“Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein are no strangers to D.C. politics,” according to NPR. “The two of them have been in Washington for more than 40 years.
“They came together in 2006 to write a book about dysfunction in Congress, called The Broken Branch. But their assessment of Congress today is even more dire — so dire, they’ve called their new book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.
“The book claims that democracy in America is being endangered by extreme politics. From the first day of the Obama administration, Ornstein says, our constitutional system hasn’t been allowed to work.
The rest of the article is here.
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Sadly, few see it, but the root cause of this problem is our highly irrelevant educational system. Still, the reform emphasis is on improving testing, but this ignores that students are not given the opportunity to make sense of the world. The failure of congress is a failure of the electorate to discern between capable politicians and ideologues and this common sense skill should be taught in school along with many others. It is useless to talk about a dysfunctional congress without at least an eye on how and why the electorate has brought this about. Let’s get real, there is a hole in the boat and all the bailing will only delay the inevitable until the hole is patched.
I do agree that the emphasis on teaching to a test, such as Bush’s NCLB law demands–and which is a horrible act, like every that came from his administration, enacted at the time I left teaching–but teachers and schools were under attack long before NCLB. The task of “making sense of the world” is vast, ongoing and a collaborative chore which starts at home, wherein the ground work must be laid. Teaching what a capable politician is and what an ideologue is a dangerous, black diamond slope, sure to result in some angry parents venting upon you. It was bad enough listening to clearly ignorant, uneducated parents pontificating on the evils of their “reluctant students” reading Harry Potter.
Opportunities for learning did exist before NCLB, but with classroom size again exceeding 30 students many times, with some students’ English lower than a 1st grade level in a high school class, and classroom managemant–which was about half of my teacher training–consuming so much effort, teachers are having a multitude of social problems dumped in their laps.
I was once asked to sign a petition for an initiative, I think, to permit parents to have more say/power in what is taught in the classroom. I looked at the petitoner and laughed, saying, “Are you kidding me? That’s the last thing I want, because what will happen is that we’ll get one half of the parents demand we do this and the other half demanding we do that.” Teachers are in a no win situation today, and if any youngster asked my advice about going into teaching, I’d strongly tell them NO. They’re being scapegoated for too many of society’s problems, when in fact the competition they face is overwhelming: video games, movies they blow students minds away, a society w/o effective disipline and the simple fact that a great majority just aren’t hungry, not like students in India, and China and other developing countries. This last statement isn’t my opinion, statistics presented by some authority at one of our inservice’s showed how even the top 10% of U.S college students trailed far behind other countries in math and science scores.
Ed, Your points are well taken except that continuing in the same manner is the worst solution. Parents are able and need to have a responsible voice in education, and especially the students. Of course there would need to be some development as part of the process but this is completely possible. You may or may not know that I have first hand experience setting up schools like this in Pakistan, so I can speak with a little authority. The alternative is having schools responding to bureaucracies wishing to strengthen their power and positions, which is how we got into this mess.
Greg, forgive me, I knew someone on this blog had been in Pakistan, but I had forgotten who it was and why they were there. Glad you had the opportunity to be part of such a unique and rewarding effort. I can’t comment on the kids in Pakistan, only speculate, that there are significant differences in all areas of the student populations.
Having expressed the general thrust of my opinions, I won’t repeat myself, except to say, a starting point is repeal of NCLB. And, the angry, divisive state of our Union will overflow and drown the classroom and teachers too. And you’d be shocked–maybe–how so very, very few parents show up for Parent nights at the traditional schools. A restructuring of the entire system–a tremendous task with no guarantee of better student outcomes–would not solve, what I see as the biggest problem: the diversions the young have and the lack of the “hunger” which comes with having nothing.
My credential was in History by degree and all Social Sciences by test, and with all the demands now being made to teach this groups history, and that groups history, etc., when there already exisits insufficient time to cover the basics. Afterall, history includes everything that happened a second ago.
None of what I have said means I don’t favor improvements.
Our extreme right bloggers are going ballistic this morning about this book. The truth hurts. BTW, I was glad to see Rich Ullery receiving kudos for the local GOP get-together this past weekend. Rich is moderate and a “bridge builder,” not extreme. He’s got his work cut out for him with the local GOP Central Committee and the “spokesman” bloggers, however! Good luck, man.
Jeff,
I gave this book to my very republican brother-in-law. We have good heated debates and he has been slowly coming around to seeing that both major parties are owned and cannot govern in the peoples interests if they want the funding for their next campaign. It took about 2 years before he figured out that my anti-Bush positions had nothing to do with the republican/ democratic partisanship. He continuously tried to get me to defend democratic administrations/ congresses horrible policies. After years we figured out my laundry list of why I couldn’t stand the Clinton administrations dwarfed his own.
I think there’s a generation gap(s) at play here too. This is not your grandma’s GOP, yet people still blindly cling to their “party.” It lacks intellectual rigor, and is more like rooting for one team or another during a football game.
Here is a simple explanation of democracy vs every other form of government tried.
Democracy is power to people while other forms of government are small segments making decisions for the masses of people. Those who have or seek power/ money fear democracy because it means they have less of everything except happiness. I think a new form of governance is in the process of evolving and it is going to be a variation on democracy. Direct democracy is the best for small populations except has the same weakness as libertarianism and communism, if anonymity becomes present the system begins to break down. The bigger the institutions the less accountable they become. This is where I kind of fit into the smaller federal government crowd. The big difference is what we think the role of the federal government is and is not.
I’d alter your statement slightly: Direct democracy is possible only for small populations–and its structure is, sadly, all too vulnerable to insidious mutations. Demands for Western style democracy in the Peoples Repuplic of China invoke images of 1,300,000,000 people shouting out as many opinions in a Vermont style town hall meeting ready to vote on important local issues. Indeed, China’s prosperity has soared–more to do with McMac’s golden Arches than McMao’s little red book–but would a so called democracy there be any different than the sham exisiting under Chiang kaishek, uno numero war lord, and democratic imposter.
As Thomas Paine wrote in the first chapter of Common Sense, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one . . .”
Even with the fall of the USSR and the brief attempt under the vodka loving Yeltsin, the KBG soon regained control, and according to Alexander Litvinenko-ex KBG and Yuri Felshtinsky, historian specializing in Russian security services, with Putin and the new state security services in alliance with criminal cartels, manufactured the so-called terrorist apartment building bombings, blaming them on Chechnia as an excuse for war, which was waged. And Litivinenko was poisoned and died in London, but Felshtinsky, so far, remains alive in the U.S. Left in control is a KBG/Mafia type of government
And we are all too familiar we the enemies of democratic/republican government on our own soil. The biggest threat to fairness and the ideals of government as espoused by the thinkers and students produced by the Age of Reason, is the dark side of human nature, glamorized page after endless page by Ayn Rand. Just because an individual decides to use what talents they have in a singular quest to aquire wealth, regardless of tactics and other lives negatively affected, justified by the holy mantra of Social Darwinism, by no means proves superiority. History overflows with examples, such as icons like John D. Rockefeller, J. Gould and the infamous Mr. Shoddy.
I never expect perfection from any candidate. Opposing interests, through compromise, hopefully, will always prevent full implementation of any program in a supposededly democratic system. What we have now, IMHO, is a political bloc as opposed to compromise as those forming the most notorious non-compromising political parties of the 20th century.
Ed,
Thomas Paine is my all time favorite forgotten founder. The jack of all trades with little formal education literally was at the forefront of many of the ideas that became the United States of America.
And if I remember correctly, while imprisoned in France, came within a whisker of beheading during Robespierre’s rule, by some incredibly lucky, last second, twist of fate, which I have forgotten.