Sunday, October 26, 2014

Polls 1 Issues 0

The Republicans are surging on the prediction markets, leading pundits to write that the Senate races are all but over.

But Michelle Nunn, the Democrat, now has a 3 point lead in the latest poll for the Georgia Senate race.

President Obama, though, seems to be a real drag on Democratic candidates who are running from him as fast as they ran to him in 2012.

Meanwhile, an internal Democratic poll has Mark Udall in the lad in the Colorado Senate race, while a Republican polling firm shows Democrat Mark Begich up 10 points in Alaska.

With just over a week to go until election day, it's still anyone's Senate and don't let anyone tell you differently. New polls contradict old polls and wild swings in some states are showing that trying to gauge public attitudes is not for the feint of heart.

What we're missing, though, are issues. Yes, state races do tend to be won or lost on state concerns, but after four years of bashing President Obama you'd think the Republicans would run on something positive and the Democrats would run on the legislation they were elected to pass. There are some exceptions, such as this Representative in Florida who is running on environmental concerns by framing them in terms of clean water and flood control,  but mostly GOP candidates are running on governmental ineptitude regarding Ebola and ISIS, and Democrats are running on...well, that's even more difficult to determine since most are running away from health care, the environment, financial reform and guns.

Poll after poll shows the voters supporting what Democrats generally support and give Republicans lower ratings on governing, but that doesn't seem to matter. A few Senate incumbents will lose, but 96% of House members will be reelected. So much for throwing out the gridlockers.

And for those of you who need a history lesson, Bill Clinton is here to tell us that partisanship was worse in the 1990s, but that he and Newt got some things done. And Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill got even more done while sniping at each other all day, then sipping scotch and swapping stories come 5 o'clock. I can't help but think that the real difference between then and now is that we've elected a bunch of entitled, wealthy, spoiled brats to the Congress and that once we get some real adults in there we'll start moving some legislation.

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Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Real Scare

Ain't nobody does scary like the Republicans. Even Democrats, who've been scaring the elderly for years saying that the GOP would cut their Medicare, can't hold a candle to the right wing fright machine once it gets enough cheap American gasoline inside it. This week was a banner week for scary, and it's going to grease the midterm slide so completely, that the Democrats won't need Joe Biden around anyhow.

Never mind that Ebola is devastating West Africa and wreaking havoc on international travel and national psyches. It's now a political issue and a subject for conspriacy theories. Some are comparing the government's response to the outbreak to GW Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina, though the scale is, at this point, much smaller. And of course the anti-government crowd is blaming the government, the CDC and local administrations for fumbling the response. There is an element of truth in this. Potential carriers should not have flown on commercial airlines, nor should hospitals be unprepared for possible outbreaks.


Now, here comes the fear. If it's not Ebola, it's ISIS and the scary possibility that our borders are so porous that diseases and Islamic terrorists are pouring into the American southwest. With the economy growing slowly and the stock market sagging, it's more evidence to many that the Democrats do not deserve to keep their majority and since most of the Senate races are in red states, well, the writing's on the wall. I have been saying that the Democrats will hold their majority in November, but that will now depend almost solely on turnout.

So make sure you get out and vote. And don't be afraid.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest  


Sunday, October 12, 2014

The Political Muddle

If the sentiments expressed in this article in the New York Times today is any indication, then the Democrats are in deep trouble in the November Senate elections. President Obama still has his fans, but even people who voted for him are losing some faith that he can lead the country out of its present political torpor in the last two years of his term. His opponents, and at this point there are more than ever, are downright gleeful at the thought of having the GOP take both houses of Congress, though they do express frustration and anger at his failures.

RealClearPolitics is being a bit coy about it, but most of the recent polling gives the Republicans leads in the states they need to win to take control of the chamber. The same is true over at Electoral-Vote, except the Votemaster is not being coy at all and is saying at this point that the GOP will claim at least 52 seats after the elections. And even over at the Princeton Election Consortium the news for Democrats is not positive, with the prognostication currently calling for 51 Republicans come January.

Does this mean that it's over? Not at all. Democrats famously under-perform in midterm election polling and there's still a half-month to go before the votes are counted. President Obama has lent his also famous get-out-the-vote apparatus to the national party and most polling organizations make an assumption that the electorate in 2014 will look a lot like that of 2010. If that's true, then the GOP will win. If not, and more of the Democrats' constituents come out to vote, then there will be many surprises on election night.

The mood of the country will have a good deal to do with the outcome, and right now the Republicans have the upper hand. Of course, they are running on the fear of Ebola and ISIS, which they are convinced will both run through the United States over the next couple of weeks. It also doesn't help that the seats the Democrats have to defend are in mostly red states.

If the Republicans win this year, then payback will most likely come during a more favorable cycle for Democrats in 2016. In the meantime, look for Congress to try to repeal the ACA, continue to investigate Benghazi, fortify the Mexican border against terrorists, and lower taxes on the wealthy.

You know, the real issues.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest  

Saturday, October 4, 2014

The Attack on History

I suppose that many Americans will see the report that the school board in Jefferson County, Colorado has decided not to blatantly impose its view of United States history on the district's students as a victory for common sense and educational policy. For those who need a refresher, here's the basic idea, from the article:
After two weeks of student protests and a fierce backlash across Colorado and beyond, the Jefferson County School Board backed away from a proposal to teach students the “benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights,” while avoiding lessons that condoned “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
So far, so good. The students and staff did a masterful job leading a peaceful protest against the proposed alterations and even shut two high schools down with a sickout last week. This paragraph ends, however, with a rather chilling sentence:
But the board did vote 3-to-2 to reorganize its curriculum-review committee to include students, teachers and board-appointed community members.
Which is then followed by the hammer blow:
The Jefferson County schools superintendent, Dan McMinimee, who suggested the compromise, said it represented the “middle ground” in a fevered debate that pitted the board’s three conservative members against students, parents, the teachers’ union and other critics who opposed the effort to steer lessons toward the “positive aspects of the United States and its heritage.”
You see, the dispute has not been solved. The Superintendent and the conservatives have merely made their viewpoint a position that needs to be debated and taken seriously as an opening gambit in a larger attack on public school curricula. The other side, which includes students, educators and parents, now has to come up with a counter-argument for a discussion that doesn't have a counter-argument. Cutting out events you don't like or that don't satisfy your agenda is not how history should be taught. There is no "middle ground" when it comes to school boards injecting politics into what's taught in the classroom.

Even worse, the school board made this decision originally without the input of teachers, who should be the first ones consulted on any change to the curriculum, and the larger community, which clearly opposes the board's agenda.

There is a larger issue at work here that's operating under the radar of many citizens. There has been a heady debate over the past 10 to 15 years in education about whether the curriculum should focus more on teaching students skills or academic content. The Common Core Curriculum Standards and the Advanced Placement curriculum that's the basis of the Colorado argument, have sided demonstrably on the side of skills. The reasoning is that if students are taught how to conduct research, write coherent essays, solve equations and theorems, and apply experimental designs to scientific problems, then they will be able to use those skills for any educational endeavor. After all, the argument goes, middle and high school teachers are not training historians or mathematicians or research scientists.

I beg, humbly, to differ.

I'm a content guy. I can teach anyone how to structure an essay or to read a historical document and apply step-by-step analyses that will render a deeper understanding of its message, and the over 3,000 students, now adults, who have been in my classroom over the past 30 years can attest to my abilities and their growth. But if you don't have the knowledge, the "conceptual capital," as my former Rutgers University Graduate School Professor Wayne Hoy used to say at every turn, then you got...nothing. I am training budding historians because students need to see how history is written and debated and for that they need a detailed body of evidence, facts, conjecture and sources that will allow them to debate, judge, interpret and synthesize what they've learned. THEN, they can write an essay with a specific and relevant thesis and support their assertions with solid historical evidence. The same goes for every academic discipline. Unfortunately, the trend is towards skills at the expense of content.

A colleague and I wrote the new Advanced Placement United States History curriculum this past summer and I am now teaching my school's two section of that AP class. The College Board, which administers the AP program, has done a fine job re-imagining much of the new course. It's broken down into historical themes and focuses on the requisites skills that historians need to use to decipher the meaning of the past. There are content outlines that divide U.S. History into nine historical periods and tests that use documents and sources as the basis for evaluation and assessment.

At an AP seminar my colleague attended last spring, though, the leader could not adequately answer the question of what content knowledge the students would need to master in order to score well on the AP test. The best he could say was that students would need to know the usual facts. I think if you put 20 history educators in a room they could give you a rough outline of what the usual facts are, but this is the AP. They should be more specific. And the reason they can't be more specific is that the skills have won.

So how does that relate back to Jefferson County, Colorado, or any other mischief-making school board that wants to create more patriotic children who avoid conflicts and always respect authority (remember, we're talking teenagers here)? According to the article above, the AP has warned Jefferson County not to alter the curriculum because if they did then they can't call it Advanced Placement, but in the end, that won't matter. Why? Because now the content can be subtly manipulated to reflect anyone's agenda. When content and facts matter less, what people are actually taught can be chopped, rearranged or simply dropped while skills are used to fill the void. That's the danger, and as a nation, we have embarked on a new educational paradigm that will result in the striking contradiction of students practicing more, but learning less.

The Common Core makes the same skills-based assumption, and for me, that's a far more dangerous problem than the time lost for testing or the fear of the federal government injecting itself into state education standards. I cannot abide the thought of a generation schooled on how to perform tasks, but taught less content with which to provide context or relevance. We need to create analytical thinkers who know a specific body of knowledge. Then we can teach skills.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest