clichéd response:

Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Inc., needs to get a job. Slogans and clichés are poor substitutes for facts.

Think about it: We all know a teacher or two. By and large, they are dedicated and work hard at a job that pays little more than just-out-of-college wages.

Further, if the teacher's unions are so strong, why are their wages stagnant, benefits on the slide, and pensions under attack? Further still, why are classroom teachers always the last to be consulted on classroom issues?

What a crazy world. We've go clowns like Jobs and Gov. Rick Perry running around convincing everyone that teachers are the enemy of education and politicians are the saviors.

The author of this letter must be a product of public education and a union member. This is a piece of self-refuting and factually incorrect nonsense. Since I'm sending a copy of this post to him, I'll have to explain what I mean by self-refuting.

• Working hard and being dedicated are necessary but not sufficient characteristics of doing a good job at teaching.
• Wages are low? Not really. The unions and their members make a choice to trade wages for other forms of compensation like time off (teachers only work nine months and have paid non-teaching days, preparation, and training time) and other benefits. In any event, it simply proves Jobs point that you can't attract good people without merit pay, which the union will never allow.
  
• Teacher's unions are extremely strong, but the writer of this letter seems to equate excellent performance (as measured by teacher compensation) with the strength of the union. That's not how the union measures its own performance. The union measures its power by the number of people it represents.   The number of members translates into cash and a bloc of deliverable votes.  This translates to political clout, as the unions endorse candidates.
  
• Is the endgame for the members about pensions, wages, and benefits? Not really. It's about job security, with a dash of indemnity. Most teachers, whether by natural inclination or successful brainwashing, are risk averse. They believe that the worst thing that could happen to them is to have their performance measured. After all, too many factors that affect their performance are out of their control, right? Dumb kids, poor kids, bad environment, sun spots. The union sells job security: no matter how crappy a job you do, you can't get fired. And...if you have the temerity to think that you are a great teacher that anyone would love, you will still join the union because with union membership, you get legal representation in the event of litigation. I've been told by more than one teacher here in the Austin area that it isn't uncommon to have a "four way" parent-teacher conference: the parents, the teacher and the parents' lawyer. As long as we're connecting dots, who are the two largest institutional contributors to the Democrat Party? Yes, the NEA and the tort lawyers.

Now, to paraphrase the warden from Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure of competition. The writer of this letter complains that his union is weak, and therefore is doing a poor job for its members. Clearly, the members need better representation. But the union doesn't allow competition: that is the real use of its political power, to stifle competition, to maintain their monopoly. If you have a monopoly, you don't have to provide a decent product: just ask Bill Gates.  No vouchers, severe limits on charter schools, no school choice. End users of education- taxpayers, potential employers, parents and even students are complaining about the quality of education. They have no choice, they are not getting value for the dollar and the education establishment is failing the taxpayers, society generally, and oh... almost forgot, the children. Very telling that the writer of the letter framed the problem as "teachers are downtrodden" and not "children are not being educated." 

Neither Jobs nor Gov. Perry have cast teachers as the enemy: they have cast the union monopoly as the enemy.  And that is a correct assessment of the problem. 

George Will began this week with a column about the turning tide in education.  There have been significant gains in the fight against the union monopoly, as Arizona expands it's "tuition tax-break" legislation.  In a nutshell, scholarship organizations can organize as non-profit enterprises so that individuals who contribute to them can receive a tax credit.  The Arizona legislature is about to expand this advantage to corporate donations, as well.  The organizations then help fund the tuitions of needy students.  This creates a demand for private and parochial schools in the areas that need them most, and there are many of those areas in Arizona: 600 of AZ's schools are deemed to be failing.

Yesterday, Utah's legislature approved the broadest voucher program in the country, where any public school student can receive up to a maximum of $3000 toward a private education.

On Wednesday, there was a large demonstration here in Austin that featured various children's advocacy groups, but the one that got the most press was the group supporting vouchers.

I had my own revelation last week, as I spoke to a woman who has been a "community organizer" for years.  She is what a friend of mine, her extremely liberal son-in-law calls "a socially-aware lawyer."   She described to me how a group she was involved in organized the East Austin communities around six elementary schools to improve those schools.  They had remarkable success, in part because they worked very hard on the difficult task of making the parents and schools work together.  They found, however, that all of the gains that the children made in K-5 were lost once they went to middle school: they were bused across town and the parents no longer had the kind of control over what was going on in their kids' school.  The parents and schools developed a coherent plan for a "district within a district" to keep the children from leaving the local community for middle school.  It was approved by Austin ISD.  Then came "No Child Left Behind."  This legislation had no bearing on the plans but had the effect of making the district "paranoid."  When a bureaucracy is faced with accountability and higher standards, the first thing it does is start digging the moat right where it is.  No innovations, so the plan for this community was deep-sixed.  Then my socially-aware lawyer said, "...and we didn't want to go charter."  I questioned her about this, and after much hemming and hawing, she said, "We support public schools."  This is code, because, in fact, charter schools are public: they are supported by tax dollars, albeit at a lower rate than regular public schools.  They do not have to comply with union work rules, however.  And there's the rub:  the "community organizers" that my socially-aware lawyer represented is itself a dues-paying organization comprised of churches, schools, and (surprise!) the local teacher's union, which is affiliated with both the NEA and the AFL-CIO.

Going charter would have been a snap for these schools.  They already had professional staff in place, a plan, and a supportive community.  They could have tapped into copious amounts of grant money because the project to that point had already caught the attention of the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Ford Foundation.  Could the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation be far behind?  The community needed this.  The kids needed this.  But in the end, the union's interests had to be protected, not the interests of the very poor children. 

It is no surprise then, as people slowly begin to connect the dots, that they begin to see that the unions work for themselves, not for "the children."  If you go to Education Austin's site, you see that they are promoting the use of a film "Nobelity" for use in middle schools and high schools.  The point of the film is to make the children more "socially aware" about such issues as world hunger and global warming.  It is also much easier to teach kids to be "socially aware" than it is to teach them content.  You know, history and writing and science and math: the hard stuff, which incidentally, would give the children the intellectual tools to understand the problems better and make them less vulnerable to "social awareness" indoctrination exercises. Also, if you go to any immigration event, the teacher's union and many others are strongly represented.  Why would the teacher's union be for "a pathway to citizenship," amnesty, when the consequences for most public schools and the tax districts that fund them would be disastrous?  Because, obviously, the bigger the disaster, the more money needs to be poured into the schools which translates into larger union membership.  The actual working conditions of the teachers will deteriorate dramatically, but the unions, like a one-note guitar, will say that the solution is more money.

Which leads directly to the big news of the week, completely lost in the hubbub of two women whose lives had spun out of control.  Educational Testing Service Policy Research Center released a report, complete with grim statistics, about the precarious state of our educational system.  While I can gather an armful of hopeful signs in the articles I've cited above (and others, including the success of NCLB's Reading First initiative, here) the larger picture is very grim, indeed.  Graduation rates haven't been much over 70% since the 1970's, National Assessment of Educational Progress scores have been flat for twenty years, and the lifetime earnings of people with no college diploma has fallen like a hot rock through butter.  This is undoubtedly because the labor market has shifted away from manufacturing and other occupations that don't require college, but it is also true that high schools and colleges are turning out a less well-educated work force, thus contributing to "education inflation."  It is also clear from this report, the unrestrained immigration of illiterates is going to have a terrible impact on the economic well-being of this country.  At this point, the report shows that 50% of all immigrants over 16 years of age speak poor English or none at all.  These immigrants are unlikely to do better for their own children for all of the obvious reasons: they form large enclaves where English isn't spoken at all, they don't value education per se, and are not demanding consumers of the public education system.  It's a win-win for the union monopoly, which is hard at work creating and perpetuating a new victim class whose rights the unions will heroically fight for, while teaching the children about the depredations of global warming (in a bi-lingual ed classroom.)

This week we met with the registrar at my children's school to pick their courses.

Aside: Yes, children, plural, in school, cross fingers and knock wood. With the exception of ten short weeks last year, I have had one or both children home with me, either being sick or getting an education or both, since November 2003. Time to get back to my preferred lifestyle: watching soaps and eating bon bons.

During this meeting we found out that our school will not be offering Intro French. Since this school requires four years of a single foreign language to graduate, this is a problem. French isn't offered anywhere at the middle school level, and given most Americans' disinclination to learn another language, this is the death knell for most foreign languages: only Latin and Spanish have survived the ax at most schools [and yes, one of those is, in fact, a dead language. Ask not for whom the bell tolls...]. We asked about this and the registrar shrugged and said, "Really it's because this is such a Spanish-rich environment." It turns out she meant Central Texas, not that particular school, although the same could be said for the school itself: about 30 per cent of the student body is Hispanic, if you go by last names. Then she said something that I found shocking. "When my husband transferred here, I applied for a job at both of the Catholic high schools. Juan Diego really liked my resume- I had worked at a Catholic high school in Atlanta- but they wouldn't hire me because I didn't speak Spanish."

Whoa. An American high school, teaching a standard college prep curriculum in which four years of English are required, with all classes, except Spanish, presumably (and all of those other foreign languages they offer), taught in English and Spanish is a requirement for the Registrar's job? Oh, I get it. Most of the kids are first generation Americans whose parents are citizens but don't speak English sorry, come from households where English is not the primary language but by golly the parents place such a high value on education they are getting those kids into a private Catholic high school come hell or high water oops again The school is pandering to the stereotype of the South Austin demographic and bending over backwards to make the notion of going to high school at all palatable to the oppressed and downtrodden victims of our cruel immigration policies.

That last statement may be harsh. Certainly there is a large element of p.c. but that isn't the only force at work here. The first is that the economics of education is so distorted by the state's monopoly that private schools can't really survive in "economically disadvantaged" areas without massive subsidies from somewhere, in this case the R.C. Diocese of Austin. Juan Diego exists in large part because of the Roman Catholic commitment to providing for its very large, relatively poor and mostly Hispanic flock in South and East Austin. They use existing structures for their class rooms and many of their classes are taught by teachers that are already employed at St. Edwards University, which is adjacent. They don't want lack of family funds to prevent a child from getting a Catholic education. I admire this. But basically everyone is buying into the cultural dominance of the Hispanic and denying that the school has a duty to support these kids lives as American citizens, not as Mexicans living in a place where they get to learn English as a foreign language.

San Juan Diego High School is a "Cristo Rey Model" high school that uses job internships held by the students to defray the cost of their tuition. This model is being used in several locations around the country, especially in areas where there are large, poor Roman Catholic populations, and you may take that to mean that you have to oprime el número uno para inglés. The curriculum is college prep, though I couldn't find out what that means, and is an alternative to the generally awful non-education these kids would get in their local public school.

But tell me again why the well-qualified Gringa registrar has to speak Spanish?

And back to the original question. In sort of a "Name That Tune" moment, I turned to my husband and said, "I can teach her enough French to get her into French II by the 14th of August." This was met with much scoffing, which I fully intend to ignore. She's willing, nay, eager, and she doesn't have anything better to do. Allons-nous.

In his book, Enemies of the Permanent Things, Russell Kirk writes at length of the importance of "normative" literature for instilling the culture in the hearts and minds of a people. Better than lectures, McGuffy's Readers or civics classes, good literature imparts timeless lessons of humanity and connects the reader with his fellow human beings across time and space. Dr. Kirk valued a good story above all for the teaching of norms, a term he uses to mean essential, timeless values, morals and culture*. Each story and every human being is a demonstration of the infinite variety of the particulars, but the human experience has a commonality that is fairly represented by these norms, and that is the essence of Conservatism.

So there I was, sitting in Izzy's Deli on California Street on Stanford University campus, hunched over a schmear of baba ganoush on an onion bagel, and listening intently to the conversation of three coeds at the next table.

“I really want to read a classic this summer but I don’t know which one to read.”
“Why?”
“Because I really feel like I should but I don’t know which one. I tried Don Quixote last summer and that was a big mistake.”
“I don’t see why you feel like you have to read a “classic.” I mean, there's modern stuff that’s just as good. And besides, it's not like a book would change your life.”
“I don't expect it to change my life. It's just that I hear people talking about these books and I think there must be something to it.
"I disagree. I think that “classics” aren’t really relevant to our lives.”

There you have it. The body language was exquisite, too, The pretty blonde Public Policy major expressing a yearning for normative literature, the classics, wanting to find out why these works have stood the test of time, out of simple intellectual curiosity. The brunette, right next to me, challenging this archaic thinking, with her arms crossed in front of her in a way that was odd in a warm deli. "Our lives are different. We are modern. The experience of humanity prior to our advent is irrelevant."

["...we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.

Our children, we vowed, would never know that.

So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.-- Arthur Sulzbeerger, 2006]

Ah, idealism. Or is it just arrogance? In any event, I was fascinated and frankly, after leaving the deli, I was so taken with the idea of encouraging the longing of the not-so-dumb blond that I took out a my little note pad and wrote three titles down. I turned on my heel and went back into the deli and gave it to her with a little fumbly speech about how she was right and these were three very different books and not very old but classics in very different ways. This was my list, with the notes that I wrote for her.

1. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thos. Hardy
2. Witness, Whittaker Chambers, the finest American autobiography ever.
3. Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay- very accessible.
   

I can hear the groans (or can I?) These were the first three works that popped into my head. My reasoning, such as it was, was based on several factors. First, accessibility. Both Witness and Millay's poetry are written in modern language and are compelling, in their own way. Millay was a genius for her elegant style that is yet highly readable, and for a young woman, identifiable. Witness is a bit more difficult, in the sense that I think that college students today would find it seriously dated, yet the heirs of Alger Hiss are still with us, only more open, more brazen in their treachery. Just today we hear that someone in the CIA may have leaked the SWIFT financial records program to the NYT. What could be more applicable to today's discussions about protecting our way of life than Witness? I will also say that the remark about "a book won't change your life," which is completely wrong in any event, was not my own experience with Witness. It did.

So why The Mayor of Casterbridge? Well, if someone asked me to name a classic novel that I loved, that is the first one that pops into my head most days. I love Jane Austin. I am smitten with memoirs, especially by women- I have a number in my library that I consider veery influential for me personally. Gerald Durrell, C. S. Forrester, E. M, Forster, on and on. But the story of Michael Henchard and Thomas Hardy's portrayal of this man is wonderful, timeless. The Penguin Classic edition that I have is full of notes explaining the dialect and odd references. The character studies are exquisite. I was completely captivated by the opening scene of the family trudging up the road:

ONE evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.

[...]

The wife mostly kept her eyes fixed ahead, though with little interest - the scene for that matter being one that might have been matched at almost any spot in any country in England at this time of the year; a road neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly, bordered by hedges, trees, and other vegetation, which had entered the blackened-green stage of colour that the doomed leaves pass through on their way to dingy, and yellow, and red. The grassy margin of the bank, and the nearest hedgerow boughs, were powdered by the dust that had been stirred over them by hasty vehicles, the same dust as it lay on the road deadening their footfalls like a carpet; and this, with the aforesaid total absence of conversation, allowed every extraneous sound to be heard.

What I've skipped is Hardy's marvelous observations of the mute couple and the conclusions he leads us to about their relationship. But I have spent quite a bit of time wondering to myself in the last ten days "Why The Mayor of Casterbridge?"

Classics aren't really relevant to our lives...

Most of my best friends are readers. A few of my very good friends are actually real literati: they've read every thing, or so it seems, and remembered most of it and write or teach writing. I, on the other hand, am pretty ignorant by comparison. I've heard about many books and can talk a good game, mainly because I listen to Fresh Air and read the NYT Book Review. I sound cultivated, but the truth is I'm not as big a reader as I used to be and I read slowly, so I am very judicious about what I choose to read. So, in a strange way, I was perhaps the best person to say, "Read this!" to someone who yearns but who isn't literarily-minded. Nevertheless, I will live with the thought that I had blown my chance to help someone simply by handing her three heartfelt choices that didn't speak to her. C'est la vie.

I was drowsing this afternoon. I am sleep deprived all this week because of spousal travel schedules and the sleepwalking child. A phone call woke me up and after I hung up, I thought about The Mayor of Casterbridge. I thought about the man, Michael Henchard, who does something as a young man that, while not "illegal," was nonetheless very lowlife, very scummy. He moves on, however, and over the course of several decades in a place where no one knows of his former disgrace, achieves a considerable measure of respect and wealth. He becomes the Mayor of Casterbridge, a substantial market town. Ultimately, his past and his own personality exact their toll and he loses everything, all the wealth and all the respect.

Just another Dead White European MaleBut all of that is just fiction and old fiction at that. It has nothing to do with a congressman who clung to his office by a thread twenty-five years ago by selling out one of his colleagues. Who has ever since lain low, but achieved quiet status and seniority, and lots and lots of lobbyist friends. Who saw political opportunity that would vault him into the limelight and reckoned that no one remembered the grasping treachery of a generation ago that contrasted rather sharply with his valorous military service.

Just fiction. Washington, D.C., 2006 isn't Dorset, 1835. Jack Murtha isn't Michael Henchard. People are so different now...

"SHE OPENED THE DOOR"

She opened the door of the West to me, 
    With its loud sea-lashings,
    And cliff-side clashings
Of waters rife with revelry.
She opened the door of Romance to me, 
     The door from a cell
     I had known too well,
 Too long, till then, and was fain to flee.
She opened the door of a Love to me, 
     That passed the wry
     World-welters by
As far as the arching blue the lea.
 She opens the door of the Past to me, 
     Its magic lights,
     Its heavenly heights,
 When forward little is to see!

1913-- 

Morning Edition on NPR ran a story yesterday about a commission that is looking into standardized testing for colleges and Universities as a way "to make them accountable."  The idea is that these institutions of higher learning receive federal funds and the government wants to make sure that those funds are being used wisely.

Let me cut to the chase: this is such a dumb idea.  Built into any and every grant to colleges and universities are "accountability measures" and if those aren't working, maybe that is what needs work.  No grants are given as blanket grants for general purpose, "Educate Kids" money that has no metrics for good use.  I will say, that for all of the bureaucracy and red tape involved in taking government money, it's still easy to not accomplish much.  But standardized tests for the students?  Come on.

The best is saved for last: The Pew Charitable Trust study that found that 5o% of college graduates couldn't read and understand newspaper articles and couldn't do simple math, like calculating a 15% tip.

Um, so how did these morons get into college in the first place?  Wouldn't it be much easier to say, "OK, in order to graduate from high school and there by qualify to get into college, you have to be able to calculate a 15% tip and read a newspaper."  That sounds like a good standardized test to me.

I submit that 99% of parents who are paying for their kids to go to college are well aware of their kids' intellectual limitations.  If they want to spend a bazillion dollars in tuition so that the little darling has a piece of parchment, let them.    But I also know that as a taxpayer, I really don't want to be subsidizing this stupidity.  It pains me to think that a young cousin of mine is going to a very expensive state school, heavily subsidized, to become an event planner.  She's going to throw corporate parties.  And her parents are forking out upwards of  $20k a year for this (and compared to most colleges, that's a bargain, for the parents.)  But the taxpayers of that state and federal taxpayers it's a rip off.  She is one of the 50%.  She probably knew how to calculate a tip when she graduated high school but has blithely forgotten that as the party curriculum swamped her little gray cells.