Protecting civil rights, still

July 30, 2006

Journalist Diane Solis wrote in the Dallas Morning News today (free subscription may be required — and its dated, so hurry) about a continuing need for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), one of the most maligned federal agencies. When I staffed the Senate Labor Committee the commission was subject to a long-term investigation of its activities.

EEOC in litigated 400 cases in 2005, but it handled 75,000 complaints. Among the incidents Solis writes about:

In May, a judge ruled that 52 Indian nationals were held in lockdown by an armed guard, subjected to food rationing and paid well below the minimum wage at the John Pickle Co. in Oklahoma. The award: $1.24 million.

In March, a court heard the case of a black man who was harassed by fellow workers and restrained as they tightened a noose around his neck at Commercial Coating Service Inc. in Texas. The award: $1 million.

The long fight for civil rights continues, too.

1 Comment | Business Ethics, Civil Rights, Current History, EEOC | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Other notable stuff

July 21, 2006

History Carnival #35 is up at Air Pollution.

The #7 Carnival of Bad History is up at Hiram Hover. I link there knowing that the carnival may well do better what I try to do here, and I’ll suffer by comparison. All exposure of bad history is good, in my view.

Leave a Comment » | Bad Quotes, Current History | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Living history – Voting Rights Act

July 21, 2006

Congress this week approved a renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Senate voting yesterday, 98-0. The Act was a watershed in civil rights legislation, a law whose effects are clearly visible in the diversity of people who populate government in municipal, state and federal government now.

Lews & Kennedy discuss VRAct

This photo by Doug Mills of the New York Times is worth several thousand words. Its caption: Representative John Lewis, left, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the room where President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

The New York Times story (free subscription required) said:

As the Senate voted, Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, who was beaten in the 1965 voting rights march on Montgomery, Ala., came to the floor, and other lawmakers provided their memories of the era as they spoke in support of the legislation.

“I recall watching President Lyndon Baines Johnson sign the 1965 act just off the chamber of the Senate,” said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and one of three current senators serving when the law was originally passed. “We knew that day we had changed the country forever, and indeed we had.”

This event is a good lynch-pin for history lessons on the civil rights movement. Teachers may want to clip the story and photos from today’s papers to save for lesson plans through the year.

(West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd is one of the other three senators who were there in 1965. Who is the third?)

4 Comments | Civil Rights, Current History, U.S. Senate | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Textbook fight in Texas:Watch carefully!

July 17, 2006

Texas textbooks suffer from political wrangling by the state’s school board, which has little else to do with the texts but wrangle over what is in them and why. News suggests the board, recently fortified with primary election wins by extremely conservative, anti-public school forces, now will try to use the texts to change curricula statewide.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the Texas State Board of Education (Texas SBOE) will go after English literature in the next round of text approvals: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/metropolitan/4024620 Reporter Jane Elliott wrote:

“Many on the board want to replace a student-centered curriculum that calls on students to use their own attitudes and ethics to interpret texts with teacher-centered instruction that emphasizes the basics of spelling, grammar and punctuation.

“It was a fight social conservatives on the board lost in 1997, when moderates and liberals adopted the curriculum for all subjects. Now, with social conservatives expected to have a majority on the board for the first time after the November elections, the plan to rewrite the English standards is viewed by some as the opening shot in an effort to put a conservative imprint on the state’s curriculum.”

English does not lend itself much to political manipulation, generally. There is a set of classic literature that Texas teachers use, basically the same set teachers in other states use. It is possible that this change in process could help English instruction. Past experience suggests this is a stalking horse issue for the board to develop voting blocs and strategies to go after the content of U.S. history courses and biology courses later. Inherent dangers in these battles include the watering down of texts to the point that they are dishwater — deadly dull for students, and deadly to the teaching of the subjects.

Dr. Diane Ravitch, now of New York University, formerly the Assistant Secretary of Education for Research in the administration of George H. W. Bush, argues that both left and right share blame for bad textbooks as a result of these fights, in her book, The Language Police. I am most familiar with the Holt Rinehart Winston (HRW) series, The American Nation, from using it for three years (we were using an earlier edition of the book shown in the link).

The books must mention a broad range of specific topics and people. All of the approved history books suffer from a resulting dullness in their addressing the topics which makes history a real foot-slogging exercise for most Texas high school students. HRW offers significant additional products to help teachers — I made heavy use of the CD-ROM accompanying the text and especially its software to help generate tests. I found it necessary to use chunks from my extensive video library to supplement, and in critical areas for the Texas exit exam for seniors, the book did not inspire students to learn the material — for Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Japanese internment during World War II, Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, Vietnam and the Cold War, for example. These specific areas do not stand out in the book, not as I wish they would, and not in a way that the average kid would understand the issues.

History should sing. The study of history should inspire students, as patriots, as citizens, as parents and as humans interested in real drama. Dull books put the burden on teachers to make the history sing, and too few teachers are up to the task, especially in a world dominated by state-mandated teaching to a test (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS). I have a dream. I have high hopes that the Texas SBOE will make great new standards for English, standards that will lend themselves to helping teachers make the subject sing for the students so they will happily and well learn the topic.

I have a dream that this process will lead to a similar renaissance in U.S. history, and in biology, and in other topics. But I am dulled with the understanding of past history from the Texas SBOE.

Because Texas is a huge market for publishers, they will skew their books as Texas asks, often. You have a stake in the Texas curriculum regardless where you live. Watch that space!

4 Comments | Current History, History Revisionism, State school boards, TAKS, TEKS, Texas, Textbook Selection | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Day to remember: Ken Lay died, avoided jail

July 6, 2006

P. Z. Myers over at Pharyngula has some comments on the “death of corporate vision statements” and the death of Ken Lay, with links to some harsher views. Some of the commenters accuse Myers and others of gloating over Lay’s death. These are my comments at Myers’ blog:

Tom Peters used to say (may still say, for all I know) that no corporate vision neatly framed on a wall is worth a damn — the only one that counts is one that is engraved on the hearts of the people who make the company go. It was such a vision that saved Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol tampering crisis — and perhaps a few dozen lives.

But it’s clear that, at best, Enron and Lay failed to live up to that vision. At worst, the officers cynically avoided doing anything close to the corporate vision.

High ideals are not folly by themselves. Nor are they folly when people don’t live up to them. The folly is in the hypocrisy, in the intentional frustrating of the dreams those ideals may hold.

Gloating over Ken Lay’s death? As usual, the knee-jerk conservatives (emphasis on “jerk”) miss the point. Lay will spend no time in prison; under the law, he is now clean as a whistle, and under the criminal law it is extremely unlikely his estate will pay a dime in restitution to the thousands of good people made paupers by Lay’s misdeeds. It is those knee-jerkers who are cynical, and wrong, for defending a rip-off of so many. Ken Lay was no Pretty Boy Floyd — Lay stole from little guys to give to the rich, and Lay put into foreclosure more properties than Pretty Boy Floyd saved. The contrast should give one pause to defend Lay.

Gloat? Over a bad guy avoiding justice? That’s for the Bushies, for the Cheneys, for the DeLays, who have made such gloating a way of life, a legacy to warn our grandchildren with.

3 Comments | Business, Business Ethics, Current History | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Next Entries »