Journalist, law student and former Army officer Phil Carter has a running play-by-play of the current Gulf War, with value added. Informed, succinct, dispassionate.
Thanks Kyle.
If there is one mantra that dominates every discussion about education in America, it is "accountability." We've heard about "accountability measures" and holding schools "accountable for results." The president and Congress, understandably tired of throwing good money after bad, passed the No Child Left Behind Act to make schools accountable.
But to whom should schools be accountable? A recent briefing at the White House for advocates of school choice addressed that question.
Just as the No Child Left Behind Act was a political peace treaty between the president and a Democratic Senate, it also reflects an ideological detente between two different views of accountability. Some lawmakers want schools to be accountable to government, while others want schools to be accountable to parents.
That is no minor distinction. It reveals two fundamentally opposing views of the role of the state in family life.
Those who prefer government accountability think that future generations should be shaped based on a deliberative democratic process. They embrace the idea of a school system that unites society by teaching roughly the same things to all students. And they think that government agencies are best able to ensure that high standards of quality are met.
But many Americans believe instead that schools should be accountable to parents first. On the heels of a century of public education in neighborhood schools with no choices, this is a radical idea. Its adherents think that families have a right and a duty to shape the next generation. They also think that no bureaucrat can choose schooling for a child as well as a parent can.
Thoughtful lawmakers should join forces with this second group. Government has had decades to decide where children attend school, with poor results. Moreover, while states must now measure the progress of various subgroups - minorities, disabled students, children from low-income families - government agencies cannot hold schools accountable for the performance of individual children.
By contrast, school choice empowers parents to hold schools accountable for the personal success of each child enrolled. Because schools cannot be all things to all people, every parent should be free to choose a school that suits her child's specific needs.
Each faction in the "accountability" debate has its favorite part of the No Child Left Behind Act. Politicians who like government accountability tout new testing regimens and a complex system of monetary penalties and rewards. Those who want to empower parents see the Act as a way to force states to provide choices to families trapped in failing schools.
But the Act's school choice provisions have had little effect. The administration wanted states to give parents of children in failing schools the ability to choose private schools. But the private school option proved a losing battle in Congress, and accountability to parents is still elusive in most places.
School districts with failing schools must only provide transfers to another public school of the district's choosing, and only on a space-available basis. Parents who want to leave all schools that cannot teach -- and will not change -- are finding that they still have no alternatives.
For example, the Chicago Tribune reported last fall that Chicago had about 125,000 students in "failing" schools. But the city allowed fewer than 3,000 transfers to schools only marginally less dreadful than the failing ones.
States must innovate to make schools accountable to parents rather than to bureaucrats. Florida, for example, offers Opportunity Scholarships to children in failing schools. Parents can choose private schools that are "academically accountable to the parent or guardian for meeting the education needs of the student."
At the White House briefing, Education Secretary Rod Paige emphasized the importance of accountability to parents, saying, "Choice is a necessary condition to reform." All speakers implored parents to demand faster state action on the parental choice provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act.
As the besieged education establishment slowly gives ground to reform, the intellectual battle about what "accountability" should mean is no mere skirmish. It will determine how much educational freedom American parents may hope to secure. Secretary Paige described the difficult nature of this battle, saying, "The problem today is not that we don't know what the solution is. We just haven't yet mustered up the political will for those solutions."
Lawmakers who think parents deserve to choose must fight for a version of accountability that empowers them to choose. Without choice, a public agency holding a public school accountable will quickly resemble one blind man leading another.
(Note: This little column is a war casualty, rejected by the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune in the past week and a half. Oh, for a return to peace and domestic policy debate!)
But not until Sunday. I'll be flying out there this afternoon to talk to state lawmakers from around the country about how best to tame the frisky feds with respect to education issues. I'll be sorry to miss drinks and stuff. DC bloggers and Catoites should ponder my plight in tourist class as they sip martinis this evening.
The NYT reports that the Bush administration may reclassify so-called crossover vehicles such as the PT Cruiser under the fedsâ notorious CAFE standards. CAFE now mandates an average fuel efficiency of 27.5 miles per gallon for âcarsâ and 20.7 miles per gallon for âlight trucksâ produced by each manufacturer.
Unsurprisingly, automakers have sifted through reams of regulations to come up with design features â such as removable back seats â that will transform small vehicles into âtrucksâ for the purposes of CAFE. The advantage of doing this is that all those relatively fuel-efficient PT Cruisers can then be used to âsubsidizeâ SUV mileage numbers, pulling down a makerâs overall âlight tuckâ average.
But donât think for a minute that Washington has become attached to the concept of calling a spade a spade. While Cruisers may indeed be reclassified as cars, the station wagons and minivans may be transformed into âtrucks.â
The reason weâre playing vehicular musical chairs? According to one unnamed official, regulators lack authority to simply change rules governing passenger-car mileage without Congressional authorization. Not that that appears to discourage them.
Well, okay, not quite. Still, this Wired magazine article is pretty creepy. Research biologist Bonnie Bassler has apparently discovered that bacteria can use chemical signals to communicate with one another and conduct "the sort of collective strategizing typically ascribed to bees, ants, and people, not to bacteria." Is anyone else uncomfortable with the notion that bacterial life may be "highly social, intricately networked, and teeming with interactions?"
A hugely respectful nod to Radley Balko, Glen Whitman, Julian Sanchez, Gene Healy and others. These bloggers passionately opposed the war before it began, but now hope for the sake of peace and freedom that the warbloggers will be right about everything turning out okay. Itâs this kind of high mindedness that separates thoughtful war opponents from the spoiled children and lunatic fringe who share their issue.
Anyone who has flown regularly in the last several months knows that â while each airport has its own apparently unique and thoroughly inscrutable set of security procedures â 18 months of practice has allowed most airports to knock the worst kinks out of their respective systems. While annoyingly invasive, security personnel have at least mastered crowd control, and it is once again possible to comfortably show up for a domestic flight a mere hour in advance.
Best of all, my college backpack no longer attracts special attention. This trusty brown canvas bag with leather trim used to sound mental alarm bells in every airport I passed through. It didnât matter what I was wearing; something about that sack just screamed âcontains marijuana or other prohibited hippy substance.â No sooner would I put it through the metal detector than a security officer grab it and run a small white drug detector cloth over it. I swear some airport security training manual contains a large picture of my backpack.
But since September 11th, the book has been rewritten on security priorities. I may have to take my boots off, but at least my backpack is no longer the victim of profiling. Not that my problems have completely disappeared. A young Turk of a security officer spent 20 minutes practically ripping out the lining of my bright red rollaboard last month. The moral? Avoid bright colored luggage. Hippies are out. Colorful characters are in.
Stories like this make me proud to be a market liberal. The Cato Institute and the Institute for Justice, two market liberal groups variously described as âconservativeâ and âlibertarianâ by the media (though more accurately the latter), have filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of a Texas law prohibiting consensual adult homosexual sodomy. Argument in the case will be held on March 26th.
Unlike the statute upheld in the 1986 case of Bowers v. Hardwick, the Texas statute facially discriminates against same-sex couples. Prohibited conduct includes both oral sex and what we traditionally think of as âsodomy.â But the law does not prohibit either activity between persons of the opposite sex. The exact same conduct is either legal or illegal under Texas law depending on the gender of the person engaging in it.
Now, the primary argument against the constitutionality of this statute is that it violates the âright to privacy.â Although this right was first formally recognized on the basis of rather poor legal reasoning (the right was held to be âemanatingâ from the âpenumbrasâ of other rights actually listed in the Bill of Rights), the Ninth Amendment provides a good textural basis for recognizing constitutional rights not explicitly listed, but nonetheless indispensable to a free and just society.
Conservatives have long spurned the idea of a right to privacy because it forms the basis of the Courtâs abortion jurisprudence. But whether or not the right should extend to all abortion decisions, conservatives and libertarians who favor limits on state control over family life â including parenting and educational decisions as well as sexual intimacy â ought to favor a strong privacy right. If the Court decides to strike down the Texas statute based on privacy, it will probably have to overturn its earlier decision in Bowers.
Even more interesting is a secondary argument on which Cato and IJ rely. Both groups argue that the law violates equal protection guarantees by discriminating based on the gender of the person committing the act. For example, Mr. A can be convicted for providing oral sex to Mr. B, while Ms. C can do the exact same thing without violating Texas law. Thus, although the law may not have the âpurposeâ of discriminating based on gender (it does, of course, have the mean-spirited purpose of discriminating based on sexual orientation), it does have that effect, and thus canât be upheld unless narrowly tailored to further an important, legitimate government purpose. If the Court strikes down the statute based on this reasoning, marriage laws that now prohibit same sex unions might easily be next.
The NYT interviewed an attorney for the American Center for Law and Justice, a Pat Robertson-affiliated conservative group that filed a brief urging the Court to uphold the Texas law. The lawyerâs quotes make him sound frankly embarrassed by his own position, characterizing the matter as a âtough case, one that we approached with reluctance.â He acknowledged the Cato and IJ efforts as revealing âa diversity of opinion among our side.â
Presumably, by âour sideâ this attorney meant a loose coalition that broadly favors limited government and familial autonomy. If so, he should be embarrassed. This statute is unfair, malicious, and most of all intrusive. In ten years, the coalition to which he refers will regret that it was ever divided on such an issue.
I think I mean that in a positive way. Regardless of how one feels about the war, itâs hard not to be a bit relieved that it is almost over. After months of stressful waiting and vitriolic debate, it looks like the U.S. is going to invade Iraq this week. We can surely agree to hope and pray, if you do, that this invasion proves quick and expert. Afterwards, the U.S. will rework the shards of a shattered nation state, people everywhere will passionately hope for a lasting peace, and pundits will resign themselves to not knowing for sure how things would have turned out otherwise.
My favorite chemically imbalanced catblogger Kyle Hampton floats a theory as to why many domestic analysts dislike addressing foreign policy issues. Whether or not his explanation is exactly correct, he is surely right that those of us in domestic policy are particularly aching for an end to the endless showdown. For one thing, we will regain our audience for those issues we understand well!
From the inimitable Robert Benchley:
"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by then I was too famous."
Read Paul Grahamâs chillingly insightful analysis of what is wrong with American secondary education. In addition to some adolescentsâ lingering lack of empathy (a learned skill), Graham blames the vicious nature of childhood society on the way adults have decided to deal with them.
Grahamâs central thesis is that âthe twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.â That cause, he argues, is the utter lack of meaningful work around which social hierarchies may be organized. People in healthy societies unite around shared missions, such as producing a product, providing legal services, promoting a political cause or fighting a war. Social status depends in large part on oneâs contribution to that mission, and lower status aspirants are more often encouraged than persecuted by the highly skilled. As Graham points out, teenagers used to participate as junior members of adult society in apprenticeship roles.
By contrast, social interactions become neurotic in the absence of external challenges. Graham correctly observes that even bright students seldom take academics seriously in the public schools, which are usually controlled by teachers hostile to talent and insulated from their own mediocrity. Graham analogizes middle school to prison culture, New York socialite culture, and the court culture of the French Empire. Without real goals, status itself is the endgame, and the result is a vicious, zero-sum struggle.
As I recently commented with respect to school bullying, Graham notes that adults often focus merely on containment and superficial order in schools, leaving children to develop isolated subcultures that become pretty vicious. That many students suffer deeply from a lack of meaningful work helps to explain why this escapist novel is so perennially popular among the young.
Grahamâs conclusion is optimistic. Adolescents are not inherently awful. Weâve just created a school environment that would make any group awful. Unfortunately, school reform must start with adults who quickly forget why, exactly, middle school was so bad.
Thanks to Amy Phillips for the link.
Iâve had some long phone conversations recently with a Seattle friend whose relationship has hit the rocks. It seems the trouble started in a big way around late February. I was meditating on this when I realized that this isnât the only troubled relationship Iâm aware of right now. A handful of friends are currently sorting out their romantic ties.
I blame Valentineâs Day.
V Day is unavoidably stressful on most dating relationships, because it creates quite a lot of social pressure for displays of love and commitment. Displays for which the parties themselves may not be ready.
If there is a significant emotional imbalance in a dating relationship, V Day will bring it up, always to ill effect. And then there is also the mutual freak out possibility, when both parties are terrified by the expectations attendant to this Hallmark event, but canât figure out how to completely ignore it. Finally, there are significant numbers of people â usually men, I think â who want to break up, but figure they should stick it out through V Day. This produces a strained and confusing V Day followed by late February/early March meltdown.
Valentineâs Day famously draws vitriol from the unattached, but Iâm not sure it isnât even more pernicious in its effect on those carefully feeling their way through the sweet or bittersweet stages of courtship.
When a happily married, pregnant friend of mine invited me to an âAnti-Valentineâs Dayâ cocktail party, I was bemused. Why should she oppose a holiday that celebrates her good fortune? âIâm for love; Iâm just against the holiday,â she explained. Quite so.
I've decided to quit my job, on advice from Authur Wallace Calhoun:
"A woman's name should appear in print but twice -- when she marries and when she dies."
On second thought, it's really too late for that.