Author: James Rosen

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is asking lawmakers to put aside “politics and ideology” as they consider a request for $23 billion in “emergency” funding for public schools – a measure Republicans reject as a massive federal bailout for the teachers’ unions.

The Obama administration is supporting the bill, formally titled the Keep Our Educators Working Act and sponsored by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA).  In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) dated May 13, Duncan warned that if the bill is not enacted, “millions” of school children will be adversely affected and the ensuing damage will “undermine the groundbreaking reform efforts underway in states and districts all across the country.”

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“This is a bipartisan issue — politics and ideology, around education, we have to put to the side,” Duncan said during an appearance on “Fox and Friends” on May 21.  “I’m very worried, very worried about anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 teachers being laid off this year.  We have school districts — due to the horrendous budget times, conditions they’re facing — looking to eliminate summer school this summer, eliminating after-school and extracurricular activities, going to four-day weeks, not five-day school weeks…None of this is good for children.  None of this is good for education.  None of this is good for the economy.  So we are urging Congress to move with a real sense of urgency to pass this legislation.”

Many Republicans oppose the measure, citing previous federal outlays for education, the size of the federal deficit, and the fact that the bill forces no spending cuts elsewhere in order to pay for itself.

“Fundamentally, what you’re seeing is the failure of the stimulus,” Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, told Fox News.  “What we’re looking at here in Michigan is 14 percent unemployment; nationally, we’re looking at 9.9 percent.  We’ve seen a spike in jobless claims — all of which was supposed to have been prevented by the trillion dollars this administration already spent to ‘create or save’ jobs.

“When you look at the overall economy, that is really what undergirds the financing of education in the United States, both at the local level and at the state level.  So as Washington continues to try to go toward emergency measures, three things become patently obvious: One, the stimulus has failed.  Two, they’re delaying the real necessary restructuring of government that is required to have a sustainable tax base that is growing, for educators to be employed.  And third,” McCotter added with a flash of deadpan humor, “given the Democrats’ record number of deficits, debt and spending, there does auger an argument for more math teachers.”

Education analyst Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., said roughly one-third of the $100 billion the Department of Education received in last year’s stimulus bill remains unspent.  She also questions the wisdom of funneling federal taxpayer funds, in any amount, to the public school system as it is presently structured.

“More federal funding is not going to solve states’ fiscal problems and could in fact exacerbate those problems, by really preventing states from making the difficult budgetary decisions necessary to reduce costs and effect long-term systemic education reform,” Burke told Fox News.  “The real problem within the public education sector has been more and more non-teaching staff positions.  These positions continue to grow and really put a strain on state budgets.  Roughly half of those people employed by the public education sector are in non-teaching positions, and at the same time we see ever-decreasing class sizes.  In the 1960s, class size was about 27:1 student-teacher ratios.  Today those ratios are closer to 15:1….There are things that states could do to reduce costs, and they dont need another bailout from Washington for public education.”

The Keep Our Educators Working Act has garnered support from some predictable quarters – and opposition from some surprising ones.  Interviewed in Minneapolis during a nationwide tour of beleaguered local school districts, many of which are already laying off teachers and closing down vital programs, Randi Weingarten, herself a former teacher and now president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, told Fox News the $23 billion is urgently needed to avert further “draconian” measures.

“Nobody is asking for it on an ongoing basis.  We’re asking for it because we see on the ground, in school after school, the consequences of devastating cuts,” Weingarten told Fox News.  “In the ’70s, I watched what happened in New York City when…we lost a generation of kids….You don’t get to ‘do it over’ if you’re five years old.  You’re only five once — and therefore, that’s part of the urgency here.”

Asked about the $34 million in stimulus funds that the Education Department has purportedly left unspent, Weingarten said that all of the funding that the stimulus intended for public school systems was, in fact, doled out – and done on an “equity basis,” with the most cash-starved school districts first to receive the funding.  “The monies that actually went to avert the direct effects of the greatest recession since the Great Depression were about 50-some-odd billion, of which some went to also ensure that we hired and maintained cops and other civil servants,” Weingarten said.  “The money that was allocated last year was allocated on an equity basis to various different states.  So ultimately we have encouraged states to spend those funds.  But what I am talking about is that the states that have spent it do not have the funds this year to go forward.  And we’re seeing that in state after state in their budget crises.”

But the Washington Post editorial board urged lawmakers to reject the measure.  In an editorial published May 14 under the headline, “Red Ink in the Classroom,” the Post lamented that last year’s stimulus bill had created among educators “an unfortunate expectation of yet more federal dollars to bail out the states.”  “Should the federal government spend money it doesn’t have to let school systems operate beyond their means?” the editorial asked.  “We might have had a different view of this measure if its sponsors had figured out a way, as they promised with their adoption of pay-go guidelines, to pay for it rather than simply add to the nation’s fast-growing national debt.”

President Obama has already indicated his support for the Miller-Harkin measure.  Addressing educators at the White House during the annual Teacher of the Year ceremony on April 29, the president claimed the stimulus bill had saved the jobs of 400,000 teachers – a figure higher than Weingarten used, in her interview with Fox News – and said: “I believe these efforts must continue, as states face severe budget shortfalls that put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk.  We need, and our children need, our teachers in the classroom.”

Clashes among members of the Texas Board of Education over the content of students’ textbooks have come, in part, to focus on a once obscure intellectual concept — “American exceptionalism” — that has now seen the president of the United States weigh in.

Although definitions in intellectual debates can be tricky, the concept of “American exceptionalism” may be defined as the notion that the United States, by virtue of its origins and ideals, its struggles and accomplishments, stands apart from — and, in some eyes, above — other nations. 

Others have framed it differently.  A reporter for the Financial Times, questioning President Obama at a news conference during a NATO summit in Strasbourg, France in April 2009, asked whether Mr. Obama subscribed to the belief that America is “uniquely qualified to lead the world.”

“I believe in American exceptionalism,” the president replied, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” 

Declaring himself “enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world,” Mr. Obama went on to say that the U.S. is “not always going to be right,” and that he sees no conflict between reverence for his own country and valuing the contributions that other nations have made to world history and current affairs.

Acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates, who teaches at Princeton University, has derided the notion that there is a distinctly American idea, one that is distinguishable from the core concepts that have animated Europeans, Scandinavians, and other cultures.

“[T]ravel to any foreign country,” Oates wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in November 2007, “and the consensus is: The American idea has become a cruel joke, a blustery and bellicose bodybuilder luridly bulked up on steroids…deranged and myopic, dangerous.”

Oates continued: “American exceptionalism makes our imperialism altruistic, our plundering of the world’s resources a healthy exercise of capitalism and ‘free trade.’

“From childhood, we are indoctrinated with the propaganda that America is superior to other nations; that our way of life, a mass-market ‘democracy’ manipulated by lobbyists, is superior to all other forms of government; that no matter how frivolous and debased, our American culture is the supreme culture, as our language is the supreme language; that our most blatantly imperialistic and cynical political goals are always idealistic, while the goals of other nations are transparently opportunistic.”

Andrew Roberts, a British historian and author of the best-selling Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945, has endorsed American exceptionalism in his own writings.  Asked about Oates’s comments, Roberts told Fox News it was evidence of a “psychiatric disorder” among liberal American intellectuals.

“For postmodernists, whereby everything has to be related to something else and nothing is truly exceptional, it’s a disgusting concept that America could stand above and away from the normal luck of history,” Roberts said.  “And of course, it also feeds in very much to Auropean anti-Americanism, especially at this time of the war against terror.”

America, Roberts said, “is not like any other country.  It wasn’t born like other countries.  It didn’t come to prominence like other countries.  It’s not holding its imperium like other countries….It probably won’t lose its supremacy like other countries.  And so in that sense it is completely exceptional.”

Even liberal historians agreed with conservative scholars that the concept has its origin in America’s own, undeniably unique origins — its unique 18th-century ambition, undermined as it was by the persistence of slavery, to create what Thomas Jefferson called “an empire of liberty.”

Eric S. Foner of Columbia University, a leading historian of the colonial and Civil War periods — his The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, due out in October, will be his twenty-second book — is also an avowed Marxist who finds the notion of American exceptionalism “parochial” and “chauvinistic.”

“It causes problems because it has, at various points in our history, led us to interventions abroad…claiming to bring the benefits of American life to people who sometimes aren’t all that anxious to receive it,” Foner told Fox News.  “So it leads to this kind of imperial frame of mind that we know best for everybody, we know that our system is better — and of course sometimes other people aren’t as convinced of that.

“To think about oursleves as exceptional really is a very narrow vision in a world which is becoming more and more globalized every day,” Foner added.  “Throughout our history, many of the processes which have shaped American history — industrialization, urbanization, things like that — are not purely national phenomena.  And yet we sometimes think that the only way to understand American history is to think about it within the United States…[the pushing Westward of] the frontier, or things that are indigenous to the United States.”

Foner also argued that “exceptionalism” is, in and of itself, hardly exceptional: “Many countries are exceptional.  The history of China,” he said, “is not the same as the history of Japan, or the history of France and Germany.”

In Texas, critics of the conservative-led school board faulted it for embracing the concept.  Mavis Knight, a liberal board member, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying the concept “seems like braggadocio to me, rather than trying to be factual.”

One fact on which both sides could probably agree is that there is a limited number of countries in the world where such a debate, with all its ferocity, could play out so openly and freely — and that China, as presently constituted, is not one of them.

While parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians in Texas clash over the content of students’ textbooks in the Lone Star state, the Obama administration is quietly expanding the reach of the federal government into local education — with results to be cheered or feared, depending on your political philosophy.

The agenda set by the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a friend of Mr. Obama and former chief of the Chicago public school system, is undeniably bold.  It encompasses not only the $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” fund, which encourages competition for federal funds, but also an effort called the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Here, the Obama administration is working with governors from forty-eight states and other leaders to develop standards in English — or “language arts,” as you may recall it from your own school days — and mathematics, for students from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

“These draft standards,” notes the initiative’s website, “define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs.”

The website continues: “States will be asked to adopt the Common Core State Standards in their entirety and the core must represent at least 85% of the state’s standards in English language arts and mathematics.”

One governor — a Republican — told Fox News the core standards will not be “all-inclusive,” just a, quote, “basic threshold” for an educated citizenry.  “While I strongly believe in states’ rights in education to create their systems, I think it’s entirely appropriate, if the federal government is giving money to incentivize, to make sure that we have strong accountable standards in education,” said Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia.  “I think it’s too important for a nation not to do that.”

The amount of money that Uncle Sam spends on education is growing.  Analysts project that the federal government’s share of total education spending will rise, during President Obama’s first term, from about 9 percent to 15 percent.

Duncan has said he wants to be “a partner, not a boss,” of local educators — but that he will not remain a “silent partner.”  Conservatives, who have never been ardent champions of the Education Department, warn that greater federal involvement will lead inexorably to greater federal control — and not just from bureaucrats, but from the very groups conservatives blame for the great decline in American postwar education: teachers’ unions and administrators’ associations.

“As the federal government puts more money into education, there’s no question but that they’re going to demand accountability and oversight for the funds that they’re spending,” said Terry Hartle of the non-partisan American Council on Education.  “We want them to do that; we want, as taxpayers, to make sure our money’s being well spent.  How many strings come with that oversight and that accountability becomes a very critical question as time goes by.”

Some libertarian groups say the evidence is lacking for those policymakers who would propose a “federalized” curriculum — which the Obama administration has not done.  Neal McCluskey of the CATO Institute, for example, wrote recently that there is “very little good, comparative research on national standards,” and thus little reason for local educators to embrace them.

And thus little reason for local educators to embrace the core standards program.

As the New York Times has reported, Connecticut Attorney General and Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal remained stateside during the Vietnam War thanks to five deferments he obtained, the last of which enabled him to take a job in the Nixon White House.

During research for my book The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Doubleday 2008), I uncovered some documents that showed Blumenthal, then a staff lawyer for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a key domestic policy adviser to the president, had aroused the suspicions of Attorney General Mitchell.

The year was 1969, and the country was wracked by divisions over the war.  A massive march on Washington was held over the long weekend of November 13-16.  The organizing group, the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, or “New Mobe,” rallied upwards of 250,000 people to descend on the nation’s capital — then a record-shattering turnout for the first major antiwar protest against the Nixon administration.

Despite pledges of nonviolence by New Mobe leaders, an ad hoc committee of Justice Department, Pentagon, and D.C. police officials reckoned otherwise.  “The potential for violence, with resulting injuries and possible deaths, as well as damage to real and personal property…is extremely high,” concluded the group’s internal report.

Against this backdrop of political tension and the prospect of violence by radical groups — indeed, the Justice Department was attacked over the weekend, with windows smashed and the building defaced, amid plumes of tear gas unleashed by police — Attorney General Mitchell came to believe that the youthful Blumenthal, who was deputized to serve as a liaison to the New Mobe, was actually “taking orders” from Mobe leaders, “and in turn directing the District Police to do [the group’s bidding].”

That was how Moynihan summarized Mitchell’s views to top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the declassified documents show.  Upon orders from the attorney general, Ehrlichman staffer Egil Krogh — later infamous as the head of the Plumbers, the covert group that conceived and executed the break-ins at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex — called Blumenthal on the telephone with stern orders.  Krogh instructed him to withdraw from all contact with the demonstrators; Blumenthal complied.

The incident upset Moynihan, who complained to Ehrlichman that Attorney General Mitchell was “mistaken” about the young attorney.  “Dick was not taking orders from anyone, nor giving them to anyone,” Moynihan told Ehrlichman in a November 25, 1969 memorandum, previously unpublished.  “He was merely passing on to the mayor and deputy mayor information they requested he obtain.  This is at least Dick’s story, and I believe it….The trouble is that now, as last February, when the Washington Post began reporting a great (and non-existent) rift between me and Mitchell…the attorney general just seems to assume Blumenthal is the cause of trouble.”

Moynihan finished the memo with a swipe at the attorney general, who before government service in the Nixon administration had been a leading municipal bond counsel on Wall Street: “It is time he acted a bit more lawyer-like, if you want my opinion.”

Mitchell dropped the issue, and Blumenthal continued on Moynihan’s staff.  However the documents show that Blumenthal later hesitated to accept a job working for Donald Rumsfeld, then head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, because Blumenthal was “worried about the A.G.’s [attorney general’s] reaction (as yet unknown).”  That assessment was recorded in a January 1970 memo exchanged between two White House aides, Chester Finn and Kenneth Cole, on Ehrlichman’s staff.

Escaped felon Raymond Taylor was picked up by authorities this morning at a friend’s home in Martinsburg, West Virginia after a 19 hour manhunt.  He was found hiding in an upstairs closet.

Taylor who is facing 3 life sentences for attempted murder, conned his way out of jail by impersonating a cell mate, William Johnson, who was scheduled to be released on Thursday. Johnson is now facing a conspiracy charge for his role in the escape plot, but police haven’t been able to figure out a motive for him helping Taylor. If convicted, Johnson could remain in prison for another 10 years.

Correction officials admit mistakes were made and policies were broken. They are currently reviewing their protocols and say disciplinary action will occur.