Readin', Ritin', Retrenchment

Sharon Otterman, "Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Problems". October 12

LISTEN, I admit that some of this is personal: I know how hard my Poor Wife works. I know how few people--including 99% of the sidewalk education reformers I come into contact with--could handle it for a week. I know what's happened to her, professionally, over the past two decades of our using schools as political soccer balls (and, particularly, with Indianapolis, and the state of Indiana, using the Separate but Unequal Not Exactly Indianapolis Public Schools as a punching bag): ceaseless churning of educational practices by local and state governments, megalomaniacal district superintendents and their fellow Education Leaders, and the education "establishment" they cow. Six years ago she spent most of her free time in the final two months of school, and all of her summer (unpaid) rewriting curriculum and planning new classes so Indianapolis Public Schools (and the School of Education at IUPUI) could rake in millions of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation largess for something called the Small Schools Initiative. IPS was the only major school district in the country to jump into the thing with both feet. All of the Foundation money went to the university, to administer the program, and to training administrators and teachers in how to run the program; in other words, it provided junkets for administrators and an extra work load for the people actually doing the educating. Not one dime ever made it to a classroom. Not one dime was every supposed to. It lasted two years, before being killed. Quietly, if you need to ask.

She has, in her career, seen Indianapolis Public Schools go from Junior High schools (7th and 8th grades) to Middle Schools (6th, 7th, and 8th, a combination only a blind sadist could have concocted), back to two-year schools, and on to integrating them into some high schools. (Isn't this how GM got to be where it is today?) Four changes in lesson plan procedure, which basically changed whose desk all those papers would sit on, unread; three complete overhauls of the online grading system, including the most recent, which prevents her from entering data from her own machine at home (because it's a Mac, and you know what sort of cross-platform compatibility problems we have in 2010) and, instead, forced a sweet technophobe and Luddite painter to learn whatever version of DOS the official system employs; and the Magnetification of half of IPS high schools, the granddaughter of School CHOICE (pick your school and we'll bus you there), daughter of that Small Schools Initiative and junior-middle-school Chinese fire drill, which, among other things, required my Poor seniority-laden, union featherbedding Wife to reapply for the job she already had, the one she'd just been named Teacher of the Year for doing, the one where by every objective standard you could apply she was one of the premier teachers in the state. Thank god they didn't require a PowerPoint presentation.

That's without mentioning how successive mayors of Indianapolis have been given the power to open Charters next to every Starbucks, or the three different procedures (In the Spring! No, in the Fall! No, in the Spring!) for the statewide, high-stakes ISTEP testing which grinds everything to a halt for two weeks every year, or the time the Indiana state legislature stripped the IPS union, and only the IPS union, of its collective bargaining rights, or the current threat that the Great State of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, Governor, Tony Bennett, Personal Anti-Union Educational Hatchet Man, will take over Indianapolis' "failing" public school system, and run it as well as it has the Family and Social Services Administration and the Indiana Utilities Regulatory Commission, those other major programs it cares so deeply about.

My wife teaches six classes in a seven-period day; that's one more than her contract permits, and she's been doing this for three years, because the school can't afford to hire the proper number of teachers. It's six different classes, not one class six times. She created a curriculum on the fly two years ago, because some idiot administrator (gotta stop repeating myself) offered a class the school didn't actually have. She took on a class last year that was created ten days after the year began. She's a mentor, official and unofficial, to her younger colleagues. She--not the entrepreneurs in the front office--is the one they call when they're going to be absent and haven't left a lesson plan for the substitute; she goes in early to see it's taken care of. She sponsored an after-school club last year despite having been told there was no money for it; when her Wobbly husband asked why, she said, "Because the kids want it." She's the one who arranges student shows, and generally the one who hangs and/or takes them down, because her colleagues have other things to do with their weekends. She mans booths at art fairs and such three or four times a year so that students can show their work. A few years back she got a Public Passenger Chauffeur's License with Special School Bus Cluster, because the district eliminated drivers for field trips and after-school events for a couple of years.

Her reward for this (Reader, do not get ahead of me!) is being treated like she was awarded a sinecure by some Borgia pope. Like she's a place-kicker one missed chip shot from being released. Like she should justify, every school year, maybe every grading period, having a job, let alone some small accrued benefits over some rookie know-it-all Ivie Teach for America boss-fucker with a two-year stint and $300,000 per administration post after in her crosshairs.

And--you may have heard--by being condemned because the century of second-class citizenship for African-Americans and their schools, if any, following three centuries of no citizenship at all (void where required by Apportionment), is now the fault of tenure in New York City schools.

But back home and out of the spotlight, Mr. Canada and his charter schools have struggled with the same difficulties faced by other urban schools, even as they outspend them. After a rocky start several years ago typical of many new schools, Mr. Canada’s two charter schools, featured as unqualified successes in “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” the new documentary, again hit choppy waters this summer, when New York State made its exams harder to pass.

A drop-off occurred, in spite of private donations that keep class sizes small, allow for an extended school day and an 11-month school year, and offer students incentives for good performance like trips to the Galápagos Islands or Disney World.

Y'know, I wonder if the drop-off was identical to the drop-off in climbing splits once the Tour de France started actually drug testing riders? I wonder if it's the same as the drop-off in 100m times between Ben Johnson setting the World Record, and Ben Johnson taking a urine test? I wonder if I could get a grant to check on this.

And the cost of its charter schools — around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending — has raised questions about their utility as a nationwide model.

Raised questions? Really? I didn't hear Brian Williams ask Mr. Canada about it. I didn't hear Colbert ask That Guggenheim Fellow about the discrepancy, or where the money was supposed to come from while barking mad crowds complain about paying any taxes at all (Defense expenditures and personal benefits excepted). I don't recall Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, "Cufflinks" White, and a dozen of their cohort saying anything about doubling spending in that Post Op-Ed. In fact, I'm fucking waiting for someone to say it. I'm fucking waiting for The Mitch Daniels Education Miracle to announce we're raising educational expense by a third, except that will no longer include property and maintenance costs, and we're slashing teacher pay and benefits so we can put social workers and Registered Nurses in every classroom. Yup. Any day now.

In 2009, the Harlem Children’s Zone had assets of nearly $200 million, and the project’s operating budget this year is $84 million, two-thirds of it from private donations. Last month, the Goldman Sachs Foundation pledged $20 million toward constructing an additional school building. With two billionaires, Stanley Druckenmiller and Kenneth Langone, on the board, its access to capital is unusually strong.

In case you've forgotten, it was Ambrose Bierce who noted that if you steal a man's money and keep it, you're a thief, but if you steal his money and give 10% of it back you're a philanthropist.

The zone’s two charter schools are open to all city children by lottery. Officially, the schools spend, per student, $12,443 in public money and $3,482 in private financing each year. But that does not include the costs of a 4 p.m.-to-6 p.m. after-school program, rewards for student performance, a chef who prepares healthy meals, central administration and most building costs, and the students’ free health and dental care, which comes out of the zone’s overall budget, said Marty Lipp, the zone’s communications director.

I wonder if it includes the cost of psychiatric help for whomever put this on the HCZ website:

The budget for the HCZ Project for fiscal year 2010 is over $48 million, costing an average of $5,000 per child.

Again, I'm all for the work of the Harlem Children's Zone, regardless of that persistent feeling of being stabbed in the shorts; I'm all for fighting poverty. But not with a lottery, not by robbing the worst off to aid the bad off, not by giving Goldman Sachs a seat on the board, but by giving it an equitable tax bill that goes towards improving everyone's lot. Supposedly "we" decided thirty years ago that the Disney version of Entrepreneurship was the model for Everything. So when does this altruistic concern for the well-being of the impoverished actually touch the real engine of all this misery? Goldman Sachs has had a hundred and forty years to worry about the Poor. It doesn't need Geoffrey Canada's help. It doesn't have to pony up a few stolen dimes to a nonprofit to improve things; it could do so by paying an equitable amount of taxes and not gaming the fucking political system. And it--and we--don't need to help destroy what's left of trades unionism in this country just so a few children can show improvement on some dumbed-down test, given enough practice first.

That's Edu-tainment!

Ian Urbina and Sarah Wheaton,"Rhee, Washington Schools Chancellor, to Resign". October 13

GOODBYE, Failing DC Schools™, Hello AEI sinecure, Educational Consultant to NBC, and six-figure book deal; we'd like to see serial liar Rhee put her career where her lyin' lips have been, and sign up for seven years as a non-union teacher in a charter school. One which admits not just the identical depressed-socioeconomic-level students as its public school neighbors, filtered through parental interest, but the same percentage of learning and emotionally disabled, the same percentage of non-English speakers, and agrees to keep them there short of prison or death. Y'know, just like the real public schools do. (And good luck finding one.) Furthermore, we'd like to see her work her Education Miracle with hormonally-mazed eight graders, not 6 year-olds, on the grounds that that's the level where the US supposedly falls behind the rest of the world, also known as Scandinavia. We'd like to see her do it with independent observers there to make sure she isn't teaching to the test, and others making sure that Joel Klein isn't dumbing down the test itself. We wanna see her live on the income, make herself available 24/7 for student and parent calls, and have her pay cut at the whim of her boss, then be fired because she's accrued seniority. We still wouldn't believe her; that much is already settled. We just think it would be a good first step, like giving Eric Erickson and Jonah Goldberg fifteen-month hitches as forward artillery spotters, or putting a banker in prison for theft. You know: symbolic.

Comedy aside, why was Michelle Rhee's proboscis in the DC mayor's race in the first place? For the sake of the children? And having made that decision, and lost, how does she come to refuse to resign, as any half-honorable hack would've?

The first sports hero I ever chose for myself--I was a baseball fanatic from the cradle, but So's My Old Man--was the great Kansas miler Jim Ryan. He's the reason I became a track and field man. I've seen the start of the Indianapolis 500 from the pits. I saw Maris and Mantle hit back-to-back home runs in '61. My school was the last to win the NCAA Men's Basketball championship undefeated, and the Colts won a Super Bowl. And nothing has ever matched the excitement of just warming up in the infield before a dual meet, or hearing the breath go out of a guy as you passed him on the stretch of a quarter he though he had won. And there's not a record in the books now that isn't tainted, and all because nobody said anything while obvious cheats grabbed the glory. Just win, baby, and no thought for tomorrow. A whole generation of baseball stars won't be in the Hall. Lance Armstrong, who would've been a great and inspiring story, will instead be covered in chess for eternity. Just win.

And apparently no one under forty knows any different, and everyone over forty is too corrupt or conflicted to say anything. Joel Klein is a cheap political hatchet-man who either ran a con game or doesn't know one when he sees it; Michelle Rhee's accomplishments are writ in vapor. They're just the latest mouthpieces for a scam that's been going on since Brown, and which, in the past few decades, has found union-bashing more profitable than tightening the nuts and bolts of local educational systems. But they don't get called on it, even after the fact, even when they lose. We know teachers, or their unions, are not the problem with education; we know there's not a single problem to correct, or a single goal to reach; we know we couldn't reach it if there was. The whole thing's bullshit. It's not the first time somebody's tried to sell the stuff, but I'll be goddamned if I remember so many people being convinced they're eating Tootsie Rolls.

Anyway, so long, Michelle. I wish I could say Goodbye.

Towards A Unified Theory Of Cupidity And Stupidity

Ross Douthat, "Grading School Choice". October 10

David Brooks, "The Paralysis of the State". October 12

We Mostly Wanted To Try A Shorter David Brooks: If we didn't give state and municipal employees medical benefits, we could afford bridges and chunnels and skyways and all that other shit we don't need. And everyone left would have a HeliHummer. Except the Drones, of course.

Say, That Was Fun, Let's Try A Shorter Ross Douthat: The American Enterprise Institute and its Associated Mouthpieces would like to remind you that we never said Charter schools were any better than the public schools. If you can't tell propaganda from fact, blame your uncaring unionized public school teacher. Hey, here's a movie!

Maybe You Should Have That Blind Spot Looked At. By Someone Who Isn't Blind: Things are apparently now so dire for the Brooks-style Republican--that is, the sort which has to pretend it considers something more than winning elections, and so realizes we're speeding toward two more years of Republican Do Nothingism--that he's taken to bashing police pensions. Cops make $70,000 per! They can retire at 50!

FY 2009

Let us note here, again, how often it is that honorary Lt. Colonels such as Brooks demonstrate their complete unfamiliarity with anyone who's actually served in the US military. Where, for example, one may retire after twenty years (at 38!) with half pay, or stick it out for another ten (48! under 50!) for 75% pay. Plus low-cost health care at restricted facilities for yourself and your family, government guaranteed housing loans, and any number of benefit programs. You can get $36,000 for college for serving two years, or one, if you pay $100/month to get into the program. Do we begrudge them, Mr. Brooks? Or are we just keeping them on standby for when we need that Trans-Pacific tunnel built?

There are roughly 700,000 law enforcement officers working at the state or local level in this country. It's absolutely certain that a considerably higher percentage puts his or her life on the line, everyday, "defending our freedoms", than do the 2.5 million members of our military cartel, which requires 8 support troops for every soldier in the field. If your Magic Formula is so fucking Magic, why don't you apply it everywhere?

[No, I didn't forget. The Army's not unionized, right? And not likely to be? So I answered my own question. Okay, then, so we've got $47 billion in aircraft carriers floating around at this minute--that's using the Navy's figures, and their math isn't like land math; there are those who say the damned things cost more than twice as much--and $23 billion in the first of their ten replacements. That's just construction cost for the existing ships, and doesn't include the billions in development, the $300M in annual operating costs, the $2.5 B overhauls they all need, and the God Knows What it'll cost our grandchildren--won't someone think of the unborn?--to decommission the damned things starting twenty years from now, at two nuclear reactors each. Wanna name an international incident in the modern era which would have required as many as three? Wanna calculate the odds, then, of two such incidents happening simultaneously? That's but 60% of the fleet. And this is not Our Military Budget, Fifty Times That of Our Largest Potential Competitor. It's just the premier show-off piece for one branch, and its express function, almost from the time the Nimitz was built, is to cow tenth-rate military powers so we don't have to go around threatening to nuke a Hemisphere every time Coca-Cola doesn't get its way. In which, by the way, we are routinely thwarted by weapons which could have been manufactured for a high school science fair. In 1917.]

Ask AEI: Douthat acknowledges anti-public school propaganda; the intention is not to correct any false impressions, but to accrue credit for admitting Truth while simultaneously arguing that we pursue Error anyway. How much longer does this sort of shit get a free pass? Some AEI functionary says, "Wait a minute, let's not go overboard about Charter schools." He says this not as we're going overboard about Charter schools, but fifteen years late, after we've seen their results are nothing like what was being claimed around the time we all jumped into the deep. And just before some pop-culture wilting convinces everyone all over again that we should go overboard about Charter schools, thereby placing them dangerously near the point where they'll have no where left to hide.

So instead it's time for a little pre-lowering expectations. After all, Charters do somebody some good, and they're already paid for. And this is supposed to explain how Missing the Fucking Point is still a viable option. Because if Charters haven't performed substantially better than the public schools, and done so right out of the box, then the mistake isn't Charters. The mistake is your argument. Not the exaggerated one; the one you're making now.

[Here's a Tell, by the way, like you fucking need one when these arrogant assholes don't think they even have to hide the cards: Douthat:

[T]he jury is still out on whether either policy consistently raises academic performance.

Or, in other words, it doesn't.]

2+2: Even supposing this shit was unequivocal--by which I mean "unequivocal evidence for your argument", and not "unequivocal evidence of your cupidity", which it almost is, you're still full of it. Just because I feel an obligation to continue free education in this country doesn't mean I think the loudest assholes, the biggest vote-buyers, and Our Acknowledged Corporate Masters get to design the curriculum. Whether Microsoft can pick up its next generation of software pirates domestically is no concern of mine; maybe when you fucks start demanding as much from corporations as you do from ordinary citizens I'll sign on. It was somewhat amusing to see that Guggenheim fellow on Colbert the other day, pretending, one, that his movie didn't bash teachers and, two, that we have an obligation to fund public education as a training ground for the private sector, but the private sector has no obligation to hire Americans nor treat them fairly. At the end of the day, you can't--or won't--lift a finger to assure that the whole thing isn't in vain. I'm not sure how you sell this to any population qualified to judge someone else's eduation. And I know it's been said before, but it seems so apt: go fuck yourselves.

Flunkies

Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and 14 other public liars including Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Eugene "Cufflinks" White, "How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders". October 10

SURELY, Mr. Riley, that recourse to bold-face ad hominem is uncalled for, a cheap partisan shot aimed out Our Nation's Education Leaders. Well, no. It would've been a cheap partisan shot if I hadn't read the thing first, which, in the event, made no actual difference, as could've been predicted. Theirs is the cheap partisan shot, made for personal and political gain; when do these people say something surprising, something unexpected, something that doesn't sound rote? I feel the same inclination to apologize for any characterization I could possibly dream up that I do apologizing to Jonah Goldberg, Erick Erickson, Ben Shapiro, or that Atlas Juggs imbecile for their refusal to put their own meat on the line in defense of Civilization. If Education is such a vital, and disastrous, part of American life then it's too important to put your name on a piece of shit that wouldn't have earned a passing grade in a decent freshman logic course.

Just me? Here's a sentence from the thing. One might almost conclude it was, in fact, the key sentence. Now, I was educated in the public schools, so you tell me what it relies on besides prestidigitation.

So, where do we start? With the basics. As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents' income -- it is the quality of their teacher.

Preteritio Alert: let's forget that sixteen of Our Nation's Vaunted Educational Experts can't match an object with its number; believe me, I've seen plenty of Gene White's professional missives, and they argue against the importance of proper English, at least where becoming an overpaid Education Leader is concerned. In 1965 the Coleman Report to President Johnson identified economic class as the major predictor of future academic achievement. It's never been refuted. If you take a look at "Failing" schools in 2010, the thing they share is high percentages of students living in poverty. This is too well known for anyone to've become an Educational Leader without a thorough familiarity with it. It's certainly possible to disagree, but even on Mt. Olympus here, claiming the opposite as established fact has but one possible description: it's a Fucking Lie.

We know very clearly that it is a student's ZIP code, in that low-income households frequently are intellectually impoverished, do not hold academic achievement or intellectualism in high regard, and exacerbate the social negatives with bad nutrition and health care, unstable living conditions, and the thousand bad influences that surround the impoverished home. We know that it is skin color, the result of hundreds of years in which anyone darker than a paper bag could not be taught to read, or, even if things happened to be less draconian, could not enter into hundreds, or thousands, of professions were knowledge could be used, excepting maybe among "his" people.

We think people ought to be ashamed to put their names to such a thing. It's not that we don't think such an opinion can be honestly held--though it can't be honestly held without acknowledging the scoundrels who hide behind it--it's that it can't be honestly held while it's distilled into a Magic Formula. A magic formula which just happens to both line the pockets of its proponents and let them off the hook for failures.

Let's take the case with which I'm most familiar, that of Dr. Eugene "Cufflinks" White (if you'd rather, Somerby has repeatedly dealt with the serial prevaricator Rhee). White makes much, professionally, from the fact that he grew up in a dirt-poor, single-parent home in Jim Crow, Alabama, and was the first of his family to graduate from high school, let alone earn a college degree. White tends to minimize that his entree into higher ed was being 6'5" and able to hoop. We don't impugn it; plenty of B-ballers waste the educational opportunities of a scholarship. We'd just like to know what the 5'5" kid with no skillz is supposed to think.

After stints in Ft. Wayne and as an assistant at IPS, White was named superintendent of Washington Township schools, Indianapolis' best and wealthiest, where he became famous for his annual dragnet of African-American high school males, where he told them to behave less like Africans and more like Americans. This, of course, was wildly popular with white voters, as well as far too many black; occasionally the complaints of an African-American parent who found the exercise racist, demeaning, and probably unconstitutional--that is, of someone who saw it for what it was--made the papers, and was promptly denounced. It's still White's schtick today, in a district which is almost 60% black and 70% minority, though now he does a separate number for the girls, just to keep things balanced. Earlier this year he was overheard in one such using the phrase "act like niggers" ("using the N-word", in local media parlance, as though the negative magic of the term itself was more important than the attitude behind it, the one they didn't want to touch), which he then lied about when confronted. Gene White is not a very good liar.

This is the attitude, folks: the African-American middle-class Church Elder distain for those crazy cuttin'-up colored folk. It's an attitude which has no place in public education. And it's a particularly ironic one when the argument seems to be that our failing students aren't being given enough personal attention. By their lazy union teachers.

White's in his sixth school year as IPS superintendent. They've been marked by lots of trumpeting. He instituted a tougher dress code (after instituting a Task Force to come up with one, so he could remain insulated. He instituted year-round schedules at some poorly-performing schools, then lost a lawsuit when he simply ordered teachers to work the extra days without compensation. He's created a number of magnet schools. He made big noise at the beginning of this year about enforcing attendance; he then quietly informed the schools not to do so. The big plan there? Make teachers responsible for tracking down truants. Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself, and doesn't feel obligated to pay the people who do.

The results have been that Indianapolis Public Schools are the same Failure they were before he arrived. So now it's on to Year-Round School for everybody, meaning another CYA Task Force to fine-tune what has already been decided. And here's what I love about Education Reform, Leadership Style: the local teleprompter readers can't get enough of explaining how this solves the problem of students forgetting stuff over the summer. And, y'know, you may correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't most of our public schools operated on the Agrarian calendar since, oh, their inception? How is it Our Educational Leaders didn't already have an answer or two? Has this just become a problem in the last couple years?

In short, let us consider the source, here: Bloomberg's anti-union hit man, a self-promoting Teach for America groupie, and a convocation of urban Educational Leaders who find it easier, and more personally rewarding, to blame their underlings than accept responsibility.

In other words, this is Reagan Republicanism III: The Calcifying. The people who actually run things are somehow Perpetual Outsiders, plagued by an amorphous but omnipotent Marxism. Their pronouncements are to be taken as unqualified Truth, and as, inherently, True American Values. And yet, y'know, this is just the latest package design for an already tired product (granting that When In Doubt, Redesign the Package is the one authentic American Value for these people's America); the crappyness underneath is never examined, and never called to account. The meddlesomeness of the last decade, or the decade before that? Oh, you're talking about Old Education Leadership! See? New package. We haven't failed. That's unpossible. We're here to clean up Failure. SURGE!

It's remarkable, really: sixteen educational professionals, and not a doubt among 'em. It's everyone else's fault. Every last one of 'em believes that seniority systems are an unqualified evil, that the vast run of claims about Test Scores, with no antecedents, no rigor, no philosophical justification--and a track record of outright cheating, under, for example, Joel Klein--"prove" Failure, which in turn "proves" that Evil Union Teachers are negatively affecting student accomplishment. And that the answer--sitting down?--is superintendent and administration autonomy. Public liars and self-promoters hiding behind a national crisis of their own promotion. Well, you gotta admit: it worked for the Bush administration.

Nixon's The One! Reagan's The Beard!

TOO busy yesterday, but let's greet the day today with a mention of Somerby breaking in on the latest Brooks/Collins Conversation, that gimcrack in the Times apparently designed to prove, under the pretext of demonstrating that its Opinionists do not think about the things they write and have no more knowledge of current events than the average dental waiting room occupant, that combining a wishy-washy centrist "Liberal" and a so-called "moderate" "conservative" yields a particularly thin gruel.

“We!” Has Brooks ever dirtied his pretty pink hands inside the walls of a low-income school? Has he ever spent any time examining the real state of play of these institutions? Here at THE HOWLER, if we had to summarize the progress we’ve made in education over the last decade, we would mention the large score gains in reading and math recorded by black and Hispanic kids on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Presumably, those score gains were pushed along by our teachers. Question: Does Brooks even know that these large score gains exist?

The other day Brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson talked about the difficulty of blogging about issues when no one seems to take any real interest in 'em. He's a young man, so I suppose this seems to him to be a near- or medium-term trend. (He's also a smart man, so I'm not suggesting he thinks this has happened in a vacuum.)

And I'm not going to reply Listen, sonny, I been around, and you don't know the half of it. For once. Because I really do believe there's been a flight from Meaning to the Redoubts of Emotion in the past few decades. But I think that amounts to people who formerly discussed Issues (and the sort of people who, a generation ago, would have been disposed to) being reduced to entrenchment because they can't win on an open field any longer.

And that's both long term and short term. The Right wants to fight fin de siecle Progressivism now, alongside its Hundred Years War on The Class Traitor Roosevelt, in part because it always has, and in part because it thinks it can get away with it now. Who Lost China? is now Who Wants Sharia Law?; Creationism begat Intelligent Design begat Teach the Controversy! without anyone ever confronting 19th century science, let alone 21st. Bobo Brooks thinks Teachers need to Learn How to Love; funny how he adopts that song-and-dance when it looks like his more hotheaded cousins might wind up responsible for doing something about the issue. Reagan hates the National Debt until his name goes on the account.

Such things travel in waves. I don't think we're experiencing a tsunami now so much as the popularizers of Politics have taken a page from the popularizers of Meteorological reports: exaggerating everything is a sure-fire ratings winner.

And since I'm old and richly endowed in crotchets, let me say that, on the beaches I comb, at least, the tide seems to be bringing in more Nixon artifacts, and less of the Reagan Miracle and Compulsive Optimism. Not enough, these days, that tax rates are historically low, Defense spending remains incontinent, and Democrats in full customary cower. Millions of our fellow citizens simply miss the paranoid rantings of a total lunatic. We've gone from Bill O'Reilly, Reagan without the PR affability, corporate shill, supremely confident (at least publicly) because he knows that hooks the Rubes while knowledge don't, to Glenn Beck, Nixon without the genius, but all the evil banality. The question for me isn't What Changed? but How They Keep Getting Away With It. It's not How We Got Here. It's Welcome Back. And maybe they all just need a big hug from Bobo Brooks.

Olio

• Credit Where Credit Is Due: Bob Somerby, all this week, on education. There is sense being made in our educational "debate"; it's just not being made in our politics, or our newspapers, or on our teevees. And we repeat: Somerby has a blog. Kathleen Parker has a Pulitzer and a teevee show.

The only thing I can add is this: it's our debate on Education, supposedly driven by Our Utter Failure, and the goddam thing is stupid on the face of it. Say it again: if people really were this stupid we'd have hundreds of deaths from shaving accidents every morning, and half again as many babies dried off in microwaves. Not to mention that all these people would've died broke, because they gave all their money to the Sham-Wow! guy and the first company to break the Hundred Blades on a Razor barrier, once thought impossible.

• Partial Credit Where Partial Credit Is Due: Mitch Daniels fires David Lott Hardy, Esquire, his chairman of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, in the aftermath of the revelation that Scott Storms, the Commission's erstwhile general council and chief administrative judge, was taking to Duke Energy about a job (one he eventually took) while he was overseeing cases involving Duke. Hardy knew about it and did not require Storms to recuse himself. For its part Duke has put Storms and its Indiana president Mike Reed (former IURC executive director) on paid administrative leave, apparently because it only became aware it had hired two IURC officials it had negotiated with while they worked for the state when the news hit the papers.

Why partial credit? Because Daniels has refused to vacate the Duke-related decisions Storms was involved in, instead ordering them to be reviewed, and his office announced the firing was a result of a "verbal report"--verbs being considered an inferior part of speech, I guess--and not a full internal review. On the plus side, Daniels does seem to have remembered the Governor's Personal Grand High Inquisitor the Republican-controlled legislature created for him in Aught Five, and which immediately set about looking for criminality in previous Democratic administrations. [So far, as I recall, anyway, they've found a lottery clerk who swiped some scratch-offs, and learned that the late Frank O'Bannon once got a haircut on company time. Meanwhile the billion-dollar Family and Social Services Administration fiasco, the Incredible Shrinking Major Moves Fund, and the thousands in unreturned Tim Durham contributions ("That money has already been spent") have been ruled, I believe the legal term is, none of your fucking business. You didn't think I'm letting that malignant toad off easy, did you?]

• Remedial Reading: I was at some pains at The Aptly Named World O' Crap to explain how it is the Big Gay Cupcake Scandal did not, in fact, involve cupcakes; curiouser things have followed. Briefly: woman calls a shop named Just Cookies to order some quantity of rainbow-iced cookies for Coming Out Day. Woman says that when Voice on the Phone (in fact, the owner) learned of the destination of said cookies, and Just Who might be licking his icing, he informed her of his moral objections, told her he had two daughters he was trying to Raise Right, and hung up on her. Complaints ensue.

Now if you happened to be a male of my approximate height watching Channel 8 "News" that evening, or the next, or whenever it is they latched onto the thing, you heard one of those Tales from the Teleprompter which have any number of elements resembling actual ("verbal") language, in which nouns were, and verbs did, but which had no connection to the way things behave in real life. And this was because the folks at 8 had decided to bend matters to the standard script, or else they've forgotten how to tell a story from beginning to end, probably from long disuse, the verbal equivalent of bedsores. Or maybe Honor has broken out among Public Christians. At any rate, they seemed bound and determined to convey that The Gays were Filing a Complaint because That's What All These Special Interests Do, even though it was a clear case of misunderstanding. Which is where the cupcakes came in: at one point we were informed that the store doesn't even sell cupcakes! And it doesn't do Special Orders, at least not often.

Oh, golly, there's that damn prickling in my thumbs again. So, first, you only have the idea that Special Interests and Sodomites get to file official complaints about every slight they encounter in life if you're a fat and satisfied semi-burgher living in the suburbs who never experiences anything like it. It seemed almost certain there was something more to the story; it seemed even more certain that the Wholly Logical Reasons why the order couldn't be filled ("Who orders cupcakes from Just Cookies? They were looking to cause trouble!") came direct from the shop owners post facto and might not have revealed the entire landscape of the event. It took me a couple days to discover the What in what had happened.

Seems a woman from the Social Justice Education Office at IUPUI had called to order rainbow cookies. And when the owner found out who they were for he explained to her that filling the order would prevent his young progeny from growing up as morally superior as he is, and hung up on her. The cupcakes are what they wound up ordering from another, less moral, bakery.

The shop rents space from the city-owned City Market; Mayor Gomer got involved, mostly because in 2012, or never, the city will be hosting Super Bowl XLVI: The Super Bowl That Might Not Happen, and its quarter-million LGBT spectators and participants.

Tony Dungy was unavailable for comment.

And the desperate weirdness continued when, last week, William Phillips, a Greenfield Police officer, was struck and killed by a hit-and-run motorist while on a bicycle training run. The accident occurred after midnight on US 40; the natural assumption was that the driver was drunk.

That turns out not to've been the case, apparently, but even before that was known the thing had taken on almost mythic proportions. At one point on Day Two I heard that police were looking for the driver who'd "killed the beloved father and husband". Ummm, tasty. Could I please have another trowel full?

Then came word, through the county prosecutor or the Greenfield PD--not exactly disinterested observers--that an attorney had contacted them, saying his client was ready to turn herself in. Much, if not all, Hell broke loose.

Apparently one, if not the major point the attorney was trying to negotiate was the avoidance of a media circus, something which should also be in the interest of law enforcement. Well, it didn't quite work. Tuesday evening, when it was widely expected that the woman was to show up for questioning, Channel 8 had a chopper overhead, and gave us five minutes of "a vehicle a man and woman had exited a half-hour ago. Of course, we don't know whether this is the woman, but…" Really. Why, to see inside we'd need some sort of infrared scanning device. So, let's turn it on.

Lemme just note here that as a long-time bicyclist I want nothing whatsoever to do with the roads anywhere from Gathering Dusk to Dawn's Mid-morning Light, and as little as possible to do with them otherwise. I ride a mostly-empty parking lot in bright sunshine and I'm still obsessive about knowing what's going on with every car on the lot and everyone on the street nearby. And I've almost been hit twice now. They say the officers were wearing safety clothing and were well-lit. But it's still and always the case that if you get into an altercation with a motorized vehicle, or even another bike, you're going to wind up the loser no matter who's at fault.

Some of the coverage--by Day Three the casual viewer might have imagined Phillips had died in a gun battle with Osama bin Laden, or that Hero was his middle name--seemed suspiciously designed to remove any questions about what he and other officers were doing training in such dangerous--and rather unrealistic--circumstances; Hendricks county does have motorized police vehicles with lights and sirens and two-way wrist radios, just like the civilized world, and these, presumably, are what they send out when someone needs to cover 12 or 15 miles in the dark. It worked. And some of the tone seemed designed to compensate for last-month's revelations about the drunken Indianapolis metro policeman who killed a stopped motorcyclist, and badly injured two others, while on duty. And the pent-up opprobrium for the driver abated only slightly when she turned out to be, not a Sterno bum with no license and a jacket the size of the phone book, but a middle-aged nurse who was driving her three children home from her parents house, who says she was distracted by the autistic one acting up. No record, unless you count the fifteen-year-old parking violation Channel 8 dug up.

And somebody had a poll the other day, asking if lawyers should be able to negotiate with police for their clients. 'Bout 80% against, as you might've guessed, unless you guessed 100. Seems like the News ought to be prohibited from encouraging public stupidity when it so obviously has a vested interest in perpetrating it.

But This Time, Baby, I Mean It

SO the President wants me--at least in so far as "Liberal" now means "anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman" in addition to its standard pejorative sense--to consider the alternatives.

Short answer: I wish there were some.

Slightly longer answer: So, it's come down to Who I Want Chairing The House Committee on Phone Answering at 3 AM? I wish Irony could have lived to see this.

Still longer answer, with implied "Motherfucker": It's what I've been doing since 1972, and, if I were four years older, since '68. I've been forced to find ways of surviving eight years of Nixon, eight years (plus reverb) of Reagan, and eight years of Bush II for the Inherent Promise of a moderate Democrat, another moderate Democrat, and you. What? Oh, this one's about Congress? Well, that's different, then. It's much worse.

The Democrats in Congress ran for the hills as soon as the last effective Democratic President, for Good or Ill--Lyndon Baines Johnson--ramrodded Civil Rights and Great Society legislation. It found enough courage, eventually, to mount a challenge to Vietnam, and impeach a criminal President. It seemed to totter for a brief moment in early 1981, considering whether to actually oppose Reagan or jump in and grab some personal profits before the Looting of America train left the station. Guess which one it chose?

Oh, right, I'm sorry; St. Ronnie's ideas were just go gawrsh-darn popular they couldn't be resisted. Because he was such an admirable communicator. Really sold us on the Grand Old Traditions of North American corporate privateering, Latin American death squads, and the Bottomless Cup O' Defense Contracting. That's why we haven't heard a peep from the Democrats in Congress for the last thirty years: Reagan's way with a quip.

That's why so many House Democrats, and a third of the Senate Caucus, lined up behind the Bush Tax Cuts even though he'd stolen the Pulpit it was delivered from just six months before. That's why they got maneuvered into voting Bush carte blanche in Iraq right before his first midterm election, on the grounds that otherwise they'd appear (Even) Weak(er) on Defense and Objectively Pro-Rape Room.

How'd that one work out? Not so bad for you; since you weren't there you got to use a streetcorner soapbox speech you'd made as your anti-Iraq War bona fides. Which convinced people, somehow, despite your record of voting for every Iraq War funding measure that crossed your desk; mind you, I'm not saying Democratic voters are blameless. But then, we're talking about Congress, right? So let's just recall the track record: Outmaneuvered, Cowed, Trounced in the Mid-terms Anyway. Given fresh majorities in 2006 ("Because the alternative was so much worse"), they put Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in charge and proceeded, shockingly, to accomplish nothing. In 2009, with a man in the White House who'd pledged his support for Single Payer, they proceed to dick around to make sure the insurance companies and pharmaceutical privateers had enough time to weigh in, before managing to eke out a victory for Water Added Ham, Sometime in the Near Future, So Long As That's Okay with Everybody. Because it was that or look like a bunch of Unprincipled Do-Nothings about to be clobbered in the midterms.

You stood on the sidelines, sir. Saving your legendary oratorical skills for a month before the midterms, evidently.

I'm sorry, but Just how is it you implied motherfuckers don't get it? Why couldn't you come out and say "It's not Liberal vs. Conservative. It's not Big Tax and Big Spend. It's about Common Fucking Sense vs. Being Lied To and Robbed Blind for the sake of Corporate Profits."? There never was such an opportunity, at least not since Franklin Roosevelt. And he took his. His picture's on the dime. Yours is on a thousand Joker and Bone-through-the-nose placards.

I can somewhat forgive the Clinton administration for being blindsided on national healthcare (though for failing to respond once it happened, not so much). You guys, on the other hand, had that history, plus fifteen years of skyrocketing costs and fifteen years of rapidly descending levels of care on your side. You had an election which offered a generational realignment of the political scene as grounds for making things happen. You're a fifty-year-old man with thirty years of 100% Guano Republican Insanity in your adult lifetime (which had followed fifteen years of Goldwater and Nixon) and you thought these guys could be reasoned with. Even after they pointedly and unanimously kicked you in the teeth just after the Inauguration. In the midst of a fucking national disaster. You're a bright man with a first-rate education; you've been outsmarted by John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Sarah Palin, who don't combine to make a triple-digit IQ.

So now you think I should ride to the rescue, because they're so awful. And here's the thing: I'll be voting next month. I'll be enthusiastically pulling the level for the only African-American Muslim in the Congress, and the only Indiana representative who had the balls, and the safe district, to come out in favor of real health care reform. I'll be reluctantly voting for Blue Dog Brad Ellsworth to take Blue Dog Evan Bayh's seat (nothing you or anyone else could possibly have said would have gotten me to vote for that Time Bandit again), the way Ellsworth reluctantly voted for health care at the eleventh hour, and refuses to defend it in the face of his opponent's well-lubricated attacks. In a state you carried, historically, just twenty-three months ago. Call it force of habit; it's sure not loyalty to the cause. That I'll exhibit after the cause shows some loyalty to me. Hopeyness springs eternal.

And it sure as hell ain't Battered Spouse Syndrome, bub. I cringe when Republicans speak because of the shit they say. I'm not afraid of 'em, because I've seen the worst they can do. Repeatedly. And even if I were, I wouldn't run to a Democrat for protection.

Better Blogs Than This One

SOMEHOW or other, Winston Smith's Philosoraptor disappeared from our blogroll undetected. Corrected.

Times Two

YEAH, I saw it. Brooks, last Friday:

Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who I think is most likely to win the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 2012...

"Most likely", of course, in that he's candidate most like Brooks--and there's a surprise choice, huh?--in that he keeps his opposition to the religioculture-war wing of the party hidden until it's time to come out and declare how much he supports and admires it.

Is this, in fact, the secret of the Republican party's (electoral) success--that it functions as a sort of Rorschach Test for the emotionally stunted and terminally untruthful? In his Times tenure alone Brooks has gone from enthusiastic war triumphalist, to Reasonable Public Intellectual Who Needs Some Time To Think Over the Apparent Discrepancy Between Everything He's Ever Said On The Subject and Reality, to Guy Returning from His Long Ruminations as an enthusiastic war promoter. He's gone from insisting that social "conservatives" were merely the more publicly moralistic tribal faction, to wishing them into the Cornfield, and back; he's gone from proclaiming the desperate need for the Republican party to look more like David Brooks, to "welcoming" the energetic and charming, if somewhat naive and redolent of hay, Teabaggers (though he, like Brother Douthat, is careful to maintain these are outsiders who've suddenly discovered all they have in common with the Party of Henry Cabot Lodge), to, as here, pretty much discounting them as a force in primary elections. The real question here is whether situational ethics and head-spinning hypocrisy should disqualify you from being stabled with the Times' Reasonable Conservative Voices, or whether it is, in fact, the major qualification.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with our own admittedly almost non-existent estimation of either man. It's just that maybe, just once, Brooks might take a column to explain why The Major American Political Party That Spends Its Weekends Discussing Burke is the one which is simultaneously The Party Perpetually In Thrall To One Snopes-Worthy Chain Email or Another. Or maybe just how he imagines Mitch Daniels is going to get through the Republican primaries after someone asks why the only thing he ever tried to do as governor of Indiana is sell off enough resources to build our section of the NAFTA highway. (Take it from me: don't waste your breath asking where the money actually went.)

Then there's Douthat, whose recent appearance on Colbert raised the question, "Who cancelled at the last minute?", as well as suggesting that there's a Wingnut Welfare cash award somewhere for the media personality who smirks the most without cause. Today's column might've been titled, "A History of the Democratic Party, As It Was Explained To Me At Pater's Knee, over the Entire Thirty Years of Life On Earth". One imagines, supposing one is a blogger with space to fill and a large coefficient of boredom, that Douthat thinks of himself as Blake's star: desperate that should he ever have an original thought the Universe might wink itself out.

Recent Discoveries

Matt Taibbi, "Tea and Crackers: How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster". September 29

Steven Thrasher, "White America Has Lost Its Mind". September 29

IT'S difficult to remember, and hard to defend, but I started this blog with the idea (I started this blog believing a blog should have an idea!) of explaining that the Red States, of which I, though a combination of inertia and indolence, am an inhabitant, were not as Red as they were typically portrayed to be, often by people in Blue states whose level of genuine knowledge of Flyover Land approached, but did not surpass, David Brooks'. This is not to suggest they'd love us If Only They Got To Know Us. To the contrary. But I had the notion--still do, despite it all--that much of the default Republicanism in the middle of the country is a product of misconceptions, internal and external.

Now, it may be added, or objected, that this is an exercise in political argument incompletely disguised as psuedo-sociological (but I repeat myself!) observation, David Brooks with more "fucks". Perhaps this is so, and more than a little. Like all men, as Borges said, I have been given bad times in which to live. I was born the same year that Harry Truman announced the first successful test of the hydrogen bomb, the better to thwart the plans of Peter the Great, and just four months after the Reds returned the favor, sort of, if you looked at it just right. (Full disclosure: I was due four months later; in reality it was four months and two weeks, signaling a lifetime's enjoyment of the Womb.)

Born fully cooked. My government, and its Western henchmen, were going to listen to Edward Teller, not Robert Oppenheimer. Its newspapers would defoliate vast stretches to report the latest pearls of ignorance from Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Liberal Presidents would replace George Marshall with Dean Acheson and give Curtis LeMay the Button.

Did people know? Hard to say. I came of age during Vietnam, often recognized as the tipping point. Left-wing intellectuals in the 50s were certainly aware that McCarthy and Nixon were crackpots and worse, but the threat of global nuclear annihilation was real, as was the sense of having been betrayed by Stalin. I've never discovered a large-scale sense in those days that the US government was lying, baldly and as a matter of course, about matters vital and trivial, for the gratification and financial benefit of a permanent ruling class. After all, FDR had changed government for the good, Hitler had demonstrated what Evil looked like, and Korea had proven that the Commies were bent on global domination. It certainly seemed at the time that the accumulating evidence of our duplicity in Indochina was revelatory, unexpected, of a different order of magnitude from chortling at the anti-communist rhetoric being aimed at the American living room every night.

Whatever, that was then and this is now. Not so long ago educated people scoffed at plate tectonics, believed in a static universe, and used mobile phones the size of grandma's stove. If you wanna feel superior to them by virtue of your having purchased an iPhone you could neither design, repair, or explain to someone who just woke from a coma, then fucking act like you've learned something.

Let's be clear: I agree with Taibbi; the Teabaggers are full of shit. We part ways only in the idea that this is something new, requiring some contemporary elucidation, that it's some nefarious picking of Ron Paul's pocket. Reagan voters were smoking the same shit a generation ago. (The other day Krugman Himself insisted that, unlike Reagan, today's GOP had no pretense of principle, however empty-headed, and its tax-cutting rhetoric would require the complete dismantling of the Federal government, excepting Defense and Social Security/Medicare, to pull off. But the exact same thing was noted at the time about St. Ronnie himself. He just didn't put it in writing, and he faced an electorate which wasn't going to let him wreck things indefinitely for the sake of ideology [there's your change, if any], so he raised taxes, and caved on Social Security.) Nor has this ever been shown to be the Dumbass Philosopher's Stone of America politics: voters have, on a regular basis, shown that they'll support higher taxes, and the concept of higher taxes, when the case is made. But Walter Mondale opened his mouth, and got clobbered, and that was It, as far as our two political parties and our nation's supply of neatly-coiffed newsreaders is concerned. Yet large-scale tax cuts create massive deficits. There's not even enough wriggle room there to pretend there's an argument. And even absent entitlements, and given perfect political will in DC, you cannot begin to slash programs to deficit-reducing levels before voters start screaming like movie extras. Period. And that's without touching Defense, which is our biggest money drain, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. Taibbi is no doubt correct that the apparent contradiction doesn't bother many Teabaggers because their dedication to balanced budgets is pure sham. But it's axiomatic that these people do not control elections, so if this is some electoral majority based on pure wishful thinking, then when do we start blaming news organizations and Democratic officials for the poor job they're doing educating America? Break up AFTRA!

But Thrasher, now, really.

For the first time in their lives, baby boomers are hard up against it economically, and white boy is becoming outnumbered and it's got his bowels chilled with fear.

Okay, again: I was born at the tail end of 1953, or almost precisely 33% of the way into the Baby Boom. The American economy hummed along mostly unimpeded for the next two decades, high on our economic hegemony after WWII. It sputtered in the late 60s, because we insisted on spending billions on moon rocks and killing Vietnamese nuns. I'm sure there's no need to explain to an expert in Boomer dynamics that many of us actually opposed those things, and went so far as to publicly oppose them at the time, rather than retroactively. Still, I'll accept the tab for Indochina soon as you pick up the tab for Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh, I forgot: that check's still open.

In 1973, when I was a sophomore in college, the Oil Embargo ushered in a decade of double-digit inflation and rapidly descending property values. (I believe that at the nadir, '76 or so, you could've bought the entire Hilton hotel chain for something like $2 million. Though I suppose we'll always have Paris.) After the slight recovery of '80-81, accomplished by the Fed throwing masses of Americans out of work in the name of inflation busting, we spiraled back down again, into what looked at one point to be another gaping maw, somewhat averted when Reagan raised those taxes again. Then the Crash of '87, and the worst recession in post-war history, followed by the boom of the Clinton years, which the youngest Boomers entered already approaching middle age. The the Bush Doldrums (or as we like to say in Indiana, the First Daniels Miracle) followed by the Bush Disaster, followed by the God How Fucking Big Can A Bush Disaster Be? Disaster. Which brings us to today, and the Dawn of that New Fucking Era your generation ushered in in 2008, despite the racist machinations of Everyone Else. So, yeah, right. First downturn I've ever dealt with. Life until now has been one bottomless glass of Chateau Latour '61, and two topless hookers with a merit badge in Breath Holding. And ice cream for dessert. Sorry we seemed to've used that all up. Sorry we're scared of brown people. Why don't you go out and win another election predicated on transcending partisan politics? Or go fuck yourself?

The Cerebral Ganglia Of The Beast

I AM the executor of my mother's estate. She died a few weeks ago when dementia took from her the memory of what to do with food. Condolences are not in order; the disease took her identity years ago, and death took away the disease. Dealing with dementia is much worse than dealing with death.

That's just set-up, of course: I mentioned a while back that posting here would be as light in quantity as it is in quality for a time. I didn't want to write about it then, and I don't now, not out of some personal or emotional tangle, but because writing is hard, while being a smartass is easy.

So this finds me not at the cemetery, nor watching the river flow (no water in it these days, anyway), but on the 17th floor of Indianapolis' City/County building, which the City Fathers erected in the early 1960s. I was so young I have but vague recollections of it being built, but the optimist in me has always chosen to believe we did so to stop people calling the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, aka the Circle, the ugliest edifice in the history of architecture.

It's an intensely uncomfortable building made much worse now that its welcoming atrium bears the twin scars of a Liposuction of Freedom, the crawling security lines where I was forced to disrobe. This, in turn, informs the wait for the elevators, which must've been insufficient by 1965, though if you knew Indianapolis in the 50s you wouldn't really blame the architects for figuring that within a decade at most the place would be all but deserted. There are maybe thirty people crammed into the hallway, migrating en masse like a hopeful covey as the electronic elevator scoreboard handicaps which descending carriage is likely to arrive next. (Fortunately their number grows slowly, since most people choose to put their clothes back on before continuing.) I managed to catch the third car, which I thought was probably pretty good for a rank amateur.

The trip up, naturally, reminds you that you share a country, not to mention the occasional confined space, with the sort of person who thinks nothing whatsoever of pressing a button to halt a roomful of people in order that the buttoniere may ride one or two floors to his destination. And, also naturally, that the very people who do this not only could've climbed the stairs between those floors in one-quarter of the time but, generally, could really have used the exercise.

Got there, found my lawyer, got in to see the judge. My sense of discomfort in such situations is profound. I sit making professional small-talk with His Honor, which is designed for him to decide if I am mens sana while I, entirely out of self-interest, pretend not to know that's what he's up to. It's like being the Washington Generals. I'm nearly overcome by the urge to grab him by his insurance adjuster's tie and yell, "You've got a lot to atone for, buddy." I manage to resist. He approves me. I can tell he's actually figured me for a potential tie-grabber, but the alternative would mean more paperwork.

On then to where the real work is done, the secretarial pool, where we witness a full quarter-hour of document stamping. Real document stamping, not virtual document virtual stamping. I wonder if I could have gotten coffee past Security. I marvel at the sweeping view of the city, dotted with taxpayer-swindling arenas and centers and malls and attractions hatched in this very building, back when all you could've seen from there was train tracks and warehouses and a block of 19th century department stores. The stamping resonates with that, a time when we did things with steel, and steam, and brawn. A time when we did things because we thought they were worth doing, not because they increased your odds of getting on teevee. Then on to another office, and more stamping. (This time, though, the fancy computer thing came into play, because my attorney failed to tell me I should bring a copy of the death certificate, or, alternately, memorize my late mother's Social Security number, and he had to sweet-talk the supervisor into looking it up for us. I had one in the car, a few blocks and seventeen floors away, but if I'd'a had to go through that line again they would have had a security problem.)

It was interesting, really, that when it comes to important stuff, like divvying up a dead person's possessions, we rely on people and paper and eyeballs and ink. I mean, it's not like we were just there voting or something.

A New Low, If Such A Thing Were Imaginable, Let Alone Possible

NBC's Education Week coverage last night was just some bottom-of-the-screen bunting shy of its Shock and Awe coverage. Is Our Networks Learning? Here's what we learned last night, courtesy NBC News Chief Personality and Tanning Salon Model Brian Williams:

1. American (public) schools are failing. We know this because we know it. Plus, millions of eighth graders do no read at eighth grade level. Plus a poll!

2. The reason public schools are failing is teachers' unions. Because bad teachers. Because hate Change. Because lazy. Because tenure. Because arcane work rules.

3. The obvious solution is Innovation. The obvious place to look for innovation is among people who earn all or a part of their sizable incomes bashing the public schools.

No, really. That's it. Go take a look. Lemme know where I missed the slightest hint there may be other viewpoints out there, or any problems with that one.

Here's Bob Somerby, the morning before this thing kicked off, commenting on a Richard Cohen column of equal value. Bob Somerby is one of the very best writers on education in the country. He has a blog. Pam Geller and Michelle Malkin are on the teevee regularly:

Cohen goes on to offer an offbeat assessment; he breaks from the society’s Standard Assessment about the alleged monstrous failure of the nation’s schools. In that Standard Scripted Assessment, teachers and their teacher unions are the villains of the piece; they are the reason—the only reason—why “this nation's schools, particularly the big city ones, are an unforgivable mess.” That script is part of a much larger war, in which the nation’s plutocrats began to target the nation’s unions about forty years ago. But when it comes to those teachers unions, every good journalist knows what to say. NBC’s mewling David Gregory recited the script on yesterday’s Meet the Press, although he doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about when it comes to the nation’s schools. As the day proceeded on MSNBC, Brian Williams, Joe and Mika all continued to pound the script home.

NBC came under fire last week because teachers, and their side, were all but excluded from its little summit. In response, NBC News President Steve Capus disavowed any responsibility for fairness, accuracy, or knowledge of the topic, insisting "the role of a news organization is to put a spotlight on these issues/challenges, and on the people who are doing incredibly strong work to try to affect change."

Interesting, really, that no one ever uses examples of our Plutocrats talking like that, and expecting other people to buy it, at full retail, to question the efficacy of our education system.

We got to hear--at length--from Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone. Mr. Canada is a dynamic speaker, passionate, and a man who has accomplished much good. He is also the man whose flagship charter school has raised $100 million in private donations. Let's just say that under the circumstances I find his lack of enthusiasm for traditional public schools less than surprising.

No one seems to notice--certainly the raccoon-eyed Mr. Williams didn't interrupt the love-fest to mention--that Mr. Canada comes pre-loaded with a Charter School defense perimeter, which included, at one point, the out-of-the-blue declaration that there were failing Charter Schools and such should and could be closed. This was not in response to any tough questioning from Williams; neither did he follow up as to why, if closing failing charters is a sufficient response, why closing failing public schools is not sufficient to preclude charters altogether. The fact is that Canada needs a prolonged defense of the Charter Movement because it hasn't begun to live up to the claims its proponents were making ten years ago, and, in fact, it clearly has, on balance, simply drawn resources from the public schools while producing roughly the same results.

A lot of charters don't have unions, so they're free to innovate.

declares Canada, letting Brian and the rest of the NBC gang know he's caught the evening's theme. We get this with as much evidence as we get the rest of the evening, namely, none. The night's other theme.

Where does this come from? To begin with, anyone making such a statement is simply lying: there's no national teacher contract, no national test (the closest thing being the NAEP, which these people don't want to talk about, because test scores are pretty much exactly where they've always been), no philosophical basis for the claims of testing expertise or comparison of results. It's an argument (and an anti-union one) disguised as a profound moral truth. Because it has no other sort of truth to offer.

What are the possible impacts teacher contracts have on "innovation"? Well, it might depend on what state you happen to be in (there was a great deal of blather about tenure last night; there's no such thing as tenure in Indiana.) Here unions may bargain for teachers--it's an open, not a closed shop--over conditions delineated by the state legislature. Wages, class size, number of classes taught per day, prep periods, extra requirements, grievance procedures. Are these things dragging down the American education system?

We've known since the Coleman Report to the Johnson administration that economic level is the key predictor of educational achievement. Nothing's ever changed that or even challenged it. At the same time, we've known this since the Johnson administration. The primary issue is that we've done fuck-all about it for forty-five years, except continue using public schools as a political football. It is the height of insanity to imagine that we're going to get different results by changing the air pressure, or moving the kickoff back ten yards. If we'd pumped $100 million into every public school in America would we be getting different results? If we put $100 million into every community for health care and social services, would we be better off? How 'bout if we stopped creating Saviors, and started creating opportunities for poverty-stricken children that go beyond getting them to do better on a math test? The government's supposed to be deeply invested in turning out little earners, but the government's supposed to keep its corrupt and incompetent mitts off the Free Market.

Next up was NBC education reporter Rehema Ellis, fluffing Race to the Top. Ellis is NBC's education reporter because she's the one who reads education stories. It's not her full-time beat; Our Nation's Failing Schools don't merit a full-timer at NBC, nor one with any more expertise than a J-school degree bestows. Ellis, of course, was up on the night's purpose:

[Tennessee's bid elicited] promises from powerful players often labelled as holdouts against change--legislators, union leaders, and even some teachers.

Yes, even some powerful teachers signed on, allowing the governor and state legislators of Tennessee (Motto: Home of the Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park!) to proceed. (I'm going to say this again, and again, as long as necessary: How long have we be listening to demands for educational change and "innovation"? How much has already been put into place, over the anti-progress protestations of teachers and their powerful unions? When do the innovators start to be held accountable? When do the union busters' grades come out? When do the forces for returning our biology instruction to the 18th century, and making our history correspond to how some people would like it get called to account?)

And Ellis narrated the evening's telling statistic, the one moment of scientificalistics:

In a nation where 68% of eighth graders can't read at grade level...

If you froze the screen and caught the boilerplate, it credited the National Center for Education Statistics Learner Outcomes. Here's the graph. In case you were educated in a public school, I'll interpret. 2009: percentage below Basic 8th grade reading level: 25. Twenty-five. In case you were educated in public school, that leaves 75% reading at Basic 8th grade level or above. You have to throw Basic proficiency into the Trash Heap of Uncaring Union Teachers to get a 68% failure rate. I'm sure this was just an oversight.

Finally, well, look: Brian made a big deal about the final segment featuring a teacher who "tossed a grenade" at their Teachers' Town Hall meeting. Here we go I told my Poor Wife when I heard the exit tease. Go ahead: sit through the commercial and look at the clip, then come back and let me know who in the audience acted like they hadn't heard this same shit their entire professional careers. 1) Early Twenty-something 2) elementary school teacher 3) doesn't see the need for tenure (so move to Indiana, e.g.) because 4) what her students really need is Phonics (or Objectivism, Magic Crystals, and Alien Lizard Masters) and 5) Teachers who spend all their free time doing unpaid tutoring. As a rule I do not hit girls, or boys, and I don't care to now. Check back when you're married. Or check back when you've done this for twenty years, and tell us all the wonderful stories of your 1020 volunteer weekends. Right. Meanwhile, the instruction of ten-year-old Spanish speakers in the rudiments of test-score achievement is an admirable pursuit; I'm glad, and a little surprised, it hasn't aged you more yet. But it's not fucking applicable to every last education issue in the whole goddam country. You're young, and may learn; Mr. Williams is not, and won't. Hand-grenade? Not even a rubber horseshoe.

By the way: what does NBC's prime-time line-up contribute to Our Nation's Education exactly?