Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Public school teachers and Democrat politicians send their own kids to private schools

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Black commentator Larry Elder writes about it in Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

About 11% of all parents — nationwide, rural and urban — send their children to private schools. The numbers are much higher in urban areas. One study found that in Philadelphia a staggering 44% of public school teachers send their own kids to private schools.

In Cincinnati and Chicago, 41% and 39% of public school teachers pay for a private school education for their children. In Rochester, N.Y., it’s 38%, in Baltimore 35%, in San Francisco 34% and in New York-northeastern New Jersey 33%.

In Los Angeles nearly 25% of public school teachers send their kids to private school versus 16% of Angelenos who do so.

The 2004 study by the Fordham Institute said its findings “are apt to be embarrassing for teacher unions, considering those organizations’ political animus toward assisting families to select among schools. But these results do not surprise most practicing teachers to whom we speak.”

“The data have shown the same basic pattern since we first happened upon them two decades ago: Urban public school teachers are more apt to send their own children to private schools than is the general public. One might say this shows how conservative teachers are. They continue doing what they’ve always done. Or it might indicate that they have long been discerning connoisseurs of education …

“The middle class will tolerate a lot — disorder, decay and dismay, an unwholesome environment, petty crime, potholes, chicanery and rudeness. One thing, however, that middle class parents will not tolerate is bad schools for their children. To escape them, they will pay out-of-pocket or vote with their feet. That is what discerning teachers do.”

What about members of Congress? Where do they send their own children? A 2007 Heritage Foundation study found that 37% of representatives and 45% of senators with school-age children sent their own kids to private school.

Of the members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with school-age children, 38% sent them to private school. Of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus with school-age children, 52% sent them to private school.

The ex-mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, was asked why he didn’t have his own kids in public school despite his strong advocacy of public education. Villaraigosa, whose wife was a public school teacher, said:

“I’m doing like every parent does. I’m going to put my kids in the best school I can. My kids were in a neighborhood public school until just this year. We’ve decided to put them in a Catholic school. We’ve done that because we want our kids to have the best education they can.

“If I can get that education in a public school, I’ll do it, but I won’t sacrifice (emphasis added) my children any more than I could ask you to do the same.”

When he got elected president, Barack Obama and his wife made a big display of looking into Washington, D.C., public schools for his two daughters to attend. But the Obamas chose Sidwell Friends, the elite private school whose alums include Chelsea Clinton.

Obama’s own mother sent her then-10-year-old to live with her parents — so he could attend Punahou Academy, the most exclusive prep school in Honolulu. In fact, from Punahou to Occidental (a private college in Los Angeles) to Columbia (where he completed college) to Harvard Law, Obama is a product of private education.

So how does this square with Obama’s opposition to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that offered a voucher for the children of participating parents? It doesn’t.

The best way to help all children – especially poor and minority children – get ahead in life is by giving their parent(s) vouchers and letting them choose public or private schools. But Democrats can’t do that – they want their supporters in the teacher unions to have a captive audience. That way, come election time, the Democrats can count on an army of big-government supporters. It’s very important to understand that Democrats don’t want what’s best for children. They don’t want them to have a choice. They don’t want them to have a quality education. They want to bribe public school teachers to help them get elected.

Commentary

Readers vote: who is to blame for this problematic marriage? The wife or the husband?

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Please read the excerpt from the article BEFORE you vote in the poll at the bottom of the post! Thanks.

Letitia the Damsel posted this article from the UK Daily Mail on my Facebook page. The article is written by a woman who rejects the traditional roles and responsibilities of women in marriage.

She writes:

My husband is the kindest, most considerate man in the world. During the seven years we’ve been married, Ben has done most of the cooking, cleaning and ironing without ever being asked.

He brings me an organic buffalo milk cappuccino every morning in bed and once spent hours making fresh syrup from rhubarb to add to my favourite champagne after I’d given birth. And yes, he works full-time.

But for all he does for me, anxious to make everything in my life better, he gets a raw deal in return.

I am shamefully neglectful of my wifely duties. In fact, I am the anti-wife.

The trouble is that I just can’t do the subservient partner thing. Ben is more likely to arrive at our home in Twickenham, South-West London, after a hard day’s work and find me having a manicure or checking Facebook than slaving over a hot stove.

This may make me sound selfish, but I’m just being honest. At 39, I’ve never ironed a single item of my husband’s clothing. I rarely cook for him either. Why would I bother when he’s so much better at it than I am?

Last Christmas, he produced a lavish three-course lunch and booked a 15th-century cottage for our whole family to eat it in. All I did was hold out my champagne glass for him to refill while saying: ‘Well done, darling.’

And if you think I reward his sterling domestic efforts with treats in the bedroom, I’m afraid I fail in that department, too. Intimacy is reserved only for his birthdays – and then just the ones with a zero.

I felt occasional pangs of guilt about our unusual dynamic during the first year of our marriage, but now I find it liberating. He even refers to me as the ‘household manager’ because I’m an expert in the art of delegation.

Recently, Ben’s job for an organic fruit and vegetable box delivery scheme meant he was away on business for three weeks.

Before he left, I found him packing the freezer with organic ready meals and ringing round for short-term nannies to take care of our children, Ronnie, six, and Stanley, two.

The truth is that I’m just too busy and involved in my career as a writer to be a traditional, caring wife.

I work from home and, like most self-employed people in a recession, I push myself to the limit. I set my alarm for 6am so I can squeeze in an hour of work before the school run and I often write until midnight.

My job often means being away from home during the evenings and weekends, which means the lion’s share of the childcare falls to Ben. Even when I am home, I keep one eye glued to my iPhone for fear of missing a work call.

Ben bemoans my inability to achieve a work/life balance. He sees the word ‘driven’ as a negative, while I think I’m aspirational and ambitious. Now, I know what you’re thinking – that I must earn more than Ben. But no, I don’t.

He’s the breadwinner and a domestic god. But my work is so all-consuming there’s little of me left to go round by the time I switch off my laptop. Don’t get me wrong – I love Ben very much and regard our marriage as happy. And he could never claim breach of contract because he always knew I was a workaholic. 

[…]When we began dating in 2003, I was helping to launch a woman’s magazine, which required me to be at work from 8am until 11pm.

It was Ben’s touching gesture of sending boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the office that made me realise what an excellent husband he’d make.

But when, in the early throes of our relationship, he mooted the idea I might one day be a ‘stay-at-home mum’, I bristled. ‘But my mum stayed at home for the first five years of my life,’ he said. 

‘That’s never going to happen,’ I replied sharply. The matter was never raised again.

[…]It’s my fault that he returns home to find no dinner and our children running amok.

But I work hard, too, and that changes everything. While I love my children deeply, wiping noses, bottoms and encrusted beans off the floor doesn’t inspire me in the way my work does.

I’m too busy to share the chores. After a day of writing, I feel happy and complete; after a day with the children, I am frazzled.

After the birth of our first son, I went back to my £60,000-a-year job as deputy editor of a national magazine and put Ronnie full-time into an eye-wateringly expensive nursery.

I felt guilty about it, and working 8am to 6pm every day and barely seeing my son just compounded that guilt. But I didn’t want to give up work.

You might think me self-obsessed, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay for my happiness.

Just before the birth of our second son, I decided to leave my job and pursue a career as a writer after being offered a generous redundancy package.

But instead of relaxing into my new job, I allowed work to seep into all areas of my life.

That is why I ignored cripplingly painful contractions ten minutes apart and carried on writing to meet a deadline.

I was back at work just two weeks after giving birth to Stanley, breast-feeding while conducting tricky phone interviews.

Now that you read the excerpt, please vote in the poll:

I’ll vote and comment later tonight to say how I voted.

By the way, if you like the articles that Letitia finds, you can hear her on her Visible Conservative podcasts on Fridays. Here’s the most recent one and the opening monologue transcript is here on Letitia’s blog. If you’re like me, and you like hearing conservative women talk passionately about issues that matter, you’ll love this podcast. I never miss it.

UPDATE: I voted and my vote was to blame the man entirely. He chose this woman to marry and to mother his children. He knew she was unqualified to be a wife and mother and married her anyway. It’s ALL HIS FAULT. She is completely innocent because she was bad BEFORE the marriage and he knew it.

You cannot blame a bad woman for continuing to act badly after you marry her. If she is bad before, she’ll be bad after. If she has no moral standard for marriage before, then she’ll have no moral standard after. She doesn’t BELIEVE that she is doing anything wrong – either before or after marriage. You can’t blame her for acting according to her own feminist worldview. It’s the MAN who is to blame for choosing her.

The man shouldn’t even be opening his mouth to complain about her after he chose her. He chose her, and he has no right now to blame her or complain about it. You can’t expect traditional wife and mother behavior when you marry someone who explicitly repudiates those roles. Blame the man 100%. And what’s more he is EVIL to have inflicted this on his children.

You can’t go to the pet store and pass by all the cats, dogs and birds and buy an alligator then complain when you get the thing home and it bites your arms off. It’s a freaking alligator, and you knew that when you bought it. It’s your fault.

Commentary

What Christians can learn about morality from “Breaking Bad”

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I found this post about the TV series “Breaking Bad” through J.W. Wartick’s “Really Recommended Posts“.

The author of the post argues that most of what you see in the arts and entertainment field tries to give us the idea that there is a dichotomy between small choices and big choices. But Breaking Bad rejects this by trying to show how small choices add up to your character.

Take a look:

I think Breaking Bad is a great show because it rejects this line of thinking [small vs big choices], because its running time is a five-season rebuttal to the idea that there are choices that matter and choices that don’t. Walt’s pride at a dinner table is ultimately as important to the villain he becomes as his murder, his lying as corruptive as his violence. In Gilligan’s eyes, there’s no differentiating between Walt’s pride and his rage and his enviousness and his determination to succeed at all costs, to be the Kingpin, the only one. Telling the story of how Walt chose to become the villain takes every minute of all 67 episodes aired so far.

You do not accidentally end up a drug kingpin, says the show. And the story is a five season long a fortiori argument whose conclusion is that you, viewer, also have a choice, in what to watch, or say, in how to treat people, in who to be. To echo James K.A. Smith, there are very few, if any, “morally neutral” practices. We get shaped by the things we do, or don’t do, even unintentionally, even if you’re not paying attention.

Breaking Bad echoes that not only in content, but in form. In the critical importance of little decisions (Walt’s wined-up boasting in front of Hank; his lying to his wife, Skyler; Marie’s shoplifting; Hank’s pride and arrogance affecting his job) that all compound in the direction of calamity.

“I just feel like I never had a choice in any of this,” Walt argues early on in season one, after he’s declined cancer treatment. “I want a say, for once.” When you first watch the scene, not knowing the kind of person Walt is going to choose to be, it’s a poignant moment. Walt wants to spend his last months with his wife on his own terms, rather than as a powerless and weak and hollowed out shell of who he used to be.

But as flashbacks inform the choices Walt made in the past, and as time and time again Walt refuses to stop cooking meth, to stop feeding his own pride, the scene is recontextualized as an ironic echo—as just another excuse for Walt’s behavior. The paradox central to Walt’s nature is that if you deny him a choice, he becomes furious. Because of this, most every conflict in the show stems from the interplay of Walt’s staggering intelligence and his equally impressive capacity for stupid, pride-motivated decisions.

But if you empower Walt, when he comes into real responsibility, he shirks it, he self-sabotages; he pretends he doesn’t have a choice, or never did have a choice. He becomes paranoid, and self-aggrandizing, and manipulative, until he’s relaxed from the tension of having responsibility—and as soon as that happens, he’s out looking for it again.

When all Walt has are choices, he demands a CHOICE; and as soon as it is presented to him, as soon as the danger of responsibility is there and real and able to hurt him, he denies it, labels it meaningless, and continues to victimize himself.

Walter is us. And that is a dangerous message, and it hurts. It hurts to be awakened to choices you didn’t know you were failing to make, or making poorly. It is always, always easier to deny choice than to accept it, to want to brush things off until it’s really important, until it’s a choice, and then perform well, and go back to the status quo of being a-volitional. We want to be fully ourselves already, and for our actions to be extrinsic, non-reflective. To keep separate who we are, our identities, and what we do in our everyday life.

But that’s not what it means to have character. And it’s not what it means to be a human being, created to shift and change dynamically. The tragedy of Walter White makes for a great narrative, and for really compelling TV. But the lesson of Breaking Bad is invaluable, especially in a culture like ours, that’s so allergic to prescriptive statements, to generalizations that aren’t platitudes, to Truth Claims about the nature of humanity. Breaking Bad doesn’t just make those claims—it does it with gusto. It confronts you with the ugliness of humanity like a Flannery O’Connor story, begging you to look and to look away, to see the outer extreme of an idea so that you’ll kick back and respond and fight with it, because engaging is just as much of a choice as anything else.

That reminds me of this well-known saying:

Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action; reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character reap a destiny

Something to think about when we are making the decisions about “how far is too far?”. The best way to avoid becoming a bad person is by not trying to walk on a dramatic line, but by making a million decisions every day to consciously get away from evil.

I find that in the church there is this strange and ridiculous idea everywhere that you can just do whatever you want and that God will give you the strength to be courageous and effective in these dramatic moments when you are tested – perhaps by being asked to deny Jesus or die. That will probably never happen for most of us. We overestimate how much an “act of God” can really do compared to the long, slow hum-drum day-to-day work towards a goal. A person has to die a million little deaths in order to achieve big things, like marry well and raise Christian kids, or keep a job to support a home, to get an MS or a PhD, etc. It’s the million little sacrifices that lead to making a big impact in the end.

Think abut it another way. How do the Armed Forces train soldiers in order to fight as a team and be brave? Do they just say “go about your lives, and when the time comes God will tell you what to do”? Hell, no. They drill and train and prepare for war because they know that this is what works. They have obstacle courses with live-fire machine guns and explosions to get soldiers used to making decisions under fire. They have classroom instruction and reading lists to share knowledge that will be useful in battle. All of this is to get the soldiers into the habit of making tiny brave decisions under controlled conditions. God doesn’t throw ordinary Christians out in a university auditorium and say “now perform like Bill Craig”. Bill Craig is Bill Craig because he chose to pass over fun things a million times and to instead focus on hard things like advanced degrees, reading advanced books and practicing debate. He isn’t debating in front of thousands of people because he made one “big” choice, but because he has a million little choices.

This lie about service being something that God has to lead you to is one of the biggest lies in the church today. That you don’t have to build the kind of life that honors God one self-sacrificial decision at a time. That you don’t have to have a long-term plan to be effective, but instead just do what you “feel led” to do moment by moment. That you can have as much impact as a Jim Demint or a William Lane Craig or a Ryan Anderson without having to train and prepare for it. It’s a lie to think that making an impact is a one-decision affair. We over-spiritualize the idea of serving God to give ourselves maximum autonomy and tell ourselves that “if it comes to that, I’ll be faithful”, while living ordinary lives the rest of the time. It’s probably never going to come to that, so shouldn’t you have some sort of day-to-day long-term self-sacrificial plan to achieve something for God instead?