Wednesday roundup

We may be polarized in 2018 post America, but somebody's buying something from somebody. Consumer confidence at highest level in 18 years.  Rise in wages and salaries of 3.1% in October.

The Pakistan Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of that Christian mother who'd been incarcerated for nine years. When the judge read the decision, she was free to go. Muslims have reacted by blocking roads in the nation's biggest cities.

Get your brain around the way he got both of these disparate assertions into one sentence:

"So, we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them," [CNN's Don] Lemon concluded. "There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban on — you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban."

Remember a few weeks ago when I noted that and enthusiasm for "implicit bias" training had infected our local school board? I'll bet it won't be long until "equity" training, now gaining a foothold in Missouri, works its way to our district. It depends on whether a sufficient number of concerned citizens have the guts to call BS on it as they did there:

Yesterday, I noted that five of seven candidates for the Montgomery County, Maryland school board say the biggest problem facing the school district is lower achievement by “students of color.” I disputed the notion that this gap is the school board’s responsibility or problem, but that view seems to be an article of faith in education circles nowadays. 

It’s also generating a new industry — cultural and racial equity training. Pacific Education Group is an industry leader. According to the Kansas City Star, the California firm “has been in high demand in recent years, training educators, city leaders and corporate executives from Lawrence [Kansas] to New York and Philadelphia to Los Angeles and around the world.”

The Group’s founder, Glenn Singleton, is the author of “Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools.” The “courageousness” of Singleton’s politically correct conversations is open to question, but according to the Star, his is the No. 1 book recommended by the Missouri School Board Association for educators and administrators to read this year. 

Recently, however, parents in a Missouri school district — Lee’s Summit — rebelled against paying Singleton and his group to provide cultural and racial equity training. They expressed their displeasure at a school board meeting and on social media. 

According to the Star, critics “opposed Singleton’s firm because of its cost, and its discussion of white privilege and the cultural competence of white teachers educating black children.” Some wondered why the focus should be on inequities related to race. 

The response, I suppose, is that race is where the most obvious unequal outcomes are. The Star tells us that “based on a formula involving Missouri Assessment Program scores, Lee’s Summit’s black students performed nearly 84 points below white students in 2015, 2016 and 2017.” And, according to district data, the margin is widening not narrowing.

I don’t think critics are denying that racial outcomes are unequal, though. Instead, it appears that they reject, as I do, the idea that responsibility for poor outcomes lies with the school district, rather than the students and/or their parents. 

They are striking a blow in favor of common sense and individual responsibility, and against fancy talk, group think, and victimology. 

We should expect no less from the Show Me State.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO on how we ought to regard Saudi Arabia:

We do not have common values with the regime in Riyadh. We are an un­matched pair, drawn reluctantly together by some common interests and enemies — which tend to be interests and enemies for saliently different reasons. We cannot avoid interaction, and better that it be cooperative than belligerent. It should, however, be strictly transactional, and there is no good reason to pretend it is anything but.

Did you know Sandra Day O'Connor and William Rehnquist dated each other when they were both Stanford law students circa 1950?