Merrillville H.S. in Indiana is banning the color pink because of its "rap overtones" and apparent gang affiliations. I understand the need for schools to enforce rules that will make children safe at the potential sacrifice of some personal freedom. When it makes sense.
At this point, the school's simply banning a color because a rapper featured it in his video. We'll also ban green because of the "Hey, Ya" video, and every single other color ever conceived of because of that "Mo' Money Mo' Problems" video Puffy and Mase did a few years back.
I love this particular brand of extreme overreaction - all it does is not only expose students who didn't get the fad to the fad, making it more likely that students participate in it, but it also gives it an outlaw air to anyone who participates in it. All because Cam'ron flashing around in pink with a pink SUV is supposedly a "gang symbol".
By the way, I do own pink clothing. It's part of gang affiliation - the Metrosexual/Gay Mafia.
MGM 4 life, bitch!
Somehow, David Brooks managed to turn the college application process from a scary series of judgements on your academic career up to that point into a soul-deadening process with no meaning whatsoever, and still come away with the idea that one should go to college...but it doesn't matter where, as long as you choose the school that fits you. Which Brooks gives no clue how to do, because he's spent so much time telling you that everything you've been pushing yourself to do is both worthless and has likely left you a less interesting person.
Never have I felt worse about caring about science fairs in high school.
There's something that's deeply unsettling to me about the idea of essentially paying for your grades by bringing in basic classroom supplies. I understand what the schools are doing in order to get the supplies they need, but at the same time they shouldn't have to sacrifice educational integrity to get tissues and paper towels. It's necessary...but it's also a travesty.
Here's something I've wondered for the longest time: the argument against spending more on education in America has been that we spend more per capita than any other nation on education (which isn't quite true, but we're assuming for the sake of argumentation that it is), and therefore our spending on education is simply wasted, as it's been shown to be a failure, apparently. We have to change the educational system and stop spending so very, incredibly much to get such poor results.
Yet, most of the same people who would argue this point would also argue that the American healthcare system, which actually is the most expensive per capita, and which results in the magnificent figure of having the 42nd highest life expectancy rate in the world, should be protected, and that we shouldn't take any steps to change it despite the fact that we spend so very, incredibly much to get such poor results. Sure, some people get wonderful healthcare...just like some people get wonderful primary and secondary educations.
Is the private market that much of a salve to the soul? I cringe whenever I hear someone spout "more spending" as a universal salve to educational problems, but at the same time, there are definite funding problems, particularly in terms of teachers' classrooms that are systematic and aren't going away simply by throwing standardized tests and progress reports at them.
I'll have more to say on this later.
Matthew Yglesias notes that Brad DeLong is engaging in some liberal academic bias despite being significantly to the right of most of my, and Matt's, professors. Looking at Brad's reading list reminds me that the problem in academia is less liberal bias than neomarxist bias. The majority of my professors are so far to the left I can barely see them. For me it's quite fun, I like arguing both sides of the debate (as some of my, err, more liberal readers know), but the absolutely quizzical expressions on the faces of some of my classmates as they attempt to reconcile what they hear and know from the the "real world" with what they're getting in class points out part of the problem.
Brad's stuff is fine, as I see it. It's an opinion students have context for, they can check those reading materials against other things they know and other materials that are easily accessible to them. Not so with anything utilizing the term "dialectic".
If this is the best that Indiana University has to offer in its college conservatives...
Hit. Counters. Measure. Visitors. And. Hits.
Go down to the rant on "cretin priorities". Please.
Rod Paige called the NEA a "terrorist" organization.
I'm sure that there will be forty bloggers linking to some liberal publication, or somebody on Democratic Underground or Indymedia calling some Republican or some Republican group a terrorist/terrorist organization.
However, none of them are the Secretary of Education. None of them hold one of the highest-ranking positions in the entire federal government. None of them are cabinet level advisers to the president. I don't think that the government will start treating the NEA as a terrorist group, but when the national head of education policy holds a view as extreme and out of touch as this one, it's something to worry about.
We should, of course, be used to Paige saying things that make no sense whatsoever. He maintained that he'd performed an educational miracle in Houston which later turned out to be faker than a Bush deficit prediction. And I'm pretty sure that he was also lying last year when he said he could, and I quote, "freestyle longer than it took the Egyptians to build the pyramids/I have other MCs runnin' 'cause I'm the Pharoah of the Fearamid."
I have spoken to numerous other Houston-area MCs, and they have said that Paige was a mediocre lyrical stylist, at best.
Now, granted, I've never actually been in academia as a professor, and I've specifically never been a professor at UNC-Wilmington, but what kind of environment does it create when you reprint alleged e-mails from them to their class in syndicated columns?
Following up Andy Sullivan, Ezra, and Kieran Healy's dialogue on conservatives in academia, I think there's a huge point that nobody's touched upon - outlets for intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) conservatism outside of the university.
Kieran touches on this a bit:
What's missing from this argument about conservative academics is the fact that there are surrogate academic (but not educational) routes for conservatives to follow. There's a much larger network of think tanks and intellectual non-university organizations on the right - and they're also much more active recruiters.
The organizational structure of conservative think tanks (and even conservative magazines and journals) was set up in large part to provide a theoretical backbone to conservative ideas. As such, there is a large surrogate market designed specifically for conservative intellectuals, particularly those who may be hesistant to enter what they perceive as a liberal market (which, in turn, fulfills the selfsame fear by creating a market more skewed towards liberals). It's not just that a materialist conservative outlook is driving people from low-pay academia to high-pay business, but that there is a market set up to absorb the exact sorts of conservatives that might otherwise go towards academia.
There's a lot to be said for the fact that conservatives have a far more robust apparatus designed to recruit conservative minds for conservative causes, particularly in this case.
I think the author of this post sort of misses the point of the whole "college admissions offices look at the whole candidate" idea. Guess what? Stanford and Amherst don't admit people the same way Florida State does - and there's a reason for that.
Florida State has 22,000+ applicants for each class, and accepts about 14,500 of them - about 2/3. Harvard receives 21,000 applications per year and accepts a little over 2,000 of them - less than 10%. This disparity in acceptance rates causes the schools' admissions programs to be run differently. It's not a "Hollywood fiction" to say that Harvard is going to evaluate students differently (more in-depth, at the very least) than a far larger state university. Having gone to a selective school myself, the whole "SATs don't count as much as the overall application" idea was true - there were so many applicants with similar scores and grades that accepting people by grades alone was simply unfeasible. Different colleges admit people in different ways.
It's a really strange indictment of "anti-standardized testing" forces, that's for sure.
Andrew Sullivan brings up the elephant in the room of the whole academia debate. Are there fewer conservatives in academia because liberals are simply smarter?
The conventional answer to this is that conservatives are discriminated against in the hiring process. That's nonsensical for two reasons. First, it's utterly unproven. Second, this overwhelming liberal tilt had to occur somehow. Theoretically, there had to be a time when there weren't professors, and then that had to merge into a time when there were many and they were overwhelmingly liberal. Since academia did not start out as an arm of the Left, it doesn't work to argue that conservatives faced discrimination from the beginning.
So where does that leave us? Well, the conservative philosophy tends to be very materialistic. That's not a criticism, it's a simple observation. Conservative economic systems attempt to make it easier to acquire and retain wealth. Liberal systems, by contrast, treat money as an engine for social progress. It's nice if people get rich, but it's even nicer if everyone has health care. That ideological split is instructive. Those who can get into academia are, in most cases, highly educated and intelligent. Usually, they could be making significantly more in the private sector. So those who enter in the public sector tend to rank material acquisition as a lower priority, a value hierarchy consistent with liberal ideals. The flip side of this would be conservatives entering the private sector, as material wealth is more highly regarded within their value system and the public sector is a terrible route through which to acquire it.
If this analysis is correct, the fault lies not with the highly charged, politically active liberals. It lies with the conservatives who are unwilling to go into academia and teach the next generation. If true, then it is not up to the Left to fix the problem by shutting up, it is up to the Right to fix the problem by encouraging their best and brightest to train the young and ensure their values are given a fair hearing.
It absolutely amazes me how easy it is for campus conservatives to propose fixes for liberal bias that absolutely contradict their other beliefs. Everything from ideological affirmative action to anti-PC censorship comes down the pike. But neither is as disturbing as the recent move towards political McCarthyism. The logical quirk seems endemic; but it's self-contradictory and just plain wrong:
In order to protect the rights of conservative students, the CU-Boulder College Republicans, an organization affiliated with Students for Academic Freedom, have put together a Web site to collect complaints about left-leaning faculty members. This Web site allows conservative students, whose voices have been shut down in many classrooms, to speak out. [...]
Students who feel their rights are being infringed upon or their views are being swayed by overbearing professors should report such incidents on the national Web site for Students for Academic Freedom. Doing so promotes awareness of the gravity of the situation. It gives back to conservative students what some professors have taken away – their voice.
I was told by David Horowitz that the best classroom possible would be one where you didn't know the ideological background of the instructor. Mike S. Adams seems to be to the right of Horowitz on this issue - he believes that any good conservative parent should make sure to put their kids through an intensive battery of intensely conservative Christian books, including works by Thomas "Kidney Bean" Sowell, David "I Swear, If I Was Taking Pain Pills For Fun, This Book Would At Least Be Entertaining, In That Lewis Carroll/Hunter S. Thompson Sense" Limbaugh, and Dinesh "Racism Isn't Dead? Really?" D'Souza.
It's a curious taxonomy of bias - apparently, if you load your kid up with enough right-wing material, they'll make it through an apparently left-wing academic experience as fair, balanced, and independent-minded thinkers. Or, they'll be the same screaming conservative activists that annoy the majority of their classmates about as much as the screaming liberal activists do. (I'm sorry, but college activism was universally high-minded and annoying, even the stuff I was inclined to agree with.)
You know, I was going to remark on his calling Michelle Malkin and Joel Mowbray talented young conservative writers, but then I realized that the standards for conservative writers are so far gone from anything resembling normal standards that it's actually perfectly apt nomenclature.
Something I've been thinking about recently: is anyone else tired of the partisan "issue" books, which are essentially like really shitty book reports?
Pick one topic (or two smaller, but related, subtopics), and tell how the people you don't agree with are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened in relation to that topic. Papers must be 12-15pp., double spaced, with appropriate citations, unless you can't find them.
Suppose that you were at school, and you were passing out a petition on school policy. A longer lunch period. Getting an art class. Banning a divisive and offensive symbol from the school.
Even if the petition were unauthorized...ten days? Two weeks of school for getting some people to sign a sheet of paper?
If you needed even more evidence that our public schools are concerned with the truly pressing issues surrounding childrens' academic experiences...well, it's not in Georgia, sorry.
"Math" will also be replaced by references to "doing stuff with numbers". I can't wait for the next generation of biologists from Georgia.
"Well, if you look here at the mitochondria-"
"The what?"
"This structure here."
"Oh, you mean the swimmy energy thing!"
On second though...maybe I can wait.
Oh, my sweet zero-tolerance Jesus...
District officials said the suspensions Tuesday also were given because the 2-inch-long GI Joe toys violated a policy against bringing toys to school.
"They don't need toys during the school day. If kids are playing with toys, they are not attending to school," Bemiss Elementary School Principal Lorna Spear said.
Okay. When I was in school, we had The Drawer. If you brought something in class that wasn't supposed to be there, it went in The Drawer. The Drawer had a near-mystical quality about it, because everything went in there. Toys, notes, articles of clothing, food...The Drawer was the inescapable abyss in which all matter, organic or inorganic, liquid, solid, or even potentially gas would eventually find itself if discovered by an authority figure.
Have we reached the point where schools can no longer afford Drawers?
They're two inch plastic guns. TWO INCHES! The only manner in which they're actually dangerous is as choking hazards. Were they threatening to swallow them?
Here's an idea: take them from the kids and don't give them back. It worked for several generations of children, many of whom are still lamenting the loss of their Destro action figures in second grade just because they were taking it out of their backpack to show someone.
I swear, that's all I was doing.
Part of me wants to cry at this. Part of me wants to head down to a Nashville public school with my Bang album and see how long I'd last before getting arrested.
Then another part of me chimes in with the whole "you don't want a criminal record" thing. That part also recommends that I pick up an Armored Saint discography and head over to the local Catholic school.
I will rock them through the spirit of Christ. And Satan. It's a bit of a twofer.
Shorter Stanley Kurtz:
A professor who thinks that college is a place to become politically aware and to not only learn about ideas but also to critically assess and challenge them is indoctrinating her students with liberalism because she thought "feminists are slutty whores" was a poor interpretation of feminist principles.
Get that asshole out of academia before she ruins another young mind by telling them that "Mussolini was a fucktard" is not an appropriate thesis for a paper on the fall of European fascism.
Those College Republicans sure know how to have a fuckin' awesome time, yo.
"We want concrete examples of bias in our arsenal when we go to the administration, the regents and the Legislature," said Brad Jones, 20, chairman of the College Republicans, who launched the Web site last week.
The CU College Republicans are affiliated with Students for Academic Freedom, a national organization started by California conservative activist David Horowitz, who is pushing a Colorado effort to protect students from what the group sees as harassment or discrimination based on political beliefs.
Now, I would never claim to be the king of cool, but when your extracurricular activities involve David Horowitz...you're lame. No offense to my college friends who brought David Horowitz to Swarthmore...but it's true.
Anyone want to bet that the discrimination involves such things as having liberals talk and not embracing "academic" conservative ideas like the moral depravity of homosexuals, the traitorous nature of liberalism, and supply-side economics?
Eugene Volokh criticizes an article attacking the worth of the SAT. I'm not going to get into his critique, but I will say this. I had a 2.2 in high school. I did terribly, I couldn't stand it, and I would never have gotten into college with those grades. I got a 1450 on my SAT''s on the first try and it got me into UC Santa Cruz. I have a 3.7 here and am about as productive of a student as you could ask. There's a very good case to be made that I didn't deserve to get into college, in fact, it's probably correct. But, in this case, my SATs were a far better predictor of my college performance than were my grades. Surely that isn't a universal phenomenon, but it's also not limited to me. To scrap standardized testing in favor of grades is to demand that all students do well in one sort of challenge in order to go to college. Those students who do badly on that challenge but have talents or abilities not predicted in their grades are sacrificed.
Mike Adams is angry. P--sed, if you will. F---ing rid--ulously g---amn p-eved. You see, a queer theory professor (actually a graduate student with an alleged chip on her shoulder - and a socialist, according to Adams) got angry because she heard him in the hall yelling about "killing liberal commies". Rather than explain why he was doing so, Adams, by his own account, got pi--y and told her she could come into the class if she wanted.
Now, it's been a while since I've been in college (nearly seven months), but I know that if a professor of mine did anything that might be seen as disruptive to other classrooms, including yelling random s--t in the hallway like a f---ing a---ole, that he or she should (and most likely would) explain to surrounding professors just what in the h--l they were doing, rather than acting like a walking c-ck.
Unfortunately, he did not take the valuable thirty seconds out of his unorthodox pedagogical style of yelling things in the hallway to explain to her what he was actually doing, leaving her to draw her own assumptions. She proceeded to badmouth him to students based on her knowledge of the situation, and rather than walk across the hall and talk to her, he proceeded to write a syndicated column about how stupid her field of study is.
Ah, the maturity and poise of the ivory tower.
She's teaching queer theory, which, for the "unindoctrinated" (i.e., the people who work in academia but don't care to learn anything), queer theory is a body of socialogical study which studies the historical and cultural construction of sexual identity, and which challenges the normal political structures of queer vs. straight, showing that the two categories are not the simple binary often portrayed, and that sexual identity is a far more complex and historically intertwined view than "God said gay people were bad, and that's that". It's actually a pretty fun area of academic study, and one which sidesteps the decidedly non-academic discussion of homosexuality generally favored in political discourse. Which is quite a bit more complicated and valid than Adams' blithe dismissal of it.
But, I guess that Adams had his b--ch a-- ear pressed to the f---ing door and couldn't actually be bothered to stay for the whole g---amn thing.
Can I just say that this is a horrible idea?
*Many* standardized tests *are designed* to show a standard range of scores. There should be an average towards which most scores gravitate, and an upper and lower end. *Some* standardized tests *are designed to show a similar range around its standard each year, and years where scores deviate out of that range, the test should be rewritten to maintain that same balance.
There's additionally the issue of how progress is measured (as also brought up in comments). Do we have two standardized tests a year to measure improvement? Do we compare entirely different classes with different students (which may negate real improvement or real weakness because of differences between the groups of students you're dealing with)? Do we ask students to improve over some school or national average?
I'd also say that tying a teacher's pay to year-to-year improvement creates a rather disturbing relationship between teacher and student, and an awful pedagogical environment.
(Clarifications between the asterisks.)
The Washington Post has a story on "Campus Watch", a conservative anti-academic group that fancies itself the vanguard of academic integrity when it comes to the Middle East...as headed by Daniel Pipes.
"We are like the toaster specialists who want to see how the toaster works," he said.
Besides missing the point of McCarthyism (which wasn't some sort of special Senatorial perk), how often is a toaster dubbed the "toaster of hate", like Prof. Rashid Khalidi was? I missed the patriotism rating in the last issue of Consumer Reports, but I'm also a skimmer...so who knows?
Way to sound threatening in the most ineffectual way possible, my man.
In a world gone mad with perceived pro-Muslim bias...one man is left to scour academic websites in the middle of the night. He will round up the uncontrolled syllabi of America's "liberal" campuses. He will harvest the most innocuous articles from free campus newspapers - online!
This spring...there is nothing that can stop his web browsing. He is...Lame.
The solution being, of course, to present both sides, but then come to the conclusion that Daniel Pipes is de facto right because he's angrier about it. One of the main problems I have with Campus Watch and groups like it is that they're driven by a vastly conservative, anti-academic ideology that dictates to academia its proper positions and invalidates en masse opinions and arguments that run counter to it. This article in and of itself does exactly what Pipes and Co. want it to, which is to circulate the idea of systematic bias while waiting for the grains of evidence to sift through their filter.
It's ironic simply because it's so entirely counter to the idea of academic study. Instead of looking at the available evidence and coming to a conclusion based on what's observed, the conclusion is already reached, and any potential evidence that comes down the pike simply reinforces their overarching conviction, because it was right anyway.
NOTE TO DAVID BROOKS: I am not an anti-Semite.
...an angel loses its wings.
First things first: did Chick steal Townhall's layout, or did Townhall steal Chick's layout?
The author of this piece says that evolution is the false religion of the Communist devil because scientists haven't been able to replicate in the past half-century a process that evolutionary theory claims took hundreds of thousands, even millions of years.
Only living cells can make RNA, because they must have the complex instructions God put in their DNA. Instructions never write themselves. Yet, atheists are forced to believe they once did or give up their strong faith in these pseudo scientific religious myths.
Remind me never to have these folks around when the next Renaissance comes.
Oh, and today's a twofer. Speaking of Townhall, Dennis Prager goes in for some critical assessment when he realizes that a significant portion of his readership is so entirely credulous that it can't tell a crappy parody from his serious nonsensical rantings about Jimmy Carter.
Because they're gullibly naive ideologues who would believe that Tom Daschle ran the Holy Church of the Dark Lord out of his basement if someone who agreed with them politically could say it with a straight face?
Unofrtunately, Atrios is just wrong on his read of the UC fee hikes:
Where this money is coming from, I don't know and I'm scared to find out. But on this issue, he's on the side of the angels.
Charles Kuffner (who will be over on the sidebar as soon as I stop being lazy), notes a controversy over Texas A&M;'s admissions policy: namely, that students will not benefit from affirmative action, but will benefit from legacy admissions.
An argument that I've heard, and one which seems to make the most sense with regards administration, is that it's about money. The idea is that legacy admissions can be justified by pointing to the bottom line - legacy students bring in money from donor parents.
One might wonder, then, why affirmative action couldn't be justified through the same lens. By giving preference to communities you might not otherwise reach, you expand your potential donor base - not just to families, but also to related activist organizations. In fact, many businesses support affirmative action for just this reason - not only does minority hiring appeal to minority communities (who in turn reward it with their dollars), but it also sheds light on how to appeal to minorities through the market, which increases the bottom line.
It doesn't answer Charles' question, but it does provide another light on the affirmative action/legacy admission comparison. Plus, it'll give my kid a super leg-up if they want to go to Swarthmore. And Swarthmore incorporates legacy admissions. And they still have affirmative action. And the kid doesn't want to go to my wife's school, or somewhere else entirely, or do something else entirely.
Oh God...what if I never have kids?!? What if I never meet the right woman?!? Jesus, Kuffner, thanks for giving me a panic attack.
This guy's retellin of his university's mandatory sexual harassment seminar made me laugh out loud. Gotta love the PC forces:
Someone demanded querulously from the back, "But how do you know they're unwanted until you try?" (OK, it was me.) David seemed oddly flummoxed by the question, and began anxiously jangling the change in his pants pocket. "Do you really want me to answer that?" he asked.
Another person said helpfully, "What about smoldering glances?" Everyone laughed. A theater professor guiltily admitted to complimenting a student on her hairstyle that very afternoon (one of the "Do Nots" on the pretest)—but wondered whether as a gay male,not to have complimented her would be grounds for offense. He started mimicking the female student, tossing her mane around in a "notice my hair" manner. People shouted suggestions for other pretest scenarios for him to perform. Rebellion was in the air. Someone who studies street gangs whispered to me, "They've lost control of the room." David was jangling his change so frantically you had to strain to hear what anyone was saying.
My attention glued to David's pocket, I recalled a long-forgotten pop psychology guide to body language that identified change-jangling as an unconscious masturbation substitute. (And isn'tCaptain Queeg's habit of toying with a set of steel marbles in his pants pocket diagnosed by the principal mutineer in Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny as closet masturbation?) If the very leader of our sexual harassment workshop was engaging in potentially offensive public masturbatory-like behavior, what hope for the rest of us!
Eugene Volokh has an interesting post on the racial gap in education. Basically, he points to a poll that finds:
Most of the whites, by contrast, said their parents would give them a hard time if their children came home with anything less than a B-minus.
By contrast, most of the Asian students, whether immigrant or native-born, said that their parents would be upset if they brought home anything less than an A-minus.
Public schooling in this country relies more on mechanical work than anything else, it doesn't measure familiarity with the material or intelligence nearly as well as it measures the ability to sit down and grind away at something mind numbingly boring. Now, if public education is meant to prep children for factory work (as it was at one time) that makes sense, but in current context, it doesn't. There were may top students at my school who, do to pressure at home, absolutely hated doing work, learning, and had no time to do things they enjoyed more. They might get into good colleges, but they did not emerge well rounded and happy people, an outcome I tend to see as far more important. So the racial gap does need to be closed, but the suggestion that we do it by cracking the whip at children just doesn't fly with me. Quantifiable achievement is too often taken as the ultimate goal in schooling when it is really just the easiest measuring stick.
There's something about this which is even more wrong than it should be.
Faced with overcrowded classrooms, Lee County officials agreed to buy the vacant buildings last week. Renovating them will be slightly less expensive than building new ones, and since the structures are already in place they can open sooner.
"If we don't use facilities like Kmart, our overcrowding will be horrendous," Estero High Principal Fred Bode said. "We need to get beyond the aesthetics of a school."
Well, at least the economic recovery and K-Mart's managerial incompetence will provide room for schools across the nation.