From the Archives: Arlington schools need history bridge (1996)

This article appeared in The Washington Times on December 4, 1996, under the headline "Arlington schools need history bridge." At the time, I was serving on the Social Studies Advisory Committee for the Arlington County Public Schools. The committee monitored and made recommendations about the teaching of history, government, economics, sociology, and other social sciences in elementary, middle, and high schools.

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In his 1978 essay, "Teaching History Backwards," Ernest Lefever noted that "most high school seniors probably know more about ancient Greece and Rome and the voyages of Columbus than about the recent events that have shaped the outlook of their parents."

Mr. Lefever went on to say that learning history "is vital for any people. It is especially so for the United States, which is a democracy, a superpower, and the leader of the free world. The exercise of U.S. power and influence or the failure to exercise it has global reverberations. A responsible American citizen must understand this and must also be aware of the external dangers that threaten our freedom or that of our allies."

Rick Sincere and Ernest Lefever

The global scene has changed tremendously in the past 20 years - symbolized vividly by the fall of the Berlin Wall - but this perspective is still valid today.

To address the problem of how the recent past affects our present more saliently than the distant past, even while schools often fail to teach about recent events, Mr. Lefever suggested "teaching history backwards," starting with the past 30 years, then moving on to more distant developments that have affected the United States and world affairs.

For the past several years, the Social Studies Advisory Committee has recommended that the Arlington Public Schools add a fourth year of social studies to the required high school curriculum.

Specifically, we have recommended that a second year of world history be offered in grade 10, largely to compensate for the phenomenon that many of us have experienced - one year of world history is simply too short to cover all of the developments in the 20th century. We commonly experience this as "not getting past World War II" in a typical history course.

Arlington schools now face an additional problem: The new state Standards of Learning require an assessment at grade 11, which may become a barrier to graduation, just like the "literacy passport." We felt that something should be done to prepare our students for that test in a way that also would fulfill our long-held desire for a fourth required course in social studies.

In response, the curriculum development staff has recommended a new 10th-grade course called "The World Since `The War to End All Wars.'" This staff proposal, which has been forwarded to the School Board for final approval by Superintendent Arthur Gosling, meets the criteria set by the Social Studies Advisory Committee. The course is precisely what our committee members had in mind when we made our repeated recommendations for a fourth year of social studies. As envisioned, it combines history, geography and political science and brings students up to date in regard to the important events and trends of our own era.

A course like this builds a conceptual bridge to the 21st century and helps students find a common language to communicate with their parents and grandparents, who lived through these events and trends.

Some parents and students object to this change in the curriculum - which would begin in the 1998-1999 school year - because it reduces elective opportunities for students, particularly art or music courses. True, the number of electives available during 10th grade would fall from three to two, but the negative impact - if there is any at all - would fall on students taking social studies electives, primarily psychology (359 students), sociology (173), advanced placement European history (143) and economics (25). Out of 1,100 10th-grade students, only a few dozen - if any at all - would have to forgo art or music classes.

One reason the School Board is considering this curriculum change now is precisely to give fair warning to parents and middle school students that in two years they will have to meet this new requirement, and that they should plot out their course of electives with this in mind. Those desiring to take art, music or advanced placement European history can plan on taking them in later grades, or can use one of the other two 10th-grade elective slots for these courses.

If the Virginia Board of Education makes the 11th-grade social studies assessment a barrier to graduation, but the School Board fails to make this curriculum change, we could face major problems down the road. Should any Arlington students fail the test because no preparation was available in 10th grade, our whole school system will be poorer for it.

In designing this new course and considering all other options, the staff aimed for minimal disruption to the current curriculum, as well as the lowest cost to taxpayers.

The new 20th century history course is being added to the high school program of studies with almost surgical precision, designed to meet both state-mandated requirements and the desire of Arlingtonians to prepare our students from the classes of 2001 and beyond to be better, more informed citizens.

* The writer is co-chairman of the Social Studies Advisory Committee for Arlington Public Schools.

From the Archives: 'School Training for Civil Defense' (1981)

Some background may shed light on this 1981 article, retrieved from my paper archives.  Fortunately the story behind it has already been told, in a remembrance of celebrated debate coach James J. Unger, which I posted in April 2008:

The high school debate topic the previous year (1981-82) was "Resolved: That the federal government should establish minimum educational standards for elementary and secondary schools in the United States." I came up with the idea, based upon research I was doing in the real world -- if the world of Washington think tanks can be described as "real" -- that we should write a case about civil defense education in elementary and secondary schools.

The problem with this idea was that there was little, if any, information available about civil defense education. (There was some material from the 1960s, but nothing recent and little that was usable by debaters.) But I was convinced this could be a winning case.

So I asked Professor Unger, "What do you do when something is topical but so obscure that there is nothing written about it that you can use as evidence for inherency?" He replied that there was not much to do in that situation, other than to intensify your research and find the evidence you need.

My solution: since I had already had one article published on the topic of civil defense -- appearing in the Washington Star on October 10, 1980, months after I submitted it and based on research I did during the summer 1980 forensics institute -- and had subsequently become an officer in the American Civil Defense Association, I could just write another one, with a focus on education, that could be used as evidence to support our case.

And that's what I did. I submitted the article to several newspapers, and it was published in the New York Tribune (a sister newspaper to The Washington Times), just days before the institute tournament. We inserted the appropriate quotations into the case (not citing me by name), held others in reserve for second affirmative and rebuttals, and moved forward.

The case was relatively successful, with two of my teams making it into the elimination rounds. After the last round that one of the teams lost, they told me that my qualifications as a source had become an issue in the debate. The judge from that round added: "Your boys defended you valiantly, but they lost on other issues."

This is a long tale meant to be background of something that happened a couple of years later. As it was told to me, late one night while preparing for a tournament, members of the Georgetown debate team had hit a brick wall, unable to find the evidence they needed to complete a brief they were working on. Professor Unger popped up and said, "Well, why don't we just pull a Rick Sincere?" -- meaning, why not write an article and get it published in a reputable newspaper or journal? I don't think they ever followed through on that suggestion, but just the idea that my name became associated with a new debate tactic was enough to warm my ego.

This article was published in The News World, a New York City daily newspaper (later called the New York City Tribune), on July 28, 1981:

Richard Sincere

School Training for Civil Defense

Perhaps no aspect of the strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union is ignored more than civil defense and emergency preparedness. Americans waste too much effort in debates which obfuscate strategic issues by statistical manipulation of throw-weights, megatonnages, and MIRV capabilities. Public and policymakers alike are blind to the reality of the strategic balance: Deterrence of nuclear war depends as much on the willingness and ability to survive such a conflict as it does on the technical capacity to fight the battle.

Soviet political and military policies do not reflect a frightened belief in the universal destruction of nuclear war. Instead, they maintain that nuclear weapons are instruments for war-fighting. In many ways, Soviet leaders view nuclear weapons as extensions of conventional war-fighting techniques; Soviet military literature categorizes war by who does the fighting, not by the weapons which they use. Most importantly, Soviet military strategy is fundamentally a survival-oriented strategy.

One result of this thinking has been the establishment of a nationwide civil defense network. The chief of Soviet civil defense is an army general, filling an office equivalent to our own secretary of the Army. The Soviets treat civil defense as a co-equal branch of the military. On the other hand, in the United States responsibility for civil defense lies buried in an obscure bureau of the Department of Commerce called the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Which country takes its self-protection more seriously?

In accord with the principle of protecting their people from the ravages of nuclear war, the Soviets have launched an extensive training program in all public schools from elementary to university levels, and as continuing education industrial plants and communities. Towns and villages celebrate “civil defense days” as holidays, with sports competitions and games geared toward teaching the citizens survival techniques. And if some Soviet citizens scoff at these methods, they will at least have some skills to draw on in an emergency.

A widely-circulated Soviet civil defense manual state: “Civil defense training in the public schools occupies an important place in preparing the people of our country for protection against weapons of mass destruction.” In contrast, the editor of the Journal of Civil Defense told me recently that “civil defense education has been badly neglected in the United States in the past few years. With no initiative from the higher levels, it apparently has fallen off to almost zero.”

This attitude seems unlikely to change. The shame of this neglect is that civil defense survival methods are so easy to teach. Generally, Soviet schools spend no more than 15-20 minutes each week on it, mostly in conjunction with sportsmanlike competition. One civil defense game involves nearly 20 million children each summer. The final match of this game, called “Summer Lightning,” is played in Leningrad as an object of intense national interest.

In the United States, inaccessibility to civil defense literature is the greatest obstacle to survival training. A good beginning for civil defense instruction in America’s public schools would be for the Department of Education to sponsor distribution of survival handbooks (such as Dr. Cresson Kearny’s “Nuclear War Survival Skills,” published in 1979) to all school libraries. Such a minimum requirement would allow individual school districts to expand civil defense education as much as they like, especially if assistance from the Department of Defense and FEMA were available.

Civil defense education will immeasurably increase the maintenance of a peaceful deterrent to nuclear war. As long as no civil defense training is available to United States citizens, our country remains a willing hostage to Soviet weapons with little hope of survival or recovery. Survival plays a major role in Soviet strategy and plays almost no role in our own. To neglect such a vital aspect of the strategic nuclear balance is to assure our own destruction.

Richard Sincere is research assistant for church and society at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. A member of the American Civil Defense Association, he also holds a degree in international affairs from Georgetown University.

Subsequent to this and other newspaper articles on civil defense, I testified on the topic before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, discussed it on many television and radio shows, and published a journal article that was reprinted in pamphlet form by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which included a foreword by actor Lorne Greene. It was a central focus of my professional life in the 1980s but faded into the background after I finished my master's degree at the LSE and the Cold War came to an end. Civil defense and nuclear weapons policy took a back seat to Africa policy.

As an added bonus, here is a 1950s-era government training (propaganda?) video about school-based civil defense education.

Despite the jokes about it, civil defense in the schools was much more than "duck and cover."

Adventures in the Land of the Mathematically Challenged

A letter to the editor in today's Daily Progress tries to draw attention to the problem of expensive housing in the Charlottesville area.

The letter writers, however, display a sad sort of incompetence when it comes to their grasp of everyday mathematics.


They explain that

according to the U.S. Census, the median value of owner-occupied housing in Charlottesville from 2008-2012 was $286,400. With the median household income in Charlottesville at $44,535, a mortgage on the median home value is likely more than half of your monthly net income.

That may all be accurate but the howler follows in the next paragraph:

Homes under the median value are rare, and are often no more than 800 square feet and/or in complete disrepair.

The second part of that sentence may or may not be true, but the first part is demonstrably false.

It is not possible that homes "under the median value are rare," since, by definition, 50 percent of all homes are under the median value. (The other 50 percent are, by definition, above the median value.)

Perhaps the writers were trying to say that homes available for purchase that are also below the median value are rare, but that is not what they said.

Would this kind of innumeracy (mathematical illiteracy) be solved by adopting the Common Core, or made worse by it? Or would this demonstration of innumeracy be solved more simply by having a good copy editor?

2014 Jefferson Muzzle awards have been announced

Violators of freedom of expression are the "winners" of the 2014 Jefferson Muzzle Awards from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville. Now in their 23rd year, the Muzzles are announced to coincide with Mr. Jefferson's birthday (April 13).

Josh Wheeler

The ten recipients this year include three educational institutions, three state government agencies, and four federal government agencies. They were announced by the Center's executive director, Josh Wheeler, via a press release on Thursday, April 10.

The awards include implicit criticism of the White House press office for limiting access to the news media to even trivial events and of the Department of Justice for "secretly seiz[ing] dozens of phone records of the Associated Press and falsely label[ing] Fox News reporter James Rosen a criminal 'co-conspirator' in order to obtain a search warrant for the reporter’s phone records and emails."

The National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Homeland Security are joint recipients of a Muzzle

For causing an online retailer to remove from its website a Minnesota man’s products satirizing various government entities on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and other items. Zazzle.com pulled the items from its marketplace after receiving cease and desist letters from the NSA and Homeland Security. Among the items removed were products featuring a variation of the NSA seal along with the statement “The NSA: The only part of government that actually listens.”

The North Carolina General Assembly police are cited for arresting a reporter who was covering a protest at the state capitol, while the Tennessee General Assembly gets dinged for criminalizing undercover reporting at agricultural facilities.

The Kansas Board of Regents receives a 2014 Muzzle award because

Following controversial statements by a member of the University of Kansas faculty on his personal Twitter account, the Kansas Board of Regents (the governing board of the state’s public universities) adopted a social media policy that allows for the firing of a faculty member for using social media in such a way that “impairs…harmony among co-workers,” or that the university’s chief executive officer deems “contrary to the best interest of the university.”

A Florida high school principal gets an award for cutting off the microphone of a graduation speaker who was stumbling over his words and then denying the student an opportunity to accept his diploma with the rest of the class. His reason? He thought the stumbling was an attempt to go "off script" on the approved text of the speech.

The principal of Pemberton High School in New Jersey wins a Muzzle for censoring two articles in the student newspaper, and then forbidding the same newspaper from publishing an article about censorship.

My favorite 2014 Muzzle concerns a case that received a lot of publicity last September. At Modesto Junior College in California, a student was refused permission to distribute copies of the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day. Here's the Thomas Jefferson Center's citation:

Campus police confronted Robert van Tuinen outside the student center as he handed out free copies of the Constitution to his fellow students on September 17—Constitution Day. Officers informed van Tuinen that school policy only permitted literature to be distributed within a tiny designated spot on campus, and only then if scheduled several days in advance.

If you missed the widely-distributed video of this incident, here it is:

To hear Thomas Jefferson Center director Josh Wheeler talk about how the Muzzle Award winners are determined, check out this interview on The Score.

Cross-posted from Bearing Drift (April 9, 2014).

@rick_sincere | facebook.com/ricksincere

From the Archives: 'West Side Racist?'

In a recent commentary on controversies surrounding sports team names, Winston Jones wrote in the Douglas County (Ga.) Sentinel:

Our society has gotten too picky and thin-skinned so that too many people are offended by too many things. And too many people are running circles around themselves to try to be politically correct on everything. Don't take life so seriously.

That's the point I tried to make in an opinion piece I wrote 14 years ago in reaction to complaints about a New England high school's production of West Side Story. The article appeared on November 21, 1999, in the Daily News of Bowling Green, Kentucky, under the headline, "West Side racist? - Objections to classic play is a sad commentary on our times." The only other place it is available on the Web is here.

This text, however, is more accessible.

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Word comes from Amherst, Massachusetts, that some students and parents object to a planned production of the classic 1957 musical play, West Side Story, at the local high school. They are insisting that it be canceled.

The local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette noted in its Nov. 11 edition that a petition presented to the school board with over 150 signatures states: "The play continues to generate negative stereotypes of Puerto Ricans in society and perpetuates the racism that we as students have been working so hard to eliminate in our school and community." Other complaints cited the play's use of violence as a way to solve problems.

This is yet another case of ill-informed cultural critics failing to see the forest for the trees. Anyone who has seen West Side Story - or performed in it - cannot help but be touched by its message against prejudice and violence. The message is not subtle. It is not hidden. It is not difficult to grasp.

Like a previous protests against such literary works as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the complainers seem not to understand that in order to present a theme that condemns racial prejudice and stereotyping, it is necessary also to present unsavory characters and dialogue that express the ideas and conditions to author wishes to condemn. Because these types of protests are successful, students are denied an opportunity for fruitful exploration of some of the complex and sad problems faced by our society.


West Side Story is itself based upon an earlier classic, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In its original concept, it was called East Side Story and its focus was to be on a conflicted Catholic-Jewish relationship. As creators Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents (and later Stephen Sondheim) moved forward on the project, they became aware of the tensions in Los Angeles between Americans and Mexican immigrants and in New York's West Side between native English speakers and recent migrants from Puerto Rico. They decided to reset their play in this environment.

But does it "perpetuate stereotypes"? Does it inflame racial or ethnic tensions? Hardly. As Ethan Mordden notes in the chapter on West Side Story in his history of the Broadway musical in the 1950's, Coming Up Roses, "West Side Story is about real people: real life, real love and something is possible, for all the despair."

In Amherst, one alumna said the possibility of her high school presenting West Side Story is "humiliating." A parent, Elizabeth Capifali (a doctoral candidate in the multicultural education at the University of Massachusetts), called it "a very racist play" that is "replete with racial discrimination, creating negative images of Puerto Ricans and poor European immigrants."

Which European immigrants? The characters in the play are all "Americans" - but the ones who speak English and originally lived in New York come off looking much worse, morally speaking, than the Americans who speak Spanish and come from Puerto Rico. It is the "Anglos" who are unwelcoming, disrespectful and hostile toward their new neighbors. It is the "natives" who would rather fight the Puerto Ricans than work and play alongside them. The "natives" are blustery Archie-Bunkers-in-training, with a violent, gangster-like bent. The Puerto Rican characters - also Americans, as they don't hesitate to remind us, and their adversaries - simply want to make a better life for themselves. What kind of negative stereotype is that?

Bowling Green Daily News, November 21, 1999

Aside from the play's message, which can only be missed by someone wearing blinders and earplugs, it is a landmark of the American stage that deserves to be seen and performed by young people who wish to be culturally literate.

West Side Story was cutting-edge in 1957, yet seems somewhat old-fashioned today. (This was my reaction to a London revival earlier this year [1999] that recreated the original production, including the sets and costumes.) Still, students of the theatre recognize its innovations: in music and lyrics, in its focus on young people to the exclusion of adults, in its daring realism in a medium that relies on fantasy. Its progeny include Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Sweeney Todd, and Ragtime. To deny members of the Amherst Regional High School community an opportunity to participate in, observe and learn from West Side Story is petty and barbarous.

We can only hope that the level-headed faculty, students, and school board members stand up to these philistines. The show must go on.

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For more discussion about West Side Story, check out these videos of a post-screening discussion about the movie from the 2008 Virginia Film Festival.

Part I:


Part II:

Victoria's Secret Elementary School

Year after year, as Virginia's annual "tax free" back-to-school shopping weekend rolls around, I find a reason to take aim at the program and set phasers to mock.

In 2011, for example, I pointed out on Examiner.com how the tax-free holiday is "more complicated than necessary":

Whatever its merits, the sales-tax holiday’s framework is far more complicated than it needs to be. The Virginia Department of Taxation provides a lengthy list of those items that are eligible and others that are ineligible for the sales tax exemption through the weekend. It would have been much simpler for the General Assembly to decree that all consumer items priced at $100 or less would be tax-exempt for the 72-hour period of the tax holiday.

Instead, the list offers a higgledy-piggledy mix of inconsistencies, in which “athletic supporters” are eligible items, but “cleated or spiked athletic shoes” are not. Computers and computer peripherals (like printers) are ineligible, but “all calculators, including those with printing capabilities” are eligible for the exemption.

Some eligible items have little or no relation to school supplies: choir and altar clothing; diapers, children and adult, including disposable diapers; and wedding apparel, including veils, to name a few.

That led to an interview with the Newsplex in Charlottesville in which I noted:

"We have these weird combinations where an athletic supporter is tax exempted but athletic shoes with cleats are not."

My solution?

"Simplify it, simplify it, simplify it."

Sincere suggests tax breaks for anything $100 or less across the board, not just school.

"Easy to understand, much easier for our retailers who have to program their computers."

As far back as 2006, on the occasion of the first such sales-tax holiday in Virginia, I made the same recommendation:

The easiest, most logical, most consumer- and business-friendly thing to do for the tax holiday would simply have been to decree that on this particular three-day weekend, all items with a retail price of $100 or less would be tax-exempt. That would be simple to program into stores' computers, and it would be simple for the average customer -- that is, taxpayer -- to understand.

Then in 2008, I asked:

How about this idea? A tax-free year. Is that too much to hope for?

These reminiscences are prompted by a report by Watchdog.org's Virginia bureau, which points out another ridiculous anomaly in the list of acceptably tax-free items:

Planning on buying your daughter some sexy lingerie for her first day back to school this fall?

Well, now you can — free from Virginia state sales tax, thanks to this weekend’s back-to-school clothing and supplies tax holiday.

But, if you’re planning on purchasing some new shin guards for your same soccer superstar daughter who plays on her school’s team, forget it.

That isn’t exempt from the state sales tax during the Friday-through Sunday tax holiday, because state officials decided that doesn’t fall under the category of “clothing.”

Watchdog.org also points to a compelling "top ten list" of reasons that explain why sales-tax holidays are a flawed idea, if not actually counterproductive, courtesy of the Tax Foundation. It's a PDF but well worth the read.

This year's back-to-school sales-tax holiday begins Friday, August 2, and extends through Barack Obama's birthday on Sunday, August 4.

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Graduation Day at PVCC

Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC) held its 37th annual commencement exercises on Friday, May 14.  Nearly 500 students became alumni at a hilltop ceremony that ended just in time for a harsh thunderstorm to blow across the Charlottesville area; the first raindrops fell within minutes of the end of the recessional and the beginning of the punch-and-pinwheel reception under tents near the college's main academic building.

Virginia's new secretary of education, Gerard Robinson, was the featured graduation speaker.  Robinson is himself an alumnus of a community college (El Camino Community College in California) and he also has a bachelor's degree from Howard University and a master's degree in education from Harvard.  Before taking on his responsibilities as a member of Governor Bob McDonnell's cabinet, Robinson was president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), a national organization advocating family choice in education.

The student speaker at the ceremony was Joshua Robert Mlcoch of Lovingston in Nelson County, who earned two degrees from PVCC -- one in liberal arts, the other in computer science.  Acknowledging the threatening weather, Mlcoch began his remarks by saying, "I come with thunder and lightning."

The commencement ceremony began with the national anthem, sung by PVCC student James A. Tubbs:

Secretary Robinson was introduced by J. Walter Levering, chair o the Piedmont Virginia Community College Board. Robinson was an ideal graduation speaker, as his remarks lasted only about 8 minutes.

Joshua Mlcoch was introduced by Dr. John R. Donnelly, PVCC's vice president for instruction and student services. Donnelly noted how impressed he was by Mlcoch's ubiquity on the PVCC campus and remarked upon similarities between himself and the student speaker. Mlcoch also kept his speech short, a model for such addresses, regardless of whether the weather is threatening or not:

NBC29 has a short report on the PVCC commencement here. Saturday's Daily Progress report is here, and the Newsplex report, including video, is here.

UPDATE, June 2:  My interview with Virginia Secretary of Education Gerard Robinson is now available for reading on Examiner.com.




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Video of 'Locked Out' Panel Discussion

A powerful documentary film, a joint project of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics and the Community Idea Stations (public television in Virginia), had its theatrical premiere at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville on Saturday, November 7.

Locked Out: The Fall of Massive Resistance tells the story of a shameful chapter in Virginia history, when the Byrd Machine, Governor Lindsay Almond, the General Assembly, and local officials colluded to close down the government schools rather than permit them to be desegregated. Instead of ending Virginia's tradition of segregating schools according to racial classifications -- one school here for Negroes, another school there for whites -- the state's elites decided to close the schools altogether and prohibited the election of school boards by the people.

The film tells the story in the words of the African-American students who lived through the process of desegregation in several Virginia localities: Arlington, Prince Edward, and Warren counties and the cities of Charlottesville and Norfolk.

The one-hour documentary, which is studded with archival film and video footage as well as photographs and recently completed interviews with participants, marks the 50th anniversary of Massive Resistance, which began -- and, in most places, ended -- in 1959. (The holdout was Prince Edward County, where schools remained closed until 1964, resulting in 10- and 11-year-old pupils sharing classrooms with 5- and 6-year-old first-graders.)

After a screening for a sold-out audience in the Culbreth Theatre on the grounds of the University of Virginia, Larry Sabato of the Center for Politics moderated a panel discussion that included the documentary's director, Mason Mills, as well as former Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder, who had become the nation's first elected African-American governor precisely 20 years before, on November 7, 1989.

Other panelists were students who suffered under Massive Resistance and whose interviews are included in Locked Out: Rita Moseley of Prince Edward, Donald Martin of Charlottesville, Michael Jones of Arlington, Delores Brown of Norfolk, and Faye Coleman Hoes of Warren County.

Before the film was projected, Larry Sabato introduced it.

After the film was screened, Sabato assembled the panelists and posed a few questions. Later, he opened up the floor to questions and comments from the audience.

Panel Part I:

Panel Part II:

Panel Part III:

Panel Part IV:

Panel Part V (Conclusion):

In that last segment, Sabato urges the audience to visit the Center for Politics web site and click on its Youth Leadership Initiative, to help the Center raise funds to distribute copies of Locked Out via DVD to schools around the country.

Locked Out: The Fall of Massive Resistance will have its broadcast premiere on November 16 at 9:00 p.m. on WCVE and WVPT, and it will become available nationwide on other PBS stations over the next few months.

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Deifying the Chief Executive

Not since "The Apotheosis of George Washington" has an American president been subjected to deification to the extent that Barack Obama has. Even FDR-worship was largely limited to rotogravure photographs hanging in the living rooms of American families and an obsequious press that pretended the president could walk unaided and that he was faithful to his wife.

One song performed by schoolchildren in praise of Barack Obama could be an anomaly. Two songs performed by schoolchildren in praise of Barack Hussein Obama may not be a trend, but it certainly is the beginning of one.

No president -- no living, terrestrial political leader -- should be the subject of songs of praise in a manner usually reserved for gods and saints. The U.S. Postal Service requires that a person be dead for at least ten years before he can be eligible to appear on a stamp. (Exceptions are made for recently deceased presidents and for cartoon characters like Homer Simpson.) The Catholic Church requires that candidates for sainthood go through a rigorous vetting process before they are beatified and subsequently canonized.

It is simply unAmerican to ascribe supernatural powers to living politicians. It's more than a bit creepy, too, when schoolchildren are required to sing hymns to the president. That is something that, before the last year or so, was limited to totalitarian dictatorships in faraway lands.

It didn't happen in New Jersey, for heaven's sake!

But now it has.

You probably have to be living under a rock if you have not yet seen or heard the youthful sycophants of B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington Township, New Jersey, chanting in praise of the occupant of the White House, followed by a hymn of praise set to the melody of "John Brown's Body" (better known for the past 145 years as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic").

Here's the video, as seen by more than three-quarters of a million viewers on YouTube:

Not surprisingly, the web site of B. Bernice Young School is inaccessible at the moment, though the Burlington Township school system's site is still live.

Fortunately, I was able to capture a screen shot of the school's homepage before it went down. The site noted that school will be closed on Monday, September 28, for "Rosh Hashanah." That's odd, since Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, was celebrated on Saturday, September 19; September 28 is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.



Apparently the administrators of B. Bernice Young School are so entranced with the worship of an earthbound deity, the Augustus of Hyde Park, that they forget about the details (like the correct dates) of long-established holidays honoring the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Or perhaps principal Denise King simply doesn't have a current calendar close at hand. (She could do worse than to buy one of those displayed below.)

Perhaps next year B. Bernice Young School will just mark the Ninth of Thermidor as a holiday and leave aside the other religious observances.



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Constitution Day 2009

Today is the anniversary of the day in 1787 that the Framers of the United States Constitution signed the document and sent it on to the states for ratification.

On Monday, September 14, the House of Representatives passed a resolution (H.Res. 686) urging that:

(1) all high school seniors across the country should spend at least one week learning about the United States Constitution in September of their senior year, as knowledge of this historic document, which constitutes the very foundation of our country, is critical to being an effective citizen; and

(2) upon reaching voting age, high school seniors should engage in civic learning activities on an issue of importance to them to demonstrate their understanding of their rights and responsibilities as citizens of the United States.

Ironically, the resolution, introduced by Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL8) and cosponsored by 222 others, itself contains a glaring error of historical fact. Can you catch it in this "whereas" clause?

Whereas a 1998 survey revealed that more teenagers knew who the `Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' was than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, more knew the star of the motion picture `Titanic' than who was the vice president of the United States, and more can name the Three Stooges and the 3 American Idol judges than can name the 3 branches of government;

(I'll fill you in: A "1998 survey" could not have included information about the three American Idol judges because American Idol did not premiere on U.S. television until June 2002.)

As well-intentioned as H.Res. 686 may be, a far more important bill, H.R. 450 (and its companion bill in the Senate, S. 1319), has been languishing with no action in either chamber.

Introduced by Representative John Shadegg (R-AZ3) and cosponsored by 51 others, H.R. 450 would "require Congress to specify the source of authority under the United States Constitution for the enactment of laws." Specifically, it says:

`Each Act of Congress shall contain a concise and definite statement of the constitutional authority relied upon for the enactment of each portion of that Act. The failure to comply with this section shall give rise to a point of order in either House of Congress. The availability of this point of order does not affect any other available relief.'

The Senate version, introduced by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and cosponsored by 21 others, is slightly different. It says:

Each Act of Congress shall contain a concise explanation of the specific constitutional authority relied upon for the enactment of each portion of that Act. The failure to comply with this section shall give rise to a point of order in either House of Congress. The availability of this point of order does not affect any other available relief.

S. 1319 also includes a provision for limiting debate according to Senate rules.

Speaking on the floor of the Senate on June 23, Senator Coburn explained the rationale of the Enumerated Powers Act:

The whole purpose behind this bill is to say when you write a bill in this Congress and any Congress that follows it, you have to know in that bill where you get the authority in the Constitution to spend this money or to authorize this program. You can still introduce a bill without it, but it creates a point of order that says a Senator can challenge that bill on the basis of what the Constitution says because you have not clearly stated in this new piece of legislation where you get the authority as a Member of the Senate to author it when, in fact, it is outside the authority given to us under the Constitution. The bill then sets up a debate on which the Senate will have to vote. I am not so naive as to believe I will win a whole lot of those, but I know I will win something, because the American people want to hear that debate, and that debate is something they are not hearing today.

They are not hearing our justifications why we can take freedom away and we can make a bigger, more powerful Federal Government that is going to borrow more money from their children to spend on things we don't need, money we don't have. The American people are entitled to hear the reasoning behind why we know so much better than they do, and to hear the reasoning why we can ignore the wisdom of our Founders in terms of our ability to grow the Federal Government.

The Federal Government is far too big and far too removed from people's lives today. That is why we are feeling this rumble out in the country....

This bill, S. 1319, requires that each act of Congress shall contain a concise explanation of the authority, the specific constitutional authority under which this bill would be enacted. What it does is makes Congress go to the Constitution, and particularly article I, section 8, and say, here is where I get the authority. We won't win many of those arguments, even though many of the bills will be outside of the authority granted us under the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson thought such an exercise was vitally important--we have ignored his advice--he thought it was important for Congress to undertake in order to study what those who ratified the Constitution had in mind. In a letter in 1823, he said this:

On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

There is no question what the context and the meaning was of our Founders when they wrote out the enumerated powers section. We have prostituted it to our own demise. The words of Benjamin Franklin ring true today: Can we keep it. If we can keep it.

S. 1319 is a little exercise in self-discipline for the Senate that maybe we ought to be explaining to the American people where we think we get the authority to trample on the 10th amendment, to tell them what to do, how to do it, and by the way, we need some money to tell you how to do that. The whole goal of the Enumerated Powers Act is to make us accountable. My whole goal in the Senate has been transparency. We ought to be transparent about how we get or where we get or from where we get the authority to grow the size of this government even further and to make it less effective.

Bills such as S. 1319 and H.R. 450 should be non-controversial, yet certain Members of Congress refuse to commit to endorsing this legislation. For instance, according to a letter to the editor published in the Charlottesville Daily Progress on June 22:

On May 8th, a group of local citizens from the Jefferson Area Tea Party met with Congressman Tom Perriello, D-Albemarle, at his office. He was presented with a petition signed by over a thousand people who had attended the April Tax Day Tea Party. At this meeting we were able to speak with Mr. Perriello about our various concerns.

One question that we asked concerned the congressman’s views on HR 450, the Enumerated Powers Act. This is a very simple piece of legislation: “To require Congress to specify the source of authority under the United States Constitution for the enactment of laws, and for other purposes.” Mr. Perriello at the time was not familiar with the bill, but after it was explained to him stated that he did not see any problem with the legislation. He promised to check into it and get back to us....

After a month I was able to finally get an answer from the congressman’s office: He would not sign on as a co-sponsor to the bill. According to his office, he felt that any legislation that currently was being passed was constitutional, and if it were not the courts could settle any questions. This bill according to him was an unneeded redundancy.

Three members of the Virginia delegation, J. Randy Forbes (R-VA4), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA6), and Rob Wittman (R-VA1) are cosponsors of H.R. 450, as are South Carolina's Joe Wilson (R-SC2), Arizona's Jeff Flake (R-AZ6), and former presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX14). One has to ask why House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA7) and the other Republican from Virginia, Frank Wolf (R-VA10), have not cosponsored this simple piece of legislation. (None of Virginia's Democratic Members of Congress, including Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb, have cosponsored either H.R. 450 or S. 1319.)

As a tribute to the U.S. Constitution, let's turn to the rising generation, those who are the focus of H.Res. 686.

I captured this short video at the Jefferson Area Tea Party that was held in Charlottesville on Independence Day. In it, singer/songwriter Lisa Mei Norton's son, Joshua, recites the Preamble to the Constitution to a musical accompaniment. His effort was met with warm applause.

For those who may not be able to make out all of the words as recited, here's the text from the U.S. Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I remember being required to memorize the Preamble in fourth or fifth grade. Is that still an expectation of pupils in our elementary schools?

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SCOTUS Stands Up for Human Dignity

With a vote of 8 to 1, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that a school district was wrong to strip-search a 13-year-old girl in an effort to enforce its zero-tolerance policy regarding all drugs, including Advil and Aleve.

The lopsided result in Safford Unified School District #1 v. April Redding (No. 08–479) -- only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented -- came as a surprise, since the line of questioning in oral arguments suggested that most of the justices were not sympathetic to the plight of a teenage girl stripped to her bra and panties in the principal's office. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seemed aghast at her colleagues' questions.)

The case involved Savana Redding, a student at Safford Middle School, who was suspected (based on the unsubstantiated claim of another student who was caught with prescription-strength ibuprofen and an over-the-counter naproxen pill) of drug possession. No drugs were found in her backpack or outer clothing, so the assistant principal ordered her to take all of her clothes off and allow school personnel to look inside her underwear.

In what may be a swan song, outgoing Justice David Souter wrote the majority opinion, saying:

...when the categorically extreme intrusiveness of a search down to the body of an adolescent requires some justification in suspected facts, general background possibilities fall short; a reasonable search that extensive calls for suspicion that it will pay off. But nondangerous school contraband does not raise the specter of stashes in intimate places, and there is no evidence in the record of any general practice among Safford Middle School students of hiding that sort of thing in underwear; neither Jordan nor Marissa suggested to Wilson that Savana was doing that, and the preceding search of Marissa that Wilson ordered yielded nothing. Wilson never even determined when Marissa had received the pills from Savana; if it had been a few days before, that would weigh heavily against any reasonable conclusion that Savana presently had the pills on her person, much less in her underwear.

In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear. We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable.

In a separate opinion for himself and Justice Ginsburg, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote:

Nothing the Court decides today alters this basic framework. It simply applies [New Jersey v. T. L. O.] to declare unconstitutional a strip search of a 13-year-old honors student that was based on a groundless suspicion that she might be hiding medicine in her underwear. This is, in essence, a case in which clearly established law meets clearly outrageous conduct. I have long believed that “‘[i]t does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude.’”... The strip search of Savana Redding in this case was both more intrusive and less justified than the search of the student’s purse in T. L. O.

In a partial dissent, taking issue with the Court's grant of partial immunity to the school officials who ordered and participated in the strip search of Savana Redding, Justice Ginsburg wrote:

Any reasonable search for the pills would have ended when inspection of Redding’s backpack and jacket pockets yielded nothing. Wilson had no cause to suspect, based on prior experience at the school or clues in this case, that Redding had hidden pills—containing the equivalent of two Advils or one Aleve—in her underwear or body. To make matters worse, Wilson did not release Redding, to return to class or to go home, after the search. Instead, he made her sit on a chair outside his office for over two hours. At no point did he attempt to call her parent. Abuse of authority of that order should not be shielded by official immunity.

Although he dissented with the Court's ruling that the search of Savana Redding was unreasonable under the terms of the Fourth Amendment, Justice Thomas touched on the larger cultural issue -- whether schools should have one-size-fits-all, zero-tolerance policies -- in his opinion. If one reads between the lines, one can see that Thomas is suggesting that state and local legislative bodies should begin thinking about changing these policies, which often result in expulsions and other harsh punishments for hard-working, high-achieving, well-behaved students.

Thomas notes:

Restoring the common-law doctrine of in loco parentis would not, however, leave public schools entirely free to impose any rule they choose. “If parents do not like the rules imposed by those schools, they can seek redress in school boards or legislatures; they can send their children to private schools or home school them; or they can simply move.” See Morse, 551 U. S., at 419 (THOMAS, J., concurring). Indeed, parents and local government officials have proved themselves quite capable of challenging overly harsh school rules or the enforcement of sensible rules in insensible ways.

For example, one community questioned a school policy that resulted in “an 11-year-old [being] arrested, handcuffed, and taken to jail for bringing a plastic butter knifeto school.” Downey, Zero Tolerance Doesn’t Always Add Up, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Apr. 6, 2009, p. A11. In another, “[a]t least one school board member was outraged” when 14 elementary-school students were suspended for “imitating drug activity” after they combined Kool-Aid and sugar in plastic bags. Grant, Pupils Trading Sweet Mix Get Sour Shot of Discipline, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 18, 2006, p. B1. Individuals within yet another school district protested a “‘zero-tolerance’ policy toward weapons” that had become “so rigid that it force[d]schools to expel any student who belongs to a military organization, a drum-and-bugle corps or any other legitimate extracurricular group and is simply transportingwhat amounts to harmless props.” Richardson, School Gun Case Sparks Cries For “Common Sense,” Washington Times, Feb. 13, 2009, p. A1.

These local efforts to change controversial school policies through democratic processes have proven successful in many cases. See, e.g., Postal, Schools’ Zero Tolerance Could Lose Some Punch, Orlando Sentinel, Apr. 24, 2009, p. B3 (“State lawmakers want schools to dial back strict zero-tolerance policies so students do not end up in juvenile detention for some ‘goofy thing’ ”); Richardson, Tolerance Waning for Zero-tolerance Rules, Washington Times, Apr. 21, 2009, p. A3 (“[A] few states have moved to relax their laws. Utah now allows students to bring asthma inhalers to school without violating the zero-tolerance policy on drugs”); see also Nussbaum, Becoming Fed Up With Zero Tolerance, New York Times, Sept. 3, 2000, Section 14, p. 1 (discussing a report that found that “widespread use of zero-tolerance discipline policies was creating as many problems as it was solving and that there were many cases around the country in which students were harshly disciplined for infractions where there was no harm intended or done”).

In the end, the task of implementing and amending public school policies is beyond this Court’s function. Parents, teachers, school administrators, local politicians, and state officials are all better suited than judges to determine the appropriate limits on searches conducted by school officials. Preservation of order, discipline, and safety in public schools is simply not the domain of the Constitution. And, common sense is not a judicial monopoly or a Constitutional imperative.

I may be reading this wrongly, but it seems to me that Thomas is waving his finger at legislators and telling them that it is their responsibility to fix these ill-suited (if well-meaning) policies.

His opinion reminds me of what he said in his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas:

I write separately to note that the law before the Court today “is … uncommonly silly.”... If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.

In both of these cases -- Redding and Lawrence -- I believe that Justice Thomas was wrong in dissenting from the Court's majority. His reasoning, however, is respectable even as it reaches the wrong conclusions.

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