Obama on School Violence

A Voice Raised in Chicago
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Senator Barack Obama took his presidential campaign to Chicago Sunday, where he addressed an agonizing issue that has been largely overlooked by the national media — the murder of dozens of the city’s public school students since last September.

Speaking to an overflow crowd of worshipers at the Vernon Park Church of God, Mr. Obama, a resident of Chicago, said:

“I asked to come here because I wanted to talk with you about the spate of violence that’s been robbing the city’s children of their future. In this last school year, 32 Chicago public school students were killed, and even more since the school year ended. This past week alone, two teens were shot in a South Side schoolyard.”

You’ve probably heard more than you wanted to about David Beckham and Posh Spice in recent days, but not a lot about the deaths of these children and teenagers in Chicago. Black, Latino and poor, they are America’s invisible children.

“In one Chicago public school,” said Mr. Obama, “a teacher was calling attendance, and when she got to the name of a particular student who wasn’t there and had missed a lot of classes, she asked if anyone knew where he was. And the answer she got was, ‘He’s dead.’ ”

He mentioned another school: “In Room 104 at Avalon Park Elementary School, an empty chair is pushed against the wall in memory of Quinton Jackson, the eighth grader who used to sit there, and who was stabbed to death a few months ago.”

And he mentioned Blair Holt, 16, who was riding home from school on a city bus when a gunman opened fire. “As the bullets flew, and Blair was shot,” the senator said, “he pulled a friend onto a seat and saved her life. And as he was driven to the hospital, where he would pass away a short time later, he asked the paramedics to tell his parents that he loved them.”

Over the past school year, Mr. Obama said, the number of public school students killed in Chicago was higher than the number of soldiers from the entire state of Illinois who were killed in Iraq during that period.

As I mentioned in a previous column on this issue, Chicago is hardly alone when it comes to the slaughter of youngsters who are living in conditions that can fairly be compared to combat.

“From South-Central L.A. to Newark, New Jersey,” said Senator Obama, “there’s an epidemic of violence that’s sickening the soul of this nation. For the third year in a row, violent crime and murder are on the rise nationwide. As we’ve all borne witness to here in Chicago, this is partly due to the rise of gang violence. The F.B.I. says there are now more gang members on our nation’s streets than police officers.”

The senator talked about the need for more stringent gun control laws, and he criticized the Bush administration for “decimating” a Clinton administration initiative that had added more than 100,000 police officers to local departments.

He said governments need to do more to combat gangs and gang violence and invest more in after-school programs that provide an alternative to the streets for vulnerable youngsters.

But he added, “There is only so much government can do.” There is also a need, he said, “for a change in attitude.”

The senator talked about the young men and boys who have gone down “the wrong path.” And he said one of the main reasons they are wreaking havoc and shooting one another is that they had not received enough attention while growing up from responsible adults.

“We’re not reading to them,” he said. “We’re not sitting down with them and talking to them. We’re not guiding them. We’re not disciplining them.”

In a conversation yesterday, he stressed that the plight of young people struggling in tough environments demands both governmental attention and a heightened sense of individual responsibility. Both are essential.

He said in his speech that he will keep fighting in Washington for more money and more programs. “But that money and those programs,” he said, “will not make any difference unless we have a change of heart.”

He also noted that there was tremendous grief across the country when the massacre at Virginia Tech happened last April, “and rightfully so.” But with 34 schoolkids dead in Chicago since the beginning of the last school year, he said, “for the most part, there has been silence.”

It’s important, he said, that Americans reach a mind-set in which “we care just as much” about the children slain in Chicago as those killed at Virginia Tech.

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

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Arrested Development

This is America. This is American freedom. This is Bush World:

Harassed in the Classroom
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Michael Soguero was a first-rate principal at Bronx Guild High School. He loved his job, and he loved teaching in New York. He has not blamed the New York City Police Department for his departure to a school in Estes Park, Colo. Nevertheless, the facts are the facts.

Back on Feb. 3, 2005, a student came running into Mr. Soguero’s office at Bronx Guild to say that a police officer was in a classroom. “I jumped up and ran to the classroom,” Mr. Soguero told me in an interview last week. “I found this officer, Gonzalez, exchanging words with a female student.

“Everyone is sitting down except for the teacher and these two. The girl was saying, ‘What did I do? What are you talking to me about?’ ”

What was about to unfold was another episode of bizarrely excessive police activity inside a New York City public school.

The girl, who was 16, had apparently uttered a curse word in a hallway. While that is undoubtedly inappropriate behavior, it is hardly a criminal offense. The police officer, Juan Gonzalez, who was part of a security task force assigned to the school, had followed the girl into the classroom.

Mr. Soguero quieted things down and asked the officer to leave the room, which he did. “I got the girl to sit down and I told her I would talk to her later to address this,” Mr. Soguero said. He thought the crisis was over.

The principal was shocked when he walked out of the classroom. Officer Gonzalez was waiting and made it clear that he wanted the girl arrested.

“He told me,” said Mr. Soguero in the interview, “that I had two minutes to ‘bring her out here.’ I said, ‘I’m not bringing her out here.’ ”

The angry officer, according to Mr. Soguero, barged past him and into the classroom. “I followed him,” said Mr. Soguero, “and he’s pushing desks aside, walking through students to get at her, disrupting everything. She’s sitting in a chair. He grabs her arm, her left arm with his right hand, and he’s reaching back to grab his cuffs. At that point I walked around him and physically stood in between the two of them.”

This sort of thing, the police wildly overreacting to behavior by schoolkids that is not criminal, happens much more often than most New Yorkers realize. Officer Gonzalez behaved as if he were rounding up the James gang. He arrested the girl. He arrested Mr. Soguero. And he arrested a school aide who had tried to come to the principal’s defense.

Mr. Soguero was handcuffed in full view of everyone — students, teachers, staff — and marched out of the school. Later the police paraded him in front of news photographers in a humiliating “perp walk.”

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly supported Officer Gonzalez, telling reporters at the time, “The principal was simply wrong.”

But that was not the case. There was no evidence that a crime had been committed, and the charges were later dropped. Mr. Soguero, who was suspended by school authorities at the time of his arrest, was allowed to resume the post of principal.

Now, more than two years after the incident, I learned from the Police Department that Mr. Gonzalez is indeed a problem officer, despite the initial knee-jerk support he received from the commissioner, from the Bronx district attorney, Robert Johnson, and from others in the criminal justice system.

In response to a query last week, Commissioner Kelly’s office disclosed that Officer Gonzalez is currently on “modified assignment.” His gun and badge have been taken away. But the department declined yesterday to disclose further details.

The Soguero incident is among many outlined in a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union titled “Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools.” Students, teachers and principals who have done nothing wrong are frequently harassed, abused and in some cases arrested and jailed by cops who are supposed to be on the lookout for criminal activity.

It’s common for police officers to belittle and curse at students. And many students have complained about “pat-downs” and intrusive searches by the police.

This is part of what appears to be a widespread campaign of police harassment against young people in New York, especially young people who are black or Latino.

If Rudy Giuliani were mayor, much of the city would be in an uproar over this kind of behavior by the police. Instead, all we’re hearing is a disturbing silence.

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

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The Educated Giant

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

Taishan, China

With China’s trade surplus with the United States soaring, the tendency in the U.S. will be to react with tariffs and other barriers. But instead we should take a page from the Chinese book and respond by boosting education.

One reason China is likely to overtake the U.S. as the world’s most important country in this century is that China puts more effort into building human capital than we do.

This area in southern Guangdong Province is my wife’s ancestral hometown. Sheryl’s grandparents left villages here because they thought they could find better opportunities for their children in “Meiguo” — “Beautiful Country,” as the U.S. is called in Chinese. And they did. At Sheryl’s family reunions, you feel inadequate without a doctorate.

But that educational gap between China and America is shrinking rapidly. I visited several elementary and middle schools accompanied by two of my children. And in general, the level of math taught even in peasant schools is similar to that in my kids’ own excellent schools in the New York area.

My kids’ school system doesn’t offer foreign languages until the seventh grade. These Chinese peasants begin English studies in either first grade or third grade, depending on the school.

Frankly, my daughter got tired of being dragged around schools and having teachers look patronizingly at her schoolbooks and say, “Oh, we do that two grades younger.”

There are, I think, four reasons why Chinese students do so well.

First, Chinese students are hungry for education and advancement and work harder. In contrast, U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.

Here in Sheryl’s ancestral village, the students show up at school at about 6:30 a.m. to get extra tutoring before classes start at 7:30. They go home for a lunch break at 11:20 and then are back at school from 2 p.m. until 5. They do homework every night and weekend, and an hour or two of homework each day during their eight-week summer vacation.

The second reason is that China has an enormous cultural respect for education, part of its Confucian legacy, so governments and families alike pour resources into education. Teachers are respected and compensated far better, financially and emotionally, in China than in America.

In my last column, I wrote about the boomtown of Dongguan, which had no colleges when I first visited it 20 years ago. The town devotes 21 percent of its budget to education, and it now has four universities. An astonishing 58 percent of the residents age 18 to 22 are enrolled in a university.

A third reason is that Chinese believe that those who get the best grades are the hardest workers. In contrast, Americans say in polls that the best students are the ones who are innately the smartest. The upshot is that Chinese kids never have an excuse for mediocrity.

Chinese education has its own problems, including bribes and fees to get into good schools, huge classes of 50 or 60 students, second-rate equipment and lousy universities. But the progress in the last quarter-century is breathtaking.

It’s also encouraging that so many Chinese will shake their heads over this column and say it really isn’t so. They will complain that Chinese schools teach rote memorization but not creativity or love of learning. That kind of debate is good for the schools and has already led to improvements in English instruction, so that urban Chinese students can communicate better in English than Japanese or South Koreans.

After I visited Sheryl’s ancestral village, I posted a video of it on the Times Web site. Soon I was astonished to see an excited posting on my blog from a woman who used to live in that village.

Litao Mai, probably one of my distant in-laws, grew up in a house she could see on my video. Her parents had only a third grade education, but she became the first person in the village to go to college. She now works for Merrill Lynch in New York and describes herself as “a little peasant girl” transformed into “a capitalist on Wall Street.”

That is the magic of education, and there are 1.3 billion more behind Ms. Mai.

So let’s not respond to China’s surpluses by putting up trade barriers. Rather, let’s do as we did after the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957: raise our own education standards to meet the competition.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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Laughing and Crying

By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

First I had to laugh. Then I had to cry.

I took part in commencement this year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of America’s great science and engineering schools, so I had a front-row seat as the first grads to receive their diplomas came on stage, all of them Ph.D. students. One by one the announcer read their names and each was handed their doctorate — in biotechnology, computing, physics and engineering — by the school’s president, Shirley Ann Jackson.

The reason I had to laugh was because it seemed like every one of the newly minted Ph.D.’s at Rensselaer was foreign born. For a moment, as the foreign names kept coming — “Hong Lu, Xu Xie, Tao Yuan, Fu Tang” — I thought that the entire class of doctoral students in physics were going to be Chinese, until “Paul Shane Morrow” saved the day. It was such a caricature of what President Jackson herself calls “the quiet crisis” in high-end science education in this country that you could only laugh.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud that our country continues to build universities and a culture of learning that attract the world’s best minds. My complaint — why I also wanted to cry — was that there wasn’t someone from the Immigration and Naturalization Service standing next to President Jackson stapling green cards to the diplomas of each of these foreign-born Ph.D.’s. I want them all to stay, become Americans and do their research and innovation here. If we can’t educate enough of our own kids to compete at this level, we’d better make sure we can import someone else’s, otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.

It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders — as wide as possible — to attract and keep the world’s first-round intellectual draft choices in an age when everyone increasingly has the same innovation tools and the key differentiator is human talent. I’m serious. I think any foreign student who gets a Ph.D. in our country — in any subject — should be offered citizenship. I want them. The idea that we actually make it difficult for them to stay is crazy.

Compete America, a coalition of technology companies, is pleading with Congress to boost both the number of H-1B visas available to companies that want to bring in skilled foreign workers and the number of employment-based green cards given to high-tech foreign workers who want to stay here. Give them all they want! Not only do our companies need them now, because we’re not training enough engineers, but they will, over time, start many more companies and create many more good jobs than they would possibly displace. Silicon Valley is living proof of that — and where innovation happens matters. It’s still where the best jobs will be located.

Folks, we can’t keep being stupid about these things. You can’t have a world where foreign-born students dominate your science graduate schools, research labs, journal publications and can now more easily than ever go back to their home countries to start companies — without it eventually impacting our standard of living — especially when we’re also slipping behind in high-speed Internet penetration per capita. America has fallen from fourth in the world in 2001 to 15th today.

My hat is off to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, co-founders of the Personal Democracy Forum. They are trying to make this an issue in the presidential campaign by creating a movement to demand that candidates focus on our digital deficits and divides. (See: http://www.techpresident.com.) Mr. Rasiej, who unsuccessfully ran for public advocate of New York City in 2005 on a platform calling for low-cost wireless access everywhere, notes that “only half of America has broadband access to the Internet.” We need to go from “No Child Left Behind,” he says, to “Every Child Connected.”

Here’s the sad truth: 9/11, and the failing Iraq war, have sucked up almost all the oxygen in this country — oxygen needed to discuss seriously education, health care, climate change and competitiveness, notes Garrett Graff, an editor at Washingtonian Magazine and author of the upcoming book “The First Campaign,” which deals with this theme. So right now, it’s mostly governors talking about these issues, noted Mr. Graff, but there is only so much they can do without Washington being focused and leading.

Which is why we’ve got to bring our occupation of Iraq to an end in the quickest, least bad way possible — otherwise we are going to lose Iraq and America. It’s coming down to that choice.

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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The Gilded Age

American Cities and the Great Divide
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

A public high school teacher in Brooklyn told me recently about a student who didn’t believe that a restaurant tab for four people could come to more than $500. The student shook his head, as if resisting the very idea. He just couldn’t fathom it.

“How much can you eat?” the student asked.

When I asked a teacher in a second school to mention the same issue, one of the responses was, “Is this a true story?”

A lot of New Yorkers are doing awfully well. There are 8 million residents of New York City, and roughly 700,000 are worth a million dollars or more. The average price of a Manhattan apartment is $1.3 million. The annual earnings of the average hedge fund manager is $363 million.

The estimated worth of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, ranges from $5.5 billion to upwards of $20 billion.

You want a gilded age? This is it. The elite of the Roaring Twenties would be stunned by the wealth of the current era.

Now the flip side, which is the side those public school students are on. One of the city’s five counties, the Bronx, is the poorest urban county in the nation. The number of families in the city’s homeless shelters is the highest it has been in a quarter of a century. Twenty-five percent of all families with children in New York City — that’s 1.5 million New Yorkers — are trying to make it on incomes that are below the poverty threshold established by the federal government.

The streets that are paved with gold for some are covered with ash for many others. There are few better illustrations of the increasingly disturbing divide between rich and poor than New York City.

“I get to walk in both worlds,” said Larry Mandell, the president of the United Way of New York City. “In a given day I might be in a soup kitchen and also in the halls of Fortune 500 companies dealing with the senior executives. I’ve become acutely aware that the lives of those who are well off are not touched at all by contact with the poor. It’s not that people don’t care or don’t want to help. It’s that they have very little awareness of poverty.”

I’d always thought of the United Way as a charitable outfit. But Mr. Mandell has committed his organization to the important task of raising the awareness of Americans and their political leaders to the pressing needs of America’s cities, and especially the long-neglected, poverty-stricken neighborhoods of the inner cities.

It’s a measure of how low the bar has been set for success in America’s cities that New York is thought to be doing well, even though 185,000 of its children ages 5 or younger are poor, and 18,000 are consigned to homeless shelters each night. More than a million New Yorkers get food stamps, and another 700,000 are eligible but not receiving them. That’s a long, long way from a $500 restaurant tab.

Only 50 percent of the city’s high school students graduate in four years. And if you talk to the kids in the poorer neighborhoods, they will tell you that they don’t feel safe. They are worried about violence and gang activity, which in their view is getting worse, not better.

This is what’s going on in the nation’s most successful big city.

Mr. Mandell is upset that urban issues, which in so many cases are related to poverty, have played such a minuscule role in the presidential campaign so far. “People need to become more aware of the issue of poverty,” he said. “It’s discouraging, frankly, to have it barely mentioned at all in the debates.

“It’s true that John Edwards is the one candidate who seems concerned about it, but to actually have the issue come up just briefly in the debates, and not at all in the Republican debate — well, my view is that we have to change that.”

The United Way of New York has issued a white paper on “America’s Urban Agenda” that says, “The greatest single challenge most American cities face lies in the increasing divide between the haves and have-nots.”

There was a time, some decades ago, when urban issues and poverty were important components of presidential campaigns. Now the poor are kept out of sight, which makes it easier to leave them farther and farther behind. We’ve apparently reached a point in our politics when they aren’t even worth mentioning.

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

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Rethinking Education

Superb Kristof column this morning on education reform. I've recommended a similar approach for years, only to hit my head against the wall of Democrat supported teacher's unions and Republican apathy.

It's about time for politicians to initiate reforms that go beyond ineffective policies based on empty slogans like "Leave no child behind."

"Any takers?" Kristof asks.

Yup. At least one, right here.

Gold Stars and Dunce Caps
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

In this presidential campaign, we need somebody who wants to address the question President Bush once raised: “Is our children learning?”

International testing shows that U.S. schools do a lousy job teaching math and science, in particular. And far too many American students aren’t going to college or even completing high school, undermining our competitiveness for decades to come.

Moreover, the U.S. education system reinforces the gulfs of poverty and race. Well-off white kids tend to go to good schools that propel them ahead, while many poor black and Hispanic kids attend bad schools that hold them back.

For inspiration, presidential candidates might look at this bold three-part plan for improving American schools:

•

End requirements for teacher certification.

•

Make tenure more difficult to get so weak teachers can be weeded out after two or three years on the job.

•

Award $15,000 annual bonuses to good teachers for as long as they teach at schools in low-income areas.

Those ideas are cribbed from a provocative report on education from the Hamilton Project, which is affiliated with the Brookings Institution. The report was prepared by Robert Gordon of the Center for American Progress, Thomas Kane of Harvard and Douglas Staiger of Dartmouth, and it fits in with a burst of other research pointing in similar directions.

In the past, we tried to ensure the quality of teachers through certification procedures. But that has failed. Growing evidence indicates that certification requirements limit the pool of potential teachers — and discourage midcareer switches into teaching — without accomplishing much else.

“Teachers vary considerably in the extent to which they promote student learning, but whether a teacher is certified or not is largely irrelevant to predicting their effectiveness,” concluded a report last year for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The reality is that paper credentials can’t predict who will be an effective teacher. A half-dozen studies have found that teachers with graduate degrees aren’t any better than teachers without them. Other studies show that teachers who did well on their own SATs, or went to selective colleges or had high G.P.A.’s, don’t make significantly better teachers, either.

Yet teachers still vary tremendously in their effectiveness, as the Hamilton Project study found when it examined results in Los Angeles schools. It looked at the 25 percent of teachers who raised their students’ test scores the most, and the 25 percent who raised students’ scores the least. A student assigned to a class with a teacher in the top 25 percent could expect — after just one year — to be 10 percentile points higher than a similar student with a bottom-tier teacher.

“Moving up (or down) 10 percentile points in one year is a massive impact,” the authors wrote. “For some perspective, the black-white achievement gap nationally is roughly 34 percentile points. Therefore, if the effects were to accumulate, having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.”

The Hamilton Project study recommends that the weakest 25 percent of new teachers should be denied tenure and eliminated after two or three years on the job (teachers improve a lot in the first two years, but not much after that). That approach, it estimates, would raise students’ average test scores by 14 percentile points by the time they graduated.

“There’s no decision that school districts make that’s more important than the decision regarding who is going to stand in front of the classroom,” Professor Kane said. “Yet most districts spend more time choosing textbooks than they do reviewing the performance of teachers on their first few years on the job.”

School reform could also play a major role in fighting poverty and spreading opportunity. One sound proposal is to pay substantial bonuses to get the most effective teachers into schools with low-income students. It’s simply unfair for America’s neediest students to be continually assigned to the weakest teachers, perhaps consigning them to another generation of poverty. Higher pay will help recruit and retain excellent teachers.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have offered much leadership on education. Democrats have been too close to teachers’ unions to rock the boat, and Republicans don’t invest in education — so Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind effort has ended up as an underfinanced mess.

What we need now is for a presidential candidate to seize these ideas and run with them. Any takers?

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Related:

• Teachers Without Pedigrees


• Tierney: Vouching for Vouchers--Again


• The Unknown Candidate: Who Will Vouch for Tierney?


• The Unknown Candidate: Testing Education


• Educators Assail No Child Left Behind


• The Unknown Candidate: Educating Davey

Technorati tags: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Education and Schools, Economic Conditions and Trends, Layoffs and Job Reductions, Bush, news, commentary, op ed

Beyond Belief

If the story of Desre'e Watson is not proof of a nation gone haywire, I don't know what is....

6-Year-Olds Under Arrest
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Avon Park, Fla.

When 6-year-old Desre’e Watson threw a tantrum in her kindergarten class a couple of weeks ago she could not have known that the full force of the law would be brought down on her and that she would be carted off by the police as a felon.

But that’s what happened in this small, backward city in central Florida. According to the authorities, there were no other options.

“The student became violent,” said Frank Mercurio, the no-nonsense chief of the Avon Park police. “She was yelling, screaming — just being uncontrollable. Defiant.”

“But she was 6,” I said.

The chief’s reply came faster than a speeding bullet: “Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we’ve arrested?”

The child’s tantrum occurred on the morning of March 28 at the Avon Elementary School. According to the police report, “Watson was upset and crying and wailing and would not leave the classroom to let them study, causing a disruption of the normal class activities.”

After a few minutes, Desre’e was, in fact, taken to another room. She was “isolated,” the chief said. But she would not calm down. She flailed away at the teachers who tried to control her. She pulled one woman’s hair. She was kicking.

I asked the chief if anyone had been hurt. “Yes,” he said. At least one woman reported “some redness.”

After 20 minutes of this “uncontrollable” behavior, the police were called in. At the sight of the two officers, Chief Mercurio said, Desre’e “tried to take flight.”

She went under a table. One of the police officers went after her. Each time the officer tried to grab her to drag her out, Desre’e would pull her legs away, the chief said.

Ultimately the child was no match for Avon Park’s finest. The cops pulled her from under the table and handcuffed her. The officers were not fooling around. In the eyes of the cops the 6-year-old was a criminal, and in Avon Park she would be treated like any other felon.

There was a problem, though. The handcuffs were not manufactured with kindergarten kids in mind. The chief explained: “You can’t handcuff them on their wrists because their wrists are too small, so you have to handcuff them up by their biceps.”

As I sat listening to Chief Mercurio in a spotless, air-conditioned conference room at the Avon Park police headquarters, I had the feeling that I had somehow stumbled into the middle of a skit on “Saturday Night Live.” The chief seemed like the most reasonable of men, but what was coming out of his mouth was madness.

He handed me a copy of the police report: black female. Six years old. Thin build. Dark complexion.

Desre’e was put in the back of a patrol car and driven to the police station. “Then,” said Chief Mercurio, “she was transported to central booking, which is the county jail.”

The child was fingerprinted and a mug shot was taken. “Those are the normal procedures for anyone who is arrested,” the chief said.

Desre’e was charged with battery on a school official, which is a felony, and two misdemeanors: disruption of a school function and resisting a law enforcement officer. After a brief stay at the county jail, she was released to the custody of her mother.

The arrest of this child, who should have been placed in the care of competent, comforting professionals rather than being hauled off to jail, is part of an outlandish trend of criminalizing very young children that has spread to many school districts and law enforcement agencies across the country.

A highly disproportionate number of those youngsters, like Desre’e, are black. In Baltimore last month, the police arrested, handcuffed and hauled away a 7-year-old black boy for allegedly riding a dirt bike on the sidewalk. The youngster was released and the mayor, Sheila Dixon, apologized for the incident, saying the arrest was inappropriate.

Last spring a number of civil rights organizations collaborated on a study of disciplinary practices in Florida schools and concluded that many of them, “like many districts in other states, have turned away from traditional education-based disciplinary methods — such as counseling, after-school detention, or extra homework assignments — and are looking to the legal system to handle even the most minor transgressions.”

Once you adopt the mindset that ordinary childhood misbehavior is criminal behavior, it’s easy to start seeing young children as somehow monstrous.

“Believe me when I tell you,” said Chief Mercurio, “a 6-year-old can inflict injury to you just as much as any other person.”

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, New York Times, Children and Youth, Crime and Criminals, Education, Desre'e Watson, news, commentary, op ed

Will Russia Bet on Its People or Its Oil Wells?

By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

In a high-rise building with a view of Lenin’s Tomb, the U.S. aerospace giant Boeing is designing key parts of its new 787 Dreamliner, using hundreds of Russian aerospace engineers. Yes, President Putin may be talking cold-war tough, but down the street from the Kremlin, America’s crown jewel industrial company is using Russia’s crown jewel brainpower to design its next crown jewel jetliner.

Boeing’s Moscow Design Center, which employs 1,400 Russian engineers (earning less than their U.S. counterparts) on various projects, symbolizes Russia’s unique potential: Russia is that rare country that not only has a treasure trove of natural resources — oil, gas and mines — but also has a treasure trove of human talent: engineers, mathematicians and other valuable minds.

Most nations with highly developed human talent — like Singapore or Taiwan — have few natural resources, and those that are rich in natural resources — Venezuela or Sudan — tend not to develop their people’s talents. The exceptions, like Norway, which is rich in both human and natural resources, usually built their democratic institutions before they got rich on oil, so the money was well spent.

The meta-question with Russia today is this: Will it become more like Norway, a democracy enriched by oil, or more like Venezuela, a democracy subverted by oil? Is the Boeing center Russia’s future or its exception?

You see signs of both trends. On the positive side, Russia has been smarter than most petro-states. It has set up a rainy day fund and tucked away $100 billion from its oil and gas windfall. Direct foreign investment in Russia hit $30 billion last year, according to The Economist, and not all of it goes to the oil and gas sector anymore.

And then there’s Boeing. Its impressive Moscow center operates two shifts of engineers: 7 a.m. until 3 p.m., and 3 p.m. until 11 p.m. — which is shortly before the workday begins in the United States. A Russian Boeing engineer might be designing part of the 787’s nose during his day, and then initials and stores his work in the computer. A U.S. Boeing engineer, working on an identical computer, then picks it up during her day and engineers it some more. With regular teleconferences, it’s as if they are in one virtual 24-hour office.

“There is no paper at all,” said Sergei Korolev, the deputy head of Boeing Moscow. “We do the presentations electronically and have online sessions with Wichita and Seattle, and everyone looks at the same part and talks about it. Our center is the reason people are not emigrating.”

But Russia has a unique legacy in aerospace from Soviet days, so the educational centers and talent were in place for Boeing to tap. What Russia still glaringly lacks is an ecosystem of secure property rights, venture capitalists and homegrown innovators, and universities and business schools churning out idea-entrepreneurs. “Made in Russia” will never be a global brand as long as research spending by Russian companies remains among the lowest in the world.

The Moscow Times recently reported that only two Russian colleges — Moscow State and St. Petersburg State — are listed among the world’s top 500 universities. When you walk down the streets in Bangalore, India’s high-tech capital, it feels as if there’s a computer school or English-language school on every street. You walk in Moscow, and it feels as if there is a new shoe store or beauty salon on every street.

A former top aide to President Putin remarked to me that Russia had a huge interest in building a postindustrial knowledge economy, not an energy-intensive industrial one, so it can export most of its oil and gas, not consume them at home. But that would take a big investment in education, which is not being done.

Noting that Russia today spends far less of its G.D.P. on higher education than Europe or America, Sergei Guriyev, rector of Russia’s New Economic School, wrote in The Moscow Times, “Russians simply are not prepared to pay the taxes that would be necessary to finance science and education at Soviet-era levels, and no incentives have been created to attract more private funding.”

So here’s my prediction: You tell me the price of oil, and I’ll tell you what kind of Russia you’ll have. If the price stays at $60 a barrel, it’s going to be more like Venezuela, because its leaders will have plenty of money to indulge their worst instincts, with too few checks and balances. If the price falls to $30, it will be more like Norway. If the price falls to $15 a barrel, it could become more like America — with just enough money to provide a social safety net for its older generation, but with too little money to avoid developing the leaders and institutions to nurture the brainpower of its younger generation.

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Russia, Oil, Boeing Co., Education and Schools, news, commentary, op ed

The Butcherer in Chief

Even before he became the War Butcherer in Chief, the Shrub, since the very beginning, has been massacring the English language to death before our very ears. And as the ever humorous and erudite Dick Cavett points out in a New York Times op ed, the butchering of our language seems to be growing .... along with the demise of our civilization ....


It's Only Language
By Dick Cavett
The New York Times

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, “It was a perfect script for she and I,” inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, “Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?”

In these days of just about enough perils facing our nation, there is plenty of evidence around to conclude that our grip on our glorious language may be loosening. And the current administration, as in other matters, is not among the good guys. Let’s get everybody’s favorite example out of the way: the leader of the free world’s goofy inability to pronounce what is arguably the most important word in his vocabulary: “nuclear.” What is so hard? A school kid botching it Bush’s way — “nuke-you-lur” — would have to stand in the corner. Fortunately, an oval office has no corners.

(Does Bush’s atom have a nuke-you-luss? Does it work in reverse? Is Bush’s railway a foo-nick-lee-ur? Let’s bet.)

Andy Rooney tried to nail this matter on “60 Minutes”. Andy wondered as I do why the literate Laura doesn’t do something. Every time the president commits this verbal blunder, she must wince along with the rest of the world. Bush’s “the French have no word for ‘entrepreneur’ ” is guaranteed immortality.

The French make fun of him, of course, and by extension, of us. I say let’s irk them back by continuing with our clanging mispronunciations of their sacred tongue, such as: “Vichy-SWA,” “coo-de-GRAH” or “double enten-DRAY” — and best of all what we did to the French “chaise longue,” dyslexically turning longue (long) into “lounge” and chaise (chair) into “chase.” A fox hunter’s chair, perhaps? (Let Froggy puzzle it out.)

I think we’re just stuck with the president’s individualist English. This is the man who gave us, “I know how hard it is to put food on your family,” and who told Brian Williams, regarding his alleged Camus studies, “I have an ‘eckalectic’ reading list.” Until he was nice enough to repeat it, I was sure he had said “epileptic,” which at least would have been a word. I prefer the three-syllable version “eclectic,” but then he is The Decider.

Donald Rumsfeld and about half of his military pals seem to feel that hidden weapons are found in a “cash-AY” [cache: from Fr., hiding place; pron. kash], provoking further giggles from our busy French detractors. The cashiered secretary of defense is equally hard on his own language, as with, “It wasn’t wrong. It was just miss-CHEEVY-us.” “MISS-chuh-vuss” is of course what he was after. Oh, and with all due respect Mr. Erstwhile Secretary, a medal can be called a memento, but not a MO-mento. Princeton, class of what again?

Getting a little thing like words right, is it so important?

The right answer is: Yes. As when poorly worded road signs cause fatalities. Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation. And why not a sloppy war? What if someone big, issuing an order of earth-shaking potential, made the (tiny) error of confusing the last letters of Iraq and Iran?

Another whole category of language abuse is the stating of untruths which, when shown to be untrue, are repeated. As in Dick Cheney, the man who recently said to Wolf Blitzer, “We’ve had immense successes in Iraq,” adding “and we will have more immense successes.” Blitzer looked, well, blitzed. Instead of lowering a large butterfly net over his guest, he got his breath and, charitably, did not request examples. And what of Condoleezza Rice? The same Condi who was willing to contribute “a mushroom cloud” to the Scare America campaign now insists that an escalation be called an “augmentation.” What, in her new tea-time vocabulary, would she call the W.M.D. that caused the cloud? An “Instrument of Considerable Inconvenience”? What are the war dead in her sanitized lexicon? “The indisposed”? Or simply “those whose coffins may not be photographed.” Once dead, our brave soldiers are an embarrassment.

Incidentally, are Jews still Semites? Or are they suddenly “Semets”? For years now the boo-boo “anti-se-MET-ic” has gained ground, even among rabbis, as well as TV talking heads, big-name news people and the literati. Where did it come from? Listen for it. Try the Sunday morning shows for a likely catch.

And what about the various distortions of the easy word “heinous.” From lawyers especially you get “hayney-us,” “heeny-us” and even “highness.” Look, guys and gals, it’s easy. It rhymes with a well-known two-syllable word which some might consider not nice, but I guarantee will stick the correct pronunciation in your brain, especially if you compose a silly rhyming couplet. (“His behavior was heinous/ And … etc.” — which, by the way is not pronounced “ECK-cetera.”)

And then there’s the poor little “kudo.” It’s a word Variety has used incorrectly — as in “DeNiro received many kudos for his performance” — for enough decades that it is now forgotten that “kudos” (Greek for praise) was already singular. There never was a kudo. Will Variety eventually take the word “pathos” and extract a “patho”? Stay tuned.

Last week during hearings, at least two of our star-spangled generals spoke of a “dim-you-nition” (diminution, perhaps?) of troops. Does ammunition then become “ama-nyoo-shun”? Let it pass.

It’s gotten so bad for “lie” and “lay” that if a candidate got the votes of only those who don’t know the difference, it would be a landslide. Upon hearing, “He was outside laying on the lawn,” I remember being glad my dad thought I was worldly enough to get it when he asked, “And who was under him on the lawn?” Wouldn’t anybody just know you wouldn’t “lie it on the table”? Try playing it as it lies. It works just as well.

When the flight attendant would say, “We will be landing in Chicago momentarily,” I used to enjoy replying, “Will there be time to get off?” But I see the forces of darkness have prevailed, and this and many wrong uses are now deemed acceptable by the alleged guardians of our language, the too-quickly supine dictionary makers. Are they afraid of being judged “not with it”? What ever happened to, “Everybody does it don’t make it right”?

Certain misquotes are rooted in marble. It would take another act of Creation to restore “gild the lily” to Will Shakespeare’s “paint the lily.” (“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.”) There are hundreds of these. And there’s, “The senator literally exploded with laughter.” Who cleaned up the mess?

Then there is that common ailment, the tin ear, and its possessor’s knack for rendering sublime quotations drab, often through insensitivity to the music of the words and their proper order. A good example is the great but frequently wounded quote of Mark Twain’s on writing, a quote that causes, when done right, my forearms to horripilate.

Here it is: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between lightning bug … and the lightning.”

Recently, an after-dinner speaker botched it. He got all the words in, but not in the master’s order, ending with “the lightning and the lightning bug.” I had to go out and walk around a while. Word order is everything. Anyone who doesn’t hear that it’s imperative to end with the majestic word “lightning” would probably argue that nothing’s wrong with “The Sierra Madre’s Treasure,” Milton’s “Lost Paradise,” “The Opera’s Phantom,” “Music’s Sound,” “The Sea and the Old Man” and, who knows, “The Island of Gilligan.” (Have I beaten the point to death yet?)

(Let us note: the hapless speaker was at the DAY-us — dais — not the DYE-us.)

But let’s be charitable. I soon learned it isn’t necessary to correct. I quickly learned to bite my English teachers’ boy’s tongue and let a lady guest refer to an “elicit” affair. But if I ever find myself once again with the senator who spoke of his “incredulous” experiences, I shall pop him one.

I don’t see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty — and evaporating quickly. Almost daily irritants, like the dumb cluck’s beloved, “between you and I” will never be expunged, it seems. “Loathe” and “loath” will continue to change places, and “phenomena” and “phenomenon” will still be used interchangeably. But, finally, what the hell? It’s only language. It’s only what we live by.

Photo Credit: Dick Cavett. (The New York Times)

For those too young to remember:

About Dick Cavett

The host of “The Dick Cavett Show” — which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1975 and on public television from 1977 to 1982 — Dick Cavett is also the coauthor of two books, “Cavett” (1974) and “Eye on Cavett” (1983). He has appeared on Broadway in “Otherwise Engaged” “Into the Woods” and as narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” and has made guest appearances in movies and on TV shows including “Forrest Gump” and “The Simpsons.” Mr. Cavett lives in New York City and Montauk, N.Y.

Technorati tags: Dick Cavett, English Language, English Grammar, American Culture, Bush, Cheney, news, commentary, op ed

Happy Talk on School Reform

New York Times:

"The Bush administration put a positive gloss on national math and reading scores that were actually dismal - and bad news for the school reform effort...."

Democrats Seek Probe Into Agency Spending

The New York Times reports:

"Congressional auditors concluded last week that the Education Department engaged in illegal "covert propaganda" by hiring Armstrong Williams to endorse the No Child Left Behind Act without requiring him to disclose he was paid...."