SELMA ON OUR MINDS: Our tribe's only trick!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2015

Part 2—Some David Carr talk: We pseudo-liberals know exactly one trick.

We know the trick about race! Sunday, at the hapless new Salon, Jenny Kutner turned our trick in a comical way about the way Selma got snubbed:

KUTNER (1/18/15): “Saturday Night Live” decided to observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day a bit early this week in Saturday’s cold open—and the show even managed to work in a nod to the overwhelmingly snubbed film about the civil rights activist, Selma.

Kutner was working from mandated script—a script in which Selma got “snubbed” in last week’s Oscar nominations.

As often happens when every pundit agrees to say the same darn thing, Kutner embellished the script a bit—jacked it up a notch. In her account, the new feature film was overwhelmingly snubbed.

Was Selma “snubbed” in the Oscar race at all? Good God! The film for a Best Picture nomination—but Kutner knew the script. She decided to jack it up a notch, as people with nothing to say, and a script to recite, will so frequently do.

Selma, a Best Picture nominee, was overwhelmingly snubbed! So it goes as we see the ditto-headed shape of our pseudo-liberal minds!

Was Selma snubbed in the Oscar nominations? For those who aren’t as silly as Kutner, the scripted claim will turn on the fact that Selma’s actors and director didn’t get nominations. Regarding the snub of Selma’s actors, Maureen Dowd was quite upset.

“I loved the movie and find the Oscar snub of its dazzling actors repugnant,” Dowd wrote in Sunday’s column. But then, within hours of last week’s nominations, everyone knew the script.

Were those actors actually “snubbed?” On the merits of the case, should they have received nominations?

We don’t pretend to be competent judges of professional acting. Neither are the vast majority of the people who have lamented the snub.

That said, as we watched Selma last weekend, we found ourselves wondering why anyone would have picked David Oyelowo’s performance as Dr. King as one of the best of the year.

Don’t misunderstand! Oyelowo is an experienced professional actor. Like anyone you see in a major film, he’s a thousand times more skilled as an actor than anyone you know.

That said, we thought he brought little life to his role, in large part due to the lifeless script and the lifeless scenes he was asked to perform. Watching the film, we marveled at the scripted fury about the way he’d been “snubbed.”

Just for the record, none of Selma’s actors were nominated for the Screen Actors Guild awards. Nor was Selma’s cast nominated for the SAG’s ensemble acting award. If Oyelowo and others were actually snubbed, the snubbing extended beyond the boundaries of the Oscar nominations.

(Oyelowo was nominated for a Golden Globe as best actor. That said, ten male actors get nominated for the Globes, as opposed to five for the Oscars. No other actor or actress from Selma got a Golden Globe nomination.)

Did Selma’s actors really get “snubbed?” Were they overwhelmingly snubbed?

Should their exclusion from Oscar nods seem “repugnant?” Should it seem like a racial “snub?”

At present, everyone knows the law—such things must be said! That said, it’s amazing to see how little effort our “journalists” make to argue this well-scripted point.

Consider the ugly, empty piece by the New York Times’ David Carr.

Carr writes a column each Monday on the front page of the Business Day section. He rarely has a thing to say in these columns.

(His claim to fame—his distinguishing mark within the business—is the fact that he was once a drug addict, a situation he described in his 2008 memoir, The Night of the Gun. Why did Carr write a memoir at all? Because he was once an addict!)

Yesterday, Carr had nothing to say about the alleged Oscar snub. But his piece ran 1332 words. Hard-copy headline included, this is the way he started:

CARR (1/19/15): Oscar Glitter Is Starkly White This Year

Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and given the context, it is an interesting moment to ask whether it really matters that the motion picture academy failed to nominate the black director and the black lead actor of ''Selma,'' the King biopic, for Oscars.

After all, it lands fairly low on the list of indignities visited on African-Americans: No unarmed people died, no innocent citizens were patted down or jailed.

But yes, it still matters. The news continues to be full of all manner of pathology and victimization involving black Americans, and when a moment comes to celebrate both a historical giant and a pure creative achievement, it merits significant and broad recognition.

Many would say that it should suffice that ''12 Years a Slave,'' a film by a black director about black history, won best picture last year, and ''Selma'' was nominated this year, and that any grievance is a conjured one. I disagree.

For Carr, this constituted a racial question from his first paragraphs on. At the present time, it’s the only play our tribe knows.

To his credit, Carr doesn’t use the term “snub” until his eighth paragraph. As he starts, he only notes the fact that the Academy “failed to nominate” Selma’s director and its lead actor.

That said, Carr describes this state of affairs as one of the “indignities” being “visited on African-Americans.” According to Carr, the snub “lands fairly low on the list” of such racial indignities. But it is on the list!

That’s a rather serious charge for a “journalist” to lodge. In 1332 words, the empty fellow with nothing to say makes no real attempt to support it.

Let’s be fair! When Carr finally refers to the “snub,” he softens his racial accusations a tad. But he’s happy to speculate and insinuate about the motives of unknown people.

His math is slightly off. His logic is hard to locate:

CARR: As someone who once spent a great deal of time reporting on the ins and outs of the Oscars, I know that the snub is not some overt racial conspiracy at work. Among other problems, Paramount thought that ''Interstellar'' would be its big Oscar horse for the year and jumped on ''Selma'' as the better bet only when awards season heated up. The movie was completed near the end of the year, and the screeners came late and somewhat sporadically. Perhaps that partly explains why ''Selma,'' which was second to ''Boyhood'' in critical acclaim as measured by Metacritic, received just two nominations, for best picture and best song.

But in general, the academy and the industry it mirrors manage diversity the same way that corporate America does, by ticking off boxes. That means that after Kathryn Bigelow won as best director in 2010 for ''The Hurt Locker''—the only female director to have won in the award's 87 years—there was no reason to even nominate her again for the extraordinary ''Zero Dark Thirty.'' The ''woman thing'' had been checked off already. And it also means that even though ''12 Years a Slave'' won best picture, its director, Steve McQueen, did not receive similar acclaim because that win took care of ''the black thing.'' (Many have noted that this year, although nine black actors were nominated in the last six years, not a single person of color is among the 20 nominated lead and supporting actors.)

Among other analytical problems, Carr dont seme too count reel gudd. In fact, eleven nominations went to black actors in the six years before this year; three of those actors were winners. (For list, see below.) The number is ten nominations in six years if we start counting this year.

That may or may not seem like “enough.” But those are the actual numbers.

Can we talk? In the ten years preceding this year (in 2005 through 2014), the Academy gave 24 nominations to black actors. (By our count. See list below.) But so what? As Carr mind-reads his way through a thoroughly muddled piece, he explains that last year’s selection of Twelve Years A Slave as Best Picture somehow explains this year’s “snub” of Oyelowo for best actor.

Or something! The logic is hard to define and follow. But as it was scripted, the insinuations and accusations run all through the piece.

Did Oyelowo deserve a nomination? Watching the film, we wondered why anyone would have thought that. But Carr says Oyelowo was “snubbed”—and he says the snub constitutes an indignity due to race.

That’s a very serious charge, except to scripted people with nothing to say and except to us pseudo-liberals. With that in mind, we recommend a reading experiment.

Go ahead! Read Carr’s lengthy piece. See if you can find a single place where he asserts or defends the claim that Oyelowo gave one of the year's five best performances.

We can find no such assertion at any point in the column. We can find no defense of any such assertion.

Instead, we find a series of passages where Carr says that Selma deserved more nominations as a matter of politics. This is just one example:

CARR: ''Selma'' may not have been the belle of the awards season, but it was certainly a target. Before the movie's release, Lyndon B. Johnson loyalists began taking shots at its accuracy. Did ''Selma'' cut some corners and perhaps tilt characters to suit the needs of the story? Why yes—just like almost every other Hollywood biopic and historical film that has been made. This is not a movie that endangers L.B.J.'s legacy, it cements King's at a near perfect moment in history and should be celebrated as such.

According to Carr, Selma “cements King's [legacy] at a near perfect moment in history and should be celebrated as such.”

Let’s assume that first assessment is accurate. Let’s assume this Best Picture nominee film really does “cement King's [legacy] at a near perfect moment in history.”

Let’s assume that's accurate. What can that possibly have to do with the question of Oyelowo’s performance? How could that mean that there weren’t five performances that were better?

Earth to Carr:

The film itself was “celebrated,” with a Best Picture nomination! Oh sorry—Selma was overwhelmingly snubbed!

We’re sorry, scripted race-baiting pseudo-liberals. We’re sorry—we almost forgot!

Tomorrow: Bad arguments from us ditto-heads

Taking a look at the record: Is it possible that Oscar voters didn’t think Oyelowo’s performance was all that hot? Is it possible they simply didn't think it was one of the year's five best?

They’ve nominated a bunch of black actors! Below, you see the list:

Nominated for acting Oscars, 2005-2014:
2014: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Barkhad Abdi, Lupita Nyong'o
2013: Denzel Washington, Quvenzhané Wallis
2012: Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer
2010: Morgan Freeman, Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique
2009: Viola Davis, Taraji Henson
2008: Ruby Dee
2007: Forest Whitaker, Will Smith, Eddie Murphy, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Hudson
2006: Terrence Howard
2005: Jamie Foxx (Best Actor), Jamie Foxx (Best Supporting Actor), Don Cheadle, Morgan Freeman, Sophie Okonedo

Do all these people identify as “black?”

As far as we know, they do. But despite the race play our tribe has divined, none of these actors got snubbed!

Did Oyelowo get snubbed this year? People! Because our tribe knows only one trick, the answer to that was quite clear.

SELMA ON OUR MINDS: On first agreeing with Maureen Dowd!

MONDAY, JANUARY 19, 2015

Part 1—On rereading Dr. King: A half dozen commenters said the same thing about yesterday’s Maureen Dowd column.

They said it was the first such column they had ever agreed with.

Funny that! The very same thought had run through our minds as we read the Dowd column! That said, we also disagreed with one basic part of Dowd’s piece.

Below, you see the part of the column with which we agreed. Dowd is speaking about Ava DuVernay’s new film, Selma, which has received an Oscar nomination as the year’s Best Picture.

In particular, Dowd is discussing the film’s semi-controversial portrait of Lyndon Johnson, a former American president. We agree with this part of Dowd's piece:

DOWD (1/18/15):“This is art; this is a movie; this is a film,” DuVernay said. “I’m not a historian. I’m not a documentarian.”

The “Hey, it’s just a movie” excuse doesn’t wash. Filmmakers love to talk about their artistic license to distort the truth, even as they bank on the authenticity of their films to boost them at awards season.

We agree with Dowd’s diagnosis. If you’re making a major film about major historical figures, you need to make a basic effort to get basic history right. In our view, DuVernay has been a bit slick, and perhaps a bit “truthy,” in her discussions of this basic matter.

Dowd thought DuVernay misrepresented the truth in one part of this story. We’re inclined to agree with that assessment—and we think this is unfortunate. We agree with Dowd!

That said, we disagreed with Dowd on another point. We wondered if she got a bit “scripty” in this part of her column:

DOWD: Many of the teenagers by me bristled at the power dynamic between the men. It was clear that a generation of young moviegoers would now see L.B.J.’s role in civil rights through DuVernay’s lens.

And that’s a shame. I loved the movie and find the Oscar snub of its dazzling actors repugnant. But the director’s talent makes her distortion of L.B.J. more egregious. Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.

Were Selma’s actors actually “snubbed” in last week's Oscar nominations? Is its director loaded with talent?

Like Dowd, we went to see the film this weekend. For various reasons, it didn’t strike us that way.

We didn’t love the movie. We thought it was surprisingly poor, just not a great piece of work.

Your reactions may differ! We brunched today with two old friends whose assessments differed from ours. That said, we thought the film was mediocre at best. In many ways, we thought it was rather poor.

Full disclosure: We rarely like “historical dramas” of this type. It’s hard to turn important historical events into two-hour dramas. To us, Selma seemed to come in on the low end of such productions.

You may not see it that way! For ourselves, we’d recommend some of the dazzling documentaries which discuss various chapters in the civil rights era. Or we’d recommend the actual words of Dr. King himself.

A few years ago, we reread, then gushed about, Dr. King’s first book, Stride Toward Freedom, his memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott. Rereading that book after many years, we were stunned by the morally brilliant person who emerged from its pages.

We didn’t find a hint of that person in Selma’s portrait of Dr. King. We thought the film was rather leaden—and we can’t help wondering if mainstream reviewers may perhaps feel compelled to say different.

Our two old friends found Selma moving. That said:

In our broken national discourse, it’s typically narrative all the way down. Stride Toward Freedom emerges from a remarkable moral and intellectual world, as did much of the civil rights movement. It's a world which lies well outside the truthy, scripty horizons of our grasping elites.

We thought Selma was murky, dull, uninspired, uninspiring. The film may not strike you that way. It didn’t seem that way to our friends.

Having said that, is Selma’s director loaded with talent? Were its actors really “snubbed” by Oscar voters?

Was Selma snubbed? That script was clownishly overextended at the new Salon, where we were told that the film, a Best Picture nominee, was “overwhelmingly snubbed.” But then, we the devolving pseudo-liberals seem more and more scripted each day.

We were surprised by the real Dr. King when we reread Stride Toward Freedom. We’d recommend that you see the new film, and that you read this man’s books.

Supplemental: It’s time for the Post’s Lyndsey Layton to go!

SATURDAY, JANUARY 17, 2015

Along with her inhuman editors: An astonishing headline adorns the front page of this morning’s Washington Post.

The claim it makes is clownishly wrong. But so what? On this morning’s front page, it stretches across four columns.

What kind of creatures are we humans? Plainly, we aren’t the “rational animal” Aristotle described long ago.

Aristotle was clownishly wrong. In this morning’s hard-copy Washington Post, the headline in question says this:

“Most public school students now living in poverty”

The claim in that headline is clownishly wrong. But the headline stretches across four columns on the front page of today’s Post.

People, can it really be true. Are most students in public schools currently living “in poverty?”

Actually no, that isn’t true, if we’re using anything like the standard measure of poverty. By standard measures, the number of students living in poverty doesn’t even come close to reaching fifty percent.

But so what? Layton never explains this fact in a 1333-word, front-page report which stretches through 29 paragraphs.

Layton, who is utterly hapless, never explains squat or squadoodle in her hapless report. That said, please note the slippery, incompetent way she takes us to the term “poverty rate” in these, her opening paragraphs (hard-copy headline included):

LAYTON (1/17/15): Most public school students now living in poverty

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation's public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention from educators, public officials and researchers.

"We've all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it's here sooner rather than later," said Michael A. Rebell of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University, noting that the poverty rate has been increasing even as the economy has improved...

We’ll assume that Layton is working in good faith. We’ll assume we’re looking at gross incompetence rather than deception.

That said, Layton performs world-class sleight of hand in those opening paragraphs. This is what occurs:

In paragraph 1, she makes a reasonably accurate but unexplained statement. She says “a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families”—but in the process, she fails to explain what the term “low-income” means.

In paragraph 2, she explains that she is talking about the percentage of students who qualify for the federal lunch program. She then makes an extremely shaky statement; she calls eligibility for this program “a rough proxy for poverty.”

Good God! Eligibility for the federal lunch program constitutes an extremely rough proxy for poverty! Almost surely, many kids in the federal lunch program come from families whose incomes are double the federal poverty line.

As you can see in these federal guidelines, children from a family of four qualify for the federal lunch program if their family’s income is $44,123 or less—and there are probably plenty of kids whose family incomes get fudged a bit in the application process.

Such families of four aren’t getting rich—but they are also aren’t living “in poverty” in any conventional sense of the term. In fact, they aren’t anywhere close to the poverty line, based on standard measures.

Is eligibility for the federal lunch program “a rough proxy for poverty?” Only to the feckless, incompetent creatures who work for the Washington Post!

To them, it's all pretty much the same! But just like that, Layton transitions from an unexplained term (“low-income families”) to a more potent term—“in poverty.” And sure enough:

In paragraph 3, she is talking about “the poverty rate;” she seems to say that “a majority” of students satisfy the terms of that measure. This leads directly to that headline, whose claim is clownishly wrong.

No, Virginia, and Maryland, and the other states of the union! Unless we’re inventing new standards (which will go unexplained), it isn’t true that “most public school students” are now “living in poverty.”

The claim isn’t even close to true. But the claim drives a headline which adorns the front page of today’s Post.

For the record, Layton isn’t one of the inexperienced, scrub-faced kids the Washington Post keeps hiring in an attempt to dumb its work product down. She’s been at the Post since 1998. She’s been an education reporter for the past four years.

Her editor, if any such person exists, is presumably experienced too. The absurd incompetence on display infests this newspaper’s adults.

Can a modern democracy actually function with people like this at the head of its discourse? In comments to this ridiculous piece, the standard ridiculous arguments start.

“Conservatives” say that this report just shows how bad things have gotten under Obama. “Liberals” flounder and thrash about, bereft of access to facts.

Lyndsey Layton, and her editors, are grossly incompetent. How incompetent is Layton? Please consider this:

In her 29 paragraphs, Lyndsey Layton never explains the standard according to which she makes the claims in the piece.

She never describes the income required for eligibility for the federal lunch program. She never explains how those income levels compare to the income levels which constitute our normal definition of “poverty”—the income levels which are normally used to compute “the poverty rate.”

In a modestly rational world, Layton and her editor would quickly get fired. But you don’t live in that rational world. You live in a world where this type of incompetence is normal at major news orgs.

In the fall of 2013, we did three posts about major reporters, and one professor, who were pushing this same type of claim. (Click here, then click on the internal links.)

But then, we did a similar post just this Tuesday. It is now assumed that our major journalists and our professors will reason and argue this way!

Can a modern democracy actually work with people like this directing the discourse? Just look around! We think the answer has become more obvious with each passing year.

The Laytons notice few distinctions. You can tell them any damn thing and they will gulp it whole.

They will accept the ludicrous claims which have driven our discourse in the past three or four decades. They will accept ludicrous claims about major pols and policy topics alike.

It will all sound right to them! From this, we get our discourse!

Nous sommes Charlie—and tout est permis! If you doubt that, just check the headline on the front page of this morning’s Washington Post.

That four-column headline is clownishly wrong. Aristotle wouldn’t have known what to make of these types.

We have a dream today: We’d love to be the salesman who gets to sell Layton a car.

If the sticker price was $26,000, we could charge her 44 grand, perhaps a few thousand more. She wouldn’t notice the difference! We’d speak to her editor next!

It’s close enough for front-page work at this morning’s Washington Post. We’ll leave you with a haunting question:

Do you think these life-forms purchase their cars in this same feckless manner?

WHO CARES ABOUT SCHOOLS: The Washington Post sees no evil again!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2015

Part 4—Some things never change: Here at THE HOWLER, we normally take the side of American public school teachers. In recent years, attacks on teachers have routinely been dumb and unfair.

These attacks have also been grossly misleading for the American public.

That said, no individual or group is perfect. With that in mind, we had some teacher-unfriendly reactions to last Sunday’s front-page report, in which the Washington Post bungled a familiar topic again.

The report concerned the “huge gains” a Virginia public school recorded on last year’s statewide tests, at least on the third-grade level. Our first teacher-unfriendly reaction concerned the extensive “test prep” lessons which produced those “huge gains,” at least according to the young journalists at the Washington Post.

Did test prep lessons produce those “huge gains?” We have no idea. But as we read the Post’s report, we were struck by the willfulness of this school’s third-grade teachers.

This is why we say that:

In the spring of 2013, third grade students at the school didn’t do especially well on the statewide tests (the SOLs). According to the Post, fewer than half of the school’s third-graders received passing scores in reading and math.

According to the Post, this represented a large drop in passing rates from previous years. As a result, third-grade teachers at the school jumped to conclusions about the state tests, then swung into action.

Based on their subjective judgment, the third-grade teachers decided that the passing rates didn’t represent how much their students actually knew. They decided to institute “test prep” lessons to help their new group of third-graders score better in the spring of 2014.

When teachers start free-lancing in such ways, standardization is gone. Third-grade students are being prepared for the statewide tests in ways that fourth-grade students are not. Kids at School A are being prepared in ways that their friends at School B are not.

Standardization is shot when irate teachers at each school devise their own extensive test prep. Beyond that, when passing rates “soar” after test prep is given, there’s no way to know why student performance improved from the previous year.

Did the new students really know more? Or was it just the test prep talking? In theory, if the state of Virginia runs standardized tests, the state should also prescribe a form of standardized test prep. When teachers take the law in their own hands, the basic purpose of testing is shot.

This brings us to our second teacher-unfriendly thought. This thought concerns the possibility that some form of cheating could have produced those “huge gains.”

Right at the start of their lengthy piece, the kid reporters at the Post directly say that the test prep lessons produced the “huge gains” in passing rates. (“Teaching to the test had remarkable results...”)

There’s no way the scribes can know that’s true. But that is what they asserted.

In the course of an 1800-word piece, the kid reporters never considered a second possible explanation for the “huge gain” in passing rates—the possibility that somebody cheated at the school in question.

To state the obvious, this is always a possibility when test scores “soar” at some struggling school. But newspapers like the Washington Post always know that they must never consider the possibility.

Did somebody cheat at this school? Did someone provide students with answers to test questions? With early access to test questions? Did someone change wrong answers to right on students’ answer sheets?

We have no idea if anything like that happened! But that type of conduct has occurred quite widely in Washington and in Atlanta in recent years, and those scandals received humongous attention in the national press.

Yes, Virginia! “Huge gains” in passing rates sometimes result from cheating! In recent years, this has been major national news—but so what?

Even in the wake of this unpleasant history, the Washington Post has now discussed a school which achieved “huge gains” without inquiring, at any point, about this possible explanation for the “soaring” test scores. But then, the Post is devoted to seeing no evil in this particular area—has been for a long time.

Did somebody cheat at this school at some point? We have no idea! But let’s discuss a scoring pattern which would cause any serious, competent journalist to ask that obvious question:

The Washington Post included two graphics as part of its lengthy, front-page report. The first graphic bears this imprecise title: AVERAGE PASSING RATES FOR ALL FOUR SOL SUBJECTS.

Alas! As we noted yesterday, it isn’t clear if the graphic shows average passing rates for third-graders at the school or for tested students in all grades. Whichever it is, a pattern on display in that graphic would have caused a competent journalist to ask some basic questions.

How odd! The school’s student population is “largely poor and Hispanic,” the Post observes at one point. The school is described as “a landing pad for young immigrants who speak little or no English.”

In most instances, deserving kids who face those challenges won’t score as well on standardized tests as Americans kids on the whole. But according to the Post graphic, passing rates at this school matched statewide passing rates in the spring of 2011 and the spring of 2012.

For a school which was largely poor and Hispanic, those were unusual test scores! But uh-oh! In the spring of 2013, a substantial drop-off occurs.

In reaction to that drop, the test prep lessons were instituted on the third-grade level. According to the Post, this produced a rise in third-grade scores in the spring of 2014.

According to that first graphic, passing rates were all over the place at this school during the years in question. Provisionally, this is the way a cynic—or a competent journalist—would interpret that scoring pattern:

Conceivably, someone was cheating on the tests in 2011 and 2012! This resulted in surprisingly high passing rates, considering the challenges facing the student population.

(If this did happen, classroom teachers wouldn’t necessarily have known. In some cheating scandals, administrators doctor students’ answer sheets. No one else knows.)

We continue now with our highly provisional story:

Conceivably, someone cheated on the tests in 2011 and 2012. But then, a big hubbub blew up in the DC area with the Washington, DC cheating scandal—and with the revelation that answer sheets can be scanned for unusual erasure patterns. As a result, no cheating occurred in the spring of 2013—and test scores dropped to a more expected level.

Shocked by the low passing rates, teachers devised test prep.

Did any such thing occur at this school? We have no idea. That said, we aren’t making an accusation about anyone at the school. We’re making a claim about unending decades of incompetence at the Washington Post.

Our claim goes something like this:

The Washington Post’s front-page report was basically incompetent, in a very familiar way.

Especially in the wake of the DC and Atlanta scandals, no competent newspaper can investigate “huge gains” in some school’s test scores without considering the possibility that cheating could have occurred.

Cheating is always possible! But so what? Not a word about this obvious fact darkens the Post report.

The Washington Post sent a couple of kids to report on this public school’s “huge gains.” Those kids behaved in exactly the way Post reporters have always behaved when discussing such matters.

Goods God! Teachers and principals have been cheating on standardized tests for a very long time! We first approached the Baltimore Sun about outright cheating at a Baltimore school in the early 1970s. We wrote op-ed columns on this topic for the Sun in the 1980s.

(Cheating took many forms as the drive for “accountability” grew. In the early 1980s, a very high official at one of the major standardized tests told us a remarkable story. He said his company had come to believe that their principal competitor, to whom they were losing market share, was faking its norms in such a way as to produce artificially high scores.)

(At the time, many school systems were switching from the one test battery to the other, and everyone knew the reason. School districts tended to get better scores with the second test battery. According to our own Deep Throat, those higher scores resulted from fraudulent norms. We don’t know if that suspicion was accurate.)

(At this same time, this same person told us that answer sheets could be electronically scanned to search for unusual erasure patterns. Even then, some school districts were paying a fee to search for that type of cheating.)

Various kinds of cheating have been happening for a long time. This has sometimes included cheating by people inside schools. Newspapers like the Washington Post have always feigned ignorance of this fact.

No matter how many times a scandal blows up—no matter how many different types of cheating emerge—newspapers like the Washington Post continue to imagine no evil. They send inexperienced reporters out to schools, where they pretend to examine “huge gains.” These unprepared youngsters return to their desks to type up piddle like this:

BALINGIT AND SHAPIRO (1/11/15): A grim picture of academic performance was emerging at Carlin Springs Elementary. Fewer than half of the school’s third-graders had passed the reading and math portions of the Virginia Standards of Learning exam, and numbers for history and science weren’t much better.

Teachers pored over the data, dumbfounded.

“To get information like that back can be like a shock to your system,” said Mary Clare Moller, a literacy teacher at the Arlington, Va., school, reflecting on test results that came in after the 2012-2013 school year. “You’re just thinking, like, ‘But I taught this information. I don’t understand why the kids didn’t get it.’ ”

Moller and other third-grade teachers devised a strategy for the following fall: They led six weeks of daily test preparation lessons, tracked students’ progress with a new computer program and provided extra tutoring for students who seemed at risk of missing the mark.

Teaching to the test had remarkable results: While the rest of the school continued to flounder under Virginia’s tougher testing standards, Carlin Springs’ third-graders saw double-digit gains across the board, with passage rates between 70 percent and 79 percent in every subject.

Alas! By paragraph 5, the Post’s reporters had made an assertion they can’t possibly know to be true.

Did test prep lessons produce the “huge gains” at this school? Did “teaching to the test” really produce “remarkable results?”

It’s possible, but it isn’t obvious! Indeed, deep in their lengthy report, the young reporters even quote a state official saying this:

BALINGIT AND SHAPIRO: Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education, countered the criticism that the test does not accurately assess students’ knowledge, and he said test preparation can only really help “on the margins.”

“We want the kids to be comfortable with the test, but we don’t want instruction to be test prep,” he said. “If students are taught to read and the kids are reading at grade level...then the students are going to do well on the test.”

Uh-oh! According to Pyle, test prep lessons “can only really help ‘on the margins.’”

If Pyle is right, then something else might explain the way these passing rates “soared.” But so what? The youngsters quoted Pyle, then hurried away from what he said. This comment didn’t make them ask if something other than test prep lessons had produced those “remarkable results.”

How bad is the Washington Post when it comes to matters of this type? Let’s recall the paper’s gigantic fail in 2006.

In February 2006, a report atop the Post’s front page hailed a Virginia elementary school which was headlined as “A Study in Pride, Progress; Alexandria School Works Hard to Erase Academic Blot.”

At the very top of page one, Jay Mathews praised the local school for its remarkable score gains. Because we’d learned, down through the decades, not to trust reports of this type, we nosed around inside the school’s test data.

Good God! We quickly saw that the various data were strangely contradictory. Eventually, we uncovered a statewide scam which was inflating passing rates all over the state of Virginia.

How badly had the Post been taken? In fact, that local school which was praised on page one had the second lowest reading scores in the whole state of Virginia! The scam which infested the state’s test scores had misled the Post that badly.

We pursued this topic for several months, as you can see in our archives. Eventually, the chairman of the state school board acknowledged to us that a giant breakdown had occurred within the state’s reporting system. This ridiculous scam had inflated passing rates at virtually every school in the state. But the Washington Post never reported this scandal to its readers.

This week, a couple of kids who don’t know schools engaged in similar conduct. What happened at that local school to produce these latest “huge gains?” We don’t have the slightest idea. Nor do the Post’s reporters.

We do know a thing or two about journalistic fails. This past Sunday, readers of the Washington Post were handed an imitation of journalism on the paper’s front page. And alas! When we discuss low-income schools in such casual ways, we show how little we actually care about the important lives of the beautiful children who work and play within their walls.

What actually happened at the latest school with the latest huge gains? In truth, the Washington Post doesn’t know and doesn’t much seem to care. Meanwhile, the liberal world has tolerated this journalism every step of the way.

We liberals! We care about poor kids when they get shot. Otherwise, they can go hang.

WHO CARES ABOUT SCHOOLS: Even after Rhee and Atlanta!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 15, 2015

Part 3—The Post refuses to ask: It’s fascinating to see the way the Washington Post reported the story in question.

The famous newspaper’s bungled report ran 1800 words. Beyond that, the report included a pair of graphics, one of which seems to be irrelevant to the questions at hand.

The lengthy report appeared on the front page of Sunday’s editions—the highest-profile spot of the week. The report concerns a type of event our big newspapers have bungled for at least forty years—“huge gains” on a standardized test at a local, low-income grade school.

By now, it’s hard to say that this journalistic bungling isn’t deliberate and willful. In this case, the procedure starts with youngish, inexperienced scribes being assigned to report the story.

In this case, their bungling starts in their opening paragraph, then proceeds onward from there. Assuming that they worked in good faith, these young reporters were unprepared to report a story of this type.

What are the basic facts of the case? How “huge” were the score gains at the local, low-income school?

Once again, this is the way the front-page report started. Basic information is missing right there in paragraph one:

BALINGIT AND SHAPIRO (1/11/15): A grim picture of academic performance was emerging at Carlin Springs Elementary. Fewer than half of the school’s third-graders had passed the reading and math portions of the Virginia Standards of Learning exam, and numbers for history and science weren’t much better.

Teachers pored over the data, dumbfounded.

“To get information like that back can be like a shock to your system,” said Mary Clare Moller, a literacy teacher at the Arlington, Va., school, reflecting on test results that came in after the 2012-2013 school year. “You’re just thinking, like, ‘But I taught this information. I don’t understand why the kids didn’t get it.’ ”

Moller and other third-grade teachers devised a strategy for the following fall: They led six weeks of daily test preparation lessons, tracked students’ progress with a new computer program and provided extra tutoring for students who seemed at risk of missing the mark.

Teaching to the test had remarkable results: While the rest of the school continued to flounder under Virginia’s tougher testing standards, Carlin Springs’ third-graders saw double-digit gains across the board, with passage rates between 70 percent and 79 percent in every subject.

As told by the Washington Post, the story goes like this:

In the spring of 2013, fewer than half the school’s third-graders passed the statewide math and reading tests.

The next year, dumbfounded teachers provided six weeks of “test prep” lessons for their third-grade students. Because of this “teaching to the test,” third-grade passing rates jumped by roughly thirty points.

That’s the way the story of told by the pair of young Post reporters. For our money, their inexperience was already showing right there in paragraph one.

This is why we say that:

In paragraph one, we’re told that fewer than half of this school’s third-graders passed the statewide tests in the spring of 2013. We’re given to think that this was a horrible performance.

But alas! We’re never told what the passing rates were for the state of Virginia as a whole. Depending on the “difficulty” of the tests, those passing rates could conceivably have been in line with statewide performance. Or those passing rates might have come close to matching statewide performance on the tests, which are called the SOLs.

And not only that! Later, we’re told that students at the school in question are “largely poor and Hispanic.” But we’re never told how their passing rates compared to those of other low-income Hispanic kids in the state.

How bad were those passing rates on those statewide tests? It’s hard to answer such a question in the absence of statewide comparative data, but such data never appear in this lengthy report. Nor are we told what the third-grade passing rates were like at this school in the spring of 2012.

At one point, we’re told that third-grade passing rates at this school “plummeted” in the spring of 2013. But we’re never told what the passing rates were in the spring of 2012—not even in the graphics which accompany the text.

(Warning! You may think that the Post’s first graphic provides this information, at least “for all four SOL subjects combined.” Careful! Based on data from the Post’s report, it seems fairly clear that this graphic must present passing rates for all the grades in the school combined, not just for third graders. You’ll note that the title of that graphic doesn’t claim that the data are for the third grade.)

Starting right in paragraph one, a lot of info is missing. Most strikingly, we never learn how well this school’s low-income Hispanic third-graders were performing compared to their counterparts around the state. And we’re never given a clear account of the drop in passing rates which occurred in 2013.

By how much did third-grade passing rates “plummet” that year? We’re never given that information! We’re simply told that teachers at the school were “dumbfounded” by that year’s passing rates—and that they devised a strategy to bring the passing rates up the next year.

At this point, the inexperience of the Post journalists struck us in another way. We were struck by how much shaky behavior they described, without ever seeming to realize.

Good God! After those passing rates “plummeted” in 2013, third-grade teachers at this school swung into action. As described in the passage above, they “devised a strategy for the following fall” which included extensive “test preparation.”

To us, the problems with that behavior start right at the top. Let’s consider the role of the state of Virginia.

In theory, if a state offers statewide standardized tests, the state should also prescribe standardized test preparation. Here’s why:

Does extensive “test prep” of the type described really change scores on the SOLs? We can’t answer that question.

In theory, if test formats are so confusing that “test prep” substantially changes scores, then those formats are too confusing. You need better tests.

Let's suppose that such test prep does change test scores on the SOLs. If so, the value of the SOLs is severely undermined if School A provides extensive test prep and School B does not. If passing rates can virtually double based on test prep lessons, then it’s pointless to compare passing rates of various schools from around the state, and it’s pointless to compare some school’s passing rates to those of the state as a whole.

Beyond that, if test prep lessons change scores that much, it makes no sense to use the tests to determine “proficiency” at reading or math. Student A may know just as much math as Student B. But Student A has not been provided the test prep lessons, so his math score may be much lower.

One is “proficient,” the other is not, even though they both know the same math!

At the Washington Post, the young, inexperienced reporters completely accepted the idea that this school’s test prep lessons produced those jumps in passing rates.

“Teaching to the test had remarkable results,” the young, largely clueless reporters wrote at the start of their piece. As they continued, they betrayed no sense that, in passages like these, they are describing a form of anarchy, chaos, bedlam:

BALINGIT AND SHAPIRO: As the teachers celebrated the gains, some soul searching began: They felt uncertain about the accomplishment and its educational value.

“I just knew it’s a part of the game,” said Carissa Krane, who taught third grade during the two years the test scores plummeted and then soared at Carlin Springs; she has since moved to California. “There has to be a way to be accountable, and this is the way that our country’s decided we’re going to hold kids accountable and the teachers accountable.”

[...]

Arlington Superintendent Patrick K. Murphy said that Carlin Springs’ gains showed that educators were able to tailor their instruction to fix a problem, acknowledging that part of their strategy involved intensive test preparation, a practice he said is common in schools everywhere. He said he thinks SOLs are not a comprehensive measure of a student’s knowledge and that teachers sometimes put too much emphasis on the results.

“We fall into the trap of wanting to be able to quantify things with a single number because it makes us feel good,” Murphy said.

For educators at Carlin Springs, the tests became a frustrating reality of modern teaching. They know that year-long classroom efforts will be reduced to scores and pass rates.

“It’s just really hard to look at just the numbers, and that’s what we’re judged by,” Moller said. “We have to try to do what we can to get the kids to pass.”

“We have to try to do what we can to get the kids to pass?”

In recent years, such statements have come from schools in cities like Atlanta and Washington, in the wake of cheating scandals that may yet send people to prison. But so what? The clueless young scribes at the Washington Post betray no sense of the problems which may lurk in such comments. They betray no sense of the chaos which is unleashed when every group of third-grade teachers feels they get to decide the proper way to prepare their students to take statewide standardized tests.

In that passage, Superintendent Murphy fails to see the obvious problem with his quoted statements. Is “intensive test preparation” really “a practice [which] is common in schools everywhere?”

Obviously, no—it is not. According to this report, there was no such practice at this school until the 2013-14 school year.

Presumably, a crazy-quilt pattern of test prep obtained in the schools of Arlington, and across the state of Virginia. But if test prep affects SOL scores this much, that means that Virginia’s testing program has virtually no meaning or utility. The teachers and the superintendent don’t seem to see this obvious problem. Neither do the incompetent, young, inexperienced scribes who did this lengthy front-page report for the Washington Post.

If test prep really affects scores that much, then (at the very least) test prep needs to be standardized. Having said that, a very basic question must be asked:

Does test prep affect test scores that much? Does that six weeks of test prep lessons really explain the way passing rates “soared” at this low-income school?

We don’t have the slightest idea why passing rates went up at that school. We do understand the possible scam the Washington Post still refuses to discuss, even after Rhee and Atlanta.

Did test prep really produce those “huge gains?” Tomorrow, we’ll look at the rest of the (possible) story—a possible story the Post has worked to avoid down through these long pitiful years.

Even after the scandals under Rhee—even after the scandals in Atlanta—the Washington Post still refuses to go there! Could it be that something other than test prep lessons produced those soaring passing rates?

Even after Rhee and Atlanta, the Post refuses to ask!

Do we care about low-income kids? If we cared about such kids, would we engage in relentless journalistic scams about their important young lives?

Tomorrow: Even after Rhee, even after Atlanta, the Post refuses to ask

WHO CARES ABOUT SCHOOLS: Who are these guys?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2015

Part 2—A look at the Post's reporters: How poorly do our big newspapers cover our low-income schools?

Consider the background of the people who wrote the Washington Post’s front-page report about one such school, a report which appeared this past Sunday.

The report ran 1800 words; it featured a pair of graphics. As mentioned, it sat on Sunday morning’s front page, the most high-profile spot of the week.

The report concerned a public elementary school in the Washington area—a school which serves a population which the Post describes as “largely poor and Hispanic.” According to the Post’s report, the school achieved “huge gains” on Virginia’s annual statewide tests due to six weeks of “test prep” sessions.

Did these things really happen? Here’s the way the Post’s report began. Moriah Balingit and T. Rees Shapiro are the reporters in question:

BALINGIT AND SHAPIRO (1/11/15): A grim picture of academic performance was emerging at Carlin Springs Elementary. Fewer than half of the school’s third-graders had passed the reading and math portions of the Virginia Standards of Learning exam, and numbers for history and science weren’t much better.

Teachers pored over the data, dumbfounded.

“To get information like that back can be like a shock to your system,” said Mary Clare Moller, a literacy teacher at the Arlington, Va., school, reflecting on test results that came in after the 2012-2013 school year. “You’re just thinking, like, ‘But I taught this information. I don’t understand why the kids didn’t get it.’ ”

Moller and other third-grade teachers devised a strategy for the following fall: They led six weeks of daily test preparation lessons, tracked students’ progress with a new computer program and provided extra tutoring for students who seemed at risk of missing the mark.

Teaching to the test had remarkable results: While the rest of the school continued to flounder under Virginia’s tougher testing standards, Carlin Springs’ third-graders saw double-digit gains across the board, with passage rates between 70 percent and 79 percent in every subject.

Wow! According to the Post’s reporters, this is what happened:

In the spring of 2013, fewer than half this school’s third-graders recorded passing scores on statewide reading and math tests. The next year, third-grade teachers devised and taught six weeks of test prep lessons.

In the spring of 2014, more than seventy percent of third-graders passed the statewide tests.

Third-grade students did much better—but in other grades, students continued to flounder. “Teaching to the test had remarkable results,” the Post’s journalists declare.

Did those things actually happen? Did six weeks of test prep sessions really produce the “huge gains” cited in the Post’s headline?

Truth to tell, we have no idea, so incompetent is the Post’s journalism. These are just a few of the problems with the Post’s reporting:

The most basic kinds of information are missing from the lengthy report. One of the graphics the Post provides seems to be irrelevant to the issue at hand.

The Post’s reporters made little attempt to explore the plausibility of the explanation they give for the “huge gains.” Most strikingly, they didn’t consider other possible explanations for the change in passing rates. In the process, they turned a blind eye to a major testing scandal which recently rocked the D.C. area and the nation as a whole.

Tomorrow, we’ll examine a few of these journalistic fails—failures which infect this report from its first paragraph on. Before we do, let’s ask a different set of questions:

How experienced were the reporters the Post assigned to this task? Was there any reason to expect that they would do competent work as they examined this school's score gains and tried to explain their provenance?

Alas! The reporters who wrote this front-page report are young and inexperienced. They’ve spent little time on the public school beat. They have little background in the widely-discussed topic of standardized testing.

They may turn out to be superb reporters in the future. At this time, there was little reason to think they would know what questions to ask about the “huge gains” they were asked to examine.

How inexperienced are these scribes? Let’s take a look at the record:

According to this LinkedIn profile, Balingit graduated from the University of Oregon in 2007. Starting in January 2008, she worked various beats at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But until she came to the Post in September 2014, she had never covered education.

According to Middleburg Life, Shapiro graduated from Virginia Tech in 2009. He went directly to the Post, writing obituaries for several years. He has covered various sorts of education topics in recent years, many on the university level, but he seems to have no particular background covering public school testing.

Obviously, there’s nothing “wrong” with being youngish reporters. Recently, Shapiro did some good front-page reporting on the alleged UVa gang rape case.

There’s nothing “wrong” with being youngish reporters. There is something wrong with assigning reporters to cover a topic for which they lack technical background and understanding. We see no sign that Balingit and Shapiro brought requisite background knowledge to the question of this school’s score gains.

What was “wrong” with the pair’s reporting? Tomorrow, we’ll explore that topic in some detail.

That said, the Washington Post has a very poor record covering public school testing. How much do we care about low-income schools? In the work routinely done by the Post, we may get a hint of an answer.

Did six weeks of test prep sessions really produce “huge gains” at this low-income school? We don’t have the slightest idea, in large part thanks to the Post.

That said, when topics get covered in slipshod ways, we may learn who we actually care about. Or perhaps we learn about the intellectual capital our big newspapers possess.

What was wrong with this front-page report? Tomorrow, in Part 3, we’ll start with the Post’s first paragraph.

Tomorrow: Just how huge were the gains in question? And what actually caused them?

Supplemental: The new Salon strikes again!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2015

Worst possible way to seek progress: Salon seems to have made a new year’s resolution—a resolution to make us even dumber.

Yesterday, the lowbrow pseudo-liberal site was offering thoughtful ruminations on “The 5 most haunting masturbation-related injuries” and “Behold the glory of the p*ssy!: My orgasmic meditation awakening.”

(Their asterisk.)

The site’s dumbness, and its sex obsession, continue to get ramped up. Today, though, it offers a political piece whose ultimate dumbness may not be apparent.

We refer to the piece by Ann Jones, an American living in Norway. The piece appears beneath these Salonistic headlines:

“Has America gone crazy?”
It's a question that dogs me wherever I travel abroad—and one for which I increasingly have no easy answer

Jones describes admirable aspects of Norway’s social democracy, making invidious comparisons to our less generous American systems. As a general matter, we tend to agree with her policy judgments. But this is the very unfortunate way her unhelpful piece ends up:

JONES (1/13/15): It’s hard to know why we are the way we are, and—believe me—even harder to explain it to others. Crazy may be too strong a word, too broad and vague to pin down the problem. Some people who question me say that the U.S. is “paranoid,” “backward,” “behind the times,” “vain,” “greedy,” “self-absorbed,” or simply “dumb.” Others, more charitably, imply that Americans are merely “ill-informed,” “misguided,” “misled,” or “asleep,” and could still recover sanity. But wherever I travel, the questions follow, suggesting that the United States, if not exactly crazy, is decidedly a danger to itself and others. It’s past time to wake up, America, and look around. There’s another world out here, an old and friendly one across the ocean, and it’s full of good ideas, tried and true.

Crazy may be too strong a word! Are Americans backward and greedy, or simply ill-informed and asleep? At the new Salon, deeply self-impressed, judgmental minds want to answer such questions!

This is vintage Salonism. In this analytical model, we the liberals hurl an array of insults at the American people, letting them know that they are vastly dumber than we are.

In truth, nothing could be a whole lot dumber than this pseudo-liberal name-calling. Here at THE HOWLER, we have taken to noting the dumbness in the way our own liberal tribe tends to function. People hate it when we do that. Imagine how effective it is to hurl such insults at those in the other tribe, to endlessly name-call The Others.

We tend to agree with Jones’ views on social policy. That said, we’re struck by how little she can explain the ways our social attitudes and policies have developed. Meanwhile, the comments to her piece are more depressing still.

Go ahead—read those comments! You’ll encounter a stew of cultural attitudes which make the plutocrats glad.

In this unpleasant, low-IQ stew, we the liberals go on and on about how dumb The Others are. For ourselves, we can think of nothing dumber than this attitude among us, the all-knowing tribe.

At present, we liberals have almost no skill at listening to those who may not agree with our basic views and outlooks. Our insults virtually guarantee that we’ll never be heard.

The dumbness of the Salonist reader leaps out from the comments. At one point, a reader tries to explain why it’s easier for smaller, homogeneous countries like Norway to institute and maintain social democracies:

COMMENTER (1/13/15): In brief summary, I feel that the single best explanation for most of the questions posed by these Europeans is that American is not and never has been a nation of a single people. We are a very loose collection of various "tribes", each tribe feeling little real connection to each of the others despite the sometimes incessant flag waving.

The commenter points to one of the difficulties confronting us as a sprawling, multiethnic nation with a brutal racial history. But here’s the thoughtful reply she receives—from “Aunt Messy,” an inveterate Salonist bomb-thrower:

COMMENTER: No. The correct answer to "Has America gone crazy?" is, "Yes".

That's perfect Salonism! Later, low-IQ readers adopt the most reductive interpretations of similar thoughts and suggestions. We liberals know how to be anti-racist in the dumbest possible ways, and we’re eager to silence all who might seem to disagree with our own low-IQ formulations.

What was that commenter talking about? For one example, Paul Krugman has explained that we didn’t get national health care in the aftermath of World War II, the way many European nations did, because Southern pols were afraid that some such system would force the racial integration of Southern hospitals.

If Krugman’s explanation is correct, our failure to get national health care was part of the tragic legacy of our brutal racial history. We modern liberals tend to react to such information by dropping R-bombs on The Other Tribe in the dumbest possible ways.

For ourselves, we tend to agree with Jones on basic policy points, but her instinctive name-calling strikes us as amazingly dumb on a political basis. That too is an artifact of our tribal society, whose excesses makes the plutocrats glad.

Divide and conquer! In those hectoring comments, you see the eternal plutocrat strategy being played out—by us!

All too often, we modern liberals are very dumb and almost prehistorically tribal. For fun and profit, the new Salon is working hard to dumb us down even more.

WHO CARES ABOUT SCHOOLS: Who cares about facts?

TUESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2015

Part 1—Surprised and not surprised: Yesterday afternoon, we were surprised, and not surprised, by a factual error on Kevin Drum’s site, in a post about charter schools.

The factual error didn’t come from Drum itself. It came in a passage he quoted from a Forbes magazine piece.

Adam Ozimek made the (familiar) factual error in question. Here is the passage in question, as reposted by Drum:

OZIMEK, AS REPOSTED BY DRUM (1/12/15): I would like to propose a better conventional wisdom: “some charter schools appear to do very well, and on average charters do better at educating poor students and black students”. If the same evidence existed for some policy other than charter schools, I believe this would be the conventional wisdom.

...The charter sectors’ ability to do better for poor students and black students is important given that they disproportionately serve them....53% of charter students are in poverty compared 48% for public schools. Charters also serve more minority students than public schools: charters are 29% black, while public schools are 16%. So not only do they serve more poor students and black students, but for this group they relatively consistently outperform public schools.

Is Ozimek's basic claim true? On average, do charter schools “do better [than traditional public schools]...for poor students and black students?”

In his post, Drum “passed [that claim] along without comment.” We were struck by the factual error within Ozimek’s post which went mentioned by Drum.

Say what? Can it really be true that 48 percent of public school students “are in poverty?” Hours after Drum’s post appeared, one commenter finally wondered about that remarkable statement:

COMMENTER (1/12/15): Leaving aside the public vs. charter debate, these statistics can't possibly be true, at least on a national level. 48% (nearly half) of public school students are in poverty? Really?

As he continued, the commenter explained the reason for his puzzlement.

“According to the National Poverty Center, 22 percent of all children under 18 lived in poverty in 2010,” he correctly noted. “Anybody care to explain what's going on with the 48 percent number?” the commenter later said.

What explains the odd factual claim imbedded in the quoted passage? Presumably, Ozimek was misstating a real statistic.

Presumably, Ozimek was referring to the percentage of public school students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a number which stands at roughly 50 percent. But that is not a measure of poverty. In fact, students are eligible for the federal lunch program if their family’s income is roughly double the federal poverty line.

Ozimek’s piece included a howler; Drum let the error slide. We were surprised, and not surprised, when we saw this familiar error thrown into the discourse again.

Drum is our favorite blogger, in large part because he’s quite smart. For that reason, we were surprised to see him let this familiar error pass without comment.

We weren’t surprised to see the error getting made in the first place. Increasingly, this is the way our discourse works, even on the “liberal” side of the dial.

We don’t know Ozimek’s politics. Those who publish upbeat thoughts about charter schools at Forbes may not be on the liberal side of the aisle.

That said, all sorts of people make the factual error in question. We’ve corrected this howler on several occasions in recent years.

We’ve seen this very basic error made by education reporters at major mainstream publications. On the other hand, it’s a type of error which is becoming more frequent on the “liberal” side of the aisle, as we “liberals” gimmick statistics to drive preferred policy claims.

No, Virginia! It isn’t true that forty-eight percent of public school students are living below the poverty line. It is true that our public discourse is routinely a clownish, underfed mess, with factual errors and technical incompetence driving a range of discussions.

This incompetence is quite widespread in our discussions of public schools. Just consider the front-page report in Sunday’s Washington Post—a report about a local public school which showed “huge gains” in last year’s annual testing.

The front-page report included 1800 words of text and several graphics. It pretends to be a discussion of the practice of “teaching to the test.”

The piece is long, and highly visible. It’s also grossly incompetent on a journalistic basis, from its start to its finish.

How do we discuss public schools? We discuss public schools like this:

The piece was written by a pair of twenty-something reporters; neither reporter has any significant background in education. There is no sign that either reporter possessed even minimal technical competence, or had any real idea what he was talking about.

Beyond that, these reporters write for the Washington Post—and Washington was the location of a recent, high-profile public school cheating scandal. It isn’t just that this pair of reporters seem to have no technical competence. They also duck an obvious question about the score gains at this school—a question which has to be raised any time “huge gains” are recorded in test scores.

(Routinely, the Post avoids this question.)

As we discuss that front-page report, we’ll be asking you to think about the way public schools get discussed in newspapers like the Post. That said, the incompetence and propaganda which drive our discussion of public schools have been enabled, for decades now, by us in the liberal world.

We liberals love to pretend that we care about black kids. In truth, we care about such children when they get shot, and at very few other junctures.

Our national discourse is pitifully weak. We liberals are part of this problem.

Tomorrow: Incompetent right from the start

THE PROBLEM IS US: Bare-breasted protests, Missouri school boards!

MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 2015

Part 4—Can the problem really be us: Can it possibly be that the problem is actually us?

For decades, we liberals have rolled our eyes at the ditto-heads, then at those we insult as “tea-baggers.” Can it possibly be the case that the problem is also us?

Plainly, yes—the problem is also us. We’re dumb and tribal and filled with loathing and pretty much nobody likes us.

We’re dumb and tribal and filled with expansive self-regard. For these reasons, nobody likes us. We can’t think why anyone should.

How dumb can we be in the liberal world? Consider the wisdom which just keeps streaming from the new Salon.

Last week, before the killings in Paris, Joan Walsh had a hernia because Chris Christie roots for the Dallas Cowboys. She even said that this troubling conduct was “frankly un-American.”

How dumb do you have to be to say that? You have to be amazingly dumb, or maybe just blindingly tribal. That said, Walsh is one of our tribe's “intellectual leaders”—and after Paris, the new Salon offered us wisdom like this:

TAYLOR (1/8/15): Hashtag activism—even the #WeAreAllCharlieHebdo campaign underway on Twitter—won’t do. To avert more deaths, we have to stand up in real—and sometimes risky—ways to noxious ideologies masquerading as salvific faiths. Pundits need to overcome their fear of being labeled “politically incorrect” and speak their minds. Politicians must come clean with their electorates and state, simply, “With Islam, we have a problem.” Better still, “We have a problem with religion. Let’s figure out how we are going to deal with it.”

Few are doing this now, but one group is—the topless protest movement Femen. By email I reached the leader of Femen in France, Inna Shevchenko, a frequent subject of Charlie Hebdo’s (admiring) coverage, who knew and was friends with the slain, including Charb, the cartoonist who was also the magazine’s director. Femen has won notoriety for its bare-breasted protests against Islam, including this one, and countless bold demarches against Catholicism there and elsewhere.

For the record, we have no religious or cosmological beliefs. But good God!

The idea that politicians can “figure out how we are going to deal with religion” is a form of massive delusion. The notion that we should engage in “bare-breasted protests against Islam” is criminally insane as a form of political advice.

For many years, we liberals amused ourselves by laughing at the dumbness and gullibility of The Others. It’s long past time when we have to admit that the problem is also us—has been for a long time.

For how many years has the problem been us? Consider a painful letter to the editor of the Washington Post.

The letter appeared on January 3. It was one of three letters which pushed back, from a liberal perspective, against a Robert Samuelson column.

Samuelson’s column had been pretty silly. But the highlighted statement stands as a tribute to three or four decades of liberal sloth and incompetence:

LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (1/3/15): Robert J. Samuelson stated that two-thirds of the federal budget went toward "payments to individuals." This covers Social Security recipients and Medicare beneficiaries. My wife and I paid Social Security taxes from every paycheck our entire working lives. We pay a Medicare premium every month for health insurance. This is money paid into a system by and for all, including the "middle class," for programs to set money aside for our retirements and the purchase of health insurance.

The fact that the federal government may have squandered the money is not the fault of the middle class but of government's ineptitude.

We are only reaping the benefits that we paid for.

Good lord! The federal government hasn’t “squandered” this gentleman’s Social Security taxes in any normal sense of the term.

But so what? Plutocrats spent several decades inserting this thought into the heads of American voters, liberal and conservative alike.

“The money isn’t there—we’ve already spent it,” voters were told again and again. All that was left of their tax payments was “a set of worthless IOUs,” they were repeatedly told.

Lazy, shiftless, inept and uncaring, our “liberal” intellectual leaders never addressed these carefully crafted misdirections. For that reason, these deceptive claims drove several decades of our political discourse.

Even today, liberal voters repeat these points, even after this propaganda campaign has largely been abandoned on the right. Has any political tribe ever been as useless and helpless as us?

Increasingly, the problem is us! Let’s recall the painful place where we started our current series.

We started our current series after reading a New York Times editorial about “the needs of black students.” One night before the editorial appeared, we had watched the bumptious Tavis Smiley pretend to discuss public schools.

It would be hard to invent an emptier speech than the one Smiley delivered on C-Span that night. The next morning, the Times’ ruminations about black students was just as empty and sad.

No, Missouri! It’s extremely unlikely that “the needs of black students” will be advanced in any serious way by the ACLU law suit the Times was praising—a law suit designed to heighten the number of blacks on the Ferguson-Florissant school board.

The fact that the Times doesn’t know that—the fact that the Times was willing to posture and boast and mislead readers in the ways it did in that editorial—is a sad example of the way the problem is us.

Is this the best we the liberals can do? Again and again, the answer seems clear: Yes! It actually is!

Starting tomorrow, we’ll look again at the way we liberals refuse to care about the needs of black, Hispanic and low-income students. To read ahead, just click this.

We liberals walked away from black students a very long time ago. Our disinterest in such kids is manifest. It's matched by our ignorance of their needs, by our refusal to discuss their apparent improved performance.

Can we talk? We liberals are an ungodly mess. Our astonishing tribal pride keeps us from noting this obvious fact, which we could change from within if we weren’t discussing Christie’s love for the Dallas Cowboys while advocating bare-breasted protests of Islam.

We’re lazy and dumb and nobody likes us! Maybe someone should organize some bare-breasted protests of us!

The death of irony: Bare-breasted protests of Islam! To prove that irony really has died, the editors of the new Salon crafted this headline for the piece which made that absurd suggestion:

We must stop deferring to religion: Laughable absurdities must be laughed at

That was the headline on the piece prescribing those bare-breasted protests!

Should we start by laughing at the absurdities which keep emanating from us? If we head down that long, winding road, the problem may, to some small extent, at long last cease to be us.

THE PROBLEM IS US: Joan Walsh tackles the Dallas Cowboys!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 2015

Part 3—From earth tones on to this: Why do we say that the problem is us? That we liberals have turned out to be too dumb, too tribal, too uncaring to function in a democracy?

By now, the evidence of our shortfall is overwhelmingly clear. Let’s review an example which preceded the killings in Paris this week. Let’s consider the anguished, angry post by Joan Walsh at the new Salon.

(We’ll assume the piece was done in good faith—that Walsh wasn’t deliberately toying with Salon’s target audience.)

Walsh was railing against Chris Christie, a favorite tribal villain. What had her so upset with the New Jersey kingpin?

Here’s what: Christie roots for the Dallas Cowboys, not for a local NFL team! According to Christie, he’s engaged in this conduct since childhood!

That’s what had Walsh so upset—the fact that Christie roots for the Cowboys, not for the Giants, the Jets or the Eagles. And please note: There isn’t a hint of irony in Walsh’s remarkable piece.

Good God! Before she’s done, Walsh declares, with no visible irony, that Christie’s lifelong preference for the Cowboys is “incredibly creepy” and “frankly un-American.” She lists it as the third reason, out of three, why Christie will never be president.

Walsh is a “liberal” intellectual leader. She’s one of our tribe’s ranking TV stars. Increasingly, the truth is clear—the problem is plainly us:

WALSH (1/7/15): [T]he first disqualifying issue I spotted in this clusterf*ck of male ego was Christie’s explanation for why he supported the Cowboys: because all his home teams “stunk” when he was a kid.

Personally, I think Americans are entitled to support whatever sports team they want. But it’s incredibly creepy that Christie himself says he became a Cowboys fan because his hometown teams “pretty much stunk” when he was growing up. The local New York Giants and Jets, as well as the Philadelphia Eagles (New Jersey is split that way), were indeed win-challenged during Christie’s wonder years. But the governor also confided that he didn’t even join his beloved father’s fandom because, again, his dad’s team, the Giants, “pretty much stunk.”

[...]

I don’t have a problem with the fact that Christie didn’t root for his father’s team. I didn’t either, but for the opposite reason. I’m a baseball fan, and I didn’t root for my father’s Yankees. But that was because the Yankees were the dominant team in my childhood, and my mother and grandmother rooted for the New York Mets. While I loved my father, I believed the Mets needed my attention more, because they were the underdogs.

Christie doesn’t have to share my sympathy for the underdog–and obviously he doesn’t, he’s a fan of overdogs. But to turn away not only from his father’s beloved team, but all of his local teams (he hates the Philadelphia Eagles particularly) is one of the most vivid examples of Christie’s grasping, kissing-up character. In particular, by rooting for the dominant Cowboys as a child, Christie showed us early that he was going to be the governor (though never president) for the 1 percent.

I’m on record long ago saying Christie won’t be president, first because of his anger issues and later because of his lame Bridgegate problems. This is strike three. His entire political career is built on his Springsteen-loving, frank-talking Regular Joe appeal. Bruce Springsteen doesn’t root for the Dallas Cowboys. Plus, Americans root, root, root for the home team (yes, I know that’s baseball, but still), and Christie’s embrace of a faraway team, just because they were winners, is frankly un-American.

This is Christie’s third strike, Walsh says, mixing her sports metaphors a small tad. Chris Christie will never reach the White House because he roots for the Cowboys!

It’s incredibly creepy that he roots for that team! Frankly, it’s un-American!

Quickly, a confession:

Back in the day, we wondered why liberals like Walsh just sat and watched as Candidate Gore was trashed, for two years, in similar ludicrous ways. (Naomi Wolf told Al Gore to wear earth tones! Al Gore said he invented the Internet!)

By now, we have an apparent answer. People like Walsh are so tribal—and frankly, so dumbfoundingly dumb—that they “reason” in similar ways.

(We know—this seems counterintuitive. But as you know if you read Salon, the proof is everywhere.)

For the record, sixty-three comments were appended to Walsh’s piece. We find only a few which complain about its manifest lunacy.

(One shining example: “This is a ridiculous article, and if one lets a politician's sport team allegiance influence their vote, than that person is ridiculous too.”)

Alas! Walsh is a liberal “intellectual leader.” And uh-oh! At the new Salon, her “liberal” readers seemed to think that this manifest drivel made sense.

Quite plainly, the problem now includes us! Emerging sites like the new Salon are making this fact—and this terrible problem—abundantly clear.

This sort of thing goes on every day. Now that the liberal world has emerged from its sleep in the woods, we ask a very basic question:

Absent a better class of gatekeepers, are we humans bright enough to make a democracy work?

Coming: Reams of examples

THE PROBLEM IS US: Selma comes to the New York Times!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2015

Interlude—Off-point by paragraph 2: Only in the New York Times could such silliness appear.

A debate has blown up concerning one part of the new feature film, Selma. At our emerging liberal sites, our intellectual leaders and our commenters have stumbled about, displaying the lack of intellectual capital (and moral integrity) which has defined our failing efforts over the past forty years.

Did you see Chris Hayes pretend to address this topic this week? If not, continue reading.

First, though, consider the letter the New York Times ran about Selma this morning.

Good God! On New Year’s Day, the New York Times ran a front-page overview of the Selma debate. As everyone knows by now, the debate concerns the way the film portrays the attitudes and behavior of President Johnson in the run-up to the Selma marches and the drive for the Voting Rights Act.

We haven’t seen the film ourselves. We can only react to what others are saying about the way it portrays Johnson.

But good God! This morning, the Times ran four letters about the debate. Sadly but all too typically, here’s how the first letter started:

LETTERS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (1/7/15): Re “Film Casts Johnson as Villain, Restarting Civil Rights Debate” (front page, Jan. 1), about criticism of a film that depicts President Lyndon B. Johnson as “a laggard on black voting rights who opposed the marches”:

I have seen Ava DuVernay’s new film, “Selma,” and I was also part of this newspaper’s team that covered the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. In my opinion, there is nothing in Ms. DuVernay’s film that significantly distorts this historic event or the leadership role played by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Did we read that statement correctly? “There is nothing in the film that significantly distorts this historic event or the leadership role played by Dr. King?”

No one has said that the new film distorts the role played by Dr. King. As we see in the quote from that front-page report, people have said that the new feature film distorts the role played by President Johnson.

What led the Times to publish this letter, which has veered off-point by paragraph 2? We can’t really answer that question. But the foolishness of the selection is all too typical of the work performed by this well-known newspaper.

For the record, the letter was written by Gay Talese. Back in the day, he covered the Selma marches for the New York Times—or at least, so he recalls.

He may have been extremely sharp then. His full letter today is rather muddy and almost completely off point. Ironically, this may have helped propel it to the top of the Times letter pile.

Nothing in Talese’s full letter speaks to the debate about Selma's portrayal of Johnson. It does say unabashedly good things about the film, and it voices a preferred pseudo-liberal line which has emerged in this pseudo-debate. (See postscript below.)

The letter’s off-point, but it voices a script. To some editor at the Times, this may have been enough to propel it to the top of the pile.

In our view, Dr. King was a moral and intellectual giant. He stood as one of the heads of a movement which was so spiritually and intellectually advanced that it’s hard to believe that it really occurred in this low-IQ, venal world.

(Many people took part in this movement. Only a few became famous.)

That said, the debate which has emerged this past week involves the film’s portrait of President Johnson. Only in the New York Times! Only there would a set of letters start with a letter which affirms the portrait of somebody else!

Did the Times do this to advance a script? We have no idea, but we can tell you this:

All around our pseudo-liberal world, our emerging pseudo-liberal leaders have found ways to advance mandated tribal reactions to this (rather minor) debate. In the process, they’ve found it hard to make a simple statement:

On the whole, the film is great. But in some ways, it does misrepresent Johnson.

It isn’t hard to say something like that. Increasingly, though, our emerging pseudo-liberal world is becoming devoted to Hard Tribal Script, like the pseudo-conservative world before it. To cite one example, we thought we saw Chris Hayes sell his soul on this score on Monday night’s eponymous cable program.

(At the new Salon, Andrew O’Hehir critiques the Hayes segment with a high degree of perspicacity. To read his analysis, just click here.)

We may return to this fascinating topic on Friday. Tomorrow, we’ll return to the New York Times editorial about that Missouri school district, an editorial in which the Times pretends to care about “the needs of black students.”

We don’t think the Times has earned the right to voice that type of concern. Over the past four decades, the liberal world has largely walked away from the interests of black kids too.

Increasingly, the truth becomes obvious—and the truth says the problem is us!

We liberals have failed for decades now. As we emerge with our new sites and our mandated scripts, our moral and intellectual shortfalls are only becoming more obvious.

Gay Talese was almost completely off-point, but he gave voice to a current script. The New York Times could see it was good.

He rose to the top of the pile!

Tomorrow: Back to that Times editorial about that Missouri school district

The script according to Talese: Below, you see the final paragraph of Talese’s letter—a letter which is rather jumbled and almost completely off-point:

TALESE: As Mr. Chestnut later co-wrote in his book, “Black in Selma,” “The march to Montgomery was the first enterprise I’d ever seen involving black and white people where the black people set the agenda and ran the show.”

Black people set the agenda for Selma! Inferentially, Johnson didn’t!

As bumper stickers go, we tend to prefer “Black and white together” to “Black people can run the show,” although the latter sentiment is plainly accurate.

(For future use, we strongly prefer “Black and white optional.” We’d prefer a world where American kids get to decide if they want to be “black” or “white” at all—where their society doesn’t tell them that their so-called “race” automatically defines who they are.)

For the most part (though not entirely), so-called black people did run the morally and intellectually brilliant civil rights movement. (According to our culture’s norms, Rosa Parks was “black.”)

That said, Talese’s letter basically skips the central point of our current week-long dispute. How did his letter reach the top of the pile?

We can’t answer that question. But the cluelessness of our emerging liberal world has been on display in this week-long debate, and the fecklessness of the New York Times has been on display for some time.

The Times is off-point by paragraph 2! Alas! Our intellectual capital is low. This doesn’t bode well for the world.

THE PROBLEM IS US: As we the liberals emerge!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 6, 2014

Part 2—Uncaring and clueless on schools: Yesterday morning, the New York Times editorial board was worried about “the needs of black students” in Missouri’s Ferguson-Florissant School District.

For several reasons, we found the paper’s editorial hard to take. And that wasn’t all! One night before, we’d watched Tavis Smiley pretend to discuss the needs of black students as part of C-Span’s In Depth program.

(For yesterday's post, click here.)

We got the impression that Smiley didn’t know whereof he spoke. It made us think of Dana Goldstein’s portrait of the “achievement gaps” which dog many public schools.

Goldstein (Brown 2006) has emerged in recent years as one of the liberal world’s alleged “educational experts.” That said, how well do our liberal “experts” function in the modern world?

Recently, we ran across Goldstein’s discussion of elementary school “ability grouping” in a piece she wrote for Salon in 2013. We were struck by the picture Goldstein drew of the American public school classroom.

In our view, the following passage is truly amazing. Sadly, it’s also deeply instructive:

GOLDSTEIN (6/10/13): Grouping fell out of favor in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was stigmatized because of its relationship to high school-level “tracking”... [G]rouping remains controversial, in part because it pits two of the education world’s favorite buzzwords against one another: “differentiation” versus “high expectations.”

“Differentiation” calls for a teacher to adjust the delivery and assessment of lessons for each student in her class. All students might hear the same introductory lecture on fractions, for example, but in small groups later on, some students would be expected to complete four numeric problems, while others would tackle those same four problems, plus an additional two word problems. The teacher would move around the room, providing one-on-one help and instruction geared toward each student’s ability level.

“High expectations,” on the other hand, refers to the idea that many children will rise to meet the standards set for them by teachers and parents. This rhetoric dates back to the civil rights era...

Good lord! Goldstein pictured an elementary school classroom where the different achievement levels came to this:

Everyone is taught the same math skill. The more advanced kids are then asked to solve six problems. The rest of the class solves four!

An elementary teacher might have a class like that. But that portrait doesn’t begin to capture the different achievement levels which may coexist within a modern American school, school system or classroom.

Reading that passage, we wondered if Goldstein (Brown 2006) has any idea how American schools really work. This past Sunday night, we had the same reaction when we listened to Smiley discuss the needs of the public schools.

Around 1:54 on the C-Span tape, Smiley offers the following oration. Sad to say, this cluelessness may sound good to the modern liberal ear:

SMILEY (1/4/15): I’ve come to put it this way, just to kind of synthesize it:

What I want, and what I believe that we need in America, is a constitutional amendment. And I know I just gave somebody a heart attack, because I know how hard it is to get a constitutional amendment in this country.

But I think what we need to wrestle with, and I would like to put this on the table for consideration at least, on education, a constitutional amendment that would guarantee every child in this country access to an equal, high-quality education.

So think of all the constitutional amendments and all the guarantees that we have to free speech and to carry weapons and all the other rights that we have as Americans. Why is it that in this country every child, no matter what state you’re born in, no matter what color you are, what county you live in, why is it that every child in this country is not guaranteed access to an equal, high-quality education?

Now that doesn’t mean that you’re trying to judge outcomes. But why doesn’t each child in this country at least start at the same place?

We’ve got fifty states and fifty different ways of educating children but nobody is guarantee access to an equal, high-quality education.

So the next question is, how do you figure out what that is? The answer is, it doesn’t matter to me. Whatever the best education is in this country that we can agree on; whatever the students in the schools that are regarded as the best, whatever they get, let’s give that to every child in this country.

We can define the standard, what we think “the best” is. And whatever the best students have access to in this country, that’s what every child ought to have access to. And again, I offer for your consideration, what would happen and how education in this country might dramatically change.

Benjamin Franklin—somebody once said one day that if Benjamin Franklin came back, the only thing he’d recognize today is the education system, because it ain’t changed much in all these years.

But I think it’s going to take something radical to change our education system. So again, I ask you to consider what would happen if we had a constitutional amendment that would guarantee every child in this country access to an equal, high-quality education.

Let’s assume Smiley’s good intentions. In fairness, let’s note that Goldstein is an educational specialist. Smiley is not.

Still and all, that recommendation is so daft, so cosmically uncomprehending, that it could only come from a modern liberal “intellectual leader.” Only a group as lazy as we could produce such strange, rank fruit.

Smiley discussed public schools several times during the three-hour C-Span program. Each time, he seemed to have emerged from a time capsule he's been sharing with Austin Powers.

Smiley seemed to have no idea where our “achievement gaps” come from. He didn’t seem to have any idea what “the best students in the country” are “getting” from the first days of life—what it is that sets them apart, in later scholastic achievement, from others who are less educationally fortunate.

His ignorance reflects the massive indifference to the interests of black kids we liberals have displayed down through these many years. That passage from Goldstein boggled our mind. But so did Smiley’s peroration, which apparently seems to make sense when heard by modern liberals.

In yesterday’s editorial, the New York Times hailed the ACLU for bringing a law suit against that Missouri school district—the same school district the late Michael Brown attended.

The Times seems to think that this district’s schools will improve in some major way if the local board has more black members. That too reads like an unknowing (and uncaring) dispatch from 1965.

Tomorrow, we’ll briefly consider the ACLU’s suit. For today, we’ll only say this:

Goldstein and Smiley and Timesmen oh my! We liberals have badly failed the test of the past three or four decades.

At our various emerging liberal sites, we are currently being trained to hate The Others for their vile traits. But in our own sloth and incomprehension, one fact has become apparent:

We liberals are the problem now too! We’re lazy and we aren’t very smart. We exude a moral squalor.

We’re lazy and dumb and our morals are bad. There’s little reason for people to like us. Presumably, nobody does.

Tomorrow: New York Times, thumbs on the scales

THE PROBLEM IS US: Posers of the Times!

MONDAY, JANUARY 5, 2014

Part 1—Creating a new situation: We hated the featured editorial in today’s New York Times.

In part, we hated it because we watched Tavis Smiley pretend to talk about public schools on yesterday’s In Depth program (on C-Span). To watch the full program, click here.

In part, we hated it because we’ve come to loathe the types of pseudo-liberal elites who put such piddle in print.

We’ve been writing this site for almost seventeen years now. In recent years, we’ve come to feel that our struggling culture just isn’t going to make it.

In part, that’s due to the ongoing propaganda of the plutocrats and their agents. But in part, it’s due to the fraudulence of the lazy elites who get accepted as the liberal world’s “intellectual leaders.”

What did we hate about that Times editorial? We hated the part where the posers who wrote it referred to “the needs of black students,” a topic the Times is too lazy, and too uncaring, to explore.

We’ll discuss that passage later this week along with Smiley’s posing. But as today's editorial started, bad faith was lurking in the wings, just waiting to appear.

The Times discussed “voting rights in Ferguson.” Hard-copy headline included:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (1/5/15): Race and Voting Rights in Ferguson

For most people, Ferguson, Mo., will be remembered for one awful August afternoon, when a white police officer there shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.

But that incident was only a snapshot in the town’s long and complicated racial history—a history characterized by entrenched segregation and economic inequality, as well as by familiar and systemic obstacles that have kept black residents from holding positions of political power.

Have “systemic obstacles...kept black residents from holding positions of political power” in Ferguson?

In theory, that’s certainly possible! But alas! As the Times proceeded, it quickly offered a silly though pleasing con:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (continuing directly): Ferguson’s population is two-thirds African-American, and yet its mayor, city manager and five of its six City Council members are white. So are its police chief and all but three officers on its 53-member police force.

If Ferguson is two-thirds black, why is its mayor white? Why is only one council member black? Why do Ferguson’s voters keep electing white officials?

As far as we know, the answer has nothing to do with “systemic obstacles” to participation in the political process; more on that later this week. But as the Times continued, the paper conflated this state of affairs with a different situation.

In the passage which follows, the Times is talking about school board elections for the Ferguson-Florissant School District, a large district which extends well beyond Ferguson’s boundaries. The situation described in this passage has nothing to with the fact that Ferguson voters keep electing white mayors:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (continuing directly): The school board for the Ferguson-Florissant School District is much the same: More than three-quarters of the district’s 12,000 students are black, but the seven-member board includes only one African-American.

Last month the American Civil Liberties Union sued the school board under the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the way its members are elected blocks minority voters from fully participating in the political process.

The method is known as “at large” voting, and lets voters cast ballots for all candidates in the district, regardless of where the voters live. Since the district’s voting-age population is 50 percent white and 47 percent black, and since both groups there tend to vote along strict racial lines, the white voters’ candidates almost always win.

According to the Times:

In the sprawling Ferguson-Florissant School District, “the voting-age population is 50 percent white and 47 percent black.” According to the Times, white candidates almost always win school board elections because of this narrow, three-point difference in population.

On its face, that explanation sounds highly suspect. And alas! Even at this early point, conservative voters who read this editorial almost surely knew or suspected something quite basic:

Conservative readers knew or suspected that the New York Times editorial board had its thumb on the scale as it described the electoral situation (1) in Ferguson itself and (2) in the larger Ferguson-Florissant School District. Every conservative knew or suspected that the editorial board was playing fast and loose with some basic facts.

Here at THE HOWLER, we think the board actually was playing fast and loose with the facts. This creates an increasingly common situation—a situation which rarely obtained in 1998, when we started this site:

Alas! Given the way our pseudo-liberal “intellectual leaders” routinely function today, conservatives often know more than we liberals do about the basic facts of various matters!This situation rarely obtained in 1998; today, it’s increasingly common. And as we the liberals proceed this way, we help insure that our struggling culture just isn’t likely to make it.

Increasingly, we “liberals” are part of the problem now too! To us, it seems that we’re a larger part of the problem with each passing day.

Tomorrow: Concerning that law suit against the school district

Once again, the basic text: To peruse the whole editorial, just click here. Tomorrow, we’ll return to that text.

We think the Times is playing fast and loose with some basic facts in that rather deceptive piece.

At one time, this sort of thing mainly came from the right. Today, our side is doing it too! Increasingly, our own lazy, uncaring “intellectual leaders” are part of the problem too.

Breaking: New Year dawns on schedule!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 1, 2015

With us in a distant locale: Yesterday, we journeyed to the Hudson Valley to attend a bit of a memorial service.

The new year has dawned bright and clear in this locale. With apologies, we expect to resume our current series on Saturday.