ANAR and the denial industry

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 24, 2008

Denial of hard facts and unwelcome implications runs the gamut. At its outer edge, we find a few sorely misguided folks denying that the Holocaust occurred, doubting the wickedness of Stalin, contending the greatness of Lincoln. Once upon a time, the Catholic Church denied Galileo's discovery that the planets revolve around the sun. On a modern denial cloud of their own are those who dispute evolution or the transmission of AIDS. In the privacy of our homes, we may deny increasing avoirdupois, receding hairlines, the tattered state of a favorite garment, the whiff of cigarette (or cannabis) smoke around a protesting teenager.

Denial has many origins and explanations, but its primary source is obvious: facing reality would be inconvenient, embarrassing, unpleasant, or costly (whether in money, votes, reputation, book sales, family relationships, or other metrics). So the denier insists that it isn't true or didn't happen. Sometimes that insistence is just for public consumption and personal aggrandizement--there is attention to be had and money to be made from certain kinds of denial. Often, though, the denier really believes it or manages to convince himself, too.

As we mark the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk on Saturday, most people gratefully acknowledge that epochal commission report's sounding of an overdue and much-needed alarum, pointing out to Americans a generation back that the country faced a quality crisis in its schools that would imperil our very future if we failed to take urgent

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ANAR and the denial industry

Revisions required

Michael J. Petrilli / April 24, 2008

You have to hand it to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and her team: they are hardly dawdling during their Administration's closing months. On Tuesday, they announced a massive set of regulatory changes to No Child Left Behind that incorporates many of the "pilot programs" and reauthorization proposals that Team Bush and others have floated over the past year. Mirabile dictu, maybe they don't really need new legislation after all.

While Spellings put forth much that's laudable and sensible, upon close inspection there's a bit less there than meets the eye, particularly when it comes to the law's interventions for schools deemed "in need of improvement." The problems with the law's current "cascade of sanctions" are multiple and legendary, but Spellings's new regulations don't provide the overhauls necessary to right that ship.

Take the lethargic efforts of many school districts to advertise the law's "free tutoring" (also called SES) opportunities. The proposed regulations would make a number of small and useful changes. For example, districts could spend federal money on marketing and outreach activities and charge that spending to the 20 percent of their Title I funds that they are supposed to allocate toward tutoring and school choice. Districts would also have to notify parents of their choice options at least 14 days before the start of the school year, and publish a description of their efforts to inform parents of these opportunities. Plus, before moving the

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Revisions required

Tendentious on tenure

April 24, 2008

Perched atop a soap box in the New York Daily News, United Federation of Teachers boss (and upcoming AFT chieftain) Randi Weingarten steps up her ongoing assault on logic and reason. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wants to consider student test scores when awarding tenure to teachers. Almost everybody in the real world (i.e., outside the field of education) concurs. Weingarten, however, thinks this is a terrible plan. Teachers up for tenure are already scrutinized, she writes: "Supervisors are supposed to observe probationary teachers in their classrooms several times a year for three years--and evaluate them in more than 20 categories." The key phrase is "supposed to," which in this case should be replaced with "hardly ever." And while Weingarten doesn't argue with Klein's point that few teachers are ever denied tenure, she does claim that, because "a third of new teachers are either dismissed or leave the classroom before the final tenure decision," it all, you know, balances out. She doesn't bother specifying that this third is likely composed of promising young teachers who leave because they're frustrated with stifling work environments and uncaring or inept colleagues. To round out her sophistry, Weingarten argues that tenured teachers can easily be fired after receiving due process. Unfortunately, in New York City, due process means locking teachers in a room and paying them $60,000 to work on their screenplays. You almost had us fooled, Randi.

"Halt assault on teacher

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Tendentious on tenure

Battle of Britain

April 24, 2008

In the United Kingdom today, over 8,000 schools were shut down by a strike of the National Union of Teachers, angry because its members' pay, which has risen 19 percent in real terms since 1997, is scheduled for only a 2.45 percent bump next year. Thus, no school for little Nigel. Just about everyone, even those in Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labor government, has come out against the union. And George Bridges, former campaign director for Conservative Party leader David Cameron, has had enough of this sort of thing. In a piece titled "Time to crush the National Union of Teachers," he writes, "If we are to raise standards in education, we have to break the NUT's grip on schools." The strike isn't truly about money, Bridges notes, but about scrapping standardized tests and pushing a leftist agenda. To combat it, he recommends that the Tories make the "argument about standards, not structures" (i.e., focus less on the process of forming good schools than on emphasizing its results; tell parents about the fine schools that choice will produce, not the process of school-choice itself), and he pushes a "Big Bang" theory of reform through which many things are done at once (rather than the incremental changes that often occur). His plan is ambitious. To which Bridges would surely respond, "So are our enemies."

"8,000 schools could close in tomorrow's national teachers' strike," by Alexandra Frean, The Times