Thursday, December 06, 2007

THE DEVIL IN NY'S CONSTITUTION

by George Will


"Republican James G. Blaine came within 1,047 votes of becoming president. He lost New York, and hence the White House, by that margin in 1884. New York's large Catholic population loathed Republicans after a Presbyterian clergyman, speaking in Blaine's presence, said the Democratic Party's antecedents were "rum, Romanism and rebellion."

Protestants resented the impertinence of Catholic immigrants who founded schools that taught Catholicism as forthrightly as public schools then taught Protestantism. Protestants thought a public school should be, in Horace Mann's words, a "nursery of piety" - of Protestant piety - dispensing "judicious religious instruction," judiciousness understood as Protestantism.

In 1875, Blaine unsuccessfully tried to amend the US Constitution to stipulate that no public money shall go to schools "under the control of any religious sect." Eventually 37 states passed similar amendments to their constitutions. Congress required Blaine provisions in the constitutions of new states entering the union.

New York's proscribes public assistance to any school "wholly or in part under the control or direction of any religious denomination, or in which any denominational tenet or doctrine is taught." Faulkner, however, wants to bring his church's family-support skills to the task of teaching only a secular curriculum. A Baptist, he shares his denomination's traditional suspicion of entangling religion with government. He just wants to increase choice and competition within the city's school system.

Not until about 15 percent of a school district's children are in charter schools do those schools exert pressure to change the way the district functions. Of New York City's 1,453 public schools, only 61 are charters. They serve 19,000 of the 1.1 million public school students - 1.7 percent.

Andy Smarick, writing in Education Next, reports that only 2 percent of America's public-school pupils are in charters, which are being opened slowly - only 335 a year nationwide, even though the students on charter waiting lists would fill more than 1,000 schools. At that rate, by 2020 charters will serve only 5 percent of the public-school enrollment. One reason for the slow growth is that some school districts, terrified of competition, mount expensive ad campaigns - tax dollars at work - to dissuade parents from choosing charter schools.

Faulkner wants to create a school that will be nimble at overcoming the sort of problems detailed in a recent report written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley for the Educational Testing Service. These include:

The out-of-wedlock birth rate among black women under 30 is 77 percent. Only 35 percent of black children live with two parents. By age 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in a working-class family and about 35 million more than the average child in a welfare family. Only 24 percent of white eighth-graders watch four or more hours of television on an average weekday; 59 percent of their black peers do."

When I was a kid we were constantly underfoot. The adults tried, mostly in vain and especially on a rainy day, to separate us from their coattails and find something else to occupy our time as they went about their adult stuff. Since wonderful old expressions such as 'children should be seen and not heard" have been with us since the dawn of time, its apparent that my generation wasn't then only one buggin' the 'rents.

Enter Sesame Street, its copycats, and suddenly kids were being plopped across from a boob tube and...curiouser and curiouser...they sat there and liked it. Since that time, untold millions of children have been TAUGHT that its fine and dandy to rot away in front of a television, and in one-parent households I do suppose that the mom or dad in charge must find some relief somewhere but TV is NOT an interaction with those who speak and act more intelligent and dignified and mature than you do. Ask any tennis player what the best way to improve his or her game is, and before you've finished the sentence they chime in with "play someone better."

These kids are now having kids. Undereducated, unprepared, unknowing children are passing along all they really know, and all they know is how to be a kid. Television is laden with sex and violence and while I'm not a believer that it ITSELF is the sole cause of the ungentlemanly behavior that plagues us to distraction, it certainly is a contributing factor. The music demands they flash guns and drugs and treat women most severely, and the public schools, ah yes the public schools, are so very afraid of competition they fight like all hell to prevent federal monies from assisting private institutions of learning that will not tolerate such bad theater.

The cycle becomes a circle and more and more of the same crass ignorance spreads throughout a society that doesn't want to spend any more money teaching these little monsters only to then have to imprison them when they are old enough to do real harm.

As long as there is a powerful political entity fighting to keep an entire race of people barefoot and pregnant there isn't much that can be done to reinvigorate the black family. Thats why schools are more important than ever, but they've not only destroyed the family, they've ruined the schools as well, so guess what?

Better be prepared to up the tax ante gang because we're going to need a lot more prisons.

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