Dana Goldstein

So, You Want to be a Magazine Journalist.

I've been meaning for awhile to write a long post culling the advice I regularly give students and recent college grads when they ask me how to jump start a career in magazine journalism. While there are some great websites out there for early career newspaper journalists -- my favorite is Joe Grimm's JobsPage -- there's a general hush-hush quality around magazine journalism career paths that, IMHO, does a grave disservice to the profession, maintaining its essentially homogeneous, insular quality. A lot of that, of course, also has to do with the crappy pay (or no pay) in this field. But that's a topic I've covered before.

Today we'll talk nuts and bolts career planning for the folks who are absolutely certain they don't want to go to law school. For those who have accepted that this is a highly competitive and contracting field rife with nepotism, yet who fall asleep at night dreaming of seeing their byline in the New Yorker. Who actually subscribe to the magazines they love and want to write for. This post goes out to you, my dear, fellow crazies.

Homemade Sour Cherry Sauce over Full Cream Vanilla Yogurt

This could not have been easier. Start with very ripe sour -- not sweet -- cherries. Remove the stems, then cut each cherry in half and remove the pit. Dump into a pot, add a few tablespoons of water, and turn the stove onto medium heat. As it thickens, stir and add sugar to taste. Serve hot over cold yogurt or ice cream.

You can do this with pretty much any fruit; it's a great way to use fruit up when it's getting over-ripe. My roommate Eva and I whipped this up in a few minutes to satisfy a week night sweet tooth. Obviously, it can be made healthier by using low-fat or non-fat yogurt.

Abortion Reduction and the Democrats

The Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners is making noise about pressuring Barack Obama to include "abortion reduction" in the Party's official platform this year. This provides a good excuse to remind ourselves of what exactly the Partly platform said about abortion in 2004, and what the state of abortion reduction efforts currently are within the Democratic Party.

Here is the full extent of the Party's 2004 pro-choice platform:

We will defend the dignity of all Americans against those who would undermine it. Because we believe in the privacy and equality of women, we stand proudly for a woman's right to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of her ability to pay. We stand firmly against Republican efforts to undermine that right. At the same time, we strongly support family planning and adoption incentives. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

Looks like, barring major changes, abortion reduction through encouraging adoption and preventing unplanned pregnancy is already a part of the Democratic Party platform. A Democratic Senator -- Hillary Clinton -- led the fight to ensure over-the-counter access for emergency contraception, a pragmatic way to reduce the need for abortions. Rep. Henry Waxman's office authored two ground-breaking reports: One on how federally-funded abstinence-only education denies teens the information they need to avoid pregnancy and STIs, and another on how federally-funded "crisis pregnancy centers" mislead women about the supposed health "risks" of abortion.

There's more Democrats can do, such as finally de-funding abstinence only education, on which they've continued to capitulate despite the overwhelming evidence that it's bad for kids. With a Democratic president, Congress can also move to require pharmacists to fill birth control prescriptions for any woman with a legitimate one, regardless of her age or marital status.

But my guess is that what Wallis really has in mind is something along the lines of the 95-10 Initiative, legislation proposed by Democrats for Life. That bill does not focus on family planning, but rather on directing women to crisis pregnancy centers and scaring them with medically questionable "informed consent" requirements that talk-up abortion's so-called negative after effects. It's been said before and I'll say it again: Carrying a pregnancy to term is far more dangerous to a woman's physical and psychological health than having an abortion. The Democratic Party platform could benefit from more specificity on reproductive health, but ideologically, I think it's exactly where it needs to be.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Are Guns a Feminist Issue?

SCOTUS' decision in D.C. v. Heller aside, I've always felt that the presence of a gun in one's home just significantly raises the probability of someone getting shot. When I had a particularly creepy landlord during my senior year of college, I told my small-town Ohio-bred roommate (hi Lauren!) that I simply didn't think the solution was for her to keep a shotgun under her bed. She rolled her eyes.

Suffice to say, feminists can have differences of opinion on this topic. Yesterday Megan McArdle said guns are a feminist issue, and indeed, they are -- but not because they equalize power between men and women. In actuality, in a physical altercation the stronger of any two people is more likely to gain control of any weapon that is present. As the Violence Policy Center reports, homes with guns are clearly more dangerous homes for women:

A 1997 study that examined the risk factors for violent death for women in the home found that when there were one or more guns in the home, the risk of suicide among women increased nearly five times and the risk of homicide increased more than three times. The increased risk of homicide associated with firearms was attributable to homicides at the hands of a spouse, intimate acquaintance, or close relative.

Granted, correlation does not imply causation. But it's a lot easier for a violent, abusive, anger-prone man (or woman) to kill his partner with a gun than without one.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Our Servicewomen

As Abby writes at TAPPED, President Bush has nominated Ann Dunwoody to be the nation's first female four-start general. But it's important to view women's place in the Bush era military within a larger context. As Spencer Ackerman points out today at his new blog home, a disproportionate number of women were the victims of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" last year. While women make up just 14 percent of the armed services, they were 46 percent of those discharged under the rule, which prevents openly gay Americans from serving in the military. A total of 627 people were discharged under DADT in 2007.

The conduct of the Iraq war has also ill-treated many thousands of American servicewomen. Today an American female soldier is more likely to be raped by a fellow-American service member than killed by enemy fire. Veterans hospitals are reporting that as many as 40 percent of their female patients were sexually assaulted during their service. And here at home, more than 100 high school-aged women were sexually assaulted or raped by male military recruiters since Sept. 11, 2001. It's a record of shame.

On a lighter note, do visit Spencer at firedoglake. He's got the best tag line ever: National Security. Iraq. Punk Rock. Real Talk.

cross-posted at TAPPED

The Suburbanization of Planned Parenthood

At The Corner, K.Lo uses this Wall Street Journal story on Planned Parenthood's suburban expansion as an excuse to urge John McCain to make de-funding the organization a plank in his presidential campaign platform. After all, suburban women don't really need Planned Parenthood, right?

As a political strategy, I think targeting Planned Parenthood would backfire among female voters, many of whom have turned to Planned Parenthood at least a few times in their lives, regardless of their socioeconomic class or political take on abortion. Visiting Planned Parenthood was one of the easiest, cheapest, and most confidential ways to obtain emergency contraception before Plan B was available over-the-counter. The organization also provides confidential gynecological care to teenagers, many of whom don't want their parents involved with the process.These teens, by the way, are going to have sex whether or not they can access birth control, so thank goodness there's an organization out there that gives them the option.

All that doesn't take into account the fact that Planned Parenthood remains the primary health care provider for millions of low-income women nationwide. The idea that the group would "suburbanize" into more affluent communities rubs some the wrong way. There's a legitimate debate to be had on whether Planned Parenthood's resources are best spent in under-served rural areas (87 percent of American counties have no abortion provider) or in suburbs where clients are able to pay for services out-of-pocket and are more likely to get involved with the organization's political mission.

But it's important to realize that suburbs aren't homogeneous. In many regions of the country, they are increasingly home to pockets of poverty, and are experiencing an influx of poor immigrants. And girls everywhere are facing a bevy of conflicting messages about sexuality and motherhood -- consider, after all, the suburban Massachusetts high school students who recently made a pregnancy pact.

There's nothing wrong, I think, with building more Planned Parenthood clinics in affluent areas and using funds raised there to expand abortion access via newer, nicer clinics in low-income areas. That's Planned Parenthood's plan. As Ann has written, the real estate of abortion providers is often depressing, drab, and institutional. That should change.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Public School Choice as Practiced Abroad

It's ironic that a year after our Supreme Court struck a blow against school integration, the Christian Science Monitor reports that Holland is planning on importing American de-segregation programs. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague, about 10 percent of neighborhoods are overwhelmingly made up of ethnic minorities. Nineteen percent of the Dutch population is foreign-born and 6 percent are Muslim.

The challenge of school integration in the Netherlands isn't just a question of mitigating the effects of segregated housing patterns, but also of a longtime emphasis on parental choice when it comes to Dutch schools. The new concept, which is based upon American models, is called "controlled choice":

In the controlled-choice setup, parents visit local schools and rank their top four. The system then tries to give parents their preferences while balancing demographics such as race, class, and parental education level in all the schools. Sometimes it factors in other variables such as gender and proximity, and whether a potential student has siblings in the school.

The potential problem here is the assumption that parents will have the time, knowledge, and inclination to visit many schools in order to rank their top four picks. Some immigrant parents who aren't fluent in Dutch (or, here in the states, English) will likely opt-out or never even hear about the opportunity. That means that when the district sits down to make school assignments, some kids have parents who've registered a choice for a top school, and other don't. That disadvantages already underprivileged kids, but still -- public school choice is one of the best options out there for keeping college-educated, middle class and affluent parents engaged in the public school system, which offers serious benefits to low-income families, who often aren't as active in pushing for school reform.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Living History

These are the fields of Monticello, once tilled by Thomas Jefferson's slaves. I visited there last Memorial Day weekend. Today, via Matt Yglesias, I see Ben Smith is reporting that Paula Abeles -- a white Jefferson descendant who's been active in keeping black descendants out of Monticello family reunions -- has become a John McCain volunteer after initially support Hillary Clinton. I've long been fascinated by Jefferson and his family history, and it's worth expanding, I think, upon how deeply racist and out-of-the-mainstream folks like Abeles are.

Conclusive DNA evidence linking Jefferson or one of his brothers to the black Hemings line has existed since 1998. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded it was likely that Jefferson himself fathered all six of his slave Sally Hemings' children. The dates of their births correspond quite neatly to nine months after the rare times Jefferson and Hemings were simultaneously at the estate. And historical documents indicate, the foundation found, that "several people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community believed that he was the father of Sally Hemings' children."

If you visit Monticello today, you'll hear chilling, wrenching stories about the lives of the hundreds of enslaved people who lived there. Jefferson, although thought of in his own time and today as a "benevolent" slave-owner, did instruct his overseer to beat his slaves. Jefferson sold husbands away from wives and teenagers away from their parents. Jefferson publicly tortured and humiliated runaways.

Those Jefferson descendants who continue to reject their black brethren are facing off against both science and history, choosing to embrace an outdated and, quite literally, white-washed image of their scion. Hearing that Abeles supports McCain will only push more Clinton supporters -- the vast majority of whom are committed Democrats and fairly progressive -- into Obama's camp.

cross-posted at TAPPED

It's Been a Century, and Women Still do Twice as Much Child Care

When men and women argue about the gender gap when it comes to time spent on household chores -- cooking, cleaning, yard work, and home repairs -- men often suggest that women should lower their standards. In other words, if you want the apartment to be neat and tidy, and he wants it to be a pig pen, you can compromise on it being disheveled and dusty. Right?

Whatever you think of that argument, it's a lot tougher to make the case that a "middle ground" can be reached on child care chores; cleaning, dressing, shopping for, and feeding kids. Researchers who study the division of child care between married couples don't count reading to kids or playing with them among these chores. As a result, they've found something startling, Lisa Belkin reports in a Times Magazine feature:

Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one. As with housework, that ratio does not change as much as you would expect when you account for who brings home a paycheck. In a family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work, she spends 15 hours a week caring for children and he spends 2. In families in which both parents are wage earners, Mom’s average drops to 11 and Dad’s goes up to 3. Lest you think this is at least a significant improvement over our parents and grandparents, not so fast. ...

Back when women had to tend fires to cook and put clothes through the wringer and then onto the clothesline, they spent 50 hours a week on housework and men spent 20. (A ratio of 2.5 to 1.) And back in the 1950s, when no one was even bothering to measure how many hours men spent on child care because it was thought to be negligible, the average mother spent 12 to 15 hours caring for her children — the same as they spend today.

That's remarkable. Over the course of a century in which women's roles outside of the home expanded radically, mothers continued to spend the exact same number of hours on basic childcare chores as their great-great-grandmothers did. And the average working man with a working spouse still spends just three hours a week on basic child care.

Belkin's article focuses on a program called ThirdPath that promotes "Equally Shared Parenting" -- a systematic approach that "trains" parents to equalize the time they spend at work, on child care, and on domestic labor. The chart-making system may seem overly rigid to many people, and indeed, some couples tell Belkin ThirdPath didn't work out for them. It seems impossible for many husbands, for example, to internalize the mental "list making" that's essential to parenting: which kid needs to go to the doctor and when, which birthday parties are coming up and when to buy a gift, and so on. Women, on the other hand, often have trouble giving up control. It's all very discouraging. But it's also worth remembering that the travails of these middle-class and affluent hetero couples aren't representative; about a third of households with children under 18 are headed by a single parent.

In any case, the piece is worth a read, and is sure to be widely discussed.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Grow Up

I agree with Ezra and, more surprisingly, Ross: The New York magazine cover story on male adultery is a piece of infantile self-justification. Not only that, but it's full of casual classism, sexism, and historical revisionism. Author Philip Weiss idealizes Victorian prostitution and "ancient aristocracies" in which "rich men had courtesans for pleasure and concubines for quick sex." In actuality, both were sordid, disease-spreading systems reliant upon the exploitation of women without other economic options. Weiss then recounts a conversation with an equally lust-addled married male friend over dinner at a New York restaurant. Weiss suggests to him "that we could change sexual norms to, say, encourage New York waitresses to look on being mistresses as a cool option." Yeah! Because after all these millennia, it's still super fun to imagine that working class women are the sexual playthings of affluent men!

Weiss continues by admitting that he and his friend's wives, to whom they don't feel like being faithful, "make our homes" and "manage our social calendar." Have they considered that picking up a few chores around the house might improve their marriages and sex lives? Just a thought.

The article goes on to traffic in completely unproven insinuations that European women don't mind being cheated upon, because they're so evolved and sophisticated. No actual European woman is consulted on this theory. As Ezra said, "Bleh." I can't understand why a guy who normally writes thoughtfully about the Middle East and American Jews would have added this particular piece to his journalistic oeuvre.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Clinton on Misogyny

Is it harder for a female candidate to get elected in America than an African American male, or just harder for Hillary Clinton to get elected than Barack Obama? Jury's out, but Clinton, in an interview with the Washington Post, chalks her probable loss up in some part to misogyny. Here's Hillary in her own words, speaking to Post reporter Lois Romano, who is very sympathetic to the candidate.

LR: Do you think this has been a particularly racist campaign? HRC: I do not. I think this has been a positive, civil campaign. I think that both gender and race have been obviously a part of it because of who we are and every poll I've seen show more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman than to vote for an African American, which rarely gets reported on either. The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable or at least more accepted. And I think there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when and if it ever raises its ugly head. But it does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by comments and reactions of people who are nothing but misogynists.

LR: Isn't that how it's always been, though?

HRC: Oppression of women and discrimination against women is universal. You can go to places in the world where there are no racial distinctions except everyone is joined together in their oppression of women. The treatment of women is the single biggest problem we have politically and socially in the world. If you look at the extremism and the fundamentalism, it is all about controlling women, at it's base. The idea that we would have a presidential campaign in which so much of what has occurred that has been very sexist would be just shrugged off I think is a very unfortunate commentary about the lack of seriousness that should be applied to any kind of discrimination or prejudice. I have spent my entire life trying to stand up for civil rights and women's rights and human rights and I abhor wherever it is discrimination is present.

Of course, the Clinton campaign's failure to organize in caucus states (and so on and so forth) was at least as influential as sexism in allowing the nomination to slip out of her hands. It's also frustrating that Clinton insists upon comparing sexism to racism instead of acknowledging that both continue to be major problems worldwide. But some of what she's saying here is quite important and, coming from the lips of a presidential candidate and U.S. Senator, almost unprecedented. To admit that sexism is at the core of religious fundamentalism and the ideology of terrorism is to begin to realize that feminism is a powerful solution -- not just to "women's issues," but to foreign policy problems, national security threats, and so much else. I think what we're hearing here is a candidate unbound, able to speak freely because she knows she's almost finished with the race.

cross-posted at TAPPED

The Dirty Secrets of Higher Ed

An Atlantic essay by "Professor X," a pseudonymous community college English teacher, is an interesting and demoralizing read. The author writes that the vast majority of students he's taught over the years in "colleges of last resort" aren't able to read, write, or analyze at the college level, either because they haven't been adequately prepared by the K-12 education system, or because they simply don't have the ability. Sadder still, these students have often been sent back to school by their employers, who will not allow them to advance at work without a diploma and won't reimburse them for their classes if they get a failing grade.

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college—but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. ...

I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

No Child Left Behind and most of the popular education reform proposals out there are based around the idea of pushing all students to meet higher academic standards. Indeed, it's depressing to see that in many low-income schools, children are learning elementary school math in ninth grade, reading middle-grades books during senior year, and the like. Vocational education is profoundly out of style, which corresponds with the shrinkage of the manufacturing sector. But can't we do much more to realistically prepare people for the workplace, without assuming everyone should read Proust? I'm thinking about courses in personal finance, basic sentence structure and letter writing, and Internet research skills (not academic research, but how to find the answers to common questions, search for job listings, interact with local government via the Internet, and accomplish business tasks). Students who need them should be able to enroll in such practical courses in high school and beyond, while still being expected during the K-12 years to read literature, write essays, master basic math, and learn about the structures and history of their political system.

cross-posted at TAPPED

What Megan is Missing on Teachers Unions

I would not defend teachers or principals unions in all cases; indeed, I agree with Megan McCardle that their resistance, in some parts of the country, to paying professionals a bonus for working in low-income schools isn't in the best interests of children. That isn't merit pay tied to test scores or other factors a teacher can't fully control -- it's simply paying professionals more for agreeing to do a much more difficult job, which would in turn attract better teachers and principals to where they are most needed. But by crediting the break-up of the New Orleans teacher's union with a subsequent small improvement in test scores there, Megan ignores many of the other factors at play in the Big Easy overhaul. Here's how the New York Times describes it:

Since Hurricane Katrina, most of the schools here have been taken over by the state, and are run either by [Superintendent] Vallas or as citizen-controlled charter schools. The local school board and administration — long notorious for corruption and political interference — have been neutered.

Classes are smaller, many of the teachers are youthful imports brought in by groups like Teach for America, principals have been reshuffled or removed, school-hours remedial programs have been intensified, and after-school programs to help students increased.

Still, the challenge remains substantial in a school district of 32,000, where 85 percent of the students are at least several years below their grade levels.

Just as it's easy to pick out circumstances in which the interests of teachers unions seem antithetical to the interests of children, it's easy to point to times when the two are in sync. Teachers unions advocate for smaller class sizes. Teacher's unions advocate for newer, better supplies, from textbooks, to chairs and desks, to cleaner classrooms. Teacher's unions advocate for more support staff, such as guidance counselors, psychologists to deal with learning disabilities and problems at home, and classroom assistants. All of that is very good for kids.

cross-posted at TAPPED 

A Long Way to Go on Transit

Paul Krugman has a chart showing that 77 percent of American commuters drive to work alone, and less than 5 percent nationwide use public transportation. But because of sky-rocketing gas prices, mass transit ridership is up about 5 percent in large East Coast cities such as New York and Boston, and up as much as 10 to 15 percent in Southern and Western cities such as San Francisco, Nashville, Denver, Houston, and Salt Lake City.

I've just returned from a reporting trip to Phoenix, AZ, where Gov. Janet Napolitano is trying to convince voters to support a ballot initiative that would raise the sales tax by a penny in order to fund a transportation package that provides about $7 billion for mass transit, and would include a light rail line between Phoenix and Tuscon. Indeed, I was shocked and appalled by the rush hour conditions of the highways circling Phoenix -- the traffic really does impose a "time tax," as Napolitano calls it. Nevertheless, her proposal is an incremental one; highway funding accounts for over $24 billion of the $42 billion package, almost three times what will be spent on trains and buses. Of course, had the plan been more progressive in terms of prioritizing mass transit, it's unlikely Napolitano could have convinced Arizona's powerful homebuilders to support it -- which they did. After all, the continued exurbanization of America depends on the car.

I'll have more on all this in an upcoming TAP print feature looking at Gov. Napolitano and the political and physical landscape of Arizona.

cross-posted at TAPPED 

The Case of the Missing Education Policy

Over at The Prospect, I report on the fact that John McCain hasn't released a detailed education platform since the year 2000, confusing education experts as to how exactly he's planning on improving our schools -- if at all.

McCain's thin education record raises questions about whether he has rethought either the central idea or the specifics of his 2000 education platform: a $5.5 billion, three-year national experiment in private school vouchers.

Since McCain first advocated vouchers, a growing body of research has confirmed that they do not improve students' academic performance or help close the achievement gap between affluent white children and poor children of color. Furthermore, the value of the vouchers McCain and other conservatives have proposed -- $2,000 -- is equal to less than half the average annual tuition at an American private school -- $4,689. That means vouchers won't give poor families many educational options beyond inner city parochial schools, which are far less expensive and exclusive than secular prep schools focused on ensuring college admission. Voucher programs stack the deck against families who prefer a secular education for their children. In Milwaukee, the site of the largest private voucher experiment to date, 102 of 120 participating schools are religious-affiliated.

In 2000, McCain wanted to fund his proposed federal voucher program through repealing sugar and ethanol subsidies. He has continued to argue against such subsidies, but no longer links that platform to education. In fact, McCain's track record in the Senate shows a long history of voting against redirecting money toward public schools, although he did approve $75 million in funding for abstinence-only education.

Read the whole thing.

How Best to Help FLDS Children?

If you've been following the story of the 437 children removed by the state of Texas from a breakaway, fundamentalist Mormon community in Eldorado, you know things are more complicated than they initially appeared: Police raided the compound after they received a call from a woman who said she was a 16-year girl who'd been sexually assaulted there. Now authorities believe those calls were actually placed by a Colorado woman with a history of making false police reports. Yet a Court chose to keep the children, even breast-feeding infants, away from their families and in foster homes, at least for the time-being. It is known that the sect forces girls in early puberty into marriages with older men, and that girls as young as 13 years old have been impregnated. A powerful argument can be made that when a community of adults forces children to conform to such a misogynist, violent, and abusive ideology, it is in their children's best interest to be raised by adults outside of that community.

Yet voices are beginning to raise in protest of the removal. Warren Binford, a children's rights expert, writes in the Oregon Statesman Journal:

If these teenage girls are being sexually abused, they should be in protective custody — absolutely. However, most of the children in custody are boys and young children, and thus, not at imminent risk of the abuse alleged.

All children have the right to remain with their families unless and until there is substantial proof of imminent risk of serious harm to that specific child. Due process rights entitle each and every child to individualized findings of harm or serious risk of harm.

It is sensible to assume that, especially for girls, being raised in an environment of sexual coercion has a profoundly negative psychological impact well before the actual acts of physical abuse take place. Still, Binford's point is well taken; removing young children from their parents abruptly may be equally traumatic. Indeed, there is no way for society to root out every family subjecting their children to such ideas and put those kids into an already over-burdened foster care system. So policy and legal solutions to these problems are unclear. Readers, what do you think? Is Texas right to keep the FLDS children in state custody?

cross-posted at TAPPED 

How Well Do Our Kids Write?

While high school grades remain the single best indicator of how successful a student will be in college, a new study finds that of all the sections on the SAT, the writing section is the best predictor of academic success. The College Board decided in 2002 to roll what used to be the SAT II writing subject test into the SAT I, which now contains both an essay and a multiple choice grammar review.

I am a total writing triumphalist, but I'm a bit surprised the SAT essay section has proven to be so predictive. The topics students are asked to write about on the exam do not at all reflect the typical college assignment. The SAT prompts personal essays on broad, amorphous topics, not exercises in building an argument through carefully engaging with competing evidence. That's why I've always been a fan of the "Document Based Question," which New York State uses on its Regents examinations. Those essays give students a number of primary sources around which to build an argument. For comparison's sake, here's an example of an SAT writing prompt:

Being loyal—faithful or dedicated to someone or something—is not always easy. People often have conflicting loyalties, and there are no guidelines that help them decide to what or whom they should be loyal. Moreover, people are often loyal to something bad. Still, loyalty is one of the essential attributes a person must have and must demand of others.

Adapted from James Carville, Stickin': The Case for Loyalty

Assignment: Should people always be loyal? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

Now a really engaged (and privileged) high school kid, one who might even know who James Carville is, could use this prompt to write about the presidential race. But most students will write about friendships, relationships on athletic teams, and other examples of loyalty in their personal lives. If they do so grammatically, include an introduction and conclusion, and begin their paragraphs with topic sentences, they will potentially ace this section of the exam. The sad fact is, most American high school students can't do even that. And that's not a problem, of course, that can be solved at the college level.

cross-posted at TAPPED 

Genetics and Health Care

Today the Senate is celebrating passing (by a 95-0 vote) the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. The bill, which President Bush supports and is expected to quickly pass in the House, would make it a crime for health insurers and employers to discriminate based upon genetic tests showing an individual is susceptible to a particular disease or condition. Sen. Ted Kennedy hailed the legislation yesterday as "the first major new civil rights bill of the new century."

Indeed, after failing to pass the Equal Pay Act earlier this week, GINDA is a real accomplishment. No one deserves to have their insurance premiums raised, or to be denied coverage, because they carry the breast cancer gene, or because they are genetically susceptible to illnesses that can be aggravated by work, such as carpal tunnel syndrome. But the bill makes absolutely certain to preserve insurers' rights to discriminate once those diseases have actually presented themselves. In other words, discriminating on the basis of a "pre-existing condition" continues to be perfectly fine, even though discriminating on the basis of genetic susceptibility to a condition will likely soon be against the law.

As an ideology undergirding our health care system, you can see how this is inconsistent. Either human beings deserve affordable medical care regardless of the diseases they have, or they don't. The sad truth is, protecting the basic for-profit nature of American health care (read: the right of insurers to deny coverage) is what's needed to attract Republican Congressional support to any reform bill. And that's why, despite Ezra's protestations, I'm inclined to woefully nod in agreement when Congressional Democrats throw water on hopes for universal health care in 2009.

cross-posted at TAPPED 

"Free Range Kids"

Via Newsweek, I've just been alerted to a dust-up in the world of upper middle class parenting: Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for the New York Sun, penned a column in early April describing why she allowed her 9-year old son to travel by himself from Bloomingdale's department store on Manhattan's Upper East Side to their home in Midtown West. (It's not a very long trip.) She wrote, "[F]or weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call. ... Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence."

Predictably, this anecdote garnered joyous cries of support, as well as rabid calls for Skenazy's head. The writer appeared on television and radio to defend herself against cries of "bad mother!" and even coined a catchphrase for the kind of parenting she supports: "Free Range Kids" -- complete with a new blog, of course. At first, I figured the backlash was in part suburban and exurban parents' horror at the idea of allowing a child to roam New York City alone. People don't realize that New York's crime rate is similar to that of Boise, Idaho. New York ranks number 136 in crime among the nation's 182 cities with populations over 100,000.

But in a follow-up column and podcast, Skenazy recounted her correspondence with parents nationwide, which proved that hovercraft parenting knows no geographical boundaries. A dad in Park Slope, Brooklyn won't let his 9-year old cross the street to go to the playground. An Atlanta mother doesn't allow her daughter to walk alone from the front door to the mailbox. A suburban lawyer makes his 11-year old call home immediately after walking one block from her own home to a friend's house. All this despite the fact that we now know "stranger danger" pales in comparison to the violence and sexual and emotional abuse too many children suffer at the hands of adult family members or acquaintances. And that the number of child abductions has been falling steadily for years.

I'm only 23 and my own childhood was quite different. My friends and I wandered our safe (but unfortunately sidewalk-less) neighborhood after school until dusk. We walked to the local Carvel ice cream shop. We rode our bikes to the library, where I once went wearing mismatched sneakers. We played in the woods. A good time was had by all.

There is simply no way for us to protect our loved ones from every tragedy that might befall them. Many of us learn this lesson in the most difficult way. But it's sad to think that American childhood has become a time of anxiety, instead of a period of exploration. To the parents out there -- do you think Lenore Skenazy is a heroine, or is she misguided?

cross-posted at TAPPED

Young Women Evaluate Candidates Based Upon Substance

I've admired Linda Hirshman's work in the past, but her recent Slate column accusing young female Obama supporters -- including TAP online contributor Courtney Martin -- of having "Mommy issues" is terribly reductionist. You can read Martin's response here, in which she thoughtfully points out that like men, women (even feminist women) are a diverse group who will never vote as a single bloc. But I really think the intergenerational divide between liberal women when it comes to these two Democratic candidates is rather simple to explain. Here are a few substantive explanations with which Hirshman and others who advance her argument should grapple:

1. Young, politically-engaged women are more likely to have been against the Iraq war since 2002 than older women are. And polls show that those young, single women who initially supported the war were among the first Americans to turn against it. Barack Obama has been consistent since the invasion in his opposition to war in Iraq. Hillary Clinton continues to refuse to apologize for her war authorization vote.

2. Generation Y is the most multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial demographic in American history. In Barack Obama, who is biracial and has written about his personal struggle with identity politics, many young voters see themselves -- or an idealized version of themselves.

3. Obama's campaign excites young activists in part because it's a campaign about organizing. Indeed, Obama's career began as an inner city community organizer, and his campaign today is offering a summer organizing fellowship.

4. There's no denying that Obama is the new, fresh face in this campaign, and that young people like that sort of thing. 'Nuff said.

In short, feminism is important to many young women who are sympathetic to Obama. Feministing, for example, a website for which the Obama-supporting Martin writes, also features a regular "Hillary Sexism Watch," which defends the Senator from misogynist attacks. Hirshman should realize that when a young woman votes for Obama, it isn't necessarily an anti-Hillary vote -- and certainly probably isn't an anti-woman, anti-feminist, anti-mom vote.

cross-posted at TAPPED