San Francisco's Bizarre Reparations Bill

Rare image of Daniel Lurie 
actually looking to the right.

Curmie can’t remember the exact circumstances, but a few years ago a friend presented him with a check for $100 million with the warning that “it might be difficult to cash.”  That moment was called to mind recently when Curmie read about San Francisco mayor Danie Lurie’s signing a bill to create a reparations fund for black residents.

The headline on the Financial Express article, in particular, caught Curmie’s attention. “Over 4600 Californians likely to get $5M reparations under new law.”  “Likely”?  Seriously?  The first sentence of the piece by Aditi (whoever or whatever that may be) tells a more accurate tale: “San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has signed an ordinance creating a Reparations Fund that could one day offer up to $5 million to eligible Black residents, though no city money has been allocated yet.”  Seldom have more modifiers been crammed into a shorter space: “Could.”  “One day.”  “Up to.”  “Eligible.”  Not to mention that literally no money has actually been designated for the purpose. 

<Sigh.>

Let’s not completely leave aside the whole issue of whether reparations ought to exist at all, even in theory.  Curmie thinks not, but you’re free to disagree, Gentle Reader.  Certainly there has been historical prejudice against blacks, but the same could be said in varying degrees to people who are female, gay, or short, bald, or left-handed, for that matter.  There are about 11,000 people of Japanese descent living in San Francisco.  Some of them, no doubt, were interned during World War II for no crime other than where their ancestors were born.  A good many more are their direct descendants.  Yet there is no movement to offer reparations to those whose claims to have suffered directly are so readily, objectively, provable.  Go figure.

But even if you think reparations are appropriate, lump sum payments or $5 million seem a bit extreme.  And the logistics are daunting, to say the least.  Who is eligible?  How black is “black”?  Would bi-racial Barack Obama be eligible if he lived there?  Or does the fact that he doesn’t need the money disqualify him?  How long must a prospective recipient have lived in San Francisco to be eligible, or is the city going to pass out millions to every black person who moves into the city?  Are there any criteria other than race?  For example, must an applicant demonstrate specific harm?  And on and on…

Exactly where that 4600 recipients number noted in the headline above comes from is unclear, as it represents fewer than 10% of the black population of the city.  But even that number would mean a total outlay of $23 billion.  Expand that to the entire black population of the city and the cost balloons to about $275 billion, or the entire city budget for over 17 years.

There’s literally no way the San Francisco will ever come up with anything like the kind of money we’re talking about here, especially since the city is broke, running a $1,000,000,000 budget deficit.  So no money is being allocated for this agency.  That’s the good news.  Ah, but you see, that’s where the private donations come in.  Riiiiiight.  So we’re expecting billionaires (because that’s who it would take) to fund a program that helps only black people, and only those who live in San Francisco.  Curmie would suspect that anyone interested in the general cause of helping black people would rather donate to, say, the NAACP or the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.  Still, if people want to voluntarily fund this program, that is their prerogative.  Curmie thinks it’s silly, but so is buying a Trump Bible or investing your life savings in bitcoin.  Stupid is as stupid does. 

If the fund is going to rely on individual donations, as it must, then the logical solution is to turn the whole business over to a private foundation to administer.  That’s the real rub: by signing on to this idiotic bill, Lurie is indeed committing city funds to the program.  Merely establishing the agency means someone has to run it, even if there’s no money there to allocate.  And the logistics of trying to figure out the details would not only be time-consuming, but would almost certainly lead to litigation, costing the city even more money to support a program that is unwieldy, unethical, and legally problematic to say the least.  Curmie supposes that establishing the new agency is some form of perverse virtue signaling, but he confesses he doesn’t see the virtue involved.  When Curmie was a lad, San Francisco was pretty much synonymous with drug culture.  It would appear that the hallucinogens are still plentiful there.

We are left with two possibilities as to why Lurie signed this bill.  Perhaps he’s a brilliant strategist, willing to spend a tiny fraction of the city’s budget to get the proponents to shut up for a while.  Or stupidity and cowardice are in a death struggle to become his defining characteristic.  Curmie leans towards the latter explanation.

Perhaps the Stupidest F*cking Idea in the History of Stupid F*cking Ideas

Thirty-something years ago, Curmie gave a paper at a conference called The Core and the Canon: A National Debate, held at the University of North Texas.  (A revised version of that work was subsequently published in what amounted to a Proceedings volume.)  As a direct result of his participation in the conference, Curmie was invited to join the rather newly founded National Association of Scholars (NAS), only to receive a snotty and condescending rejection letter because at the time he didn’t have a PhD (he was chairing a department at an accredited college, but that was insufficient, apparently).  Today, membership is open to anyone whose credit card payment goes through.  Curmie, needless to say, is not a member.

The NAS webpage claims that the organization “upholds the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.”  As Curmie is wont to say, “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”  The NAS is predictably right-wing, even de facto advocating signing on to that absurd Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.  But if the Compact was a really bad idea, one of the NAS’s more recent forays into the world of educational policy is a classic of pseudo-intellectuality and downright daftness.  Indeed, this is a contender for the coveted title of Stupidest Fucking Idea in the History of Stupid Fucking Ideas.  The NAS was apparently primarily responsible for drafting this nonsense.

The proposal in question is something called the Faculty Merit Act.  It would require:

… all parts of a state university system to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position, of every applicant selected for a first interview, and every applicant selected for a final interview. The Act also requires the university to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department. It finally requires everyone in the hiring process, both applicant and administrators, to affirm under penalty of perjury that they have provided every standardized test score.

Predictably, the National Review proclaimed this “a very good idea.”  It is not.  It is not in the same universe as a good idea.

This inanity is based on a series of, shall we say, dubious speculations masquerading as facts: that universities “draft job advertisements with specializations that will ensure only radicals need apply,” that “few close observers believe that the average professor of ethnic studies is as acute as the average professor of physics,” and above all that a standardized test score, albeit that it “is only a rough proxy for academic merit,” nonetheless will “provide some measure of general intelligence.”  All of this suggests a quantification fetish, completely oblivious to the fact that such a measure is virtually meaningless… or, perhaps, not so much “oblivious” as “fully conscious of the fact but seeking to avoid admitting it.”

First off, even the NAS admits that “Some professors will have a greater ability to teach and do research than appears on a SAT score.”  Please substitute the words “virtually all” for “some” and add “or lesser” after “greater” in the previous sentence, Gentle Reader; then it will be accurate.  The idea that a 40-year-old PhD should be judged at all by how they did on a single day when they were 17 is beyond laughable.  Standardized test scores are determined by a lot of variables.  Native intelligence is one, but so are the quality of teachers a student has had up to that point, socio-economic status, whether the test-taker has taken this kind of exam before, whether they’re running a fever or just heard some bad news about a dear friend or family member… 

Curmie has written about his own experience with standardized tests several times.  He won’t link them all here; you can use the word search feature on the blog page as well as he can, Gentle Reader.  But it might be worth mentioning that Curmie did better on the GRE than on the SAT, and better on the SAT than on the PSAT.  Did he learn something between taking those exams?  Sure.  But so, presumably, did everyone else in his age group, and the competition was presumably getting tougher: in Curmie’s day, at least, everyone took the PSAT; you took the SAT if you were part of the smaller percentage of students intending to be college-bound, and the GRE only if you were looking at grad school.  Curmie did better because he’d learned how to take that kind of test, not because he’d grown appreciably in intellect.

More to the point, those scores tell us literally nothing about someone’s skillset, only about a very rough approximation of their aptitude.  (That’s the “A” in “SAT,” after all.).  Curmie actually got a perfect score on the GRE in math.  But he’s never been more qualified to teach a college-level math course (except perhaps what is euphemistically called “College Algebra”) than his colleague in the Math Department is to teach Theatre History or Acting.  Even at the most introductory collegiate level, specific disciplinary knowledge and teaching ability are both vastly more important than intelligence, even if those standardized tests really did measure the latter.

But then we get to what the NAS considers the principal benefit of their proposal: “Perhaps most importantly, this information will provide a mass of statistical information that can be used for lawsuits…. The Faculty Merit Act will provide a mass of information that can be used by plaintiffs against discriminatory colleges and universities” (emphasis added).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that the NAS’s real goal is to dismantle public post-secondary education: add to the administrivia, costing a mountain of time and resources; limit applications because there will be a lot of prospective candidates who decide it’s none of anyone’s damned business how they did on a standardized test decades ago; and, above all, open the university up to frivolous lawsuits just because some rejected candidate who would put coffee to sleep got good board scores.  Curmie hasn’t received a single offer to teach math despite his GRE score; he’s a white male and therefore a victim of woke ideology, and dammit, he’s going to sue somebody.  😉

Curmie also notes that David Randall, the director of research at the NAS who seems to be running point for this operation, does indeed have a PhD and some scholarly publications.  What he doesn’t appear to have is any experience whatsoever as a university faculty member.  Imagine Curmie’s surprise.

This proposal is particularly diabolical because some of its foundation is indeed true: there have been plenty of DEI hires that didn’t exactly work out to the benefit of the university or its students.  Are job applicants individuals or representatives of a group?  The answer, of course, is “yes.”  To the extent that they’re the former as well as the latter, the impetus for this proposition is understandable.  That doesn’t make it anything other than moronic.

Curmie first learned of this proposed legislation from Peter Greene at Curmudgucation.  Unsurprisingly, we’re in agreement.  But you might want to check out his take, too.  Let’s give him the last word, shall we? “The Faculty Merit Act is just dumb. It's a dumb idea that wants to turn dumb policy into a dumb law and some National Review editor should feel dumb for giving it any space. If this dumb bill shows its face in your state, do be sure to call out its dumbness and note that whoever attached their name to it is just not a serious person.” 

Harvard, Grade Inflation, and the Very Special Snowflakes

A recent article in the Harvard Crimson has generated substantially more buzz on the national scale than is common for college newspaper fare.  That’s because of its subject, a 25-page report authored by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh regarding rampant grade inflation at the university.  “Our grading,” she writes, “no longer performs its primary functions and is undermining our academic mission.”

Certainly the rapid and apparently inexorable rise in average GPA scores threatens to make grades obsolete, if we haven’t reached that stage already.  There has been a lot written about the situation over, well, about as long as Curmie has been paying attention, which is to say when he started his own collegiate career over a half-century ago.  There are manifold causes of the phenomenon: from a political attempt to help men retain their student deferments in the Vietnam era to an over-reliance on student course evaluations for decisions about merit pay, retention, and tenure to concerns about student well-being during COVID. 

Increased emphasis in secondary schools on standardized testing and the accompanying teach-to-the-test mentality also contributes, as students arrive at college having memorized a few names, dates, and formulas, but without having developed the thinking skills required for advanced study in any academic discipline, especially those in which personal interpretation is foregrounded.  Curmie has often said he doesn’t care whether you think Sam or Hally is the protagonist in “Master Harold”… and the boys; he cares about the thought process that gets you there.  (And it had better be more than simply parroting what some teacher told you.)

There’s a good article on the gradeinflation.com website that looks into both the statistics and the causes.  Curmie encourages you to at least glance through it, Gentle Reader.  But keep in mind that the information included there is over a decade old, and things have gotten far worse, especially but not exclusively during COVID.

How bad is it?  Well, there are literally dozens of articles out there, examining a lot of universities, but let’s stick with Harvard, where the problem seems to be worse than anywhere else.  (Curmie devoutly hopes this is true, because if any university’s grading integrity is more compromised than this, Curmie will run screaming into the night, never to be seen again.)  Over half of the grades at Harvard are now an “A,” and from what Curmie can decipher, that means an “A” as opposed to “A-range,” which would include A-minuses.  And get this: the cutoff for summa cum laude status is now 3.989, meaning that a single B-plus or a pair of A-minuses bars a Harvard student from getting summa.  Ah, but there a few fewer 4.0s in the most recent class than in the previous year’s; this is being touted as a sign of progress.  Sigh.

Ultimately, of course, whereas there are a lot of excuses reasons for grade inflation, they all ultimately boil down to the same thing: the faculty.  According to Claybaugh, “Nearly all faculty expressed serious concern… They perceive there to be a misalignment between the grades awarded and the quality of student work.”  Well, they could always… you know… give grades that corrected that “misalignment.”  True, there are pressures to keep passing out “A” grades like candy on Hallowe’en, especially in an era in which students are perceived as consumers rather than clients.  But grades are a professor’s responsibility, and a university that truly cares about the integrity of the process would encourage faculty to be a little more conscientious, not merely in words but in actions.

All of this (except a couple of specifics) has been a standard topic of conversation for a long time.  Curmie has written about it several times, most recently in a discussion of course evaluations, and he’s had dozens of conversations with colleagues from around the campus and around the country.  There’s one proposal from the Harvard administration he wants to talk about in a moment, but first, let’s look at Harvard students’ reaction to the suggestion that perhaps not all of them are the best in the class.

When Curmie started college many years ago, part of the orientation process was telling us (repeatedly!) that over 90% of us were in the top 10% of our high school classes, and that it was mathematically impossible for us all to do so in college, but being in the middle of a class at an Ivy League school was nothing to be ashamed of.  Our parents all got a letter with the same information.  One suspects that Harvard does roughly the same thing with their freshmen.

Ah, but the weeping and wailing from Cambridge drowned out the sounds of the jets at Logan Airport.  A follow-up piece in the Harvard Crimson described the horrors associated with requiring better than average work if you want to get an A.  One student described the report as “soul-crushing”: “The whole entire day, I was crying.  I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.”  Another worried about her ongoing ability to “enjoy [her] classes.”  A lacrosse player whined that “it’s not really accounting for what we have to do on a day to day basis, and how many hours we’re putting into our team, our bodies, and then also school.”

Way to play to the stereotype, guys!  Nothing says “snowflake” louder than this drivel.  You might end up with a 3.8 instead of a 4.0?  And that crushes your soul?  Get a damned life.  The chances are, of course, that these students never really had to work very hard in high school to get the grades that would get them admitted to an Ivy League school.  (Curmie didn’t.)  And the competition is tougher now. 

You don’t, or at least shouldn’t, go to Harvard for the extracurriculars; you go to get a Harvard-level education.  And prioritizing academics, at least somewhat, is, well, mandatory.  When Curmie started at Dartmouth, the cutoff for induction into the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society was 3.4.  Curmie figured he could write and edit for the college newspaper, help out at the Forensic Union (i.e., the debate team), work on shows essentially non-stop, play intramural sports, etc., as long as he kept that GPA.  (They changed the standard for ΦΒΚ in his junior (?) year, so Curmie didn’t end up getting in, but he shifted his attention to being magna cum laude, and achieved that goal.)  You can do things other than study and still get decent grades.

The whole “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school” argument (yeah, that’s a quote, too), suggesting that the work should be easier now, is beyond stupid.  It’s the equivalent of an all-conference high school basketball player complaining about not being all-conference in college although he averages 2 points a game, can’t guard anyone his own size, and has more turnovers than assists. 

One argument seems, superficially, to have some validity: if Harvard gets tougher on grades and equivalent universities don’t, it places Harvard students at a competitive disadvantage.  Ultimately, however, this line of reasoning really isn’t very persuasive at all.  A Harvard degree means something—perhaps less than it once did, but still something—but good grades there are now meaningless from an institution where an A- GPA is below average.

Curmie is reminded of a piece he wrote 15 years ago about the efforts by Loyola Law School to help its students be competitive, namely by simply raising GPAs by a third of a letter grade across the board, including instituting a new de facto A++ grade.  Yes, really.  But the thing is, the little ploy got a lot of attention, thereby diminishing the prestige of a Loyola degree and doing little to actually help students.  Here’s what Curmie wrote:

When I was applying to PhD programs, I was looking at one school that said something like “generally, we require a 3.5 GPA in your undergraduate work.” My undergrad GPA was 3.46 or something like that; it was considerably better in my major, but I didn’t meet the stated criteria. Still, there was that word “generally” in their statement. So I called them up. Their response, paraphrased, was “You have a 3.46 from Dartmouth? Of course we’re interested in you!” That’s what Loyola students used to have going for them: the reputation that a Loyola grad, relative to alums from a different school, was better than his/her GPA. Now the entire place is—or at least ought to be—a laughing stock. Oh, what a brave new world.

Harvard didn’t learn that lesson, apparently.  And, especially in light of the New York Times article a few weeks ago, the world knows just how little a good grade from Harvard now means.

There’s one more item to discuss before we get to the putain de stupide.  One of the arguments in favor of, shall we say, excessive grade generosity is that “For the past decade or so, the College has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others.”  If a particular student needs remedial work in a single subject area, that’s understandable.  For example, Curmie had plenty of advisees who could handle all of the university’s general education requirements… except math.

The same phenomenon works in the opposite direction, as well, of course.  Years ago, Curmie taught a variation on the theme of English Composition at Cornell University when he was a grad student there.  One of his students was, from all accounts, a brilliant physicist.  But, curiously enough, he didn’t write as well in his third language (he was Korean; his second language was Chinese) as did the native English speakers in the College of Arts and Sciences at an Ivy League university.

Accommodating that student to the extent of dragging him kicking and screaming to a passing grade is one thing; giving him an A for barely passable work would have been something else.  More recently, Curmie has had a handful of students whose native language is Spanish.  All of them were learning English even as they were also learning Play Analysis.  All of them passed; all of them deserved to pass, without needing any accommodations, because they did the work, and their ideas were good even if they sometimes struggled with writing in their second language.  One, in particular, went on to become a star pupil in subsequent courses and got a Master’s degree from a quite reputable university. 

But if a student is “less prepared” across the board, that person shouldn’t be at Harvard.  One suspects, and you can be certain that the right-wing press will be asserting this, that we’re talking about what could be called DEI admissions.  There are certainly advantages to a diverse student body, but it does no one—not the student, not the other students, not the university, not the nation—any good to admit someone who just can’t cut it.  To this extent, the Trump administration has a point.

Ah, but it’s time for the grand finale.  You may recall, Gentle Reader, that Curmie described the part of the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education that demands that universities return tuition money to students who drop out in their first semester as “a contender for the stupidest fucking idea in the history of stupid fucking ideas.”  Curmie spoke too soon, as there is now a new leader in the clubhouse, a proposal so blazingly inane it could only come from a university administrator, and probably one at Harvard.

Get this: one of the proposals, apparently initiated by Claybaugh and sent to a faculty committee for discussion, is to allow a limited number of A+ grades (Harvard’s best grade at present is an A), thereby “distinguishing the very best students.”  You can’t make this shit up, Gentle Reader.  The way to fight grade inflation is to further inflate grades.  Curmie might have thought that a better course of action to curb grade inflation might be to give students whose work is very good but not exemplary an A- or (God forbid!) perhaps even a B.  Curmie clearly was never cut out for administration, at least at Harvard.

Harvard has brought this on itself.  There are other universities that are, no doubt, almost as bad, but this stuff surpasses credulity.  The pampered little snowflakes who make up at least a good share of the student body should be scorned, but they’re still post-adolescents and might be salvageable.  The administration and faculty, however, are beyond hope of redemption.

The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education Is, Unsurprisingly, the Exact Opposite of What It Pretends to Be

Baker Library at Dartmouth College

This one is long, even by Curmie’s standards, Gentle Reader.  Buckle up.

A few months ago, Curmie wrote a blog post criticizing the president of his alma mater, Dartmouth College, for declining to sign on to the “Call for Constructive Engagement” from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. 

Here’s a snippet of Curmie’s commentary: 

At the moment, Dartmouth is one of only two Ivy League schools not to have substantial cuts in federal funding based on little but the caprice of the most anti-intellectual administration in history.  Dartmouth’s time will come, no doubt.  Surely we’re not under the impression that craven silence is any kind of reasonable solution.

Sometimes Curmie hates being right.  When you’re dealing with an authoritarian bully like Donald Trump, the slightest capitulation, even if it’s manifested as inaction, will be seen as weakness, and further demands are both inevitable and imminent.  And so… here we are.  Dartmouth is one of nine colleges and universities currently being extorted into agreeing to asked for commentary about the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which, of course, has literally nothing to do with academic excellence, but is instead an authoritarian wet dream of governmental control over some of the nation’s most reputable, I dare say prestigious, bastions of higher education.  Dartmouth’s response, alas, couldn’t be more wishy-washy.  Curmie detects just a little too much Susan Collins in President Sian Leah Beilock’s statement.

Side note: The other schools on this particular hit list are Arizona, Brown, MIT, Penn, USC, Texas, Vanderbilt, and Virginia.  Gentle Reader, if you are an alum of any of the nine institutions listed here, Curmie urges you to head to a webpage created by a group called Stand for Academic Freedom and sign on to a petition to your alma mater’s president and trustees urging them to refuse to submit to the Compact.  By the way, apparently these schools were chosen because the White House believes they “are, or could be, ‘good actors.’”  Curmie, a theatre director for a half century or so, hereby hopes for more bad actors.  The Compact is essentially a threat masquerading as an opportunity: about as close as a government can come to a protection racket.

We start with the threat at the end of the first paragraph of the document: “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”  (Curmie can’t suppress a giggle here: the word the idiots who wrote and distributed this missive meant is “forgo.”  “Forego” means precede.  Oh, and they make the same mistake in the other direction in Section 9.  <Snort.>)  The “federal benefits” which might be jeopardized by failure to adhere to edicts from the Mad King of Trumpistan include access to federally-affiliated student financial aid, research grants, and student visas. 

OK, on to Section 1: “Equality in Admissions.”  There’s the predictable anti-DEI blather, but the really problematic paragraphs, to Curmie’s mind, come later: 

University admissions decisions shall be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the University’s website and available to all prospective applicants and members of the public.

Institutions shall have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT, ACT, or CLT) or program-specific measures of accomplishment in the case of music, art, and other specialized programs of study. Universities shall publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishments, by race, national origin, and sex.

What.  Utter.  Crap.  “Objective criteria”?  That would eliminate any thought process by admissions offices.  How do you reconcile, for example, excellent grades and a poor SAT score?  Could be the school has no standards; could be the student had test anxiety, or was ill or dealing with some other form of life issue the day of the test.  Curmie has been on both ends of alumni interviews: does this student have what it takes to succeed in this specific environment?  Recommendations from high school teachers really do matter; Curmie has read a few hundred of them, and not infrequently made recommendations about scholarships accordingly.

That student over there doesn’t have a very good grade point average overall, but look at how much better he did when he quit the football team and joined the marching band (or vice versa).  That other student went in the opposite direction.  Knowing why would be a good thing.  Yet another applicant is brilliant in one area but barely passable in another (Curmie saw a lot of that in theatre majors, a fair number of whom were not necessarily noted for their mathematical prowess.)  Do we celebrate the specialized excellence or go for the applicant who is very good (as opposed to outstanding) across the board?  Curmie once again reveals his inner Confucian: there is simply no way to factor all of the potential variables into an “objective” model… and if there were, it would be so complex that it could be parsed only by someone with an advanced degree in statistics and probability, not by high schooler looking at a website.

More importantly, the past matters, but it isn’t the sole determinant of future success.  Standardized tests measure test-taking ability more than knowledge.  Curmie has made this point more times than it’s practicable to link to all the examples here, but this one, with reference to his own experience as a test-taker, may be taken as illustrative.

Oh, one more thing: this administration sure does care about “objectivity” when it means rich white folks benefit (students really do perform better on the SAT if they’ve taken one of those often expensive prep courses).  And their quest for transparency inevitably means lawsuits, and that, too, benefits families that can afford lawyers.  The desire to break down the data by race, national origin, and sex—but not the economic status of the student—is sort of a tell, isn’t it?  But, more significantly, where was that reverence for objectivity when the nation was saddled with cabinet appointees like Kennedy, Hegseth, and McMahon, all of whom are objectively unqualified to be hired by their agency, let alone lead it?

The Compact, in other words, should be rejected based on its first section alone.  But (insert late-night infomercial voice here) wait!  That’s not all!  Moving on to Section 2: Marketplace of Ideas & Civil Discourse.  Here’s the money quote: 

A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines. Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.  

That all sounds pretty innocuous: well, except for the paranoia about sparking violence (!) against conservative ideas.  (Curmie, who has spent considerable time on college campuses over a period of more than half a century, has literally never seen anything approaching violence against conservatives.)  Tellingly, the proposal is sufficiently vague that virtually any actual examination of an ideology could be seen as attacking it.  Racism is conservative.  Sexism is conservative.  Homophobia is conservative.  True, most 21st-century conservatives reject, or at least purport to reject, these ideologies, but all have been standard conservative doctrine in Curmie’s lifetime.  (Curmie is old, but not that old.)  And transphobia and Islamophobia are still central to the right’s playbook.

Curmie belittled more than a few arguments from the right at some point in his career: not because they were from the right, but because they didn’t stand up to scrutiny.  He also got in trouble for saying that not all feminist arguments are good arguments, and that a proposal to enforce “anti-racism” (not being racist was insufficient) on all students in a program was “Stalinistic.”  That kind of criticism would no doubt be applauded by the Regime, not because it was well-reasoned, but because it furthered their point of view in an “enemy of my enemy” sort of way.

There’s a fair amount of argumentation in Section 2 that’s actually good policy, but rather ironic coming from this administration.  It’s fine to assert the importance of civility and to note that “Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views.”  But this administration was strangely quiet when tenured faculty were fired for being insufficiently obsequious in mourning the death of Charlie Kirk.  Free speech for me, but not for thee.

Plus, of course, the kinds of policies proposed in this section about safeguarding free expression have already been adopted, generally long ago, by virtually every college or university in the country.  There may not have been universal enforcement, but these matters are often more complicated than the Trumpsters would have us believe.  Curmie is especially fond, though, of this sentence: “The university shall impartially and vigorously enforce all rights and restrictions it adopts with respect to free speech and expression.”  It follows shortly after the prohibition of “support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.”  (“Support” is, of course, undefined.)  Oh, and there’s a prohibition against countenancing genocide (except when perpetrated by Israel, bien sûr).  We’ll just antiphrastically avoid noting that even supporting violence is protected speech unless there is a specific and imminent incitement.

By the way, Antifa, which is not an organization at all, but simply an anti-fascist (notice the first six letters) ideology, is now characterized by Dear Leader and his merry band of sycophants as a terrorist threat.  So much for free speech, a ”broad spectrum of viewpoints,” and similar sentiments. 

Section 3: Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring.  Boy, that would be great.  Having, say, a university president not be selected by the politically appointed trustees here in Texas would be a big step in the right direction.  Oh.  Wait.  That’s probably not what this section means, even if that’s what it says.  There’s also the same bullshit about objectivity as for admissions.  I mean, hire the professor who has the best (perhaps padded) résumé, not the one students respond to, right?  These people neither know nor care about actual education.

Section 4: Institutional Neutrality.  This is actually reasonable, except, of course, that it is intended in this document (see above re Charlie Kirk aftermath) to extend past insisting on neutrality from employees in their “capacity as university representatives.”  It’s also interesting and ironic that President Beilock of Dartmouth is quoted approvingly in this section of a document that is being used to extort her college.

Section 5:  Student Learning.  This is a screed against grade inflation.  Curmie wishes them luck.  Really.  No irony intended here.

Section 6: Student Equality.  Mostly an attack on trans athletes, with some argument against, say, scholarships designated specifically for students of a particular sex, race, national origin, etc.  The section is simplistic and predictable.  (Curmie would be interested in seeing a discussion of donor’s rights in this regard.  So, he suspects, would Beloved Spouse, who works in Financial Aid.) 

Section 7: Financial Responsibility.  The GOP, which has been largely responsible for under-funding public universities (including some of the nine schools affected by the Compact), is suddenly concerned with students being “saddled with life-altering debt.”  It’s certainly true that there are a lot more administrative staff than necessary, especially in Student Affairs; it’s also true that upper-level administrators are almost universally overpaid relative to other staff and faculty.  (That part doesn’t get mentioned, of course.)

But the level of reporting demanded in this section (and others) actually increases administrative costs.  Curmie is so old that he remembers when it was the liberals who were all about administrivia.  Not so much, now…

There’s also a demand to freezing “effective tuition rates” (does that mean inflation-adjusted?) for five years.  Yawn.  More grandstanding than policy.  Next.  Oh, and universities should “refund tuition to students who drop out during the first academic term of their undergraduate studies.”  This has got to be a contender for stupidest fucking idea in the history of stupid fucking ideas.

And… there would be no tuition charges for students in the hard sciences at schools with more that a $2 million endowment per student.  This one, apart from being profoundly stupid by de facto punishing universities for having good science programs (and de facto penalizing students in other fields: that tuition money has to come from somewhere), seems aimed at specific schools.  Curmie’s alma mater, for example, is certainly in good financial shape, but it comes in at $1.8 million or thereabouts in this metric.

This entire section, like Section 1, is enough to make any competent administrator reject the entire Compact, even if other parts of it make a fair amount of sense… which it sort of does in a couple places.

Section 8: Foreign Entanglements.  There’s a lot of nonsense about money laundering and such-like before we get to the real stuff about limiting enrollment by foreign students.  This is supported by predictable jingoistic argumentation about requiring “foreign students [to] exhibit extraordinary talent that promises to make America stronger and more economically productive, and the selected students are introduced to, and supportive of, American and Western values, ultimately increasing global understanding and appreciation for the United States and our way of life.”

Curmie speaks here from years of experience with an exchange program with a British conservatory.  The rationale wasn’t about making America more economically productive (the only thing this administration cares about); it was about enhancing American students’ education by exposing them to peers who had grown up in a different society and a different political system, and had been educated in a different manner.  It was about establishing relationships that would be beneficial to students from both sides of the Atlantic.  (For the record, there are at least a few of those British students who now live and work in this country.  This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it is simply a thing.)

Trump’s purported America First ideology in fact diminishes opportunities for American students to experience… wait for it… a “broad spectrum of ideas.”  It also wants to deny access to anyone who might not be willing to swear allegiance to “American and Western values.”  How would they know without being exposed to them except in the abstract?  And if those values are indeed superior, wouldn’t even a skeptical student smart enough to get into one of those universities end up being converted?

By the way, apparently those “objective” standards for admission apply only to American students.  Curmie speaks only for himself, but he’d rather have a better student who happens to be Chinese or Saudi than a lesser student who’s American.  If you’re an American student who can’t compete: get better.

Anyway… Section 9: Exceptions.  Nothing of substance here.

Section 10: Enforcement.  More busy-work; more threats.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

The Compact, as expected, does exactly the opposite of what it purports to do.  It places the government as the de facto decision-maker for both public and private universities.  It restricts freedom of speech even as it pretends to support it.  It reveals a profound ignorance about the way higher education works and a contempt for scholarship, teaching, and learning.  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…

Orwell was an optimist.

Changing Voter Eligibility: Four Really Stupid Ideas

Pondering who can vote and who can’t hasn’t occupied a lot of space or time in Curmie’s mind for several years. Yes, there was the brouhaha about absentee ballots during COVID, but that wasn’t about who could vote, but how. And there are the usual plaints from Democrats about voter suppression and from Republicans about ineligible (e.g., non-citizen) voters. But the former requires a very liberal (see what Curmie did there?) definition of “suppression,” and the latter arguments are presented with a dearth of actual evidence. 

And, of course, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the MAGA minions in aftermath of the last presidential election. But even if those protestations had merit (which they didn’t), they were centered on allegations of manipulation, not of who had the legal right to cast a ballot. 

But just in the last week or so, Curmie has seen four proposed changes to the process, all remarkable in their stupidity. (A couple have been around longer, but Curmie only recently learned of their existence.) Curmie can’t quite decide which order to put them in, but has decided to arrange them in what he currently, as he writes this, considers increasing levels of lunacy. (His ordering by the time you read this, Gentle Reader, may well have changed, and you should certainly feel free to shuffle the order at will.) 

We start, then, with an idea that seems to be gaining at least a little momentum among Democrats and teenagers. The Democrat-controlled Vermont legislature recently overrode the Republican governor’s veto, thereby allowing 16-year-olds to vote in municipal elections and indeed to hold office if elected. The rationale, such as it is, is to keep the youngsters politically involved. The veto seems to have been grounded in the potential confusion about the state’s definition of adulthood. No, the reason to oppose this is that it’s a stupid idea. 

The fact that this nonsense has any traction at all—in cities in several states, as it happens—can be chalked up to the perhaps mistaken belief among Democrats that teenagers are more likely to agree with them on such issues as gun control and abortion. But even if we grant the Dems’ dubious claim to ethics on this one, there are two objections. First, those issues aren’t the ones being decided at the local level—for there to be any benefit to progressive causes, those 16-year-old voters would have to become more engaged 18-year-old voters than they would otherwise be. Curmie doubts there’d be much change. 

More to the point, there are a lot of changes between the ages of 16 and 18, not simply in terms of brain development (although that, too). At 16, teens are staying in their parents’ house, and are more than likely to simply mirror their parents’ politics. Kent State made Curmie suspicious of Republicans, but it never occurred to him to vote for a Democrat until he was away at college. 

Oh, by the way, there is even an attempt at a constitutional amendment. This may or may not be necessary, as the 26th Amendment guarantees voting privileges to 18-year-olds, but doesn’t prohibit suffrage to younger citizens. Curmie is no lawyer, but if Maine and Nebraska can treat electoral votes differently than every other state, maybe voting rights could be different in Vermont or California or wherever? (Or perhaps not.) Anyway, it’s a non-starter, so it doesn’t matter much. 

Speaking of non-starters, let’s move on to two ideas that would definitely require constitutional amendments that are about as likely to happen as Curmie becoming starting power forward in the NBA. First up is an informal endorsement by Elon Musk of some Twitter yahoo’s idea that suffrage ought to be restricted to parents, since “The childless have little stake in the future.” A year or so ago, he proclaimed that “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” when of course the precise opposite is far more likely to be true. Musk didn’t need to own Twitter yet to be a doofus. 

Fact is, even a narcissistic prat like Musk has seldom said anything so stupid. Naturally, he thinks he’s being profound, whereas he’s proven repeatedly that when he’s not in the position to exploit other people’s expertise, he’s… well… a buffoon. He couldn’t care less about the future, except perhaps for his own multiple progeny. Curmie, on the other hand, is childless, but is a life-long educator, and dozens of his former students are also educators. Which of us has better credentials in terms of caring about the future of the species in general? 

But stop me if you’ve heard this before: there’s this arrogant twatwaffle who has a raft-load of stupid ideas, but he thinks we shouldn’t recognize that fact because he’s rich. No, not him… that’s what the last two paragraphs were about. This one is Vivek Ramaswamy, longshot contender for the GOP nomination in 2024. He’s a Randian amoral egomaniac and full-fledged wackadoodle who seems think that being even more authoritarian than Trump or DeSantis is the way to go… although it’s difficult to tell if he’s thinking more about the nation or his own campaign strategy. 

Ramaswamy’s proposal to raise the voting age to 25 with an exception for those who have served for six months in the military or could pass the test foreign nationals must take to become citizens shares more than one essential quality with the Democratic attempt to lower the voting age. This one definitely requires a constitutional amendment (which won’t happen), and if anything is even more cynical than the Dems’ plan. We suspect, but don’t know, how 16-year-olds would vote; in the 2020 election, the 18-24 year old vote went to Democrats by 25 points. Whyever would a hardcore Republican, candidate or not, want to raise the voting age? 

Each of these ideas scores in the upper reaches of what can be measured by the stupidometer. What could possibly surpass them? Well, this: Seaford, Delaware, has changed its charter to allow businesses to vote in local elections. Apparently the outsized influence those corporations already exert in a state with more than twice as many incorporated businesses as citizens just isn’t enough. 

David Genshaw, the mayor of this small town of 8,000 residents, may just be the most moronic officeholder in the country, and Curmie need hardly tell you, Gentle Reader, that there is plenty of competition for that apparently coveted title. Quoth Genshaw, “These are folks that have fully invested in their community with the money, with their time, with their sweat. We want them to have a voice if they choose to take it.” Only about 100 more people voted in the most recent city election than there are corporations registered on Seaford. The low turnout is reasonable because, let’s face it, most of what is decided at that level is rather insignificant, and there’s little difference between candidates. 

Both of these statements are changed significantly if artificial entities that don’t even have a physical presence in the town are able to vote. It’s bad enough that absentee landlords can vote on some issues; this is beyond absurd. First off, those “folks” haven’t done a damned thing to “[invest] in their community”; they are (and this is not a criticism of them) simply looking out for the proverbial #1. 

More importantly, corporations aren’t people, irrespective of what SCOTUS might think… which brings us to another reason why this is the cleanup hitter in this list. Whereas it is extremely unlikely that Delaware’s Democratically controlled state legislature will sign off on Seaford’s folly, which they’d need to do—Curmie need hardly tell you that this proposal is being advanced by Republicans—it’s certainly plausible some asshat might sue, that the case would find its way to SCOTUS, and that a far more conservative court even than the one in the Citizen’s United case (damn, was that really over 13 years ago?) would rule in favor of corporations, actual citizens be damned. 

So, whereas this is the worst idea in a contest of plenty horrible ideas, it’s also the only one with a chance of becoming law. Curmie is not amused.

Mid-July Mini-Reports

Time for some quick takes on items in the news over the past month or so. This may become a regular feature of the blog… who knows? We’ll take the stories chronologically.

Requires legislation to help incompetent parents.

#1. The June 18 edition of the Denver Post carries an article entitled “ Colorado proposes nation’s first legal limits on smartphones for children.” This is the initiative of one Tim Farnum, who noticed that his own “once energetic and outgoing boys became moody, quiet and reclusive. They never left their bedrooms, and when he tried to take away the phones, one of Farnum’s sons launched into a temper tantrum that the dad described as equivalent to the withdrawals of a crack addict.” Yeah, right. This is someone who had seen lots of folks struggling with narcotics withdrawal. Moron.

Anyway, since Farnum failed at parenting, proving himself incapable of saying no to his spawn, the only solution is… legislation! The proposal would prevent smartphone sales to anyone under 13, and would require providers to plow through a mountain of paperwork which would then have to be submitted to some state agency, which would—at taxpayer expense, of course—log everything to ensure compliance.

All this bill does is take authority away from parents who actually take the job seriously, and give it to the state. By the way, Farnum has now taken the smartphones away from his two sons, and with good results. He, being dumber than an anvil, no doubt believes this proves his point that smartphones should be kept away from kids. What it really demonstrates, of course, is that parents who acquiesce to every whim of their children tend not to be successful at raising healthy and well-adjusted children. But good parents ought to be able to decide whether their 12-year-old can have a smartphone… or if their 14-year-old shouldn’t. Farnum describes his politics as “fairly libertarian.” Curmie shudders at the prospect of someone Farnum would think of as an authoritarian jackass.

#2. The Transportation Safety Administration toyed with the idea of requiring books and magazines to be removed from carry-on bags in order to de-clutter bags, making security screenings more effective. This rationale was widely and probably rightfully regarded as nonsense by the public at large and especially by privacy rights advocates like the ACLU, who wrote a lengthy opinion on its website, recognizing the need for safety but arguing for the greater good of privacy. The good news is that whereas Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly proclaimed in May that he (N.B., yes, “he,” not “we,” or “TSA”) “might, and likely will,” expand employment of the new initiative beyond a handful of test cities, it now appears that either public outcry or a bout of common sense was sufficient to stall the program.

Academics (like Curmie) are particularly disturbed by the prospect of subjecting themselves to this level of intrusion into privacy.  Whether it’s the title. or the language of publication, or the subject matter (Curmie has read a whole lot of anti-capitalistic theory, for example), the risk of having one's reading material examined without a legitimate safety concern, and with a distinct possibility of unnecessary confrontation, disturbs a lot of folks, especially but by no means exclusively in the intelligentsia.  And the examiners—TSA agents—have neither the training nor the intellect to make appropriate decisions.

Note that the stated rationale for the added screening was that carry-on bags are now over-packed, thereby making it more difficult to determine what’s actually in them, because people want to avoid baggage fees, which apply on the first bag only to domestic flights. Meanwhile, the TSA is also contemplating banning laptops in the cabin only on all international flights. If anyone in Washington really believed that laptops are a threat, they’d be prohibited on all flights. If the problem is over-packed carry-ons, make airlines adopt the same baggage fees (which is to say, none) for domestic flights as are now common practice for international flights. The only plausible explanation is what we’ve known all along: TSA is as prying and meddlesome as it is incompetent (and that’s saying rather a lot), and John Kelly has little interest in civil liberties. He’s actually less unqualified than most Trump appointees, but he’s a military guy, not experienced in needing a rationale for his decisions, which he expects to be meekly obeyed. Civilians, especially academics, aren’t really good at that.

#3. From late June comes this story of an elderly Chinese woman who threw coins into a jet engine for good luck, delaying the Shanghai to Guangzhou flight by five hours, lest the attempt to ensure a safe slight lead directly to the opposite result. There’s really not much to say here except, well, wow.

#4. Speaking of stupid ideas, the Denver Post also reports this story about people who claim to be persecuted… for believing in a flat earth. You see, when these folks proclaim their… uh… faith, scientists and other heliocentric round-earthers call them stupid, for no other reason than that they’re, well, stupid. It turns out they even have a celebrity on board: NBA star Kyrie Irving. If ever you needed evidence of major universities’ wholesale abdication of education when there are sports dollars to be made, it’s Kyrie Irving: this idiot got into Duke! (Imagine yourself as an excellent but not quite excellent enough student who didn’t make the cut, while this cretin with a jump shot did.) Somehow Curmie suspects that no one at any university worthy of the name would have given him the time of day if he couldn’t play basketball better than virtually anyone else on the planet.

Seriously, the flat earthers are laughable… but also terrifying. They are not truth-seekers, nor independent thinkers, nor intellectual gadflies. They’re just garden variety morons who, like the snowflakes Curmie wrote about last time out, can do a lot of damage in sufficient numbers. This nation has already embarrassed itself on the world stage in terms of evolution and climate change. Further erosion of the most basic scientific truths cannot be condoned.

The Afghani delegation arrives in Washington, DC.

#5. Credit where it’s due: it appears that intervention by President Trump himself led to a reversal of a visa denial for young robotics team members. Two delegations, from Afghanistan and Gambia, were initially denied the short-term visas that would have allowed them to compete in the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge, currently underway in Washington, DC. The former group, an all-girls team from a country not exactly known for gender enlightenment, attracted more attention here, and this is where we’re hearing about presidential suasion being exercised. It’s unclear whether the President assisted the Gambians’ cause directly, but they, too, were allowed to enter the country after having their visa applications denied.

In neither case was the reason for the initial denial made clear: this is standard practice for the State Department under any administration. Whether it should be, of course, is another matter, and to an outside observer these cases seem particularly bizarre. It’s difficult to believe a bunch of high school kids are much of a threat to national security, but I suppose stranger things have happened. When the bans were first announced, many, including Curmie, feared that State was unilaterally extending the President’s travel ban beyond its original scope: Curmie even wrote that the “temporary” travel ban “sure [looks] like the thin edge of the wedge.” But he also described the SCOTUS ruling as a glass half full. It remains to be seen whether President Trump will craft policies that will allow appropriate access to this country irrespective of the applicant’s nationality. Frankly, I doubt it. But this episode has given Curmie at least a modicum of optimism.

When Perfection Isn't Good Enough

Curmie is way behind on his writing, which accounts for not getting to this story quicker. We all know that the GOP and the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party have joined forces to declare war on public education in this country. It’s all about “accountability” and similar catch-phrases, which are achieved only by high-stakes standardized testing.

The problems with this philosophy occur at two strata. First, the tests and the curricula with which they survive in perverse symbiosis are designed almost exclusively by non-educators with a single purpose: to increase the power, wealth, and prestige of their progenitors. No one is really interested in providing an accurate assessment of either student development or teacher competence. No, in a fetishistic desire for quantification, we’ve just allowed the Pearsons of the world to make shit up and pretend that it’s meaningful. And we’ve allowed arrogant know-nothings like Bill Gates, charlatans like Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee, and corrupt bureaucrats like Arne Duncan to convince us that they care about making education better, when in fact they’re just looking to scapegoat teachers as an excuse to sell their solutions to wildly exaggerated problems.

Curmie has argued against the overuse of standardized testing in general on several occasions—here’s a piece from three years ago with internal links to several others, but there are times when the inanity of the system is very pragmatic and specific. There are the utterly stupid questions.

There’s the corruption of “cut scores,” the scores a particular state or municipality decides is acceptable. If you want to show that your snazzy new system is working, you lower the cut score; if you want to show the status quo isn’t working, you raise it. And, because you’re either a corporation trying to sell a product or a politician trying to sell an idea (and usually a product licensed by one of your campaign contributors), you do this after the scores are in. So if last year’s cut score was 60% and you want to show that your spiffy new approach is working, you lower the cut score to 50% and voilà!, a higher percentage of this year’s students passed. Or, more recently, vice versa: “Oooohhh… we need to adopt this new strategy because fewer students got a 70 this year than got a 60 last year. Education is free-fall, and we need to fix it.”

There are the teachers who are evaluated on the basis of how students they never had in class fare on standardized tests. The reigning Curmie Award winners are the administrators at Rhame Elementary School, who removed 4th grade teacher Vuola Coyle from the classroom because her students’ test scores were too high, making it difficult if not impossible for her 5th grade colleagues to demonstrate that they, too, know how to teach.

It doesn’t matter if you do.  It’s not going to be good enough.

And now we get a variation on that theme. In Florida and, Curmie fears, other places as well, teachers can be punished even for students who earn perfect scores on standardized tests. You see, if they got a perfect score last year, they should show improvement by getting better than a perfect score this year, or the teacher involved is clearly an incompetent. Well, somebody is an incompetent, but Curmie suspects it’s not the teacher.

Ah, but the mouthpiece for the state education department assures us that counties are allowed to adjust their VAM (that’s Value-Added Model, for those of you unfamiliar with corporatized educationese) to accommodate such situations. Except, of course, they don’t (or at least didn’t). Well, at least those perfect scores are so rare it really doesn’t matter. Except that there are tens of thousands of perfect scores, meaning that the chances that some teacher was penalized because one or more of his/her students wasn’t better than perfect is roughly equal to the chance that Donald Trump will say something stupid and boorish in the next 24 hours: ontological certitude, in other words.

The most significant problem here isn’t that hosts of teachers are being treated unfairly because of a glitch in the system—there’s a pretty good likelihood that it’s been fixed by now, after all. And, once middle school teacher Luke Flynt made headlines by challenging the stupid rule, it’s a reasonable surmise that other Florida teachers were alerted to the possibility.

Nor is the central issue the fact that teachers are being evaluated by a system that is rife with flaws, doesn’t measure anything worth measuring, and pays no attention whatsoever to the fact that different teachers are more effective with different students, that student populations vary—sometimes radically—from year to year or even from class to class, and completely disregards significant factors in students’ performance completely unrelated to the classroom: economic and social issues, for example. All of these criticisms are legitimate, and all of them are damning. But it’s all sort of to be expected. Regardless of what you do for a living, there are two kinds of people who are guaranteed to believe they know how to do your job better than you do: rich people and politicians… and God save us from those who are both.

The core (or Core… ) problem, however, is not that a particular district has a silly procedure in place, or that this or that teacher is being punished for circumstances that no rational person, let alone an educational professional, would consider legitimate. Those cases are awful, but they are anecdotal. The central issue, however, is systemic, and it permeates into every part of our society, not merely the education sector.

The problem is that we, the electorate, keep voting for lazy, arrogant, morally bankrupt, and utterly irresponsible politicians at every level. No sentient adult would consciously vote for the kind of idiocy that passes for public education policy in Florida (or New York, or Pennsylvania, or Texas, or…). I started to include “stupid” in the list of adjectives in the first sentence of this paragraph. The problem is, that’s not accurate. They aren’t stupid. They know better, but they’re too beholden to campaign donors, too myopic to actually contemplate the implications of proposed legislation, too interested in supporting a general concept (core curriculum, privileging good teachers over bad ones, etc.) without examining the details (which is where the Devil lurks) of a proposal. And they’re trigger-happy about their pet projects. Yes, delaying tactics are very much a part of the political arsenal of both parties. But the rush to pass legislation for the sake of appearing to solve a problem is what gives us violations of basic human rights (the PATRIOT Act), prolix and convoluted gibberish (Obamacare), and knee-jerk hysteria (the rush to bar the Confederate battle flag from national parks on one or two specially designated days a year even at Civil War cemeteries ).

The average state legislator knows precisely nothing about education, and the average education secretary knows (and cares) less than that. But as long as we, collectively, keep electing people unfit to clean the toilets in a public school, there’s a very real sense that we get what we deserve. There is no Curmie nomination forthcoming on the issue of punishing teachers for students’ perfect scores: you can’t embarrass a profession to which you don’t belong. You can only embarrass yourself. And politicians of both parties across the country are doing a very good job of that, indeed.

NOTE: Curmie changed his mind. People who control the entire educational system of a state are Curmie-eligible.