From TruthDig
By Bill Boyarsky

One of the worst casualties of the Iraq war and the Wall Street failures is the U.S. public school system, which is central to the nation’s economic, intellectual and social health. With financial resources being consumed, education cuts are on the way.

We’ll be paying for this for many years. Poorly educated young people will be unable to get good jobs. We’ll lose our intellectual capital. For that, we can thank Wall Street and its anti-regulation political friends. Thank you, John McCain and President George W. Bush. And thank you both for the war.

Sen. Barack Obama has some pretty good ideas about education, but he might as well forget them. His education proposals would cost at least $18 billion in federal funds. When Jim Lehrer, moderator of last week’s presidential campaign debate, asked him what would happen to all his plans in the wake of the Wall Street bailout, he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer.

The importance of the question was clear last week when I visited with several high school teachers at Los Angeles High School.

The school is located between the poor neighborhoods east of the city’s downtown and the more affluent neighborhoods toward the west. Its student body of about 3,000 draws from them all. Some come from comfortable homes with professional mothers and fathers. Others live in crowded one-bedroom apartments with two underpaid working-immigrant parents who may or may not speak English.

I walked through the halls with my friend John Ogden, a veteran Los Angeles High School teacher who had set up my meeting with the teachers. As he greeted a colleague and then a student, I felt that I had entered a community—a complicated one, I knew, but still a community united in a common purpose: education.

Read more Public Schools

From The S.F. Chronicle
By Leon Panetta

Diversity in America is as old as the nation itself. As the home to citizens of more ethnic backgrounds and religious faiths than any other nation on earth, America is not sustained by the same type of cultural unity as most European or Asian nations. So what holds us together? For well over two centuries, the values of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution have served to unify Americans of every background: e pluribus unum. In signing the Constitution on this day in 1787, our founders built America on the values that have sustained us to this day, the ideals of self-government, liberty, and equality - all in pursuit of a more perfect union.

Yet these ideals are not automatically renewed in each generation. In the words of education reformed John Dewey, “democracy must be reborn in every generation, and education is its midwife.”

Dewey was not alone in understanding schools as the primary means of ensuring that Americans have the civic knowledge and virtue necessary for responsible citizenship. Nearly forty state constitutions cite the civic mission of schools as the reason for the establishment of their public school systems.

Despite this original mission, over the past generation the number of civics classes offered to youth has been in steady decline. Until the 1960s it was common for students to take three civics courses focused on citizen responsibility in a democracy, but today most schools only offer a single, often optional course for seniors about to graduate high school.

This decline undermines the health of a democracy premised on citizen participation. On the last national civics assessment, released in 2006, two-thirds of students scored below proficient and less than a fifth of high school seniors could explain how citizen participation benefits democracy.

Read more Values

From The Seattle PI
By Barack Obama

Every four years, we hear candidates talk about the vital importance of education. But like energy independence and health care, the urgency of bringing our schools into the 21st century has been talked to death in Washington, D.C. That failure to act has put our nation in jeopardy.

Our kids and our country can’t afford four more years of neglect and indifference. In our global economy, it’s not just that a world-class education is essential for workers to compete and win, it’s that an educated work force is essential for America to compete and win — because countries that out-educate us today will outcompete us tomorrow.

This election is our chance to move beyond the old arguments of left and right and take meaningful, practical steps to build an education system worthy of our children and our future. My opponent, John McCain, has talked about the need for change and reform in Washington. But in the nearly three decades he’s spent there, he has not done one thing to truly improve the quality of public education in our country. Instead, he marched with the ideologues in his party in opposing efforts to hire more teachers, fully fund No Child Left Behind and make college more affordable. He even called for closing the Department of Education.

John McCain doesn’t understand that our success as a nation depends on our success in education — I do. That’s why last November, I laid out a plan to invest in early childhood education, fix No Child Left Behind and finally put a college degree within reach for anyone who wants one by giving a $4,000 tax credit to any middle-class student willing to serve his or her community or country.

But that alone won’t prepare students for the 21st century knowledge economy. We need a new vision for a 21st century education — one where we aren’t just supporting existing schools but spurring innovation; where we’re not just investing more money but demanding more reform; and where we expect all children not only to graduate high school but to graduate college and get a good-paying job.

Read more Education

From The Baltimore Sun
By Cynthia Tucker

Lipstick. Pig. Palin. Pathetic.

OK, now that I have your attention, can we talk about something important?

I know it’s hard to focus on anything but the dumb dust-ups that emanate furiously from the campaign trail - especially since the 24-hour “news” channels insist on elevating every meaningless contretemps - but we ought to try to have a serious discussion, anyway.

As long as motherhood and family values and teen births are already part of the conversation, can’t we spend just a few minutes talking about family planning? If bipartisanship and cooperation are the new watchwords, can’t we discuss something most of us agree on - contraception? If change is really in the air, can’t we change our stubborn refusal to do the one thing that would further reduce the abortion rate?

Abortions have been declining for the past three decades. In 2005, the last year for which figures were available, the U.S. abortion rate dropped to 19.4 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15-44, the lowest rate since 1974, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that advocates family planning. The actual number also declined to a total of 1.2 million in 2005, 25 percent below the all-time high of 1.6 million abortions in 1990, according to the same Guttmacher survey.

Read more Pushing Contraception

From The LA Times
By Cory Booker, John Doerr and Ted Mitchell

In the summer of 1918, as tuberculosis, bubonic plague and a flu pandemic threatened America’s newly crowded cities, the chemist Charles Holmes Herty took a walk through New York City with his colleague J.R. Bailey. Herty posed a question: Suppose Bailey discovered an exceptionally powerful medicine. What institution would allow him to take his breakthrough from lab experiment to widespread cure?

Bailey replied, “I don’t know.”

That alarming answer moved Herty to propose a visionary solution — an institution that would encourage research and development throughout the country. It would find its value, Herty said, “in the stimulus which it gives” to research, thought and discovery by practitioners in the field.

Nearly a century later, that vision stands as the National Institutes of Health. Its record, from deciphering and mapping the human genome to finding the source of AIDS, leaves no doubt about the NIH’s ability to stimulate innovation.

Today, the shame of our cities isn’t bubonic plague; it’s ignorance. In our urban areas, only one child in five is proficient in reading. On international tests, we rank behind the Czech Republic and Latvia; our high school graduation rate barely makes the top 20 worldwide. As columnist David Brooks has noted, educational progress has been so slow that “America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited.” Under-education may not end lives the way infectious diseases do, but it just as surely wastes them. For all the hard work of our good teachers, our system is failing to keep pace with the demands of a new century.

Read more Education

From Wired
By Brandon Keim

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin wants creationism taught in science classes.

In a 2006 gubernatorial debate, the soon-to-be governor of Alaska said of evolution and creation education, “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

(Read about Palin’s views on ANWAR and polar bears on our sister blog, Threat Level.)

Asked by the Anchorage Daily News whether she believed in evolution, Palin declined to answer, but said that “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class.”

“I’m not going to pretend I know how all this came to be,” she said.

The battle between evolution and creationism — specifically, Christian creationism — in U.S. classrooms dates back to the 1925 Scopes trial, when a Tennessee court banned the teaching of evolution. Since then, state and federal courts have repeatedly rejected so-called creation science in public schools, calling it religion rather than science.

The latest courtroom defeat came in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, when the superficially religion-neutral theory of intelligent design was classified as religious creationism. The Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that teaching creationism violated the separation of church and state.

Nevertheless, pro-creationism education initiatives driven by Christian conservatives have flourished, and defenders of evolution — and, more broadly, scientific integrity — worry that Palin’s pick will give momentum to this church-over-state push.

Read more Creationism

From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

Policies contrived to richly reward law school deans and professors have been foisted on law schools at the expense of their students by the accreditors of the American Bar Association(ABA), which holds the power of accreditation over nearly all of the nation’s 200 law schools.

“Because of accreditation policies designed to ensure continued and increasing economic and professional benefits for professors and deans…the common man either will not gain admission to law school in the first place, or will be saddled with so much debt (upon graduation) that a good chunk of his future will be a constant struggle,” write co-authors Lawrence Velvel and Kurt Olson in their new book “The Gathering Peasants’ Revolt in American Legal Education”(Doukathsan).

In complicity with the Law School Admissions Council(LSAC) and the American Association of Law Schools(AALS), the ABA’s Section of Legal Education make up the “Big Three” of the legal teaching profession, the authors write. And they have “put and kept in place a system to obtain ever more tuition money and professional perquisites for law schools and law faculty, with as little tuition monies as possible going to the ‘undeserving’ university of which the school is but a part,” Velvel and Olson write.

“The three groups (have) coordinated their activities, there was vast and continuing overlap in their leaders, with many of the same persons being leaders in either two or all three of the groups,” Velvel and Olson write. “The Big Three accomplished their mercenary purposes; the losers were students (that paid the bills through their soaring tuition), minorities (that were priced out of attending law schools) and the public” (that wound up paying more for legal services).

Velvel and Olson write the Big Three have turned law schools “into institutions that serve only the upper middle class, and the upper class, while knowingly largely keeping out minorities, the lower middle class, the poor, immigrants and people in mid life. They are intent on keeping the legal academy and the legal profession the preserve of the white and the wealthy.” Read the rest of this entry »

From The Boston Globe
By Ellen Goodman

Once more we prepare to honor our foremothers by celebrating the anniversary of the passage of women’s suffrage. Each year, in advance of Aug. 26, our one-woman committee gathers to hand out the Equal Rites Awards to those stalwarts who have done the most in the past year to set back the cause of women.

What to say of the last 12 months? This is the year girls finally caught up with boys in math achievement. And the year women finally achieved equality with men in job losses. This year we had the first serious female contender for the White House. And all she will end up with at the convention is a roll call vote.

But enough of all that. The envelopes please.

We begin with the highly competitive Blind Justice Award. This usually goes to some worthy American, but a Russian judge swept ahead of the pack when he ruled against a woman’s charge of sexual harassment. “If we had no sexual harassment,” he said, “we would have no children.” We send this judge the blindfold to use as a gag.

Can he lend it to a French colleague? In Lille, a judge granted an annulment to a Muslim groom because his bride was not a virgin, “single and chaste.” For this, he wins the Taliban Wannabe Prix, with a side order of freedom fries and our hope that he will not permit stoning on the Champs-Élysées.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, the Fashion Victim Award goes to Wrangler Jeans for ads that display women as half-dressed corpses. Ah, yes, homicide is so chic! Dead is the new black! Our prize is a sword thrust through their profit margin.

Read more Giant Leap

From AlterNet
By Terrence McNally

“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” Barack Obama finally said it.

Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right’s stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them — and us — unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.

American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes “the jury is still out” on evolution.

Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on “The Colbert Report.” Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn’t actually list the commandments.

This stuff would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

In the 2004 election, nearly 70 percent of Bush supporters believed the United States had “clear evidence” that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda; a third believed weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; and more than a third that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion, according to the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The political right and allied culture warriors actively ignore evidence and encourage misinformation. To motivate their followers, they label intelligent and informed as “elite,” implying that ignorance is somehow both valuable and under attack. Susan Jacoby confronts our “know-nothingism” — current and historical — in her new book, The Age of American Unreason.

Read more Anti-Intellectualism

From The Boston Globe
By Ellen Goodman

Let me begin by raising a glass of champagne to the official closing of the math gap. It turns out that girls do not lack the math gene. Nor are they math-phobic. Nor is there any “intrinsic” difference - thank you, Larry Summers - between the abilities of girls and boys to succeed in the numbers business. There’s no reason at all for inequality. In fact, there’s no longer inequality.

A new study of the math scores of 7 million students in 10 states shows that girls are now on a par with boys. How many years has it been since protesters stuck a sock in Barbie’s mouth for complaining that “math class is tough”? Girls have gotten to parity the new-fashioned way. By taking more math classes.

This comes just in time for our young math whizzes to figure out a harder puzzle. There is another gender gap closing, this time in the workplace. After decades spent pursuing equality in wages and work, women have finally achieved it - ta da - in job loss.

A report shepherded through Congress by Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York shows that since the 2001 recession, women have lost jobs and withdrawn from the workplace at the same rate as men. More to the point, they’ve remained out for the same reasons as men: layoffs, downsizing, outsourcing, and wage stagnation.

Needless to say, this is not the sort of equality we were looking for. But if there is any good news, it’s that this report may finally debunk the idea that droves of women are “opting out” of the workplace for a very different reason: full-time motherhood.

Read more Equality