In October 2001, the town council of Kensington, Maryland, voted to ban Santa from his official duties as tree lighter at the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony. The vote came after two citizens, both Jewish, asked that a menorah be included in the official part of the celebration.
Now, this is a problem in modern America because the U.S. Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom had decided that all overtly religious symbols are banned from civic ceremonies. Therefore, a menorah could not be included. The Jewish citizens countered by saying, “But you’re allowing Santa…” And so the town council voted unanimously to give St. Nick the boot.
Yes, Santa Claus is, in the opinion of Kensington, as clearly a religious icon as the menorah—a theological position that should offend every faithful Jew this side of Tel Aviv. Santa Claus isn’t a religious icon anywhere in America outside of Madison Avenue. He’s more a product of Coca-Cola than Christianity.
When word got out about their foolishness, the town council was barraged by complaints. One flustered councilman, asked to explain why Santa was too religious a symbol to be allowed but a Christmas tree was okay, insisted, “Oh, no, this is not a Christmas tree. This is an entirely secular tree.” A secular tree we just happen to be lighting in December. That’s covered with ornaments. At an event sponsored by major retailers. With lots of singing. You know, one of those “secular” trees. (Ah, yes, who can forget those winter evenings with your family gathered around a Fraser fir singing, “O secular tree, O secular tree, how nonsectarian are thy branches…”)
The mild-mannered dolts of Kensington wanted to be nice and take these offended citizens seriously, despite the fact that the nature of the offense was idiotic. Unencumbered as I am by any innate goodness, my reaction would have been very different: I would have tossed these thin-skinned idiots out on their toches, shouting “Merry Christmas” as they bounced down the front stairs of town hall.
The result would have been a minor assault violation for which I would have been fined; and a hate-crime violation for which I would have been shot.
6
Nothing Gets This Bad
Except on Purpose:
Redneck Education
One result of my genetic rejection of Southernism is an innate bias against conspiracy theories. UFOs in Roswell, secret governments in Washington, virgins in sororities—all such improbable claims I tend to dismiss without a hearing.
I grew up attending church with people who earnestly believed that ghosts and demons were conspiring to bring them harm. They were convinced that their ill health and fiscal difficulties were the result of unseen forces of darkness, as opposed to the half-eaten bag of Oreos dropping crumbs over the unfinished job application on their coffee table.
Today, many of those same church folk live in fear that Harry Potter books will lead their children into the clutches of Satan. I am impolitic enough to recall the days when those same worried parents were teenagers who ended up in the clutches of hormonal supplicants at summer Bible camp.
Who has time to worry about shadowy forces of the Illuminati or the Tri-Lateral Commission? My earthbound neighbors are more than capable of putting my liberty in jeopardy during the biannual election process. It’s not what the Council on Foreign Relations is doing in private that’s the problem; it’s what the Democratic National Committee is doing in public.
So, unlike many of my fellow Southerners, I’m grateful for the fluoride in my drinking water, not fearful of it. When contrails crisscross the afternoon sky, I don’t bother to wrap my head in aluminum foil. And if I ever run into Elvis working at the Burger King at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, I’ll ask him what Jimmy Hoffa’s up to these days.
There is one area of American life, however, that is so irrational, so counterintuitive, and so openly corrupt that I am sometimes tempted to suspect the Bildeburgers are involved: public education.
America’s government-run school system represents a screwup of such magnitude I am hard-pressed to believe it is a mere accident. Nothing gets that bad except on purpose. My theory: Rednecks have taken over the American public school system.
Let’s pause for a quick vocabulary lesson: What is a “public” school? What does that mean? Better yet, let’s turn it around: Can you name a “private” school? Harvard? Yale? The Newport School for Obnoxious, Rich Children Whose Fathers Own Yachts? Are these schools “private”?
No, they’re not. They are public schools, if we use the word “public” in its most common meaning: a place that is open to the general public. And whether they’re parochial, for-profit, or elitist, all so-called private schools are open to any qualified student who can write a check.
We don’t call restaurants “private” just because they’re for-profit businesses that you have to pay to use. Hotels, bars, stores, doctors’ offices, bordellos—all of these are private businesses where one must pay for the services therein, but none of them are considered private. They’re public places. In very important, legal terms, they are “places of public accommodation,” which means the person who owns them can’t even run them as he chooses.
On the other hand, “public” does not necessarily mean publicly funded. The entire state university system is publicly funded, but not just any member of the public may attend. To attend a state college or tech school, you must meet rigorous academic standards—okay, not rigorous, but you do need a high school diploma and, in most cases, an SAT that reaches into the low four digits.
My point here is that we could easily have a publicly funded but privately run school system for K-12 education, and they would be “public” schools. Only we wouldn’t call them public because in the twisted parlance of twenty-first century America, a school isn’t public unless it’s run by the government.
“But, Michael, private schools don’t take all the people who apply. That’s what makes them private.”
Wrong again. I’ve been to many restaurants that could not accommodate me because they were already filled with customers. Other eateries demanded I wear a shirt and shoes. In my younger, alcohol-tinged days, I was tossed out of an establishment by customers who did not appreciate my 2:00 A.M. renditions of Verdi’s “La Donna è Mobile.”
When the typical American says “public,” what he really means is “run by the government.” Like “public” radio (as opposed to those mean ol’ private radio stations that we’re not allowed to listen to) and “public” parks (you know, the ones that charge admission but don’t have any cool rides?), the issue isn’t who gets to attend but who runs the show. For the sake of time, however, we’ll use the erroneous term “public schools” as a synonym for “government-run schools.” And it is government control of our public schools that makes them what they are today: expensive, inefficient, and incompetent.
In a word: Southern.
Conspiracy theorists, try this: Imagine if the Freedom Riders and civil rights activists of the 1960s had discovered a public school system where 80 percent of the black children never graduated. One where those students who did graduate had SAT and other standardized test scores in the bottom twentieth percentile of the nation? What would the activists’ response have been after learning that millions of new dollars were supposedly being poured into those schools, even as the number of students kept dropping? That the number of nepotism-inspired employees kept rising, while the children themselves continued to fail? How would those seekers of justice, traveling across the Jim Crow South, have reacted to this outrage?
Unfortunately, the school I’m describing wasn’t on the route of the Freedom March and it wasn’t under the jurisdiction of Governor George Wallace. No, you can find this school system today in Cleveland. And I don’t mean Cleveland, Mississippi.
In 1998, the very northern Cleveland schools had the worst graduation rate in America for black students. An underwhelming 29 percent of black freshmen had graduated by the end of their senior year, according to the Manhattan Institute. Do you detect racial bias? Don’t worry—the graduatio
n rate for students of all races was a mere 28 percent. So when it comes to black kids, Cleveland is actually overachieving!
Where is the second worst major school system in America? Milwaukee, which you will note is also slightly north of the Mason-Dixon line. Cleveland and Milwaukee, two very northern cities in fairly liberal states, and they, along with Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., have some of the worst-performing schools in America.
Not that Georgia and Alabama are reaching new heights of academic excellence, but remember: They’re in the South. Their schools are supposed to suck. As a victim of a hideous southern public school system, I fled North… only to find that the rest of America was also worshipping at the great altar of illiteracy.
When I first began working on this book and noticing these bright lines of demarcation between the cultures of North and South, education leaped out at me as the most obvious. Down South, the North has long been synonymous with the word “smart,” though it was frequently followed by the word “ass.”
Northern attitudes about college are so different from ours. We hear, for example, that Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Brown are popular and well-regarded institutions of higher learning, despite having never appeared in a BCS bowl game. It’s a difficult concept for Southerners to fathom.
Most southern states don’t have a single top-tier college within their borders. In fact, the southern “Ivy League” consists of Duke, Vanderbilt, and, if you grade on a curve, Georgia Tech. However, we do lead the nation in educational institutions dedicated to over-the-road trucking.
So it’s no surprise that our public schools are lousy. All the rest of our schools are, too. But what’s going on up North? I thought you guys were the smart ones.
If your doctor had a failure rate of 71 percent, he would be desmocked. If a restaurant successfully delivered only a quarter of the meals ordered, it would be abandoned. If a police force successfully closed 29 percent of its major crime cases, it would be the Washington, D.C., Metro police department.
But every single day, moms and dads in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philly are required by the government to send unsuspecting children to institutions where we know, we absolutely know, that a solid majority of them will fail. To paraphrase a question I’ve heard most of my life: Hey, Yankee! If you’re so smart, how come your schools suck?
What’s more confusing is that you Northerners don’t seem to care that your public schools are as bad as ours. If you aren’t worried about the kids, don’t you at least resent the waste of tax dollars? What happened to northern efficiency? Forget about the poorly educated, overly self-esteemed children (you might as well; the school system sure has); doesn’t it bother you that the public schools are such a lousy business proposition?
In Newark, New Jersey, the average public school education costs the taxpayers around $14,000 per child. Yet Newark is near the bottom in student achievement. They’re paying for filet mignon and getting last Friday’s meat loaf—and nobody’s complaining?
The one thing I thought I knew about Northerners is that they won’t put up with lousy service. Except for the weather, Yankees don’t put up with things that suck. And I know this for a fact, because I used to wait tables for a living. Ask any waiter, and they’ll tell you that Yankees are the last people to say thank you and the first people to send everything back. They’re the first to ask for the manager, the first to complain to the other tables around them, and, to their credit, much more likely to leave a decent tip if they get good service. But putting up with bad service is not the northern Way.
I’ve sat in a restaurant in New York and watched a customer take out a meat thermometer to check her dinner. I’ve seen angry vegans threaten to throw food on the ground in Greenwich Village because it sat on the same platter as a piece of chicken. I’ve seen customers stand at the table and wave empty glasses at inattentive waiters and, once, two guys from Jersey hit an assistant manager in the back of the head with a hard roll to get him to turn around. (I found out later that they knew the guy, but the manager beat the crap out of them, anyway.)
If the cable TV goes out on Sunday afternoon, Yankees don’t show patience and understanding. They get on the phone and start screaming. “Ice storm, schmice storm! The Jets are playin’ the Giants and I’m missin’ the goddam fourt’ qwatta!” When city services get screwed up, local pols know northern voters are not easily placated. Chicago politics can hinge entirely on how quickly an alderman gets a ward heeler his trash pickup.
In short, making a Yankee happy is harder than satisfying an aging harem. And not nearly as much fun. Northerners are living, breathing quality control experts who, when it comes to getting what they want, always go down fighting.
But I’m supposed to believe that the same people who speed-dial their lawyer over an underdone steak are cheerfully willing to accept the highly expensive but wildly unproductive public school system for their own children?
Ah, but that’s the catch, isn’t it? They won’t accept it for their children. Just yours.
Northern liberals are tireless defenders of the government-run school system, ardent supporters of higher taxes for public education, and shameless hypocrites when it comes to educating their own children in private schools. They are absolutely confident that an open-enrollment, racially mixed, county-run public school is absolutely perfect for absolutely all of America’s children. And they’ll be glad to drop your kids off on their way to taking Junior to prep school.
Liberals who can’t afford private schools move their families to cultural cul-de-sacs in lily-white suburbs. The children and grandchildren of white Freedom Riders who fought to integrate southern schools now send their children to private (mostly white) academies or live in monochromatic, educational enclaves like Rye, New York, and Deer Park, Michigan.
White flight, elitist self-segregation—that’s about as southern as you can get and keep all your teeth. Which explains how schools in the North can survive while providing crummy service to demanding northern consumers. These Northerners simply don’t see the public school system as theirs. As long as the one school in their one suburb works, the school system as a whole simply doesn’t exist to them.
Which is why nobody noticed, for example, when Bill Clinton tapped former South Carolina governor Dick Riley to head the federal Department of Education. Do you know what South Carolina was ranked in average SAT scores on the day President Clinton made his pick? Dead last! Bill Clinton literally could not find a politician leading a more poorly educated populace to oversee our nation’s school system. And nobody so much as cracked a smile.
Imagine if President Clinton had chosen the governor of Iowa to oversee the U.S. Coast Guard, or the senior senator from Utah to chair the federal Department of Porn. Such a choice would have inspired a loud clearing of throats.
But our public school system is such an overwhelming disaster that choosing the secretary of education from the worst-performing state doesn’t seem all that different from choosing one from the best. Or my choice, not having a secretary of education at all.
“But, Michael, we’ve got to have a federal education department; otherwise our public school systems would get even worse!”
Really? How? How could the public school system get any worse?
Seriously, think about it. What could be worse than what we have right now? Thousands of parents send their kids to school afraid for their physical safety. Hundreds of thousands of students go to schools where we should fear for their intellectual safety. And millions of taxpayers watch their money disappear each year into the sinkhole of a $400-billion public school system with no hope of either improvement or accountability.
At least the schools are safe, for the most part. The odds of any particular kid getting shot while at school are relatively small. Unfortunately, so are the odds of him getting smart. If you want your children bulletproofed, you can buy them a Kevlar jumpsuit for two grand and save the taxpayers a lot of money.
Not getting our chil
dren shot is a good thing. But we’re spending a national average of $7,000 per pupil each year, and there are those of us who believe this ought to buy something resembling an education. The least we ask is for the public schools to do no harm. Alas, we are asking too much.
In 1995, America’s fourth graders ranked twelfth in the world in math skills, according to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and third in science. After four additional years of taxpayer-funded education, those same students ranked eighteenth and nineteenth, respectively. By the time they’re seniors, kids in the third-world country of Cyprus know math as well as ours do.
So, my public school pals, if you’re trying to create another generation of citizens too dumb to figure out how high their property taxes are, congratulations! You’re on a roll!
If the public schools were content not to teach my son math, that would be bad enough. But teaching him to feel great about not knowing math, that’s going a little too far. According to a November 2001 report in Personality and Social Psychology Review, self-esteem among America’s youth has been on the rise for thirty years… along with their weight, their drug use, their illiteracy, their pregnancy rates, and their level of sexually transmitted diseases.
But not their test scores.
Self-esteem based on nothing can set people up for disappointment, noted Dr. Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, who made this archetypally northern statement to Reuters: “It is more important that a child actually accomplishes something than that he or she have high self-esteem. Once a child accomplishes something, self-esteem will follow naturally. Children should be praised, but only when the praise has a basis in fact.” Dr. Twenge went on to blame this disconnect between performance and self-esteem on classroom techniques that teach children slogans and affirmations such as “I am lovable and capable.” “They may also feel that the world owes them something,” Dr. Twenge said, and, as long as that “something” isn’t a real education, we should be okay.
Redneck Nation Page 6
