Remember when Katherine Kersten wrote about some perceived irregularities at Tariq Ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), an Islamocentric charter school in the southeast ‘burbs of Saint Paul?

George Soros’ minions tut-tutted (when their heads weren’t bursting with ad-homina)
David Brauer snarked “Nothing to see here, wingnuts!”

Even politicians got into the act, all but demanding Kersten be dropped off a bridge in a sack full of cats.

Nothing but calumny for the uppity wingnuts who dared question the left’s “nothing to see here”.

But it’s not over.  TIZA is being hauled into court by those bitter, Jesus-clinging gun nuts at…

…the ACLU?

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis against Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, known as TIZA, and the Minnesota Department of Education, which the ACLU says is at fault for failing to uncover and stop the alleged transgressions. The suit names the department and Alice Seagren, the state education commissioner, as co-defendants.The department investigated the Twin Cities school last year, and the school said it had taken corrective actions in response to concerns about the practicing of religion on campus. TIZA said in a written statement on Wednesday that the school is nonsectarian and in compliance with federal and state regulations.

But the ACLU claims the school is using federal and state money to promote religion in violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The moral of the story?  Katherine Kersten is, all by herself, a better, smarter journalist than every bought-off Soros-pet “reporter” in the Twin Cities.

One of the things that makes a conservative a conservative is opposition to the relentless dumbing-down of our culture.

Authoritarians need a dumb, compliant population, focused purely on their own material wants and needs – people who value punctual trains over liberty – to succeed.

Our education system has been failing for at least a generation to try to produce anything but that.

Jay Reding notes that even the Chinese are getting this:

The Asia Times talks about the value of classical music in forming a strong and supple mind:

Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool.

I’m not one of those people who dings on “rap” music strictly for its own sake – but there’s a great point here.

Classical music ties a lot of highfalutin’ concepts – meter, melody, harmony, counterpoint – together simultaneously. Not only does playing it require a lot of concentration, years of practice and long-delayed gratification, but listening to it takes time and effort to really appreciate – which was why colleges used to teach “music appreciation”. For people who don’t grow up around classical music (and I didn’t, although I played cello from ages 10 to 22, and can still crank out a tune, so I like to think I’m a fairly literate listener) some of those concepts are not things that jump out and grab you by the hypothalamus. It takes time, practice…education to really get it.

As contrast, I present hip-hop. No, this is not the standard-issue social conservative attack on the form; indeed, I used to be a rap DJ. There is a skill to taking a rhythm apart; there is a certain art to the wordplay that a really, really good rapper brings to the table. But hip-hop is about rhythm, which is the most immediately obvious aspect of music; even babies can perceive and completely enjoy rhythm and simple melody.

And there was a time when the goal was to master things that babies couldn’t do.
Jay writes:

The problem is that the concepts of “discipline” and “delayed gratification” are practically foreign to Americans these days. We’ve become a nation that has begun to systematically rout out the qualities that make us strong. Instead of allowing children to explore, we coddle them. Instead of teaching the classics, we teach drivel. We teach “self esteem” instead of formal logic. A classical education trained young minds to think critically, appreciate culture, and inculcated them with the values necessary for life in a democratic society. Now, thanks to the relentless dumbing-down of society, that sort of education has been cast out as being “patriarchal,” “ethnocentric” and even just plain “racist.” It is any irony that the Chinese seem to have a finer appreciation for our culture than we do.

Yes, it is.

There’s a parallel, of course.

Like classical music, conservatism is not intuitive to most people. Toddlers have a hard time with Hayek and Mahler, but can fully wrap their minds around “make people happy” and banging on pots. To embrace conservatism – the conservatism of Hayek and Buckley and Goldwater moreso than most of your single-issue varieties – takes some of the same attributes.

Anyone can figure out the First Amendment.  The Tenth Amendment?  That’s complicated.

Minnesota is famous for being…well, cold.

Of course, as has been confirmed on this site many times in the past, Minnesotans are wusses about the weather – North Dakota is colder, and windier to boot. 

But that’s not the chill I’m talking about, this time.

No, it’s free speech that’s freezing on Minnesota’s college campuses.  The Young Americas Foundation (YAF) has compiled its annual Top Ten Abuses for the past year – and two of them take place within a mile of each other, at Saint Paul’s two up-market Catholic schools.

And the scary part is, the story doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Saint Thomas comes in at #2:

2. Transgendered activists in, pro-life speakers out. Liberal administrators at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic institution in Minnesota, censored the appearance of prominent pro-life speaker Star Parker because campus officials felt “uncomfortable” and “disturbed” by previous conservative speakers at the school. The University’s mission statement claims it values “the pursuit of truth,” “diversity,” and “meaningful dialogue.” Except, not really—or better yet, as long as the said “pursuit” doesn’t offend leftist predilections. Meanwhile, within the past year, the same school hosted Al Franken, the bombastic liberal comedian, and Debra Davis, a transgendered activist who believes God is a black lesbian. Realizing they had a public relations disaster on their hands, the head honchos at St. Thomas eventually reversed the ban on Star Parker.

Since it’s a “Worst of 2008” award, the YAF necessarily omits the larger historical context of oppression at St. Thomas during the reign of the school’s president, Father Dennis “Havana Denny” Dease. 

Father Dease has blazed a frozen trail during his tour at St. Thomas – from forbidding students to assist Cuban baseball player Manuel Chaoui’s bid for freedom when he defected to the US on a trip to play the Tommies, to actively attacking the students that booked an appearance by Ann Coulter, to turning a blind eye to the vandalism directed against the campus’ conservative student newspaper.  Some considered his (brief) banning for Bishop Desmond Tutu from campus a sign that he was an equal-opportunity oppressor; leaving aside the imbalance of the campus’ oppression, it’s fair to say that chilling one side’s freedom of speech chills everyone‘s.  Even if they don’t know it yet.

St. Thomas sits on the east bank of the Mississippi River gorge at the intersection of East River Road and Summit Avenue is one of the most beautiful campuses in the country – unless you’re a conservative activist; for them, the campus is a windswept ideological gulag, as cold, barren and oppressive as Solzenitzyn’s Kolima.

Stroll south down Cleveland Avenue about half a mile to Randolph – the icy ideological tailwind will put purpose in your step.  Hang a left.  It takes you to the University of Saint Catherine:

10. Who knew? Universal health care is actually a non partisan issue. Administrators at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota—the nation’s largest Catholic women’s college—unexpectedly blocked young conservatives on campus from hosting Bay Buchanan, a popular conservative commentator and U.S. Treasurer under President Reagan. College officials deemed Ms. Buchanan’s remarks on “Feminism and the 2008 Election” too politically charged, citing concerns about the school’s tax status. Those same “concerns,” mind you, didn’t prohibit the school from sponsoring programs that push for universal healthcare and minimum wage increases or hosting Frank Kroncke, an anti-war radical who is reliving the Vietnam days. But Bay Buchanan? Well, she’s partisan, according to St. Catherine’s administration.

Of course, the Twin Cities has other contenders for the Top Ten.  Go east on Grand from St. Thomas (or north on Fairview from St. Kate’s) maybe half a mile, and you run into Macalester College, a Presbyterian-affiliated liberal (heh) arts school that richly earned a “Red” rating from FIRE for its stultifying-yet-capricious speech codes.  Then, don your wooly (rastafarian?) cap and handmuffs to plod up Snelling a mile and a half to Hamline, which earned brickbats (or perhaps ice chunks) from FIRE for suspending student Troy Scheffler for advocating legal concealed carry on campus (for students that passed Minnesota’s permitting criteria, no less).  I give ’em both a good shot at making the “top” ten before long.

And I’m so proud.

Twin Cities’ “liberal arts” campuses – where the icy winds of repression are always leaking up under your waistband.

Minnesota has a few rituals that we locals rely on to see in the changes in the seasons. The Vikings choking (sometimes in the playoffs, sometimes in pre-season); farmers bitching about there not being enough rain (or, otherwise, too much rain); the DFL trying to put lipstick on the pig of “huge confiscatory tax hikes”…

…and, every fall or winter, the DFL/Strib (pardon the redundancy) taking another hit piece at charter schools.

Charter schools – essentially “districts within districts”, schools calved off from regular school districts which elect their own board, hire their own teachers and, most importantly, develop or adopt their own curriculum – started in Minnesota, and have been a huge success. So huge, in fact, that the DFL/teacher’s union (pardon the redundancy) has tried to strangle the phenomenon from the cradle all the way into the movement’s twenties.

And the effort continues:

When charter schools started in Minnesota in the early 1990s, they were touted as a higher-quality alternative for parents, particularly poor and minority families, looking to escape underperforming district schools.   

But a study released today by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Race and Poverty finds that most charter schools have fallen short of that promise and perform worse than comparable district schools on state tests.

The reason for this, of course, is that charter schools are atomic units; the buck stops in the building. If a kid “underperforms”, a public school has the option of shunting the kid off to Special Ed, or in bigger districts to an “Alternative Learning Center”, where they’re “off the books” for purposes of “No Child Left Behind” accounting. In a charter school, all the kids in the building get counted toward the same average; the charter school has noplace to hide the kids who are dragging the school’s average down.  

And the biggest growth vector among the charters? Inner-city schools chartered by black and Asian parents who are dissatisfied with the public district. And what do you think is going to happen – at least in the short term – when a population that’s been woefully underserved by the public schools gets its own school, and congregates as a big group?

Their “test scores”, in the short term, might suffer. Presuming you pay attention to test scores. More on this below.
Make no mistake – there are charter schools that don’t pass muster, that do a poor job of teaching kids. Is the percentage as high as that of our failing inner-city school districts?

I don’t know, but I strongly doubt it.

But at least the claim above is based on some numbers. The next bit?

Well…:

In the process, it said, charters also intensify racial and economic segregation and compound the problem by encouraging districts to compete by creating ethnic niche programs.

I’m tempted to ask – do the Strib’s Patrice Relerford and Emily Johns know that charter enrollment is voluntary? And that the big driving force behind urban charter schools is the flood of disaffected African-American parents who believe – with complete statistical accuracy – that Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s districts serve them incredibly badly? And that given the motivation, not only is “segregation” voluntary, benign and (given the proportion of black families making up the charter school market in the city) inevitable, but fussing about “integration” is a fussy manifestation of white liberal guilt.

And when in Minnesota, whenever white liberals are guilty, Myron Orfield can’t be far behind:

“So many people are seeing charter schools as a solution to poor, segregated neighborhoods,” said Myron Orfield, the institute’s executive director. “The sad part is, they’re getting these kids to switch schools and then they’re doing worse” than district schools.

Rubbish.

The “studies” on which this “report” is based don’t measure individual achievement; indeed, no studies of relative performance of charter and public schools ever do. Whether a school does “better or worse” than another school is utterly meaningless; the only issue that matters is how do individual kids do?

And the only way to cut through the misleading spin on the poorly-chosen test parameters is to find parameters that matter. In this case, the only meaningful measure is “how many individual students‘ performances improve versus decline?”

If you believe in the free market, you pay some homage to the “wisdom of crowds”. And there is a crowd effect here:

Minneapolis and St. Paul charter enrollment has grown by 21 and 11 percent, respectively, over the past school year, according to the Center for School Change. Last year, more than 28,000 Minnesota students enrolled in charters.

That doesn’t begin to tell the story, of course. Saint Paul’s school population has dropped by 12% – about an eighth – as parents yank their kids from the district to go into charters and open enrollment. Minneapolis is faring even “worse”. In the meantime, the number of charter schools – and the number of kids in them – booms.

Just saying – when the Strib starts writing about charter schools, look for Education Minnesota’s fingerprints.

They’re all over Orfield…

When I was a kid, I pretty much associated “teachers” with “women”.  My teachers in first through fourth grade were all women – my fourth-grade teacher had in fact been my father’s fourth-grade teacher as well (which used to awe me, although now I see that it’s really not that big a deal). 

But then in fifth grade, I was astounded when I got Mr. Buchholtz’ class.  Mr. B was a big, football-player kind of a guy.  He was a Navy veteran, and had spent time in Vietnam.  He told war stories, rode a Honda 500 (or a Fiat X1/9) to school, showed us karate moves, took us out to his family’s farm for a day of running around in the countryside, led the games of tag football on the playground…

…in other words, he’d probably be fired, in this day and age; he showed us how to make toy guns, he had a paddle that he used liberally if kids sassed him, he took no BS…

…and was a godsend to a bunch of 11 year old boys who’d been cooped up in classrooms all day.  Suddenly, it was safe to want to roughhouse (indeed, Mr. B revelled in roughhousing, frequently wrestling with piles of gleeful fifth-grade boys and whuppping all our butts), to run and yell and be boys in school. 

Of course, modern feminism has succeeded in basically feminizing the classroom, nowhere more than in elementary school.  It’s made school a fairly hostile place to be a boy (or at least a boy that doesn’t learn to be verbal and facially-compliant with a regime hostile to their emotional makeup), to the point where being  a boy is going to get a kid slapped into “Special Education”.  And as a result, boys are eschewing education; they drop out of secondary school in numbers that dwarf girls’; in higher education, young women currently outnumber men by a significant margin that looks likely to climb to close to 3:2 in the not-too-distant future.

Both trends – the feminization of the Educational Academy and the falling numbers of men seeking higher education – would seem to be exacerbating this problem – the dire shortage of male teachers:

At [principal Thomas DeVito’s] Ferryway School, where boys slightly outnumber girls, male teachers are a rare species, presiding over only four of the 35 classrooms.

“The district has a job fair every year, but we don’t see a lot of guys,” DeVito said.

The problem is especially acute, he said, when it comes to hiring elementary teachers at his school, which spans kindergarten through eighth grade. For those jobs, he said, “I don’t think I’ve interviewed any males in the last five or six years.”

The same scenario is playing out across the state and the nation, where the number of male teachers is dwindling despite a recent focus on drawing more men into classrooms. In Massachusetts, only 24 percent of teachers last year were men compared with 32 percent 15 years ago, according to the most recent state data. Nationally, a quarter of teachers are men, a 40-year low.

Here’s the question:  why does this surprise people?  After thirty years of making not merely the educational establishment and academy, but education itself hostile to boys and the very notion of masculinity, why would any guy go into the field?

Of course, there is [Daschle on] “concern” [/Daschle off]:

At a time of increased emphasis on improving student achievement, especially in inner-city schools, education specialists are raising serious concerns that male flight from classrooms could be hindering boys’ ability to learn.

A study by an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College, which has been gaining national attention in the debate over single-gender classes, found that boys learned better in reading – a subject in which they typically struggle – when teamed with a male teacher. Similarly, girls did better in math and science with a female teacher.

And lest you think the piece will skirt the real issue…:

Even more eyebrow-raising, the research questioned whether a predominantly female teaching force is causing more boys to be labeled as behavior problems because women may struggle in handling the sometimes rambunctious nature of boys. It also questioned whether boys may respond better to a coachlike sternness found in some male teachers.

But in an interview, the study’s author, Thomas S. Dee, cautioned against a knee-jerk reaction of simply recruiting more male teachers.

“The more appropriate avenue to explore is how do we make teachers more productive for all students,” Dee said. “I’d rather have my son with a great teacher who is female than a mediocre teacher who is male. Teacher quality often gets lost in this debate.”

…well, OK.  They sorta skirted it.  Boys are incredibly complex; they certainly deserve better than what the educational-industrial complex has dished out for them this past few decades (I’ve written about this at some length).

Of course, it’s not all structural imbalance; it’s also bigotry borne of hysteria:

Yet the shrinking number of men can be chalked up to another reason: Some men worry that overly protective parents might falsely accuse them of being pedophiles because teaching, especially in the lower grades, is still largely perceived as a woman’s job, requiring a nurturing personality that supposedly is not common among men. In other words, something must be wrong with the guy who likes working with children.

Whether by hysteria or structure, this is a self-perpetuating vortex. 

Whenever the Minnesota DFL wants to yank at voters’ heartstrings, they invoke the “Minnesota Miracle” – the period in the sixties and seventies where Democrats and liberal Republicans (which was most of them at that time) imposed a slew of government programs and wealth redistributions, and claimed credit for an economic and social leap forward (in a state that had already been amply blessed with brains, resources and geographic accidents, and would have grown like a weed anyway).

Oh, there was definitely a “miracle” in Minnesota – which had been a poor, hardscrabble backwater state beholden to mining, lumber, agriculture and milling until the early 20th Century.  Minnesota did grow immensely; it would have grown, I suspect, had government merely gotten out of the way, too.

But government – and today, almost forty years later, big-government advocates – claim the “Miracle” as their own.

And to them, the “miracle” was about one thing; being happy to pay for a better Minnesota.

And they’re baaaaaaaack:

[Complaints that schools aren’t “underfunded”] and the sad state of the economy haven’t stopped DFL legislators from pushing what they hope will be one of the biggest school funding boosts in recent history — and one likely to involve a tax increase.

The plan is dubbed the “New Minnesota Miracle” after the state’s 1971 initiative that shifted most school funding from local property taxes to the state.

The new plan calls for $2.5 billion more a year for K-12 education, though it could be phased in over a number of years. That figure includes $400 million earmarked to lower property taxes for homeowners who have watched their tax bills go up after local school funding requests were approved at the polls. The state now spends more than $7 billion a year, or about 40 percent of the state’s total general fund budget, on K-12 education.

Calling it a “new Minnesota Miracle”, of course, is putting lipstick on a pig; it’s just another DFL tax increase, and yet another sop to another powerful DFL special interest.  The plan has no real education reforms; indeed, I think it’s fair to say that it’s at least partly a reaction to the erosion of enrollment caused by the limited school choice that Minnesotans have gotten in the past couple of decades.  But schools will stay the same; they’ll just have more of your money.

Look, Education Minnesota and the DFL (pardon the redundancy); show us some reforms.  Not just windowdressing, mind you, but reforms, ideas that change things for the better; better still, accomplish something, like increasing graduation rates; then declare a “miracle”.

Charter schools know their market.  Increasingly, their market is low-income urban parents who are disgusted with the performance of their local public school districts:

The Minnesota Department of Education recently announced the approval of 11 new charter schools state-wide, eight of which will be opening in the Twin Cities or first-ring suburbs. This year’s crop follows a current trend in charter schools: aggressively pursuing poor and low-income families who are dissatisfied and disillusioned with public school systems, particularly in Minneapolis. Six of the eight say they will explicitly market themselves to these families.

One of eight Saint Paul families has deserted the public system; the number is higher in Minneapolis.

One of the great linguistic crimes of the left in recent years is their attempt to hijack the term “tax cut” to refer to what are, in essence, payoffs to specific constituencies.

During the 2000 and 2004 elections, in a spate of almost-honesty trumping marketing, the Gore and Kerry campaigns referred to them as “targeted tax cuts” – allowing the audience to ask “Targeted?  At whom or what?”

The answer, of course:  anyone whose vote the Democrats want to buy.

As a Republican, of course, I favor across-the-board cuts in both taxes and spending.  I also acknowledge that many of the most popular tax cuts that fall short of that goal are “targeted”, in a sense.  The Mortgage Interest Deduction is targeted at homeowners; Capital Gains Tax cuts are aimed at stockholders and others who directly or indirectly buy or sell investment securities, equities or property; the Death Tax is aimed at people who die.  These have one thing in common; they affect the vast majority of the American people, most of whom own houses and participate in the market (directly or via their 401K funds, and all of whom will eventually enter the probate and inheritance system, presuming the Democrats leave them any property to bequeath).  Home owners, direct and indirect investment and probate cross all party, demographic, regional and social lines.

Democrats’ “targeted cuts”, however, try to slice the pie into much finer slices, each of them a constituency they need, essentially to rebate some of the cost of the higher spending back to the groups, classes and other slices they need to keep happy.

Hence Al Franken and his proposal to give a post-secondary tax deduction, which Aaron Landry misleadingly labels a “tax cut”. 

From a Franken press release today:

A college diploma is more than a dream for Minnesota families – it’s practically a requirement for middle-class prosperity. But with George W. Bush in the White House and Norm Coleman in the Senate, that prosperity has slipped out of reach for Minnesota’s middle class. My tuition tax cut will bring college within reach for 10 million students nationwide. And it will take a step towards restoring America’s middle-class promise: that hard work can bring prosperity to your family.

Landry:

The average student loan debt in Minnesota jumped over $6K during the first three years of Coleman and is the 5th in the nation. Coleman’s continually voted against students, such as letting tuition tax deduction expire, opposing $4.9 billion for Pell grants.

Of course, one of the reasons a postsecondary education is so expensive is the immense subsidy from the government.  It’s Economics 101; when more money is made available to pay for something for which there is a limited supply, the price will rise.  The price of postsecondary education has risen much  faster than inflation over the past thirty years; anecdotally, tuition at my very modestly-priced alma mater has nearly tripled since I was in school, while average incomes have not. 

So Franken isn’t proposing a “tax cut”, so much as a “rebate” of a price increase caused by the government’s own subsidies, which are the primary inflationary pressure on tuitions in the first place.

At any rate, getting into college isn’t the biggest problem facing Americans’ entry into the middle class; graduating from high school knowing enough English, math and citizenship is.  And on that front, Franken promises only more of the status quo.

Not even a “tax cut” to help people secede from the system that Franken’s biggest supporters, the Teachers’ unions, broke in the first place.

But I digress.

Let’s just make sure we keep our terms straight, OK?

As most of you know, I’m a big supporter of charter schools.  They provide parental choice and, at the good operations, direct accountability to parents that you can not get in a public school district (outside of a small town with a tiny school – the kinds of places the education establishment is trying hard to close down and consolidate). 

The DFL hates them, of course, because – well, because they provide choice and accountability.  They tried to kill the charter school movement in its cradle, and then in March of 2007 tried again to cap the number of charter schools in Minnesota. 

Critics of charter schools – usually DFL apparatchiks like Nick Coleman, or media outlets that are basically flaks for the left – snipe at charter schools constantly.  “What about the lack of oversight”, they bleat, or they wonder about the charter schools that fail due to financial mismanagement (never asking the question “how many public schools would succeed if they had to operate on 3/4 of their money and mind their own books?”).

So with all that said, this story here is a kick in the teeth; Joel Pourier, director of the “Heart of the Earth” charter school in Minneapolis, is under investigation, for gross mismanagement at best, embezzlement at worst:

The school, founded by the American Indian Movement in the 1970s to provide a nurturing environment for American Indian students, faces closure because of its damaged finances.

Poor financial oversight has been the downfall of a number of charter schools in Minnesota and across the country. But Eugene Piccolo, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools, said the Heart of the Earth situation is one of the worst cases of mismanagement he has seen.

People close to the 220-student school say they didn’t know just how bad things were getting until the director was suspected of embezzlement.

Bear in mind that Native American students – a big minority in Minneapolis, especially in the area around HOTE on East Lake Street – are, like most economically disadvantaged minority students, served worse than most by Minneapolis’ public system.  And it’s the economically-disadvantaged-but-still-aware minority parents that are leaving the public school systems the fastest, both in Minneapolis and Saint Paul; parents who can’t afford private school, but want better for their kids than the public system offers.

Into this mess can step the occasional (alleged) charlatan:

Pourier was hired six years ago as finance director, to pull Heart of the Earth out of debt. Principal Darlene Leiding had worked with him at another charter school where he was an unlicensed math teacher. He told her that he had an MBA with an emphasis in finance. The school survived and Pourier was later named executive director.

But trouble came to light in a June 30 audit for the 2006-07 school year. The audit, six months late, noted that the school failed to implement a balanced budget and lost more than $78,000 for failing to provide accurate information to state and federal authorities. In addition, more than $160,000 in expenses were unexplained.

That same audit noted that Pourier had unfettered power to pay school bills. Leiding said she reviewed bank records and found multiple checks that Pourier wrote to himself, without a second signature. Many of those checks are at the heart of the investigation.

Of course, Pourier has not yet been charged.  It’s possible he won’t be.  And it’s almost pro forma to say “here’s hoping he gets charged and punished to the limits of the law, and sued back to the Stone Age to boot”. 

Of course, the real problem is this:  behind each of those 220 students are parents who cared enough about their kids’ education to get them the hell out of the Minneapolis system – but who didn’t know enough about bookkeeping to find a (alleged) fraud. 

Where do they go? 

UPDATE 2/8/2010 – Greetings, visitors from “Also Spake Zustra!”  I have a special message for you at the bottom of this post:

Original post follows:

———-

I don’t read the blog “Feministing” for reasoned, rational commentary (via KAR).

Indeed, I rarely read it at all.

As the Twin Cities’ best feminist, it’s depressing, really, to see the perversions that pass for “Feminism” among some of these people.

But you learn to accept that as a given after a while.

What’s funny, though, is catching the occasional dispatch from Cloud Nine.

Academic humanities departments,nationwide, are solidly left-of-center, politically and socially. While my English major advisor indeed, started me on the road to conservatism, we were both outliers. It’s entirely possible to go through a career in humanities, I suspect, and ever have to confront conservatism as anything but a set of stereotypes that you mock with your colleagues.

So this bit here, from a Teaching Assistant at an unnamed graduate program, is interesting; it’s a cry from the heart of a woman having to face…people who approach the world differently than her.

And it’s heart-rending indeed:

I’m a graduate student, teaching a freshman-level writing class. I’ve been a feminist pretty much from the moment my mom popped me out. Anyway, I always lived in a bubble–thinking that the way I thought was simple common sense. Women are equal. Birth control is good. Yada yada yada. I realized as a I grew up, however, that the liberal home life I knew was not the reality for the rest of my peers.

Of course, for many people that can be a growth experience.

Question for the class: How did/does our author perceive this?

And then, last fall, I began teaching composition to university freshmen. My students are, by and large, white, affluent, politically and religiously conservative. To many of them, feminism is a bad word and young, female teachers are pushovers and useless.

To be fair to the students, if this post is any indication, it may not be a group assessment.

Maybe it’s the age gap, as I am 26 to their 18. Maybe it’s the cultural gap, as I am in the deep-South, but spent most of my formative years in more urban, liberal regions of the globe. There are a lot of maybes here.

Yes, indeed. Let’s keep going:

• Maybe you are a cultural bigot.
• Maybe your preening sense of entitlement has left you believing that it’s your way or the highway.

It’s a start.

I loved this bit:

I was making my rounds amongst my students, assisting them at their computers, answering questions, etc. I was sharing an anecdote with a student about my own writing/process, and she (SHE!) asked me what my focus was. I told her–technology and feminist scholarship–and then… the eyes. I heard a short intake of breath. Her eyes grew wide. “Oh my god! Are you a feminist!?” She said the word feminist just the way I say “rapist.”

I nodded. “Yes, I am. Equal rights are a great thing.” She laughed awkwardly, and I moved on.

Who told this young woman that feminism is a bad thing? Seriously–who? She’s a bright woman. She was a fantastic student. But just the same–to her, what I am, is a monster. I don’t feel particularly monstrous.

And she’s not. What she is is a caricature – so much so that a small part of me still thinks “she” is a parody. Feminism – gender identity feminism, to be exact, and as distinct from equity feminism, which is what I believe in – has become a caricature, a caricature that real, “bright women” and “fantastic students”, the people who will go on to productive lives in business, government, society and/or family as they choose, mock without mercy.

It’s a bottomless wellspring of material for some of us. So I’m gladdened to see…

And next Monday, a whole new round begins–and this year, I’m doing more socially-conscious assignments than last year. Could be interesting. But I realize now, that if I don’t ask them pointed questions about how they view the world (be it television, themselves, etc), no one else will, either.

…that not only is the caricature continuing, but it’s growing:

They’ve already made it 18 years without challenging the status quo. Imagine that.

By not becoming Mao-frenching, entitlement-mongering semiotics-of-identity zombies under the influence of the author and the vast majority of her colleagues, they are pantsing the status quo.

Kudos to them.

———-

SPECIAL ADDENDUM FOR “ZUSTRA” READERS: Yeah, my whole “Twin Cities’ Best Feminist” bit really got under some peoples’ skins.  Can they not see how absurdly they were being played?  “Best” Feminist?  Really?

And yet it’s kept the same pack of mental midgets (of both purported genders) howling with rage for years, now.  As if on cue.

I’m trying to find a concept as smug, tautological and dim-witted as “mansplainer” to apply to these – words fail – simpering infants who can’t accept the idea that there’s a rational B-side to their ideas.  But I can’t think of anything that dumb.

Anyway, thanks for stopping!

Emily at X Pespective – a high school principal – went to a funeral for a former student killed in an unspecified crime.  And she pondered:

According to stats from 2004-06, black students in MN are currently graduating at a rate of 62%. Antoine did graduate, as did all the boys I knew who were at his memorial today.

What did that get him? Or the rest of them? Two had gone on to college, but neither is going back. The rest – not so much.

Two assertions here, just to set the stage:

1. Violence in the city is a result of a whole big slew of social pathologies – poverty, drug abuse, crime, and above all the disintegration of the family – that, after forty years of government intervention, have gotten worse rather than better.
2. The whole rationale for compulsory education in the first place was to recitify damaging social pathologies (which, in the late 1800s, were “immigrants’ socialist ideals”)

By that measure, the experiment at public education has failed.  To be fair, I don’t know that our society could give schools enough power to “save” kids from the damage wrought by generations of subsidized poverty; I doubt society would want to live with the consequences of giving any part of government that much power.

(/libertarian tangent)

Overall, MN is down to an 85% graduation rate, though 91% of the state’s current workforce has graduated from high school. Why the drop? Why are kids opting not to finish? What does the diploma offer them that they can’t get without it? What does it guarantee?

All good questions – but Emily missed one.  Looking at Minnesota’s overall graduation rate is misleading; outstate rates are higher; indeed, the smaller the school, the higher the graduation rate.  The metro is dragging the state’s numbers down hard.

Why the drop – why are kids not finishing school?  Because in a society where poverty is subsidized, where hard work within “the system” is derided, where almost none of the cultural role models is a poster-child for getting an education, what is the motivation to finish school?

What does the diploma offer or guarantee?  Nothing.  Nor should it guarantee anything, except that the bearer is literate and capable of functioning in our society – and with today’s high school education, that’s a bit of a crapshoot.  I’m not even talking in terms of conservative bromides about ultraliberal educational academics and PC mandates; I think notion of the value of the high school diploma is a holdover from an era when the diploma was a rarity.  Today, while its an assumption for much of productive society, the notion that it has value beyond that is, I think, an obsolete idea.

How to fix or replace it?

Well, that’s a longer article.

David “Media Ueber Alles” Brauer read the State Department of Education’s report on Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy, and sees NO-tink, NO-think!:

The bottom line, to me, is that Kersten’s overarching concern — illegal Islamic education — is largely unfounded. TIZA’s problems come down to one 30-minute Friday break and changing after-school busing.

Things worth fixing? Definitely. A massively overblown controversy? Definitely.

Scott Johnson at Powerline begs to differ.

Yesterday the department issued its findings in the investigation prompted by Kersten’s columns. The Star Tribune reports on the findings in “State orders charter school to correct 2 areas tied to Islam.” The findings vindicate Kersten’s reportage, ordering the school to reform its practices concerning its weekly Friday prayer service and its extension of the school day. The department found that both of these practices crossed the line. (The department also found that the school’s Monday-Thursday prayer services were student-led and therefore permissible. The department does not understand applicable constitutional law in this area.)

Beyond that?

The department discussed the “after-school” Muslim Studies program run by the Muslim American Society/Minnesota, the state chapter of the national offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. MAS/Minnesota owns the building in which TIZA operates, runs a mosque in the building, and provides religious instruction at the end of the day. The department asserts that the Muslim Studies program is fee-based and voluntary. Zaman purports to be unable to provide statistics concerning enrollment in the Muslim Studies program. Zaman is not only the TIZA principal, however, he is also an officer of MAS/Minnesota. Who is kidding whom? The Minnesota Department of Education’s investigation is of the kind perfected by Inspector Clouseau.

So is Scott being overpunctilious?  Is David Brauer ingenuously taking the word of a state agency at face value (as long as it’s not Carol Molnau’s MNDoT)?  We’ll see.

Now, I don’t personally have a problem with this; I think that religious groups should  be able to start charter schools – subject to state law.  Is the Department of Education following applicable law?  I’m no lawyer – and either is David Brauer.

But Scott is…

Brauer, however, hasn’t written about this bit here yet…:

KSTP Eyewitness News sent a reporter and crew out to TIZA to get a reaction to the Minnesota Department of Education findings from Zaman. KSTP reports that its crew crew was attacked by Zaman and another school official. Its cameraman was injured while wrestling with Zaman and his sidekick over the camera. In the video of the KSTP report, Zaman goes right for the cameraman’s camera. Where is Clouseau’s servant Kato when you need him? And what is it that Zaman does not want Minnesotans to see?

We called Greiling a thug when the Star Tribune posted her letter to the editor calling on the Star Tribune to fire her. In Greiling’s case, the use of the term was metaphorical. Zaman is the real deal.

So it would seem.

Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros Monitor takes umbrage at the Minnesota Family Council’s response to the Legslture’s Sex Ed bill:

Part of the Family Council’s objections to a comprehensive sex education bill is that it would teach teens about certain sex acts and the risks inherent in those acts. The group opposes sex education that includes anal sex and anal-oral sex — a point it makes clear in its robo-calls. However, the bill itself would not mandate the teaching of these sex acts, only the teaching of “medically accurate and age-appropriate” sexual health information with curriculum decisions left to parents and school boards.

Which is either a complete explanation or a lie-by-omission.  Any socially-conservative parent in the public school system knows that “leaving decisions about these things that are left to parents and school boards”  is shorthand for “the Legislature will open the door, and the School Board meetings will be bum-rushed with activists who’ll ram through whatever it is they want”.

So the MFC responded with a phone message campaign.  Birkey notes…:

But, in its zeal to have the bill defeated, the Family Council in all likelihood inadvertently taught a few kids a little bit about anal and anal-oral sex. A colleague of mine shared a story she heard at her son’s soccer game last week. A local parent’s teenager picked up the phone and got an earful about anal sex from the Minnesota Family Council.

In fact the Family Council’s tirade about anal sex is left on answering machines and voicemails if no one picks up — answering machines and voicemails that children often check for messages.

Ow.

How dare  the Minnesota Family Council send a phone message that a small film of students might hear with information that is utterly morally objectionable…

…before the Minnesota Federation of Teachers – those noted experts on parenting and sexuality – can recite it to captive audiences of students.

Shudder.

I’m going to go to work as a curriculum writer.

I’ve got some samples I’m going to start sending around to school districts.

Sample 1

This activity illustrates the fact that whether or not your faith believes dogs and pigs are “unclean” or not, dogs and pigs should be regarded as a beneficial. Making dogs and pigs socially acceptable gives us bacon and big warm pillows on cold mornings. 1. Write “Bacon and Fetch” on the board. 2. Explain that Bacon and Fetch are two of life’s great joys and stress relievers, and that people who don’t think so really are weird. 3. Ask students to think of reasons why people in societies would find dogs and pigs unclean would like bacon and “fetch”, and write the responses in a column to the left of “”Bacon and Fetch”. 4. Next, have students think about why people in other societies love bacon and playing “fetch” with a loveable puppy, and list all of their responses in a column to the right of “Bacon and Fetch”.

I’ll give you all $1,000 when it’s accepted by the public school system!

Sample 2

This activity illustrates the fact that whether or not one believes there is a scientific basis to the theory that part of intelligence is genetic, and part of that genetic makeup is ethnic and racial, there is a need to observe this fact. As Will Saletan noted in that conservative tool Slate:

Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70. One IQ table shows 113 in Hong Kong, 110 in Japan, and 100 in Britain. White populations in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States score closer to one another than to the worldwide black average. It’s been that way for at least a century…

…So, what should we make of the difference in averages?

We don’t like to think IQ is mostly inherited. But we’ve all known families who are smarter than others. Twin and sibling studies, which can sort genetic from environmental factors, suggest more than half the variation in IQ scores is genetic. A task force report from the American Psychological Association indicates it might be even higher. The report doesn’t conclude that genes explain racial gaps in IQ. But the tests on which racial gaps are biggest happen to be the tests on which genes, as measured by comparative sibling performance, exert the biggest influence.

Admitting the genetic basis for intelligence makes it safer for the who have to deal with intelligence. 1. Write “Emotional Response” and “Scientific Fact” on the board. 2. Explain that 100 is traditionally deemed to be the “average” IQ for people in the world. 3. Ask students to think of reasons why ignoring the scientific evidence of the genetic and ethnic link to intelligence is dumb, and them under “emotional response”. 4. Next, have students think about why it’s smart to think the truth, and list all of their responses in a column under “Scientific Fact”.

I’m told I might have a little trouble getting this one passed, too. Stay tuned. [*]
Sample 3

This one’s on sex-ed. And, unlike the curriculum proposals (albeit not the Will Saletan quote in Sample 2) above, it’s real. Bob Collins writes about the debate:

Where it’s likely to get testy, if this curriculum should actually be adopted in schools statewide, are sections such as this:

This activity illustrates the fact that whether or not abortion is legal, there is a need for the procedure. Making abortion legal makes it safe for the women who access these services. 1. Write “1973” on the board. 2. Explain that 1973 was the year when abortion became legal in the U.S., but that women had abortions before then. 3. Ask students to think of reasons why a woman would have an illegal abortion and write all of their responses in a column to the left of “1973”. 4. Next, have students think about why women have abortions today, and list all of their responses in a column to the right of “1973”.

Over to you, governor.

That proposal is not only real – but unless the governor vetoes the legislation containg the proposal, it’s going to be pretty much law.

(more…)

In the mania of this week, I’ve not been able to devote the full breadth I’ve wanted to to the “Empty Holsters” protest by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus – the group that’s protesting against the forced disarmament of law-abiding, carry-permit-holding college students and staff while on most American college campuses.

There’s an active protest going on at Saint Cloud State, though, and King Banaian covers not only it, but some of the deeply-deranged response from part of the SCSU community. 

These were before the President’s letter, and all were thinking that somehow it could and should be stopped. Afterwards, the comments turned to:

• It is unfortunate that people believe simple slogans like “Guns don’t’ kill people–People do” to answer complex questions about guns, freedom, and safety!
• the fact that there are people who are lobbying for the right to bring guns to a university campus — into classrooms and university buildings, no less — fills me with extreme terror.
• Nothing about these arguments so far even acknowledges that the tragedies at Virginia tech, Recori, columbine, and numerous others ever happened.
• I know that the opposition would say that “dangerous criminals and armed killers” would still be armed, but I like the odds better if fewer students are “carrying”–especially those young people whose good judgment is not yet in full blossom.
• I can just see it now: a grading complaint. Both the professor and the student put their guns on the table, and then begin the conversation.
• I accept the rights of the holster wearers to illustrate their opinions, but I hope our elected officials have the good sense to not change the laws to their liking. I’d be more comfortable if the holstered protestors also wore their marksmanship merit badges, military sharpshooter rankings, or any other evidence of requisite skill and composure.

I did not participate much in this discussion, as I realized how little I knew, but one would have to say that if the purpose of an Empty Holster Protest was to start a dialogue, they certainly got that. The question is, what happens after starting it?

That’s always a good question.  I’ve felt for years that post-secondary academics are particularly ill-suited to “dialog”; too many of them are used to carrying on extended monologues; for too many, it seems, “dialog” and its requisite “listening” (even to those who are not academic peers!) stopped about the time they had to defend their PhD.

Amy Ledig, a sophomore at Mac, won an award this past weekend (as King relates) at the Minnesota Association of Scholars annual fete.

She won it for writing a piece in the Macalester student paper that, to the outside observer who’s heard enough stories about academic intolerance, makes me worried that she might get herself “managed” by Mac’s administration, or the monocognitive droogs that run so many campuses.

The piece concludes:

All of that, though, is beside the point. We need to either strive toward actually creating an environment where free and open discourse can exist, or we need to accept that if things continue the way they are now, we have become the liberal counterpart to Liberty University and the like. Forcing everyone to stay on the liberal straight-and-narrow path is just as much intellectual censorship and repression as what Conservatives practice.

The difference, of course, is that nobody attends Liberty for an open, unbiased discussion of, say, homosexuality.  Whatever Liberty’s pros and cons (I’m not impressed with the up-front approach, but I’ve also known some very sharp, well-educated Liberty grads).

Read the whole thing, of course; Ms. Ledig provides a sobering view of intolerance in academia, in the event you haven’t been sobered enough already.

Mac sells itself as a place where a student can get exposed to a wide variety of points of view, though – even moreso today than when I was college shopping.

This week is the planned protest by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus against the laws that require most American college and university campuses to be gun-free zones disarmed victim zones.  These zones – where the law-abiding citizen, whether student or staffer, is enjoined from carrying a legally-permitted firearm that they have a permit to carry for self-defense.

These laws have contributed to the deaths of dozens of American high school and college students in the past twenty years.

During the week of April 21-25, 2008, thousands of college students throughout the United States, organized under the banner of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC), will attend classes wearing empty holsters, in protest of state laws and school policies that stack the odds in favor of dangerous criminals and armed killers by disarming law abiding citizens licensed to carry concealed handguns virtually everywhere else.

SCCC hosted its first national collegiate Empty Holster Protest during the week of October 22-26, 2007, on the campuses of approximately 125 U.S. colleges and universities. This second Empty Holster Protest will expand upon the concept of the first protest by placing greater emphasis on educating the uninformed. Protesters will focus on sharing the facts of “concealed carry” with students and faculty who may not be aware that concealed carry laws exist or that those laws differ on college campuses from most other locations.

I’m aware that an SCCC protest is being planned at Saint Cloud State.  I’d welcome comments from participants from SCSU, or any other campuses.  I expect campus administrations to attempt to “manage” these protests – and naturally will welcome word of any administration actions.

“The University of Saint Thomas took the correct approach in resolving the Desmond Tutu flap, safeguarding academic and intellectual freedom while preventing Tutu from insulting Jews. The school has an obligation to protect students from inflammatory speech”.

The Strib stirred up a hornet’s next of controversy last fall when they put a period on the end of the Desmond Tutu controversy by endorsing a paternalistic, authoritarian approach to the controversial event.

OK. No, they didn’t. They reconsidered and re-invited the Bishop.  The Strib wrote no such thing.  Indeed, it’d be tough to imagine any such thing coming from the Strib’s editorial board if a left-of-center icon’s appearance at a campus were diverted in any way.

But can you imagine how the local media and Sorosphere would have reacted if they had?
No, it was the fairly affable conservative, pro-life, pro-self-reliance speaker Star Parker that gets the special treatment – and the Strib, predictably, backs the authoritarian approach to (conservative) free speech

In the Parker case, a compromise was struck and the university ultimately made the best decision. She will speak at the O’Shaughnessy Auditorium in St. Paul on April 21. As a Catholic college, St. Thomas had come under fire for denying space for someone who agrees with the church’s position on abortion.

The Strib dignifies Saint Thomas’ position by omission. Oh, it’s true – but they also banned Star Parker because the Young Americas Foundation had booked Ann Coulter. Jane Canney’s objections – as I noted yesterday from Katherine Kersten’s piece…

Katie Kieffer, an alumna who helped plan Parker’s visit, says that Vice President for Student Affairs Jane Canney, who oversees the committee, blocked the way. “She told me, ‘As long as I’m a vice president at St. Thomas, we will not deal with Young America’s Foundation,’” said Kieffer.

Which goes a lot deeper than just “not booking a pro-life speaker”. It means Saint Thomas indulges in institutional bigotry against conservative thought on its campus.  Speakers booked by the Young Americas Foundation – one of very few conservative student outreach groups in the country – are non grata.

Yet the university’s speaker missteps offer guidance about how private and religious colleges can balance institutional core values with respect for free speech and the duty to expose students to a variety of points of view.

Let’s come back to that last statement in a bit.

St. Thomas officials said that Coulter’s appearance was paid for by an external organization and that the same arrangement was originally made with Parker. But that arrangement gives the college little say in the event.

Of course, the University had no problem bringing Al Franken and transgender activist Debra Davis to campus – and, let’s be clear, I don’t want them to have a problem with it, since I’m a conservative and therefore value genuine intellectual freedom – even though both of their messages are, unlike Parker’s, fundamentally anti-Catholic.

What “control” is it that the Strib thinks Saint Thomas needs?

The university decided to pay for Parker’s appearance, which means she must agree to guidelines set out by the college. That contract does not censor speech. Rather, it says that speakers must engage in civil discourse and handle controversial issues in a responsible, respectful manner.

Except liberal groups’ speakers are not subjected to this paternalistic, discriminatory guilt by less-than-association!

As St. Thomas Vice President Mark Dienhart said in a statement, regardless of who pays, the university is ultimately responsible for the impact of speakers on the community and should be a primary party in agreements with speakers. That’s wise advice for any college or university.

It might be, perhaps, if it were consistently applied.

As it is, it’s merely further evidence of Saint Thomas’ intellectual cowardice – and the Star/Tribune’s hypocrisy.

UPDATE:  Scott Johnson updates this story with the latest from Katie Kieffer, whom he quotes at length (with emphasis added by me):

What exactly are the terms of this speaker’s contract? My sister Amie and I pressed Jane Canney to show us the University’s process for bringing conservative speakers to campus, and she refused to show this to us. Again, what is there to hide?

Why does the University feel such a need to properly “manage” events sponsored by conservative students? Who was monitoring the students or groups who brought Barbara Davis and Al Franken to ensure that they did not offend the St. Thomas community?

That’s the bit that gets me; the assumption, on the part of UST and the Strib, that the institution needs to “Manage” conservative events, to feel “comfortable” with the message its students get.

Would anyone in the Twin Cities’ leftymedia tolerate this if it were aimed at, say, Michael Moore?

Scott Johnson discusses his conversation with a Minnesota Department of Education official that would seem to support the loophole the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy seems to have found in the state’s laws separating church and government school funding.

You should read the whole thing for the background.

The conclusion?

Morgan [the official whom Scott interviewed] commented that so long as prayer is voluntary and not led by school officials, it does not detract from the school’s nonsectarian character. He had no knowledge of after-school instruction, but so long as it was voluntary and the school afforded equal access to other providers, that too would be in keeping with the school’s nonsectarian character. He added that the department was following up on Kersten’s Sunday column with a site visit and a letter to TIZA’s principal inquiring into the issues it raised, as it had done in 2004 following Tammy Oseid’s Pioneer Press article.

“Equal access to other providers?”

Like if I offered to start a Presbyterian youth group for the school’s after-hours activities?

Johnson concludes:

Muslim activists have found a workable seam in the purported separation of church and state in Minnesota. One does not need to engage in much speculation to foresee the day when Minnesota’s burgeoning Muslim population will be educated in separate charter schools like TIZA at taxpayers’ expense, where they will receive religious instruction courtesy of the likes of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota.

What is an opponent of the phenomenon represented by TIZA to do? If TIZA’s arrangement passes muster with state authorities, an opponent is left with two options. One must either await judicial intervention at the behest of some party with standing to bring a lawsuit raising the obvious First Amendment issues, or one must work for the demise of charter schools.

The demise of charter schools is not an option; indeed, for many of us parents in the city, charter schools have been an unqualified Godsend.

So maybe the third option is to take reciprocal advantage of the loophole; the city’s other charter schools that have adopted the structure, if not the dogma, of religious education should also take the opportunity to offer after-school activities to their kids.

OK – so you’d think a post that starts like this…:

I got the stinky meat smell out of my car.

…can’t possibly end well.  And in fact I’ll let you be the judge.  But local lefty(?)blogger and longtime commenter Discordian Stooge writes:

Our [Katherine Kersten] is enraged about religion in schools. Shocked? Don’t be. It’s only because it’s an Islamic school.

Of course, I agree with her. The school is obviously supporting religion, and specifically Islam. Since it’s a public school, it’s wrong. But of course, we dangerous atheist lefties support the Muslim hordes and only hate Christians, so we’ll ignore this. Oh, wait.

Stooge (if I may call him Stooge, since “Disco” seems a bit stretchy) is writing about Kersten’s expose on the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy, a Moslem-focused – or, according to Kersten’s source, completely Islamic – charter school in a Saint Paul suburb.

I’m not going to get into the “discrimination against Christians” argument; although there’s plenty of evidence of it, let’s come back to it some other time.

Here’s my real question; there is no figure in the Twin Cities’ media that inspires more irrational and, frankly, unseemly derangement than Katherine Kersten.  From the day it was announced the Strib was going to hire an actual conservative as a columnist, Twin Lefties – from Nick Coleman and the Strib Editorial Board to the usual array of leftybloggers – howled like a bunch of feral beagles, and churned out enough ad homina to power a good-sized wind turbine.

Of course, anyone who takes a partisan position invites a counterposition.  Such is debate.

But when Stooge says…:

Anyway, until [Kersten] decides that religion in public schools is wrong, not just the religions she doesn’t like, I’ll continue to ridicule her.

Well, that’s a choice one may make.  But I have to ask…

…when has Kersten supported “religion in public schools?”

Not “school choice”, mind you (and for clarity’s sake, let’s not go into “Vouchers”, since if you throw out vouchers you also need to throw out government-sponsored grants and government-secured student loans to anyone who attends a religious-affiliated college or university), or perhaps inveigling schools to relax a bit about allowing faith-affiliated groups to use the occasional school facility outside of school hours (since their parents paid the same taxes everyone else did, or thoroughly-voluntary prayer, say, in the locker room before a football game.

When has Katherine Kersten supported something equivalent to the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy – a publicly-funded school that has a fundamentally faith-based program that would be hostile (passively or actively) to a student of another faith from the opening bell to the moment the bus dropped him off at home?

I’d like some of Kersten’s critics to answer that one.

As to this bit…:

Honestly, Star Tribune, hire Cap’n Fishsticks as a columnist, or maybe Mitch Berg.

Stooge, what did I ever do to you?

(Hee.  Thanks).

Oh, and…:

Someone who can come up with an original idea, not just copy from other right-wingers.

Have a word with Flash, when you have a moment.

When it comes to education, the separation of church and state has never really worked.  Not that it’s not possible, or even in a sense very desirable, to have a secular education system, really – but ours just keeps getting worse and worse.

Among Minnesota’s charter schools are several successful programs that adopt the structure and ideals of religious schools – with the religion itself kept carefully segregated out.  Even amid the chaos (and success) of Minnesota’s charter schools, these schools frequently stand out as excellent ones (although they are far from the only successful idea in Minnesota’s charter system).

So when word came out that someone was going to try an Islamic charter school, I thought “let’s wait and see what happens”.  If they followed the model of Minnesota’s other pseudo-religious charter programs, it could be a very good thing, a model for helping Minnesota’s mass of Moslem immigrants both assimilate and retain the parts of their culture they care about.  Minnesota already has Hispanic, Afro-centric and H’mong charter schools – and some of them are among Minnesota’s most successful charter schools.  They are a success largely because parents are voting for them with their feet; one in eight Saint Paul public school parents has decamped their kids for the charters in recent years.

But Katherine Kersten – the single best columnist at the Strib – shows us that the one bit “if” seems to have come up “No”:

Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers.

TIZA has many characteristics that suggest a religious school. It shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is “establishing Islam in Minnesota.” The building also houses a mosque. TIZA’s executive director, Asad Zaman, is a Muslim imam, or religious leader, and its sponsor is an organization called Islamic Relief.

Students pray daily, the cafeteria serves halal food – permissible under Islamic law — and “Islamic Studies” is offered at the end of the school day.

Zaman maintains that TIZA is not a religious school. He declined, however, to allow me to visit the school to see for myself, “due to the hectic schedule for statewide testing.” But after I e-mailed him that the Minnesota Department of Education had told me that testing would not begin for several weeks, Zaman did not respond — even to urgent calls and e-mails seeking comment before my first column on TIZA.

Now, however, an eyewitness has stepped forward. Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher. She worked as a substitute in two fifth-grade classrooms at TIZA on Friday, March 14. Her experience suggests that school-sponsored religious activity plays an integral role at TIZA.

Arriving on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, she says she was told that the day’s schedule included a “school assembly” in the gym after lunch.

Before the assembly, she says she was told, her duties would include taking her fifth-grade students to the bathroom, four at a time, to perform “their ritual washing.”

Afterward, Getz said, “teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day,” was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man “was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered.”

“The prayer I saw was not voluntary,” Getz said. “The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred.”

Islamic Studies was also incorporated into the school day. “When I arrived, I was told ‘after school we have Islamic Studies,’ and I might have to stay for hall duty,” Getz said. “The teachers had written assignments on the blackboard for classes like math and social studies. Islamic Studies was the last one — the board said the kids were studying the Qu’ran. The students were told to copy it into their planner, along with everything else. That gave me the impression that Islamic Studies was a subject like any other.”

After school, Getz’s fifth-graders stayed in their classroom and the man in white who had led prayer in the gym came in to teach Islamic Studies. TIZA has in effect extended the school day — buses leave only after Islamic Studies is over. Getz did not see evidence of other extra-curricular activity, except for a group of small children playing outside. Significantly, 77 percent of TIZA parents say that their “main reason for choosing TIZA … was because of after-school programs conducted by various non-profit organizations at the end of the school period in the school building,” according to a TIZA report.

Student “prayer is not mandated by TIZA,” [the schools’ principal] wrote, and so is legal. On Friday afternoons, “students are released … to either join a parent-led service or for study hall.” Islamic Studies is provided by the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, and other “nonsectarian” after-school options are available, he added…Until recently, TIZA’s website included a request for volunteers to help with “Friday prayers.” In an e-mail, Zaman explained this as an attempt to ensure that “no TIZA staff members were involved in organizing the Friday prayers.”But an end run of this kind cannot remove the fact of school sponsorship of prayer services, which take place in the school building during school hours.

Now, charter schools are supposed to be open to everyone.  Granted, it’s presumed that parents and kids have an interest in the program; I cant’ see pacifist parents sending their kids to, say, the General John Vessey charter, which borrows heavily from the military school model (with great results, according to some parents I’ve heard), but I can’t imagine Vessey would either turn ’em down or try to turn them into soldiers.  Would TIZA have the same forbearance with, say, a Lutheran kid who had no intention of converting?
What to think…

Conceptually?  If we blow open the restrictions about public funding for religious schools, then I say “go to it!”.  We can have Moslem, Hindu, Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish and many flavors of Protestant schools to go along with the agnostic ones we already have!

But given the current set of laws that we current have, for better or worse, I’m just not seeing that.  And with that as the case, I’m not sure there’s any way around the notion that we, the Minnesota taxpayer, are footing the bill for one brand of religious education that’s barred to everyone else.

The bad news: Minneapolis has a horrible dropout rate:

America’s Promise Alliance ranks Minneapolis as 45th out of 50 cities in terms of graduation rates, putting the district’s rate well below the average.

The good news? It might just be bad statistics:

But Minneapolis Public Schools researcher David Heistad said not only are the numbers the report uses four years old, but they inaccurately consider students who transfer as dropouts.

“We have a lot more kids moving to charter schools and moving to suburban districts and therefore we had a decline in enrollment during that period of time. So it confounds dropouts with any kind of mobility,” Heistad said.

The “bad” news?

The district’s most recent official reports showed graduation rates of nearly 67 percent, more than 20 points above what the America’s Promise numbers show.

A fifth of the district’s students are seeking alternatives in mid-stream.

And at the end of that, you still have only 2/3 of your students graduating – according to the district itself..

Question for Nick Coleman:  In society today, high school students are exposed to just about everything adults are.  Forget about sex and violence and a cynical Hollywood and Madison Avenue, which treats ’em like ripe marketing targets, hypersexualized little ripe sucks.

Thanks to the hyper-left orientation of the Minnesota Federation of Teachers and the educational academy, they also get a steady diet of political correctness and the DFL line on issue after issue.  I used to pay my kids a buck for every piece of political indoctrination they brought home from school – and they made out pretty well.

Schools bus students to pro-teachers’ union lobbying events, on school time.  More cynically still, many school districts are proposing “community service” “requirements” that would make students earn part of their graduation requirements by…providing free labor for “community” non-profits.  On questioning, I got proponents to admit that the groups they had in mind included ACORN, the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, NARAL and the like – but not, naturally, dissenting groups; a kid who believed in Second Amendment rights couldn’t earn social studies credit interning with the NRA, for example.

Whatever.

Anyway – Nick Coleman, a la Captain Renault, is was shocked, shocked to learn that politics were involved in this past week’s “Vets for Freedom” rally.  Scott Johnson pretty well eviscerates Coleman’s column:

Coleman never contacted Hegseth to give him the opportunity to address the allegation that VFF is or was a Republican front group. And he didn’t bother to show up for any of the local appearances the group made in town on Tuesday. Had he done either, he would have discovered that VFF is the brainchild of (mostly decorated) Iraq war combat vets David Bellavia, Knox Nunnally, Mark Seavey, Joe Dan Worley, and Wade Zirkle — not a White House operative among them. They joined together on their own impetus to rally support on the home front for victory in Iraq against what they saw as the miselading portrait of the war painted in media organs such as, well, the Star Tribune.

VFF seeks political support for the objective of victory in Iraq. Thus its expression of gratitude to Senator Coleman and congressional Democrats such as Brian Baird (D, WA) and Jim Marshall (D, GA) who have heard the group out and come to share its point-of-view. The assertion that it is a partisan organization is a partisan lie.

More cynical still?  Coleman briefly mentioned the group of “anti-war” activists who hounded Flake High in to politically-correct submission.  But he mentions not a word of their intensely political motivation of the “anti-war” groups.

Dave Thul – an actual Iraq veteran – writes an excellent piece on his interchange with Karl “Howlin’ Mad” Bremer, a man who’s spent the last ten years of his life dedicated to attacking Rep. Michele Bachmann.  (Although various conservative commentators have linked Bremer to the campaign of harassment that caused Flake High to shut the Veterans for Freedom down, Bremer disclaims any direct involvement in the campaign.  He also notes that he is himself a veteran, and that he’s been harassed as a result of the belief that he’s been involved.  While I’ve condemned Bremer’s monomaniacal focus on Rep. Bachmann, and his frequently yellow and self-indulgent “journalism”, and think that he is the personification of the “bad speech” that the First Amendment bids us to provide “more better speech” to counter, I condemn any personal harassment, and salute his service as an MP back in the seventies).

Read Thul’s piece.  And think about what the public schools teach every single day.  And ask yourself – while they pay lip service to their alleged “mission” of creating citizens who are capable of participating in our civil society, when was the last time you actually saw them exposing kids to any idea that dissented from the DFL’s platform?

Remember – when the principle at Forest Lake High School cancelled the Vets for Freedom assembly, he claimed the event (which had reportedly agreed to eschew politics), was “too political”.

Well, good heavens – we wouldn’t want politics in our schools, would we?
P-Short, writing at TvM and True North, notes:

Back in 2004, Patty Wetterling held her campaign kickoff announcement at a public school during the school day.  I do not recall complaints from liberals.  I do seem to recall, though my memory could be faulty, the school’s logo prominently featured on the podium or perhaps behind the candidate.

Of course, if you’ve ever had kids in the schools (and not just public ones!), you know the drill; the kids are endlessly drilled in the PC interpretations of Global Warming, the War on Terror, social issues – pretty much everything.  They bus kids to the capitol, to serve as captive picketers for Education Minnesota’s various legislative pushes, at events planned on school time, and that use school functions to recruit parents to help use their kids as political props!

And the Saint Paul Public Schools – they’d never stoop to partisan politics to pander to the politically powerful.  Would they?  (Yes, I know – naming schools after public figures is nothing new.  But there’s a level of reverence for the “Wellstone Legacy” involved at the school, and in the SPPS, that takes it a few notches beyond, say “Roosevelt Elementary”, my elementary mater).

For the record, I honestly don’t care if school present kids with all kinds of politics – indeed, they might learn to be better citizens.

But Flake High’s capitulation had nothing to do with poltics; by all appearances, it was about the “threat” of the wrong kind of politics.

Rew at Powerliberal read my post the other day, about the California ruling that, at the moment, looks likely to ban homeschooling in California…

…and she took exception.

Or disagreed.

Or…something.

Oh, she thinks she made a point…:

Mitch says:

Whenever a profession sets up “credendials”, especially credentials administered by the government, the purpose is very rarely to promote a better professional service; it’s to constrict the supply of those professionals.

Mitch –

When you go to court, do you look for a lawyer who has passed the bar, or do you just grab that guy from down the street because he seems to talk real good?

Actually, the former is the only option I have. But I look for someone who talks real good, and knows something about representing whatever sort of case I’m involved in because – this may be shocking – merely passing the bar doesn’t make someone a good, or even a competent, lawyer. It merely means that someone has passed the bare minimum that the state licensing body says is necessary to be a lawyer.

Once you’ve found someone who’s passed the bar exam, that’s really just the beginning.

Stay with us, liberal kidz. The fun is just beginning:

When your children need surgery or break a bone, do you take them to the hospital, or just grab the knife or try to set it yourself?

Check out the statistics for people doing their own surgery, or representing themselves in court. Not good, right?

Check out the stats for homeschoolers. To continue with Robin’s comparision, it’s almost as if do-it-yourself surgeons achieved 30% lower mortality than board-certified physicians!

Of course, teaching kids is not surgery. One is teaching them, for the most part, to do and be things that one already is and does. You don’t need a piece of paper from the state to do that, for the most part. .

Some parents are smart and qualified enough to school their children at home.

And the state teachers’ union is the last body that should try to decide which ones they are.

A test is just to ensure those parents are the ones who do the teaching, not just any person who picks up a book and says “I’m teaching now.”

It’s only two sentences. And yet there are so many possible responses:

1. The only difference between a schmuck who picks up a book and says “I’m teaching now” and a “Certified Teacher” is a piece of paper that says “I passed Theory of the Eraser 352 at UW Stout”.
2. Like with lawyers, the piece of paper is meaningless…
3. …only moreso, since there’s very little about a teaching certificate that implies any actual ability to “teach”things to “children”. And if you disagree, don’t come yapping to me; take it up with my dad, who taught for 40 years, and still teaches the occasional class at his town’s college Education program. It’s his opinion. Some people got it, and some people ain’t, and a state certificate has very little to do with telling the difference.
4. Indeed, a teaching certificate’s main purpose isn’t teaching people how to teach. It certifies one can teach a big room full of kids. If you can’t see the difference between that and homeschooling, the sassy snarks pretty much write themselves.
5. Would that the whole crew at MNMon – who took on the role of “journalist” with, if anything, vastly less preparation and qualification than the typical homeschool parent takes on their responsibility, and whose results are dismally less impressive, would apply the same logic to their own efforts.
6. For that matter, where does this “official is better” “logic” stop? I mean, Rew and Smartie – shouldn’t you have your baby in a licensed daycare, right now? After a.., a test is just to ensure the right people do the child-rearing, not just any person who can create a zygote. Right? Where do you stop with this “logic”? (Hint: If the DFL absorbs the “Daycare Providers’ Union”, watch out).
7. More seriously, who does Rew think is better at getting through to kids than their own parents? And if she thinks she knows all the answers now, give it about six to twelve years, and wait until the first know-it-all teacher tells her otherwise.

Let’s put it this way; if you engage any professional purely on the basis of a piece of paperwork, you probably deserve the results you get.

The problem, of course, is that with doctors and lawyers, you can pick and choose; in the public school system, what they give you is what you get.