Two years after Congress overwhelmingly passed the USA PATRIOT Act, political debate about civil liberties seems focused on the wrong issues, to the detriment of liberty and security alike.
Students perform mock trials, engage in formal debates, and write stories, letters, poems, skits, and essays, [are] expected to spell correctly, and know English grammar, as well as the times tables and basic mathematical algorithms. In a class that we watched, the teacher was rapidly firing square root questions. The square root of 81 is? Students called on to answer rose from their chairs and gave the answer, loud and clear, standing tall. (An education in public speaking as well as math.) In other classes, students memorize poems and speeches. Fifth-graders must know the elements of the periodic table; sixth-graders can explain the process of DNA replication. – Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning
That’s the way they do it at North Star Academy, a public charter school in Newark, N.J., with a student body of almost entirely low-income, African-American kids and no whites. The school day runs an extra hour. The academic year is 11 months. The students wear uniforms. They pick up trash. The homework is hefty. Most parents sign a voluntary "covenant" to "check our child’s homework each night." The school’s founders see inner-city teaching as a calling. The school is free of bureaucratic paralysis and free to hire nonunion teachers, pay them extra for unusual success or long hours, fire bad teachers, discipline students, and allocate its small budget as it sees fit.
It works. Despite having spent five years in abysmal elementary schools before entering North Star, 78 percent of the students passed statewide tests in English language arts and 58 percent passed in math in 2002 — well over double the rates of other schools in the neighborhood. And these students plan to go to college.
Things got awkward when the word "culture" came up at the October 20 American Enterprise Institute forum about the enormous gap in academic performance that separates African-American (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) students from whites and Asians.
Three years ago, my friend Don Kendall employed 2,100 Americans in gleaming, highly automated plants in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Vermont, making high-end computer servers, mass-storage devices, telecommunications routers, and hundreds of other products. Now, those same plants employ just 1,100 workers. Most of the 1,000 who have been laid off have had to take retail, tourism, or other service-sector jobs paying about half of what they made before — if they have found jobs at all.
President Bush’s assertion on Tuesday that "we’ll get to the bottom of this and move on" has the ring of wishful thinking. This scandal is going to roil the White House for quite a while. That prediction holds even if — as seems reasonably likely — the "senior administration officials" who allegedly sought to discredit, or spite, a whistle-blower by telling reporters that his wife worked for the CIA were unaware that she was a covert agent, and thus committed no crime.
Underlying the debate over the aftermath of the Iraq war is a question that, in the long run, looms larger than all of the others: Is President Bush’s foreign policy making Americans safer — or less safe — from the danger of being obliterated by nuclear-armed terrorists?
The three federal appeals court judges who gave California Gov. Gray Davis a new lease on life on September 15 delighted many a liberal law professor by purporting to follow Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court precedent that Democrats most love to hate.
After seven years of congressional struggle, hundreds of editorials, 1,638 pages of lower-court opinions, dozens of Supreme Court briefs, and four hours of oral arguments on September 8, the fate of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 appears to be in the hands of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
When the first President Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, many conservatives complained that it was a "quota bill," as Bush had said of an earlier draft. Congressional Democrats and liberal groups hoped that the legislation would, among other things, help provide access for racial minorities and women to job markets that had been traditionally dominated by white males.
One way to get elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, it appears, is to thumb your nose at the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s how an obscure circuit judge named Roy S. Moore got the job in November 2000. Now Moore has made an even bigger splash by clownishly defying (until recently) federal court orders requiring removal of the 5,280-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments that he had installed in the rotunda of the state judicial building.
