Bush's "Reading First" Is Working

Everyone is disappointed by the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act.  It was bushwhacked by Sen. Ted Kennedy and the vital school-choice reforms were ripped out.

But don’t forget the phonics reading program, "Reading First."  It is working, and just in the way intended.

In City Journal Sol Stern tells how in a tale of two school districts.

One of the districts, in Richmond, Virginia, is a classic inner-city disaster.

Until 2001, Richmond’s student test scores were among Virginia’s worst. Only five of the district’s 51 schools achieved the status of full state accreditation.

But in 2001, Richmond switched to a phonics-based reading program.

By the time Reading First funds were available in 2002, Richmond was already up and running with a phonics-based reading program called Voyager Universal Literacy. The district channeled the modest $450,000 Reading First grant into a handful of its lowest-performing schools. But the principles of scientific reading instruction took hold throughout the district.

The results were dramatic.  Since switching to a phonics-based reading program in 2001,   

Richmond’s test scores have skyrocketed. By 2003, the number of the district’s schools achieving full state accreditation had climbed to 22. The next year, it rose to 39 and has now reached 44.

 Next door to Richmond is the rich suburban Fairfax school district, but with black students who aren’t doing so well.  Well, who cares about them!  You’d be surprised.

Richmond’s third-grade reading scores are closing in on wealthy Fairfax’s scores for all its students, 79 percent of whom passed the third-grade reading test in 2005. Since enacting its reforms, Richmond has moved from 114th in the state in reading (out of 132 districts) to 50th, compared with Fairfax’s 36th.

Imagine!  The poor kids in Richmond are doing almost as well as the rich kids in Fairfax.  Why is that, do you think? 

Fairfax uses a "whole language" reading method, and people have noticed.  According to activists Maria Casby Allen and Rick Nelson:

“Richmond scores rose dramatically after schools adopted science-based reading programs four years ago,” whereas Fairfax “was eligible for federal and state Reading First funding but objected to the science-based reading component.”

Fairfax, you see, uses a reading instruction system that has absolutely no confirmation in science-based research and is damned if it is going to change its failing reading program for one that been tested in peer-reviewed scientific research.

This tale of two school districts has unfolded something like Reading First’s framers had hoped. One district implementing Reading First principles showed dramatic reading improvement in its low-performing schools. As the good news spread, some parents and teachers in another district wanted to know why their schools weren’t using the methods that were working magic elsewhere. Nelson and Allen failed to convince district officials, but they’re not giving up. “Parents everywhere should compare the performance on third-grade tests of Reading First schools and other schools “then publicize the results,” says Nelson. “Parents should also ask questions such as: ‘What are your state and locality doing to train teachers in science-based reading instruction?’ ”

All this is going on below the media radar, and maybe it’s just as well.  Meanwhile another generation of children is being flushed down the toilet.

A System of Patronage So Vast...

Every three months the excellent Theodore Dalrymple reports on the utter waste and degradation of the welfare state in Britain.  And in the Winter 2007 edition of City Journal he explains how it really works.  For he asks: How is it possible for the welfare state to sustain failure on such a massive scale?

It is simple, really.  Failure is the whole point.  It is failure that justifies the whole system, the pyramid of patronage we call the welfare state.

At the bottom of the heap is the failed underclass. Their failure justifies the vast social service bureaucracy; their continued failure justifies a bigger social service bureaucracy.

But that is just the start.  For the failure concept works inside the bureaucracy.  in his book Wasting Police Time, policeman

[David] Copperfield recounts how, in 1999, a police officer said to a black motorist, who did not answer a question, “Okay, so you’re deaf as well as black.” The report of the official inquiry into the subsequent complaint had 62 pages of attachments, 20 pages of witness statements, and 172 pages of interview transcripts. Legal and disciplinary proceedings took 19 months to complete.

Do you see the beauty of this?  Think of the jobs, the promotions, the careers in that official inquiry.  Think of the jobs, the promotions, the careers spawned by it in programs to combat the crisis of “institutional racism” in the police force.  What’s the point of actually doing policing?  Much better to be doing nice safe internal investigations.

There’s the mystery of why the government education system in both Britain and the United States have insisted on using the ineffective “whole language”" reading system for over a century instead of the proven “phonics.”

It’s simple really.  What is the point of using a system like phonics that teaches children to read in six weeks?  Where are the jobs, the pensions in that?  Much better to use a failed method that requires remedial programs and studies and more funding to compensate for the expensive failures.

Higher up the food chain are the expensive consultants and their massive project failures.

[In] management consultant David Craig’s recent book, Plundering the Public Sector. Craig catalogs what at first sight seems the almost incredible incompetence of the British government in its efforts to “modernize” the public administration.

They have spent $60 billion (yes, billion) on an IT system for the National Health Service that doesn’t work.  But that is not the real source of waste.

Projects routinely get canceled after $400— $500 million has been spent on them. Modernization in Britain’s public sector means delay and inefficiency procured at colossal expense.

But that’s the point, you see.  What does it matter if the system is wasteful and expensive and the system gets canceled.  It all greases the patronage system.  The consultants still get paid, and demonstrate their appreciation in the traditional way.

This is all so obvious, that we should ask ourselves how come it took so long to figure it all out. In the immortal words of fictional silent screen star Lina Lamont: Are We Dumb or Something?  Of course the whole thing is a big patronage system.  That is what politicians do to get elected.  Always have, always will.

The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence very few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to be omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation, and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organizations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.

 That is a long paragraph.  So let us shorten it.  When you think of the welfare state don’t think of the caring and the compassion.  That is just window dressing.  Think of the power and the patronage.  Then everything starts to make sense.

Climate Change: Government Scientists vs. Deniers

Who are you gonna believe, the government-funded scientists on the UN’s IPCC and their fourth assessment of climate change.  Or is it still possible that the Sun did it?  New York Times reporters Elisabeth Rosenthal and Andrew C. Revkin give us the bad news:

In a bleak and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate change scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is "unequivocal" and that human activity is the main driver, "very likely" causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.

Well, that sounds like it is all over.  Except for one thing.  Should we respond to climate change by adapting to the new climate or should we try to arrest the change?

The international conspiracy of venture socialists are all agreed.  We should sacrifice and change our ways.  But they are the same people who advertise their devotion to science and the adaptive process of natural selection.

But let us give us climate deniers our moment.  Writes Jack Kelly:

Leaks of the IPCC report coincided with publication of two books which link climate change to a long, moderate solar cycle.

What’s he talking about?  Just this:

In "Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years," Fred Singer and Dennis Avery present evidence of 600 moderate warmings in the last million years.

In "The Chilling Stars," Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder discuss how cosmic rays amplify small changes in the sun’s irradiance, creating 1-2 degree Centigrade cycles in temperatures on earth.

Then there is the fact that sunspots are running at a 1,000 year high. Remember, they were at a  “Maunder minimum” during the Little Ice Age that the Earth enjoyed for much of the last half millennium.

Who are you gonna believe?

Reading Tea Leaves in Iraq

The big problem for us war-mongers is to know what is really going down in Iraq.  Is Iraq in a civil war?  Is the conflict there a religious war of Sunni vs. Shia?  Is all the violence being orchestrated by Iran? Is everything lost?  Or is everyone posturing for the cameras, cynically manipulated images of violence as the cheapest way to influence US policy?

First of all, writes Iranian Amir Taheri, we should understand that the war is not simply a “sectarian” war.  A sectarian war was what they had in Yugoslavia. And he was there.

You could be sure that almost all Serbs, from the taxi driver that took you from the airport to the hotel to the nation’s leading poet, would be a sectarian - hating the Croats and the Muslims with passion.
...
Nothing of the sort exists in Iraq today. The deadly disease of sectarianism has not contaminated the majority of Iraqis. Shiites and Sunnis both organize on the basis of political affiliations and interests, rather than sectarian loyalties.

So what is going down in Iraq?

What is happening in Iraq, however, is neither a civil nor a sectarian war (although elements of both exist within the broader context). This war is a political one - between those who wish Iraq to succeed as a new democracy and those who want it to fail.

The folks who want Iraq to fail include Saddamites, “death squads financed by Tehran,” not to mention the al-Qaeda foreigners.

The question for the United States is this: What exactly does victory in Iraq mean?

Maybe it is simply this.  Defeat the Saddamites.  Defeat the Iranian death squads.  And defeat the foreign terrorists of al-Qaeda.

New Hope for School Choice

After the reupdiation of the Republican Party in November, you might be forgiven for thinking that all is lost.  But at least where school choice is concerned there are grounds for hope, according to George Will.

The public school lobby, which apparently has little confidence in its product, lives in fear of competition -- the fear that if parents’ choices are expanded, there will be a flight from public schools. But the tide is turning[.]

Of course, the public school lobby is fighting all of this.  And usually, it is fighting again and again as in Arizona where the usual suspects are gearing up for a third challenge to school choice in that state.

In Arizona, some amazingly persistent and mostly liberal people are demonstrating the tenacity with which some interests fight to prevent parents of modest means from having education choices like those available to most Americans.

But maybe, just maybe, the train has left the station. Politicians, eastern politicians are starting to push for school choice.

• Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, a member of the board of the national Alliance for School Choice, proposes a scholarship program similar to Arizona’s...
• New York’s new Democratic governor, Eliot L. Spitzer, proposes lifting the cap that restricts the state to a mere 100 charter schools...
• Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg... [of] New York City... is dividing large schools into smaller ones, emancipating many principals to be educational entrepreneurs under a system that holds them accountable for cognitive results.

Well, it can’t come too soon. Too many millions of children have already been sacrificed on the altar of teacher tenure and teacher pensions.

Because they just don’t care about kids.

A Revolution in Black Politics

OK, let’s get serious, suggests Kay S. Hymowitz in a major article in City Journal.

What if someone gave a convention called “Black America Today” and Barack Obama, Harold Ford, Cory Booker, Bill Cosby, and Juan Williams starred as the marquee names?

 Er... What about Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the stalwarts of the Congressional Black Caucus?

That’s just the point.  There’s a new generation coming up in black politics, one that doesn’t live by the narrative of the civil rights movement.

And it’s not just in black politics, but in the economy generally.  Rising black professionals and businesspeople just don’t see everything through the lens of racial oppression.

It’s a huge article, so make some time and read the whole thing. The money graf?

For a younger generation of blacks, the symbolic, I-marched-with-Martin politics, not to mention the Jackson-style cronyism that it often degenerated into, doesn’t cut it... Instead of rights activists and ministers, many of these newcomers are lawyers or businessmen. Even though a few grew up poor, they’ve all spent their formative years swimming in the mainstream, including major universities, corporations, and law firms, and they are now solidly middle class.

Here’s how Vanderbilt political science professor Carol Swain (Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress) puts it. 

[The new generation] had white friends; they’ve had white girlfriends. They may still be frustrated by racism at times, but they’re functioning fine in the world they’re living in.

Using the developmental psychology of Clare Graves, we would say here at Road to the Middle Class that many blacks have left the world of red victimhood and power obsession.  Now they are blue purposives and orange achievers.  That makes a difference.

It's a Conservative not a Republican Problem

A lot of conservatives have been blaming the feckless Republican Congress for the loss last November, writes Charles R. Kesler.  For them the election defeat was “a rejection of a party that had strayed too far from the conservative path.” 

Not so fast, says Kesler.  If only it were true that all Republicans needed to do was to swing in line with conservative ideas and reap a gratifying majority!  On the contrary, conservative ideas since the end of the Cold War have been a mish-mash.

Upward floated the balloons of civil society conservatism... "third wave" conservatism (technology to the rescue), and national greatness conservatism (McCain was an early enthusiast)... Libertarianism, emboldened by socialism’s pell-mell retreat, enjoyed its moment, too, though less than one might have expected.

Meanwhile the twenty-year Reagan boom has allowed the government to offer tax cuts and spending increases at the same time.  There is no automatic conservative majority today.  And President Bush’s ad-hoc adventure in Iraq does not exactly inspire confidence in the heartland.

It’s time for conservatives to admit the need to rethink and clarify their own precepts. To be sure, there are verities to which the wise and good may always repair, and conservatism is distinguished by its reverence for them. But these must be relearned in every generation, restated in the idiom of life, and applied to new circumstances. The challenge is as exhilarating as it is serious. Far from being a cause for despair, conservatism’s perplexities may contribute to making this the most illuminating political season in 30 years.

Let us call the era just past the Reagan Era.  It was a glorious summer and glorious things were done for America and for the world.  Now it’s time to retreat to winter quarters, to think and to plan.

Don’t worry.  The problems are still going to be there 5 years, 10 years from now.  That’s because our liberal friends only know how to spend and elect, privilege and subsidize.  Every now and again they run out of money.  That’s when the American people call for conservatives to come in and sort things out.