It being the end of the year, the ProJo produced a piece detailing the public policy goals of various Ocean State political leaders. Among the topics was education reform:
Lawmakers dole out more than $699 million in school aid to their home cities and towns, but it has been years since the state had a fixed formula for determining who gets what.
Since school costs are a major component of local property taxes, House Majority Leader Gordon D. Fox said, there has to be a discussion of “what is adequate funding of education.”
Fueling the discussion will be a legislative study commission’s report on education financing, due March 1.
Fox expects it “will come with a high number of what you need per pupil to adequately educate a student,” and that will force discussion about a whole array of cost-saving issues “that people sort of whisper about, but really haven’t wrapped their arms around and tackled.” He cites as an example: how much can be saved by “regionalizing or centralizing” school purchasing.
“I don’t think you are going to see anything substantive coming this year based upon the timing of the report,” but “I think there is going to be enough information generated … where we will be remiss if we don’t begin those discussions.”
Does that mean the lawmakers are open to discussion about a single statewide teachers contact? “Absolutely.” A single health insurance contract? “Absolutely.” A further consolidation of school districts? “Absolutely,” Fox said.
Montalbano and Paiva Weed agreed it might be difficult to implement changes in the same year the report comes out, but they expect it to lead to action by 2008.
Asked about a statewide teacher contract, statewide health insurance contract for teachers and consolidation of school districts, they didn’t close the door, but Paiva Weed said, “Generally speaking, the executive branch has taken the lead on those issues.”
For his part, Carcieri also wants to continue to focus on education – but don’t expect him to head to lawmakers for much in that area. Instead, he plans to push officials at the Department of Education to implement more changes through their own rule-making procedures to – among other things – improve English skills, especially in the urban school districts.
He also envisions a closer link between the Providence, Pawtucket and Central Falls school districts. Last session, he proposed and lawmakers rejected, a combined district. This time, the governor says, he wants “some type of cooperation.”
“Let me put it that way,” Carcieri said, “because when you talk about consolidation everybody gets nervous. But clearly the state’s got the biggest stake in all of those systems.”
But when it comes to consolidation, Montalbano, whose district includes a slice of Pawtucket, said: “I don’t see that happening this year.” Those districts “have very difficult populations to begin with,” he said.
Looks like a lot of talk and no action in 2007. Meanwhile, Julia Steiny writes about a new report, “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” put out by The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. Steiny quotes specifically from the Executive Summary and also provides analysis regarding some of their proposals. The New Commission recommends more local control at the school level–though funding would still be dispersed, if more equitably, through the state. That would mean that teachers and parents would decide how money was spent and how to design the curriculum (so long as state and federal guidlines were followed). According to the report, however, the current system has inherent roadblocks that make any reform extremely difficult. That is why The New Commission is basically calling for a complete restructuring of our nation’s education system. As Steiny concludes:
Opponents of site-based management and charter schools, which are self-managed, fret that autonomous school personnel might make a lot of horrible mistakes and crash the car. Too late. The car already crashed.
But as the report says, “The problem is not with our educators. It is with the system in which they work.”
Bureaucracies are great at organizing food service, transportation and back office functions. But they are no good at caring for kids.
In the end, the commission believes that applying a 19th century industrial mindset to the organization of schools in the 21st century is no longer tenable if the U.S. hopes to compete in the global marketplace. For Rhode Island, it’s high time our Legislature come up with an equitable, student based funding structure. It’s an attainable goal and will be the first step in much needed reform. It’s also time for adults to put their egos aside and stop worrying about who controls what and how much and from where. The goal is to provide the best possible education system for our children. What adults “get” is secondary.
[Open full post]One of my New Year’s resolutions is not to talk about the 2008 Presidential election until at least next June. But since the New Year hasn’t quite arrived, allow me a few observations…
1. If Barack Obama wants to run, it has to be now. If he waits, he will marginalize himself when he tries to position himself as a “moderate” or a centrist four-to-eight years from now, in spite of the heavily-liberal voting record that he will almost certainly have accrued.
Bear in mind that the last sitting Senator to win the Presidency (John F. Kennedy) was considered “inexperienced”, in Senate terms, when he decided to run. And consider the inverse formulation — do you really believe that four/eight more years of the experience that has made Joe Biden the man he is today will somehow make Senator Obama a more attractive candidate?
2. During the initial stages of the campaign, it will be fascinating to watch most of the Democrats claim that they are really moderates (John Edwards has already started), while most of the Republicans will be stressing how they are either acceptable to conservatives, or are the “true” conservatives.
Republicans, at the national level, need to examine why they aren’t able to make more political hay in an environment like this. Is it poor organization? Or is the problem that (perhaps because of the liberal worldview that places politics before all else?) liberals can be counted on to energetically strongly support Democrats, no matter what positions they espouse (creating, by the way, the structural advantage that Democrats have in places that allow straight-ticket voting), while conservative-leaning voters are not energized unless they hear coherent ideas from the candidates they support?
3. John McCain has an uphill battle in front of him. 1) McCain-Feingold makes him unpopular with the new media. 2) His sudden enthusiasm for amnesty for illegal aliens is going to hurt him with the populist elements of the electorate. And make no mistake about it, populists are an important Republican constituency. Ross Perot’s peeling away of populists from the Republican party, for example, was what opened the way for Bill Clinton. 3) If McCain does assume frontrunner status for an extended period of time, his free ride with the MSM will be over. The relationship between Republican underdogs, which McCain traditionally has been, and the MSM is like the relationship between backup quarterbacks and sports fans. The #2 guy can be the most popular guy in town, until he has to start a few games…
4. Like many Republicans, I’m waiting to see what substance Rudolph Guiliani brings to the table. However, Guiliani’s “moderateness” is not necessarily a deal-breaker, if it turns out he really is a moderate (ala Gerald Ford) and not a liberal (ala Lincoln Chafee). In recent years, liberal Republicans have re-defined moderate bi-partisanship to mean “doing what the most liberal of Democrats want on every important issue”. This has opened a vacuum in the middle that could create a dynamic that someone like Guiliani (or McCain, if not for his other problems) could take advantage of. I’m not saying this is necessarily a good thing, just that it is.
In this week’s Providence Phoenix, Ian Donnis provides a short political profile of Giovanni Cicione, who may be the first “official” candidate for state Republican chair…
Giovanni Cicione, a lawyer and Republican activist who paid his dues by running against US Representative Patrick J. Kennedy in 1996, has emerged as a leading contender to succeed Patricia Morgan as chairman of the Rhode Island Republican Party.Later in the article, Donnis notes that Mr Cicone declined to offer any specific criticism of outgoing Chairwoman Patricia Morgan. Hopefully, Mr. Cicone’s understandable reluctance to enumerate the faults of the current chair will not stop from elaborating in the near future on what he thinks will be “different” about the leadership he hopes to bring forth.
“I’ve spoken with a lot of people in the party leadership and made my pitch,” the 36-year-old Barrington resident told the Phoenix earlier this week. “I’m not sure it’s the most sensible thing to be doing. [But] I think the party needs a different kind of leadership and I think I can bring a lot to the table.”
Donnis also quotes the Associated Press about a few high-profile names who are not interested in the Chairperson’s job, and reports on speculation about one other person who might be interested…
The Associated Press recently reported that Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian, losing secretary of state candidate Sue Stenhouse, and losing Cranston mayoral candidate Allan Fung are not interested in the position. Cicione says the only other name he has heard as a prospective candidate is that of Malcolm Maguire, who helped to raise funds for Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey’s US Senate campaign. Maguire could not be reached for comment.[Open full post]
President Ford was interviewed by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, but embargoed the interview until after his death. The portion of the interview that is getting the most play is where President Ford differed with the Bush Administration on the Iraq War. Specifically, portions of the interview are being excerpted and rehashed as news articles reporting that Ford had “had deep doubts about Iraq,” and he “doubted justifications for the Iraq war.” It is the various permutations of the latter characterization that reveals a disconnect between what the former president said and what the headline writers want to believe he said.
What the president really said about the Bush Administration’s justifications for the Iraq War was:
“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,” Ford said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.“
What Ford disagreed with was in Bush trying to justify invading Iraq based on WMD. From this can be inferred that Ford believed there were other justifications. And he said as much in an interview with Thomas DeFrank of the NY Daily News in May (also embargoed):
Ford was a few weeks shy of his 93rd birthday as we chatted for about 45 minutes. He’d been visited by President Bush three weeks earlier and said he’d told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that the 43rd President had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction.
“Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him,” he observed, “but we shouldn’t have put the basis on weapons of mass destruction. That was a bad mistake. Where does [Bush] get his advice?”
So while President “Ford said he wouldn’t have invaded Iraq…” in 2004, he had come to support it in 2006. And to characterize his belief as being that the “Reasons for Iraq War ‘A Big Mistake’” is patently false. President Ford disagreed with the method of justification. That is different than saying the war itself wasn’t justified. The press has taken a report that Ford opposed the initial invasion, conflated it with his disagreement in how the war was justified and come up with a story implying that he disgreed totally with the entire war, from stem to stern, Instead, President Ford was much more nuanced in his analysis. I thought the mainstream press liked nuance?
[Open full post]With the passing of President Ford, most people have, by now, been disabused of the notion that he was a perpetual klutz and have learned that, in fact, he was a two-time All-American football player at Michigan. Nonetheless, the role that history has cast him is as the man who pardoned Nixon. Yet, believe it or not, while conventional wisdom seems to be that President Ford was a centrist, he was a relatively conservative politician: not Reagan conservative, to be sure, but a sort of natural conservative. To today’s conservatives, that may border on heresay, but there is some evidence to support this.
Most contemporary conservatives, no doubt, would agree with Robert Novak:
The failure of the Ford presidency was the reason Reagan became the first challenger since Roosevelt to threaten seriously the renomination of an incumbent Republican. His pardon of Richard Nixon is usually cited as the reason for Ford’s unpopularity, but it went much deeper. He seemed to have no public purpose, and his presidency revealed no philosophy. A Republican president whose hero was Harry Truman has perception problems from the beginning. A career politician from Grand Rapids, Michigan, he appeared to share Henry Kissinger’s belief that the declining West could not successfully compete with the Soviet bloc and an accommodation had to be found.
Reagan’s grassroots popularity grew as the public perceived he would take a harder position against the Kremlin than the Republican president who declined to see Russian dissenter Alexander Solzhenitsyn because it might offend Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and undermine detente. But Reagan’s clever and manipulative campaign manager John Sears pulled him away from such divisive issues in the interest of seeing him nominated by a united party. In the meantime, the Ford campaign pounded mercilessly against Reagan as unfit for the presidency. Ford disdained Reagan, and his attitude was spread throughout the president’s campaign. The contempt for Reagan was palpable.
But perhaps the error is in characterizing the personal animosity between the Reaganites and the Ford supporters (including the Bushes, I might add) as reflective of wide gulf between governing philosophies. Instead, it seems more apt to view the political dispute as that between a nascent, revolutionary vision of conservatism (Reagan) and a more pragmatic, traditional conservate Republicanism (Ford). To be sure, today, Reagan’s brand of conservatism has essentially triumphed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Ford wasn’t conservative at all. While Ford’s foreign policy is what we would call “realist” (ie; George H.W. Bush/Jame Baker)–his belief in detente with the U.S.S.R. is usually given as an example–he did have some conservative moments (the Mayaguez incident) and his economic policy was essentially conservative (though he was no supply-sider).
George Will (via NRO) wrote a column 30 years ago (PDF) that helps to illustrate this latter point. According to the piece, Ford stymied the Democrat-led Congress:
Congress was going to rescue the nation’s economy from Mr. Ford’s “inhumane” concern with inflation. It was going to treat unemployment as the priority problem. To that end it ginned up a $6-billion bill to put 900,000 people on public payrolls. Mr. Ford vetoed it, and Congress failed to override.
Congress was going to codify in laws the trendy environmentalism which appeals to an intense minority of its constituents. To that end it passed a tough law restricting strip mining. Again, Mr. Ford vetoed. Congress failed to override.
The third and most intense humiliation for Congress came when the House gutted the energy bill prepared by Representative Al Ullman (D., Ore.)…[which] arrived on the floor with a steep gasoline tax and left with that and all other teeth pulled.
Perhaps most telling is Will’s excerpting of a Business Week article on Ford:
Now [Ford’s} Administration is preparing a domestic package that seeks to bolster his ’76 candidacy with such diffuse issues as a strong defense posture, a tough anticrime program, a drive to aid business through tax reforms that assist in capital formation, and rnoves that would curtail government regulation of industry.
That means that, despite his serious split with conservatives. Ford at this point is running on little more than his basic conservatism. To complicate matters further, many of Ford’s deeply felt convictions center on unabashedly probusiness stances that may be deflected by his political opponents into potent anti-consumer positions.
Now, this is not to say that Ford fits the definition of a contemporary conservative, but it is too simple to say he was a “moderate.” Nor was he a tax-and-spender. He didn’t have “the vision thing” and wasn’t a revolutionary conservative in the mold of Ronald Reagan. Instead, he was an honorable and gracious man who–much like the silent majority of the time–was a natural, traditional conservative. May he rest in peace.
[Open full post]Ted was my English teacher in 1971-1972, my junior year in high school. And he was one of four teachers who, over the years, had a profound effect on my life.
A high school classmate told me two days ago that Ted had lung cancer and I called him yesterday for the first time in years.
This post is dedicated to offering a well-deserved tribute to Ted, to highlighting what made him such a special teacher.
It was in his class where I first read many of the great works of American literature. Prior to his class, my general attitude had been that reading literature was an utter waste of time. In particular, he introduced me to and I fell in love with Hemingway’s writings.
But what changed my life forever was Ted’s famous red ink “bleeding” all over our papers. As a straight A student, I was unaccustomed to receiving many critical comments on my school work. I still remember the shock when I received my first marked-up papers back from him.
Ted reminded me yesterday that he “bled” that red ink because he felt that he owed every student a thoughtful response to their hard work. As our school year together unfolded, I developed a deep appreciation for the advice contained in his written comments as he deconstructed my often pedestrian writing. The picture of our year together, however, would be incomplete if I failed to mention his simultaneous offering of verbal encouragement.
Ted is 81 years old now, having retired in 2005 after achieving the milestone of teaching for 50 years. Think of how many students’ lives he was able to touch!
Ted was truly a remarkable teacher and I am only one of many former students who will always owe him a significant debt of gratitude. So, for all the guidance he thoughtfully offered in both red ink and the spoken word some 35 years ago, I thank him from the bottom of my heart.
Twice in the past few weeks, I’ve felt compelled to write to the Providence Journal regarding letters that appeared on its opinion page. Both letters dealt with the abstinence versus contraception education debate, and both cited specific “scientific” studies for the pro-contraception side. And in each case, my letter specifically addressed the study in question, explaining why the cited findings were wrong and/or erroneously removed from all-important context.
I’ve offered those explanations in this space before, so I won’t repeat them, but what I find fascinating is that, thus far, the Projo has published neither of my responses, or others making similar points, and it occurs to me that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to question whether a “common knowledge” isn’t being consciously constructed (or, actually, reinforced). I’m not suggesting that the letters to the editor sections of American newspapers are a significant source of information and social cues in our culture; if anything, they’re arguably the final stage of such information and cues through the media cycle. But as such, they illustrate all the more how these factoids — without reference to legitimacy or context — become evidence in an understanding of the world that, for must of us, is felt more than comprehended.
From the second chapter of Luke:
In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town. And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. While they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields and keeping the night watch over their flock. The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them and they were struck with great fear. The angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Messiah and Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying:“Glory to God in the highest
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”When the angels went away from them to heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go, then, to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went in haste and found Mary and Joseph and the infant lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known the message that had been told them about this child. All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds. And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them.
Merry Christmas to all!
[Open full post]{Nota Bene: Two years ago I wrote this post offering some thoughts from soldiers and others concerning spending Christmas at war. I still believe it to be relevant today. Merry Christmas.}
With the current confluence of Christmas and our nation at war, I think it appropriate to mention a few noteworthy writings that deal with the topic. First is a recent column written by Idaho Senator Mike Crapo that details the Continental Army’s Christmas in 1778. Despite the sense of desparation surrounding the cause of upstart colonies during that Christmas, the small, underfed and under-equipped army weathered that winter at Valley Forge under the leadership of George Washington and went on to help build a nation.
I also offer these poignant words written during the Civil War by Corporal J. C. Williams, Co. B, 14th Vermont Infantry, December 25, 1862:
This is Christmas, and my mind wanders back to that home made lonesome by my absence, while far away from the peace and quietude of civil life to undergo the hardships of the camp, and may be the battle field. I think of the many lives that are endangered, and hope that the time will soon come when peace, with its innumerable blessings, shall once more restore our country to happiness and prosperity. (source)
Equally as poignant are the words of Corporal John Ferguson of the Seaforth Highlanders, who noted the irony of a Christmas scene during World War I
What a sight; little groups of Germans and British extending along the length of our front. Out of the darkness we could hear the laughter and see lighted matches. Where they couldn’t talk the language, they made themselves understood by signs, and everyone seemed to be getting on nicely. Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill. (source)
Finally, I’d like to point you to a piece by W. Thomas Smith Jr. at NRO about the Christmas time Battle of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. (This is of particular significance to me as my great uncle Victor Comtois, a Lieutenant in the infantry (Yankee Division), died on Christmas Eve 1944 in Luxembourg during the pushback.)
With these stories in mind, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and hope that we all take the time to remember both the true reason for the season and to remember our brave men and women who find themselves in harm’s way at this time. May God Bless America and may He protect our troops.
