Read about the wound (as in shot in foot) inflicted on Virginia Republicans by one of our newly elected Republican office holders? If not, or if you want to read more, read this.
It may lose me some of my new conservative friends, who have until now warmly replaced my long-lost liberal friends.
Mark up Obama’s new education policy as another change in the “Change!” promised during the campaign. Remember his call for universal access to college?
We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that ... any young person who works hard and desires a college education can access it.Actually, that was the quote that appears on the Google link to Candidate Obama’s education policy. If you follow that same link now what you find is:
We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that American children lead the world once again in creativity and achievement....Universal access seems to have been, well, somewhat attenuated. And now the new policy has been unveiled, as reported in the New York Times:After graduating high school, all Americans should be prepared to attend at least one year of job training or higher education to better equip our workforce for the 21st century economy....
The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.The article is fascinating, even aside from the NYT’s typical news story editorializing (“His plan strikes a careful balance...”). An interesting feature of this “overhaul” is that
President Obama would replace the law’s requirement that every American child reach proficiency in reading and math, which administration officials have called utopian, with a new national target that could prove equally elusive: that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career.Well, whoever said high school graduates must be able to read and write and add and subtract?
President Bush called the attitude embodied in President Obama’s new policy the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” I think he was wrong about the soft.
By now you’ve all heard of the “Slaughter Solution” to the House Democrats’ dilemma — how to pass health care reform without actually having to vote for the Senate bill:
House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday.As the Arizona Republic described this unique new non-voting method of voting,Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.
Some House Democrats are proposing a novel way of passing a health-care reform bill, which at the moment is stuck in limbo between the Senate and House.Newt Gingrich had the best line about the Dems flocking to Slaughter:Just “deem” it passed. No “up or down” vote, as President Barack Obama requested. Indeed, no vote on the reform bill at all. Just . . . declare it passed, and that is that.
Briefly, House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., is working on a plan that would have the House vote on a “rule” bill accompanying the health-care bill, rather than the bill itself. The thinking is that this would provide political cover to lawmakers who could tell angry constituents they did not vote for the controversial health-care bill. House leaders simply would move to “deem” the health-care reform bill as passed, thus alleviating House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of the burden of rounding up votes.
Last year, the House was passing bills without reading them. This year, they're passing bills without voting on them.If the Democrats’ behavior were portrayed in a movie, viewers would not find it credible. (On the other hand, if it were in a Saturday Night Live skit no one would find it funny — just another routine description of how Democrats behave when they want to pass something the public abhors.)
Speaking of movies, I found the best description of what’s going on now in a book about Hollywood — screenwriter William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade (which I happened to see at a friend’s house), p. xi:
During the holiday season of ’81-’82, sixteen films were released by the major studios. Of those, only one — On Golden Pond — was a runaway success. And ten of the sixteen each lost more than ten million dollars. One major studio executive told me recently, “Of course the failures are upsetting. But there have always been failures. What’s got us so immobilized now is whatever it is we’re making, we’re missing he audience by a wider margin than ever before. We don’t know what they want. All we do know is that they don’t want what we’re giving them....”
Again, this is the worst period within memory.By the time this book sees print, it may well be the best period within memory. The pont being this: Movies are a gold-rush business.”
So is politics, or at least Deem-ocratic politics in the age of Obama. Until he took office and began doing things, all Deem-ocrats and many normal people thought Obama was golden. Now they know that all that glitters is not gold.
February was Black History Month. Now it’s March, and March is Women’s History Month.
Will someone tell me when is Southern Jewish History Month? I must have missed it last year.
Also, a friend just gave me a copy of Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People. Is there a White History Month that I’ve also missed?
February was Black History Month. Now it’s March, and March is Women’s History Month.
Will someone tell me when is Southern Jewish History Month? I must have missed it last year.
Also, a friend just gave me a copy of Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People. Is there a White History Month that I’ve also missed?
About a year ago I was feeling left out when the White House created a special council on women and girls: Men And Boys Need Not Apply: Obama Wants Fairness For “Women And Girls”. Now I feel left out just about every month.
A reader, E, sent a link to this article about admission to the highly selective specialized high schools in New York (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, etc.) by John Garvey, a former dean at the City University of New York.
Garvey proposes a solution to the old problem of “woefully small percentages of black and Hispanic students” at those highly selective schools based on the Texas 10 percent plan:
The Department of Education should adopt a proportional admissions plan for the exam schools that would offer admission to the highest-scoring students from each of the neighborhoods of the city.Arguing that “[j]udging students by grades or class rank would offer the fairest estimation of their potential,” he further proposes that the admissions test be scrapped. But there’s something of a disconnect here, since he also argues that there are fewer blacks and Hispanics in the selective high schools because the schools they attend are inferior: “Clearly, segregation and the unequal educational opportunities that result continue to distort the enrollment profile of the city’s most selective high schools.”
Thus what Garvey is saying is that students who do well in poor schools but don’t do well on the entrance tests are as qualified for the selective schools as students who do well in better schools and do well on the tests. This makes no sense.
Garvey notes that a “downside” to his neighborhood-based admission system is similar to an admitted “downside” of the Texas 10 percent plan (guaranteeing the top 10% of the graduate of every high school admission to the University of Texas):
High-achieving black and Hispanic students who rank below the top 10 percent at majority-white schools often do not get admitted to the college of their choice.Apparently Garvey does not regard the fact that high-achieving white and Asian students who rank below the top 10 percent of their classes also often do not get admitted to the college of their choice as a “downside” worth noticing.
Two days ago on NRO’s “The Corner,” Mark Krikorian (Executive Director of the invaluable Center for Immigration Studies) invited us to send a message with our Census forms.
Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government’s business (despite the New York Times’ assurances to the contrary on today’s editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks “What is Person 1’s race?” (and so on, for other members of the household)....I second his suggestion, but I am even more impressed and excited by his call for “the needed wall of separation between race and state.” DISCRIMINATIONS veterans with long memories, or empty lives (or both), may recall that as long ago as 2002 I made that same plea here, in Separation of Race and State.... [W]e should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — “Some other race” — and writing in “American.” It’s a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, “American” was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.
In that post I discussed (and applauded) the recent important Supreme Court case holding that school vouchers allowing students to attend sectarian schools did not violate the Establishment Clause, but I drew heavily on the dissenters in that case to argue that the history and principle underlying their impressive devotion to religious neutrality also should compel racial neutrality, the separation of race and state.
You are welcome to read (or for you hearty veterans, re-read) that post for those quotes, but I’m giving myself editorial license to include here the guts of my argument there, on the theory that plagiarizing oneself is legitimate after eight years. So:
Separation of Race and State — No, that’s not a typo. I meant to say race, not church. But first we in fact do have to go to church. By now I know you’re probably all tired of vouchers, but please bear with me. I want to suggest that the principle articulately defended in the minority opinions in the recent voucher case unwittingly provides a convincing argument why the principle of religious neutrality they advocate compels neutrality regarding race as well as religion.Amen.The dissenters dissent because in their view vouchers violate the principle of neutrality. Since 96% of the students with vouchers chose to attend religious schools, they argue, the fact of intervening private choice was not sufficient to insulate the government funds from the charge of impermissibly favoring — which in the current understanding is tantamount to establishing — religion.
What I want to emphasize, however, is not that familiar argument. More important, I believe, is the repeated, emphatic recognition throughout the dissents that the principle of neutrality itself derives not so much from the text of the Constitution as from something deeper in the very structure of our society. That something is the overriding fact of religious pluralism, a pluralism that in the absence of official neutrality would lead to constant strife and conflict. The dissenters, in short, recognize that the small “c” constitution of American society of necessity dictates the meaning of the large “C” Constitution.
[Quotes from dissenters]
Race and Sects in American History
Although I think the dissenters are mistaken when they conclude that vouchers violate the principle in, and underlying, the First Amendment, I think their vision of American history, and of the neutrality principle that history has generated, is compelling.
One of the most cherished myths of American history is that our foremothers and forefathers fled the Old World for the New to escape religious bigotry and build a new society based on religious freedom. In fact, the Puritans’ strongest complaint against the Old World was that it was too tolerant, that it was swimming in a sea of such moral sloth and corruption that it had lost all interest in purifying the church. The New World appealed to them because it was empty (except for the “heathens” ripe for conversion), and they could establish Godly communities the way they were quite certain God intended.
And yet within several generations religious toleration had broken out all over. Despite the best efforts of the Puritan divines, diversity could not be denied. The Baptists and Quakers proved irrepressible. Mennonites appeared, and Methodists sprouted like weeds in the wake of itinerant ministers. Even many Congregational churches split asunder as revivalist “New Lights” walked out and founded competing congregations.
What happened? Unintended and unplanned, America began to happen. What Voltaire said cynically about England came to be celebrated here: “If there were one religion . . . , its despotism would be terrible; if there were only two, they would destroy each other; but there are 30, and therefore they live in peace and happiness.”
Toleration developed not because it was valued but because it was necessary. “Freedom came to the Western world,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, one of our greatest theologians, “by the inadvertence of history. Toleration was an absolute necessity for a community which had lost its religio-cultural unity and could find peace only if toleration and freedom were accepted.”
America discovered, however, that toleration alone was not sufficient. Strict neutrality was also required, a prohibition against the state favoring any of the contending sects. As Justice Hugo Black wrote in Zorach v. Clauson (1952), “it is only by isolating the state from the religious sphere and compelling it to be completely neutral that the freedom of each and every denomination and of all nonbelievers can be maintained.” Or as the Court held in Abingdon School District v. Schempp (1963), “the government is neutral, and, while protecting all, it prefers none.”
But if the very structure of American society requires a principle of neutrality that in turn requires a separation of church and state (as the dissenters and I believe it does), should it not also compel a separation of race and state? After all, as the eminent Berkeley historian David Hollinger has written, in our time "ethno-racial affiliations have come to play a role similar to that played by religious affiliations at the time of the founding of the republic and throughout most of American history." (POST-ETHNIC AMERICA, Basic Books, 1995, p. 123). Surely racial and ethnic preferences are at least as "divisive" today as debates over school vouchers, which seem to have bothered a few litigants and the courts much more than the society as a whole.
As a perceptive if fickle critic of affirmative action has written, racial and ethnic preferences predictably lead (and in fact have led) to
a real Balkanization, in which group after group struggles for the benefits of special treatment.... The demand for special treatment will lead to animus against other groups that already have it, by those who think they should have it and don’t....That was Nathan Glazer, in AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION (Basic Books, 1975), and if anything he underestimated the divisiveness of bestowing governmental favors on the basis of race and ethnicity. Now that liberals have abandoned the formerly core value holding that every individual is entitled to be treated without regard to race, creed, or color in favor of multiculturalism and group rights, the very idea of “the larger fraternity of all Americans” is regarded by many as nothing more than right-wing cant.The rising emphasis on group difference which government is called upon to correct might mean the destruction of any hope for the larger fraternity of all Americans.
Or consider the current mantra of “diversity.” Harvard law professor Christopher Edley — former White House aide, co-author of President Clinton's “mend it, don't end it” review of affirmative action policies, advisor to Clinton's race commission, fervent advocate of racial preferences (he described Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's America in Black and White as “a crime against humanity”), and advisor to the 2000 Gore campaign — has written that “our rich religious diversity” provides a model for racial diversity. “We are fairly united as one of the most religious nations on earth,” Edley wrote, “but we worship differently, celebrate that fact, and recognize that religious differences should play only a limited role in our social and economic lives. Perhaps a model along these lines is what is needed in race.” (Edley, “Why Talk About Race?” Washington Post OpEd, 7 December 1997, p. C1.)
Indeed it is, but this “model” suggests a conclusion that Edley and other preferentialists will not like. If ethnic and racial groups are now analogous to religious sects, why should it be permissible for the state to grant preferences to the former when it is clearly prohibited from doing so to the latter?
Perhaps Justice Breyer and his like-minded brethren, on and off the Court, can be called on to explain why they fear “the risk” of “potential” divisiveness in what they see as religious preferences but not the clear and present divisiveness of racial and ethnic preferences. Or, in the alternative, they could explain why a principle that they believe justifies racial preferences does not also justify religious preference, for certainly they recognize that religion provides as good or better basis for “diversity” as race.
Would they look on religious preferences in admissions and hiring with the same favor they bestow on racial and ethnic preferences? What is it precisely that would make a preference for Arabs acceptable but for Muslims unacceptable? Are not evangelical Christians “underrepresented” among the students and on the faculties of our elite, selective universities? Why must the Michigan law school have a “critical mass” of blacks and Hispanics but not of Missouri Synod Lutherans? Why was the old quota system that restricted the number of Jews in the Ivy League (presumably) wrong, but the de facto quota system that restricted the number of Asians admitted to Berkeley and UCLA under the reign of preferences not wrong?
In short, perhaps it is time to insist on a separation of race and state, to insist in the ethnic and racial sphere, as well as the religious, that government must be neutral, that it protect all of its constituent groups but prefer none — not because the First Amendment compels neutrality in this sphere, but because of the same social reality that led to the First Amendment in the first place.
An major UPDATE II was added to Obama's New Anti-Civil Rights Civil Rights Policy today.
who? Discriminations was originally the joint production of John and Jessie Rosenberg, but Jessie has adopted Honorary Founding Blogger status. A 23 year old sixthyear graduate student in applied physics at Caltech, she doesn’t have time to sleep, much less blog very often. John, who has retired from real life, does have time. He is one of the world's older grad students, now completing a 30-year overdue dissertation at Stanford on discrimination.
what? John's focus, not surprisingly, is the theory and practice of discrimination, and how it is reported and analyzed. ()
Jessie's, if she ever has time, will be discriminating thoughts on ... whatever catches her fancy or attracts her attention. ()
why? Why not?
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