All his life Strom Thurmond fought to overturn Brown v. Board, tirelessly campaigning for justices who would “strictly” interpret the Constitution. Today, Thurmond must be smiling from beyond the grave, for in the Seattle School District decision, the Court edged closer than it ever has before to overturning Brown. In the process what I have termed the Gang of Four (Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas) threaten to undermine a century of racial progress.

All that prevented the Court from taking us back to the days of separate but equal was Justice Anthony Kennedy’s narrow opinion, which like his majority opinion in several other cases now has constitutional scholars and school district lawyers scratching their heads as they attempt to divine its meaning.

I spent the last few hours reading all 185 pages of the decision as soon as it was announced. It will probably take several more readings to fully grasp the meaning of this momentous decision, but several things are already clear.

The Gang of Four now speaks in a unified voice that does not appear to want to directly overturn Brown but would reinterpret it in such a way as to emasculate it. As Justice Breyer noted in his dissent, their reasoning would not only impact Brown but virtually every other area of racial discrimination.

To directly overturn Brown would be a political bombshell and also put several justices in an uncomfortable situation since in their confirmation hearings they spoke reverently of maintaining important precedents. Instead their aim is to reinterpret it so it no longer means what it has for over half a century. It would mean what Strom Thurmond wanted it to mean.

In the Seattle decision the Gang of Four advanced several arguments which indicate they would scuttle Brown by turning it on its head. To accomplish this they borrow from none other than Strom Thurmond.

In the Southern Manifesto and a lifetime of speeches, Thurmond always maintained that segregation constituted a part of the “habits, traditions, and way of life” of the South and neither the Supreme Court nor the federal government had any business interfering with those practices, no matter how whether or not others saw them as discriminatory.

In The book The Strange Death of Liberal America, I proposed that Thurmond’s Manifesto became the foundation of the Republican Counterrevolution. The ideas of the Manifesto have found their way into recent Republican platforms. But it is the philosophy of the Manifesto which Thurmond cleverly packaged as “states’ rights” that has become the controlling philosophy of the Republican Party.

The ideology of states’ rights has always viewed the federal government as a necessary evil whose main functions should be national defense, running the post office (and some question this), and refereeing intramural squabbles. If a state chose to support slavery, that was its prerogative. It was Ronald Reagan who successfully cloaked what had been seen as essentially a racist ideology into the more acceptable opposition to “big government.”

In some of the more startling passages in the decision, the Gang of Four, seem to sound like Thurmond when they defend the notion that racial imbalance as such is NOT segregation. Interesting it is Justice Thomas who makes this point the most strongly, writing:

Racial imbalance is not segregation, and the mere incantation of terms like resegregation and remediation cannot make up the difference.

Later he reiterates the point in case we did not get it the first time:

Racial imbalance without intentional state action to separate the races does not amount to segregation. To raise the specter of resegregation to defend these programs is to ignore the meaning of the word and the nature of the cases before us.

Chief Justice Roberts makes the same argument in his opinion.

The distinction between segregation by state action and racial imbalance caused by other factors has been central to our jurisprudence in this area for generations.

Pay special note to Thomas’ words “without intentional state action,” for they may be one of the scarier ideas to come from the Gang of Four. What Thomas and his colleagues are saying is that unless there is a specific law or rule that segregates people by race it is not segregation and hence not illegal. This is essentially what Thurmond maintained in the Manifesto, arguing that just because a town or even a state practiced racial segregation that was their choice.

The Gang of Four then moves on to say that the Court should have nothing to do with remedying “racial imbalance.”

Accepting racial balancing as a compelling state interest would justify the imposition of racial proportionality throughout American society.

The principle that racial balancing is not permitted is one of substance, not semantics. Racial balancing is not transformed from “patently unconstitutional” to a compelling state interest simply by relabeling it “racial diversity.”

Think for a minute what this would mean. For example, what if a “racially imbalanced” bank made substantially more loans to whites than people of color–and at better rates? What if there were racial imbalances in housing, hiring and health care? Obviously, in a statistical sense whites currently are in the majority and various data may reflect that imbalance.

Yet the data also show in many cases the imbalance is so great that people of color constitute such a small percentage that it is evidence of de facto segregation. Or, they may show people of color have been “redlined” into schools that lack the resources and experienced teachers of their white counterparts.

But the Gang of Four openly rejected the entire idea of de facto segregation. It implied that just because inner city schools received less resources or the percentage of people of color in upper level management positions was out of kilter, that unless there was a LAW that specifically mandated discrimination that “racial imbalance” was acceptable. In a footnote, Justice Thomas specifically addresses the de facto de jure issue:

The dissent makes much of the supposed difficulty of determining whether prior segregation was de jure or de facto. See, e.g., post, at 19– 20. That determination typically will not be nearly as difficult as the dissent makes it seem.

Although he provided the majority vote in this case, Justice Kennedy made it a special point to say he wanted no part of this argument, addressing what he pointedly referred to as the “plurality’s” line of reasoning. He found it:

To be inconsistent in both its approach and its implications with the history, meaning, and reach of the Equal Protection Clause.

Kennedy then moves on to state his unequivocal support for racial equality, averting the attempt to turn Brown on its head with an eloquent passage that is sure to be quoted for years to come:

Our Nation from the inception has sought to preserve and expand the promise of liberty and equality on which it was founded. Today we enjoy a society that is remarkable in its openness and opportunity. Yet our tradition is to go beyond present achievements, however significant, and to recognize and confront the flaws and injustices that remain. This is especially true when we seek assurance that opportunity is not denied on account of race. The enduring hope is that race should not matter; the reality is that too often it does.

The dissenters deplored the reasoning of the Gang of Four, asserting their support for racial equality. In his usual straightforward fashion, Justice Stevens said:

THE CHIEF JUSTICE fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools.2 In this and other ways, THE CHIEF JUSTICE rewrites the history of one of this Court’s most important decisions.

In a calculated slap against his colleagues who purport to follow the Constitution as written and to respect precedent Stevens recites the history of the Court since Brown.

It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.

Strom Thurmond probably smiled at that one, because that is exactly what he hoped to hear some day–that the Court had finally changed and adopted his philosophy.

Justice Breyer’s dissent is the lengthiest part of the opinion, so long that he feels he must justify it by stating that the tremendous volume of evidence he cites is necessary to disprove the Gang of Four’s assertion.

Breyer’s dissent represents one of the most fascinating and important sociological documents of recent years. It is clear he wanted the record of the Court to include the data and studies he cites to show that discrimination is not only alive and well in the United States, but in fact has become worse. His dissent includes tables, graphs, charts and references to various studies of racial equality.

I cite one lengthy paragraph at the beginning of his dissent because the facts he presents should be known to the entire country. They show how, under the Bush Administration, we are not only philosophically moving backwards under the Gang of Four but socially moving backwards–back to the days of Strom Thurmond.

More recently, however, progress has stalled. Between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending a school where minority children constituted more than half of the school fell from 77% to 63% in the Nation (from 81% to 57% in the South) but then reversed direction by the year 2000, rising from 63% to 72% in the Nation (from 57% to 69% in the South). Similarly, between 1968 and 1980, the number of black children attending schools that were more than 90% minority fell from 64% to 33% in the Nation (from 78% to 23% in the South), but that too reversed direction, rising by the year2000 from 33% to 37% in the Nation (from 23% to 31% in the South). As of 2002, almost 2.4 million students, or over 5% of all public school enrollment, attended schools with a white population of less than 1%. Of these, 2.3 million were black and Latino students, and only 72,000 were white. Today, more than one in six black children attend a school that is 99–100% minority.

Breyer ends his dissent on a ringing note that evokes Brown and I suspect was also designed to create harmony with Kennedy. Together the two passages represent the finest in the American tradition of equity and justice for all.

Finally, what of the hope and promise of Brown? For much of this Nation’s history, the races remained divided. It was not long ago that people of different races drank from separate fountains, rode on separate buses, and studied in separate schools. In this Court’s finest hour, Brown v. Board of Education challenged this history and helped to change it. For Brown held out a promise. It was a promise embodied in three Amendments designed to make citizens of slaves. It was the promise of true racial equality—not as a matter of fine words on paper, but as a matter of everyday life in the Nation’s cities and schools. It was about the nature of a democracy that must work for all Americans. It sought one law, one Nation, one people, not simply as a matter of legal principle but in terms of how we actually live.

As we move deeper into this election cycle, it has become clear that future control of the Supreme Court ranks among the more important issues. Right now some of the most important precedents of the Court persist only because of the sometimes ambiguous swing vote of Anthony Kennedy.

In the Seattle case he sided with the majority only in ruling that the school district had not made a compelling case for its plan. He pointedly refused to accept the Gang of Four’s twisted view of Brown. Not merely Brown is at stake but the Equal Protection Cause of the Constitution and a host of other decisions from Roe v Wade to decisions about government regulation to church-state issues. As we ponder the potential of that future, we should remember the “culture” that Strom Thurmond so vigorously defended. Do we want to return to that America?

Tagged with: Abramoff • American_Constitution • American_democracy • Brown_v_Board • Bush_administration • Chief_Justice_Roberts • civil_rights • Dean • diversity • educational_equity • equal_rights-amendment • equity • gang_of_four • GOP_Counterrevolution • Justice_Alito • Justice_Breyer • Justice_Kennedy • Justice_Stevens • Justice_Thomas • Latino_voters • presidential_campaign • rollback • Saddam_Hussein • school_districts • school_officials • seattle_desegregation_decision • seattle_school_district • segregationists • separate_but_equal • Southern_Manifesto • Strom_Thurmond • Supreme_Court • the_Constitution • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • United_States_Supreme_Court

One of the most interesting developments in the current campaign comes from the Brookings Institution in partnership with ABC News (a thanks to ABC for helping to sponsor this effort). Subtitled, “Independent Ideas for Out Next President,” Opportunity 08 is a must visit for anyone interested in the current campaign. Brookings describes the effort:

As we enter a presidential race with wide-open primaries in both political parties and enormous debate about the direction for the country, there is a unique opportunity to discuss solutions to America’s most pressing policy challenges. Opportunity 08 aims to help presidential candidates and the public focus on critical issues facing the nation, providing ideas, policy forums, and information on a broad range of domestic and foreign policy questions.

Opportunity 08 is currently divided into three main areas: our world, our society, and our prosperity. Each of those is subdivided into issues such as Iraq, China, Iran, election reform, immigration, budget, health care and taxes. The major thrust of the effort is to apply Brookings’ considerable research muscle to generating information and even policy suggestions for each of these issues. Most of all, Brookings and ABC are committed to having informed voters and candidates. The effort is nonpartisan as has always been the case with Brookings’ research.

So far it has generated the following reports: “High Cost of Health Care,” “Sustainable Development,” “Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Workforce,” “Reforming U.S. Immigration Policy,” and “The State of the Military Today.” Obviously there is not enough space in this post to delve into all the reports, but trust me, each of them contains not only worthwhile material but ideas that will give you a new perspective on the issues.

The immigration report recommends the next President, in order to ensure the economic, social, and civic integration of illegal immigrants, should support policies that:

• recognize the economic role and contribution of undocumented workers by implementing an earned legalization program
• create an Impact Aid Program that would offset state and local expenditures related to the program
• create a New Americans Initiative—a program to support state-level public-private partnership that would help all immigrants integrate into American society in a systematic, coordinated, and effective way, through local government and nonprofit programs.

Health care states the next President will have to choose some variant of the following specific options:

• increasing consumers’ share of health costs through high-deductible insurance, as an alternative to expanding employment-based coverage
• incremental change to strengthen and extend employment-based health coverage, through reinsurance or making federal insurance programs (Medicare, Medicaid, or the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program) more widely available
• universal health insurance by means of “Medicare-for-all”
• support for state-level reforms-which may be the most politically feasible of these alternatives

The education report focuses on higher education. It notes the next President should mount a determined effort, in concert with states and local school districts, to boost the academic performance of low achievers by:

• make college education more attainable for low-income students by simplifying the grants process and reducing inefficiency in the distribution of financial aid
• encourage universities that receive federal dollars to fashion responsible ways to measure student progress and track college costs
• create federally funded fellowships in biology, chemistry, and physics that require recipients, after graduation, to teach high school for one to four years
• create a signature program of federally funded fellowships not only to support students who study critical foreign languages, but also to build much-needed capacity within the Departments of State, Education, and Defense

Sustainable development focuses on the Great Lakes region, advocating that the competitiveness agenda of the next President should include an investment strategy that focuses on regional assets and institutions that steer the transition to the knowledge economy. Specifically, the next President should focus investment to:

• tap the Great Lakes region’s unrivaled educational infrastructure to produce the talent needed to compete in the 21st century, by fostering a “Great Lakes Compact on In-State Tuition” and a “Passport to Higher Education”
• expand the public-private research and development infrastructure in the region to cultivate the technologies of the future
• promote sustainable development within the “North Coast”
• strengthen economic integration with Canada, creating a new mechanism for bi-national coordination and cooperation on transportation and other issues
• enlist the region’s labor, business, civic, and political leadership to remake the nation’s social compact-and thus spur competitiveness-through a regional health care consortium and a portable defined-contribution pension plan

The state of the military report asks whether we have been “Playing Russian Roulette With the Military?” It concludes:

That we have asked so few to do so much for so long, without offering them much help or more troops to share the burden, reflects badly on us as a nation and puts our security at risk.

To deal with this crisis the Institution will sponsor on June 29 an examination of the state of the military today. Participants will include:

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies and director of Opportunity 08; Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative, Peter Singer; Brookings Senior Fellow and former Bush Administration Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman; and Lieutenant General (Ret.) Dan Christman.

I will post the results of this discussion when they become available.

If your appetite has been aroused by some of the above recommendations I suggest you pay a visit to the above links and read the complete reports along with the accompanying data. I, for one, have Opportunity 08 as a bookmark and have added it to the resources list on this site. It is efforts like this that hopefully will help to make this campaign one that truly is about the issues.

Tagged with: Brookings_Institution • Canada • educational_equity • great_lakes_region • health_care_plan • health_care_system • higher_EDUCATION • high_school • immigration • Iran • Iraq • military_readiness • next_presidential_election • todays_students • tomorrows_workforce

For most of this generation the Democratic Party has lived as if it did not have a past. When was the last time you heard a Democratic presidential candidate evoke his or her party and mean it? For some time now the preferred tactic for Democrats has centered on masquerading as an “outsider” and avoiding any mention of the party at all costs. Candidates seem embarrassed by their own party, the way people from a disreputable family are afraid of their names.

This year continues to follow the pattern. The word “Democrat” or “Democratic Party” does not appear in the biographies on Hillary Clinton’s web site or Mike Gravel’s. John Edwards, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama mention it once in their web site biographies. Bill Richardson gives the party three mentions in his bio. Joe Biden wins the award for most mentions with four. Dennis Kucinich’s web page would not even load.

As for expressing pride in being a Democrat or citing the history of the party, Democratic presidential candidates avoid that almost as gingerly as they avoid talking about taxes. Notably only Bill Richardson recognizes the importance of the past, evoking a Democrat who today is almost forgotten or regarded as a loser and a dinosaur. Richardson writes:

His interest in politics was sparked while on a school trip to Washington, D.C. during which Senator Hubert Humphrey stopped to talk to Bill and his classmates about American values and the power of public service. Governor Richardson calls this a turning point in his political awareness: “Senator Humphrey was a proud Democrat and presented his convictions with such strength, that I began to realize how a progressive vision could change the world.”

Here in one paragraph a Democratic candidate has–say we the cajones–to positively mention his party, Hubert Humphrey and the importance of a “progressive vision.” That alone is enough to get this blogger A LOT more interested in a candidate most still regard as a non factor. Blogdom overflows with words and snarky comments about Clinton, Obama and Edwards, yet none of these candidates mentions ” a progressive” vision with Richardson’s sense of passion, history and values.

Perhaps one reason the other candidates avoid mentioning their party stems from their party’s inability to define itself. I dare you to ask anyone you know what the Democrats stand for. If you get an answer other than “I don’t know” or one of Rush Limbaugh’s rants or something about the war, please post a comment immediately. You may have found something rarer than an endangered species in the Amazonian jungle.

Lacking a unified set of values, the Democrats have also lacked an agenda, putting them on defense much of the time. Since the Reagan Administration, the GOP has set the agenda and the Democrats try to respond, which represents a complete reversal of the situation even as far back as the days of William Jennings Bryan. This causes the Democratic Party look weak and indecisive; the equivalent of that venerable carnival act when a car stuffed with clowns tries to put out a fire.

The ahistorical vision of the contemporary Democratic Party strikes me as especially strange since the American twentieth century was in many ways the Democratic Century. It was the Democratic Party that crafted a unique vision and philosophy that applied the core values of the Declaration, Bill of Rights and the Constitution to the Industrial Age. Yet less than a decade into the new millennium few evoke the names of Kennedy, Truman, Roosevelt, Wilson. Rarer still is any reference by Democratic candidates to the programs or ideas of these great leaders.

No one refers to the values that stretch from from William Jennings Bryan into the 1970s, values that defined the Democratic Party and made it a political dynasty. Harry Truman summed them up:

I have told the people that there is just one big issue in this campaign and that’s the people against the special interests.

The Republicans stand for special interests, and they always have.

The Democratic Party, which I now head, stands for the people–and always has stood for the people.

To show how things have reversed, it is now the Democrats who have earned the tag as the party of special interests. Truman believed–as did every Democrat from Bryan to Kennedy–that the most important value was a belief that government’s role was to keep the playing field level. To quote Truman again:

The Democrats have believed always that the welfare of the whole people should come first, and that means that the farmers, labor, small businessmen, and everybody else in the country should have a fair share of the prosperity that goes around.

From Bryan advocating the income tax, to the programs of the New Deal and the New Frontier, that value guided candidates and administrations that are regarded as some of the greatest in American history. This idea also governed foreign policy from Wilson’s Fourteen Points, to the Four Freedoms, the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps.

Since Bill Clinton decided to join Ronald Reagan and proclaim that government was not the solution, Democrats have turned their back on what made them great. In his 1996 State of the Union speech Clinton uttered the words that ended the Democratic Century and cast aside the core value that had defined his party:

We know big Government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem.

Even before this, the Democrats had become a shadow of their former selves, but it was Clinton who articulated the clear break with the past. Since Clinton consigned Wilson, FDR, Truman and their values, voices and history to the rubbish heap, the Democratic Party has failed to articulate an alternative.

Meanwhile the largest party in America has become the nonvoters and a great many of those nonvoters represent demographic groups that once formed the heart of the Democratic Party. Curiously, I know of homes of some of those people that still have pictures of John Kennedy and not that long ago knew a few with pictures of FDR. I’ve never seen Bill Clinton’s picture in anyone’s home. If 2008 becomes another campaign of Republican vs Republican Lite, it could well signal the permanent loss of these voters and the swan song of the Democrats.

It is interesting Bill Richardson evokes Hubert Humphrey for written on Humphrey’s grave are words that give me optimism a candidate will emerge who is proud to be a true Democrat. Humphrey’s grave stone is a low, gray monument into which is incised his signature and the following phrase:

I have enjoyed my life, its disappointments outweighed by its pleasures. I have loved my country in a way that some people consider sentimental and out of style. I still do, and I remain an optimist, with joy, without apology about this country and about the American experiment in democracy.

These words capture as well as any the combination of optimism, faith in the common people and belief in the importance in the level playing field that form the heart of the Democratic Party tradition. What the Happy Warrior is trying to tell us from beyond the grave is that if we lose faith in these values we lose faith in ourselves, our institutions, and our country.

Tagged with: Adolf_Hitler • Barack_Obama • Bill_Clinton • Bill_Richardson • Bryan • Chris_Dodd • decline_in_voter_turnout • Democratic_Party • Democratic_presidential_campaign • Democrats • Dennis_Kucinich • Fourteen_Points • Four_Freedoms • Franklin_Roosevelt • Harry_Truman • Hillary_Clinton • Hubert_Humphrey • Iraq_War • John_Edwards • John_Kennedy • Joseph_Biden • level_playing_field • Mike_Gravel • New_Deal • new_frontier • Peace_Corps • rush_limbaugh • William_Jennings_Bryan • Woodrow_Wilson

June 6 the House Committee on Education and Labor took up one of the worst laws to come from beneath the marble Capitol dome–No Child Left Behind. Although, the hearings rated little media coverage, like fingers scraping a blackboard they send an uncomfortable message of the Democrat’s exasperating spinelessness.

The buzzword coming from both Democrats and educators was “flexibility.” In fact the word appears so often in their websites, speeches, and other materials that you swear they all had the same writer. At the June 6 hearings, Dr. Carol Johnson, Superintendent of the Memphis City Schools stated:

I am pleased to be testifying today on the issue of flexibility under NCLB.

Kathleen Strauss, President of the Michigan State Board of Education, echoed Johnson:

We came to the conclusion that while we are meeting the spirit of the law we clearly needed more flexibility to help our good faith efforts in meeting the letter of the law.

Rick Melmer, South Dakota’s Secretary of Education and president-elect of the Council of Chief State School Officers added his testimony:

Congress must continue to hold states accountable for improving student achievement and closing achievement gap, while also providing them with the flexibility needed to implement innovative models for accomplishing these vital national goals.

The positions taken by the witnesses echo positions taken by some of the nation’s major education organizations. The National School Boards Association has put its considerable weight behind a revised bill sponsored by Representative Don Young (R-AK-At Large). Its first three recommendations all contain the f-word:

• Increase the flexibility for states to use additional types of assessments for measuring AYP—including growth models
• Grant states more flexibility in assessing students with disabilities and students not proficient in English for AYP purposes
• Create a student testing participation range, providing flexibility for uncontrollable variations in student attendance.

In a joint statement with the National Conference of State Legislatures, The American Association of School Administrators also has a preference for the f-word. For example, the statement asks for:

Flexibility for States to Address Unique Schools and Districts: The federal government should recognize the unique circumstances present in rural and urban schools and provide incentives and flexibility for improvement in these school systems, rather than impose penalties and sanctions for failure to comply with the process requirement of the law.

Still, as Dr. Johnson noted in her testimony to the House:

Flexibility, of course, means different things to different people.

For some inexplicable reason, the prevailing stance on NCLB by the Democrats and major education organizations has avoided calling for its repeal, but instead seeking to seek to modify it. Trying to fix a bad law is like trying to repair a downed power line by grabbing onto it. It creates lots of sparks, but besides doing little to solve the underlying problem, it ends up killing those trying to make the repairs.

Yet very few educators and even fewer politicians seem willing to call for the repeal of NCLB. One organization that has gone further than most is Fair Test, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based organization funded in part by grants. Its Action Alert on the renewal of NCLB states:

The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies are trying to push through fast-track renewal of the fundamentally flawed “No Child Left Behind” law without the public debate it requires.

Now is the time for assessment reformers like you to act. Contact your U.S. Senators and Representative today. Tell them NCLB should not be reauthorized unless all these issues are addressed. Ask them to contact the Education Committee and press for adoption of the reforms listed here.

Another organization, the Educator Roundtable is circulating an online petition to repeal NCLB. The petition’s opening paragraph intentionally echoes the opening of the United States Constitution:

We, the educators, parents, and concerned citizens whose names appear below, reject the misnamed No Childresearcher and Left Behind Act and call for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist accountability, but because the law’s simplistic approach to education reform wastes student potential, undermines public education, and threatens the future of our democracy.

The petition cites 16 major reasons for repealing NCLB. Among them are:

1. Misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.

11. Neglects the teaching of higher order thinking skills which cannot be evaluated by machines.

13. Forces schools to adhere to a testing regime, with no provision for innovating, adapting to social change, encouraging creativity, or respecting student and community individuality, nuance, and difference.

16. Rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually label them all “failures,” so when they fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress, as all schools eventually will, they can be “saved” by vouchers, charters, or privatization.

Yet the major education organizations and the Democrats continue to stick to the f-word. A curious bit of trivia about the petition is that one of the signers is none other than Paul Houston, who is the Executive Director of the American Association of School Administrators. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that Houston has been unable to convince his own organization to back his position.

Other prominent names who have signed the petition include education writer and critic Alfie Kohn, writer and education researcher Gerald Bracey, researcher and education reformer William Spady, and Arizona State University Regents’ Professor in the College of Education David Berliner. To anyone like me who was involved in education reform during these last three decades these names represent some of the most inspiring and innovative thinkers in education. Their work served as the guidepost for those of us working at the grassroots level.

What is interesting about the failure of education organizations and the Democratic Party to voice stronger objections to No Child Left Behind is that the American public, as usual, is out in front of them on this issue. A June 13 Pew Research Center report notes:

Among those who have heard about the law, 34% say the law has made schools better; 26% say it has made schools worse; and 32% say it has had no impact.

In other words, only one-third of the American people believe NCLB has helped to improve schools and a quarter of the nation believes it has actually hurt them. The “report cards” for NCLB issued by various organizations also give it mixed grades. The Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind reports in the Executive Summary of its report on NCLB:

While the law set us on a more productive course and spurred some improvement, it has not been enough. Far too many children are still not achieving to high standards in every state.

Fair Test points out the following weaknesses with NCLB:

NCLB is based on false assumptions-e.g., test scores equal educational quality, and sanctions based on low test scores drive school improvement–and therefore offers false remedies.

Nearly all schools will eventually be rated “In Need of Improvement” (INOI) and sanctioned under NCLB because of the way “Adequate Yearly Progress” statistics are calculated.

“Teaching to the test” narrows the curriculum and forces teachers and students to concentrate on memorizing isolated facts.

The law’s remedies for “failing” schools do not work.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is nicknamed “the nation’s report card,” has been conducting a trial evaluation of the performance of urban districts. Its 2005 report showed that 51% of students in large central city schools scored below basic in 4th and 8th grade reading as compared with 38% for the nation as a whole. An astounding 67% of the students in OUR NATION’S CAPITAL scored below basic level. In math the differences were 32% below basic for central cities versus 21% for the nation. In Washington, D.C. 51% scored below basic.

Although the report did note that scores had gone up slightly since 2003 the increases are so minuscule as to be statistically insignificant, most being in the 3-4% range. If ever there were an indictment of the failures of No Child Left Behind these figures provide one of the most compelling witnesses.

Thomas Jefferson recognized that education was one of the major cornerstones of a democratic society. He was among the first to see that education could serve as a prime mechanism for keeping the playing field level. Yet the performance of students of color and poor students is nothing less than a national disgrace. This country is in danger of losing the third generation since Brown v. Board–in essence half a century of what amounts to de facto discrimination every bit as malicious as what Thurgood Marshall argued against in Brown.

For those who persist in thinking we have a contemporary equivalent of separate but equal, ask them to take a trip to a nearby inner city school and spend some time walking the halls and even sitting in on classes. Note the quality of the textbooks, the number of computers, the state of the restrooms, the amount of supplementary learning materials. And while you sit in on a class note the number of students the teacher must deal with, the experience of the teacher, the number of aides or volunteers helping in the classroom, the number who English language learners (ESL), and the percentage of students who have learning disabilities or behavior problems. Then make a similar trip to a rich suburban district and ask, “Which school would you pick for your child?”

With NCLB, the Counterrevolution has largely succeeded in reframing the debate about education funding much as it reframed debates about taxes. Resource poor schools where the toilets work intermittently, the textbooks have pages missing, and teachers must buy their own classroom supplies also tend to have large numbers of students not performing well on the standardized tests at the heart of NCLB. For these schools, the GOP moved the debate from lack of resources to lack of performance in a way that would earn the admiration of the most sophisticated river boat gambler. The problem is that they are gambling with our children’s futures.

Tagged with: alfie_kohn • American_Association_of_School_Administrators • aspen_institute • Brown_v_Board • Bush_tax_cuts • commission_on_no-child-left_behind • cornerstones • counterrevolution • Democratic_candidates • Democratic_Party • Democrats • educator_roundtable • fair_test • future_of_the_Democratic_Party • GOP • Hillary_Rodham_Clinton • Iowa_caucuses • Iraq • NAEP • national_school_boards_association • NCLB • No_Child_Left_Behind_Act • Paul_Houston • Pew_Research_Center • Republicans • school_districts • Thomas_Jefferson • Thurgood_Marshall

It has now been officially confirmed by none other than the folks at the Pew Research Center: two comedy shows came in first in a survey that measured the knowledge levels of news viewers. Of course we all know which shows I am referring to: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Those findings, of course, grabbed the headlines and resulted in some smug talk and not a few jokes, but the implications of these findings and other, more disconcerting results, should have us all worried.

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outscored the network evening news by a whopping 16% and local TV news and Faux News by 19%. We all knew Fox News was a joke, but little did we know that a joke was better news. Liberals may not want to hear this, but listeners of Rush Limbaugh and viewers of The O’Reilly Factor trailed the leaders by four and three percent, respectively.

Those findings, of course, grabbed the headlines and resulted in some smug talk and not a few jokes, but the implications of these findings and other, more disconcerting results, should have us all worried. But first a bit of background. The Pew Research Center on the People and the Press has issued reports on the public affairs knowledge of Americans for several decades. The latest survey came from telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International among a nationwide sample of 1,502 adults, 18 years of age or older, from February 1-13, 2007.

Bloggers should note that we came in at 37%, lagging behind newsmagazines, CNN, and even Google News. In other words, despite that fact that blogs like to think of themselves as the new media and like many youngsters have an inflated view of their importance, most blog readers are not very knowledgeable. Perhaps most disheartening is that blogs came in dead last with highest percentage of people in the “low” knowledge category–an astounding 37%. Only Fox News was close with 35%, while most other sources were in the 20% range. To fall into the “high” level people had to answer 15 questions out of 23 while the “low” level answered nine or less.

This may explain the uneven–even dismal–quality of many posts and comments. It also may explain why we are still a joke for the mainstream media. If bloggers want to be treated seriously then clearly the blogosphere needs to begin treating issues more seriously. We also need to better inform our readers so we do not continue to contribute to reinforce their prejudices or their ignorance. Curiously the strength of the Internet is that it allows for issues to be treated at some length, but the blogosphere seems to have largely opted for the soundbite approach.

That formerly august news sources such as the nightly network news have fallen so far and new sources such as blogs should be bested by comedy shows and purveyors of raucous invective says a great deal about the state of the American media and the American public. Although the survey does not mention this, to me the major finding is that Americans with the most knowledge about public affairs now prefer their news packaged as entertainment, delivered by actors not reporters.

Perhaps this accounts for the report’s more disheartening findings. The report asked 23 questions designed to elicit the public’s knowledge ranging from being able to name the vice president and the leader of Russia to whether they knew if America had a trade deficit or could identify the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni. Pew researchers found:

Eight people out of the 1,502 respondents answered all 23 questions correctly. At the other end of the spectrum, five people failed to answer a single question correctly. The average respondent got about 12 of the 23 questions right, or slightly more than half. 10 percent answered 20 or more questions accurately - and 5% got more than 20 questions wrong or said they did not know the answer.

Given their dumbed-down audience they assigned a grade to the American public based on how many of the 23 questions they were able to answer correctly. The report card stated:

Using a common school grading scale in which 90% correct is the minimum necessary to receive an A, 80% for a B, 70% for a C, 60% for a D and less than 60% is a failing grade, Americans did not fare too well. Fully half would have failed, while only about one-in-six would have earned an A or B.

Since some of the questions on this survey differed from those on earlier ones, the researchers compared five identical questions asked in both 1989 and 2007. The results:

Americans didn’t do as well in 2007 compared with how similarly-educated Americans performed in 1989. Across the board, scores declined significantly among college graduates, those with some college as well as for those with a high school education or less.

At this point Jon Stewart would probably crack a joke about that’s why we have George W. Bush for president and why we let him lead us into the mess that is Iraq and why we can’t seem to get out of it. But as the cliche goes, this is no laughing matter. Only 32% of those surveyed knew that Sunnis were a different branch of Islam than Shiites, which is sort of akin to Egyptians not knowing there is a difference between Catholics and Protestants.

You would think people would care about their own pocketbooks, but only a appalling 24% even knew that Congress had raised the minimum wage! This does not bode well for the Democrats. It also represents a sad commentary on the vaunted 100 Hours initiative and the Democratic Party’s media relations people.

Which question had the most right answers? The one about President Bush’s plan to increase troop levels in Iraq. The report did not delve into what knowledge the respondents had of the so-called “surge,” but given the other findings it is probably a good bet that they had little idea of its justification, the position against it or the politics around the decision. Only a measly 24% even knew that the Senate had been unable to pass a resolution against the surge.

Democratic Party leaders are you listening? The public apparently knows little about your work on two of your biggest issues. If the Party’s inability to get out the word about its activities continues at this miserable level, you can kiss the 2008 election goodbye.

In the book Strange Death I speculated that we were rapidly approaching the days when elections would be decided by the same people who packaged toothpaste and mouthwash. What we really should be worried about is brainwash or brain death.

Tagged with: bloggers • blogosphere • blogs • cnn • colbert_report • comedy_shows • daily_show • Democratic_Party • Democrats • disconcerting • disheartening • findings • fox_news • George_Bush • invective • Iraq_troop_increase • joke • Jon_Stewart • knowledge_levels • local_tv_news • mainstream_media • minimum_wage • nightly_network_news • o_reilly_factor • Pew_Research_Center • princeton_survey_research • public_affairs • rush_limbaugh • Sunni_and_Shiite • viewers

The ether sometimes proves deeply unsettling, like confronting a specter on a dark night. Recently I received an email image of a Mexican flag flying above an upside-down American flag outside California’s Montebello High School. The incident provides an instructive warning about what we could see in this coming campaign.

The email was accompanied by the following text:

You will not see this heart-stopping photo on the front page of the NY Times or on the lead story of the major news networks. The protestors put up the Mexican flag over the American flag flying upside down at Montebello High School in California .

Pass this along to every American citizen in your address books and to every representative in the state and federal government. If you choose to remain uninvolved, do not be amazed when you no longer have a nation to call your own nor anything you have worked for left since it will be “redistributed” to the activists while you are so peacefully staying out of the “fray”. Check history, it is full of nations/empires that disappeared when its citizens no longer held their core beliefs and values.

Curious about the entire incident I quickly found an explanation at the Urban Legends web site. They determined:

The text is a mash-up of the original photo captions, commentary by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, and the overwrought rantings of one or more anonymous emailers.

What is especially curious about the email is that the incident took place over a year ago (March 27, 2006), but you would never know that from the email. As for the photos, they are authentic, taken by Whittier [California] Daily News photographers Leo Jarzomb and Raul Roa. Here is the site’s story on the incident:

The occasion was a protest involving approximately 1,000 Hispanic students who walked out of their classes in the El Rancho Unified and Whittier Union High School Districts and marched through the town of Pico Rivera to nearby Montebello High School, where they demonstrated against proposed federal legislation calling for harsher measures against illegal immigration. As these photos and others taken that day show, Mexican flags were common currency at the event, but the standard waving got out of hand when a group of protestors hoisted the flag of Mexico up the school flagpole with the Stars and Stripes beneath it, upside-down.

Montebello administrators have been working over time to defuse the incident, especially because the school was under lock down at the time. They issued a press release on March 29 of THIS YEAR, emphasizing how this story persists on the Internet. School officials stated:

On Monday, March 27, 2006 at noontime, a group of students from neighboring school districts marched to Montebello High School (MHS). At that time, MHS was on lockdown and the students remained in their classrooms. The other students, from outside Montebello Unified School District, who were estimated to be 800-1000 strong, gathered outside the MHS campus. For a brief time, the school flag was lowered, replaced with a Mexican flag, and the American flag flown beneath, upside down. The California flag was subsequently stolen.

It is important to emphasize that this was not the act of any Montebello High School student nor any student who was enrolled in the Montebello Unified School District.

I decided to track the story back to Malkin’s web site. There I found the original along with much of the language used in the email. Malkin’s first paragraph is identical to the one in the email. Malkin appears to be the one who originally gave the story legs. But as much as I detest Malkin as a bargain basement Ann Coulter of the modem set, I could find no evidence that she has continued to feed the story, although she continues to write diatribes about the immigration bill.

It took some more detective work, but I think I may have finally found the source of the email. It apparently comes from a post by a user named “Goo” on the “Killer Frogs Forums,” a site mainly for fans of the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs. Here is what “Goo” wrote in his May 11, 2007 post “ Illegal Aliens remove American flag from CA High School, Replace with Mexican Flag”:

You will not see this heart-stopping photo on the front page of the NY Times or on the lead story of the major news networks. The protestors put up the Mexican flag over the American flag flying upside down at MontebelloHigh Schoolin California. [Errors in original.]

I predict this stunt will be the nail in the coffin of any guest-worker/amnesty plan on the table in Washington . The image of the American flag subsumed to another and turned upside down on American soil is already spreading on Internet forums and via e-mail.

Pass this along to every American citizen in your address books and to every representative in the state and federal government. If you choose to remain uninvolved, do not be amazed when you no longer have a nation to call your own nor anything you have worked for left since it will be “redistributed” to the activists while you are so peacefully staying out of the “fray”. Check history, it is full of nations/empires that disappeared when its citizens no longer held their core beliefs and values.

You will note the post is identical to the email. To The TCU fans credit, several immediately pointed out both the Urban Legends story and the fact the “Goo’ had curiously omitted the date. When confronted about this by several “frogs” he answered:

When did I say this was new?

I write about this incident at length because it demonstrates the power of the Net to pollute discussion, even on a college booster site. After Malkin’s post, The images circulated quickly over the Internet, giving truth little chance to catch up with Malkin’s distortions. That poor Montebello High School was still trying to put a lid on the entire affair a year later illustrates how quickly things can get out of hand and ruin the reputation of a public school even though none of the information was true. I once referred to blogdom as high school and now a high school is the victim of high-school like rumor mongering.

In the book The Strange Death of Liberal America, I noted one of the major threats to American democracy comes in the form of manipulating media images. This coming presidential campaign with its addition of YouTube and FaceBook and other new media promises to become the most severe test we have experienced to this date of whether our democracy can withstand a determined assault by media manipulators.

The determined–and to me–misguided efforts of many to resist any regulation of the manipulation of media imagery or the Internet have left Americans vulnerable to modern Goebbels who specialize in the kind of lies and distortions that are Malkin’s stock in trade. According to the standard line: the Internet will police itself. It is a policy that has spawned the web equivalent of Iraqi militias.

And those militias fight it out with each believing it has sole possession of the truth. Whether the Internet worked in this case is open to question. Yes, the errors and distortions were “outed” by various sites and blogs, but whether that changed any minds is a question for further research. Even those who did might see the truth as the lie.

As Martin Scorsese so effectively portrayed it in Gangs of New York, nativism has always benn the dark side of the American character. In essence the Net’s distortions threatened national security because they threatened to turn the actions of a few hooligans into an international incident. The government and citizens of Mexico cannot be happy with the implication that they condone the desecration of the American flag or harbor designs on this nation.

Like the real frontier, the electronic frontier has the potential to break out into real shooting, modern versions of the O.K. Corral and the Lincoln County War. People who post trash like the Montebello High School story resemble the true gunfighters of the Old West, most of whom were sociopaths and sadistic killers. The gunfighters of the internet threaten the security of this nation just as surely as John Wesley Hardin and his kind threatened community security. America deserves better.

As I wrote in Strange Death, along with challenges to voting rights and our growing economic inequality, the commercialization of elections coupled with growing media concentration and politicization has reached a point of no return, where the public can no longer sort out what is real from what is merely another cynical attempt to manipulate them. In this world it becomes easy for people to dismiss all sources or trust only those that share their prejudices. Economic justice can become an illusion, educational equity becomes useless except for those knowledgeable about the magician’s tricks, and voting freedom becomes as valid as throwing darts at a ballot. Figuring out whether the playing field is level becomes the equivalent of floating weightlessly in space where up and down, left and right, lose meaning.

Tagged with: 1948_campaign • American_democracy • American_flag • Ann_Coulter • blogosphere • diatribes • eletronic_frontier • high_scool • little_chance • lockdown • media_images • mexican_flag • michelle_malkin • montebello_high_school • national_security • o_reilly • school_officials • strange_death • upside_down_flag • urban_legends • YouTube

We Americans currently seem to be going through a period when we feel smug about our own democratic impulses and cynical about those of other nations such as Iraq. If there is one thread that seems to run through BOTH Republicans and Democrats about the Iraq War it is that the Iraqis are a sectarian mess seemingly bent on killing each other to the extent that some are even willing to commit suicide to take a few of their enemies with them.

Read the papers, listen to the news and sectarian conflict seems to be occurring on a daily basis somewhere in this globe. The Russians have the Chechens, India has Kashmir, Sri Lanka has the Tamil Tigers. African nations are awash with conflict between tribal and religious groups. Then there are the Basques, Quebec, Scotland. It seems as though everyone but us is going through the equivalent of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

These past few weeks have shown that America is also not immune to internal conflict. We like to believe we are a rational nation tied together by ethical people, but in fact parts of America are as crudely drawn and ill-gotten as some of the nations we like to castigate. If you have read anything about the history of Iraq, sooner or later someone makes it a point to stress that the present state of Iraq never was a nation, but with only slight exaggeration was drawn up by British bureaucrats over tea. Hence the present mess in Iraq.

If you are an indigenous American, one of the tribal peoples that were here before any of the Europeans even knew there was an America, your experience with the drawing of boundaries makes Iraq look positively rational. I was reminded of this by a wonderful, a highly recommended essay “We Shall Never Sell Our Black Hills” by winter rabbit at the Progressive Historians blog.

The essay points out:

The ownership of the Black Hills was contested in the U.S. Courts for sixty years in the twentieth century, eventually awarding the Sioux tribes a monetary sum in 1979 for their loss.
To this day, the money remains unclaimed. Tribal leaders are interested only in the return of their sacred Paha Sapa - and there the matter rests.

As of today the amount of the awards are $757,465,288.74 for the Black Hills and $105,821,479.16 for the land taken east of the Black Hills. That brings the total owed to the tribes of the Great Sioux Nation to $863,286,767.90.

In other words, the American government owes the proper owners of the Black Hills, the Lakota people, almost $900 million dollars, plus any activities by non-Lakota people in the Black Hills are essentially trespassing on Lakota land. For those who do not know it, America’s tribal people are recognized as “domestic nations” by law. Some of them such as the Red Lake Anishinabe in my state of Minnesota issue their own license plates and have their own police force that enforces the law on tribal lands.

Also in Minnesota, Winona LaDuke and others founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project which is buying back lands that were unlawfully taken from the White Earth Anishinabe. LaDuke explains:

Our land is Mino-Aki (good land) whose biodiversity is essential to the health and spiritual well-being of our people. For this reason we seek to reclaim the land of White Earth Reservation which was stolen from us through unethical tax foreclosures, treaty abrogations and property thefts in the 1800s and early 1900s.

It would take a lot of po