July 31, 2009 | 3:46 pm

Teachers Unions and Change—Again

Posted by  David A. Lehrer

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It must be in the air.

Our blog of earlier this week about teachers unions and the forces—from Washington to Sacramento—that are pushing for serious reform is being echoed from some serious sources.

We wrote,

The weeks ahead will give us a clue as to where the priorities of local teachers’ unions lie—-are they all about themselves and continue to view as a potential threat every piece of information and datum that administrators might have about how they perform; or are they willing to work cooperatively to help move our schools and students forward?

This morning the Los Angeles Times opined about the role of teacher accountability and the need for teachers unions to participate in the changes that are around the corner:

Now that politicians are speaking up for students, their next task must be to engage California teachers in meaningful discussions about how to shape accountability in ways that make sense in the classroom. Student scores are obviously part of a teacher’s job, but they should not be the only issue, or even the single most important one. Nor should low-performing teachers be summarily fired, but tenure robs administrators of the authority to compel improvement. If union leaders want a role in these discussions, they’ll need to abandon their hidebound positions and take a place at the reform table.

Today the New York Times wrote very much the same thing:

Similarly, the process requires states to develop systems that evaluate teacher performance, taking student achievement into account. States must also be required to make sure that poor and minority students finally get a fair share of high-quality teachers. But that requirement will be meaningful only if the states are forced to develop serious teacher-quality measures.

Something is happening, and it’s happening in the right direction.

July 30, 2009 | 2:41 pm

A Time for Introspection

Posted by  David A. Lehrer

The story that blared across the nation’s newspapers and news networks about the arrest of Orthodox Jews on money laundering charges has struck a note of understandable concern in much of the Jewish world.

Some of the concern has been focused on how the media reporting of the arrests of bearded rabbis is perceived in the outside world. Another, more profound, aspect of the response is the concern with the internal dynamic in some quarters of the Orthodox (and its Haredi subset) world that tolerates the conduct that has been alleged in the criminal complaints.

A particularly thoughtful article appeared in The New York Jewish Week by Mark Charendorff:

Is it possible that there is something in the Orthodox community in general and the haredi community in particular that creates fertile ground for this type of fraud? I’ve too often witnessed, here and in Israel, a perverse notion that we few who feel bound by the laws of God are free to flout the laws of man. That the seriousness with which we hold halacha (Jewish law) forces us to view state law as trite, flawed — unimportant at best, a nuisance at worst.

***
We see the same sort of flouting of laws in Israel today by some members of the haredi community — whether it is rioting to protest the opening of parking lots on the Sabbath or stone throwing and garbage burning to support a woman suspected of starving her toddler son. Municipal services recently had to be suspended in these neighborhoods out of fear for the safety of city workers.

Yes, I know — a few bad apples. But where is the outrage? Where are the haredi leaders jumping up to protest? Where are the public vigils or the excommunications? This is a community that is pretty good at enforcing standards of behavior when it is motivated to do so. Have we actually convinced ourselves that we can be good Jews and bad people at the same time?

Many years ago, when I first heard Rabbi Norman Lamm speak, the then-president of Yeshiva University accused his fellow Orthodox Jews of losing sight of the forest of Torah because of the trees of halacha. Those words were never more true than today. Is it really possible that we, as Orthodox Jews, believe that we can create better societies and more caring communities by avoiding raspberries for fear they may have bugs in them while not holding ourselves to even the basic standards of law and decency? Is it really possible that we believe we are in greater danger from women appearing at the pulpit than from rabbis appearing in a perp walk? Perhaps it is time to stop waiting for the perfection of the world that will come along with the building of the Third Temple and engage in perfecting ourselves and the communities we live in.

The Jewish community ought to use this tragic opportunity for some introspection. We should ask ourselves, as Charendorff queries, “where is the outrage? Where are the haredi leaders jumping up to protest? Where are the public vigils or the excommunications?” Their absence is troubling.

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July 29, 2009 | 7:24 pm

Black Crime Rates in the Spotlight

Posted by  Joe R. Hicks

It has now been revealed that the dirt-bag who apparently took the life of 17-year-old Lily Burke is a 50-year-old transient man, someone who had many previous run-ins with the law.  As someone who has a two young daughters, one the exact age of Burke, this hit close to home – as it did for many parents across the country.  After media coverage made no reference to the race of the alleged killer, pictures of the suspect revealed that Charles Samuel is a black man.

As I write this, the nation’s president is about to sit down with Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James Crowley to have a few beers and chat about the recent arrest of Gates by Crowley.  Obama had suggested that Crowley’s actions in arresting Gates represented the stupidity of the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department and dredged up the specter of racial profiling – something subsequently revealed to have had nothing to do with the arrest of Gates as a “disorderly person.”

The incident at Gates’ home in Cambridge, and resultant intervention by a sitting U.S. President in what was essentially a localized police matter has ignited a national political firestorm.  Mainstream media have endlessly covered the events (often badly), political bloggers have been all over the issues like a cheap suit, and race hustlers from coast to coast have emerged from the woodwork to claim that the arrest of a high profile black academic is proof positive that racism is still society’s number one problem.

Okay, that’s what race hustlers do – but while they opportunistically seek political advantage and work the old terrain of white liberal racial guilt, the real issues underlying the mythology of so-called “racial profiling”—-something that was re-surfaced by the president’s comments—-ignores the larger question of why black men in this nation are “disproportionately” housed in our prisons and jails. 

While Obama speaks either in an ill-informed or ideological way about “disproportionate” treatment of blacks in the nation’s criminal justice system, statistics do not lie.  Young black men (between the ages of 18 and 24) commit murder at ten times the rate of whites and Latinos.  Based on this disproportionate level of violent criminal behavior, police are stopping and arresting more black male suspects based on actual rates of criminality, not whim and caprice.  To blame police for arresting high numbers of black suspects is unfair and could be characterized as blaming the messengers for the unpleasant news that they have no choice but to impart.

Thanks to aggressive police actions, homicide is down in the City of Los Angeles, as it is in many major cities across the nation.  But as an indication of the disproportionate level of black crime, in 2003—-39 percent of the city’s 505 homicide victims were black, and 36 percent of the murder suspects arrested for all of the city’s murder were also black. This is in contrast to the fact that only 11 percent of the city’s population is black.  According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 94 percent of all blacks killed nationally between 1976 and 1999 were killed by other blacks.

So, when the president sits down with Sergeant Crowley and Professor Gates and perhaps engages in a lecture about unfair treatment of blacks by the criminal justice system, and the injustice of “racial profiling” let’s hope the Sergeant stops him short.  I expect that he will recite the stats on black crime that might adjust his attitude – unless the President really does have an agenda that encompasses many of the mythologies of the past.

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July 28, 2009 | 6:54 pm

A Test of Commitment

Posted by  David A. Lehrer

Something is happening in the world of public education—-the US Department of Education is serious about reform and we will soon have the opportunity to see who will help them effect the changes that are so desperately needed.

Over the past few weeks Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, has been explicit in speeches to teachers’ groups that a significant provision of the huge stimulus package that impacts teachers and their students is contingent on real reform. States that want some of the “Race to the Top” funds must have in place methods to evaluate teachers based on test score data of their students, anathema to many teachers’ unions. This past weekend, President Obama buttressed the Secretary’s call by explicitly sending a message to California, “You cannot ignore facts, that is why any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluation will have to change its ways.”

It should be no great shock to Californians concerned about education reform that our state has an explicit bar on using student test scores to evaluate teachers. In fact, just a few months ago, United Teachers of Los Angeles went a step further by refusing to even administer assessment tests to their pupils, presumably fearing that the tests MIGHT in the future be used to evaluate their performance as instructors. We have previously written about UTLA and its irrational positions.

Although state law bars the State of California from using student test score data, it is silent about how districts use the information. Presumably, if UTLA and other local unions don’t object, California could be in compliance with federal law and the much needed funds will flow our way.

The weeks ahead will give us a clue as to where the priorities of local teachers’ unions lie—-are they all about themselves and continue to view as a potential threat every piece of information and datum that administrators might have about how they perform; or are they willing to work cooperatively to help move our schools and students forward?

Hopefully, the fact that a Democratic president, who owes much to labor and its teacher unions, has taken this position is a sign that the “times they are a changin’” and the teachers unions might just come around.

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July 23, 2009 | 5:48 pm

Affirmative Action…Again

Posted by  David A. Lehrer

Over the past month, the contentious debate over affirmative action has resurfaced. The Sotomayor hearings and the New Haven fire fighters decision of the US Supreme Court generated much heated debate, argument and media attention.

What has not received much attention and impacts directly on the volatile issue of affirmative action is a recent action of California’s attorney general, Jerry Brown. Brown, California’s former governor and a potential candidate for governor next year, issued a letter opinion to the California Supreme Court that could bring back racial and ethnic preferences to California at the very time when the trend nationally is towards color blind governmental policies.

The adoption of Proposition 209 over a decade ago (sustained as constitutional by the courts) made clear that no government agency in California can discriminate for or against someone on the basis of their race or ethnicity.

In a display of legal gymnastics that nearly defies description, Brown argued that the ban on race conscious programs in Proposition 209 is unconstitutional because it would prevent race and gender conscious programs that might be permissible under the federal Constitution. In essence, Attorney General Brown opines that the barring of discrimination is impermissible because it has made the re-imposition of discriminatory governmental preferences difficult (i.e. a further constitutional amendment).

Prop 209’s ban on racial preferences is found by Brown to “effectively disadvantage racial minorities and women in the political process;” apparently, if one isn’t receiving a preference one is disadvantaged!

His arguments fly in the face not only of logic, but of the history of preferential treatment in California and the reasons Proposition 209 was enacted. It was a reaction to the rampant reverse discrimination that existed in California—- from admissions and hiring at the University of California to virtually every other governmental entity that had contracting authority in California; the forms to be completed to qualify as a “minority” were legendary. Preferences on the basis of race and ethnicity were the rule, their implementers denied they existed and a majority of Californians simply got fed up. Hence 209 passed with 54% of the vote.

Brown’s argument is troublingly tortured and specious. It is an odd day when language that simply says, “the State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin” is deemed discriminatory itself.

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July 22, 2009 | 6:59 pm

The Race Industry Strikes Back

Posted by  Joe R. Hicks

The extent to which the voices of racial victimization have almost gleefully descended on the recent and brief arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates would be surprising – unless one understands the near-pathology that lies beneath the surface of racial identity politics.

Among the many who have stepped forward to argue that Gates’ run-in with the police proves that little has changed with the nation’s racial attitudes is Lawrence Bobo, also a professor at Harvard University.  He argues that the arrest “shows how little some features of the national racial landscape have changed over time.”

This is simply part of the ongoing counter-attack that been taking place since President Obama’s inauguration by those whose world-view is threatened by the declining significance of race.  Some among those who claim to speak on behalf of the nation’s roughly 12 million black people, resemble drug addicts - blindly needing the fix of the confrontational politics of racial identity.   

What do we know about the Gates arrest?  Upon arriving home from a trip to China, Gates and his limo driver were seen forcing open the front door to his home that was stuck.  Unaware that it was Gates, someone saw the developments and alerted the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police who arrived and confronted him inside his house.  Alert to the possibility of a home robbery (the call went out that two black men with back packs were forcing open the door), one officer asked Gates for identification, at which point the confrontation begins, as do the differing accounts. 

The police (at least one of the officers at the scene was black) contend that Gates became irate when asked for ID, and followed one officer out to the front porch where he continued to berate the cop - reportedly asking if he was being asked for ID “because I’m a black man in America?” and telling the officer he had “no idea who he was messing with.” At that point Gates was handcuffed, briefly arrested and booked for disorderly conduct (all the charges have since been dropped).  Since being released, Gates has not been shy in contending that he was the victim of abusive, racist police.  Gates says this is all an example of “… how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system.” Oh really?

I (Joe) know Skip Gates.  He is hardly some cheap Al Sharpton imitator.  He is a smart, sophisticated, wealthy, accomplished and articulate scholar, one that has been internationally acclaimed for his work.  And it is this fact that makes this incident so sad and disappointing. 

Since Gates was in fact in his own home, and able to prove that he was who he said he was, why the need to “get all ghetto” with the cops?  Why is he, of all people, playing the race card?  Why did he seemingly “lose it” when asked simply to identify himself?  Did he think that the police should have known who he was, since he is an acclaimed Harvard academic and TV personality?  And was Gates’ ego perhaps bruised by this event, causing him to revert to the default “race victim” position evoked by all-too-many members of the black elite?

It’s impossible to get inside Gates’ head, and we won’t try. It is far easier to discern the transparent motives of the race hustlers like Michael Eric Dyson, Al Sharpton and others who will opportunistically make full use of this incident.  They will try to sell their message of a relentlessly racist America to anyone who will listen. 

It doesn’t matter that progress is clearly observable and well-documented.  It is this portrayal of a largely unchanged nation with intractable racism which is critical to the existence of the nation’s race industry – an industry that depends on this glum narrative for its very survival. 

The nation has changed – but they have not.

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