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Thomas Sowell asks if the left is serious about educating minority students.
Two recent events — one on the east coast and one on the west coast — raise painful questions about whether we are really serious when we say that we want better education for minority children.
One of these events was an announcement by Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., that it plans on August 19th to begin “an entire week of activities to celebrate the grand opening of our new $160 million state-of-the-art school building.”
The painful irony in all this is that the original DunbarHigh School building, which opened in 1916, housed a school with a record of high academic achievements for generations of black students, despite the inadequacies of the building and the inadequacies of the financial support that the school received.
By contrast, today’s DunbarHigh School is just another ghetto school with abysmal standards, despite Washington’s record of having some of the country’s highest levels of money spent per pupil — and some of the lowest test score results.
Housing an educational disaster in an expensive new building is all too typical of what political incentives produce.
We pay a lot of lip service to educational excellence. But too many institutions and individuals that have produced good educational results for minority students have not only failed to get support, but have even been undermined.
A recent example on the west coast is a charter school operation in Oakland called the American Indian Model Schools. The high school part of this operation has been ranked among the best high schools in the nation. Its students’ test scores rank first in its district and fourth in the state of California.
But the California State Board of Education announced plans to shut down this charter school — immediately. Its students would have had to attend inferior public schools this September, except that a challenge in court stopped this sudden shutdown. …
Eliana Johnson keeps after new IRS information.
… E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission, in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office. Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy. And now, an FEC official is raising the specter of systemic bias at that agency, too, calling the techniques its lawyers employ a “much more sophisticated way” of discriminating against conservative groups than those used by the IRS.
“When we spoke last July, you had told us that the American Future Fund had not received an exemption letter from the IRS,” an FEC attorney wrote in a February 2009 e-mail to Lerner.
But Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code provides that both “return information” and “taxpayer return information” are strictly confidential. An IRS source tells National Review Online that, within the agency, disclosing the information that Lerner appears to have provided is considered “a violation of Section 6103.”
That’s a felony punishable by up to $5,000 in fines or five years in prison. If found guilty of such a violation, Lerner, who has been on paid administrative leave since May, would also lose her job: “If such offense is committed by any officer or employee of the United States,” the law reads, he shall “be dismissed from office or discharged from employment upon conviction for such offense.”
Tax-law experts, however, disagree about whether Lerner’s apparent disclosure was a violation of Section 6103. Steven Willis, a professor of tax law at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, argues that it was. The law “does not allow for disclosure of pending applications,” Willis says, and though he acknowledges that the law is a “technicality,” he maintains that Lerner’s violation is something more serious. “In her position as director of Exempt Organizations, Ms. Lerner would surely have been aware of section 6103,” Willis tells me. “She would have had responsibility to ensure that employees who reported to her not violate the sections.” Further, her role as a senior IRS official “adds to the seriousness.”
However, it’s not clear that Lerner disclosed anything that could not have been inferred from information otherwise available to the FEC. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the president’s defense of his lawlessness.
… no president is empowered to ignore parts of laws, even ones he dubs to be outside the “core” of legislation. The president should have been challenged at the press conference. Congress should not allow its job of making and amending legislation to be usurped by the president, whose theory would allow a President Chris Christie or President Scott Walker to announce he was unilaterally halting the individual mandate or the medical device tax.
The president’s penchant for authoritarianism has not been limited to Obamacare. He has also altered immigration law and gone after the work requirement in welfare legislation. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) has put together a handy compendium of these power grabs. Couple those with his recess appointments and excessive use of executive privilege to deny Congress the ability to conduct oversight and you have a president attempting to exercise unprecedented powers.
The left is convulsed over the president’s enforcement of duly passed anti-terror legislation that is subject to both judicial and legislative oversight. Yet when it comes to their favorite domestic initiatives, they muster no concern about an out-of-control executive. They should keep this in mind when the next GOP president comes along.
The left loves housing density and Joel Kotkin knows why.
Among university professors, government planners and mainstream pundits there is little doubt that the best city is the densest one. This notion is also supported by a wide number of politically connected developers, who see in the cramming of Americans into ever smaller spaces an opportunity for vast, often taxpayer-subsidized, profiteering.
More recently density advocates span a much-discussed study of geographic variations in upward mobility as suggesting that living in a spread-out city hurts children’s prospects in life. “Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger,” quipped economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
Yet the study actually found the highest rates of upward mobility not in dense cities, but in relatively spread-out places like Salt Lake City, small cities of the Great Plains such as Bismarck, N.D.; Yankton, S.D.; and Pecos, Texas — all showed bottom to top mobility rates more than double New York City. And we shouldn’t forget the success story of Bakersfield, Calif., a city Columbia University urban planning professor David King wryly labeled “a poster child for sprawl.” Rather than an ode to bigness, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the study found that commuting zones (similar to metropolitan areas) with populations under 100,000 — smaller cities that tend to be sprawled by nature — have the highest average upward income mobility.
“Sprawl” did not kill Detroit, as Krugman suggests in his previously mentioned column, the city did that largely to itself. Another like-minded critic, historian Steven Conn, blames the auto industry for the city’s problems, perhaps not recognizing Detroit would be little more than a more southerly Duluth without it.
There are at least three major problems with the thesis that density is an unabashed good. First, and foremost, Census and survey data reveal that most people do not want to live cheek to jowl if they can avoid it. Second, most of the attractive highest-density areas also have impossibly high home prices relative to incomes and low levels of homeownership. And third, and perhaps most important, dense places tend to be regarded as poor places for raising families. In simple terms, a dense future is likely to be a largely childless one. …
Lat night humor from Andy Malcolm.
Leno: President Obama and the Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras met in the White House. Obama and the Prime Minister of Greece talking about the economy. If that isn’t the blind leading the blind.
Conan: The NFL is cracking down this year on excessive celebrations. Players are being told not to show off too much after a touchdown, a sack or a murder.
Fallon: The New York City Education Dept. says only 26% of students passed the English portion of the latest standardized test. On the bright side, they’re too bad at math also to know how bad that is.