I hesitate to inflict this interview on my readers. You trust me to inform you and even on occasion to make you laugh with a good satire or parody. I try to shield you from pain and double-speak.
But I must share this with you.
Here is the latest interview with the Secretary of Education. It begins with a stomach-turning but accurate admission that education is the one thing that President Obama and the teacher-bashing governor of New Jersey Chris Christie agree on. How’s that for a reassuring opening?
When asked why the evidence for the reforms he is pushing seems weak, Duncan replies it is because they are new and therefore don’t have a 50-year track record. Oh, please, they don’t have any track record at all, yet he is pushing these untested, invalid measures on schools across the nation. Of course, everyone wants great teachers and great principals and great schools, but nothing he is doing is producing those results.
The questioner gently asks why there were no “dramatic” improvements in New York City or Washington, D.C. or Chicago, where Duncan was in charge for eight years. The answer is so vague as to be indecipherable. Ten years of Duncan-style reform in New York City, six years in D.C., twelve years in Chicago, and nothing to show for it. Just have faith! Believe!
I can’t go on.
Maybe you can.
But isn’t it nice to know that Arne Duncan and Chris Christie and all the rightwing governors are on the same page about how to deal with teachers and principals and schools and education?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Excerpt:
Q. We hear a lot that the root problem is poverty, not schools. But how does performance vary among poor kids? Do poor minority kids in Boston do better than those in Atlanta?
A. Poor kids in Massachusetts are doing dramatically better than poor kids in other states.
Well, I’m pretty sure that is because MA worked heavily on improved early childhood programs about a dozen or so years ago, and we are now seeing the fruits of those labors. MA success is not due to recently implemented standardized testing.
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Sadly, Massachusetts adopted the Common Core Standards while the state standards they had were better. “Poor kids in Massachusetts are doing dramatically better than poor kids in other states.” Great statement, where are the facts to back this up, Arne? Mass is an interesting state. Yes, our numbers are high, but Mass has the highest rate of college grads, who tend to reproduce with other college grads. We are also a heavy union state.
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And they have some powerhouse colleges too.
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As you said Obama is the lead snakeoil salesman when it comes to education reform–unless a new champion emerges it wont matter who is elected Romney or Obama because there isnt 2 cents worth of difference between them. The war on Teachers and students will not only continue but escalate .
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I can truly see Romney keeping Duncan onboard if he wins.
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I want to stay strong and I want to continue to fight but this last blog has set me back. I have been hopeful that at some point some person who has the ability to make change will suddenly realize the error of his/her ways and take substantial action to correct what is happening to our school systems.
Alas, reading Arne Duncan’s interview pushed me over the edge. Other civilizations have not been able to withstand destruction from within its borders and I fear that we are going to be next. I want to be optimistic but can’t even find a glimmer.
The only people who are speaking up are those with no true place at the table.
There is no longer any difference between our two parties in Washington. In fact, they are all on the same side: disconnected from the general population and no interest in even finding out. They listen to each other.
What is it going to take to break the stranglehold on education?
I love teaching. What is going to happen to all the children who don’t go to Sidwell Friends and the UofC Lab School? Who is going to teach those children? Who is going to teach children who are challenging? What is going to happen to that population? Education is not for the few entitled. Are we creating a nation of underclass to be controlled by a few?
Diane, as hard as this post was to read, it had to be shared. Please find the strength to continue. Some days your voice is the only thing some of us have.
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Until the public rises up and tells the Feds to take their money , regulations and control and shove it things will only get worse. The further removed they can get from local control the more damage they will do. School Boards need to reject All outside interference and get back to full curriculums. They need to defy the Feds and the State Governments openly on all testing-ALL
Schools were NOT failing before NCLB and since NCLB it has become a self fulfilling prophecy.
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Vermont is rising up & withdrew its NCLB waiver application recently because it wouldn’t agree to play by Duncan’s rules & the overreliance on standardized testing.
If everyone could agree to lend support to Vermont as our “reform movement” then we could substitute our complaining with action.
Diane wrote a blog about this recently entitled “Is Vermont the Best State” & she contacted Pasi Sahlberg of Finland about his lending practical & moral support to their cause but I haven’t heard if anything has come of it.
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School boards are part of the problem. They see money & they take it. And governors? Disgusting.
Concerned Mom of Two (see comments below) has got it right. We need to stick with states that are saying no, our kids’ data isn’t for sale. That’s what is happening. Schools are getting $ 4 kiddie data.
RttT money isn’t for educating students. It’s to stimulate the economy. Vendors are creating education software using kiddie data. Very sad.
Gates’ education philanthropy is the tail of an ugly tail wagged dog.
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Diane, you said
[But isn’t it nice to know that Arne Duncan and Chris Christie and all the rightwing governors are on the same page about how to deal with teachers and principals and schools and education?]
Granted, there are more Republican governors (29) than Democratic & Independents. However VA, TX, Nebraska & Minnesota haven’t adopted CCSS & the R’s & D’s are equally split.
45 states (Utah dropping out? Republican governor) have adopted the standards. Plenty of Democrats (18 excluding Nebraska & Minnesota) are with Duncan on education.
Is it fair to just lump the “right wing” Republican governors in with Duncan?
Seems to me that 45 (maybe 44 w/out Utah) of the US Governors are with Duncan, independent of political party.
I know you didn’t specifically mention CCSS however money is tied to their adoption.
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If 3.5 years is enough time to measure a president’s performance on the economy (whether he is a Democrat or Republican), then 10 years is more than enough time to measure the impact of super testing on public education. The measurement is negative!
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Good line of reasoning. I hope you don’t mind if I use it.
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Okay, here we go. Luckily I haven’t eaten lunch yet so I didn’t have anything puke up while reading Duncan’s ignorant idiocies. Let’s get to the decoding. It’s going to be long!
“Other reforms have bipartisan support as well: building quality preschools, expanding the school day and school year, and building a career path that gives the best teachers more authority and higher salaries.”
Let’s expand the students’ and teachers’ workload while not compensating them any more because to give more authority to the teachers would involve less not more CCSS and standardized testing. He’s also saying he hasn’t a clue how he will pay for this but “higher salaries” sure sounds good for the “best” teachers whoever they may be.
“Or that kids should have access to great content 24/7 with technology.”
Yep, no time to tarry here or play or relax from the work that is schooling for children. Not to mention maybe not every household has access to said technology. Just might be a problem of equality of access.
“The question is whether we can take it to scale. We haven’t done that yet.”
Ah, don’t you just love the business babble. I may puke the next time I hear that phrase in relation to education. It basically means that Duncan’s buddies may not be able to make a killing off the public education teat. Won’t be able to milk it like they’d like to.
Q. “How important are the structural reforms, like promoting charter schools, when compared to personnel issues, just finding the best teachers and principals? A. If you just had a lot of Michael Jordans, structure wouldn’t matter. But we don’t have enough Michael Jordans.”
Oh yea, baby, we all aspire to be “Michael Jordanesque”. Usually, but not always the superstars make the worse coaches, much as the supposed brightest in the education realm make crummy teachers as they have no clue what it means to struggle.
“This entire pipeline is broken.”-meaning the teacher training pipeline.
Oh, of course the whole system is broken, why we all know that. Equine Excrement. Maybe we should try giving teachers five weeks of training and then send them into the classroom. That ought to work!
“I ask: “What would you think if you were 30 years old and you could make $100,000 teaching?” And you can hear a pin drop. People get real interested in a hurry. No one goes into teaching to make $1 million, but you shouldn’t have to take a vow of poverty either. I’ve talked about doubling salaries and a great teacher making $130,000 or $140,000. That would help.”
Yes, it sure would help if we got a little more than barely adequate salaries. But what he is saying is that first we need to lower the amount we pay teachers and then by comparison the “great” ones can be overcompensated in relation to their colleagues. Who will determine the “great” ones (there’s only been one and only one “the great one” and he played hockey but I wouldn’t expect Duncan to know that) and how will it be determined?
“You have to look at multiple measures.” (in reference to assessing teachers)
I almost agree here but no, not multiple measures but a variety locally formed assessment instruments which would not include VAM of any sort.
“. . . having good tests? I’m not sure we have that.”
No shit Sherlock. Only cognizant thing he said in the whole interview. And we never will due to the inherent errors involved in the process that invalidates it. (See Wilson’s work)
“A. It’s never going to be perfect. We’re investing $350 million in the next generation of assessment, so it’s going to be a choppy couple of years until we get there. We always let the perfect be the enemy of the good in education, and we have to stop that.”
When you’re in a hole stop digging. Quit throwing money away on assessment instruments that are invalid and used unethically.
“Poor kids in Massachusetts are doing dramatically better than poor kids in other states. Q. What does that tell you? A. That poverty is not destiny. There are some folks who feel you have to end poverty to fix education. I believe you have to fix education to end poverty.”
That’s right, our socio-economic-political system is not to blame for the 25% child poverty rate, it’s just that their parents and teachers are failing to provide what they need to thrive in the supposedly “best” and “greatest” and wealthiest nation ever on the face of the earth-ha ha, jokes on those kids.
“What keeps you up at night? A. I sleep pretty well. But the stakes have never been higher. When I was in high school in the South Side of Chicago, my friends could drop out and get a decent job in the stockyards or steel mills, and own their own home and support a family. Those jobs are gone and they’re never coming back. If you drop out today, you are condemned to poverty and social failure. The lack of urgency about that is striking. So how do we shake the complacency? That’s what keeps me up.”
Allow me to briefly paraphrase that “Goddamned complacent teachers are the whole problem and I can’t get to sleep at night until I figure out how to crush those incompetent bastards!”
Sorry for the length but it had to be done. I think I’m going to fix myself a John Daly now to help clear my head!!
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Missed a couple of paragraph breaks/spacing. Sorry!
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Duane,
Thank you for taking the time to write that up. I’ve had a sick stomach lately, really I have, and I don’t think I could have read it.
When do you think this will end? It appears to me that Duncan is making this up as he goes along. He really doesn’t know what he is doing, does he?
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Duncan appears to be making it up, however he knows where he has to get. Monetize student data. Stimulate the economy. RttT.
I wondered yesterday if perhaps Duncan knows exactly what is going on but is playing dumb so he can claim ignorance when someone in Congress is feeling bold. I don’t know who — but I would guess someone cares.
Duncan stated the Learning Registry people know more about the registry than he knows. The Learning Registry is an advertising network for publishers & others. I will find their self proclaimed contribution to society. It’s the product of student data.
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How dare Arne Duncan cite Montogomery County, MD, & its Peer Review system of teacher evaluation as supporting evidence of his agenda! Does he not know that Montgomery County exempted itself from Maryland’s application for RTTT funding specifically because it wanted to retain peer review wherein student test scores are NOT tied to teacher evaluations?!
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The skill level of Duncan in the fine arts of obfuscation, deception and prevarication are finely honed and quite notable (in a negative sense). Wonder who/where he learned those skills?
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YEAH!! Oh happy day, I think I have finally found job security.!! You see, I recently got a job teaching music in the special education district teaching emotionally disturbed and cognitively impaired. Do you think Obama, Duncan, Christie, or any of their ilk, WANT to factor this classification of student into their testing regime? That would mess up their stats and theories about it being all the teacher’s fault. Their policies will make special education the last vestige for any child to truly receive a enriched liberal arts curriculum.
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Disclaimer-This post is satirical and is peppered with cynicism and gallow’s humor with 1 percent truth. I am truly happy to of found a job.
YEAH!! Oh happy day, I think I have finally found job security.!! You see, I recently got a job teaching music in the special education district teaching emotionally disturbed and cognitively impaired. Do you think Obama, Duncan, Christie, or any of their ilk, WANT to factor this classification of student into their testing regime? That would mess up their stats and theories about it being all the teacher\’s fault. Their policies will make special education the last vestige for any child to truly receive a enriched liberal arts curriculum.YEAH!! Oh happy day, I think I have finally found job security.!! You see, I recently got a job teaching music in the special education district teaching emotionally disturbed and cognitively impaired. Do you think Obama, Duncan, Christie, or any of their ilk, WANT to factor this classification of student into their testing regime? That would mess up their stats and theories about it being all the teacher’s fault. Their policies will make special education the last vestige for any child to truly receive a enriched liberal arts curriculum. Combine the stress of constant over testing in math and English with the developing coping mechanisms of students and soon enough most students will be special ed.
Oh and Mr. President , I have 2 words for you – YOU FIRST! Drag your daughters out of that private school an inflict upon them the same educational policies you are supporting for the majority of children in this country.
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YOU FIRST! I like it! Only then will I vote again for Obama.
May I add that I have read that Arne Duncan’s children attend public school in Arlington, VA. This is one of the most affluent & high performing suburban school districts in the U.S. I might add, Arlington doesn’t have any charter schools.
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And VA hasn’t adopted Common Core.
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True, Sheila. School deform hasn’t infected Virginia completely – yet. There is a big fight going on in Fairfax County over the first proposed charter school in Northern Virginia. The School Board votes on this proposal in October. There is an organized & vocal opposition group led by the parents of a nearby public Highschool (Falls Church High School) who believe their school will be shortchanged by the drain of motivated students & much-needed financial resources to improve the crumbling school facilites (among the other reasons that Diane writes about often). This is a bellweather for Northern VA. If Fairfax Vounty succombs to this madness, the surrounding counties are sure yo follow.
Also, starting this fall, Virginia’s teachers (& my kids!) will be subjected to 40% of their teacher evaluations based up
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Sorry about prior post. On the bumpy commuter train trying to type on iPhone & hit send before I was done (complete with typos!)!
In addition to the 40% travesty, please note that the awful K-12, Inc. is headquartered in Fairfax County & thanks to a large campaign donation to Governor Bob McDonnell, injected itself into the for-profit online learning market without any oversight. Wash Post did a huge story about how they’ve “partnered” with a high poverty county (Caroll County) & therefore receive the highest dollar amount per pupli from the state despite the fact that the majority of their students come from
affluent counties (e.g., Fairfax) wherein the state money received by these counties per pupil is about 1/3 ($6K v. $2K). Of course we all know there aren’t any bricks & mortar involved so why should K-12 receive the same $$ as high poverty county schools? The final insult, of course, is that K-12’a CEO was paid $6 million last year & his son attends the private St.Albans School in Washington, DC (close to Sidwell Friends where the Obama girls attend).
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So you have RttT, didn’t waive NCLB & said no to Common Core. What happens? You don’t get additional RttT money but have to adhere to RttT teacher evaluation criteria? Evaluating teachers based on individual student growth is bad policy. What happens if a teacher gets a bad evaluation? Are her students high performers on standardized tests? Probably not. You then stigmatize the class as a whole. And there’s potential for student privacy breaches. I don’t want to clog the blog w my blabber however I’d like to hear more from you. Maybe communicate off blog. One last question — did you have to agree to increase the number of charter schools in the state to get RttT $?
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Duncan is fond of the “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good” line. The problem, of course, is that when we’re talking about merit pay, value-added, etc., it’s that we’re not talking about “good,” but idiotic policies that persist despite heaps of counter evidence.
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FIRE DUNCAN! Hire Ravitch1
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FIRE DUNCAN! Hire Ravitch!
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I am not as eloquent as many of your writers but this is the letter I have just sent off to Mr. Obama. I am serious. I will not vote for him or for Mr. Romney but I do not think that I am throwing away my vote so long as we can turn this into a no-confidence vote on education policy. If there are any like thinkers I would truly appreciate ideas about how to make our votes count because unfortunately, whoever we vote for in November, there will be any anti-education President in the White House for 4 more years.
Dear Mr. President:
If you check your records you will find that I contributed to and supported your campaign in 2008. I am writing today to explain to you why I will not vote for your re-election this year.
I am unable to distinguish between the education policies of your administration and the failed policies, namely NCLB, of your predecessor. Privatization of education is not the answer to educational woes. It was for good reason that Thomas Jefferson saw public education as necessary if the American experiment with democracy was to succeed. Closing an under performing school is not the way to fix it. Reducing class sizes for the neediest children, that would make some sense. Firing experienced teachers and replacing them with neophyte teachers is simply crazy, something that I would expect from Lewis Carroll or Jonathan Swift, a satire, not for real.
The painful fact of the matter, one that you should be addressing, is that the single biggest predictor of success or failure in school is economic; 25% of all American school children live below the poverty line. The sleight-of-hand trickery involved with making schools with bad statistics disappear will do nothing to alleviate poverty; in fact I concerned that current misguided educational policies will ultimately add to the economic polarization of America, decreasing the numbers of those in the middle class by pushing them over the poverty line.
I teach with my heart and soul, as do almost all of my colleagues. When I taught in the South Bronx in the 1970s I learned that the sometimes the most important thing I had to give my students was the stability that was so often missing from their lives. I am afraid that because no one has the courage to directly and adequately address this 4000 pound elephant named Poverty in the classroom, our children are still suffering and, Mr. President, the policies that you have accepted from Mr. Duncan, if they continue unchanged makes it virtually certain that the coming generations of American children will continue to have poor skills and high drop-out rates. I am afraid that your legacy will be mixed in with that of George W. Bush as the presidents that dismantled public education.
So how do we fix things Mr. President. I would be thrilled if Arne Duncan were to resign and you started consultations with educators in all of our different professional organizations to seek a reasonable replacement. I guess I had better not hold my breath on that one. Instead my goal will be to simply get every single teacher in America to vote for someone other than you. Some will insist on voting for your Republican opponent although I would suggest that doing so, at least in terms of education, would be like voting for Tweedle Dum instead of Tweedle Dee. Some of us will vote for small party candidates in the hope that our lack of confidence in your education policies will be perceived and considered by whoever is ultimately the winner. I also hope to get my colleagues involved with tracking down anti-public education legislators at all governmental levels, especially the ones who accept campaign contributions from privatization sources, and making all voters aware of the anti-public education attitudes and votes.
Mr. President, I would be glad to speak with you about this but, I will not vote for you unless I can be certain these policies that are detrimental to my profession, my students and my country will be reversed
Sincerely,
Robert M. Pomeranz, M.D.
Science Teacher
P.S. You were on the right side of the table when it came to health care reform. We’ll save you a seat on the right side of the education table.
R.P.
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Great letter. For the same reasons you cite, I am withholding my vote for Obama too.
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I’ve been breaking this interview down over the past few days:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-incoherent-world-of-arne-duncan.html
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-incoherent-world-of-arne-duncan_6.html
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-incoherent-world-of-arne-duncan_9656.html
And I haven’t even finished – more to come.
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I have been reading your posts…very good commentary as well. Thank you for taking the time to do this. It can get so discouraging. I don’t see how he had the qualifications for this job to begin with.
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Cross-posted to Democraticunderground.com with the following preface:
Chris Christie is something straight out of 19th century Thomas Nast cartoon, so obviously a corrupt thug without even the norma Republican pretense of religiosity that the mere mention of his name should be an indictment of the GOP.
Instead, Obama’s Secretary of Education is saying his president agrees this moral filth.
A talking point like this is probably meant to reassure the rich that Obama will carry their water as far and as faithfully on breaking teachers unions and privatizing public education to funnel our tax dollars into their already wealthy pockets, but it demoralizes teachers who are going to vote for him because he’s better than Romney but still kicking them in the nuts.
It is also worth noting what the interview asked and Duncan couldn’t answer: why are you continuing with this set of policies even though they don’t seem to work?
The obvious answer is because they are being paid to since the research and even common sense don’t support the conservative education reform agenda at all.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101637756
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Nice letter. The state of education is not partisan. It’s bad policy.
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The selection of Arne Duncan was a poor and uninformed one. However, in Connecticut, we have Governor Malloy who selected Stefan Pryor as the State Commissioner of Education. Stefan Pryor has very close to ties to Achievement First, Inc., the charter school company which owns many schools in both New York and Connecticut. Not only do they use one standard (AYP) to judge public schools and another (vertical scale scores) to judge charter schools, but they reward charter schools who have not made AYP by reauthorizing them and closing down public schools who have not made AYP (even though they serve similar populations as the charter schools, who are excused because they serve disadvantage populations).
We don’t need to vote for President Obama because he is, in terms of education, no different from Mitt Romney. Truly, what difference does it make which of them wins when each of them wants to privatize public education? I, for one, would love to see Governor Malloy, Commissioner Pryor, Secretary Duncan, and President Obama teach regular classes in a public urban high school for one week. On second hand, I’d love to see them even do it for a day since I doubt they could handle a week of it.
These men have no idea what challenges are faced by inner city schools, students, and teachers. They don’t know the number of kids who are forced to join gangs to keep themselves from being assaulted and bullied, even in school (where there aren’t enough security guards to do anything or administrators to deal with everything). They don’t know the number of girls who miss school because they have sick babies at home but are still babies themselves. They know nothing of the over 90% of students who live in poverty or the 25% of students who are homeless but are too embarrassed to say anything. Do they know about the students who come to school and fall asleep becaue they work 10 plus hour shifts after school in order to help their parents keep a roof over their heads? I think not.
This is what I dealt with for six years and I LOVED every day of my job. This is what my friends STILL deal with, in spite of how they’re being penalized and judged by their students’ performance. Malloy, Pryor, Duncan, and Obama know nothing about this. They want to point the finger at teachers instead of themselves for ignoring the socioeconomic conditions that have allowed our students to fail.
Why don’t we judge President Obama and Governor Malloy by the state of the economy? The American economy isn’t doing well and neither is the economy in Connecticut. Let’s use the unemployment rate as a standard of evaluation. Neither man would pass. If we apply the standards they want to apply to teachers, both Malloy and Obama should be out of their jobs.
Oh, right, they “inherited” their problems but teachers “create” problems. Wake up, gentlemen, and took a long, hard look at the millions of students you are leaving behind.
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I keep thinking about all those University of Chicago Lab School kids dropping out to go to find work at the stockyards in the 1980s and then discovering the stockyards had closed long ago.
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I’m laughing so hard I have nothing coherent to say.
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Diane,
Sometimes there are cloudy days and others are even darker. We can endure a few cloudy days. Sharing this is just putting a few clouds in today’s education forecast. Let’s hope the sun shines in the days to come. The news from Texas let the sun peep through a bit today!
I must admit the man is really clueless and I don’t like the clouds he brings.
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http://www.dumpduncan.org
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“When I was in high school in the South Side of Chicago, my friends could drop out and get a decent job in the stockyards or steel mills, and own their own home and support a family.”
For the sake of accuracy, I would like to point out that the stockyards in Chicago were closed in 1971, just before Duncan turned 7 years old. Also, by the time he was in high school, the US Steel Southworks plant was actively slashing jobs and had already cut it’s employees by half. So, actually, even when I was in high school in the late 60s, it was apparent that neither of these employers would be providing lasting careers.
Also, while Duncan seems to want people to think he’s a South Sider from the hood, very few students drop out of U-High, the progressive secondary school at the University of Chicago Lab School that he attended (and where Obama sent his daughters). Maybe he’s referring to kids at his mom’s after-school program where he grew up in the evenings, but I would have thought he’d know that we typically say “on the South Side” here, not “in the South Side”. He sounds more like someone who visited the hood, not someone who lived in it –which he didn’t, since he grew up in the mostly upper-middle income, intellectually oriented neighborhood of Hyde Park. (My Dad also lived in Hyde Park, so I spent a lot of time there and knew many U-High students. They were very different from the students who were in gangs and those who bullied me and beat me up at my South Side high school.)
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Everybody knows Christie hates all teachers, whether suburban or urban. What he really hates are the unions because they have power to help people keep their jobs and get better pay for their services. Christie wants to be rich and everybody he sees beneath him stay poor. He wants to destroy unions, he is trying to close urban public schools and replace them with charter schools because he knows urban parents will fall for that stuff. But believe me if he gets his way he will be going after suburban schools too. I really believed that President Obama, although I knew he supported charter schools, was going to be fair. I thought he was going to abolish completely that ridiculous NCLB law and all of these ridiculous tests. I am really disappointed in his lack of leadership when it comes to education. I hate his race to the top. I often wonder to the top of what. He has something called respecting teachers, well I wish he would. And since he is a friend of Chris Christi, he needs to tell him to stop bothering urban schools. Tell him and everybody else to stop calling urban schools failing schools. Tell them to tell the truth, cities don’t have the tax base to fund public schools, so the city, state and federal government want to sell urban schools ,thus the kids to the highest bidder. Stop saying urban students aren’t passing these test. We don’t need charter schools, we need God back in public schools, money, honest government officials, standardized testing every five years, test that are used to help instruction, not tests used to call kids stuipid, or harrass teachers and unions.
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How can God be readmitted to public school classrooms if we believe in separation of church and state? If we had tax credits for private school tuition, those who wanted God in their school could have it. Unless we have a second Great Awakening, a consensus on Christianity in the nation is unlikely. The only hope I see for a religiously based education is outside the public schools, but that is the opposite of what you are advocating. Ideally, of course, you are totally right. A little chapel every day starts the day right, in my view. The Ten Commandments and the Two great commandments are good reference points for any ethical discussion. Honest government officials would help too. There must be some somewhere. My county’s prosecutor seems pretty good. But in Washington? Fuhgeddaboudit. Just my perception.
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