Los Suns speak out

Steve Nash has long been one of my favorite players, not just because he is a rare type of point guard who makes everyone he plays with better, but because he is not afraid to speak his progressive political mind.

So this statement about the Arizona law shouldn’t surprise anyone:

“I think the law is very misguided. I think it is unfortunately to the detriment of our society and our civil liberties and I think it is very important for us to stand up for things we believe in,” Nash said of the bill. “I think the law obviously can target opportunities for racial profiling. Things we don’t want to see and don’t need to see in 2010.”

So yes, as Markos Moulitsas said in a Tweet, Go Los Suns.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Shoe, meet the other foot

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

Keith Olbermann stepped over a line last night in attempting to defend the president and the administration from criticism by Republicans.

Sens. John Cornyn and John McCain and U.S. Rep. Peter King attacked the decision to Mirandize the man charged in the failed New York truck bomb incident, reviving an argument that is just dangerously dismissive of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

They are advancing the idea that reading Faisal Shahzad, the now-detained the Pakistani-born American, his rights cut off potential avenues of information, potentially endangering Americans. I don’t want to argue the Mirada issue here. It is pretty clear where I stand (read the above paragraph).

What is interesting is the way in which Olbermann flipped the argument, creating a strawman to knock down and then building up a new, equally questionable argument of his own. Read this exchange between the TV host and Major General Paul Eaton, retired U.S. Army general who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004, and who is now a senior adviser at the National Security Network:

OLBERMANN: If you are the FBI agent and the police officers who spent 53 hours straight on the manhunt that was successful and as Mike Sheehan pointed out, you throw in the time of the flight that they had as a pad to Dubai, they didn‘t catch him at the last second before he left the country or would have gotten out of the grasp of this country. They got him about a day before and got him after about two days and a few hours‘ work.

What would it feel like to have done this job and have lawmakers back at home of any stripe criticizing you in the job that you just did?

EATON: Well, not good is the answer. Since January of 2009, we have seen a relentless attack on our FBI, on our armed services, on our policemen by the Republican Party. Any opportunity that they can find to see a seam to get in there and lay in an attack they have pursued. And, frankly, as a retired soldier and as a guy who supports my police, who supports my FBI, I want them to cut it out.

Olbermann offers a softball question and then gets the answer he was hoping for, one that casts the critical Congress members as anti-law enforcement and un-American. Cornyn, McCain and King are off-base and playing political games, but they are well within their rights to criticize the Obama administration, the FBI and/or the military. That’s the system we’ve erected here and one that Olbermann, himself, vociferously defended during the dark days of the Bush administration.

Olbermann is guilty of what many on the left have been guilty of since the election of Obama to the White House — a willingness to argue for things they were against, their intellectual U-turns tied to a political expediency that clouds their reason. Democrats now hate the filibuster, though they were prepared to defend it and demanded its use during the Bush years. Republicans have become so committed to it — after nearly eliminating it with the “nuclear option” — that they have stopped the Senate from functioning.

On issue after issue — torture, Guantanamo, rendition, oil drilling — liberal supporters of the president, or liberal commentators critical of the GOP, refuse to see that the arguments they have accepted just would not pass the flip test. If Bush were to have proposed the oil-drill compromise, would liberals have offered the kind of tame rebuke most offered? Would they have credited Bush with having an uncanny political mind and some kind of long-term strategy?

I think we know the answer.

As for Mr. Olbermann: I ask that he imagine the critics being Russ Feingold and John Kerry and the TV host being Bill O’Reilly. Would he have stood for O’Reilly’s blustering attack against the liberal senators? I think we know the answer to that one, as well.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Tests fail the test

Someone should listen to Charles Murray.

The conservative intellectual, famous for his absurd treatise on IQ and biology, has come around to what I see as a sensible view of standardized testing: It is badly flawed and can be detrimental to students.

In today’s New York Times, he argues that recent studies “that have failed to show major improvements in test scores” for charter schools can not be “explained away.” But, he says, that does not mean that the charters are failures. Rather, he poses an interesting question:

Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers — measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.

I can’t argue. I’ve been saying for a long time that allegedly objective tests rarely are objective and that test scores offer only a very small piece of the puzzle in judging the progress of students and schools or the abilities of teachers.

Murray turned away from the standardized test several years ago for sound reasons. He calls the SAT “superfluous” and “outright bad for American education,” providing
little information about high school students not already provided by their grades and scores on so-called achievement tests, exams that are tied to specific academic subjects.

He believes “dumping the SAT would have numerous benefits:”
scuttling what he sees as a deceptive test-prep industry, undercutting the unproductive smugness that comes from thinking one’s high SAT score reflects personal glory (he views it as the luck of the genetic draw), and short-circuiting the contention that the SAT amounts to a conspiracy against low-income students.

In today’s Times, he expands on this theme, saying that “measurable differences in schools explain little about differences in test scores.”

The reason for the perpetual disappointment is simple: Schools control only a small part of what goes into test scores.

Cognitive ability, personality and motivation come mostly from home. What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school.

And a good students has just as little room to prove the same.
He remains a supporter of charter schools — a point with which I vehemntly disagree — but he’s right on testing and one can only hope that other conservatives follow, making it more likely that the testing regime that now rules our educational establishment will fall.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.