What I Learn from My Students

I’ve spent the last semester grousing about the various deficiencies of my current undergraduate class–they’re disinterested in the world around them, they can’t write a coherent or grammatical sentence and they clearly have no idea how research differs from stream-of-consciousness-essay.

Fairness, however, impels me to note that my graduate students continue to teach me a lot.

What prompted this post were statistics contained in a student’s paper. She chose to analyze Indiana’s aggressive school privatization efforts. (For clarity’s sake, I should note here that charter schools are public schools, and thus not the focus of her analysis.)

Opponents of school privatization have emphasized the financial benefits to private contractors, and the connections of those contractors to officials in positions to enrich them. Tony Bennett and Mitch Daniels worked tirelessly for policies that–surprise!–benefitted donors and cronies; several large corporations that actively lobby for school privatization have an obvious financial interest in that outcome.  That being the case, it isn’t unreasonable to conclude that corporate profit motives are helping to drive this particular policy approach, and many observers have leveled that claim.

My student’s paper suggested a different set of motivations. She noted that the rhetoric of school choice in Indiana focuses heavily on the right of parents to send their children to a private, religious school. (She reports that public arguments elsewhere have revolved far more around educational quality.) She then goes on to share some illuminating numbers.

The Indiana Department of Education publishes enrollment data of accredited non-public schools (only accredited non-public schools are eligible to receive the Choice Scholarship funds), and according to the list of accredited non-public schools for the year 2013, 95.01% of these schools are religiously affiliated, or 310 schools out of 326 (IDOE, 2013). Of the sixteen schools that are not religiously affiliated, two are military high schools, five are alternative high schools for at-risk and troubled youth, and four are for children with special needs or disabilities (IDOE, 2013). Of the 310 religiously affiliated accredited schools in Indiana in 2013, only five are not affiliated with some denomination of Christianity (three are Islamic private schools and two are Hebrew private schools) (IDOE, 2003). For parents looking to pull their children out of public schools in favor of private schools, these eleven schools are likely too specialized to be considered a choice for any child who does not fit into the mission of those schools. The five remaining non-religious private schools are college preparatory schools, three of which are located in the Indianapolis metropolitan area and the other two in Evansville.

Apparently, the real “choice” parents are being given is between a private religious education and a public secular one (provided by a school system increasingly starved for funds).

Whether that is the “choice” privatization proponents really want to offer is an open–and interesting– question.

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The More Things Change….

I was going through my office files the other day in preparation for my Sabbatical, and came across a folder of quotations I’d kept. It has literally been years since I’ve looked at them, and I was particularly struck by two quotes from Margaret Chase Smith. Smith was the Republican Senator from Maine who was the first female member of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. She is probably best known for being the first of his peers to openly criticize the tactics employed by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Her words are as applicable today as they were when she uttered them.

“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny–fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”

“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism–The right to criticize. The right to hold unpopular beliefs. The right to protest. The right to independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood.”

I met Margaret Chase Smith once, at an event in her honor, when she was quite old and no longer in office. I was thrilled. She was a gracious woman, an impressive role model, and an exemplary and well-informed public servant.

The women in today’s GOP–Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin–would be incapable of understanding Smith (I doubt if either of them could define “calumny”). They should be embarrassed to occupy the same legislative chambers, but they are clearly incapable of embarrassment as well.

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An Important Clarification

In a recent column in the Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch, Duquesne Law professor Bruce Ledewitz makes an important point about the Affordable Care Act and contraceptive coverage –a point that has gotten lost in all the language of victimization and self-righteousness: religious institutions are not required to provide contraception and other objected-to medical coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Instead, the religious institution is required only to forward a list of its employees to its insurance carrier, which must then provide the coverage itself if the employees want it, without cost to the employer.

That, boys and girls, is what has given rise to the assertion that the employers’ religious liberty is being violated–or “burdened” excessively, to use the terminology of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). RFRA was passed in response to a series of Supreme Court decisions rejecting claims that obedience to laws of general application–laws against drug use, zoning and historic preservation laws and the like– shouldn’t apply in situations where they prevented people from acting on their religious beliefs. (For example, the Court held that Native Americans could believe in smoking peyote as part of a religious ritual, but they couldn’t act on that belief.)

As Ledewitz notes, the claim that having to send a list to your insurance carrier “burdens” your religious exercise strains credulity.

To see how extreme this position is, imagine that the Obama administration had offered yet another compromise: that the religious institution need only offer a list of its employees to the government and the government would provide health insurance ecoverage. If religious employers had really wanted to compromise, they could have lobbied for this option. But, undoubtedly, they would have objected even to this requirement…..

Even closely held for-profit corporations have claimed exemption under RFRA, as if these corporations had religious consciences. The owners of these corporations assert that their corporations are alter egos of their human shareholders, when, in fact, the whole point of the corporate form is to shield the shareholders from the debts of the businesses. When it comes to money, the corporations and the owners are quite separate.

RFRA was never intended to operate in this maximalist fashion. Under the free-exercise-religion claims that RFRA replaced, religious plaintiffs usually lost their cases against the obligations of generally applicable laws. And even today most religious believers find ways to compromise with government programs and requirements with which they disagree. Catholic judges, for example, for years have granted divorces, even to Catholic couples. These judges have not asked for exemptions in these cases.

But instead of compromise and goodwill, the Affordable Care Act has provoked overheated rhetoric and over-the-top objections on the part of religious institutions and individuals, many of whom opposed the act from the beginning and are now continuing their political campaign in the courts.

Commentators have noted the hypocrisy of Hobby Lobby’s assertion of religious objections–it happily does business in China despite that country’s one child policy and forced abortions. Given the tenuous connection of employers to contraceptive coverage availability under the Obama administration compromise, it’s abundantly clear that the objections are motivated by politics, not religion.
But even if the objections were sincere, where would it stop? If your religion teaches that women are to be submissive, can you be exempted from compliance with EEO regulations? If your theology holds that blacks are inferior (as Mormon teachings did until the late 1970s), can you ignore civil rights laws? As Ledewitz warns,
 If RFRA really means what the plaintiffs in the Affordable Care Act litigation claim that it means — that religious believers are free to invoke the protections of the act no matter how minuscule their legal obligations appear to be and despite a commercial and even profit-making context — then RFRA is unworkable and will inevitably be repealed. If that occurs, religious believers will have inadvertently undermined the very religious liberty that they now invoke and that America rightly prizes.

American law has made numerous concessions to religious belief, but this is a bridge too far. As the old saying goes, pigs get fed–but hogs get slaughtered.
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Ironies of the Season

A former student of mine, Derek Thomas, is a policy analyst at the Institute for Working Families–a local think-tank that focuses on policies affecting (duh!) working families. He has a recent post at the Institute’s website documenting the toll taken on those families by the ongoing sequester.

I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt as I read the catalog of the sequester’s consequences for my fellow Hoosiers, not because I consider myself culpable (I didn’t vote for those responsible, nor did I support the use of this meat-ax approach to budgeting), but because I hadn’t really thought about the sequester in such concrete terms.

Most Americans who share my good fortune–still middle-class, still employed, still able to make my mortgage payments–think of the sequester in terms of policy, assuming we think of it at all. It was stupid and cowardly, evidence of Congressional dysfunction. We haven’t thought about it in terms of Indiana children thrown out of Head Start, or elderly folks who aren’t getting hot Meals from Meals on Wheels, or the landlords and tenants alike who no longer receive housing vouchers both depend upon…let alone the multiple other hardships detailed in Derek’s report.

Worse still, the full impact of the sequester hasn’t yet hit.

While low-income working families are struggling with the consequences of decisions made by people those decisions wouldn’t affect, our news media has focused on the Black Friday near-riots at big-box stores, as shoppers fought each other for the presumed “bargains” on display.

What was really on display was the disconnect between the “still-haves” and the “no-longer-haves.”

Also on display was the evident lack of concern about the latter category by those of us in the former one.

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Some Unsolicited Advice to the Warriors

It’s “War on Christmas” time again, so let me suggest a tactic that might make those who don’t appreciate the insulting nature of wishing someone “Happy Holidays” take the Christian Warriors more seriously.

Listen, guys, if you really want to make the case that everyone needs to acknowledge the sanctity of Christmas and implicitly, the cultural and moral superiority of your belief system, here’s a great way to do that: start acting like Christians. Not just in December, either, but all year.

It’s really hard for Jews, Muslins, Pagans, et al to respect your demands for obeisance when you blithely and consistently ignore the rules upon which your claims of Christian superiority are based.

When people see you refusing to pay your employees a living wage, when they see you get all pissy about the very idea of giving poor folks access to health insurance, that doesn’t look very Christian to them.

When elected officials like Mike Pence publicly parade their piety but then screw over  400,000 Hoosiers by refusing to use federal dollars to expand Medicaid–all the while pontificating about the need for poor people to take “personal responsibility”–you can’t blame other folks for wondering whether they missed that place in your bible where Jesus refused to share loaves and fishes with the irresponsible masses.

When you make shit up in order to bolster your political arguments, when you get oh-so-offended because someone wished you well without including the magic words, when you wrap yourself in a blanket of victimization whenever a court doesn’t allow you to impose your beliefs on people who don’t share them….well, it gets really hard to see the light of Christian charity in your behavior.

Maybe you’d have better luck–and earn more respect– if you lived in accordance with the religion you want to cram down everyone else’s throat.

Just a thought.

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