"The Greatest Love of All," Boston PD remix

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Jul 30, 2009 at 09:51:28 AM MST

All this is true. But what got me the most was the opening of his email:

"I am a former English teacher, writer..."

Yup. Justin Barrett, the author of this stunning incoherent rant, considers himself an educator and intellectual...

...so what's the under/over on this dude appearing on Beck's show as the victim of liberal elitism and reverse racism?

Passing the Federal Budget

by: Matt Singer

Tue Apr 21, 2009 at 10:24:10 AM MST

The federal budget is more than numbers. It is a statement of values and priorities. The values here are decidedly progressive and the priorities are to reform our nation's most profound challenges: health care, energy, and education.

The good news for Montanans is that Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester have been supportive of the budget. The bad news is that our Congressman has been a pretty stalwart opponent of change.

Forward Montana is joining a national call-in day today to encourage Congress to get this budget passed. Join us and call Congressman Rehberg - 1-888-299-1447 - and encourage him to support the budget, ask his staff how he will vote for it, and request an update on his views on the budget via email.

I just called and was told that his staff wasn't sure where he was coming down on the budget. This call just takes a couple minutes. Budget negotiations can be seen as awfully inside-the-beltway, but here's the bottom-line -- if we don't get this budget passed, the rest of the agenda so many of us have worked for now for years doesn't stand a chance:

1-888-299-1447

House Republicans Strike Another Blow in War Against Low-Income Children

by: Matt Singer

Sun Mar 08, 2009 at 12:49:40 PM MST

The House Education Committee locked up on a vote on funding of Head Start -- 8-8 right down party lines.

Look, I know that this is a tough budget and all, but this is a really dumb move. There is some data out there that shows that the academic effects of Head Start may wind down a bit in the years after participation. But there's a ton of evidence that Head Start is a great investment that teaches children, helps them earn more later in life, and keeps them out of prison down the road. What's more -- it does it more effectively than other programs with similar goals. BOOM. That's what we call good public policy.

But it gets worse, because Senator Representative Ed Butcher is on the Education Committee, we get gems like this testimony:

We keep seeing this absorbing more and more of the resources, coming in from a direction that goes beyond education

And ... they're well intentioned ... I'm sure they do a lot of good for a bunch of messed up people.

Children's health insurance saves money down the line. Head Start saves money down the line. When liberals call these things investments, we do so for a reason -- because we think it would be nice if we could build some public buildings other than prisons.

Proposed Education Stimulus for Montana

by: Matt Singer

Mon Jan 26, 2009 at 14:22:35 PM MST

Data for other states here.

Education: Creating Markets and Distorting Labor Markets

by: Matt Singer

Mon Jan 19, 2009 at 09:26:22 AM MST

It's a good question. One of the things I've often wondered about is why education is one of the areas where libertarians basically give up the ghost on the rest of their theories. They don't rail against government intervention or say that the real driver in cost is government subsidies, they basically just demand that we build an education system that looks a lot like the French health care system -- privately controlled, largely non-profit health care delivery system financed primarily through public insurance (aka vouchers).

Alternately, they even like something closer to Britain's health care system, but with competing networks of hospitals (charter schools).

Anyways, it is all a bit funny.

The strange thing about education, though, is that it is a realm where the fundamental conservative critique is that we pay too much to the workers and we get poor results and the solution is to pay people less. Now, I'm not really sure that either part of this critique is correct, but it is completely baffling. Show me a single corporation on the planet that would conclude that its talent pool for hiring was insufficient and that their proper response is to slash the wages being offered and tell the applicants that they are stupid and I'll show you a firm about to hit really hard times.

Now, it is true that education costs more than it did 50 years ago. But K-12 education is extremely labor intensive. We have teacher to student ratios of probably 25:1 or 30:1. Include other staff -- executive, administrative, athletic, artistic, and support -- and you've got a lot of people working hard for each student. Throw in some particularly high-cost operations like special education (conservatives are pretty good at glossing over this issue) and you need to figure out how to pay for it.

The next piece of this is that people who enter teaching as a profession are not without other options. They come out of school with a B.S. or a B.A. and many public school teachers have advanced degrees, either in education or in a specific field of study.

Although teacher pay may have increased in the last several decades (I honestly don't have inflation-adjusted numbers handy), so has pay in sectors that compete with education, by a lot. If you're a starting college student with some solid math skills and you start evaluating options, which looks more rewarding? Teaching 8th grade math or writing algorithms for Google?

Frankly, given the way that many of our nation's loudest voices (largely from the right) have crapped all over teaching as a profession -- financially and rhetorically -- I'm amazed at the large number of extremely capable people entering the profession (folks like the writers of Intelligent Discontent are the kind of people I'm thinking of).

People choose their jobs for a number of reasons and many of us choose to do work that pays less than what we could earn in other fields because we find the non-monetary rewards to be significant. But teaching and much of other public service hasn't just been degraded financially. Meanwhile, the private sector has been held up as a bizarre pinnacle of brilliance and efficiency (a claim belied by any trip to a Carmike movie theater).

I'm actually pretty supportive of some big think on education policy. Our schools right now work pretty well for kids like me who grow up middle class in a large city in Montana. They don't work so well in other places. But beating up on teachers and their unions is only likely to make the problem worse. Lower pay, less job security, and insults don't improve productivity. They make it worse.

The budget tug-of-war...

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Nov 17, 2008 at 19:32:37 PM MST

The Montana School Boards Association says the governor's proposed budget will force school districts to cut programs or seek increases in local property taxes.

Executive Director Lance Melton is urging members to contact legislators in hopes they'll be persuaded to spend more on schools.

Republican President of the Montana state Senate, Bob Story, has already said the Governor's budget doesn't cut enough. Of course, slashing the state budget only means higher property taxes. You want permanent property tax relief, Bob?

Fund the schools.

Religious-based coursework fails to earn UC accreditation

by: Jay Stevens

Thu Aug 14, 2008 at 12:31:04 PM MST

A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.

Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC's review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts - not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

Sounds about right to me. I've always maintained that if you inject religion into, say, science, you're missing the entire point of science. Teaching evolution to students isn't about indoctrinating people into an absurd sort of secular "church," it's an exercise of applying scientific principles to observing the natural world.

The Christian extremist group, Advocates for Faith and Freedom, whose goal appears to be to merge their particular brand of Evangelical Christianity with the state, is appealing the case, claiming that the ruling legitimizes the UC system's attempt to "secularize private religious schools." Pshaw. Religious schools are free to teach whatever they want; but they shouldn't be free from the consequences of their actions. If any school fails to educate students properly, that education shouldn't be recognized by accredited institutions.

Interestingly, the court case touched on a humanities class that was rejected by the UC university system:

For example, in Friday's ruling, Justice Otero upheld the university's rejection of a history course called Christianity's Influence on America. According to a UC professor on the course review committee, the primary text, published by Bob Jones University, "instructs that the Bible is the unerring source for analysis of historical events" and evaluates historical figures based on their religious motivations.

Again, seems clear cut to me. Assuming any text is "unerring" in the practice of history is a big no-no. The purpose of history is to evoke different narratives from the past by scrupulous and unbiased research into historical records. To ignore all other interpretations or records in favor of a single text supporting a preconceived bias - well, that's anathema to the discipline.

It's worth repeating that none of this has anything to do with restricting anybody's First Amendment rights. Private schools are free to teach courses stuffed with factually inaccurate material as a form of religious indoctrination -- but they're not free to receive equal academic accreditation for those courses.

Mike Huckabee Knows Miracles, Not Math

by: Matt Singer

Wed Apr 30, 2008 at 12:00:06 PM MST

When Mike Huckabee was governor of Arkansas, he figured out that it is cheaper to pay for college tuition, room and board and books than it is to sentence a person to prison.

The choice, he told about 950 people at a Billings fundraiser Tuesday night, becomes how people want to invest their money: in a solid education or a tax bill.

"It's your money either way," Huckabee said at the Billings Christian Schools Spring Banquet.

Beyond that, I'm not really sure why Huckabee thinks private parochial schools are better than quality public schools in preventing lives of depravity. I suppose he can do that, but making the kinds of arguments he does makes me pretty skeptical of the strength of his own education.

Pro Education?

by: Forrest Laskowski

Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 14:57:03 PM MST

Honestly when I heard last week that Neiffer and Pogreba would be running for governor I couldn't help but laugh.  "What could they possibly be running on?  What makes them better than Schweitzer?" I had to ask.

Which in turn, to my great joy, lead me to find that they were actually running pro education.  Trumping issues such as high school preparatory courses,  guidance, better standards for teachers/students, and of course more financing for our schools.  Their website quite clearly states,

"We are committed to ensuring that Montana's students receive a fully funded, quality education and that Montana's taxpayers are certain that their tax dollars for education are spent efficiently on direct student instruction."

I can only find myself wishing them the best of luck and hoping that their stances on energy policy and the environment are just as strong.

In a world where our education system is slowly slipping down the charts it will be interesting to see if the Pogreba/Neiffer ballet goes anywhere.

Rural schools tether themselves to coal...why?

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Jan 21, 2008 at 07:04:11 AM MST

Schools are naturally concerned about funding. They were shorted in the 2007 state legislature, and the Good Guv has told them not to expect much of an increase in the next session, either.

Republican hacks jumped to attack. (Possible former?) House Speaker Scott Sales called Schweitzer's remarks hypocritical because he, you know, spent money on schools in 2007, and blamed the Guv's spending for the upcoming national recession. And Republican gubernatorial candidate, Roy Brown, said the Good Guv won't develop the coal tracts that would give schools a funding boost.

First, Pogie pretty much eviscerates Brown and Sales for me:

So, the principled conservative position on education is basically this: schools are rapacious, wasteful institutions that a new Republican governor would give more money to. Maybe Scott and Roy should get their anti-schools rhetoric together before they issue their press statements.

I'd also add that, if the schools are facing upcoming shortages, these jokers could have done something about it in the last legislative session. Only they didn't. In fact, Sales went even further and was against the education spending increases as they were proposed. If schools are facing budget crunches, Sales et al. are the biggest culprits. His brand of radical conservatism wants to destroy public schooling, not preserve it.

Second, schools tying themselves to coal is a bad idea. I've written before on the indications that coal is a dying industry. Siphoning off money from the sale of public coal would put money into school coffers, for the short term. But what about ten years from now? Five years, when coal prices skyrocket because of a carbon tax? Mining operations halt, and the state is left with land devastated from coal extraction, and no revenue can be made off it?

Such an agreement would benefit the big energy company that would mine the coal, probably at a state-subsidized price. And it's telling exactly which candidate is supporting the idea. (The Oil man?)

Third, mining coal from the Otter Creek tracts is simply not feasible. Due to the patchwork array of state lands there, negotiating a deal there is difficult, at best; and even if a deal were made, there's no rail line, and none likely to be built. In short, it ain't gonna happen.

And there's a better way to make money off of state lands. Ochenski:

Ironically, at the same time the rural educators were trumpeting Otter Creek as their fiscal salvation, Madison Valley Renewable Energy and its partners were moving ahead with leasing state lands near Norris for a wind energy project they say will eventually cover some 14,000 acres. Their test towers are going up now and if all goes as planned, 150 megawatts of clean wind energy will be available for sale with 3.1 percent of the revenue going to-you guessed it-Montana's schools. A similar wind development near Judith Gap produced $50,000 last year from land leases and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

In that editorial, Ochenski says that the Montana Rural Education Association "got some bad advice" in staking its future to the Otter Creek coal tracts, which begs the question, from whom?

Let's see. Who could that be? Who benefits from distracting the public from who is actually responsible for shorting Montana 's schools, financially...presenting a false promise that Big Energy is Montana 's fiscal salvation...and making the Good Guv look responsible for it all?

Hmmm....

Reading First funds dry up for Montana schools

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 16:16:26 PM MST

Either way, the outcome appears to be the same. Tying federal funding for public schools to a mandate to ever-improving standardized test scores has an inevitable conclusion: all schools will eventually fail to improve, and will lose funding. Likewise, the effect of the test-taking on the schools is that the federal government has unprecedented control over our communities' curriculum, and simultaneously ensures that the quality of public education degrades, as teachers are forced to teach to the standardized tests.

The news today is that federal funds for a reading program that help Montana schools achieve test results are being slashed:

Federal budget cuts may ax most of a reading program credited with helping struggling Montana schools boost their No Child Left Behind test scores.

But enough benefit may be left from the program to keep its effect alive, according to educators who've worked with the Reading First curriculum.

The new federal education budget signed by President Bush last week reduced Reading First from last year's $1 billion to just $393 million in 2008.

But, wait! It gets better! The president's brother, Neil Bush, was one of the vendors selling educational software to schools, software that mysteriously fails to meet "standards of financing" under NCLB law.

Get it? The Bush administration creates ever more difficult testing criteria for schools, and then directs federal funds for helping schools reach those goals to friends (and family?). Kill the public school system and enrich your friends while doing so! Kind of ingenious, actually. And utterly typical.

So where does that leave Montana schools? Begging for funds to buy textbooks from Bush administration friends.  

Keenan to meet with Senate Republican leaders

by: Jay Stevens

Wed Sep 26, 2007 at 06:21:07 AM MST

"I'm pretty much just considering the possibility" of running for the Senate, Keenan said Tuesday. "I'm wide open. There's a lot of pressure and assumption and expectation that I might run for governor of Montana as well. The third and most attractive option is to skip the '08 cycle and go on with my life."

I'm sure what Keenan wants to know is if the NRSC will make the Montana Senate race a "priority." Which means Keenan's asking for a significant financial support if he runs.

McConnell and Ensign no doubt would like Keenan to run; he's a better candidate, after all, than Mike Lange. But it should be said that the buzz in the insider papers and periodicals is that party officials consider last year's chair, Elizabeth Dole, to have squandered funds on questionable challenges - like in New Jersey - instead of shoring up tighter races against incumbents in red states, like Montana and Virginia. This year's Senate map for Republicans is even uglier than that in 2006, with most of the endangered seats belonging to the GOP in places like Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Oregon with unpopular incumbents in blue(ing) states facing quality challengers. Oh, and the NRSC has been greatly outraised by the DSCC, its Democratic counterpart.

The NRSC is short on funds and likely to spend the bulk of its money protecting seats than it is trying to win them. Keenan's not likely to find the support from the NRSC he needs to give Baucus - well-funded and popular - a good race.

And does the NRSC consider Keenan a serious candidate? There is, after all, the matter of Keenan's record on education, which in the 2005 legislative session was abysmal (pdf), to say the least. Keenan's one of the conservative home school crowd (Rick Jore, anyone?), and has consistently voted against providing Montana kids a quality public education. Education is a bad issue to be a fringe extremist, IMHO.

I'm putting my money on Keenan passing up the Senate race.

NCLB up for Review

by: Matt Singer

Tue Sep 18, 2007 at 17:37:09 PM MST

I [Heart] Conservatives

by: Matt Singer

Mon Sep 17, 2007 at 09:13:34 AM MST

Rye is a man who makes made his living as a rural broadcaster. And he basically just said that he thinks his former audience are a bunch of chumps. That's simply incredible.

Ed Kemmick is now coming to his defense, saying it is wrong to characterize Dave Rye as a prominent Republican. On the national level, that's true, but I'd say for Montana, that's not especially true. Granted, he's not as prominent as, say, Pat Davison, but he is certainly a high-profile conservative voice in Montana. And prominent and influential are not the same thing.

Kemmick's next argument about Rye is that people on blogs don't always think through comments fully. I can buy that. In fact, I thought Dave Lewis's recent apology for his statements regarding welcoming the Ayatollahs was a great example of a partisan of a different stripe saying something stupid, acknowledging that it was stupid, and we all moved on (in fact, most of us walked away with more respect for Lewis). What is different about Rye's statement is the fundamental beliefs upon which it is based.

The problem isn't that he attacked a dead soldier who could not defend himself (although that is problematic). The problem is that his knee-jerk thought was that SSgt. Gray couldn't make the argument he did because he was rural and an enlisted soldier, ergo he must be a tool of Eastern elites.

In other words, rural folks who look smart are really just having their strings pulled by city folks. Is there a more condescending notion even really possible? I don't think so.

Rye went well beyond disrespect in his comment and, when called on it, he changed the subject and tried to just say that it was all the New York Times's fault. This really isn't much different from Scott Boggio trying to avoid blame constantly for his own stupid acts.

And, as for Ed thinking we're being unfair, fine, whatever. I don't care if people think I'm being mean to a guy who has had access to halls of power for years. Deep in Ed's own comment threads, it appears that SSgt. Gray's own sister-in-law jumped in sounding completely pissed -- understandably. It's the Internet, so we can hardly be positive that Erica Gray is who she claims, but she knows some details about the process that most of us don't -- and lying about such a thing would really be the height of despicable. As Erica Gray points out, her family is pretty damn conservative. Hell, Jay even noted as much was likely. But what's so fucking incredible about modern day right-wingers like Dave Rye is that the minute anyone -- even someone fighting the war on the ground -- disagrees with them, they become unpatriotic tools.

So, how about it - Mr. Rye? Can you take some responsibility for your stupid comment?

Best NCLB Post

by: Matt Singer

Tue Sep 11, 2007 at 09:50:16 AM MST

The anti-public-school crowd

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Aug 28, 2007 at 06:10:26 AM MST

So let's end this un-American system and make education what it should be - a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn't have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America's education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.

Krugman then implied that this argument is ludicrous - it is - and said our attitude towards health care should be consistent:

The truth is that there's no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It's just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children's medical bills "welfare," with all the negative connotations that go with that term.

Unfortunately, as Brian Beutler points out, privitizing the school system is not a loony-toon idea among Republicans and conservatives.

But if he assumes that junking public schools and replacing them with a private system is an idea stuck out on the fringes of the Republican mainstream, then I think he's forgotten what sort of creature the Republican party is.

...Republicans want to block SCHIP expansion not just because such an expansion will cost insurance companies in the short term, but because they're worried that the creeping growth of well-run government provided care will ultimately reveal to the public just how preferable a universal system would be. And that would be deadly to the insurance industry.

If America had evolved in such a way that we had tax-payer-financed universal healthcare and a major private education industry, then the rhetoric would be flipped, and Republicans would attack every Democratic effort to expand public pre-school by warning voters not to be tempted by the poison berries of socialist dystopia. Because that kind of rhetoric is much more effective at drowning a baby initiative than it is at drowning one that's fully grown. As things are, it's much more feasible for Republicans to block universal health care than it is for them to dismantle the public school system, but that doesn't mean that Republicans wouldn't love to end public schooling forever if they could.

Steve Benen agrees and notes that right-wing maven and LA Times columnist, Jonah Goldberg,  already called for an end to public schooling.

And here in Montana, of course, there are loud groups who clamor for the radical changes called for by Goldberg and mocked by Krugman. Who can forget the 2007 House Education committee chair, Rick Jore, who had least one bill attacking mandatory school attendance?

Remember, for these people privatization is the answer to everything. Never mind that the private sector is particularly bad at delivering universally equitable products to everyone, which is exactly what we need when it comes to education and health care.

Getting a schooling in military history

by: Jay Stevens

Tue Aug 21, 2007 at 12:20:21 PM MST

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I discovered that the essay was just another shallow screed setting the stage for the post-war rhetoric about why we lost the Iraq War.

I wrote about the jostling in post-war rhetoric before - that line of reasoning, from pundits like Ignatieff and Friedman, faulted the judgment of war supporters, but praised their intent, which was honorable and right. (Unlike that of the dirty hippies who were against the war, and who apparently did so out of ignorance and ideology.)

Now we see a different rhetoric, and from neoconservative "warriors" like Hanson and Kaplan, that the loss in Iraq is due to a lack of will from the general populace, fostered by "elites," both academic and in the media. Of course this argument is weak, especially if you apply the study of military history to the current situation.

Let's look at the essay.

Teacher Pay, Non-Economic Rewards, and the Real Problem

by: Matt Singer

Mon Jul 09, 2007 at 14:55:38 PM MST

The reality of education reform is that there are a whole bunch of far-right policies, ranging from tax credits, charter schools, and vouchers to union busting, corporate test teaching, and so on and so forth. All of these ideas have an ideological source, but few of them have actually been proven to do anything about education quality.

What's the real problem? I think the answer might be found somewhere in one of these volumes: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America (the arrival of which I'm eagerly anticipating), and The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (which I am currently about to finish).

hermans tour, day whatever

by: Kilgore

Thu Jun 07, 2007 at 06:45:38 AM MST

Well, I'm still in the back of a van, watching America go by, and it's been going by for a while.  For those of you who don't know me, I play bass in a little Missoula rock band called the Hermans.  We've spent the past two weeks crossing the country trying to sell a book we wrote called The Hermans: Stalking America, due out in September.  All this travel, the people and places, have made me remember why I love America and why all of us fight so hard for what we believe in.  We are true patriots.

We were reminded that Wyoming loves coal, but we saw wind farms all across the midwest.  We visited small towns where diversity wasn't even a buzz word and we saw poverty in the inner cities of the East.  There've been streets so clean they sparkled and alleys so nasty you didn't want to walk in them, for fear you might stick to the ground.

I spent one morning glancing at the front page of the Philadelphia Gay News and just a few days later watched the rising sun shine off of the spires of mega-churches in northern Indiana, delivering its mixed message of love and intolerance.

I could go on and on with more examples, but I guess what I've realized once again is how wonderfully diverse this country is.  Yes there is a lot of baseless fear, stubborn nationalism, and in a lot of places, down-right bigotry, but there are a lot of people on our side, even behind enemy lines here in the breadbasket.

We do live in a bastion of diversity and that's what makes our country the greatest country in the world.  I don't think I will ever get sick of traveling across it in the back of an automobile.  We forget what we're fighting for because we fly all over the place.  Get out there and drive (if you can afford it).  Meet the people you want to help.  It feels good and it'll remind you of what motivates the opposition.  There's a lot we can learn from compassionate conservatism.  First and foremost, how to win.

Edwards Announces Rural Recovery Act

by: Feral Cat

Wed Apr 18, 2007 at 13:43:34 PM MST

Many of us here in Montana are aware that rural America is usually left out of any real discussion during Presidential and state  elections. Each candidate puts somewhere in their laundry list a "rural program".  But most of the time, a candidate talks about  values but comes up short with ideas.  Not so with John Edwards, like his Healthcare Plan, his Rural Recovery Act is well thought out and comes from a deep understanding of the forgotten America that is rural.
Having grown up in a small rural town in South Carolina, Edwards knows the importance and the hardships of the small town life.
With 8 out of the 10 poorest counties in the U.S. here in Montana, rural recovery should be a priority of ours, shouldn't it?