[Gulp!] OK, here goes.
I rarely find people I disagree with more fundamentally than John Huppenthal and the Koch Brothers. But sometimes the universe allows for rare moments of alignment. I’m putting these odd moments of agreement with Huppenthal and the Brothers Koch into one post even though they concern very different issues to amplify the weirdness of the moment (also to spare myself the task of doing this twice). And—this is a plus for me—I find our similar positions are at odds with people and organizations I disagree with as fundamentally as I usually disagree with Hupp and the Kochs.
First, John Huppenthal. A story on public radio station KJZZ talks about one of the major downsides of the letter grades Arizona gives to its schools, namely, schools with lower income students tend to get lower grades, which stigmatizes the students, the teachers and the schools. One of the few nearly undisputed facts in educational research is that no matter where you go, students from lower income families tend to do worse on standardized tests than students from higher income families.
Or, as John Huppenthal put it in the story,
“Here we have this letter grading system that comes in and is beating, to put it bluntly, beating the hell out of schools that are serving the most at-risk populations.”
John, I couldn’t have said it better myself. To be honest, you said it a hell of a lot better than I did.
Huppenthal’s statement is followed by one from Lisa Graham Keegan, who thinks the grading system is not perfect but pretty good. Keegan, like Huppenthal, is an ex-Arizona lawmaker and education superintendent. She has continued to be a player in Arizona’s education politics, pushing her destructive privatization/”education reform” agenda forcefully and successfully with a succession of Arizona governors and legislatures. So for a brief, happy moment, I find myself allied with Huppenthal against Keegan. (John, who is a regular commenter here, will most likely rain on my parade and explain how I’m distorting his and Keegan’s positions, but I’ll savor this rare moment of apparent confluence until the two of us lock horns again.)
Then there’s the Charles Koch Institute, which — spoiler alert — is on the same side as I am, lined up against the Goldwater Institute. Imagine my surprise.
A big issue on college campuses, especially since Trump was elected, is the bounds of free speech. Should anyone be allowed to speak on campus, regardless of how vile some students find their ideas to be? And, should protesters who “infringe on the expressive rights of others” by making it difficult or impossible for speakers to speak be punished by the college with suspension or expulsion?
The Goldwater Institute says yes, punish the protesters. Sarah Ruger, who directs the Charles Koch Institute’s free expression initiatives, says no. She goes so far as to insult the Goldwater Institute’s position by saying G.I. and other conservatives are acting like just the lefties conservatives enjoy belittling as “snowflakes.”
Here’s the key passage from her column.
The past year alone has seen conservative organizations creating “watch lists” to encourage harassment of faculty members accused of advancing “radical agendas in lecture halls” as well as Republican state lawmakers introducing bills to mandate screening of candidates for professorships based on their political affiliation and legislation to prevent faculty members from teaching certain topics.
Along similar lines, a model policy from the Goldwater Institute may be gaining traction to mandate punishments of student protesters, such as one-year suspensions or even expulsions for any student twice found responsible for “infringing the expressive rights of others.” Such an overly broad measure invites abuse. It also encourages micromanaging by legislators and severely limits university autonomy, which is essential for academic freedom — another area that’s under assault.
Ruger is not an outlier in the Koch universe. John Hardin, director of university relations at the Charles Koch Foundation, recently published an op ed in the New York Times saying basically the same thing. He writes about how wrongheaded the Goldwater Institute and many of Arizona’s Republican legislators are on this issue.
Consider what is happening in Arizona. Last year, a state representative introduced legislation that would ban faculty members at public universities from offering courses that advocate “social justice” for any particular “class of people.” Last month, the state enacted a law [based on Goldwater Institute model policy] that explicitly says that schools “may restrict a student’s right to speak, including verbal speech, holding a sign or distributing fliers or other materials, in a public forum.”
These actions are no doubt rooted in genuine concern for the erosion of intellectual diversity in American higher education. But each of them worsens the problem it seeks to solve.
Later in the op ed, Hardin criticizes the creation at ASU of a school which is, at the very least, indirectly linked to the Koch brothers’ incursions into universities around the country: ASU’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. It’s the rough equivalent of UA’s Freedom Center, which I have written about at some length.
The new Arizona law follows on the heels of a decision by Arizona State University and the State Legislature to create a School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, a decision that some have applauded as effectively giving conservative scholars a separate home at the university, away from the otherwise liberal political science department. But if the vision of the new school is indeed to keep scholars separate, it will surely be a mistake. Different ideas must come into contact for intellectual progress to occur.
I’m only slightly surprised to find myself agreeing with a Koch-based institute. I’m going to end up on the same side as libertarians on issues from time to time. But I have to say, reading a Huppenthal quote that states my feelings about school grades perfectly — now that’s both a surprise and a rare treat.
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2018.
Good job, David. Any commentary that actually examines ideas rather than assuming those that come from certain sources should automatically be thrown on the trash help is very welcome in the current climate.
The free speech issue is an important one these days, and while you make some good points here as you agree with Koch Institute employees, neither you nor the quotes from Koch Institute employees you provide discuss the cases that have come up in recent days where supposedly “liberal” groups have coercively and / or violently shut down speech on campuses. Where do you and the Koch Institute feel the line should be drawn between what is an acceptable form of protest of a speaker students disagree with and what is unacceptable?
For my part, like you and the Koch Institute, I wouldn’t want a legislature banning classes in public universities that advocate social justice for particular classes of people nor would I want students’ rights to hold signs or distribute pamphlets restricted, but I certainly would want students, “liberal” or otherwise, prevented from responding to the arrival of speakers they dislike by:
–erecting barricades to prevent people from attending talks (Claremont-McKenna)
–beating students and destroying property (Berkeley)
–injuring professors who propose to moderate objectionable events (Middlebury).
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/suspensions-for-college-students-who-thwarted-free-speech/534114/
https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/index.html
https://www.aclunc.org/news/aclu-northern-california-statement-berkeley-college-republicans-lawsuit-against-uc-berkeley
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/education/edlife/middlebury-divided-campus-charles-murray-free-speech.html
Discussion of the more disturbing and dangerous cases should be included. Otherwise a false impression may be created that all current attempts to limit protests or punish some forms of it are misguided and reactionary. Some are, some aren’t. It really depends on what exactly the “protesters” have been doing, doesn’t it? And most who understand the full range of what is going on would not deny that some punishments have been valid and some restraints are appropriate.
You are making progress little buddy. Is it the rainfall that opened your eyes, or that super week that OUR President has had?
Mey, by the way happy birthday Mr President. You are doing a great job.
“Make The FBI Proud Again”
Thanks for reminding me of Trump’s birthday, Some Things. I have to give some money, in his name, to a pro-immigrant organization, the ACLU or some other worthy cause which is fighting the inhumane and anti-democratic policies of the Trump administration. It’s as close to an intervention as I can come for that dangerous son of a bitch. May he greet his next birthday as a private citizen.
You said I’m making progress. In a progressive direction, I hope — which includes thoughtful analysis, not knee-jerk acceptance or rejection of people and ideas. I appreciate the compliment.
Why not encourage them to comply with our laws? Your approach is anti American. Still stuck on impeachment huh? We are closer to “lock her up” if you vary your news sources. Back away from the haters David. It’s not becoming on you at all.
First, I remain amused at the hysteria over the Koch’s “incursions” into the universities. The Universities have been dominated by liberals by two generations. If we care about viewpoint diversity in colleges, and we should, we should welcome the Kochs’ small projects. They provide much needed balance.
Second, David writes “One of the few nearly undisputed facts in educational research is that no matter where you go, students from lower income families tend to do worse on standardized tests than students from higher income families.”. This is likely because High IQ parents tend to have high incomes and they tend to have high IQ children. No school policy is ever going to change this. All children are not equal.
Third, Universities, particularly public universities, should be free and open marketplaces of ideas where all speakers should have a basic right to express themselves. No one is required to listen. But the modern liberal habit of “shouting down” unpopular speakers, or worse, using physical violence (like the attack on a professor associated with Charles Murray at Middlebury) should not be tolerated. Silencing speakers is antithetical to the purpose of universities. Again, if you don’t like what a speaker has to say, don’t listen, host your own event where you offer counterarguments, or best yet, offer to debate them in a calm and mutually respectful manner.
I overheard someone yesterday saying, “I hope that in the future, like the people who went through the Great Depression or a world war, we’ll be able to tell our kids, ‘Yeah, times were really bad then. Everyone was always hostile and on edge. You can’t imagine what it was like.'”
I hope so too, but the trend lines don’t seem to be running in that direction. We can’t change (and should not want to change) our diversity, whatever form it takes: ethnic, religious, philosophical, etc. But the constant intolerance, the constant mutual sniping and incivility — and the violence that has been breaking out — does its damage to the prospect that we will ever be able to get beyond it.
We liberals / progressives need to own our own forms of intolerance. (It’s no doubt easier to see the blind spots when, like some of us, you’re a social conservative but an economic progressive. In the current climate, you sit very uncomfortably in both camps and, depending on the issue, you will get hit by sometime-allies on both sides.)
Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote 50 years ago in an introduction to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, “The intelligent rightist does not ask to be given reasons why he should read Marx and the Marxists. […] He learns from his adversaries about the strengths and weaknesses of his own position – and of theirs. The intellectual left on the other hand – though with some notable exceptions – has a strong tendency to neglect its adversaries and to dismiss even their most influential writings, unread, with a sneer. This is associated, I believe, with another pronounced tendency on the left: that which runs to misunderstanding and underestimating the forces opposed to it.”
He was right about that, unfortunately.
Would it not be easier to accept the fact that the last year and a half is a lesson on how to repair a broken economy? All boats are rising and yet some still seems to think there just has to be a better way. Well maybe, just maybe there isn’t. What could you do with all that spare time if you simply accept the simple economic realities?
All boats are not rising: that is very clear from observing whats happening at the ground level, whether or not its asserted by some media companies.
Tired of self-righteousness, lame economic policy, emotionalism and hysteria on the left and misplaced faith in voodoo economics and the magic of markets on the right. Sober-minded, honest, careful policy analysis and genuine concern for the common good are what is needed and we see precious little of that in any quarter these days.
In response to Safiers reversion to the apocalyptic imagery of Yeatss Second Coming, heres a quote from another over-used staple of the high school English curriculum, Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach. It seems to me a better match for the current circumstance:
..we are here as on a darkling plane
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
It might seem like sanity would have a better chance in the long run against ignorant armies than against the apocalyptic rough beast, but Im beginning to wonder.
Don’t hold your breath, little David.
Don’t hold your ignorance Little Man.
We are all in the same boat. The situation unfortunately leads to misunderstanding and underestimating. I Hope that http://custom-essay-writing-service.org/blog/english-essay-help is a great resource for each of us to get the latest news!
Why? If it isn’t anti-Trump these fools won’t believe it. Just like they still don’t believe he’s president. Trust me, I checked in the N.Y. Times today. He still is.
Like I said.
I’d dislike it too if I had the absolute, undying hatred for PRESIDENT Trump the way you clowns do. Everyday waking up knowing he’s still in the White House and he ain’t going nowhere. Except up.
Why are you so hung up on the dislikes? Do they fuel your need to hate?
And you’re correct about Trump not getting anywhere in the White House. He will also be going up…the river.
I am not sure why those that are making the money are not exposed as those that have everything to gain on the backs who have everything to lose. People discuss policy as if law is come by fair and square. The arrogance is frankly unconscionable.
For example, a wealthy lawyer whose office is in our low rent neighborhood has his driveway serviced by a leaf blower. At 2am, the blowers engine echoes for approximately 30 minutes at a steadily annoying decibel throughout the blocks and cul de sacs on either side of his office.
What do you think the response to this sort of self serving action would be in his Foothills neighborhood?
What does this have to do with education and the right to hear the opinions of others?
How many years did we watch Congress fail to act because they were politically motivated? How did Teachers feel watching Az Congress people like Kelly Townsend watch movies and play computer games on their laptops when she might have respectfully chosen to LISTEN during legislative sessions that they forced into early morning hours.
All you calm and collected people can sit back and watch your stocks go up and blab about policy and how theres nothing we can do. But hear me on this one. Your money is being made on the backs of people that are suffering and now, on children that are suffering, to provide you with cheap goods. All of our air and water quality is compromised because of geniuses like the Koch organization. People are being compromised the world over by the sort of arrogance our lawyer neighbor has chosen to assert.
Maybe people are shouting because few are listening. Maybe they cant hear over their leaf blowers.
The focus needs to be on economic policy and the bottom line is the right of those who work for a living in the wealthiest country in the world to have stable employment with good working conditions that earns them a living wage, quality single payer health care, access to HIGH QUALITY free K-12 education, affordable college education not financed by undismissable loan debt, a social security system not mismanaged to the point of collapse, etc.
When it comes to these issues, what are the leaf blowers that prevents us from tracking them and exerting collective pressure behind them and who is wielding those leaf blowers? Locally, who voted to outsource the management of substitute teachers in TUSD? Which two 2016 Board candidates received donations from the private company to which labor had been outsourced? Where did the suggestion to remove the Latino plaintiffs in the TUSD desegregation case come from? Nationally, take a look at NYTimes headlines and news alerts for the last year and a half. What percent of them deal with economic and labor policy issues? What percent deal with other issues? What ARE those other issues? When we got universal health care, why wasnt it single payer? During whose administration was a non-single payer system passed? During that same administration, how was the 2008 crisis resolved? On whose backs?
When it comes to failures with economic policy issues and failures of effective labor advocacy, the Republicans and the Koch brothers are not the only culprits. Currently, concern is successfully being diverted from what it should be focused on, and the non-stop hysteria over Trump is one of the loudest and most persistent leaf blowers that is being used to do it. To say so and to note accurately that people who might have joined an authentic, labor-focused effort are deserting the partisan field is to ask for better. Asking for better in the current climate may not immediately be effective, but it is part of what needs to be done if better is ever to be achieved.
I wouldn’t mind beating the hell out of a school if we were confident they were an “F” or a “D” school, or even a C school. I wouldn’t even mind accidentally beating the hell out of a “B” school.
But, here is the problem.
In the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, our Black 8th graders finished number one in the nation in math scores. Ahead of all 49 other states.
That must mean the majority of our Black elementary school students are attending “A” rated elementary schools, doing that “A” rated job.
But, not a single Arizona school with a Black student population over 5% is rated A.
And, here is another problem.
When I looked at the academic gains of our F rated schools, a number of them had greater academic gains than many of the A rated schools.
The formula concocted by the geniuses on the State Board was steering students to schools in which, if you can squeeze any information out of standardized test scores, our best science was telling us were below average.
Any school with consistently below average academic gains should never be labeled an “A” school.
Any school with consistently above average academic gains should never be labeled a “D” or “F”.
And, here is another problem, potentially irrecoverable.
A recent study by Sean Reardon of Stanford featured nationally and much discussed, found almost no correlation between 5-year academic gains and one-year academic gains. Potentially meaning that this entire mishmash of numbers has no real meaning at all, that it is so comprehensively gamed that it has no meaning at all.
The number one district in the state, the most test-score focused district in the state, came out with exactly average academic gains over the five year period, 2011 to 2015. This the district with the highest one-year academic gains in the state.
John, looks like we still pretty much agree. Let me add what I think is an obvious conclusion I draw from your information and analysis.
School grades are a crude instrument trying to summarize subtle, elusive information about schools’ effectiveness. It’s surgery with a dull hatchet. The problems you describe indicate some of the reasons the current system fails to do the job it is supposed to do. But I don’t think there’s a fix. Add as many qualifiers as you want to the grading system’s rubric, and you’ll still get flawed results. To continue with my surgery metaphor, you can hone that hatchet’s blade to a razor’s edge, and it’s still a hatchet. It still won’t be a proper tool to perform a delicate operation.
A-F school grades are a destructive measure of school effectiveness. They are a continuation of the No Child Left Behind travesty which was forced on our nation’s schools by the Bush administration, with the help of a sizable group of Congressional Democrats. Our schools have been hurt, not helped, by our obsession with standardized testing as a measurement of educational quality.
There is no such thing as a right not to have other citizens in your country doing things that are obnoxious. There may be rights to have your “representative” government make laws that prevent behaviors that are unreasonably obnoxious, and to have the government that has made the laws enforce them.
Thus the problem in your allegory is not with the lawyer and the leaf blower he hires. It’s with Tucson city code and code enforcement, i.e. it exists in an area well under the control of Southern Arizona Dems.
Spoiler alert: the average citizen will not get ANY results — other than complete waste of their time and effort — with approaching our Democrat-controlled local governments with an advocacy issue. But still, amazingly, some people are determined to continue voting Democratic and swallowing the party line that it’s the RICH MAN and his leaf blower that are the problem.
Funny, that.
“A recent study by Sean Reardon of Stanford featured nationally and much discussed, found almost no correlation between 5-year academic gains and one-year academic gains. Potentially meaning that this entire mishmash of numbers has no real meaning at all, that it is so comprehensively gamed that it has no meaning at all.”
I agree with many that there is no meaning.
Finland, recently rated number 1 in the world for education, has exactly zero high stakes multiple choice tests. Instead they invest in education and value educational professionals.
“Finland, recently rated number 1 in the world for education…”
If only we had more Finnish kids in our schools. Regrettably, there just aren’t enough Finns to go around.
As a longtime skeptic* of the Koch Foundation’s habit of finding ways to entice liberals to support their work, here’s the loophole I see in Ruger and Hardin’s rhetoric:
The Koch Foundation has been caught trying to place unqualified academics in existing departments at several universities. In each case, those departments rejected hiring Koch-favored faculty into their departments, and Koch-funded professors at these campuses had to establish their own separate centers in order to go through with hiring people deemed unqualified by their peers.
So, Koch is probably annoyed that they are being rejected by departments, including economics departments, and having to set up second-rate alternatives in Business schools. They’d rather get the full legitimacy of established university departments with good reputations.
Here are the examples I am talking about:
Texas Tech University was a doozie – many departments rejected the Koch program, one by one:
https://www.texasobserver.org/koch-free-ma…
At Chapman University, Koch tried to take over the English department:
https://www.ocregister.com/2018/06/08/5-mi…
At the University of Utah, Koch funds created a new department that the economics department faculty says is duplicitous of the existing department. UU Econ faculty have had to defend themselves from accusations of “Marxist,” bias, which former UU Econ students and current faculty disputed:
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/…
http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=5…
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865685…
*Disclosure: I am a proud co-founder of UnKoch My Campus, which has spent five years uncovering this kind of poisonous trend in Koch’s “philanthropy.”
More documents and primary sources here:
http://unkochmycampus.org
@ Connor Gibson
Maybe one of the ways the Koch Foundation “entices liberals to support their work” is what David Safier mentions here: occasionally they have ideas on some issues with which some liberals agree. (Do you consider that impossible, Connor Gibson? If so, why?)
Without arguing that donors should be able to require the selection of “unqualified” faculty (a very bad idea indeed), we might be willing to admit that there is in fact some degree of ideological selection bias in “established university departments with good reputations.” Your post here invites the reader to make assumptions about the ideological neutrality of university departments that will not bear examination and that oversimplify the current lay of the land in American academia considerably.
P.S. Please look up the meaning of “duplicitous.” It’s not what you seem to think it is, but it may be a term that has some application vis a vis the work of UnKoch My Campus. Based on what you’ve written above, I consider it possible, but I don’t know for certain because I haven’t yet examined thoroughly the exact nature of Koch influence vs. other donors’ influence in universities, nor have I considered carefully the quality of your organization’s work on the issue. I do note that in one of the articles you linked above, it is mentioned that at a free market economics conference attended primarily by those with libertarian sympathies, “[m]embers of UnKoch My Campus registered for the conference using their real names, but did not disclose their true affiliation.”
https://www.texasobserver.org/koch-free-market-institute-texas-tech/
That does seem DUPLICITOUS, and it definitely leaves something to be desired if one of the values your organization promotes is supposed to be TRANSPARENCY.