In September 1978, Yale freshmen would not have voted Maggie Gallagher the member of the Class of 1982 most likely to get pregnant before graduation. Gallagher was the third of four children from a close family in Portland, Ore. When she was young, her parents, a financial planner and a housewife, had been active in their local Catholic parish, and Gallagher and her siblings spent some years in Catholic elementary school. As Gallagher got older, her parents began to drift away from the church, and Gallagher’s mother became something of a spiritual seeker (“She once took me to an Up With People concert,” Gallagher now recalls, ruefully.) But Gallagher herself moved to the right in high school. Like many precocious girls, she fell for Ayn Rand’s novels, including “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” and for Objectivism, Rand’s capitalist, acquisitive philosophy. (Gallagher’s other formative influence was the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.) When she got to Yale, she only gingerly embraced the secular mores, the drinking and the drugs and the hookup culture, that defined life on liberal campuses in the late 1970s. She tried marijuana once and did not like it. She smoked cigarettes but, afraid of becoming addicted, never inhaled.

In September 1978, Yale freshmen would not have voted Maggie Gallagher the member of the Class of 1982 most likely to get pregnant before graduation. Gallagher was the third of four children from a close family in Portland, Ore. When she was young, her parents, a financial planner and a housewife, had been active in their local Catholic parish, and Gallagher and her siblings spent some years in Catholic elementary school. As Gallagher got older, her parents began to drift away from the church, and Gallagher’s mother became something of a spiritual seeker (“She once took me to an Up With People concert,” Gallagher now recalls, ruefully.) But Gallagher herself moved to the right in high school. Like many precocious girls, she fell for Ayn Rand’s novels, including “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” and for Objectivism, Rand’s capitalist, acquisitive philosophy. (Gallagher’s other formative influence was the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.) When she got to Yale, she only gingerly embraced the secular mores, the drinking and the drugs and the hookup culture, that defined life on liberal campuses in the late 1970s. She tried marijuana once and did not like it. She smoked cigarettes but, afraid of becoming addicted, never inhaled.

First, from last Saturday, is my column about a student studying for an M.A. in counseling who wanted to avoid patients in same-sex relationships; her Christian faith prevented her from affirming such clients, she said. The column is here, but this excerpt gives you the gist:

Ms. Ward referred questions to her lawyer, Jeremy Tedesco of the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal advocacy organization. Mr. Tedesco said that “if referrals are acceptable, including for many nonreligious-based reasons, they can’t deny someone who has a religion-based need to refer.” He said that Ms. Ward was not singling out gay men and lesbians, and that she would also refuse to affirm heterosexuals who sought counseling about their adultery.

“Does it require a Jewish counselor to affirm the religious beliefs of a Muslim client?” Mr. Tedesco asked. He noted that the American Counseling Association allows its members to choose not to work with terminally ill patients considering end-of-life options. That proves, he said, that counselors are sometimes allowed to refuse to treat clients because of a fraught ethical question — so why not when the question is sexuality, and the counselor is Christian?

What many of the briefs fail to investigate is the role of the counselor or therapist. Is it to “affirm” the client’s beliefs, or to offer support and guidance, even to clients whose practices one may find distasteful or morally wrong? Daniel Mach, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a brief in support of Eastern Michigan, said that the canons of the profession rightly put the needs of clients ahead of the sensibilities of counselors.

“Nobody should be forced to change her religious beliefs or be punished for her faith,” Mr. Mach said. However, he said, referring a client to another counselor is not a neutral act. He pointed out that high school counselors may be the only compassionate adults available to gay, bisexual or transgender youths, and that turning away such a youth in crisis “could be devastating.”

And then here is my column from two weeks earlier, about the increasing aversion, among many evangelical Protestants, to birth control. Good quotation:

The Republican presidential field has produced a lot of babies. There is Mitt Romney, father of five sons. Ron Paul, an obstetrician by training, is also a father of five, and his campaign Web site credits him with bringing 4,000 babies into the world. Newt Gingrich and the recent dropout Rick Perry have only two children each, but Rick Santorum, who has said contraception is “not O.K.,” has seven children, and so does another former candidate, Jon M. Huntsman Jr.

And so far as I can tell, evangelical Christians in South Carolina, who will most likely constitute a majority of voters in Saturday’s primary, don’t think this über-fertility is at all strange. Support for Mr. Santorum may show that Protestants are no longer as troubled by the Roman Catholic objection to birth control.

Certain religious groups tend to have large families, whether for reasons of religious observance, as with some Jews, or because it is culturally approved, as in Mormonism. But 50 years ago, large families were unusual in evangelical Protestantism. A Santorum-size family would have been seen as a marker of exotic, sinister religiosity. Big families were stigmatized: they were for immigrants and Catholics, or for the rural poor.

Also, I suspect—although time will tell, as my kids age—that when your kids are used to declining food in other people's houses (when that food is meat), they have less of a problem declining junk food in those houses. Not that my kids won't have their fill of junk food; our 1-year-old is already bribable with an M&M...

Of course, it is plenty easy to be a fat vegetarian: you could live on pasta smothered in cheese chased by soda (or other versions thereof). And it is plenty easy to be a thin carnivore. But I wonder if Mr. Dreher, Mr. Crunchy Con himself, has considered vegetarianism (even down there in Louisiana).

The original TFA mission was based on a set of four somewhat noble if paternalistic rationales. First, by bringing the elite into the teaching profession, even if temporarily, TFA would burnish it with a much-needed “aura of status and selectivity.” Second, by supplying its recruits to impoverished school districts, both urban and rural, TFA would compensate for the lack of quality teachers willing to work in such challenging settings. And third, although Kopp recognized that most corps members would not remain classroom teachers beyond their two-year commitments, she believed that TFA alums would form the nucleus of a new movement of educational leaders—that their transformative experiences teaching poor children would mold their ambitious career trajectories. Above these three foundational principles loomed a fourth: the mission to relegate educational inequality to the ash heap of history.

Hartman then proceeds to dismantle, or thinks he proceeds to dismantle, each of these four rationales. Here is the beginning of attack #1:

Take the first rationale: that TFA would enhance the image of the teaching profession. On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own. As reported in the New York Times, eighteen percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the twenty-two percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010. Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem.

That last sentence is quite priceless: Hartman is arguing that by bringing people educated at elite schools into the ranks of teachers — and yes, the vast majority of these elite kids do not stay in teaching — the general perception of teaching as a whole goes down. Or something like that. Now, if Hartman is arguing that any time you bring more educated people into a profession, the less educated people in the profession look, well, less educated, that is a claim bordering on truism, and it's banal. What's more, it would seem to work as an argument against bringing a better-educated (or more elite-ly educated) cohort into any profession: "Don't bring in those Harvard-trained doctors — they'll lower the status of the UMass-trained doctors, and thus lower the status of the profession."

But let's grant Hartman a more plausible claim: that by having an elite group of kids drop in for two years, the people who stay in teaching for a career look, somehow, less. The question would then be: in whose eyes? I have never heard a TFA alum bad-mouth former colleagues; to the contrary, most TFA alumni are acutely senstitive to the odds arrayed against career teachers, odds that include (as Hartman argues so cogently) the economically disasterous circumstances of so many students.

And I don't think Hartman could be arguing that TFAers' existence makes more traditional public school teachers look bad in the eyes of the public, since most of the public is deaf to this whole debate. Rather, Hartman seems to be arguing that having elite TFA kids drop into teaching for two years makes career teachers look bad in the eyes of bureaucrats, who then bash unions, etc etc — more on that in a moment. But Hartman also seems to be arguing — he is never clear — that many bureaucrats are excited to have TFAers come into schools because they are looking for anti-union cudgels anyway. So it's not the case that the TFAers then lower career teachers' status in the eyes of bureaucrats (superintendents, etc). I suppose Hartman could find some evidence that TFAers get used as propaganda tools by bureaucrats eager to bash career teachers — but he offers no examples, and what's more I wonder if such propaganda would be effective.

But above all, I would retort, it's not the fault of some kid who signs up to do TFA if some bureaucrat with an anti-union agenda then says nice things about TFA, and disparages career teachers. What kind of logic is that? "Don't go help kids for two years, because there is an off chance that some conservative somewhere might use your potential success to attack career teachers"?

Anyway, back to Hartman's original claim, that TFAers do nothing to enhance the status of the profession: Isn't it possible that the mere fact that elites all over the country now personally know peers who have been public-school teachers, if only for two years, does enhance the status of the profession. Put another way: if I knew as many peers who had done two-year stints in the military as have done two-year stints in TFA, I would have a far more nuanced and fairer opinion of the military! And as I understand it, this was part of Kopp's original thinking: not that TFAers would all stay in the profession, but as they went into whatever their careers were — law, business, education, politics, medicine — they would do so as people who for two years learned a lot about the odds arrayed against public schools. Again: imagine if all Americans had spent two years in the military: would that heighten or lower the quality of debate about military deployment?

OK, claim #2:

The second justification for TFA—that it exists to supply good teachers to schools where few venture to work—has also proven questionable. Though the assertion made some sense in 1990, when many impoverished school districts did in fact suffer from a dearth of teachers, the same is not so easily argued now. Following the economic collapse of 2008, which contributed to school revenue problems nationwide, massive teacher layoffs became the new norm, including in districts where teacher shortages had provided an entry to TFA in the past.

Well, fair enough. Now that economic collapse has tightened the job market, there is less need for programs like TFA to plug gaps. But that doesn't seem a sound reason to attack TFA: "Goldman Sachs has rendered TFA superfluous."

Now #3:

But the third premise for Kopp’s national teacher corps—that it would “create a leadership force for long-term change” in how the nation’s least privileged students are schooled—has been the most destructive. ...

One of the more salient aspects of the so-called “TFA insurgency” was that it operated from the assumption that more resources were not a prerequisite for improving schools. “Schools that transform their students’ trajectories aspire not to equality of inputs,” Kopp declared, “but rather to equality of outputs.” Instead of more resources, underprivileged students needed better teachers. Reformers thus set out to devise a system that hired and retained effective teachers while also driving ineffective ones from the classroom. The TFA network has been crucial in shaping efforts to improve the nation’s teacher force. Kopp’s second book, A Chance to Make History (2011), reads like a primer for such reform measures. Kopp is particularly enamored by high-performing charter schools, which succeed because they do whatever it takes to hire and retain good teachers, a zero-sum game that most schools cannot win without more resources—those dreaded “inputs.” But successful charter schools, Kopp maintains, also stop at nothing to remove bad teachers from the classroom.

Etc. Basically, Hartman is arguing that some TFA leaders, and many people trained by or inspired by TFA, believe in a kind of school reform that he does not believe in. This may be true — and no doubt many of the kids being trained by Illinois State University, where Hartman teaches, have agendas he would disagree with. Many will even go on to do impressive work that some conservative latches onto and uses to further some conservative cause in some way. That hardly argues against education, or Illinois State. Every good program in the world — and every bad program — produces alumni who do things that Hartman (and I, and you) will disagree with.

Hartman is very sly in how he writes about TFA's role in stuff he does not like. He never says, "TFA is a neocon's secret plan to thwart everything I love," but he tries some crafty guilt by association, from his line high up in the piece that "TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement" — my italics; and how would TFA do anything "intentionally"? I think people have intentions, not nonprofits — to his later statement that "TFA’s complicity in education reform insanity does not stop there..." Ah, its complicity.

See, what angers Hartman about TFA seems to be that the wrong people founded it, the wrong people love it, and many of its alumni — like alumni of Illinois State, Yale, Cal State-Chico, etc etc — will do bad things. It's not that the college graduates who go teach for two years have done any harm, but they have been complicit in harm, and some of them are very bad people. The program has a bad smell about it, Hartman believes, even if it may have helped a lot of kids.

Although, actually, Hartman is pretty silent on the question of whether it helps kids. He briefly treats a wide body of research that shows that TFA teachers do slightly better in some areas, but overall are kind of a wash. But of course the truism there is that many cohorts of new teachers — say, those from ed. schools, or those form central New Mexico, or whatever — do averagely. I can't imagine a particular reason to hold averageness against TFA.

And such an argument glosses over, in any event, the lived reality not just of TFA teachers, but also of their students. Qualitatively, if maybe not quantitatively, having elitely educated teachers could pay all sorts of dividends. I don't know, but neither does Hartman, who seems not to have talked to one TFA teacher, or any students taught by TFA teachers. Whether the program is introducing new perspectives into the lives of students, or sensitizing a meaningful cohort of elite college grads to the challenges facing those students, is not of much interest to Hartman.

Given that Hartman never even avers a single harm that TFA might do, except the genetic fallacy that it was founded by bad people so must be bad, it's clear that Hartman is really irked by something else altogether. And he is. What Hartman really believes, we learn at the end, is that education is all eff'd up, and therefore trying to get poor kids to do better at it is totalitarian, or something like that. And TFA is complicit in that. Read on:

...in the KIPP [charter-school] model, [staffed by many TFA alumni,] we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities: for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization. This is made starkly evident in the concluding scene of Waiting for Superman, when young “Anthony,” one of the lucky few, arrives at his charter school with suitcase in hand, since his particular school boards its students. Anthony is rightly ambivalent about giving up his life with his grandparents and friends in order to attend a SEED Foundation school—the prototype in education reform—where 24-hour supervision is the only way to ensure that poor children have a chance at success.

In working to perfect their approach to education, TFA insurgents miss the forest for the trees. They fail to ask big-picture questions. Will their pedagogy of surveillance make for a more humane society? Having spent their formative years in a classroom learning test-taking skills, will their students become good people? Will they know more history? Will they be more empathetic? Will they be better citizens? Will they be more inclined to challenge the meritocracy? Or, as its newest converts, will they be its most fervent disciples? What does it mean that for children born in the Bronx to go to college they must give up their childhoods, however bleak?

Three of my best former students have, to my surprise, been chosen TFA corps members. Although I would never begrudge such hard-won personal victories for my students—well-meaning individuals who hail from decidedly non-privileged backgrounds—in the future I am determined to strongly encourage those students interested in becoming TFA corps members to read Paul Goodman’s  Compulsory Mis-Education (1964), in my opinion the single-best critique of the kind of education that the TFA insurgency seeks to perfect.

Goodman’s disdain for what the corporate-organized society did to young people was first made apparent in his 1959 bestseller, Growing Up Absurd, a response to the “curious” fact that two of the most analyzed phenomena of the 1950s—the “disgrace of the Organized System” and the problem of disaffected youth—were given mutually exclusive treatment. Goodman combined these two popular strands of social commentary—a critique of the bureaucratic society with an analysis of juvenile delinquency—and argued that the former caused the latter. In Compulsory Mis-Education, Goodman extended this general critique of the “organized society” to a more specific attack on its socialization method: compulsory schooling. Schooling as socialization, which he described as “‘vocational guidance’ to fit people wherever they are needed in the productive system,” troubled Goodman in means and ends. He both loathed the practice of adjusting children to society and despised the social regime in which children were being adjusted to—“our highly organized system of machine production and its corresponding social relations.” For Goodman, compulsory schooling thus prepared “kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them.”

So there we have it. At the end, the problem is not that TFAers are failing, but that they might succeed — and succeed in bringing poor kids into a system whose assumptions, and one assumes results, Hartman does not approve of. That this system is also the system that could get poor kids to college, and then into decent-paying jobs, maybe into the middle-class, maybe out of violent neighborhoods ... well, no matter. Hartman will have them unschooled, or home-schooled, or fantasy-schooled. They will resist bourgeois blandishments. They will be ubermenschen, untouched by TFA or charter schools like KIPP or any sort of standardized testing.

Here I should say that I share Hartman's basic concerns about public schooling. My eldest daughter is in kindergarten, and I worry about the No Child Left Behind testing regime. I worry, too, about the drill-and-kill model at many charter schools, which middle-class parents don't want for their own kids but prescribe for poor kids. I am sympathetic to a lot of what Hartman says. But the reality of TFA is a lot of college grads, kids who could go straight to law school or consulting firms or whatever, pausing for two years to see some of the world they might not otherwise see, and often doing great good for children in the process. Many of them — I know for a fact — then stay in the field of education. (In fact, I am curious if Hartman has sought out good statistics to back up his claim that "...TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance—or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership...." How many of these TFAers end up in finance? A higher percentage than their non-TFA classmates?)

Hartman does not like the role TFA plays in education politics; and he may be right about the politics. But his reasoning is poor, and I am confident that the slack thinking he brings to TFA he would not allow if brought to bear on unions or even, I suspect, the military. I think that if he were defending the former, or attacking the latter, he would use examples. He would think about people on the ground, not just the higher-ups. He might even report. His essay is powerful, but I am saddened at the thought of how much more powerful it could be.

Bil Browning and his boyfriend were homeless. To protect the identity of the boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend), Mr. Browning will not say specifically where, just that it was in “southern Indiana,” about 20 years ago. But he is very explicit about who refused to give them shelter.

“The Salvation Army refused to help us,” Mr. Browning recalls, “unless we broke up and then left the ‘sinful homosexual lifestyle’ behind. We slept on the street, and they didn’t help when we declined to break up at their insistence.”

Mr. Browning’s boyfriend was wearing a “Silence = Death” AIDS pin on his jacket, which must have tipped off the Salvation Army worker. “He told us we needed to be saved,” Mr. Browning says. “If we were willing to attend church services, he could help. We would have to break up, only one of us could stay in the shelter, and if there was room for the other, he would have to be on the opposite side of the room, and we wouldn’t even look at each other.”

Now Mr. Browning, a writer and gay rights advocate, is using his blog to publicize a decade-old boycott of the Salvation Army. The boycott’s proponents say those who drop money into the Salvation Army’s ubiquitous red kettles at Christmastime, or shop in its thrift stores, often know little about the organization’s evangelical Christianity, its opposition to homosexuality, and its occasional attempts to influence public policy on gay rights.

Then, back in New Haven, Googling about tonight, I find this interesting back and forth between Gornick and Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan about Gornick's slight twisting of the truth in her memoir. It's worth a listen.

Now back to John Casey's Room for Improvement.

And I've been watching The Forsyte Saga on Netflix streaming. Having figured out this is not the The Forsyte Saga, that there have been other TV versions, and I am somehow watching a recent and less celebrated one ... well, I am enjoying it no less.

December 22, 2011

Hitchens vs. Higher Power?

Even some of the critical commentary on Hitchens’s passing pays tribute to his atheism, which no doubt shocked readers of Vanity Fair.

But the ultimate irony seems to have gone over everyone’s head.

When I first learned that Hitchens was diagnosed with an excruciating and terminal cancer, it caused me to doubt my atheism.

Could it be merely chance?

The news came just as Hitchens was about to go on a book tour for his memoir.

It was as if he was setting out on his victory lap when the adulating crowds were supposed to fawn over him and—wham!—his legs were lopped off at the kneecaps.

Could it be the hidden hand of a Jehovah?

If I still had doubts, the events of the past week dispelled them.

First Hitchens passed.

If that wasn’t burden enough to bear, the next day Vaclav Havel imploded.

The deep thinkers among us were now beside themselves with grief.

But then, on the third day, Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket.

Was this a practical joke, and who was the joker?

Biblical scholars report that divine interventions usually come in threes.

Moe, Larry, Curly.

Christopher, Vaclav, Kim.

I cannot help but see in this otherwise improbable sequence a divine intelligence at play.

The irony could not be more perfect: the god that the vindictive but witty Mr. Hitchens made a career scoffing at turns out to be…vindictive but witty.

But I will leave the last word to a close buddy of Hitchens’ who is himself a true believer.

When Saddam Hussein was executed, Tony Blair remarked: “I do not believe in capital punishment, but I think the world is a better place without him.”

When I heard that Hitchens was dead, I took a deep breath.

The air felt cleaner, as if after a 40-day and 40-night downpour.

***

I get no satisfaction from Hitchens’s passing.

Although he was the last to know it, every death is a tragedy, if only for the bereft child—or, as in the case of Cindy Sheehan, bereft parent—left behind.

But, still, life is full of surprises.

No one should be too smug in his certitudes.

And if you’ve made a career of pissing on other people’s mostly innocuous beliefs, should it surprise that outside the tiny tent called Vanity Fair, your memory stinks of urine?

If you need even more Hitch, better to read this.