The Daily Digest

The school-choice movement has found a home in New Orleans, which, in the wake of Katrina, has become a magnet for innovation.

Michael Tanner paraphrases Randolph Bourne for Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson: "It's hard to be a small-government conservative while favoring more widespread military intervention. War is a big-government program.

Radley Balko explains to Rudy and Fred why you can't be both a federalist and drug warrior: "If ever there were an issue for which federalism would seem to be an ideal solution, it’s the medical marijuana issue, which touches on crime, medical policy, privacy and individual freedom—all the sorts of values-laden areas of public policy that states are best equipped to deal with on a case-by-case basis, and for which a one-size-fits-all federal policy seems particularly clunky and ill-suited."

Obama's new-media team is innovating with LinkedIn.

Alexa is no longer the gold standard for measuring Web site traffic. I prefer Compete.

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The Art and Influence of Pedagogy

Last month, I posted the text of a nomination I wrote for one of my favorite teachers, Al Kelly. The timing was coincidental, since a few days ago I received the 2007-08 edition of Hamilton's "viewbook," which it sends to prospective students and alumni, and which contains a wonderful essay by Professor Kelly on the art of pedagogy. Here's an excerpt (it's not online):

I've learned that what sticks with students could never get into my notes: the way I think about things; the way I bring facts to bear; the way I call the obvious into question; the way I read; the way I tear apart a sentence; the way I try to jolt them into seeing the world differently. The students can look up the Ems Dispatch. But I flatter myself that they cannot look up any of those really important things that I try to teach them. If I do my job well . . . I lead them along the path from what can be Googled into the land of what cannot be Googled. . . .

What long-term effects do I want my history teaching to have on my students? I'd like them to have a hard head and a soft heart. I'd like them to be wise; to maintain perspective; to puncture fatuous claims of novelty; to write with skill and grace; to judge only after they have empathized; and to develop what the Germans learned the hard way to call "civil courage." Faced—God forbid—with a totalitarian regime, my former students would, I hope, be among the first arrested.

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Quote of the Day

"If you don't like what's going on, don't get in your car and drive by your school board and maybe drive by the capitol and get on an airplane and fly to Washington and say, 'I don't like the way the school down the street is being run.'"

—The ever-quippy Fred Thompson, on why education should be a state rather than a federal issue—even though he voted to do the exact opposite in 2001 via No Child Left Behind.

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Al Kelly: Professor Extraordinaire

In explaining the origins of this blog's title, No Straw Men, I usually point to the first column I wrote for my college newspaper under the same title. This morning, I dug up an essay I penned on the professor who inspired the title, Al Kelly, the Edward B. Graves Professor of History at Hamilton College. I just put the essay online at www.jonathanrick.com; here's an excerpt:

Last summer, as I struggled to concretize a proposal for a Watson or Bristol postgraduate fellowship, I knew there was one person whose guidance I needed. I had talked with others, but no one had this person’s ability to explain any subject I’d ever asked about with such clarity, conciseness, context and cogence. Add this to patience that never flags and a wit that never runs dry, and this is why I think of Al Kelly as a personal encyclopedia.

I showed up unannounced at his office one weekday, doubtless while he was hard at work on his own research. What made our meeting special is Professor Kelly’s consistent brilliance to immediately distill the essence of an issue. Since my passion for a fellowship far outran any specific ideas for it, we spent about an hour and a half clarifying the reason for and goals of my project. Not where I would travel, or what I would do, or how I would do it, but simply why. Surely, anybody else would have either given up or moved on after say 20 minutes, but here was Professor Kelly calmly, happily connecting disparate dots, drawing out the big picture, and raising points as important as they were seemingly hidden. He knew that without a sound foundation, I was dooming myself to failure.

Yet rather than condescend whatsoever—how, with his intelligence, he does this is extraordinary—Professor Kelly never interrupted but let me hold forth as I attempted to verbalize my thoughts. Only when I finished, as is his unique habit, did he reply, speaking slowly and humbly, choosing his words thoughtfully, and asking me pointed questions. When I left, he transformed my mental chaos into lucidity.

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No Chinese Left Behind

The United States still retains the world's best universities, but after reading Nick Kristof's non-hysterical report from China, I fear for our current kindergarteners:

First, Chinese students are hungry for education and advancement and work harder. In contrast, U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.

Here in [Taishan], the students show up at school at about 6:30 a.m. to get extra tutoring before classes start at 7:30. They go home for a lunch break at 11:20 and then are back at school from 2 p.m. until 5. They do homework every night and weekend, and an hour or two of homework each day during their eight-week summer vacation.

The second reason is that China has an enormous cultural respect for education, part of its Confucian legacy, so governments and families alike pour resources into education. Teachers are respected and compensated far better, financially and emotionally, in China than in America. . . .

A third reason is that Chinese believe that those who get the best grades are the hardest workers. In contrast, Americans say in polls that the best students are the ones who are innately the smartest. The upshot is that Chinese kids never have an excuse for mediocrity.

Chinese education has its own problems, including bribes and fees to get into good schools, huge classes of 50 or 60 students, second-rate equipment and lousy universities. But the progress in the last quarter-century is breathtaking.

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The Daily Digest

Tulips in Washington Circle

The caveats regarding the blowback theory of U.S. foreign policy, recently popularized by Ron Paul, cannot be overemphasized. Radley adds some I missed: (1) This isn't some fringe idea common only to crazy September 11 conspiracy theorists; (2) It doesn't suggest that we deserve or deserved to be attacked; and (3) It doesn't suggest we shouldn't retaliate or have retaliated against those who attack us.

Another online boat I missed: a wiki for summarizing the meaning, arguments for and against, and the status of federal bills. The Politico reports: "So far, WashingtonWatch has thousands of entries on each piece of legislation moving through Congress. They're written, edited and frequently rewritten, as is the wont with wiki-ers."

Speaking of ingenious ideas, NZ Bear, who previously brought us the magnificent Porkbusters project, is again proving why CPAC named him the 2007 blogger of the year. Soon after the electronic version of the immigration-reform bill was passed, the text made its way to NRO. But the file was a big and clunky PDF, so NZ "parsed it into a format that allows for easy browsing online." Features include an interactive table of contents, a highlights section, and the ability for anyone to comment on, and for anybody to link directly to, any section of the bill. As if that weren't enough, further proving that he cares more about getting things done than about who gets credit, NZ then teamed up with Heritage to make the text searchable.

Semantic insidiousness watch, courtesy of John Stossel: apparently, if you oppose school choice, you're "pro-education." Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Post, documents why the exact opposite is true: "If it were up to the children and their parents, there'd be no question that the District's five-year experiment with school vouchers would be renewed for an additional five years or more. That's the most emphatic finding of an independent evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program published last week."

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The Daily Dose

Check out Google's latest toy, Image Labeler, through which you can improve the Internet and sharpen your Scattergory skills simultaneously.

I was fortunate enough to attend a college where the majority of professors, despite being opinionated liberals, did not politicize the classroom. (It helped that I was outspoken.) But my alma mater appears to be an anomaly, as evidenced by a new documentary by Evan Coyne Maloney, Indoctrinate U, the trailer of which appears below. (To get a ticket for the DC screening, contact Audrey Mullen of Advocacy Ink.)



Advocates of a national curriculum assume that higher standards produce better-educated students. But, in fact, as Cato's Andrew Coulson demonstrates, it is the competitive pursuit of better-educated students that produces high standards: "We understand this point implicitly in every field outside of education. We didn't progress from four-inch black-and-white cathode ray tubes to four-foot flat panels because the federal government raised television standards. Apple did not increase the capacity of its iPod from five to 80 gigabytes in five years because of some bureaucratic mandate. And the Soviet Union did not collapse because the targets for its five-year plans were insufficiently ambitious. Progress and innovation in these and almost all other human endeavors have been driven by market incentives: consumer choice, competition among providers, the profit motive."

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Assimilation via Language

Newt Gingrich takes to the op-ed page of the LA Times today to clarify his YouTubed remark equating Spanish with “the language of living in a ghetto.” His premise is as follows:

Mastering the language of a country opens doors of opportunity. . . . In the United States, English is by no means our only language, but it is the language of economic success and upward mobility.

This is so self-evident, I’m constantly dumbfounded when I run into someone (say, a server in the capitol building cafeteria, as I did yesterday) who shrugs and says, “No hablo Inglés.”

Of course, the ignorance of such people is their loss, not mine, and ignorance does not threaten me. What does threaten me, for instance, are multilingual ballots.


Why should ballots be unilingual? Because what makes America unique is our ability to assimilate immigrants. A common tongue gives us unity and thus strength. As Charles Krauthammer has argued,

The key to assimilation . . . is language. The real threat to the United States is not immigration per se but bilingualism and, ultimately, biculturalism. Having grown up in Canada, where a language divide is a recurring source of friction and fracture, I can only wonder at those who want to duplicate that plague in the United States. . . .

The way to prevent European-like immigration catastrophes is to turn every immigrant—and most surely his children—into an [English-speaking] American.

Indeed, this is why bilingual education—that is, being taught (usually in Spanish) while being gradually taught English—is misguided. As Krauthammer notes, “It delays assimilation by perhaps a full generation.”

To be sure, had I learned espanol while learning English (instead of blowing off classes in the former in high school), I bet I'd be fluent today. Research shows that learning a language is easiest when you're young and the mind is sponge-like. Moreover, in part because of our geographic insulation, Americans are less worldly than our European counterparts, among whom bilingualism is the rule rather the exception. In the age of interconnectedness, speaking only one tongue—even if it's the global one—surely puts us at a competitive disadvantage.

These objections are valid, but can both be addressed via immersion classes, instead of bilingual education. The difference—between English-first and English-second—is crucial, and, in fact, once one learns English, one should move on to Spanish.

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