Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling

Arrested Development

Former Atlanta schools superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 other school employees, including high-level administrators, principals and teachers, were recently booked in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail after being indicted on 65 criminal counts. The charges included racketeering, theft, conspiracy, making false statements and witness tampering.

Just four years ago, Hall was the National Superintendent of the Year. Now, she faces 45 years in prison for having allegedly snagged almost $600,000 in bonus income for higher test scores achieved through fraudulently changing students’ test answers.

And this, the nation’s largest-ever cheating scandal, may prove only the highest shard of a proverbial large floating mass of frozen water.

But instead of condemnation, some of the nation’s leading “education experts” seem bent on excusing the cheaters.

“What we do know,” Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss pointed out, “is that these cheating scandals have been a result of test-obsessed school reform.”

Dr. Christopher Emdin of Columbia University Teachers College reminded readers at the end of a recent Huffington Post column, “I am not saying that educators and school officials who cheat on tests or conspire to cover up cheating should not be reprimanded.”

Just “reprimanded”?

Award-winning teacher Steven Lin explained  that “environments such as that alleged in Atlanta present the classic sociological phenomenon of ‘diffusion of responsibility,’ along with a host of other flaws regarding the compartmentalization of job descriptions within bureaucracies.”

You mean they suffer from “peer pressure”?

Nevertheless, I still think it’s more than sorta bad to cheat.

And I agree wholeheartedly with the “controversial” remark by George Washington University Dean Michael Feuer: “It’s not the test that made them cheat.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Daniel B. Klein

Government is a unique player in society, and rules and norms have emerged that recognize that uniqueness. We tolerate governmental coercion that we would not tolerate from private parties, and not only because the government is more resolute and better armed.

Categories
media and media people

Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?

Some folks have all the subtlety of a whoopee cushion.

In a Washington Post column about the influence of freshman Senator Ted Cruz, Dana Milbank remarked that Cruz “is the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate.”

The reader is supposed to recognize in natal form a dangerous McCarthyesque demagoguery in Cruz, who is a vigorous and no doubt sometimes wrongheaded polemicist. Milbank offers no substantive comparison of the two men. He just let slip a hit-and-run innuendo, then raced away.

Why? I can’t read Milbank’s mind. Typically, though, smear artists defame a person in hopes that others will reel back in horror or contempt, thus diverted from relevant considerations of fact. Perhaps the smear-wielder also wants the target to be cowed into silence.

Turnabout is fair play and underscores the silliness here. After the Instapundit blog linked to Milbank’s rapier-like thrust, readers gave reciprocity a try. Christopher Arfaa came up with: “Dana Milbank will turn 45 next week, the same age as Walter Duranty was in 1929, when he secured an exclusive interview with Josef Stalin.” Jay Brinker proposed: “John Kerry is 69, the same age as Neville Chamberlin when he signed the Munich Agreement.” You get the idea.

Sounds easy to get caught in such a net.

I may as well admit it: I too am of a certain age — the same age at which any number of disreputable persons perpetrated some enormity or another.

All my known associates have regular birthdays as well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Daniel B. Klein

True social decency does not dwell on, pity, or patronize someone’s weakness or disadvantage, real or supposed. It does not rescue when rescue has not been sought. It does not judge or even draw attention to. It proceeds on the assumption that the individual is conducting his affairs as he sees fit, no matter how mad the method may seem.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

Sleep Rules?

Getting kids to go to bed at night, and to stay there till morning, and not get up, again and again, is possibly life’s greatest challenge. When I had young children, I was willing to do whatever it took.

Drink of water? Sure. Okay. No more.

Drone strike? Well, as tempting as that sounds . . . no.

But according to The Washington Post, Farea al-Muslimi, a young Yemeni man, testified before the United States Senate that some parents in his country have taken to threatening their children at bedtime, “Go to sleep or I will call the planes.”

Pretty funny. Until it dawned on me that our USA is now scarier than the monster hiding underneath the bed.

“What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village,” Muslimi warned, “one drone strike accomplished in an instant: There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.”

Georgetown University Law Professor Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon advisor, testified: “Every individual detained, targeted, and killed by the U.S. government may well deserve his fate. But when a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law.”

Anything that undermines the rule of law, undermines the United States of America.

It’s long past time we put the lawlessness of the killer drone program to bed . . . and not just till morning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.

Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

[T]here lie before the legislator several open secrets, which yet are so open that they ought not to remain secrets to one who undertakes the vast and terrible responsibility of dealing with millions upon millions of human beings by measures which, if they do not conduce to their happiness, will increase their miseries and accelerate their deaths?

There is first of all the undeniable truth, conspicuous and yet absolutely ignored, that there are no phenomena which a society presents but what have their origins in the phenomena of individual human life, which again have their roots in vital phenomena at large. And there is the inevitable implication that unless these vital phenomena, bodily and mental, are chaotic in their relations (a supposition excluded by the very maintenance of life) the resulting phenomena cannot be wholly chaotic: there must be some kind of order in the phenomena which grow out of them when associated human beings have to cooperate. Evidently, then, when one who has not studied such resulting phenomena of social order, undertakes to regulate society, he is pretty certain to work mischiefs.

Categories
links

Townhall: 33 Billion Balloons in a Strange Land

So, what country are we living in, today? Well, it’s explicable, if absurd — explicable in terms of the old “Cui bono” idea, of incentives and disincentives; absurd because of . . . well, click on over to Townhall.com, read this weekend’s Common Sense column, and see. Then come back here for further limning of the absurdist status quo.:

Categories
video

Video: Odds Against

How safe from terrorism are we? Well, look at the odds….

Some very basic truths are not very popular. So, folks, let’s start with those very basic truths. The ones most politicians, for example, don’t dare say.

Categories
Thought

Herbert Spencer

The great political superstition of the past was the divine right of kings. The great political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments. The oil of anointing seems unawares to have dripped from the head of the one on to the heads of the many, and given sacredness to them also and to their decrees.