Public school scores may be static but where government schools are privatized, progress is actually being made. “In Arizona, where I live, there are 500 charter schools,” Matthew Ladner of the Foundation for Excellence in Education said at the Heritage Foundation on January 26, 2012. “Nine out of ten of the top-performing high schools in Phoenix are charter schools.”
“Twelve percent of students in Arizona go to charter schools.” Ladner previously worked at the Goldwater Institute.
Arizona also has Education Savings Accounts (ESA) for special needs kids, Ladner noted. The Grand Canyon state is the only state to offer such ESAs, Malcolm Glenn of the Alliance for School Choice pointed out in another meeting at the Fordham Institute that afternoon. Nevertheless, “almost half of the private school choice programs in the U. S. are for special needs kids,” Glenn avers.
In Milwaukee, while the cost per pupil in public schools is almost $13,000, students on vouchers receive an education in private institutions for about half that amount. Indeed, private schools educate children for about “$10,000 less per child than public schools,” Glenn claims. Glenn serves as National Director of Communications for both the American Federation of Children and the Alliance for School Choice.
Ladner is co-author of a report published by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—ALEC Report Card on American Education. The Alliance for School Choice has compiled a yearbook called The Year of School Choice, which you can download here.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
When you look for the great books in academia, you may not find them collected in the form that you remember them in. For example, you can see “innovative ideas in the current wave of breakthrough international productions of Shakespeare made available in the MIT Global Shakespeare Video and Performance Archive, a large and growing collection of theatrical videos from around the world,” Peter S. Donaldson and Alex C. Y. Huang of MIT tell us.
How innovative? Try this:
- “A Brazilian street theater version of Romeo and Juliet—on stilts:
- “A Chinese opera King Lear in which one actor plays Lear and all three of his daughters”; and
- “A Japanese Hamlet who sits motionless on stage and mechanical dolls enact his thoughts.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
Hanging out with professors can sometimes give you an idea of trends in higher education. Here’s what I noticed at the 2012 Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting: Although politically more subdued than in years past, the MLA is, to put it mildly, not likely to become a Republican bastion anytime soon.
Nevertheless, despite the pivotal role it played in organizing the Occupy protests, the visible signs of the decline in influence of the Radical Caucus of the MLA are quite striking:
- At the 2006 meeting in Philadelphia, the Radical MLA Caucus fielded about a half a dozen panels in the group’s program. This year, the Radical MLA Caucus showcased three panels.
- In 2006, the Radical MLA Caucus held its strategy session in a hotel ballroom. This year, they held it in Grover Furr’s hotel room. Furr is the English professor from Montclair State University in New Jersey who claimed that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had been framed of the murder of thousands of Russians. Could the Occupy movement be the last hurrah of the Radical Caucus?
As well, its three panels notwithstanding, the LGBT crowd was virtually MIA at the MLA. The only sign of its presence that I noted was in the person of a nice young lady who stopped me outside the convention center and asked if I wanted to help stop anti-Gay bullying.
I told her, “I promise not to do any myself.” I’ll bet she’s still cogitating on that one.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
When you compare the masters to modern-day writers, the latter inevitably suffer. Maybe they should, figuratively that is.
In a panel on “Dickensian Things” at the 2012 Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in Seattle, Carolyn Lesjak of Simon Fraser University felt compelled to reference Judith Butler and Suzanne Daly of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst harked back to Jacques Derrida in talks on Charles Dickens.
Butler is famous for theorizing that gender differences are learned.
Derrida is the father of deconstruction.
Dickens is still read and remembered 200 years after his birth. Will Butler and Derrida’s memories prove as enduring?
It should be noted that both Lesjak’s and Daly’s lectures were, save for the above references, insightful. Lesjak noted that the broad outlines of Dickens’ memorable characters could be found in widely available 18th Century character books that the creator of Ebeneezer Scrooge had in his library but the novelist artfully improved upon them.
“Too many strokes leads to caricature while too few leaves no impact,” Lesjak pointed out.
Similarly, Daly observed that, “Physical violence punctuates much of Dickens’, for example, in Oliver Twist, but not so much in Bleak House.”
“We see women who have been beaten rather than being beaten.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
Occasionally, you can actually learn something from the Modern Language Association (MLA) but it may not necessarily be about literature. In the penultimate scene of Carol Reed’s 1949 cinematic classic, Orson Welles, as the amoral villain Harry Lime, says:
“Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
It turns out that not only did Welles write the line but the author of the screenplay, novelist Graham Greene, thought it was the best one in the film, according to Matthew Paul Carlson of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Carlson spoke on Greene’s sub-career writing screenplays at the 2012 MLA convention in Seattle.
“Greene claimed the screenplay was never meant to be read,” Carlson claimed. “It was only meant to be seen.”
Nevertheless, Greene did create a memorable one in The Third Man.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
Civil War buffs routinely collect bullet shells and casings. At the Modern Language Association (MLA) conclave of English professors that took place in Seattle this month, a panel on poetry from the War Between the States featured a handout of a Union song parody housed at Baylor University which lampoons Confederacy president Jefferson Davis.
It goes, in part, like this:
Oh! Jeffy D! You “flow’r of chivalree,” Oh royal Jeffy D!
Your Emprie’s but a tin-clad skirt, oh, charming Jeffy D!
This Davis, he was always full of bluster and brag,
He swore on all our Northern walls he’s plant his rebel rag,
But when to battle he did go, he said, “I’m not so green,
To dodge the bullets, I will wear my tin-clad crinoline.”
The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that “crinoline, originally, a petticoat made of horsehair fabric, a popular fashion in the late 1840s that took its name from the French word crin (“horsehair”). In 1856 horsehair and whalebone were replaced by a light frame of metal spring hoops; these were used to create volume underneath the hoop skirts favoured by fashionable women. The wide, bell-shaped crinoline was much lighter than the previous fashion of multiple petticoats and recalled an earlier but similar device known as the farthingale, in which hoops were sewn into a petticoat.
“In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the spring hoop crinoline became so popular that it was worn by ladies’ maids and factory girls as well as by the rich. Originating as a dome shape in the 1850s, the crinoline was altered to a pyramid in the 1860s, and about 1865 it became almost flat in front. Smaller “walking” skirts were devised, and by 1868 the smaller crinolette was hooped only at the back and served as a bustle. The crinoline was generally out of fashion by 1878.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
Chances are you might remember when most college courses about animals appeared under the heading of Zoology, Biology or Veterinary Science. But that was long ago . . .
Today, we’re living in a world where animals and humans have been lumped together in a still hazy new academic category called “Animal Studies.”
For example, this spring Harvard freshmen will be able to take a course called “Humans, Animals and Cyborgs.” A glance at the course description shows that
the seminar intends to “walk through history, examining the shifting boundaries between humans, animals, and machines,” according to The New York Times.
“We will question the boundaries and categories that we once held “natural” and we will study the personal needs, cultural norms, and historical trends that have transformed and manipulated our human category through time. The class will focus on the way in which Darwin defined the category of “human” and how that conception of humanity changed his life, and “examine the work of his contemporaries, the race scientists who were positing hierarchies of humanity that pushed some human groups into animal categories.”
“The second section of the course will examine the boundaries between humans and animals. Should we draw lines according to species groups, language ability, or emotional expression? As we define these boundaries, our relationships and the ethics that direct them become matters of debate. Should we eat, wear, or dissect animals? Should we house them, free them, or worship them?”
Other courses in this emerging field include “Animals and Women in Western Literature: Nags, Bitches and Shrews,” offered at Dartmouth last year, and “animals, People and Those in Between,” offered at New York University.
To understand this field of study more thoroughly, it helps to know that it grew out of a larger field called “cultural studies,” which has focused on “ignored or marginalized humans.”
According to The Animals and Society Institute, there are currently more than 100 courses on American campuses that “fit under the broad banner of animal studies.”
While animals have always received attention from scholars, the reason for revived interest in the field apparently stems from the sense that “behavioral and environmental science had laid a foundation” by demonstrating that “we, like other animals, are ‘subject to the forces of nature.’”
“The most direct influence may have come from philosophy,” namely Peter Singer’s 1975 book, Animal Liberation,” which argued “against killing, eating and experimenting on animal.” * * * *
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Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.
Contemporary politics is never far from the minds of professors, whether they are in the political science department or not. For example, at the Modern Language Association (MLA) conclave of English professors in Seattle this month, one scholar tried to make a connection between the French Republic of 1789 and the American Republicans of 2012.
“People do not trust in principles, which is probably apt today given the Republican primary,” Julia V. Douthwaite said at an MLA panel on Dickens in France. Douthwaite teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
The aside came in an otherwise informative lecture on Dickens and Flaubert. Douthwaite is, by all accounts, expert in both, steeped in French and British literature and history.
“A Tale of Two Cities is largely unknown in France and when it is discussed, it is dismissed,” she said.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
In a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Bauerlein noticed that their “Working It Out” column tackled an issue that American students and their families view as highly important.
It was addressed in the form of a question:“Should each college be required to prominently post consumer information for prospective students – a kinds of nutrition label for higher ed?”
The idea was that colleges should actually post “externally audited” material that would submit the over-hyped and often false promotional material presented in glossy school brochures to the harsh sunlight of truth, suggested writer Marty Nemko. Of course, truth has its downsides.
Too many market-driven stats about employment prospects might inspire colleges to “narrow their offerings to market-driven majors,” to the detriment of liberal arts, according to MindingtheCampus.com.
Senior editor Derek Thompson reported that “the question sparked a huge response.” Some readers wanted more numbers, i.e. “the debt-after-graduation and earnings-by-degree.” Others were adamant that the “college experience is unquantifiable and easily perverted by metrics.”
Despite the outpouring of opinion on both sides of this issue, Bauerlein said that one important factor escaped mention – that is, “how much students learn relative to their grades.” For example, how much do English majors at a state school know with a B+ average?
And what about chemistry majors who earn Bs for a couple of years?
Bauerlein offered a straightforward solution to this problem, namely creating two tests – one taken before the course of study and one afterward, to determine the amount of value added by a particular course or seminar.
That way, “if a student doesn’t do well on the tests or the grades, we can’t blame the university. If a student scores well in grades but poorly on tests, then grade inflation is at fault. If there is minimal improvement in a B student’s grades over a couple of years, the course curriculum isn’t rigorous enough, and so on.
Still, a major roadblock exists. Who will make up the tests?
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Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.
Yet another pedagogue has taken a stab at understanding conservatism and missed the target by a mile, like most other intellectuals who have attempted similar exercises. “After decades of ‘compassionate conservatism,’ ‘a thousand points of light,’ and ‘Morning in America,’ dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback,” Corey Robin writes in The Chronicle Review. “So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we’ve forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much.”
“ With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type.” Robin is an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and CUNY’s Graduate Center.
Actually, not for nothing does activist Grover Norquist call his meeting “The Leave Us Alone Coalition.” In his survey of conservative thought, apparently Robin has failed to make note of the Greta Garbo streak in conservatism.
He also launches into a riff on “some of the stuffiest partisans of order,” then immediately gives the late Russell Kirk as an example. I had the privilege of knowing Dr. Kirk and stuffy he wasn’t: Generous, brilliant and kindly he was.
In an otherwise rambling essay, Robin does make one good point, at the end: “And while the mavens of the right would probably prefer four more years to four good books, they might want to rethink that,” Robin writes. “They wouldn’t be in the position they’re in—when, even out of power, they still govern the country—had their predecessors made the same choice.”
Robin seems to confuse capturing the debate with governance. Many conservatives would argue that they don’t get to govern even when they are allegedly in power. Nevertheless, conservatives, like the rest of the country, could use four good books.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
