At Truthdig, the good E.J. Dionne raises his head in a column, "Can't We All Just Get Along? No", which begins thus:
The word partisanship is typically accompanied by the word mindless. That's not simply insulting to partisans; it's also untrue.
If we learn nothing else in 2010, can we please finally acknowledge that our partisan divisions are about authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing?
Amen to that. But what about the flip side? If partisanship actually reflects real differences in ideas, how much does bi-partisanship reflect a mindless approach that ignores not just ideas, but reality itself? (Including, of course, the mindless use of the term "mindless partisanship.") Take, for example, the mindless bipartisan approach to education, exhibited by Obama's support for firing all the teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, which Jeff is going to be writing about 4 PM.
The bottom-line reason given for the firing in many news reports was a 48% graduation rate. Now, that rate is nothing to be proud of--even though it would have been quite respectable for the "Greatest Generation", which sent a lot of high school dropouts off to war. But 48% is still almost halfway to perfection. Contrast that with the violent crime rate for Oakland, California, 1917.8 per 100,000 in 2007 (the most recent year for which statistics are available in the DOJ online database). You'd have to double their performance (cut their violent crime rate in half) eleven times before you'd get close to perfection, a violent crime rate of less than 1 per 100,000.
Obviously, the entire Oakland Police Department should be fired. No other conclusion is possible. It's a no-brainer.
But why stop with Oakland?
The safest community in California is Laguna Woods, and it's violent crime rate is 16.4 per 100,000. You'd have double their police performance four times to get close to a violent crime rate of 1 per 100,000 and five times to get under 1 per 100,000. If perfection's your measure (and why shouldn't it be?) then the Laguna Woods police are spectacularly worse than the Central Falls High faculty and staff.
The conclusion is obvious: Every police department in America should be fired en masse.
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Of course, some might argue that perfection is an unreasonable standard. Some would argue that we need to look at things in context. So here's a list of the ten most and ten least dangerous communities in California in 2007, in terms of violent crime rates...along with their crime rates as a multiple of the crime rate of Laguna Woods:
That's quite a disparity between the top and the bottom. And since we're talking about basic levels of physical safety--which even the most conservative politicians argue is a basic function of the state--it's a remarkably graphic representation of just how fundamentally our system fails to protect and provide for its citizens as a whole... not counting the elite, of course.
Just to provide some context, here some basic information, first, Laguna Woods:
Laguna Woods is both one of California's newest and oldest cities. Incorporated in 1999 as Orange County's 32nd city, the average age of Laguna Woods residents is 78. Ninety percent of the City's 4 square miles is contained within the senior citizen gated community of Laguna Woods Village (formerly Leisure World, Laguna Hills). The balance of the City contains three additional senior residential communities and several thriving commercial centers.
Wow. With an average age of 78, one might almost regard that violent crime rate as remarkably high.
Let's move on to Hillsborough:
Hillsborough is an incorporated town in San Mateo County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hillsborough is one of the wealthiest places in America and has the highest income of places in America with populations of at least 10,000. It is located seventeen miles (27 km) south of San Francisco on the San Francisco Peninsula, between Interstate 280 and SR 82 (El Camino Real). The population was 10,825 at the 2000 census. The town is served by Hillsborough City School District. Hillsborough is home to some of the Bay Area's wealthiest people, and the landscape is dominated by large homes; the city enforces a 2,500-square-foot (230 m2) minimum house size and half-acre minimum lot size to preserve exclusivity.[1] As a result, there are no apartments, condominiums or townhouses in the city limits; however, it is not unusual for the homes along the eastern edge of Hillsborough to face condominiums in neighboring Burlingame, with which it shares ZIP code 94010. Hillsborough is one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States, with a median home price of over $3.8 million.
Compared to Hillsborough, Palos Verdes Estates is downright downscale. Still, these brave people manage to soldier on:
Palos Verdes Estates is a city in Los Angeles County, California, USA on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It was designed by the noted American landscape architect and planner Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. The population was 13,340 at the 2000 census. According to the 2000 US Census, Palos Verdes Estates is the 81st richest place in the United States with at least 1,000 households (based upon per capita income). The 90274 ZIP code was listed as the 47th most expensive U.S. ZIP code in 2007 by Forbes.com.[5] Palos Verdes Estates is one of the most affluent communities both in Los Angeles County and the nation.
On the other hand, there's Oakland:
Oakland is the eighth-largest city in the U.S. state of California[2] and a major West Coast port city, located on San Francisco Bay about eight miles east of the city of San Francisco. Oakland is a major hub city for the Bay Area subregion collectively called the East Bay, and it is the county seat of Alameda County. Based on United States Census Bureau estimates for 2008, Oakland is the 44th-largest city in the United States with a population of 404,155.[3]
...
During the 1940s, thousands of war-industry workers moved to Oakland from the Deep South, and the late twentieth century saw a steady influx of immigrants from around the globe. According to the 2000 U.S. census, Oakland is the second most ethnically diverse city in the United States, with many languages spoken.[4]
Oakland has struggled with significant challenges, including high unemployment, widespread poverty, and an elevated rate of violent crime.
Of course, it should be obvious that if Hillsborough or Palos Verdes Estates had crime rates like Oakland does, then heads would roll. And yet, the vast disparities in crime rates are politically acceptable, even though they represent a far greater level of disparity in minimal safety than the disparities in minimal educational achievement.
Once upon a time, the Democratic Party stood for the proposition that some basic level of equitable treatment was due to all Americans. This outlook represented what E.J. Dionne called "authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing" than those promoted by the GOP.
Those days are now gone. The Democratic Party has become the party of mindless bipartisanship, and nothing shows that more clearly than Obama's eagerness to see an entire school faculty thrown out into the cold in the midst of a deep recession.
Yesterday, in "OUR 'Tea Party Movement': California's students march forth, leading fight for public education", I mentioned that Democracy Now! had an interview with Diane Ravitch, long identified as a leading conservative education scholar. But Ravitch was never a true ideologue, and when the data failed to support the policies she supported, she changed her mind:
In a companion piece focused on primary and secondary education, Democracy Now! interviewed education scholar Diane Ravitch, long a leading proponent of charter schools, privatization and testing, who has changed her mind, based on the overwhelming record of failure of these "bipartisan" "reform" ideas, as she details in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, which jeffbinnc will be reviewing for Open Left next weekend.
Without stealing Jeff's thunder--indeed, to whet your appetite a bit, I'd like to quote what Ravitch had to say about a key turning point in which the extremely meaningful partisan differences were done away with to create a "great leap forward" in bipartisan mindlessness in the war on public education. It's actually a two-step: On the one hand, there's a coming together on "accountability", which translates into demonizing teachers. But there's also the abandonment of actual, substantive standards--what students are supposed to learn. In place of standards based on knowledge, we have devolved to measuring "skills"--an obsession with process that should sound chillingly familiar:
DIANE RAVITCH: Right. Well, when I went to work for the Department of Education, I came in as a Democrat, and I thought, somewhat naively, that education was somehow a nonpartisan issue. And so, I came in to work on the idea of promoting arts education, science education. And in the department-part of the department I was in, we gave grants to different professional associations of educators to develop voluntary national standards of the arts, science, history, geography, economics, civics, lots of different areas. We wanted people, educators across the country, to say this is what an education is, this is what all American children should have. It was not a race to the top. It was based on the idea of equal educational opportunity means that all children get these wonderful things.
But I think, within the Bush administration, the more important dialogue that was going on, that I was just very peripheral to, was the idea of school choice, vouchers, charter schools, and then also accountability. And where the Democrats and the Republicans began to make common cause was around this theme of accountability. And what accountability ultimately meant, not just in the Bush administration, but in the Clinton, and now in the Obama-in the, you know, next Bush and then this administration, accountability means who should be punished. If the scores don't go up, who should be punished? Teachers. Teachers should be punished. The unions should be demonized.
But you asked me about Lynne Cheney. The reason that Lynne Cheney gets into this conversation is that she was the one who saw that the history standards were-you know, she attacked them. And there got to be a huge national brouhaha back in 1994, 1995, about whether the history standards were politically correct. And it caused such an uproar in the press with-you know, the right-wing talk-show hosts jumped all over it, and then you had people on the left defending it. Congress and the administration just said-and this was in the Clinton administration years. They said, "Let's not touch this whole idea of standards. Let's just stick with basic skills." And that's how we today have inherited this legacy of the only thing you're allowed to really talk about is reading and math, don't touch science, the arts. They're all too controversial. You might get into an argument over evolution if you try to talk about science.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But you also say that in many state curriculums that have been developed now, even in reading, it's more about the functions of reading-
DIANE RAVITCH: Right.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -than the actual content of the literature that people are reading.
DIANE RAVITCH: Right, sure. I mean, this is-to most people, it would come as a shock, if you pick up your state standards and you say, "Well, where's the literature?" Because what they talk about is strategies and processes and previewing and reviewing and predicting. And you think, you know, why aren't kids getting good literature? Aren't they reading the great stuff, you know, world literature, American literature, English literature, Spanish literature? No, it's not there, because if you make a choice about literature, then choosing this means you're not choosing something else, therefore choose nothing at all.
"Choose nothing at all." Mindless bipartisanship in a nutshell. |
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