I will be on the Arlene Violet radio show today at 3 p.m. WHJJ 920 AM.
Primary subject will be public education issues in Rhode Island.
Scrappleface says it better than I’ve been saying it…
“Clearly Mr. Bolton is a blunt man, with a focus on results and little patience for fools and swindlers. How could he ever function at the U.N.?”[Open full post]
Mr. Voinovich added that [I am] “not beholden to any special interest group — like the Republican party or the United States — so I can be fully in touch with the feelings of diplomats from other countries and other political ideologies.”
From today’s New York Times, on the John Bolton nomination
Mr. Chafee told CNN that the committee’s Republicans might consider whether to recommend that the nomination be withdrawn.Senator Chafee, you need to tell your constituents exactly why you believe this. The article hints that the sole reason is “bad temperament”
Mr. Chafee and 2 others have now voiced significant doubts about whether Mr. Bolton has the temperament and credibility to win confirmation.The “bad temperament” charge rests on two flimsy accounts, both from anti-Bush partisans; 1) testimony about a single incident, ten years ago, from the organizer of a group called “Mothers Opposing Bush” and 2) testimony from a permanent bureaucrat who seemed primarily interested in defending his turf and who supported John Kerry in the last Presidential election. You owe your constituents an explanation of why the testimony of two anti-Bush partisans outweighs all else in this matter. (Even if the explanation is “well, most of my constituents are anti-Bush partisans”).
Senator Chafee, if you are truly the maverick that you are often described as, give your constituents a bold explanation, on policy grounds, why John Bolton is unfit to be America’s UN ambassador. Do not let yourself be used by partisans who seek to 1) to embarass the President in any way possible and, more importantly, 2) who believe that the job of the UN ambassador is to relay the “international community’s” instructions to the US, not to represent the views of America to the world.
[Open full post]What greater gift can we give our children than a fair shot at living the American Dream? The important contribution of a quality education to having that fair shot led me to write:
While hard work alone can make the difference, sometimes it is not enough to make the American Dream come alive for every American citizen. That leads to the final enabling component to the American Dream: access to a quality education. Such access is the great equalizer, ensuring that all Americans have a decent starting position as they enter adulthood.
But, in spite of well-documented performance problems in American public education, the educational establishment continues to actively resist change – even if that means blocking citizens from living the American Dream and putting our country at a long-term competitive disadvantage in a knowledge-based global economy.
In that context, the March 2005 edition of “The School Choice Advocate,” published by the Militon and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, has a very relevant article. Not yet accessible on-line, here is an excerpt from an article entitled “Celebrating 50 Years” by Robert Enlow:
[Open full post]In 1955, Milton Friedman wrote an essay that articulated an old idea of liberty in a fresh and innovative way.
The idea went something like this. Elementary and secondary education in America is in serious trouble because government has combined the appropriate role of financing the general education of children with the inappropriate role of owning and operating schools. It would be much better and more equitable, he argued, if the government would “give each child, through his parents, a specified sum [voucher] to be used solely in paying for his general education…The result would be a sizable reduction in the direct activities of government, yet a great widening in the educational opportunities open to our children.”
Joseph Manning’s pro-life activities in Cranston evoke mixed feelings in me:
Joseph Manning agreed to take down the baby outfits he had hung in the trees.
They were part of an antiabortion display he puts up three days a week outside the Women’s Medical Center on Broad Street.
“That said the whole thing,” he said. “You know what I’m saying? The baby suits waving in the trees.”
But Manning, 74, won’t remove his signs, as many as 11 at a time, some that depict bloody, dismembered fetuses.
I do sympathize with parents’ desire to preserve what innocence in their children they can:
The clinic, which provides medical services, including abortions, is at the corner of Betsey Williams Drive, a street with enough children to hold its own Halloween parade.
Bobby Raposa sees the display from behind his picket fence. “I don’t like it at all,” he said, motioning toward his daughter, who was playing in the yard. “She shouldn’t have to learn this at age five, but I have to explain this because these people have pictures of dead babies on the street.”
The town would have a right to demand that pornographic posters be removed, even if they were displayed in protest of a bordello. (Of course, for the time being, such a business would be operating illegally; perhaps if Rhode Island’s sex workers unionize…) I’d also speak against a thrice-weekly open-air presentation of graphic images of terrorists’ beheaded victims, for example. But Mr. Manning does have a point:
Told of the neighbor’s concerns that children were seeing his signs, he motioned toward the clinic and said: “I understand. I relate. But there are children being killed in here. If you go on a scale of things, one is much worse.”
If a business were somehow legally euthanizing disabled kindergarteners, would our focus really be on protesters’ inappropriate signage? Of course, the broader society wouldn’t need graphic images to be disgusted by such a thing (at least not at present); the act itself screams in bold letters. Which makes me wonder whether Mr. Manning oughtn’t apply the same principle to abortion. How about one big sign with bold letters reading:
There are children being killed in here.
That would avoid the reflexive turning away, and personally, I would find it much more shocking, in its bare truth. It would also force those who object to address the message itself, not its delivery — unless they were to do so by requesting that it not be so blunt. That, actually, is one disturbing aspect of the Providence Journal’s report:
Elizabeth and Peter McStay were working in the yard in front of their house, white with green shutters. Peter McStay said, “it’s a tough thing. It’s a free country, but you don’t have the right to infringe upon my way of life.”
Exactly wrong. We can only allow ours to be a free country to the extent that we have the right to infringe upon each other’s way of life. Put differently, we can only dislodge government authority from the capillaries of our personal lives if we are allowed to influence each other through other means — if we are free, as individuals, to get as far under each other’s skin as the boundary between public and private will permit.
Me, I find it a discouraging sign that the apparent compromise between Manning and the town was to sacrifice the symbolism of flapping baby clothes for the gratuity of photographic gore.
This posting continues a periodic series on Rhode Island politics and taxation, building on fourteen previous postings (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV).
Sometimes certain news events do not need a lot of commentary because they speak for themselves. This posting on the latest developments in the implementation of Separation of Powers is about such a news event.
Although it has apparently been stricken from the itinerary within the past couple of days, today’s RI House Committee on Judiciary hearing was supposed to include testimony concerning a bill (PDF) that would delete gender from Rhode Island’s definition of marriage. Being unable to make it to Providence, this afternoon, I submitted written testimony, which I’ve pasted below. Please consider contacting your state representatives and, if you’d like to make a more prominent statement, the Committee on Judiciary as well.
When I began considering testimony in opposition to bill H5660, concerning same-sex marriage, my first thought was of the people who would be making statements for the other side, whether verbally, in writing, or through participation in the corresponding rally. Their motivation is easy to understand; at issue are the terms by which they live and love.
In contrast, I was drawn to the topic during the summer of 2001 as an intellectual matter. More or less ambivalent about the issue, I merely thought some of the arguments put forward by same-sex marriage proponents were incorrect in interesting ways. As I’ve researched, thought, and written about the topic, however, it has become increasingly apparent to me that at issue are the terms by which we all live and love. Unfortunately, the experiences that would count as personal testimony of this are so pervasive that we take them for granted, and the people who would be most harmed by such a profound social change are not available for comment.
Before the representatives of the people Rhode Island is a bill that would make some editorial changes to statutory language. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like much — a simple matter of erasing gender. Man and woman, husband and wife, simply becomes “any person who otherwise meets the eligibility requirements” and “any other eligible person regardless of gender.” A tweak, really, to answer the emotionally compelling pleas of a minority for whom the historical model of marriage does not fit their relationships.
But passage of this bill would not represent a minor change. For some perspective, consider that, until extremely recently, every reference to marriage in law, sociology, psychology, history, literature, lexicology, and, yes, theology has been understood — by definition — to suggest a man and a woman. More: in the interwoven network of culture, every law on the books, every idea by which our society has defined itself, was formed in a world that took the meaning of marriage for granted.
No doubt, it would be compassionate, and conducive to social health, to extend certain benefits to homosexuals for their roles as parents and as mutual caregivers. If they face inordinate difficulties ordering their affairs, then their fellow citizens should consider means of addressing undue hardships. We should do these things, however, without tampering with the meaning of marriage.
Marriage is not solely, or even primarily, a civil contract. It is not a system for awarding benefits. It is not a statutory definition to be rewritten. It is a matter of fundamental construction, linking families across generations, tying a man and a woman to the children whom only a father and a mother can create. The phrase “regardless of gender” recklessly disregards the unique nature of relationships that join the genders. This is not a disparagement of those who are not drawn to such relationships; it is a statement of reality.
Homosexuals who would like the legal ability to marry each other ask whom it would hurt. The answer is not emotionally satisfying, but it is no less important for being so. Marriage is effective because of its shared principles and the way in which it counterpoises benefits and requirements, law and romance, responsibility and emotion. And this balance of factors is most important for those least able to articulate them.
There are two distinct reasons that such people aren’t stepping forward to testify about the importance of marriage’s preservation. The first covers people who do not realize how important the social and moral standard of marriage is to them, because they are not among those who consciously uphold the standard, but rather are those whose lives the standard is meant to shape. The second reason covers people who have not yet been born and have not yet been subjected to a society in which marriage is not about ensuring stability in the circumstances of their birth. We can glean a sense of the effects that marriage’s redefinition would have on these groups by observing the effects of previous changes to the institution; look particularly to the inner city.
No, the question that you face as representatives of the people of Rhode Island is not an insignificant one. Please do not use the law of this state to dictate a change with consequences that we cannot possibly comprehend as we stand, now, in the midst of turmoil and controversy. Please do not ignore the countless faces that we cannot see out of compassion for a few that we can.
The abysmal performance of America’s public schools is a well-documented fact and has been discussed in a previous posting.
George Will has written last week on an idea about how to get more productive public schools:
Patrick Byrne, a 42-year-old bear of a man who bristles with ideas that have made him rich and restless, has an idea that can provide a new desktop computer for every student in America without costing taxpayers a new nickel. Or it could provide 300,000 new $40,000-a-year teachers without any increase in taxes. His idea — call it the 65 Percent Solution — is politically delicious because it unites parents, taxpayers and teachers while, he hopes, sowing dissension in the ranks of the teachers unions, which he considers the principal institutional impediment to improving primary and secondary education.
The idea, which will face its first referendum in Arizona, is to require that 65 percent of every school district’s education operational budget be spent on classroom instruction. On, that is, teachers and pupils, not bureaucracy.
Nationally, 61.5 percent of education operational budgets reach the classrooms. Why make a fuss about 3.5 percent? Because it amounts to $13 billion…
To see how much money would flow into your state’s classrooms under Byrne’s approach, go to FirstClassEducation.org.
The horrible performance of our public schools requires us to challenge the status quo within the overpaid and underperforming public education bureaucracy. Nonetheless, it is unclear how this proposal, while provocative, will change educational outcomes. It does not address the structural problems within public education that ensure there are no meaningful incentives for excellence.
However, on a tangentially-related topic, I found comments in the article by Chester Finn, Jr. offered an interesting perspective on teachers’ salaries:
Much of the reallocated money under the 65 percent requirement would go for better pay for teachers, which is wiser than just adding more teachers. Chester Finn, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, notes that, while the number of pupils grew 50 percent in the past half-century, the number of teachers grew almost 300 percent. That pleased dues-collecting teachers unions and tuition-charging education schools. But if the number of teachers had grown apace with enrollments, and school budgets had risen as they have, teachers’ salaries today would average nearly $100,000 instead of less than half that.
America, says Finn, has invested in more rather than better teachers — at a time when career opportunities were expanding for the able women who once were the backbone of public education. The fact that teachers’ salaries have just kept pace with inflation, in spite of enormous expansions of school budgets, explains why too often teachers are drawn “from the lower ranks of our lesser universities.”
Yet another example of where the structural incentives of teachers unions are not aligned with excellence in education. Now, isn’t that a surprise?
[Open full post]I received an email today from someone, who wrote:
…how shockingly demanding the unions are at this point. I feel like they are outting themselves as the unreasonably greedy private concerns that they are.
This posting is about yet another Rhode Island case study of unreasonable greed by public sector unions.
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