Planting Liberally

There is a fascinating discussion going on at the Quick and the Ed recently about problems in the public education system, and James Forman, Jr. chimes in with a very interesting perspective, looking at the racial and class dynamics behind the public education debate.

To get you up to speed: The Quick and the Ed, spurred by a series in the Washington Post on the collapse of the DC school system, have been examining overarching policy approaches to public education. The consensus view is that conservatives want to blow up the system and replace it with private schools via vouchers; centrists want to provide "public choice" via things like charter schools; and progressives want to tinker at the margins with teacher pay and class size. Conservatives say foolish things about public education, while progressives have nothing to say.

Forman's take on this debate is quite interesting. He notes that in many cases, failing inner-city public school systems are run by black principals, superintendents and other managers. These systems are the chief employers within their cities. The result: progressives are hesitant to criticize these systems, for fear of exchanging fire with their natural allies. He sees this as a terrible misuse of the hard work of the civil rights movement: those activists gave their time, energy and lives so that all children could learn, not so that some middle-class black professionals could have jobs. (I'm paraphrasing a bit.)

Forman's piece is anecdotal, but I think he's hitting on a pretty important point. A related and very similar point is that public schools are run by teachers' unions, which are a major source of support for Democrats and progressives.

I don't have much to add to the discussion, but I'd like to learn more about this. Vouchers are bad policy because they un-democratize education. Charter schools are interesting, but some of them are built on the premise of exploiting teacher labor and/or busting teachers' unions.

How will progressives fix the school system? A failure to educate minorities and lower-class children is not just a waste of significant human potential and the beginning of all sorts of social problems. It also weakens our movement, since these children have a high likelihood of being future progressives, and poorly educated children usually do not become voters, activists, and leaders. We need to really solve this problem.

In this month's Commonweal Institute newsletter (which is unfortunately not on the website yet), Katherine Forrest details some good spade-work on an obscure right-wing think tank called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

The ISI recently released a report which purportedly showed that elite colleges are not properly educating students in civics, while small Christian colleges are. Forrest uncovers a number of problems with the survey, and makes a strong case that the conclusions reached are not supported by the data; it appears that ISI is dressing up an opinion piece as an academic study.

The institute's motivation is plain enough - ISI wants to take a swipe at allegedly liberal colleges like the Ivies and wants to boost small Christian colleges. But I wonder what ISI's audience and goals are? Forrest found the group through an interview in a San Francisco TV show - that would suggest that ISI's audience is the general public. But is the goal to discourage parents from sending their children to liberal arts colleges in favor of Christian colleges?

I doubt it. Few, if any, parents or college students will make their choice based on the quality of civics education. I wonder if the primary goal of this study is to push potential educational funders - whether non-ideological grantmaking foundations or governmental appropriation committees - to favor Christian colleges over liberal arts colleges.

Alternatively, perhaps the institute's goals are more or less consistent with what they say they are: promoting the teaching of political science, history, and economics on college campuses. Not a bad goal by itself, but no doubt the ISI has strong opinions about what kinds of political science, history, and economics should be taught; we can bet that Charles Beard and Howard Zinn aren't high on the ISI hero list. Moreover, one wonders why the ISI stooped to such deceptive tactics to promote such a rather bland and wonkish goal, unless there is a darker motive hidden behind the curtain.

One way or the other, kudos to Forrest for this catch. Exposing right-wing pseudo-science is extremely important.

Alternet has a great piece on textbook policy in California. I don't have much to add, except that textbook and curriculum standards policy is something that liberals absolutely need to be engaged in pro-actively. A small change in a state's education policy can have a big impact on whether or not the high school students are predisposed to liberalism. It's not difficult to see why: a solid education about the basics of government, an introduction to liberal history, and a literary foundation that includes the voices of women and minorities all predispose a student to think positively about liberalism, whether or not that specific label is attached.

I suspect that there are already a number of liberals working on it - and they are probably very effective, actually. Our aim in this area should probably be to sustain the victories we have already won, and incrementally expand them.

Via Street Prophets, it appears that more and more Southern Baptist colleges are cutting ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, over issues ranging from the administrative (control of boards, use of funds) to the theological (literal interpretation of the bible). The latest is Georgetown College in Kentucky, according to the New York Times.

When we last checked in with Street Prophets there was some discussion about how media narratives about various religions affect the fate of those religions: the mainline churches are declining in influence, according to the news media, and there fore (according to Street Prophets) those churches are less likely to gain new members.

I wonder how that story ties in with this one. In a church as big as the SBC, there are bound to be some internal struggles over precisely the kinds of things the Times is picking up on. Are there, perhaps, even more internal splits within the SBC that the news media doesn't really report on frequently? The coup at the national SBC meeting last month certainly suggests it's possible.

If so, is the fact that we're not hearing about these splits very much just another example of conservative media bias, and moreover, what can we do about it? After all, disaffiliation of a string of colleges from the SBC has arguably a much greater impact on the larger world - in terms of secondary effects in popular culture and politics - then does the disaffiliation of a handful of churches from the UCC over gay marriage.

There's another angle to all of this, which is actually more important: the divisions between SBC and colleges like Georgetown largely revolve around academic freedom, or the lack thereof, provided by the state Baptist conventions. The interests on both sides are easy to understanding: the state convention wants the college to toe a theological line, and the college wants a bit more freedom to let its students and professors explore other thoughts. Of course, this tension is at the heart of a religious education. Then again, the increasingly hard-line nature of SBC leadership over the past decades may have sharpened this tension to the breaking point.

This tension is an opening for Baptist liberals to start to unravel the conservative dominance over their denomination. Could liberal Baptist groups like the American Baptist Churches start to provide supplementary funding to off-set losses in money from the state conventions? They might start small, by, say, endowing a professorship or funding a number of scholarships. I'm not sure that either the colleges or the American Baptists would want to go down that road, of course. But it's something to think about.

MyDD has a fantastic post today about the National Democratic Law Students Council (NDLSC). NDLSC is an organization of law school students of Democratic stripes. It's a bit of a cross between the College Democrats and the National Democratic Lawyers Council, a subgroup of the Democratic National Committee. The founding conference of NDLSC was held this weekend at Harvard Law School, and I unforunately had to miss it.

In no small part the group owes its existence to the imagination and effort of David Burd, a third-year law student at Harvard Law School. Burd is also the founder of DL21C Boston, a local group which holds events for young Democrats. I've had many opportunities to work with him personally, and he is an exemplary leader. He should be seriously commended for his role in building a network for left-leaning law school students. Law school students are not just another interest group within the Democratic party. As MyDD points out, they can serve crucial roles in election protection and other related activities.

Far more importantly, law school students are at an important nexus within the judiciary: they edit law review articles and serve as clerks for federal and state judges. As such they play a reasonably major role in shaping jurisprudence. They are at least on a par with legislative staff in shaping policy and attitudes about policy.

The conservative movement, through the Federalist Society, has developed an intricate system of patronage for conservative law school students. Conservative federal judges will sometimes make participation in the Federalist Society a requirement for their clerks. No doubt most of the federal dollars paid to federal clerks would reach conservative law school students anyway; these kinds of requirements merely add clout and influence to the Federalist Society. The quasi-mandatory nature of membership in the Federalist Society among conservative law school students more tightly integrates promising scholars with the conservative movement. Moreover, the patronage system provides incentives for moderate to become part of the conservative movement.

The NDLSC and a related organization, the American Constitution Society, are forming the left's answer to the Federalist Society. We have yet to see whether the NDLSC and ACS will foment a patronage system like the Federalist Society, or even whether such a system would be appropriate and ethical for left-leaning judges. However, the importance of the two groups in facilitating networking and idea sharing among left-leaning law students cannot be overstated.

(Note: I originally wrote this as a diary on MyDD. I think it's a good illustration of how we can use ideological conversion machines to de-militarize our culture.)

I believe that the Leave My Child Alone campaign has great potential to be an ideological conversion machine for liberals.
If you've been a member of DFA for the past month or so, you've probably heard about Leave My Child Alone (LMCA).  LMCA is an effort to encourage parents to ask school boards not to give their high schooler's contact information to military recruiters.
If you've been reading MyDD for the past year or so, you've probably read a few front-page posts about ideological conversion machines, or social institutions which tend to alter a person's ideology.
I believe that LMCA can do for liberals what the anti-evolution movement did for Christian conservatives: sway people who are otherwise not concerned with politics to become passionate ideologues for our side.

For starters, I'll spell out what I think makes for an ideal ideological conversion machine (ICM).  An ICM is an institution which:

• helps people solve a problem they have
• is local in flavor - that is, it engages people in a problem which they can attack by acting within their neighborhood
• tends to encourage its participants to think about larger issues and more abstract power dynamics
• makes the people it encounters amenable to a particular ideology
• is capable of drawing its participants into a long-term effort

Here is how LMCA meets these criteria:

• The problem in this case - kids are being recruited (and in some cases bullied) by military recruiters; those who join the military are often sent to Iraq.  LMCA allows parents to solve this problem by preventing recruiters from contacting their kids.
• The problem is the degree of friendliness between the school board and the military recruitiers.  If the school board is friendly to opt-outers, parents will have an easier time at defending their kids.  So the problem is local because a local pressure point is the school board.
• I think it's quite evident that there are larger issues at play than recruitment here.  For one, the war in Iraq; as well as the lack of good jobs and opportunities for advancement.
• This is inherently a movement which is anti-militarization, pro-nurturant parenting.  Both of these attitudes are fare more suited to the liberal ideology than the conservative one.
• The long-term aspect of this campaign is perhaps least obvious, but I believe it has potential.  For example, a long-term goal for LMCA participants would be to try and get as many parents in their district as possible to join the LMCA movement; then recruit teachers and school board members; and finally, try to spill over into other districts.  Such a long term effort would necessarily require the creation of a strong, lasting, active citizen's group, which could morph into a more fully-developed ICM.

The long and short of this post is as follows: the more people we can get to opt-out of military recruitment via the LMCA campaign, the better poised we are to get recruits to liberalism.
I also think that we should be cultivating ideas which run along the lines of LMCA: local action which helps people solve a problem and makes them more liberal.  This is the heart of the conservative culture war, and if we are going to make a liberal culture take root and grow, we've got to start with the same tactic.
To get involved with LMCA, visit the Leave My Child Alone website or your neighborhood DFA group.