Are good grades a right?

Promoting New Standards of Professionalism & Educational Enrichment

EducationMatters

October 2007

A publication of the Association of American Educators

By Niki Hayes

Suppose those learning to play musical instruments had to learn to play them by ear. There would be no focus on the symbols of music, sounds of specific notes, practicing scales, learning classical pieces, or even learning some standard tunes from which creative “extensions” could be made. The small percentage of students who could play an instrument by ear could not help others as they try to craft their own natural talents into productions because the intuitive players couldn’t translate their innate abilities into internationally known music symbols.

Discovery Learning

So the adopted method for all other students would be called “discovery learning.” Students would “manipulate” their instruments with teachers “facilitating” the students’ efforts to discover how to form a particular tune, which, of course, they had created themselves. There would be no continuous practice—no “drill and kill” of repetition. All tunes would be considered acceptable because they were the original, personal creation of each student. Comparisons to respected or classical renditions might be possible, but that would be extremely time-consuming, and it would not be considered “relevant” in today’s modern classroom.

Students who needed to learn by the old-fashioned methods, such as studying music symbols, their related sounds, and repetitive practice would need extra tutoring. Supplemental materials might be allowed that taught some “basic skills,” but the bigger picture to learning music, or the conceptual approach, must be maintained. All of this supplementary material would cost extra money for the schools—and extra time for the students and teachers.

Schools of education that train teachers would insist this “discovery” method of learning music is progressive and provides social justice for girls and students of color in the music profession. They would base much of their beliefs on a few education researchers in the 1970s who had concluded that inductive and intuitive methods—those that focus on process rather than product—were needed by these two “subgroups.”

White males and Asian students were the only ones who had benefited, they said, from the traditional methods of learning music for the past several thousand years. The progress made in music by the “ancients” and their methods were considered of no significance in the child-directed “discovery” teaching philosophy.

Many elementary school teachers liked the discovery method because it did not require their learning the music symbols and the many complicated relationships that could result from those symbols. High school music teachers hated the discovery method because they had difficulty finding enough qualified students to form a school band, symphony, or choir.

Many parents of elementary students accepted the discovery learning because the students seemed to “enjoy” it and they always had good grades in the subject. After all, the grading was based on subjective judgments about the student’s process of creating his or her own musical piece, and it was not a comparison to another’s work.

Some Math Programs are Out of Tune There would be no continuous practice— no “drill and kill” of repetition. All tunes would be considered acceptable because they were the original, personal creation of each student.

If we taught music like some “experts” say we should teach math, it would be the end of the road for music in America

Dire Consequences

The consequence, however, would be a growing lack of new musicians. This would impact high school bands, symphonies, musical productions in theatres, and the entire music industry. Foreign students who had studied traditional music lessons would become the heart of America’s shrinking music scene.

How long before the public would refuse to tolerate this destruction of music education and ultimately music’s contribution to society and the world? Would it take five, ten, or even twenty years?

Would college music teachers stand by quietly as their incoming students’ proficiencies continually disintegrated? Would professional music companies and businesses ignore the shrinking pool of talent? Would business leaders buy into the progressive philosophy that insists we must focus on “creativity thinking” and not worry about the significance of foundational work in the music discipline?

Music & Math

Now substitute “mathematics” for “music” and you have a picture of what has been happening in American mathematics education for the past 40 years. “Whole math,” based on conceptual, intuitive, processed-thinking has replaced traditional mathematics education. (Yes, it is the parallel universe to the “whole language”fiasco that produced two generations of poor readers and writers in American education.) Algorithms, symbolic manipulation, and basic skills are no longer mastered in elementary mathematics—and therefore in high school classes—because those represent the traditional, classical education formerly reserved only for white males, according to the leaders of “reform mathematics.” The traditional program represents “drill and kill,” they say. Traditionalists say the program offers “drill and skill,” as well as mastery of concepts.

Crescendo

This reform pedagogy was codified in 1989 by a private group called The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) when they published their Curriculum Standards for K-12 mathematics education. The National Science Foundation (NSF) bought into their ideas, probably due to their emphasis on egalitarianism. From 1991 through 1999, the NSF pumped $83 million into universities and publishers that would create math curricula that supported the reformists’ social engineering agenda. In 1999, more than 200 professional mathematicians  sent a letter to Richard Riley, Education Secretary, asking him to withdraw support for the reform math products, due to their poor quality of mathematics instruction. He ignored them. Even more millions have been funneled into the programs from both government and private sources.

Educators have latched onto these cash cows as money is offered to “pilot” reform programs and students have become research subjects. Math wars have erupted among parent groups and districts in pockets across the country, as parents (and a few teachers) try to change the direction of mathematics education in their schools. Parents are learning, however, that schools really do not want parent involvement if it means they are going to question curriculum choices. Moreover, test scores continue to show the disintegration of mathematics’ skills among American students.

When educators and businesses wonder why this is happening, they should think about students learning to play music by ear. That is the real world of mathematics education today. It has been going on, officially, for almost two decades. How much longer will it be allowed by the people who can make a real difference?

Raising the Bar: How Parents Can Fix Education

By DANIEL AKST   Wall Street Journal
August 29, 2008; Page W9

Everyone, it seems, has a complaint about the schools. Indifferent bureaucracy, change-averse unions, faddish curricula, soaring school taxes matched with mediocre student performance — the list is long and seemingly unchanging.

At the start of yet another school year, it’s time for some radical change in your local schools — a specific change that only parents can bring about. It’s a thing already being done in some far-off countries but that remains strangely rare here in America. It’s something I’ve tried — and, despite the skepticism of friends and neighbors, it seems to work.

What is this miracle that lies within the reach of nearly every family? It’s simple. All you have to do is to start insisting that your children fully apply themselves to their studies — and commit yourself to doing your part. That means making sure they do all the work expected of them as well as their abilities allow. It also means making sure everything at home stands behind these principles and supports the idea of learning.

These will sound like obvious ideas. In fact, given all the distractions of modern life, it is a radical departure from the normal order of things. Let’s face it: More than budgets or bureaucrats, more than textbooks or teachers, parents are the reason that kids perform as they do in school.

In a survey of the research, Michigan’s Department of Education summarizes the findings neatly: “The most consistent predictors of children’s academic achievement and social adjustment are parent expectations of the child’s academic attainment and satisfaction with their child’s education at school. Parents of high-achieving students set higher standards for their children’s educational activities.”

One great thing about this statement is that income should not matter, since almost any family can insist that conscientious schoolwork be Job One. The stereotype, of course, is of frantic upper-middle-class parents bombarding their precious little ones in utero with Mozart and then hectoring teachers and hiring tutors right up until the Harvard application essay.

But my impression is that many prosperous parents pay mere lip service to education. A study of elementary-school families last year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics bears this out. Researchers at Brigham Young and the University of Michigan found that parents preferred teachers who make their children happy over those who emphasize academic achievement. My experience in a nonobsessive school district is consistent with this. Our family’s intense focus on learning is regarded warily by some parents, whose dissatisfactions with school are mostly about testing and creativity but never about a lack of foreign-language instruction or overall academic rigor. Indeed, teachers have reported watering down the public middle-school curriculum in response to parental complaints that it was too difficult. The lack of demand for serious schooling is the least of it. Too many kids are growing up in homes with little emphasis on reading, learning or culture. Nielsen Media Research reports that Americans ages 2 to 17 spend an average of three hours a day watching television, which is way too much for any good student. In a study of 4,508 middle-school students published two years ago in the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that weekday TV and videogames were strongly correlated with poor school performance.

Reading among the young is also in decline. The National Endowment for the Arts, in a sobering report last year, found that a mere 30% of 13-year-olds read for fun daily (a number that has been shrinking), while 13% hardly ever read for fun (a number that has been growing). The adults weren’t much better; by their own report, Americans aged 15 and over spent less than 22 minutes a day on voluntary reading of any kind.

Is it any wonder that our children aren’t doing as well in school as we’d like? Can we really blame the educational system, with all its shortcomings, for the failure of American children to emerge from years of costly schooling with a reasonable level of knowledge about the world, or with the ability to read, write, think logically and handle math? I don’t think so.

Yet with some parental effort, children can do better. Lord knows I’m no Ozzie Nelson, and “My Three Sons” involved one more than I could ever handle. But I can convey something of my own family’s experiment in education, which so far seems to be working.

The first thing we did was to tell our kids that we had no doubt they could do well, and that in fact we expect it of them. We declared that their education is our family’s highest priority, and that during the school year everything in our home will revolve around their success in school. We reiterate these messages regularly, and we communicate them to teachers and administrators, making clear that we want to be kept well-informed.

With some effort, we resist the impulse to “help” our boys much with their homework. Would doing push-ups for them strengthen their arms? The same applies to schoolwork, whatever it is — including science projects. But we make sure homework is done early, without loud music or other distractions. We’re available for consulting, and while they’re still young we review their work nightly.

We keep a tight lid on media. Computer time is limited, there’s no gaming system, and during the school week virtually no television. Extracurricular reading is constantly encouraged, and we choose movies with care. For years now we’ve made a family project out of classic cinema, most of which is highly suitable for kids (and pleases grown-ups as well). “To Be or Not to Be” (1942), in which Carole Lombard and Jack Benny hilariously foil the Nazis, was recently a huge hit with our boys. They can have their jarring music, as long as there’s no foul language or misogyny, but during family meals — which we never miss — they can get used to Mahler or Miles Davis.

We’re also conscious that incentives matter. Like most kids, ours have spending money, cellphones and most other perks of prosperity. But none of these things are mandatory, and all parties understand that blowing off school will have a high cost. Extracurricular activities hinge on school performance too. Recently I heard from a friend that his teenage son, a superlative athlete, was getting poor grades, so I asked if they’d considered cutting back on sports. “I could never do that to him,” my friend said, and I couldn’t help thinking: “How could you not do it for him?”

We take the kids to museums and the like, but there’s always room for athletics as well as silliness. An occasional brainless blockbuster at the mall on a rainy Sunday doesn’t seem to be doing them any harm, and we spend ample time watching the Yankees and “The Simpsons.” But it turns out that acing exams is lots of fun for kids too, and once they got going, my guys wanted to keep it up. Who knew?

Kids form lots of habits over the years, some good and some bad. What a nice surprise that doing well in school can be one of them.

Mr. Akst is a writer in New York’s Hudson Valley.

The Increasing Burden on America’s Schools

Schools cannot do this alone by Jamie Vollmer

The Case for Chutes and Ladders  by Sharon Begley

Why Memorize Math Facts?

by Aimee Yermish, Educational Consultant

My private practice is full of kids whose parents thought that way, and now have to pay me lots of money to teach the kids what they could have been taught for free in second or third grade. They usually hit the wall some time in middle school or in algebra I, where you have to use these math facts rapidly on the fly.

Quick! Two numbers that multiply to -24 and sum to 5!

No, sorry, using a calculator to do guess-and-check to factor a quadratic equation is not an efficient strategy. And inefficient rather rapidly blends into ineffective, because when it takes you too long and uses too much working memory to do the basic skills, you can’t keep track of the higher skills you’re supposed to be learning in your current grade. It’s like a dyslexic kid who can’t keep track of the flow of ideas in a long article because he’s spending too much brain power (and hence time) on reading individual words. It may seem like it only takes a few seconds to punch “6×4” into the calculator, but it really does add up and derail the kid’s train of thought.

Calculators are useful tools, but they need to be used for the right kinds of tasks. They should never be used to substitute for learning the skill that is actually being taught. Kids need to be independent enough that they can choose their brain over the calculator as the most effective tool for the job, as it frequently is, and so that, as Marjorie points out, they will be estimating the answers on the fly so that they can realize when they may have made calculator mistakes.

“If you don’t know the math, will you know that you pressed the wrong buttons? My chemistry professor used to have a saying, “Don’t be a Calculator Cripple.”” — Marjorie

I usually express that as “Freitag’s Law” (named after my friend Walt Freitag who was the first to say it in my hearing) “Never use a tool that’s smarter than you are.”

And while I would agree that some of the very highest areas of math (beyond my own expertise, as I am but a lowly molecular biologist-turned-educator, so I haven’t studied much beyond multivariate calculus and simple differential equations, plus statistics, linear algebra, and discrete math) do not require automaticity of basic math facts, they do require automaticity of the skills that fall somewhere in between them and single-digit addition, and that those skills are very difficult to master and to automatize when the basic stuff isn’t firmly in place. It’s going to be very difficult to get to graduate-level mathematics if you can’t hack calculus because you couldn’t hack algebra because you couldn’t hack middle-school math because you couldn’t hack arithmetic.

Now, where you do have my agreement is that a gifted child who is ready to progress should be allowed to progress. If he is ready to understand algebra, then he should be allowed to study algebra, even if he is still struggling to memorize his math facts. The two areas should be worked on in parallel. Frequently, it’s the algebra study that convinces the kids that it was a good idea to learn the math facts in the first place. Holding the “good stuff” hostage to the gifted kid’s weakness with basic facts is really neither fair nor truly appropriate, and it’s a recipe for underachievement.

I think there’s a basic problem here that we as the parents of gifted children must come to terms with. Not all useful learning is intrinsically interesting. Our kids have a right not to be bored in that they should not be held down, but they do not have a right not to be bored such that they have a right to skip anything that isn’t fun to learn. Math facts are boring. Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean that our precious children who don’t tolerate boredom well shouldn’t have to learn them. We have to teach our kids the difference between being bored because you are being taught something you have already mastered and being bored because the work is intrinsically boring but still important. We can turn our fertile brains towards making the practice fun and interesting, if we don’t tolerate boredom well, but we don’t get to just declare ourselves to be so brilliant that no one should ever make us do anything we don’t feel like doing.

Another issue that I think we as gifted parents have to come to terms with here is that our brilliant children may not always be brilliant across the board. They may in fact not be very good at rapid retrieval of decontextualized information like math facts. That skill may not come easily to them. Frequently, when someone asks this question on this board, it’s because their kid is bombing the mad minutes and freaking out and calling themselves stupid, and the parent wants to tell the teacher not to make their kid do the timed practice. But that’s completely backwards — if the kid isn’t doing well at the mad minutes, then that shows that he has something to learn! Wow! Since we’re often complaining that they never teach our kids anything, when they actually are teaching our kids something, we should be pleased.

All gifted kids must, at some point in their lives, recognize that giftedness does not mean that everything comes easily and that one never needs to work hard at anything. As a parent, our goal in this kind of situation should be to help the kid emotionally adjust to the situation and to help him come up with effective strategies for learning those annoying math facts so that they don’t have to be upsetting any more, not to browbeat the teacher into not teaching our precious kid something that he is having trouble learning to the level of automaticity necessary for future success in mathematics. We, of all people, should not lower our expectations of our children just because they meet with initial difficulty.

“Why stop there? Let’s make them memorize Latin roots if holding large chunks of useful data in ones memory is good.”

Actually, that’s an excellent idea (I know you meant to be ironic, but sorry, it didn’t work). If you want to improve your vocabulary, then by far the most efficient route is to memorize Latin and Greek roots.

© 2003 by Aimee Yermish
Reprinted with permission of the author.

By Jerry Hirsch, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 2, 2008

John Wooden is generally regarded as the nation’s greatest basketball coach. His UCLA teams during the 1960s and 1970s won 10 NCAA men’s basketball national championships and set records for consecutive victories. But since retiring in 1975, the 97-year-old coach has gained fame as a philosopher and motivator.

His “Pyramid of Success” guide to life is revered by former players and business leaders for its insight on how to help individuals to grow and how to manage organizations.

 

John Wooden

He is the inspiration for the UCLA Anderson School of Management’s John Wooden Global Leadership Award, which will be given annually to a business executive who reflects the coach’s leadership values.

The first recipient of the award, handed out last week, was Starbucks Corp. Chief Executive Howard Schultz.

Wooden sat down with The Times and offered up 10 tips — one for each of the NCAA basketball championships his players won at UCLA — for how business owners can become better leaders.

1. Listen. One thing that is often overlooked in leadership is the ability to listen. Listening is so important to those under your supervision.

2. Care. Another very important part of leadership is to make those under your supervision feel that you care for them — not just for the job they are doing for you, but you really care for them personally. You just can’t tell them you do that, you have to show it.

While some roles aren’t as big or in the forefront as others, they are still very important. I used to use this analogy: It is like having a powerful car. Now the engine, like an Alcindor [now called Kareem Abdul-Jabbar], who played for me, that’s powerful. Here’s another fellow who is just a wheel. And there is another fellow who is just a nut that holds the wheel on. You have to have them all. You must make every person feel that they are needed.

3. Recognize. When I was teaching in high school in basketball, for example, [I taught that] my players must never score without thanking someone. Don’t run over and shake their hand but look at them and give them a little sign or something of appreciation. Everybody likes to have a pat on the back.

4. Prepare. [Managers should be aware of] preparation for whatever their job is, little or big, preparation is so important. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail. You must not put things off.

5. Be industrious. Nothing can be accomplished without work. You’ve got to work hard. If you are looking for the short cut, if you are looking for the easy way, if you are looking for the trick to get things done, you might get them done. But you are not adding strength, you are not building.

6. Have enthusiasm. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing you are not going to be able to give it the industriousness that you should have. You must have that to inspire others to do their best.

7. Be patient. Good things take time. And that’s the way it should be. We don’t want it that way but that’s the way it is. I think that is a very important thing that a leader must get across to those under his supervision.

8. Have confidence. You must believe in yourself. If you don’t have confidence in yourself you can’t expect those under your supervision to act with much confidence.

9. Don’t fear failure. Have initiative but don’t be afraid of failure. We are all going to fail at times because we are all imperfect. When I had assistants, I always wanted them never to be afraid to make a suggestion. We don’t know a thing we don’t learn from somebody else in one way or another. If you do agree [with their suggestion] and use it and it works, be sure that they are the one that gets the credit, not you. Now if it doesn’t work, you take the blame because you made that decision to use it.

10. Win respect. You have to have the respect of those under your supervision. You can’t obtain that respect unless you are honest with them and they can depend upon you. Don’t try to sell them a bill of goods or you will lose all respect.

jerry.hirsch@latimes.com

Earth Day

Respect   Responsibility   Readiness

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Walter Williams: Enviros’ not so good at prognostication

By WALTER E. WILLIAMS

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

In 1968, professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S., and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome, warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992.

Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book “The Doomsday Book,” said Americans were using 50 percent of the world’s resources and “by 2000 they [Americans]will, if permitted, be using all of them.”

In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.”

Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “[C]ivilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 “somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

It’s not just latter-day doomsayers who have been wrong; doomsayers have always been wrong. In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. In 1949, the Secretary of the Interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association, there’s a 1,000- to 2,500-year supply.

Here are my questions: In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of man-made global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity? When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome? In 1939, when the U.S. Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken?

Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to man-made global warming?

Here are a few facts: Over 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth’s average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit. Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of Earth and variations in the sun’s output. On top of that, natural wetlands produce more greenhouse gas contributions annually than all human sources combined.

Respect   Responsibility   Readiness

Education lessons we left behind

By George Will

If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
— “A Nation at Risk” (1983)
Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week’s melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission’s report that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools’ proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.
Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities — the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.
Chester Finn, a former Moynihan aide, notes in his splendid new memoir (“Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik”) that during the Depression-era job scarcity, high schools were used to keep students out of the job market, shunting many into nonacademic classes. By 1961, those classes had risen to 43 percent of all those taken by students. After 1962, when New York City signed the nation’s first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students’ scores on standardized tests declined.
In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so “seismic” — Moynihan’s description — that the government almost refused to publish it.
Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools’ effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class — fractured families — would have to be faced.
But it wasn’t. Instead, shopworn panaceas — larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes — were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.
In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA’s behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us “open” classrooms, teachers as “facilitators of learning” rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of “multiculturalism,” and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.
In 1994, Congress grandly decreed that by 2000 the high school graduation rate would be “at least” 90 percent and that American students would be “first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.” Moynihan, likening such goals to Soviet grain quotas — solemnly avowed, never fulfilled — said: “That will not happen.” It did not.
Moynihan was a neoconservative before neoconservatism became a doctrine of foreign policy hubris. Originally, it taught domestic policy humility. Moynihan, a social scientist, understood that social science tells us not what to do but what is not working, which today includes No Child Left Behind. Finn thinks NCLB got things backward: “The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best.” Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier.

A nation at risk? Now more than ever.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008  OC Register

The Orange Grove: The business end of democracy

We know more and care more than you do and will vote accordingly

By MARK PATLAN

I know better than you how you should run your life. I know right from wrong better than you. I will decide what you can do in the privacy of your home and bedroom. I will decide how you should manage your money. I will decide what you can eat, drink, and smoke. I will decide what deals you can make with others. I will decide what to teach your children. I will decide what you can do with your property. In fact, I have an endless list of good ideas. I will protect you from yourself because I know better than you.

Does any of this bother you? Would it make you feel better to know that it is not just me who knows what is best for you? Your friends and neighbors also know what is best for you better than you do. They also know better than you do about how to run your life and manage your business affairs. What I am saying is, there are more of us than there are of you. And if there are more of us than there are of you, then, surely we are right, and you are wrong. Just do what we say and there won’t be any trouble.

You still have a problem with this? Would it make you feel better to know that we took a vote? We took a vote, and it was a secret ballot. Everyone had the chance to vote – well, almost everyone. We didn’t let the felons or the illegal immigrants vote. What matters is that we took a vote on how you should run your life, what you can do with your property, and what we will teach your children. It was democracy in action. And what could be wrong with democracy?

Don’t you understand that democracy is the greatest system in the world? That’s how your friends, neighbors, and I (and yes, your worst enemies, too) decide what is best for you. We the People have a show of hands and decide what is best for you. Would you prefer that we have a dictator or a king? Don’t you understand? When We the People overthrew King George III, we took his powers away and we gave them to ourselves, every man and woman a king or queen.

Surely, you don’t have a problem with this? Would it make you feel any better to know that we will use our powers only for good? We will take a vote and decide what is good, and we will use our powers for that purpose. And we will use our powers only for good because we care. We will decide what is best for you because we care, but you only care about yourself. However, your neighbors and I care about more than just you. We also care about the rest of us.

The rest of us have problems that need solving. Health care costs a lot. And so does a college education. Someone needs to pay for all of this. Together we can find someone to pay for it, someone other than us. Then, we can have all the health care and college educations that we always dreamed of – for free.

Maybe you only care about yourself, but the rest of us have wants. We want free health care and free college educations, and only the best will do. And there are more of us than there are of you. Democracy means that we are right, remember?

If you disagree with our democracy then you must be wrong. If you have a problem with that then maybe it is time you stopped caring only about yourself and started caring about the rest of us. We care. We care enough to vote for what we care about. But someone else needs to pay for it, or the rest of us won’t be any better off.

You can show that you care about the rest of us by paying for the rest of us. Yes, it will be expensive. But price is no obstacle because democracy means that we are right to make you pay for our wants. It is true that you will probably have to borrow money that your children and grandchildren will have to repay. But by borrowing to pay for our wants today, you are investing in tomorrow. Your children can invest in their tomorrow by borrowing from their grandchildren, and so on. What matters is that we care enough to invest in tomorrow.

Still bothered by this? I make no apologies. Democracy means never having to say you’re sorry.