Education

Sexism, Alive And Well in Georgia

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
One ball more than Patrick Stuart - CEO of Strong Rock Christian Academy - possesses.
One ball more than Patrick Stuart – CEO of Strong Rock Christian Academy – possesses.

 

Some depressing but thoroughly unsurprising news from the land of segregated school proms, this time concerning sports and religion today, centering on a private Christian school in Atlanta where apparently the teachers and administrative staff are every bit as immature as some of the students.

ThinkProgress reports that a twelve year old girl was kicked off her school’s football team for a reason so jaw-droppingly moronic that it took me several minutes to come to terms with the knowledge that something of this nature could take place in the twenty-first century:

A private school outside Atlanta recently informed 12-year-old Madison Baxter that she would not be welcome at tryouts for the 7th-grade football team, even though she started on the sixth-grade team and has been playing football since second grade. The reason she won’t be allowed on the field? Because her male teammates are beginning to have “impure thoughts” about her, Strong Rock Christian Academy school administrator Patrick Stuart told Baxter’s mother.

“In the meeting with the CEO of the school [Patrick Stuart], I was told that the reasons behind it were one, that the boys were going to start lusting after her and have impure thoughts about her and that the locker-room talk was not appropriate for a female to hear even though she had a separate locker room from the boys,” Baxter’s mother, Cassy Blythe, told Atlanta’s WXIA-TV.

So the school’s reaction to finding out that the boys on the team were lusting after the one girl (which is pretty much what twelve year old boys do), was not to tackle the problem with any sense of proportionality, or direct their action at the people doing the “lusting” (which goes mysteriously undefined throughout the article and the school’s statements), but rather to penalise the innocent girl and remove her from the team.

The article caustically concludes:

There are more than 1,500 girls playing football at American high schools, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, and that number has increased more than 17 percent in just four years. It’s not just a boys’ sport anymore. And more than that, playing football with a girl could have been a valuable experience for Baxter’s teammates about how to appropriately interact with women and girls, about how a person’s sex doesn’t make her inherently inferior athletically or in any other way, and about how having “impure thoughts” doesn’t mean you have license to act on them. They won’t get that lesson, though, because the adults in charge of Strong Rock Christian Academy’s athletics program apparently have yet to learn it themselves.

Absolutely. This poor girl is being denied the opportunity to continue to represent her school on the football team because the “adults” supposedly in charge of the Strong Rock Christian Academy (with a name like that, you can already be quite sure that they harbour and teach some fairly wacky views) are too prudish or squeamish to sit down with the boys on the team and have a serious – and yes, mildly uncomfortable and awkward – discussion about acceptable behaviour toward people of the opposite sex. If, given this gold-plated opportunity to impart some useful information to the boys on the team, the adults choose to duck the challenge, how much does this diminish the chances of those boys to grow and develop healthy attitudes to their female peers?

My shock at reading this story, not in 1953 but 2013, was tempered, however, when I realised that the unfortunate events took place in the great state of Georgia. Georgia is, of course, famous for being the last state in the union to have a school district that continues to hold racially segregated proms.

Way to go.

SEMI-PARTISAN SUMMARY

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

CULTURE

Amanda Marcotte, writing at Slate magazine, makes a compelling case for movie scriptwriters and directors to show more condom use in their movies. She makes a fair point: “In the world of movies and TV, people seem to be having sex all the time, but they almost never talk about or are shown using contraception. Since so much of movie sex serves the plot, you get encounters that are much more spontaneous than they would be in real life, without any pause in the action to wrap it up. Young viewers could easily get the sense that the norm is to hop right in bed with someone without ever worrying about unintended pregnancy.” And it’s true – if realism is your aim (and admittedly this is not always the case), pretending that people hop into bed with each other without going through that awkward “fumbling in the bedside cabinet drawer” moment is a misrepresentation, and one that can be easily (and, if done well, humorously) corrected.

Jim Henson Studios, creator of The Muppets, is boycotting Chick-fil-A over that company’s president’s condemnation of gay marriage. In a stern rebuke, their statement reads: “The Jim Henson Company has celebrated and embraced diversity and inclusiveness for over fifty years and we have notified Chick-Fil-A that we do not wish to partner with them on any future endeavors”.

Proco Moreno, Alderman of Chicago’s 1st Ward, joined in the anti Chick-fil-A backlash, stating that he would block the restaurant chain’s attempts to open their second Chicago outlet in his district because of the aforementioned statement issued by their CEO. His statement is somewhat over-the top – “If you are discriminating against a segment of the community, I don’t want you in the 1st Ward” – it is hard to see how any discrimination is taking place, as the restaurant does not check the sexual orientation of its customers upon entry, or have any policies in place that discriminate against one or another. But the fact remains that needlessly coming out in favour of a regressive social policy position that has no direct impact on your business or bottom line, can cost you money.

Getting in on the act, The Onion reports on Chick-fil-A’s new homophobic sandwich. Reports The Onion: “In a press conference to reporters, company representatives said the homophobic new sandwich will include the national fast food chain’s trademark fried chicken filet wrapped in a piece of specially-smoked No Homo ham that would be topped with a slice of Swiss cheese and lathered in a creamy new Thousand Island-based Fag Punching sauce”.

 

BRITISH POLITICS

The UK economy shrank by another 0.7% according to the latest figures released today. Iain Martin, writing in The Telegraph, thinks that George Osborne has six months to turn things around. I would guess that this estimate sounds about right, but I am not optimistic that Osborne will do anything differently, given his obstinate refusal to implement the needed supply-side reforms, and his obsession with trying to score cheap political points from Ed Balls, a diversion which should be beneath him.

The Guardian’s foremost education journalist twists herself in knots trying to explain why she is against private schools, and yet is sending her daughter to a private school. She takes a whole article, and many unnecessary words to explain what I can say in just three – she’s a hypocrite. She says: “I remember reading about Diane Abbott’s decision to send her son to the £10,000-a-year City of London school. She said she was a mother first and a politician second, a point that resonated strongly with me.” Precisely. She’s happy to inflict her left-wing social engineering on other people to make them conform to her ideal worldview (uniform standards, uniform people, uniform outcomes), but as soon as her own interests come in to play, she takes the conservative position.

 

AMERICAN POLITICS

Oh noes. The house of cards built by Grover Norquist has started to come crashing down as more and more elected officials repudiate his “tax pledge”. Whether you think the current tax burden in America is sustainable or not, I think most reasonable people can agree that Norquist’s pledge is overly restrictive on lawmakers, preventing them from closing unwarranted and discriminatory tax loopholes on the grounds that doing so would constitute a “tax increase”. Norquist, and his advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform, are one of several significant hurdles standing in the way of a fundamental simplification of the existing byzantine tax code. We should all cheer its demise, and hope that similar obstacles from the American left fall by the wayside too, in the name of meaningful, lasting reform.

It is hard to disagree with this piece from Marbury, discussing the old-fashioned political art of persuasion, and the relative aptitudes of Obama and Clinton at using it. Through the lense of the Northern Irish “Good Friday” peace accord, Marbury looks at the way that President Clinton was able to flatter, cajole and reassure the key parties so that they reached a point where a deal could be signed, and how this skill is currently lacking in the Obama administration. Money quote: “Obama likes the big set-piece speech. But every policy he has backed, from the stimulus to healthcare, has declined in popularity the more speeches he made about it. His speeches explain things very well, very precisely. But they don’t change minds. This, it turns out, was the big hole in Obama’s campaign rhetoric of unification, of bringing red and blue together. He spoke about it eloquently, but he was never going to be the president who put it into action. Obama is a preacher, not a persuader. He’s terrific if you already agree with him, but doesn’t have much impact on those who don’t.”

Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate magazine, effectively deconstructs the Romney campaign’s attempts to smear President Obama with the “Chicago machine politician” label. Says Weisberg: “Of course, Romney isn’t interested in this kind of nuance. ‘Chicago-style politics’ is mainly just a way for him to call Obama corrupt without coming out and saying so”.

Why The Left Is Wrong On Education

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

I read with interest an op-ed piece in The Guardian by former Education Secretary under the previous Labour government, Estelle Morris, in which she argues that the very idea of profit-making schools threatens the “moral purpose” of education. I thought that it rather neatly summed up one of the major flaws in British left-wing thinking, and the reason why they are wrong on educational policy in particular.

To be fair, in her letter Morris states clearly that she is open to a greater mix of providers in the education space, and that this can bring benefits at times:

The role of the private sector has already been contentious. It’s certainly easy to make the case that it has not been a universal success – some school meals services and messy PFI contracts, for example – but the new “mix” ought to be welcomed. There is a wider and more diverse range of service providers, many bringing new ideas as well as experience, as schools increasingly control their own budgets.

This is to be welcomed, as there are those on the left who seem to reflexively oppose anything but centralised, standardised provision of public education, a stance from which Morris is at pains to distance herself.

Unfortunately, there the open-mindedness comes to an end. Harking back to a time before Thatcher, Morris recalls:

Thirty years ago, “not for profit” would have been assumed to be at the core of a key public service like education – part of its reason for being.

Here, right here, is the problem. Morris speaks as though this worldview was noble and that it died out thirty years ago, but to my mind it is an ignoble thing, one that it is alive and well in the hearts and minds of many left-leaning and Labour supporters in Britain today – the belief that part of education’s very reason for being is to not turn a profit, to deliberately shun the gaudy world of capitalism and the idea of generating a return on investment. This is actually quite a shocking sentiment to hold – the idea that the needs of the customer (the schoolchildren) must compete with any other motive or “reason for being” when educational policy is considered, and that among these valid and competing interests is the need to provide public services on a not-for-profit basis, regardless of the impact on quality. But of course, there are many such competing interests when one subscribes to this worldview – those of the teachers unions as well as left-wing ideology in general.

I should add a disclaimer at this point, that I am writing specifically about education policy in Britain, and that my views on these topics as they relate to the United States are different and will be covered separately in future.

We then reach the core of Morris’ argument:

At times of falling school budgets any surplus cash should be reinvested in schools rather than into people’s bank accounts; this is irrefutable but it is not the core of the argument. Profit can drive improvement. But the financial bottom line will never provide the motivation to deliver what we want and need from schools.

Firstly, I would like to know from Estelle Morris why the financial bottom line cannot deliver this motivation – surely the correct behaviour and outcomes from providers can be incentivised if the correct performance metrics and standards are used and applied?

But more generally, I would like to tackle this point with a hypothetical question. Suppose that there are two separate school systems at work in Britain, one state owned and not-for-profit and the other a regulated but private sector-delivered system, both receiving the same amount of funds per student from the government. The private system achieves significantly higher results in terms of test scores and long-term employability than the public system, and diverts a proportion of its budget surplus to dividend payments for shareholders. The public system achieves lower results and reinvests any budget surplus back into the system. In this scenario, should the private system be effectively neutered and shut down by being forced to reinvest its entire surplus back into operations rather than making payments to shareholders, even if this means that all students in the country then have to join the lower-performing public system? Leave aside for now questions as to whether or not privately delivered education would achieve better results, I’m just interested in the principle here. Yes or no?

Morris concludes:

There is a moral purpose that underpins education and, although by itself it is not enough, it must be the driving force. Without it, it’s too easy to accept that it’s not worth trying, yet again, to help a child to master a skill, or to rationalise that the social class divide is something we’ll just have to live with. Understanding this moral purpose for education is not the preserve of those in the public sector; others bring the same passion and determination and share in the same joy success brings, but all this feels strikingly at odds with the drive for profit. Value for money, certainly; careful management of resources, essential; but there can only be one set of shareholders – and that is the children.

I see in this argument a lot of hazy worries and doubts about whether profit-making companies can grasp and nurture what Morris calls the “moral purpose for education”, but no acknowledgement of the doubts – proven doubts, incidentally – that those of us on the right have about the public sector’s ability to deliver the value for money and good resource management that she also admits are essential. For-profit providers have not been given the chance to prove whether they can deliver public education to a good standard, because they are not presently allowed to do so. The public sector, however, has proved time and again that they cannot deliver quality educational outcomes that represent value for money or careful management of resources. And yet Morris proposes that we spurn the promise of the private sector and give the public sector carte blanche to continue just as they have for years, free from any competition or external impetus to improve.

The more that one hears arguments such as this from the British left, the harder it is to avoid the conclusion that for them, the ultimate prize, or the “reason for being”, is not to offer the best standard of education that can be provided to British children, but rather one of two very different, rather grubbier goals: either to ensure that every child receives precisely the same standard of education, even if this means embracing the lowest common denominator rather than striving for the best and risking unequal outcomes, or else having the ideological satisfaction of knowing that all public services are provided centrally by the state, whatever the cost in terms of wasteful spending or squandered potential.

A higher moral purpose indeed.