Last week, Steve and I were watching Palin’s speech and, truth be told, we were making lots of rude comments throughout the speech. But then she mentioned special education parents and said that we would have a friend in the White House. OK. We shut up. I got a little teary eyed. And then we recovered and shouted more insults at the screen. Steve – "I don’t believe it." Me – "What exactly are you going to do for us, honey?"
If we shut up and got teary eyed for a moment, so did a million other parents. It’s tough being a special education parent. It’s not the kids that are tough. My kid is fantastic – smart, affectionate, funny. I think we should clone him. The tough part is getting services for him. He’s been in speech therapy since he’s been 2-1/2 years old. Over the years, we’ve had to deal with incompetence, stupidity, feet dragging, and plain old meanness. And with all that, we’ve been told to be grateful for what we have, because in this political climate, nobody wants to spend anymore money on special needs kids.*
Friends I’ve got, Palin. I would like to know what you’ll do for us.
I’ve been getting links all weekend about Palin and special education. One report by Hilzoy who’s blogging at CBS news (cool) says that Palin actually slashed funding for schools for special needs kids by 62%. The Weekly Standard says she increased funding. Some are hoping that Palin’s special needs son and nephew will make her an advocate.
So, what would Palin do for us? Going back over Palin’s record in Alaska isn’t very useful. The state is swimming in oil money from the rest of the country. The Democrats in the state house are saying that Palin is taking credit for their programs.
What do special education parents need? They need acceptance and money. The presence of Trig is fantastic. He’s an adorable kid and his family is certainly happy to have him around. We need scenes like that on TV everyday.
But special education parents mostly need programs. They need health insurance companies to pay for therapy. They need after school programs. The kids need to sit in first rate classrooms, not tucked away into the broom closet in the back of the school. Kids need accommodations for physical handicaps. They need earlier intervention. Parents need assistance at home. These services require money and ideas. I didn’t hear either come out of Palin’s mouth during her speech. Republics, who promise to shrink the size of government, don’t have a good track record here.
Truly, I’m sick of trying to read the tea leaves and figure out what Palin would do about special education. It would be nice if she got away from the teleprompter and told us what her plans were. I hope it involves more than just dragging Trig around to political events.
Here are Obama’s plans, which includes $1 billion in new funding for research and services. McCain‘s website doesn’t mention special education or disabiilty politics.
*I won’t blog about our battles with the special education bureaucracy,
because one school system has used a parent’s blog posts against her in court. Thanks to Wendy for alerting me to that matter.
Apt. 11d 
We cannot trust Republicans on this score. The “tax cut” mantra puts them in a box. They are simply unwilling to think seriously about the needs and demands of disability policy. Furthermore, McCain (remember him!) will be setting priorities, and his top goal will be the military, rebuilding it from the drain of Iraq, and expanding and using it in his quest for “national honor.” He will be looking to win the Vietnam War. Between the tax cut pressure and the military expenditure desire, there is virtually no room for significant resources to go to the already ignored area of disability policy.
Palin will not be a force in DC policy circles. Her role is symbolic, to rally the base, win the election -and that seems to be working! After that, I suspect she will become very familiar with a certain warm bucket of spit…
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(I accidentally posted this in the wrong thread earlier, but here it is.)
An Ed Week article from this April said the following:
“Gov. Sarah Palin and state lawmakers have gone ahead with an overhaul of Alaska’s school funding system that supporters predict will provide much-needed financial help to rural schools and those serving students with disabilities.”
[snip]
“A second part of the measure raises spending for students with special needs to $73,840 in fiscal 2011, from the current $26,900 per student in fiscal 2008, according to the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.”
Of course, as both Laura and the article point out, Alaska in flush with oil revenues right now. This stuff is hard for me to follow, but I’ve seen the claim that the reductions came from Palin’s predecessor’s budget. An added factor is that in some ways, Alaska is a very high cost-of-living area, so $74k isn’t as much as it would be down in the lower 48.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/04/30/35recaps
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Agree. Palin is a huge distraction from the main fight. It’s McCain v. Obama. And McCain’s record on this issue is nonexistent. I got to that point rather weakly at the end. Should have driven that point home.
Palin has rallied the base in the past week. I’m not sure if she’s going to be able to keep it up when smart people begin to ask real questions about her.
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But if W has taught us anything, it is that smart people do not win elections.
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I think Sam’s point would be more accurate if it read “People who insist on reminding everyone that they consider themselves smarter than everyone do not win elections.”
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The worst comment I’ve heard about Palin’s plan to help disabled children is that a republican administration would “force more women to have children with Down syndrome”
I think it would be foolish to expect more practical help from a republican administration on special needs funding or public services (as one would expect for any public services provided directly to families and children). After all, the republicans are about cutting taxes and reducing the size of government.
On the other hand, I do think that the Palin family is a providing a high profile role model on accepting and integrating a special needs child into a family, and I think that’s could be more than symbolic. But, as with how one runs a family with 5 children, while running a campaign or a state, I would like to hear more specifics about how the Plains are doing it, not to judge, but to understand. Children with trisomy 21 can have a variety of health problems (congenital heart defects and gastrointenstinal problems being the one that affects infants). Is Trig one of the more fortunate ones? How was health care handled — what kind of insurance do they have? What will be covered? Someone mentioned the idea that Bristol & Levi haven’t gotten married yet, because of healthcare coverage. Those details are precisely the things that average people deal with every day, and knowing how she does it is necessary, if she is a role model.
Because if one is going to be a role model, one needs to show *how* one does it (in addition to showing that it can be done).
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Even though I’m not a Republican (I’m a Libertarian)- when I first heard about her I thought – wow. One of us – but then I realized that she has never said or done anything about special ed. Having a 4 month old Down Syndrome baby doesn’t count yet – from what I read they are pretty much like any other baby in the beginning if they son’t have the myriad of health problems. But then the milestones that other parent’s are used to seeing fail to come – and depending on the child’s abilities those early interventions can mean alot. But for now, the only difference with Trig and any other baby is that he gets passed around alot and goes to work with mommy. And just like the Spear’s family – they sometimes forget to put in in a car seat.
We just got my son’s yearly tuition bill – $53,000. Just like your son, he is bright and most programs for special ed just aren’t designed for a child like mine (but he wasn’t functioning at all in the public schools). Even though he was approved for private schools there were none (but one that is 8X harder to get into than Harvard) on the sacred state list that could provide an appropriate placement. Unfortunately, there was no room at the inn. Most of the private special ed schools designed for children with his set of disabilities were not set up to handle a child with his academic needs. It was a no brainer – but because the school is not on an approved list – we do the dance every year. Every year we hire lawyers and go to court and secretly pray for a district procedural screw-up (looks like we lucked out this year!). Maybe Ms. Palin will have better luck – but then, maybe those underfunded programs in Alaska won’t do her child much good no matter how much easier the system will probably be for her.
Before Palin’s arrival, Obama was the fist candidate to even talk about special ed funding OMG – he just lacked the handicap kid to pass around.
The Democrats really don’t care that her daughter is pregnant – marriage and motherhood seems to be going the wayside anyway. What they do care about is that since society has dropped its shame of the unwed teenage mother – and now she keeps the baby – then she needs support in doing so. And as far as Levi goes, leave him alone – he doesn’t seem ready for marriage yet. Why add to the divorce statistics?
And as for the pro-life movement – well – stop talking about how to save all these unborn babies and start raising money to take care of the ones that weren’t aborted.
Palin made a brave choice with Trig – but it doesn’t make her a hero. Most of us didn’t knowingly sign on for our special needs kids – but it doesn’t mean we love them any less. I have alot of people I would like to introduce Ms. Palin too – and I bet it won’t change her advocacy stands on federal funding for our children one little bit.
If McCain-Palin loses this election – I would suggest a new, more meaningful role – become the nation’s special ed advocate. I never thought about these kids – not really – until we had one. And trust me, she will learn – like we all did – the hard way that it isn’t always God’s Blessing – nor is it faith that gets us the services our children need. It is letters, lawyers, phone calls, and being more of a “pitbull” in lipstick than any hockey mom that ever lived.
Oh by the way, I wasn’t going to become one – but I am now joining the Democrats. the Religious Right terrifies me and this is the direction that the GOP has decided to go.
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MH, guilty as charged about looking down on Bush voters, but I don’t know how to talk to people who refuse to accept basic truths.
Any advice?
By the way, on an interesting sidenote, on a local e-mail list where I’ve been talking about my residency issues (nothing to update yet) with other residents, one person trashed our school district as inferior and said the high school wasn’t even accredited and so he had to send his kid to a parochial HS. Obviously, our HS is accredited. But how am I supposed to deal with someone so invested in his POV that he refuses to accept basic facts?
I grew up in a family that was lower middle class in the case of finances and such, and we have traditionally lowbrow tastes (no arugula here!), but the biggest crime you could commit in my house was to be stupid. And stupid wasn’t about educational status or what college you went to. It was about simple critical thinking skills and fact checking.
As far as I can tell, we were very much in the minority.
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More or less off-topic, but will you do a post on McCain’s education policies more generally? I started one yesterday, and still might write one, but the one I started was way too partisan for my liking (I’m afraid this might be inevitable — like you I am much more willing to give Republicans credit on education than most leftists, but McCain’s site looks like he paid one Cato’s interns to spend 3 hours writing it).
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She gave birth to a special needs child. She’s not been home caring for one! I really think its harmful for her to be dragging her kiddo out on the campaign trail when what our kids need is stability and nurturing!!! Not to mention that her oldest daughter needs her too. Doesn’t seem like a good time to me to thrust your family out in the spotlight, on a crushing publicity tour!
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Wendy, as long as the errors are randomly distributed, in the aggregate it usually doesn’t matter if any one individual is wrong.
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Laura, from the NYT article you cite:
“The law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, passed in 1975 with bipartisan support, called for the federal government to pick up 40 percent of the state cost of teaching children with special needs. The federal government pays less than half that, though more under the Bush administration than under President Clinton.”
(Emphasis added.)
You are right to be skeptical of (a) anything you hear in a convention speech and (b) the ability of the federal government to affect the daily lives of parents of SN kids, but I don’t think disability policy generally breaks down easily along politically partisan lines.
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But MH, I don’t think that the errors are randomly distributed. I think it’s basically that a lot of people want to believe what the Republicans tell them and so they do despite all evidence to the contrary. And there have been studies showing how the frequency of error is greater among certain groups of people who get their information from certain news outlets.
These are the people I’m talking about.
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“I don’t think disability policy generally breaks down easily along politically partisan lines.”
My experience is that education policy period doesn’t break down easily along politically partisan lines.
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harry – re: ed post and McCain. Why don’t you do it, harry, since you’ve started it already? I’m sure it will be better than anything I can do. Besides I’ve got some half baked thoughts on the culture wars theme going through this election and I want to write a post on that next.
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“But MH, I don’t think that the errors are randomly distributed. I think it’s basically that a lot of people want to believe what the Republicans tell them and so they do despite all evidence to the contrary. And there have been studies showing how the frequency of error is greater among certain groups of people who get their information from certain news outlets.”
Over at the Washington Post, Rick Shenkman has an article up entitled “5 Myths About Those Civic-Minded, Deeply-Informed Voters.” My apologies for quoting a big chunk of it, but the article has something for everybody. Here are myths 2 and 3:
—————————
2. Bill O’Reilly’s viewers are dumber than Jon Stewart’s.
Liberals wish. Democrats like to think that voters who sympathize with their views are smarter than those who vote Republican. But a 2007 Pew survey found that the knowledge level of viewers of the right-wing, blustery “The O’Reilly Factor” and the left-wing, snarky “The Daily Show” is comparable, with about 54 percent of the shows’ politicized viewers scoring in the “high knowledge” category.
So what about conservative talk-radio titan Rush Limbaugh’s audience? Surely the ditto-heads are dumb, right? Actually, according to a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Rush’s listeners are better educated and “more knowledgeable about politics and social issues” than the average voter.
3. If you just give Americans the facts, they’ll be able to draw the right conclusions.
Unfortunately, no. Many social scientists have long tried to downplay the ignorance of voters, arguing that the mental “short cuts” voters use to make up for their lack of information work pretty well. But the evidence from the past few years proves that a majority can easily be bamboozled.
Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after months of unsubtle hinting from Bush administration officials, some 60 percent of Americans had come to believe that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, despite the absence of evidence for the claim, according to a series of surveys taken by the PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll. A year later, after the bipartisan, independent 9/11 Commission reported that Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with al-Qaeda’s assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 50 percent of Americans still insisted that he did. In other words, the public was bluntly given the data by a group of officials generally believed to be credible — and it still didn’t absorb the most basic facts about the most important event of their time.
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A link to the pew report.
http://people-press.org/report/319/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news-and-information-revolutions
Daily show/colbert report: 54% high knowledge
Major newspaper websites: 54%
NewHour with Jim Lehrer: 53%
O’Reilly factor: 51%
NPR: 51%
Rush Limbaugh: 50%
News mags: 48%
TV News websites: 44%
Daily newspaper: 43%
CNN: 41%
. . .
Fox News: 35%
Network morning shows: 34%
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Why do they collapse the Daily Show/Colbert Report? Aren’t they different?
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I haven’t seen either the Daily Show or the Colbert Report in a long time. However, Jon Stewart appears in an episode of Jack’s Big Music show and Colbert plays the letter ‘Z’ in a very good Sesame street video.
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I’m intrigued by the relatively lower rating that newspaper readers get. I’m also surprised that CNN viewers do so well, based on the bits of their programming I’ve seen while in transit in airports. And why doesn’t NPR rate higher? Shouldn’t NPR listeners do better than CNN viewers? Or do people just get hypnotized by those smooth, quiet NPR voices, and just tune out? Here’s another question: how does this stuff break down by gender? Is “Network morning show” viewers just a nice way to say women?
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OK, here’s the kind of thing I’m talking about:
http://chrisofrights.blogspot.com/2008/09/vetting-sarah-palin.html
and
http://explorations.chasrmartin.com/2008/09/06/palin-rumors/
The latter guy was going to be on Fox or something.
Here’s an example:
“yes, she did ask the librarian if some books could be withdrawn because of being offensive; no, they couldn’t; yes, it was “rhetorical”, at least as was reported contemporaneously in 1996[1] ; yes she did threaten to fire the librarian a month later; no, that wasn’t over the books thing but instead over administrative issues; no, the librarian wasn’t fired either; yes, the librarian was a big supporter of one of her political opponents; yes, the librarian was also the girlfriend of the Chief of police mentioned above; no, this is not the first time in the history of civilization that someone has been threatened with being fired over a political dispute”
Oh, but when it’s the Clinton Travel Office situation, it’s BAD BAD BAD BADDITY BAD.
And here’s the first guy quoting someone else:
“She changed her mind, he said, when “she saw that Alaska was being perceived as taking from the country and not giving, and that impression bothered her and she wants to change it. … I think that Sarah Palin is someone who has the courage to reevaluate situations as they developed.”
Excuse me while I VOMIT remembering the trash Kerry took for being a “flip-flopper.”
There is no logical consistency, no moral value that holds up from one moment to the next except “IS S/HE A CHRISTIAN?” or “IS S/HE A REPUBLICAN?”
That’s all that matters. Facts be fucking damned.
I’m sick of it, people. Just sick of it.
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Wendy,
Everybody wants to keep certain books out of libraries. There’s only so much money and space, so librarians are going to choose which books are worthwhile to buy or keep. Libraries are forever flushing books off their shelves, mostly for lack of space. That sort of “censorship” is going on invisibly all the time. Some librarians might not want to stock “Little Black Sambo.” Others might hesitate to shelve a copy of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” under the original English title. Also, should some donor generously provide a library with subscriptions to the leading White Supremacist magazines, I don’t think that those magazines would be accepted or displayed, nor should they be. I don’t know what libraries have done about it, but it is a genuinely difficult question what to do about children’s classics with un-PC language. The Dr. Dolittle books, for instance, are very imaginative and clever, but they had to be extensively bowdlerized starting in the 1960s because of racial content (or so says Wikipedia). (My husband and I unwarily downloaded a couple Dr. Dolittles from Librivox to listen to in the car with the kids and we had to do some occasional fast-forwarding, particularly when Dr. Dolittle visits Africa.) A children’s librarian today would be very unwise to do a read-aloud of the Dr. Dolittle books. And that goes double for Huckleberry Finn. When my mom substitute-taught on an Indian reservation when I was a kid, she spot-edited the Little House book that she was reading aloud to her class, and I think she did rightly.
There’s also the issue of context. Some items belong in the children’s section and some don’t. “The Joy of Sex,” “Lolita” and Matthew Sweet’s “Inventing the Victorians” are very fine book, but they don’t belong in the children’s section. Those are clear-cut nos, but opinions are inevitably going to differ on the question of which books belong in the children’s section and which don’t. It seems to me that this question should be decided by community standards, rather than by some sort of high priesthood of librarians. And that means that there should be political influence on what books are in the children’s library. Hence, a mayor is not out of line asking theoretically about this issue. We can argue book-by-book which are valuable to either the adult or children’s collection, and I think that argument is worth having. If public money is going to be supporting the libraries, the libraries have to be at least somewhat responsive to the public. I realize that this means that Danielle Steele gets an entire bookcase of her own in adult fiction, but that’s the price we pay.
(At least in my opinion, the Harry Potter books get better and better from the 1st up until the 4th book, and then there’s a precipitous drop in literary quality. Purely on the grounds of literary merit, it’s very difficult to defend the 7th Harry Potter. Personally, I’d like to pretend the whole thing never happened.)
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Being charged with flip-flopping has always depended on you views on whatever was flipped. I’m sure that the people who wanted the bridge built charged Palin with flip-flopping. The errors are hardly all in Palin’s favor, including on the library thing. Which is why I think the best you can hope for is randomly distributed errors. So plot the residuals.
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“Deathly Hallows” wasn’t that bad. Sure, it was a bit of a surprise when “Snape” pulled-off the mask and revealed that actually Dumbledore had killed Snape at the end of the last book. But when you think back to what happened right before Hermione died, I think Rowling really laid the ground work for the twist.
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No, I don’t agree that the books in a library should be chosen by “community standards” anymore than I believe that the value of pi should be so determined.
But, that might go a ways to explaining the lack of knowledge of Fox viewers.
BTW, 54% and 50% are not significantly different from each other with the Pew sample size of 100, p=0.67. Therefore, there is no evidence from that data that NPR viewers are less knowledgeable than daily show viewers (or, frankly, Rush viewers). Fox viewers, on the other hand, are significantly less knowledgeable, p<0.01 than Daily show viewers, though not than CNN viewers.
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Oops, I read the wrong number for the sample size, and thus, my calculations above are wrong. I can’t find the sample size, actually. Will update when I find it.
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OK, Daily Show not significantly different from NPR (p=0.1); NPR significantly different from FOX (p<<0.01).
(the n is 1502)
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bj,
1. Doesn’t “Fox News” mean “old folks” and doesn’t “morning news” mean women?
2. If the community doesn’t get a say in the content and running of the library, why should the community pay for the library?
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1. Doesn’t “Fox News” mean “old folks” and doesn’t “morning news” mean women?
No, I don’t think so — the 18-29 population is not particularly low for Fox, and, “old folks” are actually the more more knowledgeable voters.
morning news is women-biased, though
2. If the community doesn’t get a say in the content and running of the library, why should the community pay for the library?
for the same reason that they should pay for biology and math teachers who teach the fundamentals of biology and math.
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bj,
We live in a democracy. Like it or not, the taxpayer has a say as to how public institutions manage their affairs. Taxpayers (or at least some of them) care what books are part of the children’s collection at the library, just as they have opinions on their children’s math homework and their children’s science teachers and vote accordingly. Those opinions may be completely uninformed, but if so, that reflects badly on the math, science, and English teachers of the past who were unable to produce a better-informed citizenry when they had the chance.
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What bothers me about Palin’s statement about special needs kids is that this is apparently entirely because she has one. Did she say anything about parity for mental illness, for example? I guess she would if she had a mentally ill child. That is what’s wrong with it — leaving aside that the promise of an “advocate” in the White House is unlikely to translate into a funding in a McCain administration.
(And Amy: Of course *librarians* make decision about books all the time. That’s their job. It is not the Mayor’s job, and when the Mayor gets involved it is meddling of the worst kind.)
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Question:
Imagine you are a white head librarian in a significantly minority neighborhood. A delegation of residents objects to the presence of Huckleberry Finn out on the shelves. What do you do?
If it were me, I’d either send the book to another branch or banish it to some limited-access location on-site. Then if anybody wanted it, they could special order it or ask for it. This isn’t a fantastic situation, but it’s better than becoming the star of some uncomfortable racial situation and then getting fired or transferred.
I agree that some lone yahoo shouldn’t be able to have a veto over the holdings of the library. However, I think it’s much more acceptable if it’s the product of the political process and there is a large group of people who object to a particular title. Ditto for classroom use. There was a dust-up a few years back over the classroom use of Flannery O’Connor’s brilliant short-story “The Artificial N*****.” People just couldn’t get past the title. I regret the fact that the teacher couldn’t use the story in peace, but it was extremely imprudent to try.
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Amy, the process of obtaining and carrying library books by librarians is pretty complex, and I don’t think your examples quite do it justice. Libraries must offer services and are accountable to state guidelines. Libraries need to keep track of usage statistics and demonstrate the benefits they give to the community.
Sorry, I am a strong public library user and advocate, a former student employee at my college library, a member of the “Friends” of our local library (and a prospective member of the Friends operating committee at one point till I ran out of time), and I follow library politics in my community quite a bit.
I think the question you should be asking yourself is “If I were someone who wanted to censor any books that challenged my religious beliefs, what would I want my mayor to do on my behalf?” Chances are, the answers will line up pretty well with what Palin did.
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Wendy,
I don’t know the exact details of how this stuff is managed at the higher levels of library management, but there seems to be quite a bit of local variation. A community with a big Asian population might have lots of Chinese-language books, a community with lots of Russian emigres might have a large collection of pulpy Russian detective stories, a largely Jewish community might have lots of Judaica, and a public library in a historically important neighborhood might have an entire room devoted to historical materials. It’s clearly not all top-down–there’s at least some room available for local initiative and local character.
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“Imagine you are a white head librarian in a significantly minority neighborhood. A delegation of residents objects to the presence of Huckleberry Finn out on the shelves. What do you do?”
Huckelberry Finn is a classic of American literature, and it would be odd to find a librarian who would be willing to banish it on the basis of a “delegation of parents.” It depicts a real part of American history, and whitewashing it from the past would be denying that history.
But then, librarians have been one of the bulwarks of defending first amendment freedoms in the United States, including the “National Security Letters.”
http://www.ala.org/
And, yes, another big supporter of public libraries and librarians. Thanks for reminding me to renew my subscription at Freedom to Read Foundation. They won’t let me join the American Library Association, ’cause I’m not a librarian, so instead I’m a librarian groupie.
Does anyone else remember the story of the librarian in Basra who “saved the books, one by one.” There’s a children’s book about the story now: http://www.amazon.com/Librarian-Basra-True-Story-Iraq/dp/0152054456.
In my culture, one of the things you cannot step on, is a book, or a document with a written word.
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bj,
I’m trying to understand the library arguments better.
Do the ALA and Freedom to Read object to censorship, or to other people than them doing the censorship? In other words, do they defend all points of view, or just theirs?
For example, would they object to someone trying to get “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” out of the history section?
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The librarians think that they, librarians, are experts in considering the collection and organization of books, and that they should be free to build their collections in a non-democratic way. They believe this in the same way that I believe that math or biology should be taught in a non-democratic way. I decide what I’m going to teach in my classroom, based on my expertise about the subject. A librarian decides what books belong in their library, based on their expertise of the subject.
My guess for your question about protocols of zion, is that they a librarian would never have put it in the history section in the first place, just like a history professor wouldn’t have taught it in her class. Librarians regard themselves as academics, with the same freedoms academics in the classroom expect, to built their book collections based on expertise of the subject.
(but, check out the web site, if you are really interested in this question; I’m a groupie, but can’t speak for librarians)
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12 Ways Libraries Are Good for the Country
http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/resources/selectedarticles/12wayslibraries.cfm
#10: 10. Libraries offend everyone. Children’s librarian Dorothy Broderick contends that every library in the country ought to have a sign on the door reading: “This library has something offensive to everyone. If you are not offended by something we own, please complain.” This willingness and duty to offend connotes a tolerance and a willingness to look at all sides of an issue that would be good for the nation in any context; it is particularly valuable when combined with the egalitarianism and openness that characterize libraries.
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The librarians think that they, librarians, are experts in considering the collection and organization of books, and that they should be free to build their collections in a non-democratic way.
That was my impression. But what it means, in practice, is that the ALA is not–and is not perceived as–neutral in the culture wars.
Because to me, this technocratic dynamic is what drives the culture wars. More and more, the important decisions are made by “experts”–there’s no way for the citizens to have any significant say in how their community school/library/zoning/police department is run. In Megan McArdle’s great one-liner–“they don’t hate us for our freedoms; they hate us because we think we deserve to rule them.”
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“That was my impression. But what it means, in practice, is that the ALA is not–and is not perceived as–neutral in the culture wars.”
I don’t understand why being immune to community pressure makes the ALA not neutral. “This willingness and duty to offend connotes a tolerance and a willingness to look at all sides of an issue that would be good for the nation in any context” (to quote actual librarians, rather than me, to me that’s the definition of neutrality). There seems to be some culture war belief that librarians are more susceptible to challenges from the left than the right (hence Amy’s questions). But, they’re not, either in practice, nor in theory.
Of course, biologists are also not considered “neutral” in the culture wars, because evolution is the guiding principle that gives structure to biology.
Is expertise itself not neutral? Do we determine the value of pi by voting? (which, incidentally, usually results in values that will cause the world to blow up). Should community standards determine what should be taught about evolution? or global warming? Should we teach something different in rural alabama than we do in urban seattle?
If these culture wars are about ignoring knowledge (i.e. expertise), and what I’ve always feared about this current administration, then I guess there really is a war, and that I’m on the other side.
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Expertise should be neutral; experts, being human, are not. (Pick 10 people out of the phonebook, and there will be a subject on which they are both wrong and in the minority.)
Now, there are lots of footnotes to that: I only have time for the most important.
Expertise in one area can lead to ignoring out-of-area concerns–functional bias. (If you ask a group of actuaries, “Is this a fair way to set rates”, fair will be defined as “matching premiums to benefits,” not as “charging the same to men and women.”)
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bj,
As a science person, I don’t think you realize how very murky these humanities issues are. For instance, I bet very few librarians feature Little Black Sambo prominently in their children’s libraries or do read-alouds featuring the book, even though it is every bit as much of a classic in its way as is Huckleberry Finn. Furthermore, the question of what is and what is not a classic is a highly politicized area as well. Literary and critical fashions shift from decade to decade (ask Wendy) and there is no certainty as to what will be venerated a few decades from now. That’s one reason why we should be skeptical that a coterie of librarians can privately choose “the right” books without the benefit of energetic public discussion.
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