Trust Our Courts

America's strength lies in our deep-seated belief in the value of the rule of law. At the core of that belief is a faith that questions of guilt or innocence are best resolved in a court of law, run by a judge and adjudicated, in part, by a jury.

Now we have a number of Americans, many of whom consider themselves great patriots, who argue that our system of justice can't handle its fundamental purpose. For example, John McCain and Lindsey Graham say that terrorists and other criminals, like Dzhokar Tsarnaev, should not be tried, but should be held indefinitely as "enemy combatants." "Our goal at this critical juncture," they said in a joint release "should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks." Graham later added, “The last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to 'remain silent.'" 

These comments reflect a serious -- and tragic -- misunderstanding of the principles of justice underlying our system. This is not "Law and Order," in which some heinous criminal goes free on an arbitrary ruling from a character actor. Federal judges know their business, and federal prosecutors seldom lose cases they pursue. Not only that, but the rights of the accused do not hinder prosecution or impede justice. Quite the opposite is true: by ensuring a fair trial, courts increase the likelihood that convictions will "stick" and that sentences will be fulfilled.

McCain's comments are especially sad. This is a man who, rightfully, has argued for years against the use of torture because it reflects badly on Americans and endangers our soldiers. Why can't he see the implications of his position here/

"Guns Don't Kill People, Immigrants Kill People"

Chuck Grassley wants us to be safe. To prevent the kind of behavior that led to the Boston Marathon bombings, he wants to change the way we regulate immigration. Speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, Senator Grassley wondered

How can individuals evade authorities and plan such attacks on our soil?How can we beef up security checks on people who wish to enter the U.S.? How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?

What we know now is that one of the suspected bombers was a nineteen-year-old who graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a remarkably successful public school. He was a college kid who tweeted about doing laundry. Grassley may not have been able to know these details when he made his comments, but that's no excuse for the silliness of his message.

The speech is silly because just before he delivered it, he helped kill the Obama Administration's proposed gun-control bill. Why? Because it would have made owning and trading assault rifles more difficult for "law abiding citizens."

Of course Dzhokar Tsarnaev was a law-abiding citizen right up to the moment when he filled a backpack with explosives, walked to Copley Square, and detonated a bomb that killed an eight-year-old boy, among others. And the police officers he killed did not die from the explosions. They died because Tsanaev and his brother had guns and ammunition designed to kill people.

Grassley and his ilk cannot have it both ways. If they support the 2nd Amendment, they must face the fact that, if the right to own guns is a fundamental right it is so because the founders wanted to permit occasionally violent dissent against the government. Place the 2nd Amendment between the 1st and the 3rd and take the group as seriously as Grassley and that whack-job Wayne LaPierre want to do, and you get armed opposition to the government.

Like the Tsarnaevs.

What Rutgers and Horace Mann Have in Common

There's no need for another voice condemning Rutgers men's basketball coach Mike Rice; he's been fired as a result of an enormous public outcry over his "coaching methods." In light of the recent revelations about long-standing sexual abuse at Horace Mann and other schools, however, it is time to start talking about how to hold teachers accountable for important stuff.

First and foremost, the best way is decidedly not to link teachers' evaluations to arbitrary statistical performance. Test scores do not make a teacher, and won-lost records do not make a coach. Both of these measures are arbitrary because they do not take into account "distance traveled" by the students in the charge of teachers and coaches. A good coach brings his players from one level of play to another; as players improve, they ought to win more games than before, but only if the schedule and other factors allow it. Won-lost records can measure the talent of players, and some test scores can measure the talent of students, but they are not good ways of assessing educators.

On the other hand, eccentricity and bizarreness are not teaching methods. Being self-involved and weird is neither necessary nor sufficient for good teaching. I don't buy the Dead Poets' Society model of excellence, in which the teacher inspires kids to "be themselves" by himself being entirely different from anyone else. High-quality instruction also requires patience, discipline, and hard work. Individuality, free-thinking, innovation, and a certain amount of quirkiness often do reflect and allow excellent teaching. Teachers have to dig new ground and push students beyond their comfort.

But both Horace Mann and Rutgers confused extremity with originality. Kicking kids is not quirky, it's violent, undisciplined and ineffective. Rutgers should have recognized that fact immediately. Athletic Director Tim Pernetti, also fired in the wake of the scandal, should not have entertained for a moment the idea that Rice was just "intense." Convincing kids that they only have value except insofar as they worship the teacher is not avant-garde, it's abusive and selfish. Horace Mann administrators chose to interpret clearly bent behavior as a "method," when it really was pathology. In both cases, the supervisors in question were lazy and unprofessional.

As a private school teacher myself, this stuff angers me personally. The number of comments I have seen recently suggesting that sexual abuse is rampant at prep schools, that only someone with similar pathologies would be interested in working at one, and that all students in such places are snot-nosed are not only unfair, but harmful. The comments come from the ignorant, but they are the responsibility of the bad teachers who created the impression.

The Disgrace of Horace Mann and Robert Berman

Ever since the New York Times Magazine published a story last June revealing the long pattern of sexual abuse allowed at Horace Mann over the course of thirty years, the school has had to contend with the problem of how to deal with the past crimes of its faculty. It's not an easy question to resolve, since many of the alleged perpetrators are dead, and the statute of limitations -- in the strict legal sense -- has expired. Amos Kamil, the writer of the Magazine piece, was an alum of the school, and the fact that he himself has a stake in the outcome is complicated and interesting.

My reaction to Marc Fisher's new piece in The New Yorker on the Horace Mann scandal was different. His primary subject was a particular teacher, Robert Berman, who taught English at Horace Mann for many years. As a father and a person, I am saddened and disgusted by the stories about Jerry Sandusky and the abuse by Catholic priests. But Fisher's description of Berman provokes something even more visceral.


image from http://horacemannsurvivor.org/

I teach at a private school, and have done so for more than 20 years. I am personally invested and interested in my students. I keep in touch with some of them for many years after they graduate. As a result, I feel smeared by Berman, besmirched by association. Here's what I mean: Megan McArdle, of The Daily Beast wonders aloud why we have not more generally questioned the existence or structure of private schools as an institution, given these accusations. Her hypothesis is that too many journalists and other people of privilege went to these schools, and therefore are reluctant to expose the problem. In other words, my school is probably just as bad as Horace Mann, but the issue is being covered up.

That Horace Mann administrators fell for the intellectual facade is sad in itself. That they allowed him to use it in the furtherance of a crime is beyond disgrace. They do not represent us as a profession; they are not representative as a cross-section.

To teach is to empower. Berman prowled for the weak and vulnerable, found them at their lowest ebb, and then exploited them. He belittled them, according to Fisher, and exalted himself.That he could abuse his power in that particular way is worthy not only of anger, but of contempt. If Fisher's story is even half right, Berman is a despicable human being, the lowest of the low.

Not only that, but he appears from Fisher's account to be a loser. The beatnik affectation of suits and sunglasses, the writing of lists (the refuge of intellectual dwarfs), and the tedious, pedantic writing he did, using big words in an attempt to mask small ideas, indicate a wannabe seeking approval.

What Gitmo Means

When President Obama promised five years ago to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, he recognized the blight of an American regime of indefinite imprisonment. All of the fundamental principles of American government abhor the imprisonment of people without trial and without the opportunity to confront the charges against them. Even the current Supreme Court, which includes staunch security-state advocates like Samuel Alito and John Roberts, has repudiated the claim that the executive has the power to hold people at its whim.

Today, prisoners at the camp continue a hunger strike in protest of their 11-year detention. That the United States government is a target of such protests is itself shameful. Only people in the weakest of positions, facing the most egregious abuses, resort to such tactics. They should never be necessary against a government committed to individual liberty.

Student Ability Tracking and Educational Policy

Where I teach, at an independent school,students must pass through a relatively rigorous filter before attending. Our admission office considers standardized tests, essays and interviews, and accepts those it figures are best suited for the school. In other words, the whole school is "tracked." Only people who have chosen to undergo the process and then have met certain standards ever enroll.

Even so, teachers will sometimes remark on how difficult it is to teach classes in which the range of students' ability is too wide. These complaints bug me in part because of their factual context, but also because I think they represent a kind of professional laziness.

In its latest report on educational policies and trends, the Brookings Institute includes similar comments from a survey of public school teachers:

A substantial number of teachers believe that heterogeneous classes are difficult to teach. The 2008 MetLife Survey of the American Teacher asked teachers to react to the following statement: “My class/classes in my school have become so mixed in terms of students’ learning ability that I/teachers can’t teach them.” Responses were: 14% “agree strongly,” 29% “agree somewhat,” 28% “disagree somewhat,” and 27% “disagree strongly.”³¹ The percentages are surprising given the questionnaire’s blunt assertion that heterogeneous classes are impossible to teach. Moreover, the 43 percent of respondents that either agree strongly or somewhat agree with the prompt is up from 39 percent on the same survey item in 1988. Teachers’ beliefs about the impact of achievement heterogeneity on instruction undergird the use of ability grouping and tracking.

Now, public school teachers have problems that I don't. They don't have an admission office, and they don't always have the support of the parents. But this extreme hand-wringing is embarrassing. It's our job to teach kids where they are, not where we wish they were. Just get on it.

Tracking in certain subjects -- math, foreign language -- may facilitate certain kinds of learning and may even be necessary. But I'm not positive that's true all the time, and I think it's time for teachers to think carefully about what they are doing and why. I do not think it's right for teachers to call on administrators to filter student differences just to make the teachers' job easier

John Boehner is an Idiot

This is why the Republican Party has ceased to function as a viable political option these days: the leadership seems not to understand its own basic economic platform or its consequences.

First, the Republicans created a massive federal deficit by slashing taxes and raising military spending. Remember, when Bill Clinton left office in 2000, the federal government had a surplus. Then, they contributed to the economic crash by insisting on deregulation of financial practices. (To be fair, Clinton and the Democrats were foolish enough to think deregulation was a good idea, and Clinton himself signed the laws putting it in place.

Then the GOP got smoked in the 2008 elections, and demanded that overnight the new president and Congress should repair the damage done over the course of eight years. They called for more tax cuts, more spending cuts, less federal investment in infrastructure, no federal support for health care reform and argued that all these cuts in spending would cause people to open their pocketbooks and drive the economy.

Turned out they were wrong. The biggest incentive to spending appears to be political stability, and when the federal government creates severe uncertainty by refusing to pass fundamental legislation like a federal budget, the economy suffers. The "fiscal cliff" and the "sequester" lead to doubt and therefore suppress investment, both by individuals and by industry -- and it's investment, not spending that causes economic growth.

The sequester ought to be just the ticket, according to the Republicans. It will cause immediate, across the board cuts in federal spending and services, and if the Republicans believed their own stories, they should be perfectly content to allow them to happen. The Tea Party should be ecstatic.

But instead of taking credit for the cuts, which are not nearly as deep as the ones they say they really want, they are blaming Obama and the Democrats for them. The Republican-controlled House has done absolutely nothing to avoid the sequester, and that's perfectly consistent with their supposed political theory. So what's the stink?

The problem is that the Republican Party is for fools, right now. There is no plan, there is no philosophy, there is not basic adherence to political or physical facts.

It does not have to be this way. There is a coherent, sensible agenda for the GOP to build. A lot of it I probably would dislike, but that's not a problem. The problem is that the Republicans prevent useful discourse because they act like morons, and there's no use talking politics with a moron.