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David Brooks introduces us to Harlem’s Children’s Zone schools. Mr. Brooks has lost favor here since he drank the Obama Kool-Aid. Anything though that might close the achievement gap in schools merits our inspection. While the program is new and we know little, the Children’s Zone looks to be remarkably similar to the Walter Segaloff’s Achievable Dream Academy in Newport News, VA.
Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.
They also smash the normal bureaucratic strictures that bind leaders in regular schools. Promise Academy went through a tumultuous period as President Canada searched for the right teachers. Nearly half of the teachers did not return for the 2005-2006 school year. A third didn’t return for the 2006-2007 year. Assessments are rigorous. Standardized tests are woven into the fabric of school life.
The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours?
Thomas Sowell’s part four to his “empathy” tour.
While President Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying that he wants judges with “empathy” for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal — getting judges who will ratify an ever-expanding scope of the power of the federal government and an ever-declining restraint by the Constitution of the United States.
This is consistent with everything else that Obama has done in office and is consistent with his decades-long track record of alliances with people who reject the fundamentals of American society.
Judicial expansion of federal power is not really new, even if the audacity with which that goal is being pursued may be unique. For more than a century, believers in bigger government have also been believers in having judges “interpret” the restraints of the Constitution out of existence.
They called this “a living Constitution.” But it has in fact been a dying Constitution, as its restraining provisions have been interpreted to mean less and less, so that the federal government can do more and more. …
Stuart Taylor notes the dichotomy between Obama’s left-liberalism and his duty to protect the country.
… Filling moderately left-of-center Justice David Souter’s seat with anyone seen as more centrist would be a stunning abandonment of Obama’s campaign stance that would infuriate his liberal base.
But nominating a crusading liberal activist could seriously jeopardize the president’s own best interests, in terms of policy as well as politics. And although some of Obama’s past statements are seen by critics as a formula for judicial activism, he has also shown awareness of its perils.
As a matter of policy, consider Obama’s most important responsibility: protecting our national security from jihadist terrorism and other threats.
As I have noted briefly, the intersection of law and national security will provide the most consequential cluster of issues that the Supreme Court will consider over the next decade or more. Obama surely understands that the Court’s response to his national security policies will be more important by far to the success of his presidency than any decisions on abortion, race, religion, gay rights, crime, or free speech.
Obama’s national security policies are already under relentless attack from leading advocates of liberal judicial activism, such as the ACLU. Indeed, most (or at least many) lawyers and scholars who favor a liberal activist approach on social issues also tend to support relatively broad judicial power to overrule the president on national security.
The justifiable rejection of President Bush’s wildly excessive claims of near-dictatorial war powers by the five more-liberal justices — including Souter and swing-voting centrist Anthony Kennedy — has a downside for Obama. The justices, followed by the lower courts, have now asserted far more power than ever before to oversee and second-guess presidential decisions about national security. …
Jason Riley says while it’s good for the administration to correct crack cocaine sentencing disparities, where’s the concern about the education disparities?
… The reality is that the Obama administration chose to make the disparate treatment of black and white drug dealers a priority. Attorney General Eric Holder has set up a task force that will recommend shorter jail sentences for crimes involving crack. And Democrats have not ruled out reducing crack sentences retroactively. But even if the administration achieves its objective, what has been accomplished? As Bill Cosby once quipped: “OK, we even it up. Let’s have a big cheer for the white man doing as much time as the black man. Hooray!”
Mr. Cosby’s point was that the real travesty is not the treatment of black criminals; it’s their prevalence. According to the Justice Department, “At midyear 2008, there were 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 black males held in state and federal prisons and local jails, compared to … 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.” Blacks are 13% of the population but 38% of prison or jail inmates. And a black male born in 2001 has a 32% chance of being incarcerated at some point in his life.
One of the more effective ways to address this problem is by providing black children with decent schooling. Repeated studies have shown an inverse relationship between educational attainment and the likelihood of incarceration. Our prisons aren’t teeming with high-school and college graduates, and it’s no coincidence that cities with high crime rates also tend to have low-performing public schools.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems more interested in the sentencing gap than the learning gap. The president pays lip-service to the need to open pathways to educational achievement, but he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been actively working to shut down Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides low-income children with $7,500 per year to use toward tuition at a private school. …
Roger Simon starts a section on Pelosi and her tortuous lies.
… Pelosi, from all her public statements, is clearly a blithering idiot and as close to unqualified for major office as anyone I can think of in my lifetime (and that’s saying a lot). Politics is obviously not a high IQ profession, but this woman makes Dan Quayle seem like DaVinci.
Therefore, her presence at a meeting at which enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) were discussed is not an indication that she understood what was going on or even was paying any serious attention. …
Ed Morrissey takes up the subject.
Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to evade responsibility for her role in approving the use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques took another hit today in the Washington Post — and this time the fire comes from her side of the aisle. Pete Hoekstra upped the ante as well, demanding the release of precise minutes of Congressional briefings, and Leon Panetta has promised to make them available, at least to Capitol Hill:
A top aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attended a CIA briefing in early 2003 in which it was made clear that waterboarding and other harsh techniques were being used in the interrogation of an alleged al-Qaeda operative, according to documents the CIA released to Congress on Thursday. …
Jennifer Rubin too.
It is not just Nancy Pelosi who is facing increased scrutiny for her feigned ignorance of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. The Wall Street Journal reports on Jay Rockefeller’s denial of knowledge:
Amusingly, or almost, Senator Rockefeller’s denial is flatly contradicted by his own report on the subject released last month, which notes that “On May 19, 2008, the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency provided the Committee with access to all opinions and a number of other documents prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel . . . concerning the legality of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Five of these documents provided addressed the use of waterboarding.” …
Power Line closes the section.
… The Democrats’ attack on the Bush administration, with respect to “torture,” has fizzled out. There will be no criminal investigation or prosecution; Nancy Pelosi is on the defensive due to a CIA leak of what everyone already knew, that she approved of waterboarding when she was on the House Intelligence Committee; polls show that most Americans approve of waterboarding, etc., and the Democrats are trying to forget the whole thing.
The public is left with two conclusions: 1) the Democrats’ main indictment of the Bush administration is that it was mean to terrorists, and 2) if terrorists pull off an attack between now and 2012, the kinder and gentler Obama administration will be to blame.
This is a terrible position for the Democrats to be in, and the wound is entirely self-inflicted. We’ve been waiting for a while for the Democrats to pay a price for their orgy of hatred, and it looks like they finally have.
The Economist reports on efforts to make electric cars safer by generating noise.
… Dr Rosenblum and his colleagues recently repeated the experiment outside in a car park. This time blindfolded subjects stood three metres away from the point where the vehicles passed. The researchers found that the hybrid vehicles had to be around 65% closer to someone than a car with a petrol engine before the person could judge the direction correctly.
What sort of noise should electric-powered cars make? They could, perhaps, beep as some pedestrian crossings do, or buzz like a power tool. Having worked with blind subjects, Dr Rosenblum is convinced of a different answer: “People want cars to sound like cars.” The sound need not be very loud; just slightly enhancing the noise of an oncoming electric vehicle would be enough to engage the auditory mechanisms that the brain uses to locate approaching sounds, he adds. …
Power Line provides a preview of a new book about Truman and the founding of Israel.
… The book has won prepublication plaudits from scholars and writers including Michael Oren and Princeton’s Professor Sean Wilentz. Oren is of course Israel’s newly appointed ambassador to the United States and a distinguished historian in his own right. Oren writes: “Exhaustively researched, compellingly narrated and conceived, A Safe Haven is an outstanding achievement. The Radoshes succeed in debunking the many myths surrounding President Truman’s policies toward Palestine and Zionism, and answer the lingering questions concerning his decision-making on the crucial issue of Jewish statehood.”
Professor Wilentz adds: “Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh have written a thorough, powerful, and often surprising account of a fascinating political history, covering everything from diplomacy at the highest levels to the backroom machinations of left-wing Manhattan. It is one of the great stories in modern history, with a seemingly unlikely but steadfast hero in Truman — a book which will absorb anyone who cares about how the world we know came to be.”
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