Charles Murray finally admits that school choice isn't about performance, it's about ideology

For decades conservatives have been telling anyone who would listen that U.S. needed to destroy the entire public education system in this country and replace it with a system of vouchers whereby parents could send their kids to any school -- public or private.  We were told that if schools were forced to compete with each other, the magic of the market would naturally lead to better schools and improved test scores.  Never mind that this same market just pissed your 401(k) down the drain while enriching Goldman Sachs and destroying the global financial system almost overnight.

Progressives correctly recognized the wolf in sheep's clothing -- vouchers would be a subsidy to conservative families who already pull their kids out of public schools to send them to religious schools.  And progressives knew that the vouchers would never be large enough to cover the full cost of education -- conservatives' goal of course was to punish poor people and brown people by giving tax breaks to the rich while destroying the educational system serving the rest of the country.

Then a funny thing happened.  President Clinton called their bluff.  He said 'you want to create your own schools -- fine.  We'll call 'em charter schools -- they'll still exist within the public school system -- but you can run 'em and any kid who wants to can attend your charter school.'

So all sorts of philanthropists and entrepreneurs and ideologues of various stripes poured into the school system to create charter school -- all with the goal of showing the existing educational leaders that they (the newbies) knew better.

Now after a nearly 18 years of experimentation in creating and running charter schools a new study is out that looks at the effectiveness of charter schools.  And results are not impressive:

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.” 

Like always, exposed to the rigors of the real world, conservative ideology falls apart:

Perhaps the sharpest knock on charters — one that even some proponents acknowledge — is that mediocrity is widely tolerated. Authorities are reluctant to close poor schools. Some advocates concede that the intellectual premise behind school choice — that in a free market for education, parents will remove students from bad schools in favor of good ones — has not proved true.

“If you look at the hopes and dreams from 1992, it didn’t pan out that quality would rise because of marketplace accountability,” said James Merriman, chief executive of the New York City Charter School Center. “It turns out you need government accreditation to drive quality, and the human capital to make schools go. The hard lesson is, it is so dependent on human capital.” 

You would think that conservatives would put their tail between their legs and crawl back under the rock they came from.  But if there is one thing we know about conservatives, evidence to the contrary rarely derails their dystopian dreams.

So into the debate walks cracker ass cracker racist mutherfucker Charles Murray with an Op Ed in the New York Times this week. [For those who don't know Charles Murray, he's the author of the Mein Kampf of modern conservatism, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life that argues that wealthy white people who have every advantage in the world are just better people than poor people of color and so they deserve all the advantages they get.  Like Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged it's an execrable piece of writing and thinking -- and like Atlas Shrugged it sold like crazy because it basically functions as conservative porn.]  And in his Op Ed on May 4, Why Charter Schools Fail the Test, Murray finally admits what progressive have been pointing out for years -- school choice isn't about effectiveness, it isn't about test scores, it isn't about education, it is solely about ideology.  Murray:

As an advocate of school choice, all I can say is thank heavens for the Milwaukee results [that showed the charter schools underperformed regular public schools]. Here’s why: If my fellow supporters of charter schools and vouchers can finally be pushed off their obsession with test scores, maybe we can focus on the real reason that school choice is a good idea. Schools differ in what they teach and how they teach it, and parents care deeply about both, regardless of whether test scores rise.

...And yet, knowing that [that charter schools do not outperform regular public schools], I would still send my own children to that charter school in a heartbeat. They would be taught the content that I think they need to learn, in a manner that I consider appropriate. 

Murray doesn't care if kids are learning.  He doesn't care if the nation falls behind other nations in math and science and economic competitiveness.  His ideology tells him that schools should teach in a certain way and the results be damned.

New Rule: No Civil Disobedience Until You've Made 1,000 Phone Calls

White people love getting arrested for protesting things they claim to care about. In fact, I'm surprised that the blog Stuff White People Like hasn't already done a post on civil disobedience -- because if there is one thing white people love, it's getting arrested for a good cause. 

I want to share my own experiences with civil disobedience briefly and then make the case that white people should do a whole lot more phone calling and a whole lot less getting arrested to show how much they care.

Nineteen years ago, the first Persian Gulf War was just starting to heat up.  I was in college and I started participating in meetings on campus about how to stop the war.  One of the first suggestions that came up was, 'let's commit civil disobedience.'  Out of an anti-war group of roughly 200 people, about 30 of us split off to form an Affinity Group dedicated to pursuing civil disobedience. As I learned, ya gotta have an Affinity Group to do this kinda thing.  Everyone in the Affinity Group plans an action and then some members volunteer to get arrested while the rest of the members witness (talk with press and police) and then post bail to get the arrested members our of jail.

Members of our Affinity Group tried to get arrested in a "Die In" at the White House prior to the start of the war.  But the D.C. police have seen everything and they hate the additional paperwork from having to arrest people every weekend.  So they just let us die in and lay on the cold hard pavement while they stood around chatting with each other.  Their supply of donuts and coffee was greater than our supply of warm clothes and patience, so we returned home unarrested.

Undaunted we did a civil disobedience vigil at the Federal Building in Philadelphia a few days later.  But again, we couldn't get arrested to save our lives.  Black people get arrested for driving a car in the wrong neighborhood, brown people get arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts but white people can't get arrested even when they BEG the cops to arrest them.

And then, the 100-hour (1st) Persian Gulf War was over.  The short duration of the war was actually a problem because many of our non-hierarchical Affinity Group meetings took 5 or 6 hours.  By the end of the war our Affinity Group had probably spent more hours in planning meetings than the war itself took.

But we were determined to get arrested doing civil disobedience.  The next event on the progressive protest calendar was Earth Day.  So a subset of our Affinity Group -- the more environmentally minded members, split off to form a separate Affinity Group to do civil disobedience in connection with Earth Day.

So on April 22, we dutifully headed up to Manhattan for an Earth Day protest on Wall Street.  While the D.C. police seem intent on ignoring you, the NYPD seemed more focused on humiliating protesters.  They herded us into a little square "official protest zone" purposefully designed to make our numbers look small and pitiful against the backdrop of the NY Stock Exchange.  Too cramped to march around, we were supposed to yell while standing in place behind a series of metal barricades across the street and down about a block from our intended target.

Our group quickly surmised that being crammed into the official protest zone was worse than useless.  So we wandered around looking for ways to get our message across.  And sure enough, a couple blocks away we discovered a local news crew doing a live broadcast about the protests.  Sensing correctly that this was about the only chance we were going to have to get our message out -- one of the members of our group walked out into the middle of the street and just stood there.  He was promptly joined by four or five other members of our group and they stood together holding hands in a line blocking traffic on a major Manhattan street (now that I think about it, I believe the street they were blocking was Broadway).  The timing was impeccable.  The news cameras had something to focus on, the reporter had something to talk about, and the riot police had someone to arrest.

I videotaped the whole encounter.  The Rodney King beatings had just happened in LA, showing both the ruthlessness of the LAPD and the importance of videotape.  We figured that if police could see that we had a camera recording our actions -- that our protesters would be less likely to be harmed.  

Within about two minutes our group was rustled into the back of a waiting NYPD paddy wagon. Our members sang a little song as the doors closed and the paddy wagon drove off.  And our Earth Day Protest had made the morning news in the largest media market in the U.S.

But here's the thing -- the protest made absolutely no difference.  There was no policy that we were advocating, no specific law that we were trying to pass.  It was pure white guilt kabuki theater.  It made us feel better for a day -- that we were doing something -- when in fact, we weren't actually accomplishing anything.  

So I just want to make 2 related points about civil disobedience:

1.  We are doing it wrong.  Almost all modern uses of civil disobedience bear NO resemblance to the civil disobedience committed by Martin Luther King, Jr.  The situation facing the civil rights movement was completely different than the situation facing privileged white Americans today.  In the deep south in the 1950s blacks couldn't vote so they had to resort to means outside of the electoral system. Moreover, MLK and the SCLC were breaking unjust laws.  MLK wasn't blocking traffic just to get arrested.  The laws that were broken -- sitting in at lunch counters, crossing a bridge to the other side of town (where blacks weren't allowed), sitting at the front of a public bus -- all of those were unjust laws.  Through their actions the civil rights movement was saying, 'we are challenging your authority to rule because you are violating widely held moral principles of fairness and justice.'  The thing I disliked about our Wall Street protest was that we had no problem with the traffic laws in Manhattan -- but that was the law that we were breaking.  In most modern uses of civil disobedience, the law that is being broken is completely unrelated to the issue that is being protested.  It's just protest as theater -- which is not the purpose of civil disobedience.

2. Civil disobedience should only be a last resort, not a first resort.  Civil disobedience should only be used after ALL other avenues to reach a resolution have been exhausted.  Look, if you care enough to get arrested, you should care enough to at least make a few phone calls first to ask for a redress of your grievances.  But how many phone calls do most protesters make before getting arrested?  Real phone calls -- to people who don't agree with you but who are in a position to do something to improve the situation?  Prior to our protest on Wall Street NONE of our group had made ANY phone calls to any of these Wall Street firms to ask them to change their behavior.

Look, creating lasting change is about gaining power.  And the way you build power is through building relationships.  And the way you build relationships is through talking with lots and lots of people.

So I propose a new rule:

Thou Shalt Not Commit Civil Disobedience Until You've Made At Least 1,000 Phone Calls.

Calling the President, your two Senators, and your Representative in the House -- that takes 4 calls.  So what are you going to do with your other 996 calls?  Ah, that's where it gets interesting.  Who has a vote or say in making the decision that you want to see enacted?  Who are they connected with?  What do they care about?  How do they see the world?  If you are unhappy with a company -- who are their largest shareholders?  Largest customers? Points of vulnerability to public opinion? If you are upset with a politician -- how many calls can you make to voters in his/her district?

The fact is, if progressives (as a movement) required that no one could participate in a civil disobedience protest until he/she had made 1,000 targeted calls -- then we would never need to get arrested. If we each made 1,000 phone calls we would win on almost every issue that we care about because our members would be building the sorts of networks of relationships that lead to power.

The 1,000 phone call rule could be seen as a rite of passage -- like the100,000 prostrations, known as "chak-boom" in Tibetan, required of anyone who aspires to become a Buddhist monk. 

If you are not making phone calls, knocking on doors, and talking with people who can impact the outcome of a decision -- then you are not actually serious about your issue.  You are just engaging in kabuki -- narcissistic performance art to assuage your white guilt to make yourself feel better. 

heckuva paragraph

In the midst of an otherwise unremarkable Modern Love column in today's NY Times comes this absolute gem of a paragraph:

It’s hard to say when our differences began to eclipse what we had in common. I kept thinking things would right themselves, but our marriage had become like a radio that played only static; we couldn’t find a clear frequency no matter how much we fiddled with the dial.
--Katie Brandi, Anchors Don't Come in Pretty Boxes

link of the week

This is a topic I've touched on before.  But Ezra Klein really hits it out of the park with his interview of an anonymous Harvard graduate who went to work for Goldman Sachs in an article titled, "Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street?"  Because really, at the end of the day it's kinda bizarre that many of Americas best and brightest go to work for these Wall Street firms that are basically mobsters with better clothes.  Money quote:

Investment banking was never something I thought I wanted to do. But the recruiting culture at Harvard is extremely powerful. In the midst of anxiety and trying to find a job at the end of college, the recruiters are really in your face, and they make it very easy. One thing is the internship program. It's your junior year, it's January or February, and you interview for internships. If all goes well, it's sort of a summer-long interview. And if that goes well, you have an offer by September of your senior year, and that's very appealing. It makes your senior year more relaxed, you can focus on your thesis, you can drink more. You just don't have to worry about getting a job.

Oh so THAT'S why Colgate Total Toothpaste causes my tongue to go numb!

A few months ago I bought a tube of Colgate Total Toothpaste at my local Target. It made my teeth look shiny but it also caused my tongue to go numb.  Not a good side effect for a toothpaste.  So I called Colgate and told them about the problem.  The customer service rep read a script that said, "We're sorry that you had that experience. It is not a problem that we expect.  But there are many ingredients in toothpaste and everyone reacts differently.  We'll send you a coupon for a free tube of toothpaste."  So I got a coupon worth $1.81 and felt pleased with myself for taking some sort of action.  And just as the lawyers (who drew up the script read by the customer service agent) hoped, that seemed like the end of the story. 

But today, buried deep within the LA Times health section was an article titled, "FDA is reviewing the use of antibacterial products containing triclosan."  It turns out that triclosan is an antibacterial chemical that is used in hand soaps and yes, Colgate Total Toothpaste.  Turns out triclosan is also an endocrine disruptor that interferes with "thyroid hormones, thereby impairing growth and brain development." It also interferes with the reproductive hormones estrogen and testosterone, leading to infertility. Money quotes from the article:

"There's no question that exposure to triclosan is widespread in the U.S. A national health survey found triclosan in the urine of 75% of the 2,517 people who gave samples. The chemical can enter the body via absorption through the skin or the lining of the mouth.

Mae Wu, a program attorney at the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group in Washington, D.C., says that even people who deliberately try to avoid antimicrobial products still end up getting exposed because the soaps are in public restrooms, offices and restaurants.

What triclosan does once it enters the body is not clear. Research in animals has found hormonal effects of triclosan, including upsetting the normal balance of thyroid hormones, thereby impairing growth and brain development, and of the reproductive hormones estrogen and testosterone, leading to infertility. These effects are similar to other so-called endocrine disruptors, such as bisphenol A, dioxins and pesticides such as DDT. The FDA says it intends to evaluate this new research."
-- Jill U Adams, LA Times, April 19, 2010. 

I thought it was a little creepy that they claimed that their toothpaste continued working for 12 hours!  But seriously, to put a fucking endocrine disruptor in my toothpaste!!!  WTF!? 

A few years ago I took a homeopathic treatment for a chronic ailment and it worked better than any prescription medicine I had tried.  Interestingly, the homeopath said that in order for this treatment to work I could never ever drink coffee, smoke, or use mint.  "It turns the remedy off," she said.  I don't think for a moment that the magic sugar pills actually produced the helpful result.  Rather, by religiously observing the rules about avoiding coffee I was finally able to sleep again and I believe that helped my body to repair itself. I imagine those who cut out smoking (not a problem for me since I already didn't smoke) also saw similar benefits from the subtraction of the toxic particle pollution rather than the addition of the sugar pills. But I could never figure out why mint was also prohibited.  The only real consequence of that prohibition was that I  changed toothpaste -- from Colgate to Tom's of Maine (Anise flavor).  But it now it makes sense -- by banning mint, homeopaths also get people to stop using traditional toothpaste -- and it turns out that traditional toothpastes are loaded with all sorts of nasty chemicals like saccharine, titanium dioxide, and triclosan.  And because the gums are a mucous membrane, brushing your teeth with traditional toothpaste then allows these chemicals to enter your bloodstream.

Elizabeth Gilbert on same-sex marriage

I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Gilbert.  I really enjoy her voice on the page and I benefit from watching how she works through problems -- depression in Eat, Pray, Love and her doubts about marriage in Committed. Look, I get the criticisms of her writing (that it can be self indulgent, self absorbed, unaware of the vast privileges she enjoys).  But really that criticism can be leveled against the entire memoir genre for the most part.

I actually think Gilbert is a much better writer than most folks (even her fans) give her credit for.  Gilbert's ability to synthesize and summarize massive amounts of research into just a paragraph or two to set up a scene or a chapter is really quite amazing.  In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert gives the entire history of a town or a particular Buddhist meditation practice in just a few paragraphs to set up the narrative about her experience. Some of those paragraphs must have taken months of research just to get those 10 sentences right -- but she makes it look effortless. Her research into the history of marriage in Committed is equally skillful.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage is a different book than Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert is older, a better writer, and wrestling with a different set of issues this time.  But the book stands on its own quite well and provides an insightful history of marriage and a compelling memoir of a woman wrestling with her doubts about getting married for the second time.

But today I want to quote from a section in chapter 3 of Committed to share her thoughts on same-sex marriage.  I think she makes a compelling, conservative case for gay marriage:

     Anyhow, to be perfectly honest, I find it a bit crazy that social conservatives are fighting so hard against this at all, considering that it's quite a positive thing for society in general when as many intact families as possible live under the estate of matrimony.  And I say this as someone who is -- I think we can all agree by now -- admittedly suspicious of marriage.  Yet it's true.  Legal marriage, because it restrains sexual promiscuity and yokes people to their social obligations, is an essential building block of any orderly community.  I'm not convinced that marriage is always so terrific for every individual within the relationship but that's another question altogether.  There is no doubt -- not even within my rebellious mind -- that in general, matrimony stabilizes the larger social order and is often exceedingly good for children.
     If I were a social conservative then -- that is to say, if I were somebody who cared deeply about social stability, economic prosperity, and sexual monogamy -- I would want as many gay couples as possible to get married.  I would want as many of every kind of couple as possible to get married.  I recognize that conservatives are worried that homosexuals will destroy and corrupt the institution of marriage, but perhaps they should consider the distinct possibility that gay couples are actually poised at this moment in history to save marriage.  Think of it!  Marriage is on the decline everywhere, all across the Western world.  People are getting married later in life, if they're getting married at all, or they are producing children willy-nilly out of wedlock, or (like me) they are approaching the whole institution with ambivalence or even hostility.  We don't trust marriage anymore, many of us straight folk.  We don't get it.  We're not at all convinced that we need it.  We feel as though we can take it or leave it behind forever.  All of which leaves poor old matrimony twisting in the winds of cold modernity.
     But just when it seems like maybe all is lost for marriage, just when matrimony is about to become as evolutionarily expendable as pinkie toes and appendixes, just when it appears that the institutions will wither slowly into obscurity due to a general lack of social interest, in come the gay couples, asking to be included!  Indeed, pleading to be included!  Indeed, fighting with all their might to be included in a custom which may be terrifically beneficial for society as a whole but which many -- like me -- find only suffocating and old-fashioned and irrelevant.
     It might seem ironic that homosexuals -- who have, other the centuries, made an art form out of leading bohemian lives on the outer fringes of society -- want so desperately now to be part of such a mainstream tradition.  Certainly not everyone understands this urge to assimilate, not even within the gay community.  The filmmaker John Waters, for one, says that he always thought the only advantages of being gay were that he didn't have to join the military and he didn't have to get married.  Still, it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as full integrated, socially responsible, family-centered, taxpaying, Little League-coaching, nation-serving, respectably married citizens.  So why not welcome them in? Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic, ne'er-do-well, heterosexual deadbeats like me?  --Elizabeth Gilbert, pages 74 to 76, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. 

a theory on relationships

Okay I've got a new theory on relationships:

The key to any relationship -- romantic, workplace, relationships between citizens, etc. -- is that both parties share the same platonic ideal of what that relationship should look like.

If you think the platonic ideal of a romantic relationship is a white picket fence with two kids and a dog -- and your partner thinks the platonic ideal of a romantic relationship is a life of vagabond travel with occassional bursts of polyamory -- that relationship just ain't ever gonna work.

By the same token, if your platonic ideal workplace is a vision of collaboration, communication, and democratic decision making -- and your boss's platonic ideal is a workplace where employees know their place and speak when spoken to -- it ain't gonna work.

And nationally, when one political party's vision of the platonic ideal of the nation-state is a European-style multicultural democracy with a vibrant public sector and a sturdy safety net, and the other party dreams of a Milton Friedman/Ayn Rand inspired White Somalia with no regulations governed by theocratic misogynistic Old Testament (Christian Sharia) law -- well, needless to say, the political debates are gonna be difficult. 

This post is really just the flip side of the coin to the argument I made in my earlier post on mutuality. It just seems to me that before any two parties (in ANY relationship -- romantic, workplace, citizen to citizen, etc.) get into a conversation about any specific area of disagreement, we should first have a conversation about what our platonic ideal is of how we think things ought to look (and why).  And furthermore, only through a  continual dialogue regarding the platonic ideal (the form, process, and goal -- the telos of the relationship) can we ever hope to see any sort of shift in our platonic ideals so that we might eventually come to some sort of consensus about how things ought to be.  

abaissement du niveau mental

Heckuva paragraph today by Olga Tokarczuk in an Op Ed in the NY Times about the plane crash that claimed the lives of the Polish President and many of the members of the Polish elite.  She writes:

I am reminded that when a major trauma occurs, the kind that is both individual and collective, something happens that Jungian psychology calls an “abaissement du niveau mental” — a lowering of the level of consciousness. Intellect gives way to the gloom of the collective psyche. The horrified mind tries to find meaning, but lets itself be seduced by old myths. -- Olga Tokarczuk, April 15, 2010

Yep, that is EXACTLY what happened in the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks.  The U.S. regressed in its collective consciousness back to a prior stage of development.  That's the reason that Dennis Miller and Victoria Jackson went from being smart edgy comedians to becoming paranoid delusional spokespeople for radical conservatism.  That's the reason that we were able to elect appoint Bush, a guy with the intelligence of an average high school kid who likes to party, to two terms.  That's the reason that otherwise decent people quickly embraced violations of international law including torture and pre-emptive war. 

I'm just happy to have a term for it now. 

corporatist domination exists because it's an immortality project

As frequent readers of this blog will know, I'm keen to better understand the ways that domination shows up in the economy.  It's my contention that domination and its twin, violence, play a large role in our economy (even in "white collar" jobs); that domination/violence has been at the core of wealth creation for thousands of years; and that the goal of any sort of progressive movement is to move society away from systems of domination and towards systems based on love.  With that in mind...

I stumbled across this quote in Erich Fromm's, "On Disobedience and Other Essays" and thought it relevant to this discussion:

"Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God.  In this way he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself and experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted.  Another possibility of overcoming separatness lies in the opposite direction: man can try to unite himself with the world by having power over it, by making others a part of himself, and thus transcending his individual existence by domination."  Erich Fromm, On Disobedience, page 2.

I think Fromm is really on to something quite profound.

I would argue that no one is a corporatist by nature.  No one comes out of the womb desiring to serve the interests of capital.  Babies want to be in union with others (primarily the mom, but also with dad, brothers, sisters, grandparents, the dog, other kids).  Thus, by definition, all babies are communists. If you want to base your politics on natural law, the only choice is communism because in nature, capital doesn't exist.

But later, as a child hits 7 or 8 years old, and becomes conscious of him/herself and becomes aware of the fact that he/she is finite, perishable, vulnerable, and mortal, he/she begins to search around for immortality projects. And capital, or rather, the pursuit of capital through the control and domination of others (either through slavery or wage slavery or off-shoring of production) becomes a popular immortality project.  Which explains then why corporatists fight against any attempts to regulate or restrict their actions -- as if their lives depended on it. If they ever stopped to think about it, common sense would tell them that their actions are immoral, that paying someone 80 cents an hour violates basic norms of human decency.  But corporatists can't stop -- because the domination of others -- whether it is people within their own household or factory workers 5,000 miles away is their immortality project, the means by which they transcend their individual existence and their fear of death. 

Update #1: Honestly, the more I think about the quote above, the more it seems to me the perfect description for the dynamics within the Republican party.  Namely, the Republican party consists of two blocks -- a handful of overclass corporatists who thrive on domination + large numbers of undereducated white males who submit to the corporatists -- and feel united with them through their acts of submission.  It's a perfect closed loop, an immortality project for both the dominators and the dominated.

Link of the week, April 11

Ian Welsh is one of the finest progressive thinkers in the world.  Largely self taught, his writing breaks through the myths and distortions that too often clutter our political debate.  So when Welsh writes a post called, "Books which influenced me the most" it's definitely worth a look.  As for me, I'm going to click over to Amazon.com to buy Jane Jacobs', “The Economy of Cities”, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”