Compare and Contrast: Republican & Democratic Views of Women

This article was accessed at Slate: 

Is the GOP the Real Party of Women?    By J. Bryan Lowder

Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at 2:27 PM ET

"In this election year, there’s no doubt that women are a hot property—like the Boardwalk in Monopoly hot. Both the Democrats and Republicans are falling all over themselves to claim the title “party of women,” while accusing the other of being a charlatan. Politico hosted the latest rejoinder yesterday, when a group of 14 House GOP women (including Michele Bachmann) wrote an op-ed arguing that their “big tent” is where all the ladies want to be.

"But of course, neither party is truly the “party of women.” Or better put, each party serves the interests of different types of women.. So while the piece fails to convince in universal terms, it does present a fascinating profile of exactly who the Republicans think they’re representing" (emphasis supplied by me).

"Let’s just start with the lede:

"There’s an old joke about a married couple that’s asked about their hobbies and interests. The husband says he’s focused on “important things”—like the federal budget, health care reform and peace in the Middle East. The wife says she’s focused on the “small things”—like their household budget, their children’s health care and keeping peace within their family.

"There’s an important truth here. The things that women focus on and the decisions they make are often unappreciated—but they’re the foundation of our society.

"Huh. So controlling their husband and/or children’s intractable spending and bellicose interactions is so preoccupying that women can’t be bothered to think about “important things” like the Middle East? Does that strike anyone else as being almost comically retrograde? Darling, you know I just get lost when you boys start talking business; let me refresh your drink. It’s absurd, and moreover, the rest of the piece, which details all the “important” issues on which the GOP supposedly trumps the Democrats, is even more unhinged since the straw women in question should be too distracted by making sandwiches or whatever to care. If I were a real Republican woman, I’d find all this very condescending … but I digress.

"Beyond this initial fumble, the op-ed traffics in the traditional conservative rhetoric of by-your-own-bootstraps capitalism. “We want an equal chance to succeed—no special favors and no glass ceilings,” the congresswomen write. Obviously we’re all against glass ceilings, but what do Bachmann and company mean by “special favors”? Based on their bashing of our new friend “Julia,” it’s any government program that’s designed to help make up for the structural inequality in our society that still places many women at a large disadvantage, especially economically. It takes little critical thinking to realize that “social issues” like reproductive health are fundamentally tied to economic success and that the popular conservative idea of achieving wealth or middle class stability or what-have-you by one’s “own initiative” is inextricably wrapped up in class, gender, and dare I say it, racial privilege.

"And in the final analysis, privilege (not a favorite word of mine due to its overuse, but unavoidable here) is the perennial Republican blind spot. No one wants to depend on the government for much of anything; we lack the European gene for that. But many women—due to the quicksand of historical injustice, unequal education, institutional sexism, a lack of inherited money or financial literacy and a hundred other factors—need the government at least to extend a branch to help pull them forward.(emphasis supplied by me).

"Unlike the hypothetical “Republican woman,” these ladies do not have the luxury to be unaware of the “important things”; but then again, it’s clear they’re not really invited to the party of women anyway."

D.C. Appeals Court Rules Trade Group Can Keep Informant Anonymous

“The appellate decision is terrific vindication of the First Amendment speech rights of whistleblowers, to remain anonymous,” Scott Bain, chief litigation counsel for the trade group, wrote in an e-mail. “It sets a solid First Amendment precedent that will benefit the SIIA, other associations, and publishers here in D.C., and is a persuasive roadmap for other jurisdictions.”

Everyone still pretending they know what they're talking about

11-12-11
THREE days after the exploding Euro-summit, everyone is still pretending that they know what is going to happen.

As people who are sceptical about Europe and people who want to have sex with it continued to shout, experts said there was no sign of either side conceding their 'facts' are just opinions and not particularly good ones at that.

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: "At some point someone with a fancy title is going to say 'I haven't the faintest fucking idea' and that will hopefully start a chain reaction of people admitting they're full of shit.

Stand Up and Fight: A Week of Action Against Censorship | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"This legislation, if passed, will wreak havoc on our Internet community, jeopardizing the innovative and creative ecosystem that has created hundreds of thousands of jobs, helped countless people access information, and spurred a new generation of artists and creators. But big media groups are willing to sacrifice all of that in a ham-fisted attempt to control how you consume online content. And in the process, they'll undoing long-standing legal protections for websites and endangering the basic infrastructure of the Net. Join us in standing up. Show Congress we’re willing to fight for an uncensored web, & that lobbyists will never drown out the voices of the Internet community. "

A Week of Action Against Censorship

We’ll be adding to this list daily. Check back to see what you can do to join the fight!

Day One:

Toolkit for Anti-SOPA Activism

Action Alert! Call Congress Now

What's Wrong with SOPA (One-page PDF handout)

Stand Up and Fight: A Week of Action Against Censorship | Electronic Frontier Foundation

On Being Disinherited....

There are so many interesting aspects to this story that I don't even know how to start.

Excerpt from article: "Why had he done it? I suspect in part I was the wrong kind of offspring for him. The only daughter, and the family outsider, I had moved away from my hometown and their idea of who I should be."

What  Wasn’t  Passed  On  -  Modern  Love  -  NYTimes.com

I would have gotten this 1 Wrong....

Study: Atheists distrusted as much as rapists – USATODAY.com

"The study is part of an attempt to understand what needs religion fulfills in people. Among the conclusions is a sense of trust in others. "People find atheists very suspect," Shariff said. "They don't fear God so we should distrust them; they do not have the same moral obligations of others. This is a common refrain against atheists. People fear them as a group.""

Are we becoming a police state? Five things that have civil liberties advocates nervous | Need to Know | PBS

Are we becoming a police state? Five things that have civil liberties advocates nervous | Need to Know | PBS

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

Posted at 04:00 AM ET, 12/05/2011

By Valerie Strauss

Update, 4:40 p.m. Tuesday:

Revealed: The school board member who took standardized test

Original post:

This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.

By Marion Brady

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.

All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.

But maybe there’s hope. As I write, a New York Times story by Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of school principals.

Winerip writes: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state (New York) had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.”

One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan. Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, but is required to attend 10 training sessions.

“It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend those 10 training sessions.

Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended was “two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations.”

A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking. They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.”

My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”

He’s wrong. What they’re being made to do isn’t ethically questionable. It’s ethically unacceptable. Ethically reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.

How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution? Why haven’t they been asked?

Quiz: How smart are you? Test yourself with some National Assessment of Education Progress questions.

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