I missed coverage of this over the weekend, but learned about it via a WSJ column this morning.
Jeb Bush really poked the Tea Party interlopers (you know, the ones who call real Republicans RINOs) in the eye. He called illegal immigration, at least in some circumstances, “an act of love.” The Fix quoted at greater length:
Photo by Gage Skidmore
There are means by which we can control our border better than we have. And there should be penalties for breaking the law. But the way I look at this — and I’m going to say this, and it’ll be on tape and so be it. The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn’t come legally, they come to our country because their families — the dad who loved their children — was worried that their children didn’t have food on the table. And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of commitment to your family. I honestly think that that is a different kind of crime that there should be a price paid, but it shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families.
He’s also going after the folks who are so worked up about Common Core:
He said those who oppose the standards support the “status quo,” oppose testing and are worried too much about children’s self-esteem.
“Let me tell you something. In Asia today, they don’t care about children’s self esteem. They care about math, whether they can read – in English – whether they understand why science is important, whether they have the grit and determination to be successful,” Bush said.
“You tell me which society is going to be the winner in this 21st Century: The one that worries about how they feel, or the one that worries about making sure the next generation has the capacity to eat everybody’s lunch?”
See what he did there? He defined the Common Core opponents as touchy-feely types worried about self-esteem — one of those qualities conservatives traditionally despise in liberals.
I like this approach. If he runs, he’ll be offering his party a clear choice between spinning off into the fringes (or at least into a demographic dead end), or remaining a party that can muster majorities across the nation. He seems to think there are enough real Republicans left for the party to choose the latter.
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Would you mind if a homeless family moved in your backyard as an “act of love”?
Bush has zero point zero chance of being the nominee. America doesn’t want another Bush.
I would if they mowed my lawn, grew and picked me some vegetables, and did repair work on my house, all for a wage I could afford.
And then sent the money home to help the family members left behind.
But seriously, folks… Jeb Bush wouldn’t say these things without having good reason to believe he not only can get away with it, but pull together all the people who won elections for his Dad and brother…
Nicely played
Well, quite a few left-wing critics of Common Core can be described as “touchy-feely types worried about self-esteem.” But it’s a lot harder to marginalize Common Core critics than you think; they span the political spectrum, and they include really sharp people like Diane Ravitch. It’s got the support of all the kind of people you think the rest of us should defer to–the Chamber of Commerce, big philanthropy, etc. But there are a lot of legitimate concerns here. Common Core claims to foster “critical thinking,” but they’re only going to “measure” critical thinking with high-stakes, standardized tests? That does not compute. And of course the Right thinks fostering critical thinking is code for teaching students to reject received, eternal truth. And as for the Asian comparison, there’s increasing concern among Asians themselves that their approach places too much emphasis on rote learning. Do we really want to go there? We’ve gone too far down that road already, and despite the propaganda, I have yet to be convinced that Common Core isn’t more of the same top-down, cookie-cutter approach to the messy and particularistic process of real education. Finally, yet again, you see the tiresome notion that whatever you and your friends favor is favored by the “mainstream,” but for no other reason I can discern than that you define yourself as “mainstream”–regardless of whether you really are or not. Do you, like, actually have any evidence than this position can “muster majorities across the nation”? Sorry, but the notion that Jeb Bush must know what he’s doing doesn’t work. Jeb Bush hasn’t run for any kind of public office in twelve years, and the Republican Party has moved well beyond him. It makes far more sense to say that he doesn’t realize that yet.
“Desperate people do desperate things”
~Bird, Stillinger and Associates [ circa 2005]
http://investigatesc.com/ {spit}
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Desperate?s=t
David, I wield no cudgels for Common Core. I’m agnostic on the subject. I just don’t see how people like Sheri Few get so worked up about it. Reminds me of the crusade for phonics a few years back. I didn’t get what was the source of all the emotion…
I was agnostic on the great Common Core debate, but inclined to agree with Jeb Bush until I saw this on Colbert Report: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/04/09/colberts-hilarious-common-core-confusion/
P.S. I ditto Brad Warthen’s sentiments — “I feel sorry for Henry.” He got nailed by the ‘desperates’.
First, it was Modern Math, then No Child Left Behind, and now, Common Core. Our daughter was one of the first to be involved in an open classroom setting when we lived in Virginia. Then, after moving back to SC, she was in the first REACH program locally. But, after all of the innovative ideas and programs, when it came down to the basics, or as the old adage goes, the 3 Rs, Reading, “Riting, and “Rithmetic, are the foundation of her education and the involvement of my wife and me in her school activities, studies, and all of the other things parents should support. We had the same involvement with our son in his studies.
At home, we worked with both to engage them in “critical thinking” and problem solving by encouraging as thorough a thought process as possible. Exploring the possibilities and never turning away from a challenge to an established belief or solution to problems. As a proud parent, it gives me great pleasure to boast that both have earned their MA and our son is working on his doctorate.
Once we decided to enhance the new with a strong infusion of the old and personal involvement, their education was earned by both applying all aspects, not just centering on the latest fad.
I am glad you engaged with your children at home. My parents did, too. It’s probably why we comment on the blog.
What about parents who cannot meaningfully engage with their kids?
Most of their kids are destined for failure no matter how much money you throw at the problem. Always has been, always will be.
The best way to get parents engaged? Promise a $20K reward if their kid graduates from high school. Cheaper than a lifetime of government support.
How the heck are the poorly educated parents supposed to suddenly develop critical thinking skills and the ability to impart them to their kids? Seriously, Doug, dropping $ on the parents isn’t a magical cure!
It is possible that highly trained professionals could help, but we don’t deploy them to troubled kids’ schools. They are busy making sure already advantaged kids do even better!
Unless you can assign one trained professional per student, it’s a waste of time. We already spend double in many cases per student in the worst schools with no impact. You could triple or quadruple it with no impact.
The best thing a parent in a lousy district can do is move.
With what money?
What evidence do you have for your confident assertions as to the futility of spending more on disadvantaged kids? Also I don’t believe the data back your assertion that we spend double per student on the worst schools. I cite Corridor of Shame.
Here’s a very interesting article that compares Clarendon County and Allendale County .
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20130217/PC16/130219297
“Nevertheless, Zais insists that more money is not the answer. He points to Allendale County’s consistently failing schools, which spend the fourth-highest amount per student in the state, $15,790, and get the third-highest amount from the state per student, $7,506. Only McCormick County, at $7,549 per student, and the state’s Charter District, at $7,894, get more state money. By comparison, Charleston County gets $3,836 per student from the state.”
“In its effort to provide for the school district, Allendale already imposes one of the highest property tax rates in the state. But the money from that tax, $4,651 per student, isn’t anywhere near enough to provide for an adequate education. Even with more than $11,000 per student a year in state and federal money, Allendale’s student performance remains near the bottom.”
So Allendale gets more than double the state money of many well performing districts AND gets more federal money AND has high property tax rates. They spend $15,000 per student when other districts spend half as much.
As the article makes clear – it’s not about the money as much as it is about the people who are part of the education process. You can’t buy initiative and effort.
From the Department of Education website:
Per pupil spending 2013
Allendale (an “at risk” school district) : 13,493
Greenwood (an average school district) : 8370
Aiken (an excellent school district) : 7971
How much more does it take per pupil to turn a lousy school district into even an average one? Would another $5000 per student guarantee it? $10,000?
“The best thing a parent in a lousy district can do is move.”
If the source of the problem is that the parent is not engaged – will that solve the problem? If the parent is engaged enough to want to move then chances are they are engaged enough to make the education available even in a “lousy district” more worthwhile.
Since you love data, Doug, what does the data show for how children perform even in lousy districts when the data is disaggregated by socioeconomic level? Do “lousy” districts do as badly with the few kids from higher socioeconomic levels that they have? Does the overall low performance come from the quality of the school itself or the nature of the population?
I know we’ve had this conversation many times. It seems we often can agree that the challenge is in the population served yet your answer seems to be just abandon them – don’t spend money on them because you don’t see a return on the investment. Is that a wrong assessment of your position? Is that really your answer? That cannot be my answer.
I realize that there certainly are variances in quality among schools and districts, and it is the nature of the thing that those involved on opposite sides of the issue tend to gravitate to opposite poles in explaining the problem – The schools want to define the problem to be with the “population” and others say the problem is with the quality of the school itself. The answer is clearly some combination of both. What frustrates me often is that the side that wants to demonize schools completely gets in the way of actually evaluating the true quality of schools and doing something about it. Schools that do need to improve likely are not near as different in quality of actual services delivered than supposed quality schools, but it would be easier for them to improve even more if critics acknowledged the work they are doing with challenging populations first instead of just attacking and demonizing.
But Kathryn makes a very good point – “How the heck are the poorly educated parents supposed to suddenly develop critical thinking skills and the ability to impart them to their kids? Seriously, Doug, dropping $ on the parents isn’t a magical cure!
It is possible that highly trained professionals could help, but we don’t deploy them to troubled kids’ schools.”
From where I sit, this is the crux of the problem and I don’t have a good answer for it but I’ve not heard it really discussed much. The truth is there are high poverty parents that really do care and really are as engaged as they know how to be, but they don’t have the skills to help in the way that is needed even when they are engaged and doing their best. Honestly so much of academic success – especially with what the common core is bringing – comes back to language skills. The basis for strong language skills starts way before schools ever get their hands on kids. High poverty parents, who speak non-standard dialects (both white and black) and have low vocabularies themselves (research clearly shows link between poverty and low vocabulary) and who are affected by cultural differences in the quality and type of conversation that happens around and with very young children, simply do not know how to behave in ways linguistically that give their kids the kind of language skills needed for academic success in a challenging language based system of standards in a dialect different from their own, despite the fact that they care very much and try hard with their children.
I am reading journal articles right now to get CEUs for my speech license. I just came across this statement in the article I am currently reading which supports this point, “Children from low SES backgrounds are at particularly high risk for entering school with weak emergent literacy skills due to factors such as less language input from adults (Hart and Risley, 1995) and limited access to high quality childcare (Lee & Burkam, 2002; Miller, 1998)”. (And to me, one of the key differences in high and low quality child care is the quality of the language input to the child, i.e. education level, vocabulary, and language habits of child care workers).
So that brings up the next point Kathryn made – “It is possible that highly trained professionals could help, but we don’t deploy them to troubled kids’ schools.”
I don’t know how much, if anything, as been done in high poverty populations with training parents of very young children in the ways they talk to and around their child to facilitate language development. I don’t think a whole lot has happened there. If it was me, that is where I’d focus the deployment of highly trained professionals.
I realize that being a speech language pathologist makes me see everything through a language lens, but I really do think it could make a difference. The dialect issue alone is huge to me and I never hear that discussed. We need to be teaching explicit code switching for reading and writing purposes without demonizing the native dialect in the process. The majority of SC students speak a non standard dialect whether it’s poor southern white English or African American Vernacular English or some kind of Spanish, for that matter, and the standardized tests expect reading and writing in the standard dialect. Rural teachers are blind to this themselves often – as they speak it too half the time. I hear teachers saying in conversation things like “This is what he had wrote”. But dialects aren’t bad or wrong nor do they imply low intelligence. They are rule based communication systems. To be a competent speaker of the dialect you grow up hearing implies competent intelligence in order to perceive, assimilate, and use the rules of the language. Dialects are just different and that’s a fact. If we don’t acknowledge and explicitly teach around that, its going to continue to be a problem.
And we aren’t doing it. It is the elephant in the room.
Ok, sorry, I’m gonna get off my soap box now.
I am not demonizing schools. The schools aren’t the problem – the parents are the problem. Spending more money in the schools won’t fix the problem.
The root cause of the issue is people having children they cannot raise and nurture. Everything starts with that. We need to invest more money in educating poor people to avoid having children. We need to have communities send that message on a daily basis to their young people. DON’T HAVE KIDS IF YOU CAN’T AFFORD THEM AND CAN’T RAISE THEM! That should be drummed into their heads BEFORE they reach puberty. The cost to NOT have a kid is ZERO. Or are we to just assume that there is no capacity nor interest within those communities to prevent unwanted pregnancies?
I don’t say abandon the kids who are stuck in the poverty cycle — I just don’t believe that spending more money has shown outcomes that justify it. Spend the money on other things instead… And accept the reality that there are people who are never going to succeed no matter what tools and options you hand to them.
I believe in the carrot versus stick approach to these problems. Offer incentives to parents based on their kids’ achievement. What would have greater impact? Spending $50,000 on a trained professional to try and come in and work with 25 students an hour or two a day or offering that same pot of money as a reward to parents when their kids achieve certain scores on standardized tests? That would also have the added benefit of putting more money back into the community.
OK, I think I understand your point better now. I agree that spending more money on high poverty schools will never solve the problem outright. But removing money from those schools may well cause even further regression. I recognize that the problem is somewhat intractable but I don’t think we should stop trying to find ways to spend the money smarter. There is no silver bullet but we can continue to refine what we are doing and make small improvements that add up over time.
I suppose because I am more of an idealist, I don’t get to this point as quickly as you: “And accept the reality that there are people who are never going to succeed no matter what tools and options you hand to them.”
I do accept that but I think your definition of “succeed” is important too. I can recognize that some will never reach a certain level of success, while still measuring how far they do get and striving for them to get as far as their potential allows – which will give them the best possible quality of life available to them. That has value even if they never “succeed” by certain standards, and it costs money to get them as far as they can go, even if it isn’t all the way.
I get your point about unwanted pregnancy too. I really don’t know what drives those complexities. We probably shouldn’t “assume that there is no capacity nor interest within those communities to prevent unwanted pregnancies?” But we as a society have not found an effective way to tap into them.
I just focus on what I can do.
I <3 scout!
Can we agree that at a bare minimum “success” means being able to live independently of government assistance except for cases of disability? Can it include attaining a high school diploma? Or is the bar lower than that?
Open classroom? That’s so 1970s. You’re dating yourself, Bart…
Yes, I am dating myself and at my age, why not? The grand experiments with education started with open classrooms and from there, almost any radical idea possible was tried to engage students and elevate their desire to learn, especially when their desire was not fueled at home. The lack of parental engagement is not necessarily relegated to any particular socio-economic ethnic demographic but it is spread across a much broader spectrum today than ever before.
Brad, at my age, I have been involved in the process for a very long time and even with the advent of instant communication and information at the fingertips of students, the quality of education and language has degraded to something almost unintelligible at times. The gap between the older generations and the younger when it comes to the use of complete sentences and proper use of words has never been wider than it is now. I truly feel for Scout trying to bridge the language/speech gap now that another element has been introduced, the Hispanic influence that is ever expanding.
George Carlin was one of my favorite entertainers because he advocated the use of language in its purest form. One example was the way the expression, “shell shock” went to “battle fatigue” and ultimately evolved into PTSD. There was a purity to the expression “shell shock” because it brought to the imagination an image of war that PTSD or “battle fatigue” simply could not convey. My Uncle Harvey suffered from “shell shock” in WWII and never recovered.
When I am walking through the shopping center or eating at a local restaurant and overhear conversations within different ethnic groups, including Caucasian, at times it is as if they are speaking a foreign language, nothing resembling the English language I learned during my years in public schools. The slaughter of the language is commonplace and if one makes a negative comment about it to an offender, in too many instances, an automatic charge of racism or bigotry is leveled. After trying several times to understand some speech patterns and word pronunciations to no avail, now I simply walk away.
One of the positive attributes of this blog is the fact that all of the comments are usually very clear and understandable and Kathryn has taken on the role of “language monitor”, thankfully. There will always be mistakes but they are usually attributed to hurriedly typing a comment and not subjected to spelling and language checking.
There are several excellent communicators who frequently post here and I do enjoy reading their comments whether I agree with them or not.
Soap box back to you Scout.
Alas I am outnumbered again. >Gang-stalking<
http://www.lulu.com/us/en/shop/a-k-forwood/gang-stalking-and-mind-control-the-destruction-of-society-through-community-spying-networks/paperback/product-15660096.html
I heart you, Win Ward. Edwin Coulter Ward III. Rouwwwahhh! Swak!
Mmmmmmmmm
Bush III is a fantasy. Whose, I cannot be certain.
If chosen by the “Establishmen” Republichans, the wealthy elites, it will surely be because they understand (after selecting Dole, McCain and Romney) it will result in Hillary’s election buy default. That means, in a calculous most do not understand, that they assess Democratich apparitchiks with a better chance of delivering their goals at this juncture:
1. Abolition of (the separate sovereignty of our 50 united states.
2. Novation of the U.S. Constitution to a U.N.’s model for aone-world governance.
3. Implementation of the lowest common denominator for human rights among members of the U.N. Security Council. HINT: not the E.U.
4. A twenty-first century version of feudalism, in which most citizens immediately become serfs, and in which transitional helpers gradually become laborers.
No, thank you!
In some ways, the Common Core debate is kind of like the healthcare debate. There is a whole contingent out there who are against it simply because it is Common. In their eyes any Common standard is bad. Because their ideal is local control of education, they think having something Common equates to some kind of imposed mind control.
I honestly don’t relate to this idea at all. How can they expect the education their child gets to be relevant in a global economy without some effort to make sure there is a standard that is relevant beyond local borders. We’ve tried individual state standards. It was a mess. It’s very hard to know what being competent in one state means when compared to another.
So I agree we need good challenging common standards. My issue with Common Core is in the specifics. (Just like healthcare, there is a contingent that says we need a healthcare law but this specific one has problems.) I believe these particular standards needs some tweaking, especially at the lower end. They have striven for higher order thinking so much that anything basic or foundational is almost a bad word. They push the bounds of what is developmentally appropriate in 5k and they skip the foundational skills needed to get to those higher levels. And in some schools the pressure is such that you aren’t allowed to teach it if its not in the standards. I think it was a good and valiant effort but they started from the top down and I don’t think they had a lot of input from early childhood/elementary professionals.
We just need to keep working on it.
Scout,
Great observation and conclusion. The problem with “great” ideas is that all too often, they are initiated and put into practice from the top down and the real work is always at the foundation level. Without a solid foundation, no program or building will stand the test of time.