Education Subcommittee Chair’s Response To Low Student Achievement: Blame Parents

By Guest Blogger on Apr 15, 2011 at 3:52 pm

Our guest blogger is Theodora Chang, Education Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA)

What’s the most significant cause of poor student performance? Inequitable school funding? A shortage of strong school leaders? At least for Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), the answer is none of the above. Instead, he targets parents in a recent interview:

The blame in the end goes to the parents — to the mom and the dad, that’s where the blame lies. You could send my kids to any school, and I guarantee you that they are going to get straight A’s. My wife is standing behind them whacking them over the head every time they stop doing their homework…we stand over them like little dictators and make them do exactly what they’re supposed to do…If a parent doesn’t do that, there’s only so much an educator can do, no matter how good they are, no matter how much money is invested in that school.

As the Chair of the House Education & Workforce Committee’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education, Hunter plays a significant role in ESEA reauthorization, and his response to low student achievement is troubling. Family involvement is integral to a child’s education and future, but policies should actively engage parents instead of blame them. For example, the School District of Philadelphia was recently highlighted for its efforts to boost student achievement by offering free classes to families of enrolled students on topics ranging from math to computer training.

In addition, Hunter’s comments entirely ignore the fact that systemic inequities contribute greatly to low student achievement. New research shows that low-income students have unequal access, on average, to the highest-performing teachers. Funding formulas and loopholes shortchange high-poverty schools. Districts have varying levels of educational efficiency.

Addressing these inequities requires reforming an Elementary and Secondary Education Act that is badly in need of repair. Its teacher policy ensures teachers have degrees and credentials but it doesn’t make sure the teachers are effective at improving student learning. Schools are required to implement improvement strategies that are not strong enough to help them improve, and they get zero credit for making growth.

Reauthorizing ESEA is an effective way to stop perpetuating institutional problems that contribute to low student achievement. Failing to act means that students and families will have no one to blame but Congress.

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Climate Progress

TN state Rep. says Einstein would teach creationism

By Climate Guest Blogger on Apr 15, 2011 at 3:33 pm

JR: Conservatives can’t quite make up their mind whether they hate Albert Einstein or love him. Conservapedia says his theory of relativity is a liberal plot: “The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.” The first footnote to that Conservapedia entry states, “Virtually no one who is taught and believes Relativity continues to read the Bible.”

Brad Johnson points out a different right-wing view of Einstein in a TP repost.

Armed with fantasy and lies, Tennessee legislators are attempting to dismantle science education in their state’s public schools. Last week, the Tennessee House voted by an overwhelming 70-23 margin in favor of a radical bill to teach the “controversy” about scientific subjects “including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” During the debate on HB 368, introduced by Rep. Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), anti-science conservative Rep. Frank Nicely (R-Strawberry Plains) argued that the “critical thinker” Albert Einstein would have wanted public schools to teach creationism alongside the science of biological evolution:

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Politics

Paul Ryan’s ‘Compassionate’ Budget Would Gut The Food Safety Net

By Pat Garofalo on Apr 15, 2011 at 3:32 pm

The House today will vote on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) 2012 budget, his radical plan to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid while providing a healthy tax cut for the rich and corporations. Ryan’s budget has received a fair amount of criticism — and is making some House Republicans queasy — so Ryan took to the Washington Post today to defend himself:

Our budget offers a compassionate and optimistic contrast to a future of health-care rationing and unbearably high taxes. We lift the crushing burden of debt, repair the safety net, make America’s tax system fair and competitive, and ensure that our health and retirement programs have a strong and lasting future.

This so-called “compassionate” plan would double health-care costs for seniors, endanger vital Medicaid services, and likely increase taxes on the middle-class to finance tax cuts for the rich. But it would also undermine another important part of the social safety net: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps):

Converting SNAP to a block grant, as Chairman Ryan proposes to do beginning in 2015, would hurt the tens of millions of Americans who rely on the program. SNAP would largely lose the ability to respond to rising need, forcing states during economic downturns to cut benefits or create waiting lists for needy families.

Turning SNAP into a block grant to states would severely restrict the program during an economic downturn when it is most necessary. There was little increase in household hunger between 2008 and 2009 — despite the economy’s weakness — because of SNAP and the food safety net. Currently, three-quarters of SNAP benefits go to households with children and nearly one-third go to households with a senior citizen or person with a disability.

As the economy improves, SNAP spending will decrease back to its normal levels. And the SNAP program in its current form is hardly generous. The benefits breaks down to about $4.50 per person per day. Currently, one in seven residents of Ryan’s own district did not have enough money to provide adequate food at some point in 2010.

SNAP is an effective anti-poverty program that is most important when the economy takes a turn for the worse. The budget that the House will vote on today would kick the legs out from underneath the program, with no clear benefits.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.

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Alyssa

Bow and Arrow

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 15, 2011 at 3:31 pm

Friends, readers, countrymen, I’ve got a pressing question: what do you make of Katniss Everdeen? I’m halfway through Catching Fire, the second book in the Suzanne Collins’ wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy, and I’m finding myself perplexed.

Collins is a fairly pedestrian prose stylist (she really needs to find a way to tell more than she shows, particularly when it comes to political awareness and emotions), but she’s set up some interesting constructions. Katniss, who comes from an astonishingly poor region in a post-apocalyptic America, has her first experience of female grooming and dress when she’s picked to fight to the death in the annual reality show spectacle, the Hunger Games. She bonds with her style team in a way that’s particularly female, but in a reversal of class differences, looks down on them in a fairly abrasive way as self-absorbed and substanceless. I can see why she’s bothered by them—disdaining modern-day vomitoriums makes sense, particularly for someone who grew up in a state of extreme hunger and scarcity. But at the same time, Katniss’s style team is part of her protective crew, the people who made and kept her an icon before she even knew she had that potential.

Similarly, I think there’s a problem in the way Collins has Katniss approach romance. First off, she doth protest far too much that she’ll never get married, which is understandable if you don’t want to send your children off to slaughter. Second, I sense some Bella Swan-like Mary Sueing amidst all the protestation that Katniss doesn’t know that she’s really pretty, and it’s so weird to her that both of these guys should be so interested in her. There is something admirable about Katniss using her sexuality and the public interest in her relationship with Peeta, a boy from her region who is sent to the Hunger Games with her, to stay alive, but she’s strangely distanced from her own desire. Collins always stops short of Katniss actually feeling anything sexual for either of the boys in her life—all of their kisses are heightened by political feeling, or the need for survival, but Collins leaves Katniss empowered to manipulate people’s emotions but not to know what she wants either emotionally or sexually. I’m not sure that’s such a fab message for teenage girls.

Then, there’s the question of Katniss as political symbol. She actually reminds me of Dany in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice books, someone who vacillates back and forth between being an active presence in her own story and someone who is a reactive symbol. Katniss seems slower to me than perhaps she ought to be to put together the pieces of what’s happening around her. I understand there’s a fine balances to be struck—making her omniscient would be another kind of Mary Sueism, and a potentially narratively destructive one. But if you look at someone like Jonas in The Giver, who is 12 when he starts learning the actual shape of his community, Katniss seems somewhat naive. Jonas is given more information than Katniss is, I guess, but he also puts together the implications of things more quickly.

Maybe I should refrain from speculation until I’ve finished the books, and tell me if that’s the case. But Katniss feels a bit muddy to me. The Hunger Games themselves are a great invention. But I’m not sure if the books themselves are worth the hype.

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Yglesias

Friday Freaky Future Politics

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 15, 2011 at 3:13 pm

Neil Sinhababu says we can’t know the future of the welfare state:

If there’s one thing I’m convinced of about the future, it’s that it’s going to be really weird in ways we can’t imagine right now. There’s going to be all sorts of crazy new technologies. Some of them are going to transform human social relations in ways we can’t predict in advance. Others might make life utterly awesome for those who have them, making it an important big government liberal cause to provide them to everybody. The government is violating people’s right to pleasure if it doesn’t fund the writing of the program that allows people to set themselves up with whatever awesome sex dreams they want once they download it into their brains through the USB slot in the back of their necks! We need to discover the minimal physical unit that can have the experience of intense pleasure, and devote huge resources to manufacturing them by the quintillions!

I don’t think that’s right. There’d be no reason to specifically provide awesome sex dreams as an in-kind benefit. There’s always an argument from the declining marginal utility of money for redistribution of money but that’s different from saying there’s specifically an argument for public subsidy for some specific thing. We want to subsidize activities that are associated with positive externalities (education, other stuff related to kids), do direct provision of risk-pooling (retirement security, some health insurance), and at least consider direct provision of natural monopolies (mostly physical infrastructure) but crazy pleasure machines have nothing to do with it.

The foreseeable game-changer here is some kind of genetic engineering. For many of the same reasons that we subsidize education, we might want to subsidize in utero interventions to improve the people of tomorrow. It wouldn’t just be a question of equity, it would be a question of specifically wanting to encourage parents to invest in this direction. After all, you can’t “win the future” just by having kids crack the books and work hard when in Finland the children emerge from the womb already two years ahead of us in math and science. I suspect the emergence of this kind of technology would substantially remap politics.

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Media

Mickey Kaus Explains That Barack Obama’s Bad At Politics Because He’s Black

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 15, 2011 at 2:54 pm

Mickey Kaus:

Cost doesn’t go into why Obama managed to get to the top of politics without being all that good at it. The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history.

It’s brilliant. The only thing left to explain is how is it that white men are so disproportionately successful at getting elected to national office despite the terrifying obstacles that stand in our way.

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LGBT

Delaware To Become 8th State To Legalize Civil Unions For Same-Sex Couples

By Igor Volsky on Apr 15, 2011 at 2:50 pm

Yesterday, in a vote of 26 to 15, the Delaware state house approved S.B. 30, a bill that would allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions. The measure passed the Senate last week and now goes to Gov. Jack Markell (D), who has pledged to sign it. Proponents of the bill defeated nine amendments, before holding a final vote which elicited applause and cries of “thank you” from supporters gathered in the chamber. Listen:

“Parties who enter into a lawful civil union in Delaware, or whose legal union is recognized as a civil union under Delaware law, will have all of the same rights, benefits, protections and responsibilities as married persons under Delaware law,” the measure says. It will go into effect January 1.

Delaware will become the eighth state to offer civil unions or domestic partnerships to same-sex couples. Illinois and Hawaii enacted civil union legislation earlier this year and the recognition is also available in California, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington. Same-sex marriage is currently legal in five states, plus the District of Columbia.

A recent poll found that more than six out of ten Delaware voters — 62% — support civil unions.

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Politics

BREAKING: House Republicans Overwhelmingly Vote To Phase Out Medicare

By Ian Millhiser on Apr 15, 2011 at 2:40 pm

When President Obama proposed ensuring affordable health care to all Americans, Congress spent a year hashing out how best to achieve this goal. Yet when Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) decided that he wanted to phase out Medicare, the GOP-controlled House took only two weeks to debate and pass this radical proposal. This afternoon, House Republicans overwhelming endorsed his plan to eliminate Medicare, slash education, and jack up the middle class’ taxes. 235 Republicans supported the Medicare elimination bill, with just 4 GOPers casting a vote to leave Medicare unmolested:

The centerpiece of the House Republicans’ plan is a proposal that repeals traditional Medicare and replaces it with a health insurance voucher that loses its value over time. Because the value of the Republicans’ privatized Medicare replacement does not keep up with the cost of health care, their plan will gradually eliminate Medicare because its increasingly worthless vouchers will eventually only cover a very tiny fraction of the cost of a health insurance plan.

Seniors will feel the effect of the GOP’s draconian plan long before it succeeds in phasing out Medicare. According to the CBO, total health care expenditures for a typical 65-year-old “would be almost 40 percent higher with private coverage under the GOP plan than they would be with a continuation of traditional Medicare” in the very first year that the GOP plan goes into effect:

Of course the GOP budget doesn’t call upon all Americans to share this sacrifice. Seniors may lose their health care, but the wealthiest Americans will all be treated to a massive tax cut.

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Yglesias

Natural Resources Are No Guarantee Of Wealth

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 15, 2011 at 2:30 pm

I don’t know anything about Nigeria, so I found Dayo Olopade’s article on the Nigerian election campaign fascinating. But it’s worth observing that Bill Clinton ought to be smarter than this:

The contrast between potential and performance is fascinating in Nigeria—the fourth-fastest growing economy in the world. Nigeria is a major oil exporter whose sagging infrastructure still requires it to import petroleum for local use. The country expertly polices most of the African continent, in military operations from Sierra Leone to Sudan—yet can’t squash poisonous regional tensions over oil and religion. Visiting Lagos in March, Bill Clinton remarked that “there is no reason why a country with so much resources and potential should be poor.”

This happens all the time. If you take two very similar stable democracies like Norway and Denmark then it’s true that, yes, Norway’s natural resource wealth helps make it richer than Denmark. Similarly, Alaska would be nowhere without oil. But it’s just not the case that natural resource wealth is some kind of ticket to prosperity for poor countries and it’s probably well past time for people to stop being surprised about this. In the particular case of Nigeria, it seems like the fact that controlling the government means you control the oil has contributed to the country’s public sector dysfunction. If you’re running a country with few resources, you really only benefit personally from being in charge if you manage to run the country well. That’s the story of, say, Singapore. Charles Kenny says there’s not really a resource curse but it’s clear that resource miracles are pretty rare.

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LGBT

‘Defending Marriage’ Hearing Attacks Obama While Reinforcing Stigma And Parenting Falsehoods

By Zack Ford on Apr 15, 2011 at 1:50 pm

This morning’s “defending marriage” hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution invited anti-LGBT witnesses Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage and Edward Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center to reinforce stigma against gays and lesbians. Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) and subcommittee Chairman Trent Franks (R-AZ) also used the hearing to attack the White House.

Gallagher repeatedly stated that children do better with a mother and a father, despite ample evidence that children of same-sex parents fair just as well, if not better:

GALLAGHER: If, in fact, marriage, as a public and legal institution…is oriented towards protecting children by increasing the likelihood they have a mother and father, then same-sex couples do not fit, and conversely, if same-sex couples fit the definition of marriage, then marriage really is no longer about responsible procreation in the sense.

Meanwhile, Whelan attempted to paint President Obama and the Department of Justice as “pretending” to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) previously and that it’s, in fact, a “scandal” that the DOJ tried to “sabotage” DOMA.

WHELAN: As I document in detail in my testimony, I think one would have to be very naive to think that it’s anything than a stealth strategy of step by step by step, the administration is doing whatever it can to promote same-sex marriage and to induce the courts to adopt that approach.

Watch a compilation:

Professor Carlos Ball of Rutgers School of Law was also on hand to offer testimony in support of same-sex marriage. Representatives Nadler (D-NY), Conyers (D-MI), Scott (D-VA), and Quigley (D-IL) used much of their time challenging Gallagher and Whelan on their claims.

Complete video of the hearing is available on the Judiciary Committee’s website.

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