On Birmingham’s most famous Sunday!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2013

What two ministers said: Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of Birmingham’s most famous Sunday.

As many people mentioned yesterday in the formal commemoration, Birmingham is not the same city today. We were struck by one part of the editorial in yesterday’s New York Times.

Three days after the bombing killed four children at Sunday school, Dr. King described the four girls as “victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.” Reading yesterday’s editorial, we were struck by what two Birmingham ministers had already said:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/15/13): The city has planned a full day of remembrance and prayer on Sunday, along with a food festival and music. The commemorators have every right to blend somber and light as they mark a half-century of progress. But it’s worth remembering a point [Diane] McWhorter has powerfully made: the civil rights struggle was not simply a victory of good over evil, of the righteous defeating the Klansmen who gave “Bombingham” its bloody reputation. The struggle was good against “normal”—against the segregation that was seen as the natural order of things, buttressed by government, tradition and the law. In this, Dr. King and his allies were the radicals.

The most radical thing was their willful commitment to peace as a weapon for change and as a check on justified rage. The clouds from the dynamite blast had not even cleared when the Rev. John Cross stood before a furious crowd on the church’s front steps and said, “We should be forgiving as Christ was forgiving.” Then he handed a megaphone to the Rev. Charles Billups, who said: “Go home and pray for the men who did this evil deed. We must have love in our hearts for these men.”

To recall what Dr. King told a crowd in 1957 when his own home was bombed, just click here.

(His own later account of his remarks that night included this: “We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them.”)

Back to Birmingham Sunday:

“We must have love in our hearts for these men?” Reading the words of the two ministers, we were struck again by the radical strangeness at the heart of the nonviolent civil rights movement.

Not everyone felt the same way about that nonviolent approach, which had been derived in large part from Gandhi. But we’re always struck by how radically strange it is that people could have reacted to such events in such unusual ways. That they could have said such things, were willing to act upon them.

We think we all have a lot to learn from those highly unusual reactions. In our view, the instinct behind those reactions is barely visible in today’s liberal world.

“We must have love in our hearts for these men?” What in the world did those ministers mean? And why was their movement successful?

Tomorrow: A car ride with Bull Connor, 1961

Dr. King's full eulogy: On September 18, 1963, Dr. King spoke at the funeral service for three of the children. To read his full speech, click here.

Among other things, Dr. King said this: “Good night, sweet princesses. Good night, those who symbolize a new day.”

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DIVISION AND CONQUEST: The one percent are making up time!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2013

Part 1—The Wreck of the Whole 99: “The Wreck of the Old 97” is one of America’s most famous train songs.

You couldn’t make Johnny Cash stop singing it. When Vernon Dalhart recorded it in 1924, it became perhaps the first million-selling country music recording.

The song memorialized the wreck of the famous “Fast Mail” train, which had been trying to make up time heading south toward Danville. According to the famous lyrics, the engineer “was going down the grade making ninety miles an hour when his whistle broke out in a scream.”

That was The Wreck of the Old 97. In modern times, there’s the ongoing Wreck of the Whole 99, which Annie Lowrey described again in last Wednesday’s New York Times.

Saez and Piketty had released new information about the gains of the highest earners. As Lowrey began (headline included), she even referred to “a new Gilded Age:”

LOWREY (9/11/13): The Rich Get Richer Through the Recovery

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax.

The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.


[...]

The income share of the top 1 percent of earners in 2012 returned to the same level as before both the Great Recession and the Great Depression...jumping to about 22.5 percent in 2012 from 19.7 percent in 2011.

Is this pre-tax or post-tax income? Lowrey didn’t explicitly say, although certain parts of her report implied that she was discussing income after taxes.

Whatever! New records for income inequality are being set, Lowrey reported. You might even say that the top one percent has been making up time!

Lowrey wasn’t completely gloomy as she reviewed the new data. In this passage, she reported “a glimmer of good news for the 99 percent:”

LOWREY: There is a glimmer of good news for the 99 percent in the report, though. Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez show that the incomes of that group stagnated between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, they started growing again—if only by about 1 percent. But the total income of the top 1 percent surged nearly 20 percent that year. The incomes of the very richest, the 0.01 percent, shot up more than 32 percent.

Incomes grew by one percent last year! As an example of “good news,” you might file that under the heading, “seeing the glass one percent full.”

Different people will have different ideas about the meaning of these data. For example, should the federal government try to address this level of inequality?

Different people will have different ideas about that. Lowrey reported something the authors have said on that score:

LOWREY: Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty have argued that the concentration of income among top earners is unlikely to reverse without stark changes in the economy or in tax policy. Increases that Congress negotiated in January are not likely to have a major effect, Mr. Saez wrote, saying they “are not negligible, but they are modest.”

Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics, plan to update their data again in January, after more complete statistics become available.

Should Congress try to level incomes a bit? That is a matter of judgment. But in the absence of some such action, it seems the trend toward income inequality will continue.

By now, it hardly qualifies as “news” when such information appears. Indeed, Lowrey’s report appeared on page B4 of Wednesday’s New York Times. The release of these new data occasioned little reaction in the public discourse.

Nor will everyone agree about the meaning of these data. Do data like these represent a problem? Not everyone will agree, but let's make one basic observation:

In theory, progressives think that these data do represent a problem. But if they represent a problem, they represent a problem that is being felt on both sides of the tribal divide.

Within that 99 percent, the income of conservative voters is failing to rise; so is with the income of liberal voters. Then too, red and blue voters are all being looted through the massive overspending which characterizes American health care—a looting the liberal world has generally been too lazy to discuss.

At some point, you’d think the 99 percent might get mad at the one percent. You’d think the whole 99 percent might get mad about data like these:

Health care spending, per person, 2011:
United States: $8508
Finland: $3374

As compared with Finland, $5100 per person is disappearing every year in our health care spending. (For a family of four, multiply accordingly.) That’s money that isn’t going into the stagnant wages of the 99 percent.

Where is all that money going? At some point, you’d almost think the whole 99 would want to figure that out!

In our view, data like these could be part of a modern-day song, “The Wreck of the Whole 99.” Incomes are stagnant for almost the whole population. Meanwhile, ridiculous looting affects this huge group in various obvious ways.

That said, something seems to keep the 99 percent from fighting against this type of looting and income stagnation. These problems affect red and blue alike, but The Whole 99 fails to unite and put up a fight.

What keeps the 99 percent divided against itself? Some of the division comes from the so-called right. This has been true for a very long time.

But some of the division comes from the so-called left. It seems to us that instincts toward division have been growing on that side of the aisle.

Why can’t The Whole 99 fight back? We’ll examine that question all week.

Tomorrow: Ways to divide, thus to conquer!

Through the miracle of YouTube: Through the miracle of YouTube, you can hear several versions of Vernon Dalhart’s historic 1924 recording.

For one such recording, just click here. Musically, we’ve come a long way since that time, as have the top one percent!

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Jim Lehrer was more than a writer of novels!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2013

News anchor also wrote plays: There’s nothing wrong with writing plays. Shakespeare did it a lot!

That said, we were surprised by Thursday’s report about Jim Lehrer’s new play. We didn’t know the newsman wrote plays, though we knew all about his novels.

Laura Bennett handled the history in the New York Times:

BENNETT (9/11/13): Mr. Lehrer’s career in television news has made him famous. But far less well known is that he has always loved writing for the theater, and that he is the author of four plays. (He also has 21 novels to his name.) His first play in two decades opens at the National Geographic Society here on Thursday: “Bell,” a one-man show about Alexander Graham Bell.

[...]

Growing up in Wichita, Kan., Mr. Lehrer decided he wanted to write fiction. In college, he studied playwriting, but after a short stint in the Marines, he became a journalist. Then in 1983, after watching the Redskins, he had a heart attack. His doctor advised him to make two lists: things he most enjoyed, and tasks that ate up his energy and time.

So Mr. Lehrer sat down with a notepad. He hated flying between Washington and New York. He was done with business lunches. But he knew what he loved: his family, and writing fiction. Finally, he thought, he’d like to try his hand at a play. The first script he finished was “Chili Queen” in 1986, about a small-town chili parlor. Then came “Church Key Charlie Blue” in 1988 and “The Will and Bart Show” in 1992.

It wasn’t just the 21 novels. He also wrote three plays!

There’s nothing wrong with writing novels, as Jane Austen proved. Still, it has become increasingly hard to keep up with the news as the news has been “democratized.” And we'd assume that writing 21 novels takes a lot of time.

(We could be wrong about that.)

Un-oh! As the news became “democratized,” the discourse came to be dominated by all kinds of shaky assertions, bogus claims and ridiculous Standard Press Corps Tales. It’s hard to get clear on all the bogus claims floating about, some of which are flatly false, many of which are only grossly misleading.

It’s hard to get clear on claims of this type even if you have a staff. We’d assume it’s even harder to do if you’re writing 21 novels.

We only say this because Lehrer sometimes seem a bit clueless about even some famously bogus claims in The Big Golden Book of Standard Press Corps Tales. In recent years, he keeps repeating the famous old groaner about Nixon winning that first debate among people who listened on the radio. He also keeps suggesting that Gennifer Flowers was a figure of rectitude.

As he worked on all those novels, was Lehrer keeping up?

Whatever! Observing the rules of the game, Bennett profiles Lehrer as a patient, civil person who doggedly seeks the truth. Beyond that, she lets him advance his ongoing rehab campaign concerning events of last year:

BENNETT: In the society’s Grosvenor Theater, Mr. Lehrer, 79, had the same patient air he brought to “PBS NewsHour” and the 12 presidential debates he moderated: the quiet civility, the eagerness to listen.

“Jim has a passion for complete ideas,” said Jeremy Skidmore, the director of “Bell.” “ ‘NewsHour’ was unique in that they didn’t want to do interviews that were sound bites. And as a playwright, Jim wants to sit with an entire section of Bell’s life before he moves on.”

Rick Foucheux, who plays Bell, once aspired to be a news anchor himself. “When I watch Jim, I see the reason he went that direction and I didn’t,” he added. “He’s got that natural curiosity to figure out the way the world works.”

Mr. Lehrer said he has no plans to return to television, especially given the bruising he endured after moderating the first presidential debate last fall, for which he came out of semiretirement. His wife, Kate, warned him not to: Twitter could be brutal. His style of polite discourse was no longer the norm.

“She had told me, you know, you could get hurt,” Mr. Lehrer said. “And she was right.” He shook his head. “It’s something that I did not have to do. But I convinced myself I had to.”

Poor Lehrer! He was badly mistreated by Twitter! His style of polite discourse was no longer the norm!

Within the guild, everyone knows to say these things about Lehrer. He's a patient, civil man who is eager to listen. Why did he become an anchor? Because he has that natural curiosity to figure out how the world works!

In some sense, in most contexts, those portraits may all be true. But even now, 53 years later, Lehrer doesn’t seem to know what happened in that first Kennedy-Nixon debate. And in his books and his public appearances, he still pretends he doesn’t know why Candidate Gore refuses to speak with him for public consumption about the 2000 debates.

(We don’t know why Gore keeps refusing to be interviewed by Lehrer. But we can make a pretty good guess; Lehrer keeps playing dumb.)

We’re sure that Lehrer is a good decent person among his family and friends. That said, he played a remarkably inappropriate role in the presidential debates of 1996 and 2000, with a bit of his stance lingering on in 2004. Oddly enough, he described his peculiar conduct in the Clinton-Dole debates in his own book, Tension City, in 2011. But he’s still largely playing it dumb about the Bush-Gore debates.

We think Lehrer showed very bad judgment in those crucial sets of debates. Rather plainly, he was part of the insider cult which had come to resent and dislike Clinton and his chosen successor, Gore. Good God! In the second debate in 1996, he tried to get Candidate Dole to talk about Gennifer Flowers, he weirdly reveals in his book. (Gennifer Flowers!) In 2000, we’d have to say that he behaved rather badly all through the Bush-Gore debates.

In his book and his public appearances, he pretends he doesn’t understand the complaints about 2000. The key word there is “pretends.”

Judging from what he himself has written, Lehrer got himself tangled up in the cult which believed that Clinton and Gore had large “character” problems. Our view? Maybe if he hadn’t spent so much time writing novels (and even three plays), he might have had a clearer grip on the real events of the world.

We know, we know! You’ve never heard anyone say that Lehrer did something wrong in those debates. That is exactly the problem! No one but us will ever tell you, including, it seems, Laura Bennett.

On Thursday, Bennett typed the same familiar old piddle about Lehrer’s civil ways. And she let him advance the claim that he was criticized unfairly in 2012. By Twitter, it now seems!

This is very familiar stuff. As we’ve told you about mainstream news: it's novels, all the way down!

Visit our incomparable archives: This summer, Lehrer discussed his role in various presidential debates. For our review, click here.

In 2011, when Lehrer’s book appeared, it fell to Gloria Borger to pretend that his various stories weren’t bogus. For our first reaction to the book, click this.

In October 2012, we did a longer series about Lehrer's book and his past work in presidential debates. For part 6 in that series, just click here. All six reports can be accessed in the margin to the right.

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The Times reports why Christine Quinn lost!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2013

Nobody cares about issues: Yesterday, Gail Collins tried to explain why Bill de Blasio rolled to victory in this week’s mayoral primary.

As we noted yesterday, she said de Blasio won because of race—because one of his TV ads generated an “urban feel-good moment.” You see, de Blasio's wife is black. And in the TV ad in question, the whole family seemed very happy!

Like Collins, we don’t know why de Blasio won. It wouldn’t be easy to answer that question, since it involves the votes of many New Yorkers.

That said, we were struck by how little Collins seemed to care about the policy issues involved in the campaign. We had a similar reaction to the lengthy analysis piece in which Jodi Kantor and Kate Taylor tried to explain why Christine Quinn lost.

Right off the bat, we were struck by the banner headline on the large, sprawling piece. This was the headline in our hard-copy Times:

“Questions About How Big a Role Gender and Sexuality Played in Quinn’s Loss.”

Gender and sexuality might have played important roles in this race—although, to be perfectly honest, the reporters didn’t turn up much information. For the most part, they offered anecdotal accounts and complaints which added up to very little.

Still, we were struck by their focus. We wondered—could we imagine banner headlines like these in the New York Times?

“Questions About How Big a Role Stop and Frisk Played in Quinn’s Loss.”
“Questions About How Big a Role Early Childhood Education Played in Quinn’s Loss.”

It was hard to imagine those headlines. Those articles didn’t appear.

In truth, the Times did little reporting in the last few months about the issues of this campaign. The paper obsessed on Anthony Weiner’s sexual problems while showing little interest in much of anything else.

Yesterday, Collins discussed a feel-good moment concerning de Blasio's family; Kantor and Taylor speculated about sexuality and gender. In truth, these are the types of things which interest the New York Times. To judge from its emphasis and focus, the Times doesn’t care about the issues which got discussed in de Blasio's ad, the ad which made Collins feel good because his family seemed happy.

It isn’t Kantor and Taylor’s fault that they received this assignment. The questions they raised are perfectly valid, although they came up with little real information.

But land o Goshen, some of the glimpses they offered from within the Quinn campaign! Welcome to the cultural frameworks surrounding the upper-class Times:

KANTOR AND TAYLOR (9/121/3): Critiques of Ms. Quinn’s physical attributes came from many corners, even the wealthy Upper East Side women who helped raise money for her mayoral bid. “Why can’t she dress better?’” they would ask Rachel Lavine, a Democratic state committeewoman who was on Ms. Quinn’s finance committee.

“I might think that St. John is not the end all and be all of fashion,” Ms. Lavine said, referring to the upscale clothing line favored by wealthy, older women. “But that’s what they’re saying. ‘Why isn’t she wearing a size two St. John’s dress?’ There’s that kind of constant commentary.”

Remember—those were the people supporting Quinn. And this is part of the cultural framework which spills from the upper-class Times.

In fairness, Kantor and Taylor sounded somewhat clueless on their own at times. Who is betraying a hopelessly upper-class outlook now?

KANTOR AND TAYLOR: [Quinn’s] fall from front-runner status to a distant third place finish in the Democratic primary is now stirring intense debate about whether her femaleness, or her homosexuality, played any role in her struggle to win over voters.

Exit polls showed no gender gap in the results and indicated that Ms. Quinn lost for a number of reasons—her close association with the plutocratic incumbent mayor, her rivals’ ability to outmaneuver her on the issue of stop-and-frisk policing, and her inability to be a change candidate in an election in which voters sought new direction.

Still, her supporters wonder: Why has New York, home of tough, talented women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Anna Wintour, proven resistant to female candidates? And was it simply too much to expect the electorate to embrace a candidate who would be not just New York’s first female mayor, but its first openly gay one, too?

According to that middle paragraph, it sounds like de Blasio won because of the desire to move away from plutocrat approaches. Kantor and Taylor moved quickly past that, saying Quinn's supporters had other things on their minds.

Wintour is editor in chief of Vogue. She was all over yesterday’s Times, mainly in the highly foppish Thursday Styles section.

But good lord! Who could be so clueless as to ask why the city where Wintour lives could “prove resistant to female candidates,” if that is really what happened? Granted, Kantor and Taylor attribute that question to Quinn’s supporters. But they were willing to type it up as if it made perfect sense.

Collins talked about race, but only concerning that “feel-good moment.” Kantor and Taylor's analysis piece went on and on about sexuality and gender. Increasingly, this is the stuff of press corps discourse, and not just in the upper-class Times. We were struck by this statement by Gloria Steinem:

KANTOR AND TAYLOR: [T]rue to the concerns of the women who met with Ms. Quinn in July, some allies thought the campaign could have handled the tricky matter of being a woman candidate with more finesse.

Gloria Steinem said in an interview that Mr. de Blasio effectively “took over the language of gender” in the race with his proposal to expand preschool programs with a tax increase. (The proposal was widely seen as impractical but politically effective.)

Even though Ms. Quinn passed a Council bill to provide paid sick leave, she stalled action on the measure for so long that she was widely viewed as an opponent, which hurt her credibility as a fighter for women.

In this account, de Blasio didn’t make a proposal which many voters favored. Instead, he “took over the language of gender,” aside from which nothing exists. (Steinem may have said a great deal beyond the remark which was quoted.)

Reading this piece after reading Collins, we were struck by the lack of interest in the lives of average people. The Times likes to talk about race and sex, not about people in Queens who might yearn for preschool programs because that would help them with their everyday lives, not because it helps them figure who’s saying what about gender.

Not about people in Manhattan who may think that preschool programs would create a better society.

Why did people vote as they did? Without any question, gender and sexuality might be involved, though Kantor and Taylor offered little real information.

But the Times likes to talk about sexuality and race. Does it like to talk about preschool programs for low-income children?

People! Possibly not quite so much! Collins blew right past that crap. On assignment, so did Kantor and Taylor.

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ADULT ABUSE: What the Times should report!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2013

Part 4—Return from Gilligan’s Island: Does anyone at the New York Times know jack-spit about schools?

Certainly, very few readers do. Consider the way of the Times:

Last month, the former executive editor, Bill Keller, wrote in his weekly op-ed column that the United States has experienced “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education.”

Among journalistic elites, such claims are very familiar. They’re also extremely hard to square with our best educational data.

That said, who gives a dang! Last Sunday, the Times handed the keys to the gloom machine to Robert J. Gordon, a self-regarding economics professor who doesn’t seem to know a lot about the public schools.

Beneath a visual of a broken-down school bus, beneath a headline which announced “the great stagnation of American education,” the self-regarding economics professor rattled a list of familiar scripts about “the poor quality of our schools.”

He failed to mention the last two decades of NAEP scores, which show large gains in reading and math by black and Hispanic students. Also by white kids!

Those large score gains didn’t get mentioned. But then, they never are!

Does anyone at this upper-class newspaper know jack-spit about schools? In fairness, they all seem to know the standard scripts, which all bring in the gloom.

More on the clueless Times:

Last year, the former editorial page editor, Gail Collins, staged the most embarrassing excursion since Gilligan attempted to stage his now now-famous three-hour tour. In support of a snark-laden book about Texas, Collins paraded about the land, warning crowds about the way the clownish red state was failing to educate its Hispanic kids.

The red-state failure had Collins upset. In Chicago, she warned a collection of blue-state liberals:

COLLINS (6/10/12): [Texas is] not doing the job of educating young Hispanic children that it needs to do if they’re going to become critical skilled workers for the next generation.

Right now, Texas imports college graduates. It imports as many as it creates on its own. So when you are paying to help make the universities in Illinois top-tier universities, you are paying to help staff businesses in Texas because a lot of your graduates are going to wind up down there.

Now, unless Texas antes up and really, really, really steps up to the education plate—

In the future, ten percent of the work force of America is going to be Texas born, bred and educated. And unless they do a better job than they’re doing now, that’s when we all go south.

Poor Illinois! The state was funding top-tier universities while Texas was frumping around!

Using evocative tribal language, Collins warned the Chicago crowd that, if Texas didn’t improve its schools, we might “all go south.” She showed no sign of knowing that Hispanic students in Texas schools strongly outscore their peers in Illinois on the National Assessment of Educational Testing, the federal testing program she had praised at length in her thoroughly clueless book.

In short, the New York Times is a clueless disgrace when it comes to the public schools. From its most famous players on down, the paper pimps the gloomy scripts which constitute upper-class conventional wisdom—gloomy scripts which advance conservative political themes and corporate privatization strategies.

Its readers are rarely—actually, never—exposed to even the most basic data about the state of the schools. If you read the New York Times, you are the victim of adult abuse with regard to this major part of American life.

Keller and Collins should crawl on their knees, begging forgiveness from Times subscribers for their absurd presentations. After that, someone should explain why Gordon was invited to rattle the scripts about a topic he seems to know little about.

Someone should also awaken the children, the horrible children at The One Liberal Channel, to ask them why they sleepwalk through life concerning the state of the schools. If they complained about the endless spewing of corporate-laced nonsense, the New York Times might be forced to perform some real reporting for once.

That said, the children aren’t going to complain. These topics don't exist on The One True Channel. The adult abuse will continue.

Still and all, a person can dream! If the Times got off its big fat asparagus aspic and did some reporting about public schools, what would that reporting look like?

The schools are constantly in the news. If the Times decided to do its job, this is what several series of front-page reports might attempt to cover:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress: What has been happening in public schools over the past few decades? At newspapers like the New York Times, everybody praises the NAEP, the gold standard of domestic testing.

Nobody ever tells the public what NAEP data show.

Check that: Reporters frequently cite the “achievement gaps” found in NAEP data. Those data enable the gloomy tales which constitute the memorized upper-class line.

But alas! Big newspapers never report the large score gains among all major groups in the student population. Readers are never told about the large score gains in reading and math recorded by black and Hispanic students.

Darlings, that would sound like good news! In the world of the Times, good news about schools is withheld.

If a paper like the New York Times decided to do its job for once, it would start by telling the public about those NAEP data. This couldn’t be done in a single report. The issues are too complex.

Times readers would finally hear about those very large score gains. Through interviews with NAEP officials, the Times would try to explain how large the gains in achievement may actually be.

The Times might even inform its readers about the different scores achieved by different states. (Don’t forget to disaggregate!) By the way, is there any chance that higher scores in some states result in part from retention procedures? Are fourth- or eighth-graders in some states older than those in the others?

We’d like to see that report. We can't find a way to tease that out through the NAEP’s public data, which are quite voluminous and are almost wholly ignored.

Might there be problems with the NAEP data? A real newspaper would examine that question—would have done so long ago. But alas! During those years, the Times has been off on Gilligan’s Island, clowning around with the Thurston Howells and advancing their upper-class dreck.

The Times has been dishing the adult abuse, has done so for a long time.

The PISA, the TIMSS and the PIRLS: As everyone knows, newspaper readers are constantly told about our nation’s gruesome performance on international tests. Last Sunday, the self-impressed Professor Gordon made a standard presentation:

GORDON (9/8/13): Then there is the poor quality of our schools. The Program for International Student Assessment tests have consistently rated American high schoolers as middling at best in reading, math and science skills, compared with their peers in other advanced economies.

According to Gordon, results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) show “the poor quality of our schools.” In a rather standard move, he didn’t mention results from the other major international tests, on which American students have sometimes performed rather well.

The most recent PISA results are from 2009. But uh-oh! In 2011, American students did rather well on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), a major international assessment of fourth-graders’ reading achievement.

How well did American students do? They outscored their peers in Canada, England, Germany and France, four well-known large nations. They outperformed Spain, Italy, Australia and Taiwan, four other famous countries. (Technically, Taiwan is still part of China.)

They outscored every smaller European nation save one, including Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. They outperformed the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. They outscored New Zealand and Israel.

They were outscored by only two nations—Russia and Finland—and by Singapore and Hong Kong, two small, wealthy city-states. Other than that, they outscored all comers.

Following established practice, Professor Gordon said good-bye to all that. But then, such strong performances almost never get mentioned. Based on the quality of Gordon’s piece, we wouldn’t assume that he’s ever heard of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) or the PIRLS.

What is the overall picture on the PISA, the TIMSS and the PIRLS? If the New York Times ever returns from its stay on Gilligan’s Island, that would make for a fabulous, highly relevant series of front-page reports.

Is the PISA a better test battery than the TIMSS and the PIRLS? Does that explain why the Times tends to ignore the stronger performance on the latter tests while screeching about the lower scores on the PISA?

And by the way: Did the PISA over-represent low-income kids in its 2009 American test group? We don’t know the answer to that. A real paper might want to report it.

Such a series of reports would include the truly gloomy news about what happens when you “disaggregate” American scores on international tests. The scores by white kids look pretty good. The scores by black and Hispanic kids don’t.

The Times might also report what happens when you disaggregate scores by income. In short, there is a slew of information Times readers have never heard.

The Times could fill its front pages for weeks with reports on these seminal topics. Readers of the famous newspaper might start acquiring some information. At some point, the Times might even develop the types of skill which would let it examine the sorts of programs occurring within our schools.

At present, the Times is simply too unskilled to tackle such topics. Last month, the paper created a world of confusion trying to report a bone-simple matter—the transition to more difficult statewide tests in New York based on the new Common Core standards.

That was a stunningly hapless performance by a grossly incompetent newspaper. But the Times is persistently over its head when it tries to discuss even the simplest classroom topics.

In short, if the world were split into reading groups, the New York Times would be grouped with “the buzzards,” not with the robins or bluebirds. On average, American students may not be half bad. The American press is a mess.

What is the actual state of our schools? What could we possibly do to help our low-income and minority kids improves their performance faster? Enjoy their lives in school more?

At the New York Times, they don’t seem to know and they don’t seem to care. But then, the career liberal world doesn’t seem to give a rip either.

Welcome to the horrible world through which the Dowdism crept! In this world, the news is mainly entertainment, although it’s also a way of driving plutocrat scripts.

Like the Times, MSNBC is off on that three-hour tour when it comes to the public schools. So is the gang at Salon; so too for “career liberal” writers.

Relentlessly, public school teachers get trashed as the swells suppress those rising NAEP scores. We’re told that the teachers have ruined the schools through their infernal unions.

We’re told we need to privatize schools. We need to bring in the Princeton kids. We’re told the government can’t do anything right, not even in “government schools.”

We aren’t allowed to know about the large score gains achieved by our black kids. We ought to be pleased by what seems to be happening. But by the current rules of the game, we can’t even be told!

That said, the children at the corporate liberal orgs are talented with their R-bombs. They love to flounce about, announcing that we’re The Very Good People and The Others Are Just Very Bad.

The public schools and their kids can go jump in the lake. Who gives a shit about scores by black students?

The adult abuse has been widespread. But also, who cares about kids?

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Roxane Gay mocks “wealth porn” in the Times!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

Then quickly breaks our hearts: According to Nexis, the term “wealth porn” does not enjoy a rich history.

Within the Nexis archives, the term tracks to Matt Zoller Seitz, then of the Newark Star Ledger. He reviewed a TV documentary in 2002 as the swells made ready to summer:

SEITZ (6/1/02): "The Hamptons" is an impressive achievement—a serious work of social anthropology that can be enjoyed as pure entertainment. The fact that it's running over two nights on a major broadcast network is amazing all by itself. (When a network has nothing to lose, it rolls the dice on art.)

If you tune in expecting a shallow spoof of privileged people, a trashy so-called "reality" series or a voyeuristic slab of wealth porn, you'll be pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised.

Two years later, he used the term again, this time reviewing Trump TV:

“Like HBO's Sex and the City, The Apprentice is wealth porn—a weekly showcase of privilege that lingers over limousines, aircraft, champagne, caviar, fancy clothes and expensive shoes with the same loving care that soft-core sex movies lavish on naked bodies.”

Since then, the term appears in the Nexis archive about two dozen times. In 2011, Seitz used the term in Salon to describe the TV adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s wealth porn best-seller, Too Big to Fail.

Yesterday, the term appeared in a headline at Salon. We were thrilled, then instantly saddened:

SALON HEADLINE (9/11/13):
Why we read New York Times wealth porn
Their stories of the 1 percent are gruesome real-world fairy tales—and I can't look away

Doggone it! The piece was written by Roxane Gay, who doesn’t use the term “wealth porn” herself. In her piece, Gay describes her subject as “the fawning wealth journalism of the New York Times.”

In our view, that subject is very much worthy of exploration. But doggone it! Why did Gay have to say that she enjoys the New York Times’ wealth journalism so much?

GAY (9/11/13): “Blue Jasmine” is very much one of those movies trying to make a subtle statement that ends up doing the opposite. While the film is supposed to be some kind of high-minded critique of excessive consumption and who pays the real price for the wealthy to remain wealthy, the movie falls desperately but unapologetically short of that ambition. Instead, there is an aspirational quality to the filming, with loving depictions of wealthy New York—homes in the Hamptons, the impeccably designed apartment in the city, Jasmine’s exquisite wardrobe, ladies lunching. Oh how wonderful it would be, the film suggests, if we could all have nice things.

This reminds me of one of my truly guilty pleasures: reading articles about rich people in the New York Times. I cannot get enough of the breathless, thinly veiled envy in so many of these articles written by journalists who are, like most of us, on the outside looking in at the wealthy as they breathe such rarefied air. What I particularly enjoy about these articles is the shamelessness. These people have money they have earned (or stolen, or inherited), and by god, they will enjoy that filthy lucre.

The fact that the Times does a lot of “wealth journalism” is an important observation. We only wish Gay hadn’t said that she enjoys the product so much.

We also think Gay misunderstands the relationship between those struggling New York Times journalists and the “wealth journalism” they’re forced to produce. Sorry—in most cases, the writers are not, “like most of us, on the outside looking in at the wealthy as they breathe such rarefied air.” It’s true that most of those journalists won’t ever become super-rich. But if they work for the Times, they have already earned a shot at the lower rungs of the culture’s guild of the pointless and over-compensated.

Just a guess: In their hearts, those journalists are often playing on the same team as their wealthy subjects. Nor do they plan to risk their gigs at the Times by getting their ascots out of line.

We recommend Gay’s piece, which catalogs the types of pieces she regards as “fawning wealth journalism.” We wish she had discussed the way the cultural values involved in such work inform the Times’ entire package of news reporting and opinion journalism.

Increasingly, the New York Times is designed to tiptoe around the concerns and the interests of the mega-rich. You see that in the obvious ways they avoid reporting the types of looting which increasingly define the society. In a lighter vein, you see it in the type of porn Delia Ephron smeared on our faces last Sunday.

Ephron went on and on and on and on, letting us know about all the fancy pastries the wealthy enjoy. We rubes are expected to admire her conspicuous self-admiration.

This Hamptons culture suffuses the Times. You see it in the ridiculous piffle Gail Collins plies you with two times a week—work which seems designed to keep you chuckling and clueless.

In our view, people like Gay shouldn’t wink at this work. It comes from a pernicious culture and it’s spreading fast, even as the upper-end hacks at Salon chase the brass ring of success.

Amanda Hess noticed the wealth porn too: At Slate, Amanda Hess noticed the wealth porn too, although she treated it more as a manifestation of sexism.

Under the circumstances, three cheers for Amanda Hess.

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What the heck happened to Candidate Quinn?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

Fascinating portraits today of Times journalistic culture: Christine Quinn was ahead in the mayoral race. She ended up losing badly.

This morning, the New York Times offers two assessments of this electoral reversal. In our view, these two pieces, taken together, provide a fascinating portrait of Times journalistic culture.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at this long analysis piece by reporters Kantor and Taylor. They focus on the possible role played by “gender and sexuality”—and on nothing else.

Not for them the tedium of the campaign’s various issues—of the possible role played by the candidates’ stands on stop and frisk, let’s say, or early childhood education.

At the Times, piddle like that tends to flow down the drain. In a very long piece, Kantor and Taylor discuss gender and sexuality and nothing else.

Gender and sexuality are important, of course. Obviously, there's nothing wrong with discussing the role they may have played in the campaign.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at that long analysis piece. For today, we’ll suggest Gail Collins’ new column.

Today, the reporters talk about gender and sexuality. Collins talks about race.

Race is important, of course, just as gender is. But Collins talks about nothing else, and her take about race is rather bougie—we’ll even say upper-class.

As usual, Collins spends the first half of her column apologizing for making you read about something other than kittens and letting you read about sex. After she finishes killing time in these ways, she starts explaining how Bill de Blasio came from way behind to register a big win.

According to Collins, “One very big factor was a TV ad.” In this passage, she starts to describe the ad:

COLLINS (9/12/13): Politicians around the country are going to be looking at de Blasio’s campaign to figure out how he made his meteoric rise. One very big factor was a TV ad he aired that featured his son, Dante, talking about his father’s stand on the issues. Michael Barbaro of The Times, in a postelection analysis, called it “the commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race.”

De Blasio’s son did a TV ad in which he talked about his father’s stand on the issues! But according to Collins, that isn’t why this ad (supposedly) transformed this campaign.

According to Collins, the ad changed the campaign because of race. Because of a “feel-good moment:”

COLLINS: The thing viewers remember most about the de Blasio ad is not the candidate’s housing policy but the fact that his family is racially mixed: he’s white, his wife is black and Dante has the most impressive Afro since Angela Davis. That was what Mayor Michael Bloomberg was referring to when he called the de Blasio campaign “racist” in a New York magazine interview. “It’s comparable to me pointing out I’m Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote,” he added.

The mayor’s remarks were an excellent example of why the other big factor in de Blasio’s ascension was Bloomberg fatigue.

They also missed the point. The real key to the Dante ad was not that it reminded black voters that the candidate had an African-American wife. It was the way it appealed to our multiethnic yearning for racial harmony. The de Blasio family seems so happy. The pictures of them laughing together remind you both of how far we’ve come and where we’d like to go. It’s the same effect the nation got when Barack Obama talked about his background and you remembered that when Obama was born, less than 10 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage.

De Blasio is still going to have to prove himself as a candidate, but, at the minimum, we’ll remember that he was a guy who made one ad that created one urban feel-good moment, just before Election Day.

Why did that ad turn the race around, if it did? In the analysis piece to which Collins referred, Barbaro said that de Blasio and his wife “instantly recognized the power of its message: that the aggressive policing of the Bloomberg era was not an abstraction to Mr. de Blasio, it was an urgent personal worry within his biracial household.”

To Barbaro, the ad conveyed de Blasio’s personal understanding of the problems of stop and frisk. To Barbaro, it also conveyed de Blasio’s understanding that contemporary New York is “a tale of two cities.”

Collins didn’t mention stop and frisk. To Collins, the ad didn’t work because it spoke to policy matters confronting average New Yorkers. Instead, she said the ad gave voters an “urban feel-good moment.”

The de Blasio family seems so happy! Collins said the ad “appealed to our multiethnic yearning for racial harmony.”

Did that TV ad change the race? We can’t answer that. Nor do we know how voters perceived the ad, although we’ll assume that some voters reacted one way, while others reacted another.

But we were struck by the way Collins busted past any discussion of day-to-day issues affecting average New Yorkers. Let’s just say that she may not be getting stopped and frisked on her way in and out of those Town Cars.

Going back to the famous Dowd quote about welfare reform, Timesmen and Timeswomen don’t give a shazam about policy issues. They give a shazam about upper-class life—about the ways they themselves feel.

Collins said the mayoral campaign turned on a feel-good moment. We can’t tell you she’s wrong in that assessment. If she's only describing the way she reacted, we won’t tell you that she was wrong to react that way.

That said, she skipped right past the issues affecting average people to talk about a feel-good moment. Needless to say, she offers no evidence supporting the claim that others reacted this way.

Tomorrow, we'll see what Kantor and Taylor reported about Quinn’s defeat. Through no obvious fault of their own, we thought their piece emerged from deep within upper-class Gotham culture.

What the ad actually said: Here's how the ad in question started, Dante de Blasio speaking. To watch the ad, click this:

DE BLASIO AD: I want to tell you a little bit about Bill de Blasio. He’s the only Democrat with the guts to really break from the Bloomberg years. The only one who will raise taxes on the rich to fund early childhood and after-school programs. He's got the boldest plan to build affordable housing and he's the only one who will lend a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color...

To Collins, it wasn't about any of that. The ad worked because the family seemed so happy at the end of the ad!

We can’t tell you she’s wrong in that assessment. We can tell you that’s very typical of upper-class Times culture.

Who gives a fig about stop-and-frisk? How did the ad make me feel?

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ADULT ABUSE: Does Professor Gordon know squat from squadoosh?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

Part 3—Standard memorized gloomy claims about our broken-down schools: Does Robert J. Gordon know squat from squadoosh about the public schools?

It’s our impression that he may not. Here’s why that’s a problem:

Professor Gordon, an economics professor, sounded off in Sunday’s New York Times about the state of the public schools. He wrote this long gloomy piece for the Sunday Review.

As editors saw the piece, it told a familiar story. Here’s the way they presented that tale to Times readers:

The visual which accompanied Gordon’s piece showed a broken-down yellow school bus. Smoke poured out from under the hood. The headline told a gloomy old tale:

“The Great Stagnation of American Education.”

In his lengthy, gloom-shrouded piece, Gordon discussed “American education” through the completion of college—but students don’t go to college in yellow school buses. As such, that visual conveyed a Tired Old Tale about K-12 schools, a tale the Times loves to recite.

Last month, Bill Keller recited this Tired Old Tale. In his weekly op-ed column, he announced that we have experienced “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education.”

The visual of that broken-down school bus told the same gloomy story. But then, the professor seemed to tell a similar tale as he started his piece:

GORDON (9/8/13): For most of American history, parents could expect that their children would, on average, be much better educated than they were. But that is no longer true. This development has serious consequences for the economy.

The epochal achievements of American economic growth have gone hand in hand with rising educational attainment, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have shown. From 1891 to 2007, real economic output per person grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year—enough to double every 35 years. The average American was twice as well off in 2007 as in 1972, four times as well off as in 1937, and eight times as well off as in 1902. It’s no coincidence that for eight decades, from 1890 to 1970, educational attainment grew swiftly. But since 1990, that improvement has slowed to a crawl.

A careful reader might note this fact: if our improvement has slowed to a crawl, that means we’re still improving. “Great stagnation” would be a gloomy way to describe this state of affairs.

That careful reader might also note this: the professor hasn’t yet said what he means by “educational attainment.” As it turns out, he seems to mean the number of grades completed in school. He seems to refer to the percentage of people who are attaining high school or college diplomas.

The percentage obtaining a high school diploma may be slightly down from 1970, the professor says—although this is a very difficult topic, and it isn’t clear that the professor knows that to be the case. By the same token, the professor says the number attaining a college diploma is still going slightly up.

If those are the professor’s facts, why would the Times illustrate his report with a broken-down school bus? Our answer:

Because this is a treasured standardized tale, a tale the elites have all memorized. But also this:

Professor Gordon enables that tale in his gloomy, selective pronouncements. This brings us back to our basic question:

Does Robert J. Gordon know squat from squadoosh about the public schools? Or is he simply repeating memorized claims, the Familiar Gloomy Memorized Claims all pundits know how to recite?

For ourselves, we lean toward the latter idea, in which this professor may not know whereof he speaks. Let’s run through the familiar claims in which this non-specialist seems to put his thumb on the scale, tilting things heavily toward Major Gloom, as Keller did last month:

Forget about what happens in college. Let’s consider what Gordon says about K-12 schools, the ones with those yellow school buses. For starters, has “educational attainment” “slowed to a crawl” in those schools since 1990?

Almost surely, many Times readers took Gordon to be making that claim, right in his opening paragraphs. But uh-oh! The professor never mentioned the data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the widely-lauded “gold standard” of domestic educational testing.

Those data show large gains in reading and math since 1990. The score gains by black and Hispanic students have been especially large.

The New York Times constantly lauds the NAEP as our most reliable program. Has the paper ever reported those basic facts about NAEP data? We will guess that it never has done so! And sure enough: on Sunday, Professor Gordon blew right past those encouraging data as he brought in the gloom.

Before long, the professor sharpened his claim about K-12 schools. In this passage, his work was fuzzy, and fashionably selective, in new and different ways:

GORDON: Then there is the poor quality of our schools. The Program for International Student Assessment tests have consistently rated American high schoolers as middling at best in reading, math and science skills, compared with their peers in other advanced economies.

Before we note the professor’s selective data, let’s note his fuzzy logic. If American students perform roughly as well as their peers in other advanced economies, should that generate gloomy comments about “the poor quality of our schools?”

Logically, no, it should not! There is no obvious reason why American students should read better than students in Denmark, or Norway or France. Indeed, given various aspects of our brutal national history and our current social policies, it can perhaps be seen as amazing if our students, in the aggregate, perform equally well, even better.

But gloom about the public schools is A Standard Memorized Stance. In this instance, this standard stance is once again fueled by selective inclusion of data.

NAEP data say that our students are improving, but NAEP data don’t appear in this piece. Similarly, the most recent data from the TIMSS and the PIRLS, the other major international tests, show American students doing rather well in comparison to their peers in other developed nations.

Perhaps for that reason, results from the (more recent) 2011 TIMSS and PIRLS are routinely deep-sixed in favor of results from the (less recent) 2009 PISA. As with the NAEP, so too with the TIMSS and the PIRLS: Professor Gordon ignores their data, enabling the gloomy picture conveyed by that broken-down yellow school bus.

(For what it’s worth, Richard Rothstein and Martin Carnoy have argued that the 2009 PISA tested too many low-income American students, producing an unrepresentative national sample. Are they right? We don’t know. But the possibility of such errors helps explain why it makes sense to consider all major international tests, not simply the test which produces the gloomiest outcomes.)

Professor Gordon blew past the NAEP, the TIMSS and the PIRLS. In fairness, this is standard procedure in modern “journalism,” where the script demands that we generate gloomy claims about the “poor quality” of our broken-down public schools.

That said, Professor Gordon isn’t a specialist in education. Did he even know that he was omitting these data? We wouldn’t feel real sure about that; those encouraging data from the NAEP are almost never cited in elite polite company! And uh-oh:

As Gordon continued, he occasionally got the impression that he might not know squat from squadoodle concerning the public schools:

GORDON: Federal programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have gone too far in using test scores to evaluate teachers. Many children are culturally disadvantaged, even if one or both parents have jobs, have no books at home, do not read to them, and park them in front of a TV set or a video game in lieu of active in-home learning. Compared with other nations where students learn several languages and have math homework in elementary school, the American system expects too little. Parental expectations also matter: homework should be emphasized more, and sports less.

First, a relatively minor point: the second of those highlighted sentences doesn’t make sense. We assume this is some sort of typo. Presumably, that sentence should have said something like this:

“Many children are culturally disadvantaged. Even if one or both parents have jobs, these parents have no books at home, do not read to their children, and park them in front of a TV set or a video game in lieu of active in-home learning.”

That gloomy assessment would be accurate, here and in other countries. That said, it’s typical of modern script promulgation that some Times editor didn’t notice the fact that this passage, as published, didn’t make basic sense.

It sounded gloomy, upsetting, depressing! At the Times, that’s close enough for public education work!

The highlighted statement didn’t make sense. More strikingly, we asked ourselves this: was Gordon saying that public schools “have gone too far in using test scores to evaluate teachers” because many children are culturally disadvantaged?

He doesn’t explicitly say that here; here, as elsewhere, his writing is fuzzy, unclear. But in possibly seeming to make that suggestion, Gordon seemed a bit clueless.

Whatever one thinks of the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, so-called “value-added” assessments eliminated the problem he seems to suggest long ago. When test scores are used to evaluate teachers, Teacher A will typically be compared to other teachers with demographically similar students—a practice which makes obvious sense.

That said, Professor Gordon is often fuzzy when he writes about schools. As he continues to spread the gloom, do you understand what this means?

GORDON (continuing directly): Poor academic achievement has long been a problem for African-Americans and Hispanics, but now the achievement divide has extended further. Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, has argued that “family breakdown is now biracial.” Among lower-income whites, the proportion of children living with both parents has plummeted over the past half-century, as Charles Murray has noted.

Do you understand what that paragraph means? We’ll guess it means that biracial kids don’t score as well as white kids do, and that lower-income white kids score less well that their higher-income peers.

Assuming that these claims are true, what do they tell us about the progress, or lack of same, being displayed in our public schools? Those gloomy claims don’t tell us squat—though they do spread the feeling of gloom.

Finally, the professor offers the highly familiar statements we highlight below. As he continues, so do his fuzzy expression and logic. Whatever that highlighted passage is supposed to mean, does Gordon believe it is true?

GORDON (continuing directly): Are there solutions? The appeal of American education as a destination for the world’s best and brightest suggests the most obvious policy solution. Shortly before his death, Steve Jobs told President Obama that a green card conferring permanent residency status should be automatically granted to any foreign student with a degree in engineering, a field in which skills are in short supply..

Richard J. Murnane, an educational economist at Harvard, has found evidence that high school and college completion rates have begun to rise again, although part of this may be a result of weak labor markets that induce students to stay in school rather than face unemployment. Other research has shown that high-discipline, “no-excuses” charter schools, like those run by the Knowledge Is Power Program and the Harlem Children’s Zone, have erased racial achievement gaps. This model suggests that a complete departure from the traditional public school model, rather than pouring in more money per se, is needed.

It’s hard to know how conferring permanent residency status on foreign students with engineering degrees addresses the preceding claim about biracial and low-income white kids. But the professor’s logic tends to wander about in this piece, until he returns to Familiar Old Scripts—in this case, to the Familiar Uplifting Claim about KIPP and the Harlem Children’s Zone.

We’re strongly inclined to support the efforts of KIPP and the HCZ. But have they really “erased racial achievement gaps?” Depending on what the word “erased” means, it’s our impression that this claim simply isn’t true. That said, the claim was quite familiar in 2009. And it’s easily memorized!

On Sunday morning, the New York Times let Professor Gordon spout from a lofty perch. But does he know what he’s talking about when he talks about public schools?

It’s our impression that he may not. One thing is quite clear:

The professor’s sprawling, careless piece repeats a long list of Standard Claims about “the poor quality of our schools.” And sure enough:

At the hapless New York Times, some editor read that familiar phrase in this piece. When he did, a picture of a broken-down school bus flashed before his eyes.

Smoke was pouring from under the hood. A STOP sign on the bus’ door told us our schools are failing.

This editor didn't think about those NAEP scores, which have been shooting up. As a member of the pseudo-journalistic elite, there's every chance that he has never even heard about those data from our “gold standard” testing program!

On the gold standard of domestic educational testing, reading and math scores have shown large gains since 1990, a year Gordon mentioned. The score gains have been very large among black and Hispanic kids.

You’d almost think that would be major news. But you’re never told about those gains in this low-IQ, upper-class newspaper.

Tomorrow, a basic question:

When will the Times get off its aspic and do the work of a real newspaper? When will the paper abandon its current procedures, a form of adult abuse?

Tomorrow: Back to school, Dangerfield said

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We teach the professors how to talk!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

What you should say to your seatmate: Are women discriminated against in the world of academic philosophy?

If so, they shouldn’t be. Yesterday, we started reading the links Katy Waldman provided on the subject.

For Waldman’s piece at Slate, click here. For ourselves, we were stopped dead in our tracks by the way her first link began.

The piece was written by Sally Haslanger, a philosophy professor at MIT and, we’ll assume, a darn good one. Below, you see the way her piece began.

What follows has nothing to do with women’s issues. Times are hard all over:

HASLANGER (9/2/13): Many of us have had the experience of sitting on an airplane and being asked by the person in the next seat, “What do you do?”

It is a moment of uncertainty: what to say? There are risks if you reply, “I’m a philosopher,” for you may then have the neighbor expounding “their philosophy” at length, or recounting how awful their experience was when taking Philosophy 101. (“We read some crazy article about being kidnapped and hooked up to a famous violinist to keep him alive!”) One time, a male friend of mine got the enthusiastic response, “Oh, you’re a philosopher? Tell me some of your sayings!” However, when I’ve tried the “I’m a philosopher” reply, it has prompted laughter. Once when I queried why the laughter, the response was, “I think of philosophers as old men with beards, and you’re definitely not that! You’re too young and attractive to be a philosopher.” I’m sure he intended this as a compliment. But I stopped giving the answer “I’m a philosopher.”

Haslanger doesn’t know what to say when people ask her what she does. It seems she wants to answer their question by saying, “I’m a philosopher.”

Is Haslanger “a philosopher?” You can answer that question as you like. On balance, we’d be inclined to say the answer is almost certainly no.

(Do physics professors answer that question by saying, “I’m a physicist?” We don’t know!)

Out of the goodness of our hearts, we’re going to teach the professors how to talk! The next time someone asks Haslanger what she does, she could say something like this:

I’m a college professor.
I’m a college instructor.

She could even say, “I’m a teacher” or “I teach philosophy in college.” What would be awful in that?

Down through the years, we’ve often wondered where the philosophy professors are as our culture’s access to logical thought is blasted to smithereens. It turns out they’ve been writhing in pain on jets, not knowing how people talk.

Haslanger keeps talking: As she continues, Haslanger says this:

HASLANGER (continuing directly): Although most philosophers these days are not old men with beards, most professional philosophers are men; in fact, white men. It is a surprise to almost everyone that the percentage of women earning philosophy doctorates is less than in most of the physical sciences (see chart). As recently as 2010, philosophy had a lower percentage of women doctorates than math, chemistry and economics. Note, however, that of these fields, philosophy has made the most progress on this count in the past five years.

Most “professional philosophers” are men? Did you know that such people existed? Where are they? What do they do?

In closing, it's our turn to writhe in pain. According to the identity line at the Times blog where this piece appeared, Haslanger “was awarded the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the year in 2010.”

As it turns out, it looks like Haslanger is “a philosopher” after all! Where has she been down through the years as our access to logical thought has been stripped away, in large part by the “journalists” right there at the New York Times? Putting it another way:

When will the national's philosophers give their seatmates a little help?

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Politico is (said to be) upset with Joan Walsh!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

Joan Walsh runs the rubes: Yesterday morning, Salon’s Joan Walsh was back on her very high horse.

Few people have ever been quite so heroic. We were struck by what she said about the good folks at Politico.

This is the way Walsh began. We’ll include the pair of headlines, which she presumably didn’t write:

WALSH (9/10/13): You heard me: Rush Limbaugh is “a racist troll”
Mediaite and Politico think my saying that is news. Have they missed his 40 years of shameful racial stereotyping?

Politico and Mediaite are aghast that I called Rush Limbaugh a “racist troll” on “Politics Nation” with Al Sharpton on MSNBC Monday night. The immediate cause of my diagnosis was Limbaugh terming President Obama’s pitch for military intervention in Syria “Operation Shuck and Jive.” Or as Limbaugh said: “Bush had ‘Shock and Awe.’ We’re looking at ‘Shuck and Jive’ here. That’s what I’m going to name this. The Obama operation in Syria—‘Operation: Shuck and Jive’—because that’s what this is.”

Is Rush Limbaugh a racist troll? For various reasons, we wouldn’t be inclined to say that ourselves. We think it’s lazy politics—politics of the kind the plutocrats adore.

That said, we aren’t concerned with Joan’s heroic denunciation of Limbaugh. We were struck by her claim that Politico and Mediate were “aghast” at her saintly conduct.

We’re sorry, but that isn’t true. Surely, Joan of Salon must have known it.

Was Politico aghast? Walsh linked us to this short blog post. For the record, the piece was written by media reporter Dylan Byers, not by “Politico.”

We’re sorry, by Byers gave no sign of being aghast at Walsh’s heroics. The saintly one was making that up, sanctifying herself in the process and treating her readers like rubes.

Rather plainly, Salon is now inventing a culture in which liberal politics consists almost solely in dropping R-, B-, S-, M- and H-bombs. In these ways, We The Good People fluff ourselves as we take The Bad People down.

Who knows? This culture may work out well in the end. But can you build a truly progressive politics by making bogus statements?

In this case, Joan chose to stoke the sense of tribal warfare, pretending that “Politico” was very upset with her heroic conduct. This is the way we liberals get dumb.

This is the way saints get over.

In search of the aghast: For the record, Josh Feldman wasn’t hugely “aghast” at Walsh either, although his tone at Mediaite differed from Byers’ a bit. In all honesty, no one was aghast at Joan, who was simply running the rubes of a Tuesday morning.

Joan Walsh is an overpaid cable hack. Can you build a progressive politics this way, by having the overlord TV stars toy with the pitiful rubes?

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ADULT ABUSE: Two different worlds!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

Interlude—Times profiles Ravitch: Readers of Sunday’s New York Times were exposed to a Familiar Old Story—an easily memorized, often-told tale about “the poor quality of our schools.”

The messaging was conveyed by the headline on the piece—and by a gloomy visual.

In the visual, a bright yellow school bus has broken down. Smoke is pouring from under the hood. Gloomily, the headline says this:

“The Great Stagnation of American Education.”

The writer, Professor Robert J. Gordon, rattles a list of familiar complaints about our public schools, the kinds of complaints a typical pundit could recite in his or her sleep.

Some of Gordon’s complaints and claims make sense. Some of them pretty much don’t. But is the general situation as bad as Gordon seems to suggest? His gloomy piece starts like this:

GORDON (9/8/13): For most of American history, parents could expect that their children would, on average, be much better educated than they were. But that is no longer true. This development has serious consequences for the economy.

The epochal achievements of American economic growth have gone hand in hand with rising educational attainment, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have shown. From 1891 to 2007, real economic output per person grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year—enough to double every 35 years. The average American was twice as well off in 2007 as in 1972, four times as well off as in 1937, and eight times as well off as in 1902. It’s no coincidence that for eight decades, from 1890 to 1970, educational attainment grew swiftly. But since 1990, that improvement has slowed to a crawl.

There’s a lot of air in that opening paragraph, partly thanks to the helpful word “much.” At this point, it isn’t clear what Gordon means by “educational attainment.”

That said, Gordon’s claims sound very gloomy—especially perched beneath that bus. That said, is it true?

Has “improvement” slowed to a crawl since 1990? In part, it depends on what the professor means—and sometimes, that isn’t real clear.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at Professor Gordon’s various claims, which are rather selective and often unclear. For today, we thought we’d give you a look at a different world.

We start with today’s New York Times. On the first page of the National section, Motoko Rich profiles Diane Ravitch, who has a new book about public schools.

Kirkus has already penned its review. This is the way it starts:

KIRKUS: A noted education authority launches a stout defense of the public school system and a sharp attack on the so-called reformers out to wreck them.

We’ve been misinformed, writes Ravitch, about the state of our public schools. Test scores are higher than ever, the dropout rate is lower, and achievement gaps among races are narrowing. The only “crisis” is the one ginned up by government bureaucrats, major foundations, an odd coalition of elitists and commercial hustlers intent on privatizing education...When it comes to education, notoriously plagued by fads, it’s always difficult to determine truth. Ravitch, however, earns the benefit of the doubt by the supporting facts, figures, and graphs she brings to her argument...

Say what? If “test scores are higher than ever,” why did the New York Times show that school bus broken down?

Kirkus can be wrong, of course. David Kirp, a Berkeley professor, is smart and very experienced as an education specialist.

Last week, we cited his treatment of Ravitch’s book. Here’s part of what Kirp wrote:

KIRP (9/4/13): In her new book, Reign of Error, Ravitch documents how public education’s antagonists have manufactured a crisis in order to advance their agenda. They deploy doom-and-gloom language to characterize the threat...

Exhibit A in the sky-is-falling argument is the claim that test scores are plummeting. Ravitch shows that, quite the contrary, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, have never been higher. (The biggest gains in NAEP scores were recorded before the No Child Left Behind Act, with its fixation on teacher accountability and high-stakes testing, was implemented.) Nor do American students perform as badly as advertised on international exams—in 2011 tests of math and science, only a handful of countries did better.

Say what? Kirp makes the same observation as Kirkus, except with more detail. NAEP scores have never been higher!

Depending on what Professor Gordon is trying to say, it’s like we’re living in two different worlds! The gloom and the doom are very familiar—but Kirp says the gloom isn’t true.

Why the heck did the New York Times show us that broken-down school bus? That visual told a familiar old tale. But is that familiar tale true?

As usual, you won’t find out by reading Rich’s profile of Ravitch. In fairness, it isn’t the world’s longest profile. And it isn’t a formal review.

But Rich is an education reporter, and the profile is a featured news report in the National section. It just doesn’t make any real attempt to evaluate, or even state, the claims in Ravitch’s book.

Are test scores higher than ever? No such claim is mentioned. Instead, we get a type of soft profile, focused on Ravitch’s personality and life style. We get to learn about her pet Labrador-German shepherd mix, but not about what she has said.

Rich’s observations today aren’t wrong. But people, where’s the beef?

Tomorrow, we’ll return to the claims of Professor Gordon, who isn’t an education specialist. Does Gordon know what he’s talking about? Or did the Times let him blow a string of familiar old claims right straight out of his ascot?

Tomorrow: Professor Gordon’s various claims

Friday: What the Times should report

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Maureen Dowd’s Two Faces of Barry!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

The one face of Milbank and Dowd: In this morning’s Washington Post, Milbank plays the silly card with respect to Susan Rice.

But first, Maureen Dowd played the silly card with respect to President Barry. On Sunday, she started her column like this, pitiful headline included:

DOWD (9/8/13): Barry’s War Within

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize had been up late pleading for war.

The president looked exhausted as he met the press in St. Petersburg on Friday. The man elected because of his magical powers of persuasion had failed to persuade other world leaders at dinner the night before about a strike on Syria.

Return of belittling nickname? Check.

Silly pseudo-contradiction? Check. (Man of peace pleads for war!) Loaded account of the way he looked? Check.

Everyone knew what was coming next. Soon, the doctor was IN:

DOWD: It is uncomfortable to watch the president struggle to reconcile his two conflicting identities as he weighs what he calls the unappetizing choices on Syria, and as he is weighed down by the malignant choices on the Middle East made by his predecessor.

In his head, is Barry at war with the commander in chief?

One side of him is Barry, the smooth consensus builder and community organizer, the former constitutional professor and the drive-by senator who must stand by the argument he made when he ran for president excoriating W.’s and Dick Cheney’s highhandedness: checks and balances must be observed...

When it came time to act as commander in chief, he choked and reverted to Senator Barry...

In our view, it is beyond “uncomfortable” to watch the New York Times offer this pitiful dreck to the public. That said, Dowd has been playing these games for so long that the liberal world doesn’t seem willing or able to see it.

In Dowd’s childish Two Faces of Barack, the smooth “Barry” may be at war with the commander in chief! Soon, she offered her childish take on Nancy Pelosi:

“Now the president who saw no benefit in wooing Democrats on the Hill is desperate for their love. Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco peacenik, will have to win Barry the right to bomb.”

To Dowd, Pelosi is a “peacenik.” Dowd, a childish empty soul, is living in 1960.

This morning, Milbank follows. For him, as for Dowd, life-and-death issues get resolved to simple-minded pseudo-ironies. Headline included:

MILBANK (9/10/13): Susan Rice returns to CIA talking points

This is the price of insularity.

About a year ago, the White House put Susan Rice, then the ambassador to the United Nations, on TV to read CIA talking points that turned out to be false about the attack in Benghazi, Libya.

The backlash poisoned her relationship with Republicans in Congress and dashed her chances of becoming secretary of state. President Obama instead named her national security adviser, which didn’t require Senate confirmation.

Now there is another crisis. Obama needs congressional support for a military strike on Syria, because a “no” vote could cripple his presidency and damage American credibility. So what do the big brains in the White House do? They put Susan Rice in front of TV cameras to read CIA talking points.

Rice is back on the CIA points! It’s just like last year!

Milbank forgets to note a basic fact from last year’s batch of points: When Rice was “put on TV to read CIA talking points that turned out to be false about Benghazi,” she noted, again and again, that she was offering preliminary assessments—that the investigation was continuing, that the facts might change.

Beyond that, the points Rice read last year weren’t all that false if you review what she actually said. Milbank isn’t going to do that. The pundit clowns to forget.

In our main set of posts this week, we are reviewing the “adult abuse” readers get from the New York Times. For many people, it’s hard to grasp the depth of the inanity displayed by our press corps elites.

Is Nancy Pelosi a peacenik: In this morning’s New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer profiles Pelosi.

Is Nancy Pelosi a silly peacenik? In the mind of the broken child Dowd, she is! For a more adult portrait, click here.

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It’s pretty darn good being Wagner or Cupp!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Notes on two all-new programs: Two Sundays ago, Meredith Blake reviewed the all-new Newsroom in the Washington Post. The piece was a reprint from the Los Angeles Times.

We don’t get HBO on our sprawling campus. In part for that reason, we don’t know a great deal about Newsroom.

That said, we’re not sure that getting HBO would help. Last year, a few free episodes of Newsroom aired. We tried to watch but couldn’t do it, so awful was the program.

Last night, we found the all-new second season on our free cable, so we tried to watch again. Same result! Newsroom can’t be watched!

That said, it’s good being a “cable news” denizen! Blake included this throwaway note about Newsroom’s second season. She discussed the ways Aaron Sorkin keeps trying to get it right:

BLAKE (9/1/13): For the show's [second year], Sorkin enlisted 13 paid consultants, including former MSNBC and CNN president Rick Kaplan, political strategist Mark McKinnon, New Republic Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier, conservative pundit S.E. Cupp and MSNBC host Alex Wagner.

With their input, he made some storytelling tweaks.

It’s good being Alex Wagner and S. E. Cupp, with cable consultant payments rolling in!

Cupp is one of the conservative hosts of the all-new Crossfire, which debuted last night on CNN. This reminds us of the unpleasant post we did in April 2010.

By now, it’s perfectly clear that Cupp is perfectly bright. She’s also telegenic and youngish. In the past year, she served as the house conservative on MSNBC’s three-against-one afternoon discussion program, The Cycle. A few months ago, she departed for the all-new Crossfire, which was in preparation.

(Rather plainly, The Cycle was based on The Five, the Fox News Channel's four-against-one afternoon discussion program. The Cycle makes up for its lack of imbalance by booking liberal guests.)

Cupp is perfectly bright. But back in the fall of 2009, she was so dumb it hurt. Or so it seemed when she spoke with Brian Lamb, for the full hour, on C-Span’s Q&A.

For transcript or tape, just click here.

At the time, Cupp was working a ridiculous shtick which seemed to grab Lamb’s interest. Again and again and again and again, he asked her about her “I’m not a religious believer but I sure would like to be” heartfelt shtick.

Cupp struggled to answer Lamb’s questions about this stance, seeming rather dumb in the process. To us, Lamb seemed puzzled, bemused.

In the last few years, it became clear that Cupp just basically isn’t dumb. As a result, we generated a theory about that program with Lamb:

At the time, a lot of folk were creating slightly offbeat conservative personas to make themselves useful to Fox. Tammy Bruce had fashioned herself the “lesbian former head of Los Angeles NOW” type of offbeat conservative, to cite just one example.

We’ll take a guess! Back when Cupp did that hour with Lamb, she was working on such a persona. She just wasn’t especially good at playing the part. Lamb kept inquiring about her deeply felt existential stance concerning religious belief. She kept giving him answers that did in fact seem rather dumb.

As it turns out, Cupp isn’t dumb! This week, her all-new Crossfire debuts, even as she pockets the honoraria from helping Sorkin get it right on his all-Newsroom!

As for Wagner, she reads script on The One True Channel. Life is good if you’re Wagner or Cupp, hauling the cable cash.

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Lawrence interviews Anthony Weiner!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

The end of the human race: Last night, Lawrence made us think of Norman O. Brown again.

Brown, a well-regarded classicist, suddenly got very hot in the 1960s. He got very hot because of his books, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) and Love’s Body (1966).

We don’t recall what those books were about, or why Brown suddenly got so hot as a visionary of the revolution. If you’re interested, this remembrance of Brown from 2005 helps explain how it was.

That said, we have always remembered that one brief passage from Love’s Body, the one in which Brown described the way societies die:

BROWN (1966): I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.

We don’t really know what that means; we don’t know why that has stuck in our head for maybe 45 years now. But the highlighted passage always pops into our head when we watch performances like the one Lawrence staged last night.

Lawrence interviewed Anthony Weiner—rather, pretended to do so. Instead of interviewing Weiner, he staged one of his trademark stupid-ass rants.

Granted, Lawrence gets crazier than he was last night. Still.

Lawrence said he doesn’t care about what Weiner did on-line. Instead, he kept haranguing Weiner about—well, his harangue didn’t really make sense. That’s why we thought of Brown again, of his thoughts about the way societies come to an end.

O’Donnell is one of the genuine nut-balls. He is a monster of self-regard and a genuine nut. Despite that, he holds an honored place in the corporate liberal firmament.

He stages crazy sessions like last night’s and nobody in our failing tribe seems able to notice or care.

This man has been crazy—dumb crazy— for years. He’s part of the guild within the guild which did the most to put Bush in office. And yet, we liberals just sit there and take it. We simply don’t have what it takes to see what Lawrence is.

As Norman O. Brown once said, “I sometimes think I see that societies...end in exhaustion.”

To watch Lawrence rant at Weiner, click this. (It will make you think better of Weiner.) For the record, Lawrence was crazily dumb this way back when he was hunting down Candidate Gore and the two Clintons, both of whom he still incoherently abhors.

For all these years, our liberal tribe has been unable to see the problem with this. This makes us think of Norman Brown, who said that societies die.

By the way: That low-polling candidate whose name Lawrence bungled is actually Randy Credico (CREDD-i-co), a progressive political comedian. Way back when, we brought Credico to Baltimore, where he staged his deathless act. (He had already been on the Tonight Show.)

Lawrence O’Donnell is visibly nuts. Credico probably isn’t.

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ADULT ABUSE: Same old memorized standardized lines!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Part 2—Who is Professor Gordon: Adults don’t stand a chance with the New York Times.

Consider what happened in this week’s Sunday Review. Eventually, the bright young couples you see in those Times TV ads glanced at Professor Robert J. Gordon’s piece about the public schools.

They may not have actually read what he wrote. But they saw the gloomy headline, and they saw the gloomy visual. You can see the headline and visual just by clicking this.

The headline tells a gloomy tale, a story that’s very familiar. “The Great Stagnation of American Education,” it says.

The visual drives home the tale. It shows a big yellow school bus, the highly familiar type which takes children to school every day.

But uh-oh! A STOP sign bars children from entering the bus, which has broken down. The hood on the engine has been propped open. Black smoke pours up from under the hood.

Adults who read the New York Times are constantly handed this story. In this case, the gloom is spread by Professor Gordon, who rattles a set of easily memorized talking points in his actual piece.

Many of these points are extremely familiar. Some will perhaps be less familiar, but they all spread the gloom.

What does Professor Gordon say about the great stagnation of our K-12 education? He starts with a gloomy claim which may seem to echo a highly familiar point, the one about the first generation to do less well than their parents:

GORDON (9/8/13): For most of American history, parents could expect that their children would, on average, be much better educated than they were. But that is no longer true. This development has serious consequences for the economy.

You'll note that Gordon doesn't say that these kids will do less well than their parents; it just maybe sounds like he does. As he continues, Professor Gordon advances a gloomy claim about “educational attainment,” a rather murky term:

GORDON (continuing directly): The epochal achievements of American economic growth have gone hand in hand with rising educational attainment, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have shown. From 1891 to 2007, real economic output per person grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year—enough to double every 35 years. The average American was twice as well off in 2007 as in 1972, four times as well off as in 1937, and eight times as well off as in 1902. It’s no coincidence that for eight decades, from 1890 to 1970, educational attainment grew swiftly. But since 1990, that improvement has slowed to a crawl.

According to Professor Gordon, the growth in “educational attainment” has slowed to a crawl since 1990. The gloomy language may keep us from seeing what this means: whatever “educational attainment” is, it has still been growing.

That said, what does the professor mean by “educational attainment?” You’ll have to figure that out for yourselves; Professor Gordon never quite says what he means by that term. At this point, the professor spends some time discussing the slowing growth of the national economy. Before long, he returns to the public schools, with a claim which may not be familiar:

GORDON: Every high school dropout becomes a worker who likely won’t earn much more than minimum wage, at best, for the rest of his or her life. And the problems in our educational system pervade all levels.

The surge in high school graduation rates—from less than 10 percent of youth in 1900 to 80 percent by 1970—was a central driver of 20th-century economic growth. But the percentage of 18-year-olds receiving bona fide high school diplomas fell to 74 percent in 2000, according to the University of Chicago economist James J. Heckman.

Did Professor Gordon just say that the drop-out rate has been rising? We’re not sure; we can’t help noting that qualifying phrase, bona fide high school diploma. (More on this point as our series continues. Much later, Gordon cites an educational economist who “has found evidence that high school...completion rates have begun to rise again,” though Gordon cites a gloomy reason for that rise.)

At any rate, the drop-out rate doesn’t typically figure in Standardized Tales about Our Broken-Down Schools. As he continues, Gordon returns to a type of claim which is extremely familiar:

GORDON (continuing directly): Then there is the poor quality of our schools. The Program for International Student Assessment [PISA] tests have consistently rated American high schoolers as middling at best in reading, math and science skills, compared with their peers in other advanced economies.

Question: If our schools rate about as well as those in other developed nations, does that mean that they exhibit “poor quality?” In the land of Standardized Talking, it does! Needless to say, we must omit results from the TIMSS and the PIRLS, international tests on which American students have scored higher in recent years than on the PISA.

After another long break, Professor Gordon again returns to the schools. In this passage, he shows that he can repeat sets of Highly Familiar Points which cut various ways:

GORDON: Federal programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have gone too far in using test scores to evaluate teachers. Many children are culturally disadvantaged, even if one or both parents have jobs, have no books at home, do not read to them, and park them in front of a TV set or a video game in lieu of active in-home learning. Compared with other nations where students learn several languages and have math homework in elementary school, the American system expects too little. Parental expectations also matter: homework should be emphasized more, and sports less.

Poor academic achievement has long been a problem for African-Americans and Hispanics, but now the achievement divide has extended further. Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, has argued that “family breakdown is now biracial.” Among lower-income whites, the proportion of children living with both parents has plummeted over the past half-century, as Charles Murray has noted.

Let us count the ways:

Our schools have gone too far in using test scores to evaluate teachers! Many students are culturally disadvantaged! And not only that:

Our schools expect too little! Our parents are slackers; we over-emphasize sports! And not only that:

“The achievement divide has extended” beyond African-Americans and Hispanics, Professor Gordon says. As with much that he says in this passage, it isn’t quite clear what he means by this claim. But he seems to say that some biracial kids have experienced family breakdown too! Also, lower-income white kids!

Eventually, the professor ends his string of single-sentence claims about The Problems Infesting Our Greatly Stagnant Public Schools. These claims are familiar too:

GORDON: Other research has shown that high-discipline, “no-excuses” charter schools, like those run by the Knowledge Is Power Program and the Harlem Children’s Zone, have erased racial achievement gaps. This model suggests that a complete departure from the traditional public school model, rather than pouring in more money per se, is needed.

Early childhood education is needed to counteract the negative consequences of growing up in disadvantaged households, especially for children who grow up with only one parent. Only one in four American 4-year-olds participate in preschool education programs, but that’s already too late. In a remarkable program, Reach Out and Read, 12,000 doctors, nurses and other providers have volunteered to include instruction on the importance of in-home reading to low-income mothers during pediatric checkups.

Some charter schools are kicking aspic! We need a complete departure from what we’re doing! Also, we need fuller early childhood education, and we need it earlier. Doctor and nurses should tell low-income parents how to nurture literacy in their new-born children!

The professor has touched quite a few bases here. Some of his points make perfect sense. Most of his points are, or sound, extremely familiar.

Some of his points are so poorly expressed that they’re quite hard to interpret. But we tell this Standardized Story about Our Greatly Stagnant Schools, precision is rarely required, certainly not in the Times. We simply need to bring in the gloom. We need to justify the visual, in which a familiar yellow bus has tragically broken down.

As our series proceeds, we’ll examine the professor’s various points, including the points which are so fuzzy that it’s hard to tell what he’s saying. But for today, let’s ask a familiar question:

Who is Professor Gordon?

We were surprised, but not surprised, by what our research told us. In one of the three biographies of the professor on his own web site, we were soon reading this:

PROFESSOR GORDON’S WEB SITE: Professor Gordon is one of the worldʹs leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and productivity growth. His recent work on the rise and fall of the New Economy, the U. S. productivity growth revival, the recent stalling of European productivity growth, and the widening of U. S. income inequality, have been widely cited. He is the author of The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices, which has become known as the definitive work showing that government price indexes substantially overstate the rate of inflation. His book of collected essays, Productivity Growth, Inflation, and Unemployment, was published in 2004. He is editor of Milton Friedman’s Monetary Framework: A Debate with His Critics, The American Business Cycle, and The Economics of New Goods. In addition he is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and more than 60 published comments on the research of others. In addition to his main field of macroeconomics, he is also a frequently quoted expert and author on the airline industry, and is the founder and president of an internet chat group on airline management.

According to Professor Gordon, Professor Gordon is one of the worldʹs leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and productivity growth. He has written the definitive work showing that government price indexes substantially overstate the rate of inflation.

He’s also an expert on the airline industry. He founded an internet chat group.

None of that means that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he talks about public schools. But some of the points we have quoted sound extremely memorized.

Beneath that broken-down school bus, Professor Gordon offers a gloomy account of the public schools. That said, it’s a very familiar account. If you read the press corps at all, you could have rattled off most of those points exactly as Gordon did.

Many readers of Sunday’s Times took in that gloomy visual and that gloomy headline. In some cases, they read the professor’s gloomy account of Our Greatly Stagnant Schools.

Were these people getting the dope about the real state of the public schools? Or were they being exposed by the Times, once again, to a form of adult abuse?

Tomorrow: Professor Gordon’s points

This should be noted today: Was this, from a passage we've posted above, some sort of editing error?

“Many children are culturally disadvantaged, even if one or both parents have jobs, have no books at home, do not read to them, and park them in front of a TV set or a video game in lieu of active in-home learning.”

You're right—that sentence doesn't make sense. It doesn't parse.

That said, it parses beautifully in one way. The whole darn sentence sounds gloomy!

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