Re: Spinning NCLB "accountability" as civil rights: neocon girly manh...

["Nancy Patterson" <patterna@gvsu.edu>]

I think that if it were a case of good versus evil, it would be easier
to battle this.  But what I think it really is is two opposing views or
epistemologies, really, regarding the nature of school and learning.  It
is two different belief systems about what it means to learn and how we
define the concept of knowledge.  Historically these two factions have
been warring with each other at least since the enlightenment, and
probably longer.

But you are right that we also have to deal with those who view
education as a playing field for profit.  That crowd is quite diligent
at demonizing approaches to learning that threaten the bottom line. 

Nancy 

Nancy Patterson, PhD
Literacy Studies Program Chair
College of Education
Grand Valley State University 
920 Eberhard Center
301 W. Fulton
Grand Rapids, Michigan 49504
616-331-6226
patterna@gvsu.edu
http://faculty.gvsu.edu/patterna

>>> <Bussardre@aol.com> 8/7/2007 8:03 AM >>>

Wonderful articles. Thanks for sharing, Quan.
 
 I just wonder how long it will take before the nation wakes up and 
realizes 
how it has been manipulated all lthese years by these evil souls. I 
used to 
see these people as ignorant but I decided they are just plain  EVIL. 
Let's 
hope there is a hereafter where they will be held  "accountable."
 
Billee Bussard
 
 
 
In a message dated 8/6/2007 8:44:28 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
QCao009@aol.com writes:

_Black  is white_ (http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/black_white) 
Submitted by  _Rick Perlstein_  
(http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/user/rick_perlstein)  on August 6, 
2007 - 
8:55am.  

When I wrote about  the Supreme Court's  monstrously mendacious
decision to 
ban local school  districts from  seeking racial fairness, I was
especially 
offended by Chief  Justice  Roberts' formulation, “the way to stop 
discrimination on 
the basis  of  race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."  

Historian Nancy McClean has now published an amazing little essay in 
which  
she reveals the workshops that churned out this Orwellian  notion.
"Roberts’s 
 
decision," she writes, "is replete with quotable  phrases from the
lexicon  
conservative strategists honed in their  think tanks in the 1970s and
then  
carried 
into the nation’s  courtrooms through their various legal societies."

Here's the story:  
[H]ow did National Review greet the Brown decision? Frank Meyer, its  

founding co-editor and the leading conservative movement builder in 
the  
formative 
years, called the high court’s decision a “rape of  the 
Constitution.”

To fight the implementation of Brown, Buckley  and Meyer forged an 
alliance 
with the intellectual architect of  “massive resistance,” James 
Jackson 
Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick’s  agitation against school desegregation as 
editor 
of the 
Richmond  News Leader earned him praise as “one of the South’s 
most 
talented  
leaders” from the Mississippi-based white Citizens’ Councils  then 
working 
to 
crush the civil rights movement.

Buckley traded mailing  lists with this avid white supremacist 
organization 
in 1958,  assuring its leader that “Our position on states’ rights 
is the 
same  
as your own.” Indeed, it was. What made “the White community” in 
the  South 
“
entitled” to use any means necessary to keep blacks from  voting, 
Buckley 
had 
editorialized the year before, was that “it is  the advanced race” 
so its “
claims of civilization supersede those of  universal  suffrage.”
But calling the emancipation of black  schoolchildren a "rape," and
calling  
blacks civilizationally  inferior, wasn't flying with the public. So
they did 
 
what  conservative do: borrowed from the black arts of corporation
public   
relations. 
They were tutored by northern neo-conservatives like Irving  Kristol,
who  in 
1964 warned Buckley of the “political folly” of  arguing against
school  
desegregation “in terms of racial  differences.” Buckley and his
allies 
wisely  
dropped the racial  rationales and most now say that they regret their

earlier   
arguments.

But their core commitments stayed the same. To fight  social justice, 

conservative spokesmen simply mastered the art of  rhetorical jujitsu.
They  
seized 
the civil rights movement’s greatest  strength--its moral power–to 
defeat 
its 
goals. They complained less  and less that civil rights measures 
violated 
property rights, aided  communists or elevated racial inferiors. 
Instead, 
conservatives  claimed that civil rights measures themselves 
discriminated.

“I  am getting to be like the Catholic convert who became more
Catholic  than 
 
the Pope,” Kilpatrick marveled in 1978 about his own altered 
phraseology.  “
If it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or  sex,” intoned
the  
outspoken enemy of civil rights, “well, then, it  is wrong to
discriminate by 
 reason 
of race or sex.”

The  former segregationists now portrayed themselves as the true 
advocates 
of  
fairness. They framed “the egalitarians,” in Kilpatrick’s words, 
as  “
worse 
racists--much worse racists--than the old Southern   bigots.”...
Yes: quite literally, they argued that black was white. Read  the whole
essay 
 
_here_ (http://hnn.us/articles/41501.html) , then  groove to Nancy's
_book _  
(http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Not-Enough-Workplace-Foundation/dp/0674019091/r

ef
=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0698794-2006438?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186404043&sr=8-1)
 
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of  the American  Workplace.


Quan







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