Michael Crowley liked Senator Claire McCaskill’s performance at a town hall earlier today:

Any Democrats headed with trepidation into town hall meetings this month should get themselves video of the session Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill has been conducting, and which MSNBC carried for several minutes this afternoon. She was pitch-perfect: polite and responsive without being a pushover, armed with clear and compelling facts (emphasis on things any health reform bill will *not* do) and firm when necessary. She shamed one of the loudest hecklers by reminding him that “we have good manners in Missouri,” but without losing her own temper. I know the mid-day MSNBC audience is small, but I feel like almost any open-minded person who saw this performance would come away trusting McCaskill over the protesters.

I agree, but watching McCaskill on TV what I mostly thought of was that I don’t understand why members of congress are holding these town halls. There’s been so much focus on the spectacle of the whole thing that nobody’s really stepped back and explained what the purpose of these events are other than to give us pundits something to chat about. Obviously this is not a good way of acquiring statistically valid information about your constituents’ opinions. And it doesn’t seem like a mode of endeavor likely to increase the popularity of the politician holding the town hall. The upside is extremely limited, and you’re mostly just exposing yourself to the chance that something could go wrong.

An African American man lynched from a tree, 1925 (wikimedia)

The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro opines that Sonia Sotomayor’s selection “represents the very worst of racial politics” as “she is not a leading light of the judiciary and would not have been considered had she not been a Hispanic woman.”

I think this is a revealing moment. Sotomayor has the normal qualifications for a Supreme Court justice—she shares the president’s political views, she lacks a record of inflammatory legal writing that would prevent confirmation, the has experience as an appellate judge, she went to fancy schools. Insofar as her background was a consideration in selecting her, which it undoubtedly was, this is also totally normal. Presidents have always sought various kinds of regional, religious, and ethnic balance in the courts. Much was made out of Samuel Alito’s Italian American ancestry, and obviously Thurgood Marshall was initially put on the court in part to make a symbolic statement about civil rights and Clarence Thomas was appointed to replace him in part out of a desire to fill Marshall’s old seat with an African-American. There was a tradition of a “Jewish seat” at various times, etc.

But even more revealing is that even if Sotomayor’s selection were somehow out of the ordinary, the idea that picking one appellate judge rather than another for a promotion could possibly be the very worst of racial politics is ludicrous. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of people, their subjection to pervasive social and economic discrimination, and the maintenance of the apartheid system via the threat and reality of state-sponsored terrorist violence. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved persistent filibustering to prevent the federal government from doing anything to curb widespread lynching. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved a violent rebellion that sought to dismantle the country in the name of chattel slavery and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

But despite that long history, broad swathes of the American right remain persistently and willfully blind to the problem of discrimination against non-whites. Their view is, essentially, that racism emerged as a problem sometime in the year 1967 and that the problem consists of white people being unduly burdened by efforts to remediate something or other.

Cardozo High School, Washington DC (cc photo by Mr. T in DC)

Kevin Drum expresses frustration with the very mixed evidence on charter schools:

I’ve been modestly favorable towards charter schools for a while, and I still think they’re worth trying. It might take more than a few years to get the formula right, after all, and most of the research suggests only that charters don’t outperform public schools, not that they’re actively worse. (The Stanford study showed mixed results, with better results for charters in grade school and middle school but worse results in high school.) Still, time is running out. If charters can’t start demonstrating systematically better results soon, the experiment is going to run aground.

I think that’s really the wrong way to think about it. If you look at the charter school system in a typical jurisdiction with low-performing public schools, what you usually have is an oversubscribed charter sector combined with a statutory cap on the number of charters that are allowed to open. Some of these charter schools may perform well and others perform poorly. And since the public schools are performing poorly, even the low-performing charters have an okay time attracting students. Meanwhile, the higher-performing charters are helping the kids who attend them, but it’s necessarily a small number of people.

The solution to this isn’t to say that “the charter school experiment” has “run aground.” The solution is to scrap the existing cap policies and replace it with something more like smart caps that are actually focused on school quality. I don’t think it should surprise anyone that charter schools, as currently administered, perform about the same as public schools. But it’s the very averageness of currently existing charters that provides the opportunity for improvement. On average the charters are about the same as public schools, but there’s a range of outcomes within the charter sector. We need to get more aggressive about shutting down the low-performing charters, more aggressive about allowing successful charters to expand or replicate, and committed to always permitting space for people to try something new.

The “something news” that people try probably won’t be any better, on average, than existing public schools. They might even be worse! But then you shut down the models that don’t work and let the models that do work replicate. There’s no “charter magic” that makes schools good, but the greater openness and flexibility of the charter sector lets us experiment and discover which things work. What we need to do is take that to step two where we act on the basis of that knowledge.