Jul 07

Origins of the universe

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Can science prove or disprove the existence of God? Has the origin of creation without a creator come to be settled science? Are these questions knowable, even by the brightest minds in the world? Yes, sort of, is the basic answer…

Except for the question of ‘settled science’, because it’s not settled and if anything, keeps advancing toward an undeniable conclusion that a creator was behind creation.

So says, more or less, Fr. Robert Spitzer, Jesuit philosopher, educator, author and executive producer of Cosmic Origins, a fascinating new film that explores modern scientific theories about how the universe came to be. Spitzer was my guest on radio Friday for a compelling hour.

He said the eight scientists featured in the film based their dialogue around the fundamental question ‘What is the evidence for God from physics?’ The answer is plenty, so  much in fact, that “today there’s more evidence than you can possible imagine,” he stated. Then he added “Stephen Hawking kind of left them all out.”

He said scientific atheism is not scientific at all. And agnosticism can come from honest naturalism, and kind of stay there. “They won’t move to a supernatural explanation unless they’ve exhaused every other natural explanation,” he explained, and of course they’ll never be able to do that.

But a most interesting thing happened at Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday party last January as assembled guests celebrated and conversed. Spitzer pointed to Lisa Grossman’s article in New Scientist to elaborate, but you need a subscription for more than the preview. Here’s more:

You could call them the worst birthday presents ever. At themeeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday- loftily titled “State of the Universe” – two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.

One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed (see ” Naked black-hole hearts live in the fifth dimension”). The other suggests thatthe universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without thehand of a supernatural creator.

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists,including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. “A point of creation would be a place wherescience broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God,” Hawking told themeeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as aneternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well asthe future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that theuniverse most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

A call came in from a listener in the Batavia, Illinois community near Fermilab, who asked for good resources so he could better understand the topic and engage the debate with local scientists hard-set in their elimination of God from the creation and evolution equation.

Grossman’s article was the first resource Spitzer pointed to. I’m happy to direct folks to his book as well, New Proofs for the Existence of God, in which he presents peer-review physics studies, “string theory, quantum cosmology, mathematical thoughts on infinity” and more, in an easily digestible collection of evidence. Spitzer, founder and president of the Magis Institute, also highly recommends Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, reviewed here in First Things.

Barr begins his book by pointing out that the methods and discoveries of modern physics can and must be separated from the philosophical doctrine of materialism, which so often serves as a dogmatic and, as Barr goes on to show with great power and effectiveness, unsubstantiated faith among physicists.

Seems to me that’s a very important note, “unsubstantiated faith among physicists” who willfully hold to their beliefs in spite of growing evidence that counters or at least questions them.

According to Barr, it was never obvious that physics implied or presupposed a materialistic view of the universe, but the existence of such a connection has been rendered downright implausible by a series of developments in twentieth-century physics. In a series of lucid chapters, Barr addresses the question of whether the universe had a beginning, looks at the issue of whether the universe exhibits any evidence of design or purpose, and examines what contemporary physics (and mathematics) has to say about the nature of human beings—specifically on the question of whether our behavior is determined by physical laws and whether we have an immaterial nature. At each point, Barr shows that “recent discoveries have begun to confound the materialist’s expectations and confirm those of the believer in God.”

Alas, it will continue. But with a fascinating compilation of new data all the time adding to the pool of scientific evidence. Last week the headlines touted the discovery of the ‘God particle,’ which Spitzer explained has nothing to do with God but everything to do with marketing. The New York Times explains more here.

Cool stuff, but the coolest of all is the fullest possible exploration of available evidence in the world at the moment. When you’re open to that, you’re open to everything, God and all.

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May 06

Overpopulation myths, anti-humanism and Chen Guongcheng

Abortion, Culture, Education, Geopolitics, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

The Obama administration was involved at the highest levels of diplomacy with China last week to negotiate a deal over the fate of a human rights activist targeted by the Chinese government because he exposed so much abuse tied to China’s population control policy. Big media did a good job driving that story and keeping Chen’s fate a top and prominent focus.

Some of them noted this president’s difficulties with human rights affairs around the world. But since this crisis was tied to China’s one-child policy, their draconian population control response to a perceived global crisis, it presented a particularly gnarly problem for a president whose science adviser is a disciple of the population control guru Paul Ehrlich.

To pick up where the post below left off, on an excerpt from Merchants of Despair…

Until the mid-1960s, American population control programs, both at home and abroad, were largely funded and implemented by private organizations such as the Population Council and Planned Parenthood — groups with deep roots in the eugenics movement…

This situation changed radically in the mid-1960s, when the U.S. Congress, responding to the agitation of overpopulation  ideologues, finally appropriated federal funds to underwrite first domestic and then foreign population control programs. Suddenly, instead of mere millions, there were hundreds of millions and eventually billions of dollars available to fund global campaigns of mass abortion and forced sterilization. The result would be human catastrophe on a worldwide scale.

Population Research Institute’s president Steven Mosher told me that China boasted of addressing perceived overpopulation issues by aborting 400 million babies, which was so breathtaking I asked him to repeat that statement. He said forced abortion has been the policy in China since 1979, after the government there bought into the Club of Rome study ‘Limits to Growth’ purportedly showing that the world would run out of resources if we don’t drastically reduce populations. Although, Mosher quickly added, the study was debunked within two years as a fraud. The voices discrediting the report somehow didn’t reach China.

Fast forward to now, with what Mosher referred to as ‘the most pro-abortion, population control administration in our history’, and here we are.

In Merchants of Despair, Zubrin states:

The human race is not, as later Malthus admirers John Holdren (currently President Obama’s science advisor) and Paul Ehrlich sneered in 1971, so many bacteria in a culture dish, doomed to quick extintion unless our appetites can be controlled by wise overlords wielding sterilants to curb our excessive multiplication.

To be precise, that quote from Global Ecology in 1971 was this:

When a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the “carrying capacity” of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet.

To which Zubrin responds:

No: we are creative inventors, and the more of us there are, the better off we are. And the freer we are, the faster we can make the inventions that can advance our condition still further.

China never got that memo, and Congressman Chris Smith told me he pleaded with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to assure Chen Guongcheng’s safety and confront the Chinese government about their brutal policy that has particularly targeted baby girls, called the ‘lost daughters of China’ by human rights activists. “This is the true war on women,” Smith told me, alluding to the politically strategic spin in news cycles lately between Democrats and Republicans. And people in high places have been “indifferent” to China’s forced abortions, causing “tens of millions of aborted baby girls” and many years of women being “denied basic freedoms.”

Congressman Smith was instrumental in Chen’s eventual arrangements for release, tenuous as that remains. Now, he told me, the US and western media are obligated to follow up on Chen’s safe travel with his family, as well as the internal business of securing safety for his extended family and human rights activists who helped him. The media have been nearly heroic exposing this cause, he said. The State Department has its own duty to protect…

and demonstrate to the world that the US stands firm for fundamental human rights and the rule of law.

The world has been watching this drama for the past week. The upside to the tense drama is that maybe now they’ll focus more on the human rights cause at the center of Chen’s activism.

Which PRI does constantly.

Stay tuned.

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May 06

Overpopulation myths, pseudo-science and anti-humanism

Culture, Education, Geopolitics, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

That’s a lot to take on, especially about an establishment movement.

But I did a set of interviews with Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of Merchants of Despair on these topics right around Earth Day recently, and found he did just that, with thorough research and historic and scientific references. Which he pursues with passion not just to debunk myths, but to set the record straight on human flourishing  and ethical ecology. It’s stunning to learn the scope and depth and power of the misinformation.

Then, because of the Chen Guoncheng ordeal last week, I got human rights expert Steven Mosher on for a radio interview on the China one child policy and the back story behind it, because there are few experts in the world as knowledgable and experienced in documenting China’s population control as Mosher is.

Congressman Chris Smith gave me an update with astonishing background to the Chen story and the human rights violations record of the Chinese government, based partially but largely on falsified Western studies warning that population control was an urgent necessity to save the planet and its resources from a doomsday crisis.

There’s a crisis alright. But it’s in the human toll of these persistent myths based on the enduring eugenics movement. How can these atrocities continue, with widespread approval or at least acceptance, explicit or implicit, by governments and international organizations?

Through political power, says Zubrin, and the cult of antihumanism.

There is a single ideological current running through a seemingly disparate collection of noxious modern political and scientific movements, ranging from militarism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and radical environmentalism, to socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism. This is the ideology of antihumanism: the belief that the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity.

Which brings the China one-child policy and Chen Guongcheng into the picture, but more on that in a bit…

The founding prophet of modern antihumanism is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who offered a pseudoscientific basis for the idea that human reproduction always outruns available resources. Following this pessimistic and inaccurate assessment of the capacity of human ingenuity to develop new resources, Malthus advocated oppressive policies that led to the starvation of millions in India and Ireland.

Zubrin’s book documents the horrors of how this played out in both lands, and it’s appalling. And totally unnecessary. Which should have been made clear long ago.

However…

While Malthus’s argument that human population growth invariably leads to famine and poverty is plainly at odds with the historical evidence, which shows global living standards rising with population growth, it nonetheless persisted and even gained strength among intellectuals and political leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its most pernicious manifestation in recent decades has been the doctrine of population control, famously advocated by ecologist Paul Ehrlich, whose bestselling 1968 antihumanist tract The Population Bomb has served as the bible of neo-Malthusianism. In this book, Ehrlich warned of overpopulation and advocated that the American government adopt stringent population control measures, both domestically and for the Third World countries that received American foreign aid. (Ehrlich, it should be noted, is the mentor of and frequent collaborator with John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor.)

And so it continues.

In the next post.

 

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Nov 06

Baby seven billion

Church, Education, Geopolitics, Society No Comments »

In a way, I wish we knew exactly who this child was when he or she was born into the world. On the other hand, given certain aggressive measures to ‘control’ population, perhaps we’d best not have an identity.

But that’s precisely the point. Behind the numbers and statistics and academic angst is the fact that the word ‘population’ means people, lots of them, individual women and men and children who are unique and distinct from every other human being in the world, with equal dignity.

Which is why I was glad to see Seven Billion Reasons to Celebrate.

As the Financial Times reported late last week:

“In contrast to the photographs feting the symbolic sixth billionth birth in 1999, the UN is deliberately avoiding selecting a similar baby to mark this year’s milestone, in a move that Babtunde Osotimehin, executive director of the [UN Fund for Population, or UNFPA], said showed the need for reflection rather than celebration.”

“Reflection” rather than “celebration”?

Can we talk honestly, just for a moment? When was the last time anyone heard bien-pensants in population policy circles bemoaning a surfeit of blond-haired, blue-eyed babies? Think about it.

As these graceless official preparations for Baby Seven Billion inadvertently indicate, there is an ugly underside to today’s international “population movement” (whose enthusiasts no longer prefer to be called “population controllers”).

It is an underside whose intellectual heritage traces back to the heyday of eugenics, with its then-explicit emphasis on the imperative of pruning away “the unfit” from the human race. As Ur-eugenicist and population-controller Margaret Sanger, the mother of these modern efforts, declared in the 1920s,

“Feeble-mindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly indifferent to their racial responsibilities. And it is largely this type of humanity we are now drawing upon to perpetuate our world for the generations to come.”

And lest anyone forget: those high-minded eugenic precepts were parent to the concept of unlebenswertes Leben (roughly translated, “lives not worth living,” as determined by those other than the particular souls in question)—a notion that would fatefully come into vogue in Germany during that country’s darkest hour.

For obvious reasons, this is a pedigree that today’s population controllers do not strain to highlight.

And incidentally: what of this veil of tears into which Baby Seven Billion is being born? Baby Six Billion is now about 12 years old (having been born in 1999)—and Baby Five Billion has recently marked his or her 24th birthday (he or she was born in early 1987). The world has changed over these years—and not for the worse, if material living standards are our benchmark.

Read on in that article. Bottom line:

The plain fact is that Baby Seven Billion will have a greater chance to live to adulthood and receive an education—and a lower chance of suffering extreme material poverty—than a child at any previous juncture in history. This prospect, in and of itself, should be a cause for celebration.

Besides the fact of life itself.

The Vatican’s chief press spokesman welcomed this baby into the world, wherever he or she is.

“Dear baby number seven billion,” said the Italian priest Nov. 5, “we pray that you can understand that your life will find its fullest meaning not in this world but in the next. Because this is what you were born for. Your Creator and Father made you for this.” …

“I don’t know if you were born on a remote island, or in a refugee tent. I don’t know whether you are healthy or sick or handicapped. I don’t know whether both your parents were there to embrace you at your birth, or whether your mother alone was there to hold you.”

“I don’t know whether people will say there are too many or too few of you and your contemporaries. Today, I don’t care about that.”

Fr. Lombardi told the landmark baby that the world he or she is coming into “is a bit complicated and it’s not friendly for everyone.”

“We haven’t done a very good job preparing it for you,” he admitted.

He noted that the G20 Summit of the world’s wealthiest nations had just concluded its two-day meeting in the French city of Cannes.

“The leaders of the richest and most powerful nations are sitting around a table, struggling to find a way forward. We too are asking ourselves about your future.”

Fr. Lombardi’s greeting is personal but also universal. And exquisite.

He told the baby that he or she is “unique and special, that you are a wonderful gift, that you are a miracle, that your spirit will live forever, and so you are welcome.”

“We hope that when you smile someone will respond to your smile, and when you cry someone will caress you. We hope you can go to school and that you won’t go hungry. We hope that someone will answer your questions wisely and encourage you as you find your place in the world.”

Let’s do all we can to make that happen.

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Oct 22

Parental rights, schools, and rival moral visions

Culture, Education, Society No Comments »

In the public schools, parents are losing more rights with more frequency these days.

The California school system has been in the news a lot in recent months for its change in curriculum to make it not only gay-friendly, but featured.

…California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 48, which dictates that California schools adopt instructional materials in social science classes that emphasize “the role and contributions of … lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans” in history.

When considering the myriad ways such a law tramples on parental rights and academic legitimacy, it is hard to know where to begin. However, since the law will be celebrated by some as a triumph of inclusivity, perhaps it should be noted it solves no conceivable problem currently plaguing California.

Regarding inclusivity, California law already bans discrimination in instructional materials based on “race, sex, color, creed, handicap, national origin, or ancestry.” Not content with banning discrimination, earlier California legislators already mandated emphases on the contributions of both men and women as well as “Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans” and other ethnic and cultural groups in California textbooks and curriculum.

In other words, it is hard to imagine that historically significant lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans are not already being included.

Now, it’s news in New York. Robert George and Melissa Moschella address it in this piece as a New York Times op-ed.

IMAGINE you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?

That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control.

Observers can quarrel about the extent to which what is being mandated is an effect, or a contributing cause, of the sexualization of children in our society at younger ages. But no one can plausibly claim that teaching middle-schoolers about mutual masturbation is “neutral” between competing views of morality; the idea of “value free” sex education was exploded as a myth long ago. The effect of such lessons is as much to promote a certain sexual ideology among the young as it is to protect their health.

But beyond rival moral visions, the new policy raises a deeper issue: Should the government force parents — at least those not rich enough to afford private schooling — to send their children to classes that may contradict their moral and religious values on matters of intimacy and personal conduct?

Liberals and conservatives alike should say no. Such policies violate parents’ rights, whether they are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or of no religion at all. To see why, we need to think carefully about the parent-child relationship that gives rise to the duties that parental rights serve and protect.

This argument deserves serious engagement.

Parenting, especially in moral and religious matters, is very important and highly personal: while parents enlist others’ help in this task, the task is theirs. They are ultimately responsible for their children’s intellectual and moral maturity, so within broad limits they must be free to educate their children, especially on the deepest matters, as they judge best. This is why parental rights are so important: they provide a zone of sovereignty, a moral space to fulfill their obligations according to their consciences.

The right to parent is rather like the right to exercise one’s religion. Like parental duties, religious duties are serious and highly personal. This is why, absent the most serious reasons, it would be a grave violation of individual rights if the state prevented people from honoring what they regarded as their religious obligations. To subject children to indoctrination in deeply personal matters against their parents’ consciences is no less a violation than forcing Muslim parents to send their children to a Catholic Mass…

Unless a broader parental opt out is added, New York City’s new policies will continue to usurp parents’ just (and constitutionally recognized) authority. Turning a classroom into a mandatory catechism lesson for a contested ideology is a serious violation of parental rights, and citizens of every ideological hue should stand up and oppose it.

Let’s see who engages it most, and best.

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Oct 11

US wins Nobel prize in economics

Education, Geopolitics, Society No Comments »

That line wound up on a popular comedy show.

But seriously, I found this impressive.

The Nobel in economic science was awarded on Monday to Thomas J. Sargent of New York University and Christopher A. Sims of Princeton University for their research on the cause and effect of government policies on the broader economy, a major concern of countries still struggling to address the aftermath of the recent financial crisis.

This is really interesting.

Back in the 1970s, Dr. Sargent and Dr. Sims were interested in figuring out how a new policy, like a tax cut or an interest rate increase, might affect the economy. But economists cannot run controlled experiments in real life to see what happens when a policy is executed and compare the results to when it is not. Instead, they have to study whatever history is available to them, with all the complicated conditions that happened to coincide with the policy change.

They could not have foreseen how much we would need their analysis at this point in the future.

Their new methodologies are used to figure out whether a policy change that happened in the past affected the economy or whether it was made in anticipation of events that policy makers thought would happen later.

“For both Sims and Sargent, their research is fundamental,” said Mark W. Watson, an economics professor at Princeton. “They figured out what it is you need to know to answer this cause and effect question, and then they developed methods for actually measuring the effects of causes.”

Okay, but wait…That’s all related to past events. What caused what, and how its anticipation affected its outcome. Or something like that.

Today I asked a professorial scientist something reasonable about cause and effect in advance of the result, and he smiled and said “If I knew that answer, I’d be in Sweden picking up a Nobel right now.”

Though the guys that did, didn’t exactly have the answers. Just interesting research methodology.

Dr. Sargent’s body of work is somewhat eclectic. For example, he spent the early part of his career building up the “rational expectations theory” — the idea that people make choices based on what they rationally expect to happen, and so expectations can affect outcomes — and then spent subsequent decades criticizing it.

“He’s an amazing character in that sense,” said Dr. Christiano, who wrote his dissertation under Dr. Sargent. “He contributed a revolution, and then tried to develop a revolution against that one.”

Looks like we have a new frontier.

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Sep 27

UC Berkeley students hold ‘teaching moment’

Education, Society No Comments »

It was a ‘racist bake sale.’ No kidding.

At first glance, this looked like a parody in the Onion.

A student group at the University of California Berkeley has sparked a furor by staging a bake sale that charges customers differently based on their race and gender.

The Berkeley College Republicans devised the satirical “Increase Diversity Bake Sale,” as a protest against proposed bill SB 185, which would have the race, gender, ethnicity and national origin of prospective students considered alongside other admission criteria.

The bake sale, which went ahead Tuesday despite the disapproval of the school’s administration, set prices for baked goods on a sliding scale — charging the most to Caucasian males and the least to Native American women.

“If preferences based on skin color are okay for college admissions, they should be okay for other aspects of life,” wrote the group’s president, Shawn Lewis, on their website.

“We agree that the event is inherently racist, but that is the point.”

Delicious thought experiment. Though the school finds it tasteless. Only some critical thinking applies at UC Berkeley, and only some tolerance is tolerable.

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Aug 30

What happened to school choice?

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I’m told it’s the political power of unions. Makes me wonder about all the good teachers trapped in a system without the power to express or carry out their own ideas.

Dr. John Sparks is concerned, too, and we spoke late last week about the problems. Here’s how he expressed it in his latest column for the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College.

In a recent editorial, The Wall Street Journal calls 2011 the “year of school choice.” Parents and the legislators who represent them, particularly in inner-city schools, are tired of waiting for the promised effects of “educational reform” on the public schools their children attend. Therefore, according to the Wall Street Journal, in one form or another, 13 states have passed school-choice legislation, and similar changes are proposed in 28 other states. Such legislation often permits the formation of publicly financed “charter schools,” which are run by new schools boards whose members insist upon an educational environment that will produce real learning.

Despite progress in many places, New York City children, many of them African-American, may not be able to return to charters or start in them anew in the fall due to a lawsuit instituted against the NYC’s Department of Education by what would seem to be a tragically ironic twosome: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

What? That doesn’t make sense. Sparks makes the point, connecting the dots.

One would certainly assume that NYC’s charter program—which would allow parents to withdraw their children from the 22 poor public schools in New York and move them to effective charter or other schools—would be eagerly supported by the NAACP and the UFT. After all, these are schools deemed (by pre-established criteria) to be “failing.” But that is not the case. Why?

Perhaps one could understand the UFT, long an ideological champion of public schools, no matter how poorly they perform, engaging in such a suit, but why the NAACP, in light of its announced commitment to black and Latino youths and their parents? Here is a case where political/ideological dedication to the public-school monopoly is stronger than loyalty to the very people which the NAACP is pledged to help.

Fortunately, NYC parents with children attending or about to enter charter schools in the fall are not committed to this ideological blindness. They simply want the good schooling for their children that educational choice provides, and they are speaking out.

Good for them. In fact, Hooray for them. Outraged parents are telling the UFT their time’s up.

The same could be said to the NAACP. How can an organization supposedly committed to helping blacks and other minority groups climb the educational ladder file a lawsuit to obstruct educational opportunities for what amounts to 7,000 of New York’s most disadvantaged kids? Black parents have a right to be perplexed, frustrated, and outraged by such a stance.

The Economist reports that another parent, Ny Whittaker, whose child attends a Harlem charter school, summarized it well: the “NAACP is on the wrong side of history.”

So is the US Department of Education, at this point. In operation only since 1980, note this part of its original stated mission:

The Department’s mission is: to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.

Seriously. Each time I’ve brought that up in an interview, someone inevitably expresses incredulous surprise.

Which makes the case for a movement to respect education and equal access to it as the civil rights issue it is.

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Aug 17

Abolish the Department of Education

Culture, Education, Law, Society No Comments »

I’m hearing this from more voices now.

The most recent being columnist Dennis Byrne.

Here’s a way for taxpayers to save billions of dollars while improving education:

Get rid of standardized tests. Get rid of the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires the tests. Get rid of the U.S. Department of Education, which administers the tests. Free us from having to pay for this pointless extravagance.

This should be especially apparent with allegations of adult cheating (Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere) to boost student test scores to meet idealized benchmarks set by legions of “experts.” Those allegations, of course, require the deployment of more legions of experts to hunt down frightened or fed-up teachers and administrators caught in the gears of this Rube Goldberg contrivance.

You don’t need more studies or tests to know that this whole scheme has done little in the years since it was installed as a national priority to quiet the alarms about American students. But the alarms have become more thunderous, requiring the application of ever more stringent and costly measures. It’s as mindless as Dark Ages bleeding; if bleeding off a pint doesn’t improve the patient, take a quart.

Attention-grabbing, but because it so resembles the truth.

Last week I had Dr. Anthony Bradley as a guest on my radio show and this was the topic of conversation for that ‘closer look’ at inner-city schools and the failure of the bureaucracy of education.

As Congress moves toward reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the problem is not that the Department of Education is not doing enough but that it suffers from an acute case of what psychologists call “organizational narcissism.” If they really wish to address America’s inner-city public school crisis, federal education officials must look beyond the boundaries of their own agencies and recognize the crucial role of churches.

Steven Churchill, of the Center for Organizational Design, explains that organizations can have a grandiose sense of self-importance and an inflated judgment of their own accomplishments, leading to “an unreal, self-defeating preoccupation with the company’s own image.” For example, even with overwhelming evidence that, other than family support, church involvement is the most consistent predictor of academic success for inner-city children, the organizational narcissism of the education industry prevents it from tapping into the resources of black and Latino churches.

He made many good points, in fact the hour was loaded with them. The ‘War on Poverty’ has failed. Education reform hasn’t improved our public schools and especially inner-city schools, or access to them. Government programs separated from the influence of families and local churches fail. This is proven and easy to see, for anyone who looks.

In “Faith in the Inner City: The Urban Black Church and Students’ Educational Outcomes,” Dr. Brian Barrett, an education professor at the State University of New York College at Cortland, describes the unique contributions black churches play in cultivating successful students in the inner-cities. He observed that “religious socialization reinforces attitudes, outlooks, behaviors, and practices … particularly through individuals’ commitment to and adoption of the goals and expectations of the group” that are conducive to “positive educational outcomes.”  In fact, back in 2009 Barrett reported that for black inner-city youth who reported attending religious services often, the black/white achievement gap “was eliminated.”

Barrett reports that one of the most important advantages of inner-city churches is that they provide “a community where Black students are valued, both for their academic success and, more broadly, as human beings and members of society with promise, with talents to contribute, and from whom success is to be expected.” Churches also affirm inner-city youth as trusted members of a community that celebrates academic success, and the practices that produce it, which overrides the low expectations communicated at school. Additionally, Barrett highlights the ways in which black churches, because they are equipped to deal with families, are effective at sustaining and encouraging parental educational involvement from the heart as well as providing contexts where youth can have regular contact with other adults for role-modeling and mentoring.

The fact that they don’t or won’t see this at the federal level, while layering on more and more federal jobs in the Department of Education, proves Bradley’s point about the ‘organizational narcissim.’ He also adds that those bureaucrats know that with increased involvement of churches, the Department of Education would lose the lock on control they now have. Never mind that it’s dysfunctional.

“When more government programs came the breakdown of the family,” Dr. Bradley told me. “It fostered a culture of irresponsibility. The whole system needs to be radically restructered. It’s not a resource problem. Throwing more dollars into more technology for classrooms isn’t the solution, clearly. We need to ask better questions. Why isn’t the church part of the educational policy for this administration? Black pastors haven’t been invited into the Obama administration Department of Education planning.” He makes this point in his article ‘Inner-city education fails without the church.’

In 2008, President Obama rightly acknowledged that, “There is no program and no policy that can substitute for a parent who is involved in their child’s education from day one.” This is an indisputable truth. What should baffle every American citizen is that the role of inner-city ethnic churches is oddly missing from the Obama administration’s education reform vision.

Faith-based initiatives work when they are tried. School choice and the voucher system do, too. The principle of subsidiarity works.

Dennis Byrne concludes:

It will take nothing less than a revolution by fed-up Americans to break the hold that this cartel has on our children.

Anthony Bradley concluded, on radio, that…

We need a lay movement to be launched. We need paople to operate out of their convictions that this problem must be solved. We need people in the pews to be at school board meetings to put forward new solutions, backed by data, what’s known to work. And that’s new for us as Americans, because we’re used to coming to the aid of people in crisis in other countries. This is in the crisis category, but it’s happening here.

We need a bailout, from government intervention.

Suddenly, an old television public service spot just came to mind. “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your kids are?”

It’s school time, and the same question applies.

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Jun 16

The Department of Education fable

Education No Comments »

It’s remarkably like The Emperor’s Clothes. Only this one is a true story.

Hard to believe that it is.

As Congress moves toward reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the problem is not that the Department of Education is not doing enough but that it suffers from an acute case of what psychologists call “organizational narcissism.” If they really wish to address America’s inner-city public school crisis, federal education officials must look beyond the boundaries of their own agencies and recognize the crucial role of churches.

That rests on the big “if”. According to Bradley, they do not so wish.

…even with overwhelming evidence that, other than family support, church involvement is the most consistent predictor of academic success for inner-city children, the organizational narcissism of the education industry prevents it from tapping into the resources of black and Latino churches.

They have what he calls an “education monopoly” and enjoy wielding power and receiving big paychecks while devising new programs to address problems they’re responsible for in the first place. Though the Deparment of Education is unaware of that, since that would require institutional integrity.

This should not be happening, for many reasons. Here’s one:

In 2008, President Obama rightly acknowledged that, “There is no program and no policy that can substitute for a parent who is involved in their child’s education from day one.” This is an indisputable truth. What should baffle every American citizen is that the role of inner-city ethnic churches is oddly missing from the Obama administration’s education reform vision.

It’s because of politics and power, says Bradley. And the distinct lack of initiative to change or even seriously confront ‘the system’ that’s broken. “We have a graduation crisis,” he told me, citing statistics from major cities of around 28-35 percent of black males graduating from high school. Which leads, he continues, to a lack of not only education but skills and ambition, which leads to unemployment, drug use, crime and incarceration, teen pregnancy, hopelessness…

This is intolerable. And, as Bradley pointed out to me at least twice, it isn’t an achievement gap based on race but opportunity for access to involvement of families and community based churches.

A series of 2010 studies in Howard University’s Journal of Negro Education (JNE), one of America’s oldest continuous academic journals focusing on black people, reported how church involvement increases education success in inner-cities. In “Faith in the Inner City: The Urban Black Church and Students’ Educational Outcomes,” Dr. Brian Barrett, an education professor at the State University of New York College at Cortland, describes the unique contributions black churches play in cultivating successful students in the inner-cities…

In fact, back in 2009 Barrett reported that for black inner-city youth who reported attending religious services often, the black/white achievement gap “was eliminated.”

There. It’s verifiable…as if evidence were needed for the benefit of character development and the foundation of morals.

Barrett reports that one of the most important advantages of inner-city churches is that they provide “a community where Black students are valued, both for their academic success and, more broadly, as human beings and members of society with promise, with talents to contribute, and from whom success is to be expected.” Churches also affirm inner-city youth as trusted members of a community that celebrates academic success, and the practices that produce it, which overrides the low expectations communicated at school.

The ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. What improvement has realization of this made in the past 5-10 years?

None.

Barrett is not alone. In another JNE study of 4,273 black students titled, “How Religious, Social, and Cultural Capital Factors Influence Educational Aspirations of African American Adolescents,” Hussain Al-Fadhli and Thomas Kersen, sociology professors at Jackson State University, report that “family and religious social capital are the most potent predictors for positive student college aspirations.” These scholars explain that “students who attend church and believe religion is important may be more likely to interact with more adults who can help them with their school work and even provide guidance about their futures goals and plans.” The authors conclude that students with an “active religious life, involved parents, and active social life have greater opportunities and choices in the future.”

So the answer is…

Lost on the Department of Education, which remains caught up in its organizational narcissism. And new schemes to justify its existence. In a dysfunctional system. Amazing.

Bradley suggests citizen involvement with the black ministerial alliance in the inner-cities, separate from any government agency, is the beginning of the solution to the crisis in the schools. And that seems like the least we can do, and the best place to start to impact the lives of these students.

“Provide a new narrative,” he told me, and we give them an alternative and the chance for success.

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