Will, Moynihan and Finn: Axis of drivel.
George Will should stick to baseball.
It has always been a mystery to me why every time they do a documentary on baseball, George Will shows up. What does this pompous jerk have to do with baseball?
The other night, PBS ran a documentary about Roberto Clemente, the late great Puerto Rican baseball player for the Pittsburgh Pirates. And there was George Will adding absolutely no insight into either baseball or about Roberto Clemente.
But baseball is not the only thing George Will pontificates on and has absolutely no knowledge about. In today’s WaPo, he writes about schools and teacher unions.
Fair warning. This is the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk and there will be a lot of pontificating on schools these next few days. I myself will be pontificating about a Nation At Risk on the Columbus Education Association’s blog in the near future at their request.
Here’s a example of Will’s junk:
After 1962, when New York City signed the nation’s first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students’ scores on standardized tests declined.
You read it right. Will argues a cause and effect relationship between teachers earning a fair wage with collective bargaining rights and the supposed decline in standardized tests scores.
Not done with this destruction of logic, Will claims that the real problem facing schools is too many kids from black families.
The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class — fractured families — would have to be faced.
But it wasn’t. Instead, shopworn panaceas — larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes — were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.
The problem, says Will, is the black family. Reformers are wasting money on teacher salaries and smaller class sizes (where is that happening, exactly?).
This racist bunk was discredited years ago when Daniel Patrick Moynihan first published it and it should be dismissed now when Will and Moynihan’s successor, Chester Finn argue it again.
Have Will stick to baseball. Who does it hurt?
I remember shuddering at Moynihan’s utterances back when he was our Senator, and wondering to myself why on earth I’d voted for him, or how on earth it was that he was, ostensibly, a Democrat.
I knew a young girl doing a research project for high school, who’d stumbled upon homelessness in Long Island. She got the senator on the phone, he declared there was no homelessness on Long Island, and hung up on her. Later I saw reports about the homelessness that did indeed occur here.
He also very famously stated that there was no health care crisis in America (which is probably true if you happen to be a US Senator), and called for the special prosecutor in Whitewater. I remember Republicans quoting him constantly.