I will commend her for at least acknowledging that it exists. But I still find her argument unconvincing in that it ignores how comprehensive is the (formerly) fringe right-wing narrative on government illigitimacy, and how it has left considerable wreckage in its wake.
In the 1990'sRuby Ridge and Waco were highly politicized by the right and used to continue fabricating the paranoid narrative of impending tyranny. As was the Elian Gonzalez stand-off, I might add. This was the same right wing that at the time was talking about the New World Order, UN, and forming up militias all over.
The government was never close to posing any such threat, yet to hear the fringe pundits at the time, the response to Ruby and Waco were perfect such evidence. So the connection from these events to Oklahoma only existed because the groundwork had already been laying for decades.
Imagine if the left continued its delegitimizing of the government and business the way it had in the 60's, hewing to that radicalism more in line with Jeremiah Wright. (It hasn't - that sort of discourse is still very fringe on the left. It's an empirical question and demonstrably false.) But if it had, and the mainstream left seriously talked about the government in terms of impending tyranny or oppression, they would be completely on the hook for any sort of anti-government/business violent protest that occurs.
A perfect example of this is eco-terrorism and animal rights radicals. They feel that certain industries are illegitimate, and therefore real targets. To the extent that there is extreme rhetoric over these issues, it should be held accountable for contributing to a climate of violence. I've never heard anything like that on the radio, but it must exist! On the right, this would be the anti-abortion terrorism, and the extreme rhetoric that fuels it.
I don't see how hard it is to make the connection. Extreme rhetoric from Islamists contributes to terrorism because it legitimizes the entirety of the West, and thus violent acts occur. Once one's opponent is no longer simply a democratic sparring partner and loses their legitimacy entirely, they become much easier to think of as an "enemy" to be removed with force. The right has allowed such discourse of "illegitimacy" into its mainstream, it is a common occurrence for them to use extreme and violent rhetoric, and therefor it is perfectly justified for people - the left, whoever - to become concerned that the climate has become dangerous.
I think the right is really struggling right now because it has in a sense hoisted itself on its own petard, captured perfectly in the phrase "keep your government off my Medicare". It has embraced a sort of big-tent conservatism that wraps around and eats its own tail. The crazy originalist libertarians who want to gut the federal government and go back to the nightwatchman state are at one end, while the reasonable folks who view some government as important and good are at the other. All of the sound and fury comes from the former, who can make grandiose claims and invoke the enormity of the gap between the present and their ideal, making it seem as if the US government really is one step from Socialism. Yet the same originalism, if followed logically (as many libertarian zealots do, in their defense), would do away with enormous parts of what the latter holds dear.
Thus, in their extremist rhetoric they've gotten all the passionate narrative they've asked for, yet it is one quite out of step with reality. So you have the Althouses of the world having to do these elaborate rhetorical gymnastics just to get this cancerous genie back in the bottle. "Oh, it's all in good fun. They don't really mean it. It's just their style of speaking." Well, sorry dear, but while that may be true for someone as brilliantly smarmy as Limbaugh, his listeners - as well as proteges such as Beck et all - actually believe it! Let's just hope they wise up and tone it down a notch before we really do get someone shouting "Goooooooooooooold!" as they ignite a truck of fertilizer.
After reading some of his posts on education, I realized I had found in Conor an interesting adversary. He essentially takes the standard Education Reform position: that bad teaching is to blame for the achievement gap, that poverty is being used as an "excuse" for schools' continued poor performance, and that by eliminating teacher tenure and removing, or side-stepping, union resistance we will be able to close the gap.
I responded to a post of his in which he agonized over whether to send his own child to a DC school, knowing that so many of them are performing so poorly. He wrote:
I began by pointing to the fact that SES effects child development, and different students have different needs that aren't being addressed by current reform models. I then took on his specific comments:
I then went on to discuss a Super Vidoqo perennial favorite site: schoolperformancemaps.com, and how perfectly it illustrates the real problem facing our schools.
Conor responded by acknowledging that our theoretical differences were indeed great. He then offered his own insight based on his experience teaching at a high poverty charter school:
My response is as follows:
I didn’t go into alternative prescriptions as I wanted to make the point that kids from different backgrounds need different levels of support. I think it is awesome that you were able to see such remarkable results with your students. And there are a few questions I would ask.
But first, you wrote:
This isn’t how I’d frame my position. Did you have a chance to look at the mapping website I linked to? Schools with high APIs are by far the ones located in affluent neighborhoods, where high levels of social capital, and thus human capital exist. I’ll assume you aren’t denying that there is a huge “environmental gap” in where students are coming from.
Your side is saying that this gap can be erased by more effective teaching methods (better teachers), not more support, or smaller classes. (You did mention that your school had longer hours, which I am in complete support of, although asking teachers to do this without extra pay seems unreasonable. If the union demanded extra pay for these hours would they be “standing in the way of reform”?).
My side is saying that the gap won’t be erased this way. And so far, the evidence bears this out. To date, charters aren’t really showing much better results. There are many more factors that go into successful schools than merely “high expectations” and fire-at-will policies. I spent three years teaching kindergarten at a low-income charter with no union and it was pretty horrible. The administration had a top-down approach that stifled teacher input and an oppressive climate of fear developed after numerous seemingly capricious firings. Good teachers (in my view) were fired, and often replaced by those no better. Expectations were high in all of our classes, but as we struggled to maintain enrollment, we couldn’t afford to expel students for non-compliance . (A K-12 school, many of our students had left district schools because of behavior, and acted no different with us.) So when assignments weren’t completed, or attendance was abysmal, there was no option but to push on.
The main question I had when I read your response, and this is a big criticism of charters in general, was what role selection might have played at your school. Could you afford to hold parents and students accountable by expulsion for non-compliance, and if so, would this have had an effect on your student population? Obviously, all poor families are not alike. Many, if not most would be capable of following rigid expectations for accountability. But many cannot – for any number factors associated with low-SES, such as drug abuse, violence, low-priorities for education, etc. These are the families that pull entire classrooms and schools down. These are families who produce students with severe emotional and behavioral problems, who hate school, and make learning difficult for everyone. These are the families parents are avoiding when they seek school “choice”. These are families that can’t handle “high expectations”. I taught high school science my last year at the charter (long story), and 3/4 of my students were consistently failing. They would literally just not do the work. Assigning homework was a joke. I practically did somersaults trying to make my lessons as engaging as possible, but they simply hated school. I currently teach at a continuation high school and this is my entire student population. They come in after two years of high school transcripts are seas of “F”s. Their lives are filled with drugs and violence, and school feels more like a prison than anything else – which is where many will end up.
My solution – to the extent that I have one – is built around these families. They are the ones responsible for the achievement gap, and they are heavily concentrated in poor urban areas. They are the ones who really need extra support. They need smaller class sizes, longer hours, school psychologists, and social workers. You can get rid of teacher tenure and unions, implement pay-for-performance, but these families will still not be getting their needs met. To the extent that these families are not being addressed by current reform models – it’s all the teachers/schools – they will continue to be left behind, pulling many down with them. This is what teachers in regular schools know, and what is behind the unions’ advocacy for not unfairly penalizing those of us, with a class of 30 kids and little extra support, faced with an impossible challenge day in and day out, who are doing our best in a bad situation.