Blogito, Ergo Sum - 22 April 2008

Bob Herbert writes a column about education titled "Clueless in America". The piece informs us that somewhere after the fourth grade, our system starts failing vis-à-vis that of foreigners, for one thing.

“In math and science, for example, our fourth graders are among the top students globally. By roughly eighth grade, they’re in the middle of the pack. And by the 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring generally near the bottom of all industrialized countries.”

For some strange reason, though, Bob seems most concerned about the drop-out rate.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Bob does not make it clear how remaining in a school which wasn't teaching those students adequately, anyhow, would represent an improvement.

Why the "many" are a "too small a fraction" is unspecified, therefore we do not know if this represents a deficiency in Mr. Herbert's mathematical skills or merely an opinion columnist's propensity for preferring to appear to be saying something rather than actually doing so.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, offered a brutal critique of the nation’s high schools a few years ago, describing them as “obsolete” and saying, “When I compare our high schools with what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow.”

Said Mr. Gates: “By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they are broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools — even when they’re working as designed — cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.”

They may or may not be broken, flawed or underfunded...and perhaps there's not even a design flaw, because some work as designed. But they're not doing the job. Got that?

Other than suggesting that dropping out of obsolete high schools which cannot teach a large fraction of our students what they need to know today (even if "many" somehow manage), Mr. Herbert stays on theme to the end, leaving us as clueless afterward as we were when we began.

Mr. Gates has seen the world's schools, the ones which our tanning our britches for us, but likewise offers no clue of what may or may not be wrong, although, he hopefully adds, a case can be made for any number of points...or perhaps not.

Why not tell us what differences he observed in those obviously not-obsolete schools over there so that we might emulate them?

What are they doing better than we do? Are their teachers superior? If so, why are we hiring and paying for inferior teachers? If it isn't the physical plant and the funding, or the qualify of the teaching staff, or even the design, then what in God's name has changed since the days when American education led the rest of the world?

Why don't the elite pundits who can so clearly recognize that there is something wrong, also tell us what to do to remedy the situation? If people like they don't know, what chance do our presidential candidates have?

What differences did Mr. Gates notice when he traveled abroad? What did their school systems have which ours lack? Discipline, perhaps? Respect for the authority and the status of their teachers? Are they given 'real' examinations and required to get a passing grade? Are they required to do homework in order to merely stay abreast of their peers? Do those students care more?

What is the difference in today's schools when compared with those which obviously gave Mr. Herbert an excellent education?

It's very hard for people like me, at 73, not to look back at the "good old days" and see how things were different. I went to a rural high school in flyover country; southern Utah. It was a two-story wooden building built before the turn of the century, heated with pot-bellied cast-iron coal stoves we students were expected to stoke ourselves, and air conditioning was an unknown. The building was actually a firetrap and it burned to the ground not long after I graduated. We often had to share textbooks, since there weren't enough to go around, and so we frequently sat two-to-a-desk. I had three teachers I remember as being outstanding: Ella Adair, Walt Talbot, and Grover Brough. I remember two (I won't name) who I thought were pretty poor. My music teacher was somewhere in between, but at 15 I was passionately in love with his daughter and my judgment may have been affected where he was concerned because he was also clearly one of those people known as "a father" and not simply a teacher.

Our small community was rather poor, too. Nobody starved--that doesn't happen in Mormon communities--but none were exactly rich. And a fair number of students dropped out of school to work the family farms, or to get married, or because they got pregnant, or, in some instances, they just plain didn't like school.

A big difference between then and now is that our forbidden drugs were tobacco, alcohol and even, to a lesser extent, coffee. I was not a Mormon, myself, but that did not matter in this instance. We were aware that there was something called marijuana, and it was even worse than the rest, but that was about it. Still, some kids would sneak smokes (in fear of Coach Talbot catching them at it more than the church elders) and a very few managed to have a pint of whisky at some of the school dances, which got passed around as more of a show of macho manhood than anything else.

Other than drugs, how was my school, and other schools across America, different than schools today? Herbert complains:

A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900. ... ...nearly 20 percent of respondents did not know who the U.S. fought in World War II. Eleven percent thought that Dwight Eisenhower was the president forced from office by the Watergate scandal. Another 11 percent thought it was Harry Truman.

I cannot judge by those questions, of course. I started high school in the 10th grade (the 9th had been considered an intermediate school grade) in 1948 and not only was Hitler more recently alive than Saddam is today, World War II had just ended and even the Civil War was barely over for my community's elders. Ike and Truman were very much with us.

I quite frankly do not remember exactly what we learned in Civics class, since it was perhaps my least-favorite subject. No,..biology. Chemistry was close.

Have I come up with any answers? Discipline, and respect seem to be it. If I got in trouble at school, I could be sure of one thing: my parents sided with my teacher, who was in full control of my person when I was away from home at school. The principal was pretty close to being God in terms of absolute authority. I had my run-ins with C. Price Allred, but for a certainty I respected his authority. Do kids do that today?

The Educational Testing Service, in a report titled “America’s Perfect Storm,” cited three powerful forces that are affecting the quality of life for millions of Americans and already shaping the nation’s future.

He then identifies what they are (go to the link), but those represent details which aren't important to my questions so I won't go into them. Here's what puzzles me:

At the moment we are not even coming close to equipping the population with the intellectual tools that are needed.

While we’re effectively standing in place, other nations are catching up and passing us when it comes to educational achievement.

How, exactly, is this happening? How are they managing to pass us; what are they doing differently? And why aren't we simply emulating them?

As one strategist put it, if Clinton were just an extremely bright senator from New York whose husband had not been president, she probably wouldn't even be in the race -- and certainly would not have started out as the prohibitive front-runner.

And we all know what Geraldine Ferraro too-frankly said about what if Obama were a one-term ultra-liberal senator from Illinois with no track record other than an attractive personality and an ability to speak...but also white. He'd have been another John Edwards, not a front-runner, and that really isn't racist but merely a fair evaluation of the assets of the two men. Edwards has almost exactly the same things that Obama does...an attractive appearance, an intriguing personal story, money, an ability to speak, a good education, experience as a lawyer, and a few years in the U.S. Senate.

Which makes you realize that neither one of the two Democrats now vying for the nomination, Hillary and Obama, would even be there at all if not for special circumstances. Neither one of them actually brings any qualifications or experience to the table, only the fact of the unique "who" they are.

Republican Ben Ginsberg wrote: "The superdelegates I know (and for some reason they seem unburdened talking to a Republican) want a way out. So they're looking for a win by either that's enough to give them cover." ... Superdelegates will decide the nomination, but they prefer not to be decisive in the outcome.

That's certainly the way that I see it. I think a lot of them might actually prefer to vote for Hillary but are afraid of the personal consequences which will accrue to them if she wins. The charge of being racist will be only the beginning.

But the prospects for a convention battle appear smaller than they might have a month ago. Democratic strategists are increasingly confident that, once the primaries end, the superdelegates will quickly coalesce around the candidate with the lead in delegates and popular vote.

There's a small problem looming here, though: Obama almost certainly will have the delegates, but Hillary may well have the popular vote. For Republicans, this is the truly delicious part of the entire primary season! The superdelegates will, in actually fact, have to play out their super roles, choosing between the delegate winner and the popular vote winner. If Obama has both then of course no question will remain in anyone's mind, but if he doesn't...

E. J. Dionne Jr. notes the ABC guys who got on Obama's case, but he certainly won't:

At a campaign rally here on Saturday during a whistle-stop tour across southeastern Pennsylvania, Obama laced into Clinton for "the say-anything, do-anything style of politics that has become the habit in Washington." Obama insisted he was "not going to play the same old politics" and, with relish, gave this description of Clinton's attacks on him: "She's got the kitchen sink flying, the china flying, the buffet is coming at me."

Without mentioning last week's ABC News debate, much assailed for becoming a staging point for one attack on Obama after another, the candidate was clearly courting a backlash against "a politics that's all about tearing each other down." And he continued to shred Clinton for accepting contributions from lobbyists. Noting that Clinton once said that lobbyists simply represent people with interests before the government, Obama declared, to laughter, "I don't know how many of you have a lobbyist in Washington."

E. J. certainly will not be the one to point out to Obama that if he was speaking to any people over 55, or any union members, or any school teachers, or any real estate agents, etc etc etc, that they almost certainly did, in fact, have a lobbyist in Washington.

Obama's willingness to distort and mislead is starting to bother me more than just a little.

What’s that? Yes...yes, I suppose my expecting Dionne to point it out is rather foolish of me.

But she has gone too far -- too much disturbing stuff, some of it shocking in its coarseness. For instance, she added the coy "as far as I know" to her "60 Minutes" statement that Obama is not a Muslim. More important, she offered a weak and disingenuous defense of her Senate vote in support of going to war in Iraq. But more recently came her stunning Moses Moment, that polygraph buster about being under sniper fire in Bosnia. It was a defining time in her campaign, not because she exaggerated or lied -- call it what you want -- but because the statement was hurled into a gale of contrary evidence, including eyewitnesses and video: a serene welcoming ceremony, complete with the requisite young girl bestowing the requisite gift. No snipers. No avoiding the obvious, either: Sometimes Hillary Clinton just can't help herself.

The story was nuts -- and Clinton herself has been at a loss to explain it.

Not really; she just can't afford to be honest about it, because the truth would be worse than the lie, as far as getting elected goes.

Psychologists have pointed out that apparently all of you people out there, bitter or otherwise, mentally embellish your own histories. And with each revisit, whether aloud or in private, apparently you people, incredible as this seems, polish them more and pile it a little higher. The thing is, the psychologists tell me, is that you guys don't actually recognize that you are doing this. And for favorite memories which display character traits that you urgently wish you had, apparently you really put in extra effort. All quite subconsciously.

I can understand, of course, why all of you would do that. And if the false memory is never challenged or disturbed, pretty soon you are unable to discern that it isn't every bit as true as your other memories are. Things harder to manipulate tend to be conveniently "forgotten".

Hillary very likely knows this about human psychology, but how can she admit to the electorate that she wanted so badly to be the heroine risking herself to sniper fire that she created an entire false memory about it which later fooled even her...even though that was what her subconscious intended to do all along? The pundits would immediately start speculating about how many of her other memories were false, and in politics it's actually better to be called a liar rather than delusional.

Speaking of Rather, it was the delusion which cost him his job in the end. If he had admitted his lie, arguing that he did it for the best of motives, he was trying to save his nation from destruction even at the expense of his personal commitment to honor, but now he regretted his nappy-headed transgression and would henceforth sin no more, then he’d still be on the air, a respected speaker of should-be-truth to power.

Richard has trouble seeing this about Hillary, perhaps because he has, himself, created his own scenario for justifying his own one-time support for the war in Iraq, which increasingly seems to him now to have been much better than Hillary's disingenuous defense.

Well, time for my nap. A little dreamtime music, please...cue my theme song, "Oh, Lord, it's hard to be humble"...a little louder, if you don’t mind...ah, just right, thanks. I think I'll relax by remembering what I did in the Marine Corps again. While I wasn’t personally involved in the landing at Inchon, not exactly, I...

Meanwhile, as I wait for the polls to close, Wes Pruden cracks me up, as usual:

This Pennsylvania primary is no campaign for old men, nor for squeamish young ones, either. Somebody might say boo.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw pillows at each other through the weekend in what Mr. Dooley, who famously warned that politics ain't beanbag, would have recognized as little more than a polite disagreement. Monthly business meetings at almost any Baptist church radiate more sticks and stones.

"While my opponent says one thing and his campaign does another, you can count on me to tell you where I stand," Hillary told an election-eve rally. (Slam.) Barack Obama, slogging manfully through a succession of towns where clinging to guns and religion is the only other entertainment available, answered mildly. "She just ignores the facts," he said. (Bang.)

He conceded late yesterday that he hasn't closed the gap in Pennsylvania. "I'm not predicting a win," he said. "I'm predicting it's going to be close and that we are going to do a lot better than people expect." If Hillary scores anything close to an 11-point victory, he faces another tough six weeks ahead in the final round of primaries, beginning two weeks hence in Indiana and North Carolina, and then (to paraphrase Howard Dean, at lower decibel) West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Montana and South Dakota in quick succession. Only then we'll get relief, but probably not a nominee.

And why does everybody forget Puerto Rico, likely to be very strong for Hillary? Although they don't get to vote in the general election, they count in the Democrat primary.

"I need them to say who they're for, starting now," Mr. Dean told CNN's Wolf Blitzer after Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama debated in Philadelphia. The party "cannot give up three months of campaigning and active healing time," he said.

That's what is expected if the primaries and caucuses have not chosen enough pledged delegates for either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama to clinch the nomination. The decision would go to the full Democratic National Convention in late August.

That's a delight for journalists because it means real news would break out.

Good line! Clarence, of course, is for Obama, which means he's willing to do a little spinning if necessary:

Mr. Obama seemed prepared to answer a new question on the character theme. How well did he know his Chicago neighbor and former fellow foundation board member William Ayers, the former member of the Weather Underground Organization, a violently radical 1960s and early-1970s group? Mr. Ayers, now a college professor and education consultant, has been a model citizen for more than 20 years. Yet, conservatives like Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity have been accusing Mr. Obama of an Ayers "relationship" for weeks as if Mr. Obama were a fellow bomber.

Yeah, well, I guess for liberals there's a statute of limitations for just about every crime. Lay low for x-number of years and you are redeemed. Conveniently overlooked by Page are inconvenient facts, such as... On the morning of 9/11, before the planes hit, model citizen Ayres was quoted as saying that he was sorry that he hadn't set off more bombs. His "relationship with Obama was characterized as "friendly" by Obama's campaign before the curtain of silence got lowered, and Ayers served as a campaign advisor, even. They were board members together on a board which involved both money and pastor Wright.

The problem with Ayers is the same problem that Obama has with Wright: he seems to be saying, now, that he hardly knew them or who they were...some English professor, wasn't he? Wright, if you noticed recently, had been downgraded from spiritual advisor to just some sort of old guy who said, ah, what was the word...oh, yeah, controversial things when he wasn't baptizing babies.

This is the part that will catch up with Obama. He, and nice guys like Clarence, keep saying things which would be fine if nobody looked any closer. But they aren't quite right when someone does, at which point some people who otherwise wouldn't care a hell of a lot start wondering why.

The Weather Underground attacked the Pentagon, the Capitol and other public buildings; Mr. Ayers was quoted in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, as saying, "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough."

It was at Mr. Ayers' house that Mr. Obama's state Senate candidacy was launched in 1995; Mr. Obama continued to serve on a nonprofit board with Mr. Ayers after the Times article appeared.

Mr. Obama was asked about his ... "friendly" relations — "friendly" is his campaign adviser David Axelrod's word — with William Ayers. ... The normally poised candidate looked irritated and weary. "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English" — actually, it's education — "in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George."

Obama seems even more clueless here than he did with the Pennsylvania guns-and-God people...yes, Barry, knowing and associating and being friendly with people who did detestable things, no matter how long ago, if there has been no expiation or even remorse, which clearly was not the case, DOES reflect upon you and your values. If they're still proud of their deeds, your association says quite a lot to them.

I'm laughing. My totally unscientific prediction, which I shared with you the other day: 14 points. And I know nothing about Pennsylvania politics other than the little bit I read here and there.

Now the polls have closed...and they say that the exit polls are too close to call!

Later...CNN has just declared for Clinton, projecting a 4-point win based on 6% of the precincts counted. Not good enough to do either side any good.

Now the lead has crept up to 10 points, although none of the CNN people, busy punditing each other, have noticed it.

The lead is over 10 points with 22% still left to count. Here's Hillary's argument now. If you try to take into account ALL of the people who have voted, including Michigan and Florida, plus estimates for the caucus states which did not post recorded totals (Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington)...in other words, counting EVERYBODY and not leaving anyone out...Hillary will almost certainly be in that popular vote lead tomorrow morning.

Worse, from Obama's point of view, because the superdelegates are going to have to at least think about it, if the Democrat primaries had allocated delegates the way that the Republican did, Hillary would have a big lead in elected delegates by now. Obama leads, therefore, only because of the Byzantine Democrat delegate allocate scheme, which they now may regret creating. The superdelegates were created in an effort to rectify things like this, weren't they? Yes.

Hillary can credibly make the case that she's ahead in the popular vote, really should be ahead in the pledged delegates, and--most importantly--that she won the electoral college states which will be crucial in the general election.

I don't think the superdelegates have any choice but to think hard about those things.

And, when you take all of those things into consideration, why should Hillary even consider dropping out? In her mind she's ahead, and should be clearly ahead.

The other thing that has to buck her up: Obama reportedly threw everything he had into Pennsylvania, spending a ton of money, yet is going to lose by a quarter of a million votes.