On the home front...

Opting Out
Opposition is growing to Arne Duncan's "data based" approach to "saving" American education by obsessively testing schoolchildren and using their scores to "evaluate" teachers and schools.  Hooray for all those parents choosing to "opt out" of the testcapades for their kids. The children of poverty who are supposed to be the chief beneficiaries of the testing regimen will continue to score poorly, no matter how many "failing" schools are closed and no matter how many "incompetent" teachers are fired.  The most important key to educational achievement is the security and predictability of a middle-class lifestyle, a lifestyle denied to more and more children as more and more Americans are pushed out of what used to be the American middle class.

Minimum Wage
More Americans can enjoy "middle-class" lives when more Americans are able to live comfortably on their earnings.  Right now, our low-wage workers — even those lucky enough to have steady, full-time jobs — have to depend on food stamps and Medicaid just to scrape by.  Too many are only one or two unpaid sick days away from financial catastrophe, and they know it.  They and their children need and deserve real security.  Raising the minimum wage to $15/hr is not enough to restore the American middle class, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

As I've said before, raising the minimum wage will not lead to lay-offs, because employers know they maximize profits by employing the smallest work force needed to get the job done.  If forced to pay their workers more, employers must either accept lower profits or raise the prices of their products.  The affluent will scarcely notice any price increases, and better paid workers will have more money to spend.  Only the most poorly conceived and managed businesses will fail.

Democracy
To the extent it exists in the USofA, democracy doesn't work very well.  People struggling to earn a living, or to claw their way to the next level of economic success, don't have a lot of time to peruse the "important issues" that are supposed to determine the outcomes of elections.  Candidates win elections when they have the financing and skills to promulgate sufficiently convincing lies, or to distract our attention from political decisions that actually might have an impact on our lives.

The classic Clinton approach, "polling over principle," is endemic in our current system.  We expect political candidates to say the things we want to hear.  What they actually do once in office is unlikely to have more than cosmetic resemblance to what they say in order to win.

Short Subjects for Early April

The National School Shield
The NRA's idea for putting armed guards into every school is, of course, absurd.  The organization, sponsored by gun manufacturers, had to come up with something — and, needless to say, their solution had to involve more guns.  The NRA has offered to "train volunteers," but the cost of just insuring against the risks of some yahoo with a semi-automatic wandering around a school building probably would have to be offset by firing two teachers.

Marriage Equality
While we wait for the Supremes to act, here's a thought: I've always been in favor of Civil Unions.  If you want your marriage recognized by the state, go to a judge or a JP or some other state official.  If you want to get married by a religious personage, well, go do it — but don't expect the state to recognize that personage's authority.  On the other hand, if you think religious leaders should have the right to approve marriages, just let them decide who can get married — gay, straight, or interspecies.  As an ordained minister, I would hesitate to marry a man to a sheep, but if it looked like they really were in love...

North Korea
Well, it looks like Kim Jong Un is striving to outdo both his daddy and his granddaddy in the craziness category, but I suspect his real problem is nobody takes the North Koreans all that seriously these days.  The boy king with the bad haircut can beat his chest like Kim Kong, and nobody pays much attention.  "Okay," say the Americans, the South Koreans, the Japanese and, increasingly, the Chinese, "let him rant.  If the need arises, we can blow his ass right off the peninsula, and we're pretty sure he knows that."  On the other hand, I think we have kind of a moral obligation to keep some of those undernourished kids alive.

Atlanta Cheaters
Okay, the bail seemed kind of high to me for a batch of school administrators — I mean, where in hell are they supposed to go?  Will they join the Colombian rebels, or the Taliban?  Can they drain the "vast" profits from their administrator bonuses to flee?  I don't think so.  It is no secret that I'm not at all a fan of school administrators, but I suspect the main failure of the cheating assholes was less cheating skill and a little more hubris than other cheating assholes who are doing it in the white neighborhoods.

The Chicago Teachers' Strike

I honestly can't imagine why Republicans think the Chicago strike will hurt Obama, unless they think Chicago teachers — seriously pissed off by Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan — will stay home rather than go out and vote for Obama.  Well, it's true that a lot of Americans are assholes, and won't figure out that the Chicago teachers are fighting Democrats.  Nobody supports the American Federation of Teachers anymore, in either party, despite the perennial efforts of AFT to support, mostly, Democrats.

The "school reform" movement currently being pushed by Republicans and Democrats alike reflects a corporatist philosophy in that it demands that schools be run like for-profit businesses (and increasingly by for-profit businesses running charter schools.)  Rahm Emanuel's push to open more and more non-union charter schools is a direct attack on the Chicago Federation of Teachers.  So is his refusal to agree to re-hire laid off veteran teachers when new positions become available.  Replacing them with beginning teachers would save the school district a lot of money.

The main point of disagreement, though, appears to be the extent to which student test scores are used to evaluate teachers.  The union is ready to agree to test scores counting for 25% of a teacher's rating, but not to the 40% value Emanuel demands.  Teachers know how misleading test scores can be.  The same teachers who "succeed" in raising test scores one year very well may "fail" the next.  So much depends on the quality of the students assigned to their classes.

Just one or two "mainstreamed" special education students with emotional disabilities can disrupt a class often enough to slow progress for everybody.  Some children can be absent for as much as a third of the total days of instruction.  Families in poverty often change addresses — and their children change schools — with distressing regularity.  Many children grow up in home environments that discourage homework and study.

More than anything else, student test scores in any teacher's class depend on the luck of the draw (or the favoritism shown by  administrators who assign children to classes.)  As the old saying goes, "You can't make a silk purse out of a horse's ass."