The Retreat From Education Reform

"We have a very fundamental disagreement here. You see this is what happens when you rush. …When you are trying to fly the plane and build it at the same time … you move too quickly, and you end up with controversies” -- Sharon Palmer, president of the American Federation of Teachers Connecticut.

Hours after a USA Today columnist draped around Governor Dannel Malloy’s shoulders the mantle of Roger Sherman, the Connecticut delegate to the Constitutional Convention responsible for offering the “Great Compromise” that unified the convention and paved the way to a ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a wing came off Mr. Malloy’s educational reform plane.

“This month,” USA Today proclaimed, “Connecticut Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy signed into law a compromise bill that could be a blueprint for meaningful education reform in the other 49 states. The bill, which passed with near-unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats, is a broad attack on the state's troubled public schools… Recognizing the dire consequences of failing to fix this problem, the governor and legislators overcame partisan bickering and produced a law that also won the backing of public school administrators and teachers' unions.”

The Palmer quote above may be found in a story titled, ominously, “Teacher Evaluations: January's Dream Agreement Now On The Rocks: Misunderstanding On Key Issue Of Student Test Scores.”

The January “Dream Agreement” is the same “Great Compromise”tooted in the USA Today opinion piece.

The sticking point for teachers and unions concerns the percentage of a teacher's evaluation that would be based on students' performance on tests. Last February, both sides appeared to agree that 45 percent of the evaluation was to be based on "multiple student learning indicators," and half of that measure was to be based on standardized test scores. The present disagreement centers on the remaining 22.5 percent. Teacher unions now insist that this portion of the evaluation should include measures of student performance other than tests, while representatives of school administrators and superintendents insist that this portion of the teacher evaluations could include tests.

This management-labor disagreement -- which would profoundly affect the education reforms proposed by Mr. Malloy, reducing by a considerable amount the role played in education reform by measurable objective data –apparently surfaced only recently within the state's Performance Evaluation Advisory Council, the group charged with producing a compromise plan between teachers and administrators that would implement the reforms Mr. Malloy has insisted are necessary to reduce Connecticut’s first in the nation education gap between performing and non-performing public schools.

The real rift here involves the usual management-worker tug of war: When Mr. Malloy first unscrolled his reforms, his proposed changes seemed to hold out the promise of greater management control over the hiring of good teachers and the firing of inadequate teachers by principals and superintendents. Teacher evaluations linked to student performance, a measurable datum, along with tenure linked to teacher evaluations, would give school managers greater control over the educational product in under-performing public schools.

That lofty ambition soon crashed into a wall of union opposition. Everywhere Mr. Malloy wentto sell his reforms to the real customers of public education – the tax paying publicand the parents of students in under-performing schools, for many years the victims of an inadequate public school education – the governor met with an unbendable opposition on the part of teachers, their union leaders and the usual culprits in the media and academia, all of whom are heavily invested in the maintenance of the status quo.

And the end result of all the palavering is: Non performing schools will receive more money; the schooling net, now approaching cradle to grave union directed “education,” will embrace more students, leading to the hiring of more teachers; teacher evaluations have been rolled back; the coupling of employment and performance as measured by objective data has been loosened; and the state a few days ago was graced with the presence of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who granted Connecticut a waiver from the rigors of the federal No Child Left Behind requirements during the 2013-14 school year.

One news report noted: “Calling the state's evaluation framework ‘meaningful’, Duncan did not weigh in on how much of a teachers' grade should be tied to standardized tests.”

Of course he didn’t. That matter is on the point of being decided by union muscle. Why should politicians intervene vigorously on behalf of students in the state who are receiving a below par education? According to recent figures, one in five Connecticut high school students failed to graduate on time or at all; and of high school students who graduated in 2004, just two in five had earned a degree or certificate from college six years out. Why destroy the fantasy that the majority of teacher evaluations will in any firm sense be coupled to student performance?

WWE vs. Powell

It doesn’t take much to startle most journalists in Connecticut, many of whom are as lion-shy as gazelles. A growl from a snarling lawyer is in most cases sufficient to quiet the whole herd.

Dismayed by a political column written by Chris Powell of the Journal Inquirer, World Wide Entertainment (WWE) senior vice president of marketing and communications Brian Flinn wrote to Mr. Powell an e-mail threatening to sue if Mr. Powell did not issue a retraction “by June 4, 2012 in as public a manner as that in which you made these false statements.” Should Mr. Powell fail to comply with Mr. Flinn’s demand, “we will seek legal and all available remedies,” the e-mail specifies.

In the e-mail sent to Mr. Powell, copied to many other Connecticut newspapers, Mr. Flinn advises, “This time, WWE is taking a proactive and aggressive approach to ensure that accurate facts and statements are made about our company and brand. This has absolutely nothing to do with politics.”

A threat to sue must mention the word “malice,” and Mr. Flinn’s e-mail does not disappoint: “That you would repeat the false statement that WWE is in the pornography business, after being told of the falsity of that statement, is especially strong evidence of malice.”

In the context of the First Amendment, public officials and public figures must satisfy a standard that proves “actual malice” in order to recover for libel or slander. Legal malice must be committed intentionally without just cause or excuse.

In order to recover damages, WWE would have to show “actual malice” on the part of Mr. Powell. The legal standard for publications is New York Times vs. Sullivan 376 U.S. 254, 84 S. Ct. 710, 11 L. Ed. 2d 686 (1964).

In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that public officials and public figures cannot be awarded damages unless they prove that the person accused of making the false statement did so with knowledge that the statement was false or with reckless disregard as to the truth or falsity of the statement. Demonstrating malice in this context does not require the plaintiff to show that the person uttering the statement showed ill will or hatred toward the public official or public figure.

It is nearly impossible to sustain that standard in a commentary piece. There are multiple difficulties, these among others: Courts have allowed hyperbole in commentary pieces; pornography, more often than not, lies in the eye of the beholder; most often, communications of the kind sent by Mr. Flinn  are intended to curtail free speech, and the First Amendment is a mighty bulwark against the suppression of speech.

This is what Mr. Powell said of Mrs. McMahon in his column: “Her practical qualifications for office did not extend beyond her fantastic wealth, and that wealth derived from the business of violence, pornography, and general raunchy.”

This is what Mr. Flinn said Mr. Powell said in his column: “That you would repeat the false statement that WWE is in the pornography business, after being told of the falsity of that statement, is especially strong evidence of malice.”

In a suit alleging legal malice, a court would likely examine the statement to which Mr. Flinn imputes malice rather more closely than he might like. Mr. Powell is not saying that WWE is in the pornography business. The present tense – “IS in the pornography business” – is important. The subject of the putative “malicious” sentence is also important. Nowhere in the column does Mr. Powell mention WWE. Therefore, Mr. Powell is not repeating “the false statement that WWE is in the pornography business.”

WWE, as others have pointed out, is in a process of transition, and its present rating falls on the non-pornographic side of pornography. The “entertainment” provided by WWE, like the side-shows of P. T. Barnum’s day, are intended to fool the foolish. Virtually all of the set-piecesin the WWE ring are highly scripted. The “Barnum effect” is an actual term used by professors of psychology in which students purposely are gulled into believing invalid results of psychological tests in ethics courses. Deceptions of this kind always involve ethical catches. But courts are not chiefly concerned with ethics: They are concerned with the veracity of charges.

And Mr. Powell, in the line adduced by Mr. Flinn as legally malicious, is making a statement about 1) Mrs. McMahon’s “practical qualifications for office” and 2) Mrs. McMahon’s wealth, which Mr. Powel conjectures “derived from the business of violence, pornography, and general raunch” -- nice distinctions that will be important to a court gathered to rule on the nature of Mr. Powell putative malice.

Of course the court must also decide whether Mr. Powell’s statement breeches the wall erected by other courts interested in preserving both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, which allows both Mr. Powell and Mr. Flinn a certain latitude of expression without which  public speech would be matter decided through frivolous legal suits. Absent a presumption in favor of untrammeled speech, even masters of prose such as Honoré de Balzac, self-described as “a galley slave to pen and ink,” would not have been able to write without fear of prosecution the line: “the secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten”.

The line above from Balzac introduces Mario Puzo’s Godfather, though it is there misquoted as: “Behind every great fortune lies a crime.”

Balzac’s statement is carefully qualified, the improvising somewhat reckless. Most galley slaves to pen and ink depend on courts to take note of such differences.

Veteran’s Day With Dick

Non-Vietnam War Veteran Dick Blumenthal Declines To Apologize For Lying Several Times Concerning His Service In Vietnam

Here Mr. Blumenthal appears in a splendid documentary on “StolenValor,” an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) production. To see video, hit “play video”:

Here are a series of blogs published in ConnecticutCommentary, many of which were also columns touching Mr. Blumenthal’s inability to offer a sufficient apology for his several lies:

WWII

Lili Marleen, sung here in English and German by Marlene Dietrich, was one of the most popular songs of World War ll. It was a German marching song, quickly appropriated by all the nations that fought in that war. By 1943, Lili Maleen was being sung in America, England, Russia, Italy, among other nations. It is the song of a solider led through blood and slaughter by a memory of the girl he left behind as she stood bathed in lamplight.


In English, at the café De Paris in 1954

In German. Take note of the flowering hands and fingers.

The Memorial Day

The picture above is the only certified photo of Lincoln at Gettysburg

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Newton Reinvented

In the good old days, before the advent of campaign finance reform, a stretch in prison was no bar to election. Mayor Michael Curley of Boston, a colorful mob-connected figure in Massachusetts politics who made good on his campaign pledge to get the washerwomen of the city off their knees, ran the city from prison. Mr. Curley later rigged out all the washerwomen of Boston with long handled mops.

It may well be the case that a stretch in jail was the booster that rocketed Mr. Curley into a long and eventful career in politics.

Mr. Curley received news that he had been elected to Boston’s Board of Alderman in 1904 while cooling his heels in prison on a fraud conviction: He had fraudulently taken a civil service exam for two men applying for postmen in his district, and the stint in prison helped to burnish his reputation among the poor Irish of Boston as someone who was willing to go to the mat for those in need. During his career in politics, both as Boston Mayor and a U.S. Senator serving in the Congress from 1943 ton 1947, it was not uncommon for the city’s poor and unemployed Irish to line up outside his house in the mornings to speak with him about getting a job or to get a handout of a few dollars to see them through the week.

Running for the Congress against blue-blooded Tom Eliot, the son of a Unitarian minister, grandson of Harvard president Charles Eliot and a former New Deal attorney of sterling reputation backed by Franklin Roosevelt, Mr. Curley anchored his campaign in unvarnished appeals to ethnic, class and religious bigotry, shaking the  communist spook stick against  the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Yankee Eliot: “There is more Americanism in one half of Jim Curley's ass than in that pink body of Tom Eliot." Having won a spot in Congress, Mr. Curley proceeded to compile a voting record in support of the Roosevelt administration that was the envy of New Deal pinkoes everywhere.

Mr. Curley’s long political career ended in 1951 when he suffered an erosion of electoral support. Following his death, two statues honoring Mr. Curley appeared in Faneuil Hall; a bar called “The Purple Shamrock,” one of the mayor’s symbols, popped out of the ground nearby; his house, known during his time as “the house with the shamrock shutters,” became an historical site; and he was immortalized in the film “the Last Hurrah” as the protagonist, Frank Skeffington. Disappointed with the film, Mr. Curley, a shameless self-promoter but always the best guardian of his own reputation, initially threatened to bring legal action against Edwin O’Connor, the author of the novel, but on reflection thought better of it, telling Mr. O’Connor that he most enjoyed “the part where I die.”

Somewhere in Bridgeport, where the old-guard Democratic Party structure still lives and breathes, there may in the future be a spot for a couple of Ernie Newton statues.

An ex-felon and ex-State Senator from Bridgeport, Mr. Newton surprised Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo  when he won the endorsement of the Democratic nominating convention for the 23rd State Senate District, which comprises 75 percent of Bridgeport and a bit of Stratford.

"I have to say I am surprised," Ms. DiNardo said, adding when asked by a reporter if she would discourage voters from returning Mr. Newton to the General Assembly, “I think that's up to that district to make that decision, not me."

Governor Dannel Malloy, known for having in the past actively participated in the campaigns of Democrats formally nominated by his party, appeared to be consulting a similar script.    

When queried by Hartford Courant reporter Jon Lender, Mr. Malloy characterized the race in Bridgeport as “local issue, first and foremost.” He urged voters in Bridgeport to “take into consideration all of the abilities of the people that they have to choose from. It looks like there may three names on the ballot. And so I think the people of Bridgeport have a decision to make. I have to say to you that I’ve long been an advocate of a second-chance society. As a prosecutor, as a governor, as a mayor I’ve advocated for second chances. But ultimately in the political arena that’s a decision for the public to make… I think the public has a balancing act. They have to decide whether … the person has paid a sufficient price, whether they’ve expressed sufficient remorse, whether they have the skill set necessary to do the job. … That’s why we have elections, and I would urge all the voters to vote.”

Mr. Newton offered a much abbreviated concision of the governor’s remarks: "The governor said, `It's the people's decision.’”

Mr. Newton launched into a defense of his record in office, minus the four years he passed in prison for having solicited a $5,000, one of three felonies he was convicted of in 2005: "Felons are people too. They can't say anything about my record in the House or Senate. It was impeccable. If people truly are forgiving, you judge a man on his work ... I paid my debt to society. I ought to be a free man to do whatever it is I want to do with my life."

He told a reporter, “Listen, I still got friends in Hartford.” His Democratic comrades in the legislature “know the (legislative) process. I'm a team player. I know how to get things done." Surely, fellow Democrats in the General Assembly and the governor’s office understand the important role Bridgeport had played in statewide elections. After all, Mr. Newton stressed, the city helped Mr. Malloy, the former mayor of Stamford, win a slim victory in 2010.

"The governor needs to get re-elected, and he's going to need my help to do it," said Mr. Newton, according to a CTPost report.

Apparently, the governor, the titular head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, and Ms. DiNardo, the nominal head of the party, have for the moment taken a hand’s off approach to what may well be Mr. Newton’s “Last Hurrah.” Maybe they saw the movie.