Albert B Fernandez's List: politics

• Rise Above
• Movement

• Neither our pundits nor our political class may be prepared to acknowledge as much, but in the short time in which Trump has held the presidency, he has done his country more “essential service” than the last three presidents combined. Liberating the nation from the regulatory tutelage in which his statist predecessor bound it, reforming the tax code, positioning the United States to attain economic-growth rates of 3 to 4 percent, appointing Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court (with Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation pending in September), appointing federal judges across the country who will uphold (not rewrite) our laws, securing our hitherto unsecured southern border with Mexico, putting China on notice that their unfair trade practices will no longer fly, and initiating talks to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, with or without the cooperation of Kim Jong-un—these are all steps in the right direction.

• • CF Gladwell's Blink

• Florida governor Rick Scott. Citing the miserable economy, Scott argued that precious state tax dollars should go to support science and tech studies, not “educate more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology.”
• University of Connecticut president Susan Herbst
• Not only do the humanities teach “critical t
• ,” says Herbst, they also “teach us how
• we’re supposed to live.
• hinkin
• An FDR brain-truster, he went on to become a law professor at Columbia. In a 1960 speech, he took American universities to task for having “run away” from their duty to teach, as Herbst puts it, “how we’re supposed to live.
• Up until the ’60s, most colleges and universities required all students, regardless of major, to study the great works of philosophy, literature, politics, art, and music. If you examine the course catalogues of today’s schools, you’ll find
• r a common core curriculum
• that fewer than 2 percent of them still offe
• Western Civilization survey courses, which were a staple up until the ’60s, are today “virtually extinct” across the country.
• Moral and cultural relativism are the thin gruel that the universities feed their students’ hungry souls.
• Academically Adrift, found that 45 percent of the students it surveyed showed little improvement in their critical-thinking capacities after two years of college. After four years, 36 percent continued to show little improvement.

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• . Confronted with a New York Times report claiming that blacks are suffering from racial discrimination in mortgage lending, he begins his detective work with the observation that markets tend to work against racial discrimination rather effectively: “Empirically, it is very hard to find people who are willing to lose hard cash, in order to discriminate. Racists may prefer their own group to others, but they prefer themselves most of all.”
• But of course our American public orthodoxies are not enforced by an Inquisition but rather a Disinquisition: Thou shalt not notice certain uncomfortable things
• You will not be surprised to find that Asians are approved for loans more often than whites are, and that they are offered expensive subprime loans less often. “Does that mean that whites were being discriminated against?” Sowell asks. “Or are statistics taken seriously only when they back up some preconception that is politically correct?
• When you are walking down a dark street at night and you see a shadowy figure in an alley up ahead, do you judge him as an individual—or do you cross the street and pass on the opposite side? Judging him as an individual could cost you your life….Recently, a black, middle-class professional wrote of his resentment when he was asked to pay for his meal in advance in an Asian-owned restaurant—especially after he noted that a white couple that came in was not asked to do the same. Was this arbitrary racism or self-protection based on experience in this neighborhood? That was the key question he did not ask—nor do most journalistic or even scholarly studies.
• “the vision of the anointed”
• reality is not optional
• chronicling the double standards in admissions (and, in some cases, in grading) that have undermined blacks’ education in the name of helping them.
• fascinating disquisition on the geography and natural environment of Africa, in which he argues that such factors as the lack of navigable interior waterways, the steepness of its rivers, the lack of pack animals due to insect-born disease, the lack of natural ports and harbors on the continent’s smooth coastline, other interior barriers to travel, the resulting isolation of group from group, and linguistic fragmentation (Africa, he points out, has 10 percent of the world’s people and a third of its languages) explain much of the continent’s socioeconomic backwardness.
• But what do you say to the welfare mother or to the ghetto youth?” I cannot imagine what would have led anybody to think that I was writing handbooks for welfare mothers or ghetto youths, or that either would be reading them, if I were.

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• Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey respondents who’d gone to college did only slightly less badly than those who hadn’t. Among members of less-educated groups, brighter people tend to respond more frequently to online surveys, so it’s likely that our sample of non-college-educated respondents is more enlightened than the larger group they represent. Still, the fact that a college education showed almost no effect—at least for those inclined to take such a survey—strongly suggests that the classroom is no great corrective for myside bias.

• Unfortunately, Brill is completely ignorant of a vast body of research literature about teaching. Economists agree that teachers are the most important influence on student test scores inside the school, but the influence of schools and teachers is dwarfed
• by nonschool factors, most especially by family income. The reformers like to say that poverty doesn’t make a difference, but they are wrong. Poverty matters. The achievement gap between children of affluence and children of poverty starts long before the first day of school. It reflects the nutrition and medical care available to pregnant women and their children, as well as the educational level of the children’s parents, the vocabulary they hear, and the experiences to which they are exposed.
• Every testing program shows a tight correlation between family income and test scores, whether it is the SAT, the ACT, the federal testing program, or state tests.
• Like Brill, she is angry at the school system, but for very different reasons. What she experienced firsthand was “grossly underfunded schools,” with overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating and mouse-ridden buildings, and dirty bathrooms with no toilet paper or soap. Unlike Brill, she is critical of the fact that suburban schools “spend double, sometimes triple, the amount of money per student that New York City spends” and that schools generally continue to be racially segregated. Far from detesting the union at her school, she was grateful that it was there to fight for better conditions and to represent her when she had to deal with an abusive principal
• When test scores become the goal of education by which students and schools are measured, then students in the bottom half—who will inevitably include disproportionate numbers of children who are poor, children with disabilities, children who barely speak English—will be left far behind, stigmatized by their low scores.

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