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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Overstating the significance of individuals’ Twitter commentary is an easy pitfall, but Phil Eil is a journalist and writer and so spends more time observing and thinking about the world around him than the average. The following tweets are likely to be more representative of the progressive mindset than would be the case if it were just Phil the barista:
It is wild to be living amidst a multi-systems meltdown in the United States. Politics. Academia. Pop culture. Tech. Just chaos and dysfunction everywhere you turn.
Not saying that some — even a lot — of this upheaval isn’t overdue and righteous. Just observing the palpable and pervasive sense of uncertainty and instability. Very few things seem solid in this country right now.
These sentences have a cult-like feel, actively undercutting the voice inside the adherent warning that something is off. “Chaos and dysfunction are everywhere you turn!” says the voice. “Ah, this is just the storm before the calm,” soothes voice of the cult, echoing Jesus’ warning about the end of days.
The critical difference, however, is that Jesus presented the turmoil and trials as a natural precursor to an event that humanity could not control — indeed, we explicitly cannot know when it will come, much less bring it about. By contrast, the Marxist-progressive cult has an alchemical expectation; if they actively cause turmoil and trials, the righteous flame will burn away the evils of the West’s foundational institutions.
This is pure faith, not only ungrounded in evidence and reason, but actively contradictory to them. Human society is not a pure core of crystalized goodness with inhumanity caked onto it and hardened over millennia. Rather, our institutions cultivate goodness.
In other words, the progressive cult believes that if we destroy what is visible, we’ll see the utopia underneath. That is dangerously, fatally wrong. Behind chaos is only more chaos; the flames aren’t burning away privilege but consume the bridges away from disadvantage; and society will only tolerate the destruction for so long before submitting to whatever tyrant proves able to impose order.
Progressives who instigate, rather than merely investigate, know this. They are simply expecting to be the tyrants and believe themselves to be benevolent. They, too, are dangerously wrong. Either they (as proven agents of chaos) won’t be the ones to whom humanity looks for order or they will prove less benevolent than they believe (although excuses for their corruption will be plentiful).
In this, Eil is doubly emblematic. Not only does he represent the progressive delusion, but he illustrates the clever strategy of the Left. The journalists, observers, and heralds whom the West has entrusted to warn of coming danger have been convinced that it is not danger at all, but salvation and deserving of promotion.
Featured image by Issy Bailey on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee invites in the FBI (and doesn’t know it)
- The excitements and bow-outs of the CD2 race
- A change of career for the top cop
- Ashley Kalus checks in
- Election cheats try to extend the unwasted crisis
Featured image by Dan Grinwis on Unsplash.
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Here’s an important detail from a recent budget analysis by the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council (RIPEC), as summarized by WPRI’s Eli Sherman:
In a breakdown of the hospital’s financial picture, RIPEC estimated McKee is seeking to spend $143.7 million in state and federal revenue next fiscal year on the state-run medical and psychiatric facility, comprising Zambarano in Burrillville and three more units in Cranston.
With about 188 patients currently living at the hospital, the per patient cost would total $764,362 per year – an eye-popping figure considering House Fiscal Office staff pegged the number at about $557,000 per year during the 2019-20 fiscal year. That’s a roughly 37% increase in per patient cost over four years.
For comparison, RIPEC cited a 2020 report done by the consulting group Alverez & Marsal that estimated the average cost of nursing home care is about $125,000 per year – about six times less than what the state is spending on Eleanor Slater patients.
This result is emblematic of government systems. Public records show Eleanor Slater has gotten control of its six-figure laundry workers, but that issue was always low-hanging fruit for those investigating the system’s poor management. In fiscal year 2021, the state Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities & Hospitals (BHDDH) paid 187 employees more than $100,000 in regular and overtime pay, most of them nurses.
Sixteen employees took home over $200,000, with Eleanor Slater Hospital’s chief medical officer, Brian Daly, topping the list with $366,702. The highest-paid nurse was Portia Richardson, with $230,905— a quarter million dollars!
Making matters worse, these eye-popping payrolls aren’t to blame on individuals; they’re built into the system. When I investigated nursing salaries a decade ago, it came to light that one big problem is the payment structure in the union contract. A supervising nurse covering for another on a different floor could be credited multiple times for each hour of overtime worked. The only universe in which that arrangement is fair for the taxpayer is one in which patients are being put at extreme risk because nurses are being asked to do something that isn’t humanly possible.
The systemic corruption goes deeper, however. Eleanor Slater’s troubles have been amplified in recent years as the federal government has withheld aid because too high a percentage of patients are hospitalized for psychiatric reasons.
Following state government for some years makes it easy to imagine how this sort of thing happens. The regulations that the state imposes on private organizations mean those who absolutely need care can only look to the government because non-government organizations can’t make the numbers work. At the same time, federal programs create incentive for the state to pile the patients in, pushing the boundaries of the programs they’re tapping for funds.
Meanwhile, the super-strong labor unions take advantage of these pressures, combined with the lack of real accountability for systemic failure, to lock in unheard-of arrangements.
Something has to give. Either taxpayers have to shoulder the burden, worsening the condition at the heart of the problem, or patients begin falling through the cracks… or both.
These are the inevitable results of excessive use of government to control people’s interactions combined with reliance on government to provide services that others are thereby prevented from providing. We see it in RI because the state is small and progressive, but the chronic illness is worsening throughout our entire society.
Featured image by Adhy Savala on Unsplash.
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We’re not supposed to eat meat on Fridays during Lent. However, yesterday was the Solemnity of the Annunciation, which means the rule of abstaining from meat was suspended for the day.
Whether Biden knew of the suspension, we cannot know. Even if he didn’t, this would have been a small transgression (especially compared with his full-throated support for killing unborn babies). It may even have been excused by the likelihood that he genuinely forgot the date, the liturgical season, or the rule.
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