The Vanishing Left ... one year before the elections

[xiggi]

<p>Is there a lot of difference between what politicians present to voters as the left agenda and what scholars think it should be?</p>

<p><a href=“http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=740[/url]”>http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=740&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>

I DON’T KNOW about “vanishing”—we probably weren’t as strong as we thought we were in the sixties, and we probably are not as weak as we think we are today. Back then, there were still some illusions about ideological coherence and perhaps some sense that we were actually building organizations. But the sixties left no organizational residue, and we no longer can have any illusions about ideological coherence. Still, if you add up all the “fragments”—environmentalists; feminists; antiwar activists; all the people still fighting for civil rights; ACLU types; multiculturalists of all sorts (well, of some sorts); Americans active in global civil society in organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders; the readers of left magazines, and so on, I doubt that our numbers have dropped all that much. </p>

<p>If we are politically weaker, as we obviously are, it is not because we are fewer, but because of two long-term trends: first, the demobilization of the labor movement and the decline of the unions (liberals and leftists have paid too little attention to this); and second, the mobilization of evangelical Christians, who were largely withdrawn and politically passive back in the sixties (and also, though we never noticed it, bitter and resentful).

</p>

<p>

The left we need would be strongly pro-labor and committed to rebuilding the union movement. I put this first because the idea of an egalitarian politics without a base among industrial and service workers is an illusion—a common illusion among leftist defenders of “difference,” but an illusion nonetheless.</p>

<p>We should have a redistributive program with teeth in it, which means that we are committed to a radical revision of the way the tax system works, so that the burdens of both domestic welfare and an internationalist politics are shared fairly by all our citizens.</p>

<p>Public education has to have a central role in any left program—and it has to be funded in a way that reflects its centrality. We should be the defenders of a secular curriculum, with strong intellectual content, imaginatively taught, by teachers who are respected and decently paid. And we should be defenders of schools that are integrated across the lines of class and race. “Difference” (especially religious difference) should mostly be accommodated in after-school and weekend classes, but we can live with head scarves and yarmulkes—we don’t have to be Jacobin secularists.

</p>

<p>I believe that before ou country turns the keys to the White House to a bird of different feathers we ought to explore what hides behind the innocent plumage, and wonder how much of the exposed agenda might become part of our daily life. </p>

<p>Is a a country that is strongly pro-labor, seeks to rebuild the union movement, and wants to base its future on an exclusive secular education really the United States of the … future?</p>

[1of42]

<p>I don’t know about the labor movement stuff, but 2 thumbs up to the education part. Keeping public education secular and intelligent (which is almost redundant to say) is a great goal. I think the labor movement part is more of a “how we can achieve these ends” type of thing.</p>

[xiggi]

<p>Is non-secular education … non-intelligent? Should we ensure the centrality of our mediocrity by making it exclusive?</p>

[Opie_ofMaybery2]

<p>You know I am pro labor, sorry fellas but I WANT taxpayers vs. tax takers. If they ain’t working and earning disposable income, the rest of the taxpayers end up supporting them through government assistance programs. </p>

<p>Unless of course you guys have a plan to deal with the labor loss and the people who can’t move to china. This is where I disagree with alot with some of business scholars. If people aren’t working here, they are still here, in need of assistance. Who provides the assistance? Who pays? </p>

<p>One of the downfalls of rome was the dole and how many people ended up on it. So when you skoff about somebody losing their job overseas, then their home, who picks up the tab? Before those occurrances, those people paid taxes, now what would they pay?</p>

[1of42]

<p>I’m not really with the whole taxation or labor movement parts, but fully with the secular education.</p>

<p>xiggi: Yes, I’d argue that a religious education is almost always less intelligent and rational than secular education.</p>

[great_lakes_mom]

<p>I’m not religious, but some of the brightest, and most intellectual people I know have Jesuit educations.</p>

[WashDad]

<p>

@1of42

Yes, I’d argue that a religious education is almost always less intelligent and rational than secular education.

</p>

<p>Do public schools have a superior educational outcome to parochial schools of all sorts?</p>

[xiggi]

<p>

xiggi: Yes, I’d argue that a religious education is almost always less intelligent and rational than secular education.

</p>

<p>Well, that means that we must use different definitions of religious education and non-secular education, and for that matter, a whole different set of statistics. As a small example, wouldn’t you like to switch the performance of the US high schoolers on the international PISA test math section for the one of the Flemish Belgians who benefit from an education system that is overwhelmingly non-secular (read Catholic?)</p>

<p>Further, what does the author mean by making secular education central? Is the 10% of our education system that has survived the secular persecution the source of our current problems? Are our “values” under such attack from parochial and other private schools which happen to be founded by religious organizations that we need to relegate such schools to after hours or weekends?</p>

[citygirlsmom]

<p>“secular persecution”? </p>

<p>that is too funny!!!</p>

[weenie]

<p>

I believe that before ou country turns the keys to the White House to a bird of different feathers we ought to explore what hides behind the innocent plumage, and wonder how much of the exposed agenda might become part of our daily life.

</p>

<p>Hilarious! Especially in light of the, ahem, poor “exploration” the conservatives did for GWB - clearly our, Worst. President. Ever. LOL</p>

<p>Oh Xiggi, you just know you just can’t do that stuff anymore. Too much water under the bridge.</p>

[xiggi]

<p>Weenie, I am happy to amuse you. I guess that beats being annoying!</p>

<p>Out of curiosity, CGM what is … too “funny” about secular persecution?</p>

[1of42]

<p>

@WashDad

Do public schools have a superior educational outcome to parochial schools of all sorts?

</p>

<p>I’m assuming that wasn’t a serious argument. The answer is of course No, but for reasons entirely unrelated to the secular vs. religious issue. Parochial schools have better education than public schools because they attract richer pupils, have better funding, etc. etc., which I assume you are well aware of, thus my suspicion that your argument isn’t really serious.</p>

<p>A better simulation would be to take one public school, and give its control over to a religious order of some kind, and give them free reign, while taking another of comparable socioeconomic and other characteristics and keeping it secular.Of course, both schools would have to be disallowed from affecting any external policies differently - for example, the religious one should not be able to recruit more religious students externally in a way that the secular one could not. I can say quite confidently that the religious one would suffer compared to the secular school over time.</p>

<p>

@xiggi

Well, that means that we must use different definitions of religious education and non-secular education, and for that matter, a whole different set of statistics. As a small example, wouldn’t you like to switch the performance of the US high schoolers on the international PISA test math section for the one of the Flemish Belgians who benefit from an education system that is overwhelmingly non-secular (read Catholic?)</p>

<p>Further, what does the author mean by making secular education central? Is the 10% of our education system that has survived the secular persecution the source of our current problems? Are our “values” under such attack from parochial and other private schools which happen to be founded by religious organizations that we need to relegate such schools to after hours or weekends?

</p>

<p>Wow, we’re expert with the straw men. Yes, I would trade with the Belgian system, but not because it’s religious, because it’s better-funded, and better-structured. Ideally I’d take the Belgian system without the religious part.</p>

<p>Our values aren’t under attack by private religious schools. Our educational values are under attack by religious people who would seek to teach non-scientific gibberish in biology classes; who would seek to ban books they find offensive from libraries; who would like to see things that conflict with their religious beliefs not taught. They are what is attacking our educational values, and while so far we’ve done a good job at holding them off, it’s a fight that must be continued.</p>

[BedHead]

<p>This article is a total straw man. I consider myself a stalwart liberal Democrat. And yet, what do I believe? I don’t really spend a lot of time concerned about union politics, though I am not anti-union. Here’s what I believe:</p>

<ul>
<li>We need a strong defense, so we can defend ourselves from aggressors – not embark in pre-emptive strikes against dictators that don’t represent real threats.</li>
<li>We need to be fiscally prudent, living within our means. </li>
<li>Trade is going to happen – it’s just a fact of life and it has many, many benefits. So the best way to make trade work for us is to try to instill the same standards of environmental safety and worker treatment across nations.</li>
<li>We need to put a priority on investing in education – public education – and scientific discovery so that our workers can have job opportunities and so that we are at the cutting edge of new industries that afford opportunities for our citizens.</li>
<li>According to the McKinsey Global Institute, we pay $1,600 more per capita for health care in our nation that is of lower quality and that covers a much lesser percentage of our citizens than that of the OECD – in other words our peer – nations. Surely supporting the vast private sector bureaucracy that is ineffective and in the worst cases stonewalls the people it insures is something we can move beyond to finding a better way.
– Terrorism that affects our country and that of our allies is a reality that we will have to deal with. But fighting a war to prevent terrorism is like is working to barricade your front door when what your house is facing is fire or cockroach infestation. We need intelligent police actions and the best technologies to forestall what may be the inevitable though delayable next attack.</li>
<li>Gay marriage: absolutely</li>
<li>Seperation of Church and State: It’s the American Way</li>
<li>Environmental standards to reduce our dependence on oil and coal: Vehemently</li>
<li>Strive for energy self-sufficiency and enhanced conservation: why wouldn’t you?</li>
</ul>

<p>You can rave all you want about the labor unions and the hidden agenda of the left. The fact is I am sure the vast majority of Americans would agree with most of what I just said. And this is what a lot of Democrats are for and have been for.</p>

<p>With regards to the notion of “secular persecution” and all that, give me a break. The church has done, and does, a lot of good in the way of educating people. I am about to opt to send my stepdaughter to a Catholic school, and in fact have been pushing for it in spite of my agnosticism/atheism.</p>

<p>But don’t ignore for a second the bad parts of what religion does: Catholic priests molested a lot of children while the power structure looked the other way, Ted Haggard was doing meth and getting “massages” from a man while militating against gay rights. And it’s the Christian right that believes that what we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is “sharia” or Muslim law while it tries to assert its own version of this here.</p>

<p>As a strongly patriotic American, I say this: keep your religion to yourself. Let it be a private affair between you and God. If you believe in it so much that you want others to believe, fine you can proselytize, but don’t do it in state facilities or on state time. And keep your private religious mores out of the realm of public policy when it comes to regulating what people to do in their bedrooms or in their minds. We live in a secular nation. And if you keep up pushing right-wing Christian certitude on others, human beings being who they are will continue to have Ted Haggards, priest pedophiles and the like come out of the woodwork. Because in my intimate experience with religious people and religion, the ones who scold and protest the most are invariably the ones that have the biggest skeletons in their closets. I think Jesus said something about being more concerned with the plank in your own eye rather than the mote in another’s.</p>

<p>There used to be a strain of Republicanism that I really accorded with, but what the Republican party has done to this country in the past 8 years is a horrible shame. Don’t try to distract from that with some marginal article on something completely irrelevant. Look within, Xiggi. The Right is the problem – and it has caused the expansion not of the Left but of a disaffected Middle that wants the country on the right track again.</p>

<p>Oh, and by the way, the count is that 15 Republican lawmakers are retiring next year vs. 2 Dems who will retire their current positions to seek higher office. I’d say those numbers put the lie to your proposition of a “Vanishing Left.”</p>

[xiggi]

<p>

Parochial schools have better education than public schools because they attract richer pupils, have better funding, etc. etc.,

</p>

<p>

Wow, we’re expert with the straw men. Yes, I would trade with the Belgian system, but not because it’s religious, because it’s better-funded, and better-structured. Ideally I’d take the Belgian system without the religious part.

</p>

<p>While, I don’t know about straw men and expertise, I do believe that you’ll find a bit of research on your example … illuminating. </p>

<p>Are you sure that parochial are better funded that their public counterparts? </p>

<p>Are you sure that the Belgian system is better funded that the United States’?</p>

<p>And, before deciding on taking the Belgian system without the “religious part” you might want to check on the performance of non-secular schools versus secular schools, and also on the performance of the part of the country that relies on catholic schools more than their southern citizens. Unfortunately, you can’t make a difference between public and private schools in Belgium since all regulated schools are funded by the government. That is the beauty of a country that believed it was appropriate to include the freedom of education in its constitution. Freedom as in free to select a school and free as in free of charges. Isn’t it amazing what happens to the “religious part” when the field is level for all types of schools?</p>

<p>A little bit of education and research on these issues might help you.</p>

[mathmom]

<p>The first year New York State instituted high stakes testing the parochial schools said they’d take the test too. Oops, they did no better and in many cases worse than the local public schools. That was the last year they participated.</p>

[xiggi]

<p>Mathmom, what was the test and the year of this one-time test debacle?</p>

<p>Here’s a story from 5 years ago:</p>

<p>

Whatever problems Catholic educators acknowledge, many maintain their schools provide an enormous bang for the buck. A recent study comparing Catholic and public schools in New York found that the Catholic schools were twice as efficient spending less money per pupil, with better academic results, and that their students generally perform better on state tests. </p>

<p>In March, however, it came to light that the citys parochial eighth-graders did nearly as badly as public schools students on the state math exam. Sixty-two percent of the Catholic students in the New York archdiocese failed, compared to 77 percent of the public school students. Catherine Hickey, superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, expressed displeasure with the results at the time, and a study conducted by New York University concludes that “Catholic schools need to address the challenge of the new state standards in mathematics.” </p>

<p>But Principal Brancato, while admitting that some students do struggle with the test, also argues that the numbers of students who fail the test are relatively small compared with the number of students who graduate with advanced math courses. In addition, he points out that that particular test is relatively new, and that teaching to the test has not traditionally been the Catholic school approach. “Testing takes a lot of the creativity out of teaching,” he feels. </p>

<p>Sol Stern looks at the testing results in another way. “There has been a lot of comparison of tests over the past couple of decades,” Stern says. “If you could accumulate all of the data, most would indicate at least some advantage for similarly situated poor minority kids.” But the real point, Stern believes, lies in something more important: graduation rates. In the New York archdiocese, the high school graduation rate is about 95 percent, more or less comparable with the nation. The figure is roughly double the graduation rate in New York City public schools.

</p>

[xiggi]

<p><a href=“http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E0DF1E39F936A25750C0A9649C8B63[/url]”>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E0DF1E39F936A25750C0A9649C8B63&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>

Public Schools Lag in Test Scores </p>

<p>Published: March 15, 2002
As a group, students in New York State’s private and religious schools performed almost identically to public school students on the fourth-grade math test last year, and only modestly better in fourth-grade English, state officials said yesterday. </p>

<p>But in eighth grade, private and religious schools outperformed public schools by a significant margin – seven percentage points in math and 11 percentage points in English.

</p>

[1of42]

<p>xiggi: If you want to compare Belgium and America that’s fine, but you have to account for the differences in culture, differences in social strucutre (a much stronger welfare state), and so forth, instead of pointing to school performance as in a vacuum.</p>

<p>Regarding your research questions: no, I’m not confident of my numbers on those issues. Care to post them? Or do you not have them? I’d love to see them if you do - I think it’d be educational. ;)</p>

<p>On the overall issue, though, do you really think that religious education can be advantageous? Do you think that schools where evolution is not taught, certain books are banned, and so forth, could possibly be as good as secular schools (just using what Evangelical schools might be like as an example)?</p>

[xiggi]

<p>1of42, please note that I pointed to a country (Belgium) which offers comparisons to not only the United States but also within its own borders. Inasmuch as its reliance on well-developed social programs such as welfare might be of concern, I am not sure if this does render the comparisons invalid.</p>

<p>Also, I did not really address the issues of curricula at non-secular schools. I was curious why the author believed that it would be important to obliterate the small percentage of our education that happens to be non-secular, and accordingly not supported by public funding. At no time do I defend extreme positions of religious zealots since this does not really concern me. I’m simply looking at a call to further reduce --and indirectly attack-- a system of education that has served our country extremely well and is facing huge problem, not to establish its superiority but to ensure its economic survival. </p>

<p>And, fwiw, we are not talking about fat cats here. For instance, the bulk of the parochial schools are operating with very small budgets that are a fraction of what is available at publicly funded schools. Also, many catholic schools do operate in our least privileged neighborhoods and continue to offer alternatives to systems that have failed their “clients.”</p>

<p>We should not let our fear of religious fanaticism blind us in such a way that we can’t separate the good from the bad. In the end, we should support the education systems that perform and reform the ones that fail. This cannot be accomplished with sensationalism, and more importantly not through a call to revive a dying unionism. Unfortunately, one area where unions have been allowed to thrive and use its formidable resources to buy its political stronghold is in public education.</p>

[xiggi]

<p>A good place to start is here:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/6010606.html[/url]”>http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/6010606.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Education Next: Can Catholic Schools Be Saved? By Peter Meyer </p>

<p>

The latest NCEA data show the mean tuition and per-pupil cost for Catholic elementary **schools to be $2,607 and $4,268, and for high schools, $5,870 and $7,200, all below average public-school per-pupil expenditures. **Thus, too, the persuasiveness of the argument that Catholic schools are a form of subsidy to the nation’s public education system. Diane Ravitch wrote, in a Daily News editorial after hearing word of the Brooklyn diocese school closings in 2005, “It will be a loss for all New York City. The Catholic schools in this city have provided genuine choice for children from low-income and working-class families for more than 150 years. What is more, they have established a solid reputation for safety, academic standards and moral values. All of this has been supplied at a nominal cost to families and at no cost to taxpayers.” The NCEA estimates the value of the Catholic school system’s annual subsidy to the nation at $19.4 billion.

</p>

<p>For more scholarly research, you may want to consult Coleman or Bryk.</p>