VIRUSES

Wonder Land: Big bad decisions have created big bad schools. (DANIEL HENNINGER, 5/09/03, Wall Street Journal)

[I]n Goss v. Lopez, the Court established and enumerated the due-process procedures to which a student suspended for less than 10 days is entitled. In dissent, Justice Powell wrote: "One who does not comprehend the meaning and necessity for discipline is handicapped not merely in his education but throughout his subsequent life."

Justices Black and Powell prophesied the conditions of disorder and disrespect now decried in the Public Agenda polls. They were in the minority.

You can argue back on the majority's behalf, but a lot of principals quickly posited their own dictum: Why bother. In the years since, courts and legislatures gave the neighborhood school yet another big legal obligation: Mainstream and educate severely disabled students. There is a rights-based argument for doing this, but many effective principals came up with a counter-argument: I quit.

Another bad decision: In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988. That famous order led to state laws permitting the unionization of public employees, including teachers, who'd previously been protected by civil-service law. We know the theoretical arguments here, too, but the daily reality is that teachers' unions in the big cities have become about as subtle as the United Mine Workers in the 1940s. Merit raises for top teachers? Curriculum changes? Don't even think about it. So no one does.

Curriculum, what students actually learn, is another chipped brick in the institutional edifice of our schools. We now have "The Language Police," education historian Diane Ravitch's meticulous but horrifying narrative of how the major textbook publishers, the testing companies and state education departments have reduced what public-school kids learn to politically correct, politically laughable pabulum and swill. Ms. Ravitch's new book is must reading for anyone who wants to learn why (my conclusion, not hers) so many kids would rather listen to hip-hop songs on their headphones than read what's now in their textbooks. Answer: The rappers use bigger words.

What all this means, among many other things, is that politics matters, however aimless it may seem. Wrong political decisions can be viral, weakening and killing healthy institutions for years.

Nothing is more characteristic of the intellectual/political class than the belief that institutions are like Gumby dolls that can be twisted into any posture you like. Nothing more characterizes the conservative than the belief that they are more like fine china, to be handled, if at all, only with great care. The truth may lie somewhere between, but it's certainly well to the Right. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 10, 2003 8:35 AM