By Mike Appleton, Guest Blogger
“We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.
-The Southern Manifesto, Cong. Rec., 84th Cong. 2d Session, Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956)
‘This was an activist court that you saw today. Anytime the Supreme Court renders something constitutional that is clearly unconstitutional, that undermines the credibility of the Supreme Court. I do believe the court’s credibility was undermined severely today.”
-Michele Bachmann (R. Minn.), June 26 2012
Most people are familiar with the opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al., 349 U.S. 483 (1954), in which a unanimous Supreme Court summarily outlawed public school segregation by tersely declaring, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” 349 U.S. at 495. But many people do not know that Brown involved a consolidation of cases from four states. The “et al.” in the style refers to decisions on similar facts in Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia. And the response of Virginia to the ruling in Brown provides an interesting comparison with the actions leading to the current government shutdown.
In 1951 the population of Prince Edward County, Virginia was approximately 15,000, more than half of whom were African-American. The county maintained two high schools to accommodate 386 black students and 346 white students. Robert R. Moton High School lacked adequate science facilities and offered a more restricted curriculum than the high school reserved for white students. It had no gym, showers or dressing rooms, no cafeteria and no restrooms for teachers. Students at Moton High were even required to ride in older school buses.
Suit was filed in federal district court challenging the Virginia constitutional and statutory provisions mandating segregated public schools. Although the trial court agreed that the school board had failed to provide a substantially equal education for African-American students, it declined to invalidate the Virginia laws, concluding that segregation was not based “upon prejudice, on caprice, nor upon any other measureless foundation,” but reflected “ways of life in Virginia” which “has for generations been a part of the mores of the people.” Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 103 F. Supp. 337, 339 (E.D. Va. 1952). Instead, the court ordered the school board to proceed with the completion of existing plans to upgrade the curriculum, physical plant and buses at Moton High School. When the plaintiffs took an appeal from the decision, the Democratic machine that had for many years controlled Virginia politics under the firm hand of Sen. Harry Byrd had little reason to believe that “ways of life” that had prevailed since the end of the Reconstruction era would soon be declared illegal.
When the Brown decision was announced, the reaction in Virginia was shock, disbelief and anger. Reflecting the prevailing attitudes, the Richmond News Leader railed against “the encroachment of the Federal government, through judicial legislation, upon the reserved powers of the States.” The Virginia legislature adopted a resolution of “interposition” asserting its right to “interpose” between unconstitutional federal mandates and local authorities under principles of state sovereignty. And Sen. Byrd organized a campaign of opposition that came to be known as “Massive Resistance.”
In August of 1954 a commission was appointed to formulate a plan to preserve segregated schools. Late in 1955, it presented its recommendations, including eliminating mandatory school attendance, empowering local school boards to assign students to schools and creating special tuition grants to enable white students to attend private schools. Enabling legislation was quickly adopted and “segregation academies” began forming around the state. Subsequent legislation went even further by prohibiting state funding of schools that chose to integrate.
In March of 1956, 19 senators and 77 house members from 11 southern states signed what is popularly known as “The Southern Manifesto,” in which they declared, “Even though we constitute a minority in the present Congress, we have full faith that a majority of the American people believe in the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness and will in time demand that the reserved rights of the States and of the people be made secure against judicial usurpation.”
Throughout this period the Prince Edward County schools remained segregated, but when various court rulings invalidated Virginia’s various attempts to avoid integration, the school board took its final stand. It refused to authorize funds to operate any schools in the district, and all public schools in the county were simply closed, and remained closed from 1959 to 1964.
There are striking similarities between Sen. Byrd’s failed plan of Massive Resistance and Republican efforts to prevent implementation of the Affordable Care Act. There was widespread confidence among conservatives that the Supreme Court would declare the Act unconstitutional. When that did not occur, legislators such as Michele Bachmann, quoted above, attempted to deny the legitimacy of the Court’s ruling. Brent Bozell went further, denouncing Chief Justice Roberts as “a traitor to his own philosophy,” hearkening back to the days when southern roadsides were replete with billboards demanding the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren.
The House of Representatives has taken over 40 votes to repeal the ACA, quixotic efforts pursued for reasons known only to John Boehner and his colleagues. And in accordance with the Virginia legislative model, the House has attempted to starve the ACA by eliminating it from funding bills. Following the failure of these efforts, Republicans have elected to pursue the path ultimately taken by the school board of Prince Edward County and have shut down the government.
Even the strategy followed by Republicans is largely a southern effort. Approximately 60% of the Tea Party Caucus is from the South. Nineteen of the 32 Republican members of the House who have been instrumental in orchestrating the shutdown are from southern states. It is hardly surprising therefore, that the current impasse is characterized by the time-honored southern belief in nullification theory as a proper antidote to disfavored decisions by a congressional majority.
In reflecting upon the experience of Virginia many years later, former Gov. Linwood Holton noted, “Massive resistance … served mostly to exacerbate emotions arrayed in a lost cause.” Republicans would do well to ponder the wisdom in that observation.
Civics began leaving the curriculum back in the 80’s/90’s. It was folded into history curriculum in the school districts the stand alone civics class was eliminated. When civics was taught on its own, it was 7th or 8th grade. I had it in 8th grade. By the 2000’s civics was pretty much gone as a stand alone class. No Child Left Behind was the knockout punch for the few schools that still had civics. As someone alluded, trips to DC have now come to be the civics class. Teach a few “units”[God do I hate that industry term], and then put the kids on a bus or plane to DC for 2 nights where they get to see our govt. during the day, and try and get laid, drink and smoke in the hotel @ night. I’ve taken a couple of them!! However, I did more than “teach few units” of civics. I taught civics almost daily, just working it in often to history.
Teaching 8th grade on 9/11 was one of the most “teachable moments”[hate that one too] about history and govt. Having worked in govt. and law for decades, I had real world experience to relate. Real world experience is valued almost everywhere but w/ education industrialists, and some circles here. If you have balls, you can teach a lot of civics. You just need to thumb your nose @ some of the horseshit history books and chapters. I always had parents on my side by treating them, and their children, w/ respect. So, administrators, for the most part, left me alone. Maybe some of you can visualize that.
Here’s the sad part of this. This is not a left right, Dem Republican issue. Parents, business people and almost all folks, of all stripes, lament the loss of civics and the effect it has had on our culture. The one group that doesn’t speak much about it, except political lip service, are politicians. They could make it happen w/ one vote! I guess they prefer to keep our kids barefoot and pregnant. My kids were taught civics around the supper table.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Fox News
October 19, 2013
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/lies-damned-lies-and-fox-news/?_r=0
The other day Sean Hannity featured some Real Americans telling tales of how they have been hurt by Obamacare. So Eric Stern, who used to work for Brian Schweitzer, had a bright idea: he actually called Hannity’s guests, to get the details.
Sure enough, the businessman who claimed that Obamacare was driving up his costs, forcing him to lay off workers, only has four employees — meaning that Obamacare has no effect whatsoever on his business. The two families complaining about soaring premiums haven’t actually checked out what’s on offer, and Stern estimates that they would in fact see major savings.
You have to wonder about the mindset of people who go on national TV to complain about how they’re suffering from a program based on nothing but what they think they heard somewhere. You might also wonder about what kind of alleged news show features such people without any check on their bona fides. But then again, consider the network.
*****
Inside the Fox News lie machine: I fact-checked Sean Hannity on Obamacare
UPDATE I re-reported a Fox News segment on Obamacare — it was appallingly easy to see how it misleads the audience
By Eric Stern
10/18/13
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/18/inside_the_fox_news_lie_machine_i_fact_checked_sean_hannity_on_obamacare/
Excerpt:
I happened to turn on the Hannity show on Fox News last Friday evening. “Average Americans are feeling the pain of Obamacare and the healthcare overhaul train wreck,” Hannity announced, “and six of them are here tonight to tell us their stories.” Three married couples were neatly arranged in his studio, the wives seated and the men standing behind them, like game show contestants.
As Hannity called on each of them, the guests recounted their “Obamacare” horror stories: canceled policies, premium hikes, restrictions on the freedom to see a doctor of their choice, financial burdens upon their small businesses and so on.
“These are the stories that the media refuses to cover,” Hannity interjected.
But none of it smelled right to me. Nothing these folks were saying jibed with the basic facts of the Affordable Care Act as I understand them. I understand them fairly well; I have worked as a senior adviser to a governor and helped him deal with the new federal rules.
I decided to hit the pavement. I tracked down Hannity’s guests, one by one, and did my own telephone interviews with them.
First I spoke with Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C. He and his wife Michelle had lamented to Hannity that because of Obamacare, they can’t grow their construction business and they have kept their employees below a certain number of hours, so that they are part-timers.
Obamacare has no effect on businesses with 49 employees or less. But in our brief conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he has only four employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? “Well,” he said, “I haven’t been forced to do so, it’s just that I’ve chosen to do so. I have to deal with increased costs.” What costs? And how, I asked him, is any of it due to Obamacare? There was a long pause, after which he said he’d call me back. He never did.
There is only one Obamacare requirement that applies to a company of this size: workers must be notified of the existence of the “healthcare.gov” website, the insurance exchange. That’s all.
Next I called Allison Denijs. She’d told Hannity that she pays over $13,000 a year in premiums. Like the other guests, she said she had recently gotten a letter from Blue Cross saying that her policy was being terminated and a new, ACA-compliant policy would take its place. She says this shows that Obama lied when he promised Americans that we could keep our existing policies.
Allison’s husband left his job a few years ago, one with benefits at a big company, to start his own business. Since then they’ve been buying insurance on the open market, and are now paying around $1,100 a month for a policy with a $2,500 deductible per family member, with hefty annual premium hikes. One of their two children is not covered under the policy. She has a preexisting condition that would require purchasing additional coverage for $600 a month, which would bring the family’s grand total to around $20,000 a year.
I asked Allison if she’d shopped on the exchange, to see what a plan might cost under the new law. She said she hadn’t done so because she’d heard the website was not working. Would she try it out when it’s up and running? Perhaps, she said. She told me she has long opposed Obamacare, and that the president should have focused on tort reform as a solution to bringing down the price of healthcare.
I tried an experiment and shopped on the exchange for Allison and Kurt. Assuming they don’t smoke and have a household income too high to be eligible for subsidies, I found that they would be able to get a plan for around $7,600, which would include coverage for their uninsured daughter. This would be about a 60 percent reduction from what they would have to pay on the pre-Obamacare market.
Fox News Planted False Story To Burn Reporter
The Huffington Post
By Jack Mirkinson
Posted: 10/24/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/fox-news-fake-story-folkenflik_n_4155501.html
David Folkenflik’s new book on Rupert Murdoch is the gift that keeps on giving.
The media world has been buzzing over a string of scoops contained in “Murdoch’s World,” the NPR reporter’s account of the inner workings of the mogul’s media empire.
The latest, which the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple flagged on Thursday, deals with the notorious PR department at Fox News. The network’s press office has developed a fearsome reputation for bullying, blacklisting and dirty tricks. Folkenflik recounted one particularly bruising episode involving Matthew Flamm, a reporter for Crain’s New York who was writing a story about CNN’s ratings success in 2008.
Flamm then received a hot tip from a producer at the network: Bill O’Reilly was going to anchor some of the channel’s primary election coverage. Giving such a high-profile job to a highly opinionated man is a very big deal, and Flann jumped at the tip, only to find Fox News publicly laughing the story off when he published it.
From the book:
“What the hell had happened? Flamm called the producer at Fox who had given him the errant tip. She was incredulous when he finally reached her. Who are you? she asked him coldly. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Panicked, the reporter sent an email to the Hotmail account from which he had received the original scoop. It bounced back. The account had been shut down. As Flamm and his editors conceded to associates, they should have treated the email as a tip rather than a confirmation. A former Fox News staffer knowledgeable about the incident confirmed to me they had been set up.”
That being said … I just remembered that I must go pick up my youngest grandchild from pre-school … we are then going to come home and do our nails and “make-up”. She’s a girly-girl.
Later
Elaine,
Well, we are getting older … maybe I just think I told it … 😉
Tony C.,
Very interesting concept … can you imagine the kind of society we’d have if that were our public education system?
Silly question … of course you can.
Blouise,
I don’t recall reading that story about your mother-in-law before.
Gene,
On that trip the children are required to take pictures and prepare a photo/essay album which is turned in for a grade. That essay became much easier to do with the advent of digital cameras and cell phones.
I have helped in the preparation of 7 such reports starting with my oldest daughter in 1984. The next to youngest grandchild did hers in 2006 and took a lot of pictures of guys with guns on the roofs of D.C. buildings … most of them would wave.
Blouise,
I fear for education today–and I feel sorry for children who are spending valuable class time learning how to take “fill-in-the-bubble” tests. School reform was taking all the joy out of teaching for me–and it is taking all the fun/joy from learning for children.
It sounds as if your mother-in-law was a superb teacher. I’m sure the memory of that week spent at Hale Farm will stay with her students all through their lives.
Gene: I actually believe in complete individualization in education, I subscribe to a “mastery” model of learning that is self-paced, ungraded and age and IQ independent. Here is my plan:
The idea is you have a segment to complete, that the average child can learn in 4 weeks. Tests are devised to see if you mastered the segment; you can take them at any time, even at the beginning of the segment. The questions are changed and randomized for every test.
When you score 100% on the segment test (or depending on the segment, perhaps 95%) you get the next segment. If you don’t, your test is reviewed to find the flaw in your understanding, that is retaught, and when you demonstrate you can answer those questions correctly, you retake the entire segment test. Teachers are trained in the segment concepts, and a student can leave the top end range of one teacher’s expertise and graduate to the bottom end range of the next teacher’s expertise.
It is “ungraded” because there are no letter grades, the only grade that counts is 100%. It is also “ungraded” in the sense that we don’t need first, second, third grade, the kid has 40 segments to finish on “arithmetic” and is on #28. That might be fast or slow for their age. Arithmetic is a pre-req for 20 segments of Algebra, or 20 segments of (optional) Basic Geometry. The kid graduates when they have completed a certain number of overall segments (like 750), and have also finished a minimum number of segments in required topics (e.g. the last 10 segments of arithmetic might be optional, 30 is the minimum. Writing has a minimum of 30, but 38 if you want to take Creative Writing, and so on.)
It is my experience that almost all misunderstandings of a topic by a student can be traced back to fundamental misunderstandings in their past. Of the meaning of a word or term of art, or the intent of a procedure, or something, and usually one they don’t realize is screwing up their thinking. Once the past error is corrected, and the domino ramifications are explained, the problem usually disappears. This fixes that problem at inception (except for lucky guesses).
I know that would be more manpower intensive (teacher wise), but I also think kids would develop further in a shorter amount of time, be less bored and more engaged, and if a teacher knows their segments they could multi-task. Also, no rote homework grading! Although the segment test results might require some investigative thought.
I have used this “mastery” approach in tutoring a handful of children experiencing difficulty, and it works. It is also the approach I take with my own education, and it has worked there as well.
Gene,
In this district it has always been 8th grade and combined with a four day class trip to D.C.
Elaine, (I’m sure I mentioned this before to you)
My mother-in-law used to take her 4th grade class for a week to Hale Farm and Village where they held class in a one room school house, wrote on slate with chalk, pumped water for drinking, used outhouses, played games with hoops, and sat on stools wearing dunce hats for misbehaving. The girls wore bonnets and the boys wore suspenders and they brought their lunches in buckets which were also used for drinking water from the pump.
Paul Revere rode through on his horse to stop and warn the kids about the British coming, George Washington showed up accompanied by a drummer and fifer, and they went to the old courthouse on the property to watch an reenactment of the signing of the Declaration.
The children spent all year learning and preparing for this late spring adventure. They arrived at school every morning of that week very early, boarded the bus and road to Hale’s and they returned every evening. Parents fought to get their kids in her class. (I always went along as teacher’s helper)
Blouise,
Civics was 7th grade course work when I took it.
nick,
Yes, I read your 9:12a post and thought we all were discussing our philosophies which is why I was flummoxed by your later posts, which you have now explained as in response to some sort of injury you feel OS inflicted on you.
Bron,
More to the point, Mike is often typing from a Kindle. Not exactly a precision input instrument.
Tony,
Sorry for taking so long to respond to what you wrote earlier about history. I’ve been busy taking care of my granddaughter.
Regarding the teaching of history—a subject that may seem too difficult for children to grasp/understand at certain ages. Teachers begin to build a base of knowledge/understanding in young children in the primary grades. Instead of using textbooks, teachers often provide different types of learning experiences for children—including hands on activities/projects and field trips as well as reading biographies, nonfiction books, and historical fiction to their students. The foundation set in place in the early grades is built upon as children go through school.
In Massachusetts, teachers can take their students on “historical” field trips to places such as Plimoth Plantation and a Wampanoag Village in Plymouth (MA), Wenham Historical Museum, Pioneer Village, Old Sturbridge Village, Lexington and Concord, the Freedom Trail in Boston, the Witch Museum in Salem. On some of these trips, students are able to see reenactments of Pilgrim/early colonial life, sit in a wigwam and listen to/talk to a Wampanoag Indian, board a replica of the Mayflower. They may churn butter, grind corn, peel apples using antique artifacts, etc.
Unfortunately, by the time I had retired from teaching in 2004, our school committee decided to limit the number of field trips teachers could take their students on. Why? Because of school reform and the implementation of high stakes testing. Now, much more class time is spent on prepping children for tests. School reform and high stakes testing are destroying what was best about education in the town where I taught.
Everything that has a beginning has an end.
The salient question becomes, “What is the beginning?”
Reactions are often far more telling than actions.
Ask of each and every thing what is it in itself.
This is not only the key to understanding the law of identity, but understanding causality as well.
I think that you should spend the rest of your life pondering your existence. That way we don’t have to read any of your sociological BS.
nick:
A Soviet bloc isnt about individuals at all. Far from it.
But I think Mike meant blog. To give him the benefit of the doubt. But you never know, he did say he hung out with communists in his formative years. 🙂
We identify intelligent children in most public school systems and put them in advanced courses.
I agree with tony about teaching history, I think, in the early grades we need to focus on reading, writing and math so they will have the foundation to understand the higher level courses. History can be be incorporated into reading lessons if need be.
“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.”
Would that be this Soviet “bloc?”