The inaccuracy of Steve Ahlquist’s tweet is worth noting, but it should be a springboard, not a stopping point:
86% of Johnston voters voted to approve a $215 million proposal to finance the largest modernization of education facilities in Johnston’s history.
The results table he appends does indeed show that 1,100 people voted to approve the measure, versus 178 against, but it also shows that 23,980 Johnston residents are registered to vote. Properly speaking, therefore, only 4.6% of Johnston voters voted to approve that massive spending for all of them.
People involved in local politics debate this point frequently, tending to switch positions depending which side of a matter they support. You can bet that if the vote approved something he opposed (like safeguarding the lives of unborn children), Ahlquist would emphasize the small participation rate, perhaps insinuating voter suppression in some form.
Objectively, one basic assumption of democracy is that lack of participation is implicitly deliberate. It’s possible that the people of Johnston didn’t vote because they knew the bond would pass and supported that outcome. More likely, many of them just didn’t care enough to vote, often because they don’t care enough to pay attention.
Moreover, such issues don’t have to be broadly unpopular to generate opposition. A contributing factor is whether they inspire strong opposition among a small group of people willing to expend time and money convincing their neighbors.
These possibilities raise an important question that those of us who do care ought to answer. Do Rhode Islanders support the direction of our state? Do they simply not care? Or are the apathy and hopelessness so profound that small groups don’t (or can’t) form to mount an opposition?
The natural incentives are obviously in favor of the big spenders. Each vote seems like a relatively small charge on the tax bill, while on the other hand, a minority of residents will see a significant improvement in an area of special interest for themselves. Our state goes further, layering on regulations, mandates, and thumbs on the scale to throw this imbalance into a full tilt.
We need to break this pattern, because it’s not just spending. The same factors that lead to crumbling infrastructure despite high taxes lead to abysmal educational results and more.
In that context, both sides of the vote may hinge on hope. A majority up to 95% is hopeless that its vote can make a difference, while the 5% turn out because they hope desperately that spending a bunch of money will do something (anything) to improve their situation.
It won’t… at least not in the long run.
Featured image by Josh Carter on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee finds his FBI-investigation talking points
- Smiley’s dubious messaging
- Quietness on the congressional front
- Kalus comes on strong
Featured image by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash.
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When Bill Felkner introduced me to Republican state Senator Frank Maher on the back steps of the State House, I was still new enough to politics-in-the-flesh to think he was a representative sample of elected officials. “He’s one of the good guys,” Bill told me, and he was right.
On another occasion, not long after, both Frank and I followed a Republican convention in Newport as it crossed the street and continued into the night at a bar. We distracted each other, along with his wife, Kathleen, from the felt need to schmooze with a long conversation about matters political and personal.
Senator Maher was in politics for the right reasons. He wasn’t looking for an edge in the insider career path or running for a place on local talking head shows. He was a man of strong values who saw politics as a means of doing some good in the world.
Too often, those who should be our models are too modest to draw attention to themselves. Rest in peace, Frank. I know you’re doing what you can to help us from where you are.
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One bit of trivia that marks a step on road to full assimilation into the Ocean State when one learns it is that the State House dome is the fourth largest self-supporting marble dome on the planet. The list goes St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Minnesota State Capitol, the Taj Mahal, then Rhode Island’s Capitol building.
That is our heritage. And Tim White’s forthcoming report about collapsing marble in the State House is documentation of how well we’re maintaining it.
I’m not merely speaking about the State House, of course, but the whole state… more than the state, truth be told. The popular understanding of the word, “decadence,” is extravagant expense and indulgence. We think of flash and great opulence, but the most decadent and costly vice is carelessness, and our entire civilization is succumbing to it.
Many of us who’ve invested so much effort trying to wrench Rhode Island out of its spiral have done so with the recognition that we’re on the sharp end of the flayer’s knife and the hope that we can find the cure and prove its worth here.
The time is short, and collapsing marble is only one of the more obvious symptoms. The Convention Center gorging on employee bonuses is another. Put Providence, Barrington, Portsmouth, and other communities that are busily destroying the education systems on the list. We hear our decadent deterioration every time the power goes out and we learn that a few more neighbors have taken the increasingly necessary step of installing home generators.
Just so do we squander our wealth of money, resources, and social capital. Those who can afford private schools, generators, and constant auto repairs in lieu of well paved roads are buying the luxury of apathy.
It doesn’t have to be this way, yet every week brings another news story that ought to generate outraged churn of our elected officials, but no longer does. The governor could propose five-figure annual hazard pay bonuses to the public sector aristocrats who walk the State House halls, and few Rhode Islanders would ask why our state’s massive spending is insufficient to maintain our architectural heritage.
I say leave the marble where it fell as a reminder. Put some velvet ropes around it, with a plaque bearing a Once-ler-esque warning. Then fix the State House around it — and fix the state around that — so Rhode Island can be a beacon of hope for those still feeling that knife scraping along their civic nerves.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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Has it ever happened in history that a country’s government has so aggressively opposed a domestic industry so vital to the economy and national security? It’s like an autoimmune disorder.
[Open full post]Nancy Pelosi: We cannot “use [high gas prices] as an excuse” to produce more American energy pic.twitter.com/txlUvEYVmS
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 31, 2022
Whoever they are, they are relentless. Whether they are deliberately “transforming” education because they’re members of an ideological cult, because they’re enraptured by pseudo-intellectual mental games, or because they’re exploiting the rapture of some to achieve the ideological goals of others is another question.
We hear that “parents [in Barrington] are really upset,” but they’re not nearly upset enough. If they were, the news reports wouldn’t be simply about polite expressions of discontent with the school department’s edging out honors programs, but about members of the community shouting and making threats of political repercussions. School officials have likely set one of the best districts in the state (which, granted, is not saying much) on a course for destruction; at best, they’re conducting a risky experiment with it. Either way, their materials feel like a scam.
Take, as a starting point, the sloppy Q&A of the district’s “high school program of studies restructuring”:
As noted earlier, students in these courses will have the opportunity to engage in passion and interest-based learning that will set them apart from their peers with whom they are competing for college and career opportunities. Students will pitch a proposal for their project at the start of the course, they will outline touchpoints and expectations, and teachers will approve or request refinement to the proposal. Students will be provided expectations and teachers will be available for support and guidance. Work will occur during adn beyond the school day, as is consistent with honor’s level courses. Teacher will review the final project at the end of the course according to the expectations set and will determine if honor’s designation has been achieved. With the option of earning honors-level distinction open to all, more students will have the opportunity to pursue their individual interests and passion.
Typos understandably find their way into all documents, but this is an important product for the district, as indicated by the long list of references appended to give it heft, and its authors didn’t care enough to catch a sequence of errors, including “adn,” “honors” as a possessive, and “teacher” without an article or plurality. This superficial sloppiness could be ignored if it weren’t so clearly evidence of the strategic intention to slip the important questions past the reader.
Ideological texts often utilize this approach. They make the assertions of the sales pitch (“passion and interest-based learning… will set them apart from their peers”) without explaining how the new system will functionally work better than the methods it is replacing. For that, the reader must dig into the sources, which swing wildly from lengthy reports to brief video arguments that don’t explain the change so much as they push politically motivated pressure campaigns that rely on deceptive and inflammatory rhetorical tricks (“how can you possibly defend that apartheid in our schools”).
The viewer almost has to laugh. The title of the video is, “Why does ability grouping or tracking have a negative effect size?” (i.e., cause harm, on net). The very first words out of Professor Hattie’s mouth are, “tracking actually doesn’t have a negative effect size.” These are the markers of a systemic scam.
In the local case, the Barrington school district — not some Australian academic — is imposing this change on its students. It is up to the district to explain in detail how this will work. Instead, we get expressions of intent, in the WPRI article at the first link above, by a consultant, Kate Novak:
“The intent is not to provide all students with a single curriculum, but rather a learning environment that meets their needs for challenge and support,” she wrote.
What does that even mean?
One suspects, however, that Barrington’s lack of rigor and obviously ignored questions follows through to the entire movement, almost certainly to a base of research that is equally sloppy and with a tendency to ignore complicating results and extrapolate isolated findings as if they have universal applicability.
For illustration, follow a link that WPRI’s Kim Kalunian provides. Here, you will learn (if that word really applies) about a scary new nice-sounding acronym: Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Again, the key questions that ought to be answered right up front are ignored or buried. Introductory videos that look more like advertisements or promotions for a political campaign make the claim that putting all children into a single classroom and requiring teachers to accommodate a room full of different learning styles all at once will produce miraculous outcomes. Again, they never answer the obvious questions that anybody with experience of traditional education would ask:
- How does this work?
- Why is this preferable to the way we were doing things before?
- Even if there are different learning styles, why doesn’t it make sense to group children by those styles?
- If the old system was flawed, why wouldn’t we work those problems out rather than experiment with something different?
The answer, one begins to sense, is that the academics and administrators bringing these changes don’t really know. They want to try something new — for whatever reason — and thanks to copious funding from governments and meddling billionaires, they have the power to force it on your children.
Featured image by Google Maps.
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Sometimes it isn’t clear whether progressive activists are warning about what they genuinely believe their nemeses will do or explaining what they will do once they have the power. Such is the case, here:
“When we react to [legislation in Florida],” Equality Florida Nadine Smith apparently tells Disney employees in a virtual meeting, according to a video posted by City Journal writer Chris Rufo, “a lot of us are reacting from the pain we experienced being isolated and stigmatized in school, but we are also reacting from the reality that when they can erase you, when they can criminalize your existence, when they can demonize who you are, the next step is to criminalize you and take your kids.”
Erasing people, criminalizing their existence, demonizing them, and separating them from their children is, in fact, the approach of the Left. Note Smith’s language; she doesn’t hedge in the least. Taking children is “the next step.” In her mind, it’s apparently just what you do once you’ve managed to dehumanize your opposition.
We shouldn’t gloss over the hyperbolic dishonesty about what the Florida legislation actually does. Progressives trade in this strategy frequently because there’s no downside for them, particularly with the news media and cultural elites on their side. At best (from their point of view), the mass of people who pay marginal attention to socio-political issues will take them at their word that conservatives are the frothing fascists the progressives claim we are. At worst, those people will blend the progressives’ supposed fear with conservatives’ expressed concerns about indoctrination in the schools and decide not to take sides.
Even were there room for both-sides-ism, an honest analysis would find progressives much closer to unconscionable actions. Directly on this point, they have made it policy and law (including in Rhode Island) that government-run schools should actively deceive parents about their children’s experimentations with sexual identity — leading other children and other people in the community in the lie.
While this may be more than one step removed from actively taking people’s children away, it isn’t many. Moreover, the various statutes, regulations, and policies supporting the deception illustrate Smith’s point about demonization. The rationale for government schools to step between parents and their children is that the parents might be a threat to the students’ safety if they aren’t sufficiently woke.
Featured image by Iluha Zavaley on Unsplash.
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I’m glad to have learned about the Abernathy Boys’ cross-country adventures a century ago, but I do wonder. Sure, the 10- and 6-year-olds’ adventures do echo across the decades as something lost. And yet… their story was unique even then, and life has become less dangerous for children, which is a good thing.
On the other hand, we’re definitely overprotective these days, largely (I think) because we overemphasize the rare stories on the other side of the spectrum, where things go tragically wrong.
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The response to COVID showed that we aren’t a serious society. One hallmark of that condition for all to see (if they look) is that we are institutionally incapable of identifying the actual causes of our difficulties and, therefore, of addressing them. Consequently, because the solution of the clueless must always be to throw more resources at a problem, we’re going to make things worse.
For today’s example, turn to Lynn Arditi’s brief article on a recent Rhode Island Kids Count report. The topline number is that 98 children were hospitalized because of abuse or neglect in the Ocean State in 2020, which represented a 145% increase over the prior year, which itself represented a significant increase over the prior year:
The sharp rise was related to an increase in mental health issues and “the stresses associated with the pandemic,’’ Katherine Chu, a Kids Count spokeswoman, said in an email. The closure of daycare centers and schools during the pandemic increased stress on families, she said, and also removed children from teachers and caretakers who could report suspected abuse or neglect.
The immediate cause, in other words, was the government-enforced shutdown of our communities. (The toll of that decision continues to climb.) But RI Kids Count turns its attention to the lack of reporting. So, predictably:
“The devastating effects of the pandemic fell on the shoulders of our most vulnerable children and families,” Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director for Rhode Island Kids Count, said in a statement. “Now more than ever, we need to ensure that we provide the funding to support the community-based providers that provide the mental health services, prevention services and early intervention services children need to be safe and supported.”
Kids Count recommended expanding services for at-risk young children and families, including raising Medicaid reimbursement rates for programs that serve them to improve the recruitment and retention of staff, and improving screening and evaluation tools to assess mental health needs of infants and young children who have been neglected or abused.
We will see no reevaluation of the state’s decisions. No serious consideration of whether the tradeoffs were worthwhile or whether another option existed. Even as our institutions deteriorate before our eyes, the only solution institutionalized advocates can conceive is to rely more heavily on those very institutions.
We will see no attempts to address the underlying causes of our social ills because we might (read: “will surely”) then find reason to reverse our radical turn, which is the motivating force behind the sorts of people who fund and produce these reports and the resulting policies.
Featured image by Jan Kopriva on Unsplash.
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Dakota Wood of the Heritage Foundation discusses military considerations with Russia, and Cortney Nicolato and Monica Deroche promote 401 Gives.
Featured image by Damir Spanic on Unsplash.
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