Peter Sacks: The Sordid History of Human Intelligence Goes On

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While the American educational establishment now shudders at the impolitic utterances of a Watson or Summers, the fact is that mainstream educators remain wedded to intelligence tests and their close cousins to designate intellectual talent and to sort academic stars from the also-rans, whether the arena is admitting toddlers to a private pre-school in Manhattan or freshmen to an elite college or university.

The testing industry, keenly aware of the sad history of intelligence testing and the tendency of its test users to draw their universal conclusions based on the tests, steers clear of marketing their exams as IQ tests, aptitude tests, or intelligence tests. Once known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, for instance, the SAT is now simply the SAT. Long forgotten is the test’s troubling kinship to the same IQ tests that once labeled Italians and Jews as feeble minded.

The Sordid History of Human Intelligence Goes On, Peter Sacks

What’s good for corporate globalization is good for Chicago and the rest of the nation – unless you live on the Black side of town. As the Color-Blind Curtain descends on American discourse, it has become taboo to even mention that map color-codes designating affluence or poverty coincide almost perfectly with the race of neighborhood residents. In the corporate celebration of Chicago’s “global” status, it becomes ever more necessary to gloss over the true facts of urban life in an industry-robbed nation. For every leap into hi-tech, hi-finance, and hi-living among the gentrifying rich, the places we once called “ghettos” fall deeper into misery and marginality.

White Washing Global Chicago, Paul Street

We’re not just trying to fight racism, of course, we are haunted by earlier, historical racisms. And racism shapes how we distribute economic and cultural capital. So the school system is shaped by the eugenicists of the first two or three decades of the century and the neighborhoods by the waves of migration driven by the end of slavery and reconstruction and Jim Crow.

Posted in: Economics, Uncategorized, Writing

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

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The purpose of this protest is as simple as it is crucial: to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat. Nothing could be more politically incorrect than to point this out. But nothing could be more important for American students to hear. In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted, the academic left has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves. According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an “Islamophobe.” According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are “oppressors.”

from “A Student’s Guide to Hosting Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, ” on the Terrorism Awareness Project.

Once you start reading this stuff you really feel that you have fallen down the rabbit hole. Even in strict linguistic terms it is hard to make sense of any of it. The idea is that a tactic, the use of terrorist violence, is a larger problem than a global-wide climatic disaster. The problem, too, is that these academic leftists– not the 70 plus percent of the U.S. who believe the war in Iraq should end– are forcing us all to be “politically correct.”

Even stranger, this argument is being made against all of the evidence that has piled up to explain the sources of terrorism and to suggest strategies that might do more than simply destroy a country already reeling from years of a violent dictatorship and devastating sanctions. Perhaps the whole problem is that these recent acts of violence against the U.S. have such a simple explanation that it’s just not very satisfying.

Robert Pape has made a very compelling argument based in a close examination of what terrorists claim as motivation. The American Conservative (hardly a bastion of liberalism) published an interview with him last year. “The central fact,” Pape says, “is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.”

Religion does play a role, Pape found. “When there is a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied, that enables terrorist leaders to demonize the occupier in especially vicious ways.” The U.S. occupation of land in the Middle East, then, has a doubly explosive effect. Leaving the Middle East– not just Iraq but also Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan, among others– would not silence bin Landen, Pape says, but fewer would listen.

So these Islamo-Facists proponents are just looking for something dark and complicated to hang their paranoia on. Hyperbole is hard when the problem is just that we need to stop occupying other countries. It’s interesting to think about how far they would be willing to go with their thesis. The Old Testament, for example, argues that ‘an eye for an eye’ ought to be the ethical norm. Does that make the U.S. death penalty an example of the dominance of Christo-Facism? I guess, then, the death penalty is linked to the KKK, Timothy McVeigh, and those nuts who kill doctors and bomb clinics.

It’s also always amazing to hear that academia is full of leftists and radicals. I bet there are a lot of English and Philosophy departments who would love to think that is true but research tends to show otherwise. Socially, they put on quite a show sometimes but universities are very conservative places run by business people. What’s most frightening is that large slices of the public have apparently taken the Orwellian bait and begun to believe freedom of speech has to be quashed in order for freedom of speech to be protected.

In a review of a survey of academic political culture, (“Americans’ Views of Political Bias in the Academy and Academic Freedom“) John W. Curtis, AAUP Director of Research, worried that 65% of respondents agreed with this statement: ““Public universities should be able to dismiss professors who join radical political organizations like the communist party.” On a more positive note, about the same number agreed that professors have a right to express anti-War views in their classrooms. We’re a complicated people.

Posted in: Economics, Language, War, Writing

Moral Hazzard, Education, and Health Care

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According to our collective mythology about schools as the great equalizing force in American society, we want — or say we want — public schools to make a difference. But the reality on the ground often makes a mockery of that ideal. In recent years, public schools have been infected by a system of hidden privileges offered to affluent and politically powerful upper-middle class families and their children — a system that flatly contradicts politicians’ lofty goals of reducing the achievement gaps.

Schools reward privilege in many subtle ways that go mostly unnoticed because the mechanisms are the very fabric of the modern American education system.

Peter Sacks, in the Huffington Post, October 4, 2007

As bell hooks famously noted, class in rarely talked about in the United States, especially in terms of our education system. Sacks is a remarkable exception. Talking about race, especially white privilege, isn’t exactly welcomed either.

I think class and education is even more difficult to discuss when it comes up against our American sentimentality about young children. What parent would go to their child’s elementary school and demand that the privileges afforded Advanced Placement students be made available to all? Who wants to know the messy financial details of our kid’s classmates’ families?

At the heart of the “fabric of the modern American education system” lies the ideals of merit and, at bottom, a kind of Social Darwinism. That’s the iron fist beneath the velvet glove of a privileged childhood. Bush and the Republican Cabal, for example, cannot stomach the idea that more children would be guaranteed health care through a government program. In his view, socialized medicine represents a kind of moral hazard.

What outlandish medical risks would these kids take if they knew that no matter what they did their health care costs would be covered? Obviously, they need the discipline of the market to keep them safe. In school, too, those kids who do the best on the tests get the smaller classes and the most challenging curriculum. What could be more natural?

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing

Love Me, Love Me, I’m A Liberal

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Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I’ve grown older and wiser
And that’s why I’m turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

Love Me, I’m a Liberal, Phil Ochs

The liberal establishment is worried that the more sophisticated classbased voting rooted in economic awareness they see growing in Latin America after three decades of a disastrous neoliberalism may be heading north. Robert Rubin, Clinton’s first secretary of the treasury and his successor Larry Summers have spearheaded the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution focusing on what they see as the paradox of wage stagnation in a period of robust growth in the productivity of the U.S. workforce. They are worried that growing inequality and wage stagnation will lead to radicalization. The idea is to come up with a program to preempt discussion of more radical proposals and the self-organization of grassroots movements in opposition to business as usual. Modest improvements through spending on education, training, and infrastructure will not be enough to address rising income and wealth inequalities and the deteriorating status of American workers. Nevertheless, establishment liberals hope that frustrations can be cooled by these means.

Wage Stagnation, Growing Insecurity, and the Future of the U.S. Working Class by William K. Tabb

In one sense this is a simple set of issues. Wages are rising very slowly while productivity is increasing at a relatively rapid clip. This means that there’s an increasing disparity in wealth, a process well documented by economists like Emanuel Saez and Edward Wolffe.

What gets more complicated is what you think is or should be done about it, especially when it comes to the upcoming election, which represents a remarkable opportunity for regime change in the U.S. Tab sets out what might be called a kind of old-leftist party line: as Phil Ochs reminded us, the liberals by definition cannot be trusted to do much more than protect the system.

Kucinich may be more of a progressive than a liberal, but so far our only practical choices are mainstream liberals. So we are faced with the same basic dilemma. Do we vote for Clinton, Obama, or Richards knowing that we are only voting for stop-gap measures at best? None have come out in favor of a single payer health care plan, for example, which means the problems in health care could only grow worse a little less fast in their administrations.

Or do we put our vote into the long term plans of alternative parties, especially the Greens, who have some chance of getting to a position of influence nationally, perhaps especially now that Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize. Or perhaps we should vote for Edwards, who at least seems willing to acknowledge that the growing income disparity problem must be addressed?

“Under Clinton,” Tab writes, “and in the economics advanced by Gore and Kerry, it is clear that the Democrats accepted and encouraged corporate globalization and lacked enthusiasm to defend working-class interests.” Tab concludes by noting that “There remains a basic disconnect between what Americans think is important and what politicians in thrall to the well-to-do are willing to consider.”

At this point, though, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which any of the leading candidates changes their positions. And I doubt a new candidate is likely to come out of nowhere. So I can’t help but wonder if the real question is which liberal policy might have the most bang for the buck in terms of helping the rest of us get organized. Reform of the laws around organizing unions seem the obvious candidate.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Union, Writing