Election Day

 

Image via The Geek Anthropologist.

New Yorkers from upstate and Long Island may not even realize it, but today is Election Day for them—an election in which hardly anybody normally bothers to vote, for their local school boards (in New York City, we don't have them at all, having surrendered the Education Department to mayoral control under the Bloomberg administration), because how is that even important?

It's becoming important now, as a key component of the web in which Republicans are attempting to take control with the bogus issues of "critical race theory" and anti-trans terror focusing on girls' bathrooms and sports teams, and the right to bully LGTBQ+ kids in general, and COVID masking and shutdowns. The enemy can bring out voters in some force, no doubt generally old people with no schoolchildren of their own; former GOP lieutenant governor and celebrated Pants-on-Fire liar Betsey McCaughey warns readers at the New York Post that 

In school-board elections from Long Island to Albany and westward Tuesday, New York parents outraged by the indoctrination and sexualization of their children will try to wrest control.

Don't let them succeed. Please please please check with your local media and find out what you can about the candidates and vote! On other races...

More Good News!

 

Drawing by Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer, June 2021.

You know how upset conservatives are about "cancel culture" and how they've reacted to this menace by going on a spree of banning thoughtcrimes like "critical race theory" and their proponents from educational institutions (it's not an attack on freedom of speech, it's just for the children's sake)

Btw still haven't heart a word about this shit from the anti-cancel-culture crybabies.

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) December 7, 2021

It's weird to imagine terms like "culturally responsive teaching" or "abolitionist teaching" or "free radical therapy" or "normativity" in an 8th-grade classroom, or a 12th-grade one either. Why wouldn't they ban them in the teacher training institutions where they might get used? I'm glad they're just banning the words and not the practice—abolitionist teaching sounds like a good thing

The Playing Fields of Eton

 

Johnson at Eton, front and center as usual, in one of a number of pictures where he seems to be trying on a Mussolini face. Photo via The London Economic.

This fine Guardian piece by the novelist Richard Beard, talking about how upper-class boarding school nourishes and shapes the psychopathy of the Tory ruling class in UK, as typified by Old Etonians like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, is harrowing (see what I did there?):

One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were – in name-taped pyjamas with a single soft toy (also name-taped), blubbing themselves to sleep and wetting their beds.

I don't have to!

 

Image by Chloe Cushman, The New York Times.

In a sense, she’s correct, though her words are poorly chosen. There are, I’m sure, dozens, hundreds of democrats who can explain why asylum for undocumented aliens is entirely legal and appropriate.

— Steve (@BroomallSteve) July 5, 2021

I would be shocked if she did. She shows no kind of curiosity. I don't think she's smart enough to realize that she's not very smart.

As Vonnegut wrote, “The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.”

— Steve (@BroomallSteve) July 6, 2021

Decodification

 

Via Theories of Media and Communication/University of Westminster.

This is really interesting, from a Rectification standpoint, on North Carolina's ban of "critical race theory" in the schools, from State Senator Jeff Jackson (D-Mecklenburg County, and running to replace retiring US Senator Richard Burr, with a good chance of winning, and you might want to show him some love):

Here's a good self-own that explains the basic strategy: pic.twitter.com/f9wHodvNjN

— Sen. Jeff Jackson (@JeffJacksonNC) May 13, 2021

That's not just a self-own, it's a new word, or at least a new meaning for "decodify", which used to just be a four-syllable way of saying "decode", though it can also be for removing a provision from the law (as in being the secretary whose job is to pull some language out of the code after the legislature has repealed it, which isn't sinister), or doing it without the legislature (which is kind of sinister), as in this dire, but possibly accurate, prediction from Sarah Kendzior, October 2020:

For the Record: Bad Boyfriend

Hahaha Kevin https://t.co/hfeEQVyOOE

— 🔻Cookin With Yas🔻 (@Yastreblyansky) July 25, 2020

It's so pathetic. House Republican Congressional Committee is begging Trump campaign for a few dollars, out of the $295 million the campaign and the Republican National Committee are sitting on, and Kushner, who apparently "oversees such decisions and has a greater say than RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel", just says no.

According to one anonymus,

Brooks Explains Education

Victor Sjöström, The Phantom Carriage (1920).

David Brooks all excited about his new proof that socialism doesn't work, because it doesn't account for the greatness of Scandinavia, contrary to popular opinion, and the unpopular reasons are wrong too ("This Is How Scandinavia Got Great"):

Progressives say it’s because they have generous welfare states. Some libertarians point out that these countries score high on nearly every measure of free market openness. Immigration restrictionists note that until recently they were ethnically homogeneous societies.

But Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy.

See, the Nordic countries adopted the German concept of Bildung, a much larger and more holistic idea than the idea of "education", the "formation" of the whole person, not just training in the 1870s Scandinavian equivalent of STEM, but "the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person", which I think is not quite right—it's more the creation of the person: you don't want to take the preschooler and make her into somebody different, but to fully realize the flower latent within the bud. Also, of course, the Germans adopted it too, it's their concept, but they took some pretty alarming detours along the way which would complicate Brooks's argument in a way he'd prefer not to do.

This is not the way to bring an end to class

This is not the way to bring an end to the class system.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Meritocracy Is Ripping America Apart: How Savage Exclusion Tears the Social Fabric", New York Times, 13 September 2019:

Hey, guys, it turns out inequality is really bad! Not only for you and me and the rest of the great mediocre majority who never get a chance to rule the world, but even for the brilliant Ivy-trained wizards who do rule it! They have to work too hard, and it's ruining their lives! Meanwhile, I've learned that there are these things called state universities! They have one in Arizona! I got to visit it last spring and it knocked my socks off. Instead of doing all they can to keep people out, they keep trying to get more people in, and instead of getting worse from letting all those mediocre people in, it gets better. This could be a game-changer!

He's come to some clarity on the subject of what it is he hates about meritocracy, thanks to the book Brooksy has read the first 20 pages of for Friday's column, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor who is, according to the publisher blurb, "well placed to expose the sham of meritocracy. Having spent his life at elite universities, he knows from the inside the corrosive system we are trapped within." Well, speak for yourself, pal. If the rest of us peasants only know if from the outside, then we're not trapped within it. And if we're all trapped within it, then his experience isn't that special.

As a matter of fact it sounds like a pretty fierce indictment of something. As Thomas Frank writes, reviewing the book for The Times,

An education in itself

Question to Radio Yerevan: Did Elizabeth Warren use to agree with Betsy DeVos?

Answer: Oh boy don't get me started...

W.C. Fields in Leo McCarey's Six of a Kind (1934), and the entire thing (just over an hour and featuring Charlie Ruggles and George Burns and Gracie Allen) is watchable here. H/t Professor Fate!

Shorter David Brooks, "When Elizabeth Warren Agreed With Betsy DeVos", New York Times, 3 September 2019:

We should be deeply concerned about Senator Elizabeth Warren, once a Republican law professor with startlingly heterodox and innovative views who wrote an entire book on the problem of women being forced to work outside the home, or not, as the case may be, not that there's anything wrong with whichever one of them she was against, and advocating school vouchers as the solution, just like President Trump's heterodox and innovative secretary of education. Now, suspiciously just in time for the presidential primary campaign where she is running as a Democrat, she's suddenly turned around and started blaming everything on the bankers instead!

Well, maybe not exactly. I'm not certain when she became a registered Democrat (sometime after 1993 or so), but as one of the nation's foremost and most innovative experts in bankruptcy law she has had the bankers in her sights for a very long time; she just used to think ("capitalist to her bones") members of the Republican party were allowed to feel that way, when it was associated with nice little George Bailey Main Street banks as opposed to the behemoths that gave us 2008:

Just Deserts

A kind of poignant thing about this college admissions scandal is the way the kids themselves were protected, in many or most cases, from knowing that they were involved in a fraud:

Sitting very still and wearing a dark suit, [master criminal William Singer] described how he arranged for students’ SAT and ACT results to be falsified by sending them to take the exams in Houston or Los Angeles, where he had bribed test administrators. He described the students as believing they were taking the tests legitimately, but said that his test proctor would correct their answers afterward. Mr. Singer said he would tell the proctor the score he wanted the student to get, and he would achieve that score exactly....

Mr. McGlashan’s son was unaware of the scheme, according to court documents....

Mr. Singer told Mr. Caplan that his daughter would not know that her standardized test scores had been faked.

“Nobody knows what happens,” Mr. Singer said, according to the transcript of the call. “She feels great about herself.”

Some students may have been directly slipped test answers, but more of them just were given to understand that they'd succeeded in the test on their own, whether a confederate was changing their answers or simply retaking the test to replace their original scores; some participated in photo sessions where they were posed as star athletes, but they didn't necessarily know what the purpose of it was, and others were just entirely in the dark while their parents photoshopped their faces onto stock pictures of high school sports, but neither they nor the college administrations were aware that they were supposed to be star athletes, and nobody questioned why they didn't sign up for the soccer team or crew.

Brooksy Gets Tingly

Pola Negri in Ernst Lubitsch's The Wildcat (1921).

David Brooks, "Students Learn From People They Love":

A few years ago, when I was teaching at Yale, I made an announcement to my class. I said that I was going to have to cancel office hours that day because I was dealing with some personal issues and a friend was coming up to help me sort through them.

I was no more specific than that, but that evening 10 or 15 students emailed me to say they were thinking of me or praying for me. For the rest of the term the tenor of that seminar was different. We were closer. That one tiny whiff of vulnerability meant that I wasn’t aloof Professor Brooks, I was just another schmo trying to get through life.

That unplanned moment illustrated for me the connection between emotional relationships and learning. We used to have this top-down notion that reason was on a teeter-totter with emotion. If you wanted to be rational and think well, you had to suppress those primitive gremlins, the emotions. Teaching consisted of dispassionately downloading knowledge into students’ brains.

This is apparently from when he was teaching Humility at Yale and his wife threw him out and his girlfriend fled to Houston and it's very sweet, except as you see there's no attempt whatever to demonstrate his point. He doesn't say how this glimpse of the Brooksian humanity helped his students learn more or better of what he was teaching them, or even betray any knowledge of whether they were learning anything at all or display any interest in it. He's only interested in what he himself learned about how likable he is.

It's the principal of the thing

Good budgeting makes good schools in Chicago as elsewhere, and everybody knows it, even the Republicans complaining about Rahm Emanuel while the Democrats complain about Bruce Rauner. They just want somebody else to supply the money. Photo via Illinois Review.

Sorry about the headline, but yesterday's Brooks ("Good Leaders Make Good Schools") really kind of forces my hand, because it turns out that principals are the thing that will bring on the Brooksian social transformation:

When you learn about successful principals, you keep coming back to the character traits they embody and spread: energy, trustworthiness, honesty, optimism, determination. We went through a period when we believed you could change institutions without first changing the character of the people in them. But we were wrong. Social transformation follows personal transformation.

All "we" have to do is change the character of "our" principals, making them energetic, trustworthy, honest, optimistic, and determined, and "we" will change everything. This is simple. We'll send them to principal reeducation camps. (Actually we have something like that in New York City, but Brooks is all on about Chicago for some reason.)

Labor stuff

300 of the 430 kids at Beckley Elementary qualify for free breakfast and lunch under federal law, and striking teachers are helping to make sure they get fed. Via Today.

The Federalist's David Harsanyi looking for an even bigger audience at National Review Online, à propos Janus vs. AFSCME, the case, for which the Supreme Court just heard oral arguments, involving the union's right to charge workers who are unwilling to join not dues, but a fraction of the dues listed as "agency fees", to cover the collective bargaining from which those workers have benefited, without contributing to the union's political activities, of which the plaintiff disapproves:

Among many significant problems with this arrangement, the most obvious is that it’s an assault on freedom of association. If there is another organization in American life that has a license to compel workers to participate in their nongovernmental organization simply to secure a job, I haven’t heard of it.

The prime bullshit there is that it isn't the union that compels employees to participate in this attenuated way, it's the agreement between the employer and the employees, who have democratically appointed the union to represent them. As a contract it's no different than the managing agent a coop building hires collecting a fee out of your maintenance checks. Or, if the employee status is so special and sacredly different from other relationships, the health insurance plan and if you're lucky the retirement plan your employer forces you to buy. If you're politically opposed to Blue Cross and that's all they've got to offer, you're stuck.

Vapid but haunting

Gloria Swanson sadly strums the ukulele in Cecil B. De Mille's Don't Change Your Husband (1919). From Fritzi.

Two score and thirteen years ago, the social critic Paul Goodman brought forth a book titled Compulsory Miseducation, in which he argued that school was an overrated way of dealing with childhood and there was too much of it for most kids, especially in the horrible, oppressive and embarrassing, petit-bourgeois moral code within which it was conducted in those days. It was pretty thrilling at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but to be honest the whole treatment seems a little callow nowadays, in its willful ignoring of the economic realities that meant the kind of education he had in mind could be very attractive to some among the very privileged, but look like an insult to everybody else. Indeed, what's developed is a two-tier system where the wealthy have the option of a creative, flexible education and the periodic dropout period, while the non-wealthy must apply themselves to the grimmest old-style grind.

Unless you're former New York Times columnist David Brooks, who offers his own critique of contemporary schooling in a column he calls "Mis-Educating the Young" (first time that hyphen has been used in The Times, as far as I can learn, since 1933, demonstrating once again that David Brooks has no editor). To him it's the very privileged who have gotten the worst deal:

We pump them full of vapid but haunting praise about how talented they are and how their future is limitless. Then we send them (the most privileged of them) to colleges where the professors teach about what interests the professors. Then we preach a gospel of autonomy that says all the answers to the deeper questions in life are found by getting in touch with your “true self,” whatever the heck that is.

"Vapid but haunting" sounds like a self-description. I have no idea what kind of school he's talking about, let alone whether it exists, except it's clear that the future really is limitless for "the most privileged among them" who are being given an opportunity to study with intellectuals who get to do what they love instead of being shoehorned into rote teaching with PowerPoints, the kind of meaningless repetition that everybody else will have to make a career of. So that one day, even when you're a millionaire opinionator for the world's most important newspaper and writing that stupid educate-the-spirit column for the 20th time, you'll probably feel really sad. It's all the fault of your high school.

I think it's telling that he's baffled by the concept of a "true self". Brooks doesn't have one, or the one he has is vapid and ghostly, looming in the peripheral vision but too faint and shuddery to grasp. He wants an education that will give him a soul, and get him at last out of the psychic uncertainties of 8th grade:

I’d say colleges have to do much more to put certain questions on the table, to help students grapple with the coming decade of uncertainty: What does it mean to be an adult today? What are seven or 10 ways people have found purpose in life? How big should I dream or how realistic should I be? What are the criteria we should think about before shacking up? What is the cure for sadness? What do I want and what is truly worth wanting?

Please, teacher, I have a couple of questions! Give me some techniques for finding a purpose in life! Give me a pre–shacking up checklist! (Let's see, "Kids, before shacking up, ask yourself how much do I have culturally in common with my potential partner? Is she 25 years younger than me?") What is the cure for sadness? What do I want?

(The spelled-out vs. numeral "seven or 10" is, in fact, Times house style, suggesting that maybe there is an editor, but one who only enforces the paper's bad decisions.)

Amputated Love

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

We all need some comic relief. Fortunately there's the opening sentence of today's David Brooks column, "The Building Blocks of Learning":

The ancient Greeks had different words for different kinds of love — like Ludus (playful love), Pragma (longstanding love) and Agape (universal love).

That's a Radio Yerevan joke:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that the ancient Greek words for different kinds of love included ludus (playful love), pragma (longstanding love), and agape (universal love)?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all, ludus is Latin, not Greek; second, ludus meant "game, sport, play" or in the plural "public entertainment", and pragma meant "thing done, fact"; third, when they are used nowadays to mean a kind of love, pragma means "practical" or "convenient love", and agape means "love that is altruistic towards one's partner"; and fourth, these uses come not from the ancients but from the Canadian psychologist John Alan Lee's Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving (1973).

Ludus is one of Lee's primary "love styles" (mapped out like blue, red, and yellow on the traditional color wheel) alongside eros (passionate love) and storge (family love), and pragma and agape are secondary styles, like green, orange, and purple, together with mania (love accompanied by madness and obsessiveness). There are also nine tertiary styles, but we're not getting into those today.

Should we go on?

Instant Grits

One of my late mom's (it's four years this month, still miss you daily) best jokes, belated Mother's Day tribute:

Shopper: I'd like some grits, please.
Attendant: Hominy?
Shopper: Oh, two or three...

True Grits by NibbleMeThis.

David Brooks has put his humble-failed-political-journalist baseball cap back on the rack and shown up in his world's-greatest-education-expert mortarboard, for the first time in weeks or months ("Putting Grit in its Place", New York Times, May 10 2016):

We all know why it exists, but the grade-point average

No, you mean like any time you have a set of integers between 0 and 4 you can calculate the mean and—

is one of the more destructive elements in American education.

No wait, I think I don't know why it exists. Can we go back over that, Prof?

Success is about being passionately good at one or two things,

It is? In what sense? Is it a limit, like it's not OK to be passionately good at three things, or that's the best you can hope for? Is it what high schools or colleges should be aiming at, graduating kids with a minimum number of passionate skill sets, or is it a choice the kids should be making, in contradistinction to aiming at a high GPA, say? Is it a definition of success in school, or is it about preconditions for success in their future lives, that if they don't come out of school with those passionate skill sets they will end up failures as adults?

Brooks no argument

Olive Thomas in Alan Crosland's The Flapper (1920). Via QuirkyLadyBookworm.

So Brooks went to visit this progressive Small High School of Choice in Bensonhurst—the Expeditionary Learning School for Community Leaders—and found that it was a nice place. He didn't go so far as to say it radiated, but he did say it glowed.

So that's nice. I really don't have the heart to work this one over, other than to point out the school's success involved working closely on its innovations with the teachers' union (Brooks: "the single biggest impediment to school reform"), beefing up its funding with philanthropy from sources like the Gates Foundation (Brooks: "The problem is not lack of attention, and it’s not mainly lack of money.... American public spending on schools is high by global standards,"), and working to eliminate high-stakes testing as an issue, by turning as much as possible to performance-based assessment for the students and non-quantitative evaluation methods for the teachers (Brooks: "Ravitch thinks the solution is to get rid of the tests. But that way just leads to lethargy and perpetual mediocrity. The real answer is to keep the tests and the accountability but make sure every school has a clear sense of mission").

In short, succeeding by disregarding all Brooks's advice on education.

Annals of Derp: Why Conservatives Can't Read

Basically, because they don't want to. You could get all stuffed up with information, and it might contradict your assumptions. Have some, if you must, but responsibly, and always leave a few paragraphs on your plate.

Photo by Mark Bonifacio/New York Daily News.

What's up in the world of universal pre-K, Callie Gable for National Review?

It helped get progressive stalwart Bill de Blasio elected mayor of New York, and it resurfaces again and again in speeches by both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but the Left’s dream of publicly funded child care is suddenly getting pushback from an unlikely source: Jonathan Gruber, the liberal economist who helped design Obamacare.

Is that right?

Um, no, it's not. In the sense that Jon Gruber did not help design the Affordable Care Act (he did play a noteworthy role in the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law, from which the ACA borrowed a number of important elements, but was only an outside consultant on limited aspects of the latter), and that the study we're talking about today, "Non-Cognitive Deficits and Young Adult Outcomes: The Long-Run Impacts of a Universal Child Care Program" (NBER Working Paper 21571, September 2015) had three authors, Michael Baker of U. Toronto, Jonathan Gruber of MIT, and Kevin Milligan of UBC, working for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and far from unlikely or sudden, it is a followup study to one the three published seven years ago, “Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being,” Journal of Political Economy 116 (4), 2008.

Support our students, just don't give them any help

Clara Bow in her talkie debut, The Wild Party, directed by Dorothy Arzner, 1929.

Shorter David Brooks, "Support our Students", New York Times, January 20 2014:

The problem with the president's plan for universal free community college is that getting students to enroll is neither hard nor important. The important task is to help students graduate. And how is paying their tuition supposed to help with that?

What's interesting today, if anything, is what gets left out of the discussion. For example, according to Brooks:

In the first place, community college is already free for most poor and working-class students who qualify for Pell grants and other aid. In 2012, 38 percent of community-college students had their tuition covered entirely by grant aid and an additional 33 percent had fees of less than $1,000.

Or, as Robert Kelchen put it in an essay in Inside Higher Education last October, with reference to the Tennessee program and the proposed one in Chicago, long before Obama's plan was publicly mentioned,

But is our children learning?

Philip Kovacs at Education Week. 2011.

You've heard about the situation in the Newark Public Schools, which have been under state control since 1995 and now, under the imperial control of Governor Christie's proconsul/superintendent Cami Anderson, faces the layoffs of about 1000 teachers or a third of the teaching force as well as of other workers, while Teach For America missionaries (no doubt wearing pith helmets and carrying machetes; see shrill Owen Davis) replace them and in spite of the $40-million budget gap Anderson's local minions reap remarkable rewards. I just wanted to post all these extraordinary links, and note in passing that Newark is getting to be like the Stalingrad of education rephorm.

But in the interests of fairness, I'd like to present the following comment in favor of the layoffs, from a story at www.nj.com:

CC0715

last month

As a teacher I think it's a great idea to "trim the fat", so to speak. I work hard for my position and I see other teacher's doing the same things year after year. Other professions are merit based, I think Teaching should be too. We are talking about the future of our Country. What types of people would you like to see fix our nation, slackers or go getters?

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Hey, I'd like to see our classrooms staffed by people who know how to use apostrophes and capital letters, but nobody's asking me.