We begin today with Kevin Mahnken of the education blog The 74 and his reporting that from 2020-2023, math and reading assessment scores plummeted to levels not seen in decades.
Wednesday’s publication of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — America’s most prominent benchmark of learning, typically referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — shows the average 13-year-old’s understanding of math plummeting back to levels last seen in the 1990s; struggling readers scored lower than they did in 1971, when the test was first administered. Gaps in performance between children of different backgrounds, already huge during the Bush and Obama presidencies, have stretched to still-greater magnitudes.
The bad tidings are, in a sense, predictable: Beginning in 2022, successive updates from NAEP have laid bare the consequences of prolonged school closures and spottily delivered virtual instruction. Only last month, disappointing results on the exam’s history and civics component led to a fresh round of headlines about the pandemic’s ugly hangover.
But the latest release, highlighting “long-term trends” that extend back to the 1970s, widens the aperture on the nation’s profound academic slump. In doing so, it serves as a complement to the 2020 iteration of the same test, which showed that the math and English skills of 13-year-olds had noticeably eroded even before the emergence of COVID-19.
A.O. Scott of The New York Times writes a long form essay wondering why do many Americans seem so afraid of reading.
The reading crisis reverberates at the higher reaches of the educational system too. As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?
Beyond the educational sphere lie technological perils familiar and new: engines of distraction like streaming (what we used to call TV) and TikTok; the post-literate alphabets of emojis and acronyms; the dark enchantments of generative A.I. While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.
There is so much to worry about. A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.
I’ll admit that I haven’t read John Milton’s Paradise Lost in decades. I think that given the times we live in and Mr. Scott’s subject matter, I would think that Milton’s more obscure work Areopagitica is just as important to read considering that the essay deals with free speech and is cited in four Supreme Court cases.
(FTR, the most discussed literary work in Mr. Scott’s essay is Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave so I sense that he has something of an expansive view of “the canon.”)
Mary Ellen McIntire of Roll Call writes about the vote to censure Adam Schiff in the House and that it seems to be a prelude for a whole lot of attempted impeaching of President Biden and other members of the Biden administration.
Schiff is the 25th House member ever censured, and the first since 2010.
The vote came as some House Republicans were preparing to force votes on the impeachment of President Joe Biden and potentially other members of his administration. After the censure vote, the Rules Committee met and approved a rule to refer a Biden impeachment resolution to the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees. The full House would have to vote on that rule for the referral to take place.
The censure vote was 213-209, with six members voting present. Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna offered the resolution to censure the former House Intelligence Committee chairman, who Republicans say unfairly targeted Trump. The resolution argues that Schiff abused his power as the ranking member and chair of the panel and falsely spread allegations about Trump’s 2016 campaign colluding with Russia.
You can talk about this sideshow if you wish, lol. I swear, no couth whatever.
The bulk of Richard V. Reeves essay for the Brookings Institution is about the plight of Black men but I want to comment on the opening of the essay which deals with his godson’s new pair of glasses.
A few years back, I was delighted to see my godson wearing glasses. It makes me feel better to know others are aging too. Judge me if you like. “Don’t feel too bad, Dwight,” I said with faux sympathy. “It happens to all of us in the end.” Dwight laughed. “Oh no,” he said, “these are clear lenses. I just do more business when I’m wearing them.” Dwight sells cars for a living. I was confused. How does wearing unnecessary glasses help him sell more cars? “White people especially are just more relaxed around me when I wear them,” he explained.
Dwight is six foot five. He is also Black. It turns out that this is a common tactic for defusing white fear of Black masculinity. When I mentioned Dwight’s story in a focus group of Black men, two of them took off their glasses, explaining, “Yeah, me too.” In fact, I have yet to find a Black American who is unaware of it, but very few white people who are. Defense attorneys certainly know about it, often asking their Black clients to put on glasses. They call it the “nerd defense.” One study found that glasses generated a more favorable perception of Black male defendants but made no difference for white defendants.
I’ll turn 56 years old next month. I’ve worn glasses for over 50 of those years. Throughout much of my 20’s, I noticed that I was generally better received by society as a Black man than other Black men that I knew, even by cops, but I did not know why.
Finally, at some point in my 30’s, I figured out that the Black “nerd with glasses” thing was real. Plus I don’t drive. Plus I happen to be obviously gay.
Implicit biases that kinda sorta work in my favor. Sometimes.
Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post explains the reasons for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Washington this week, with the full pomp and circumstance of a state visit that comes on the heels of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s tense trip to China, followed by President Biden’s comments on Tuesday calling Xi Jinping a “dictator.”
Neither Biden nor Modi would frame their engagement as primarily being about containing the China challenge, but the subtext is plain. Rather, officials say, it is about lifting up a rising power — the world’s largest democracy, if an imperfect one — and showcasing the momentum in the relationship based on a set of shared interests.
“This visit is not about China,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an interview with reporters this week. “But the question of China’s role in the military domain, the technology domain, the economic domain will be on the agenda.”
C. Raja Mohan writes for Foreign Policy that the United States has been working on improved relations with India for at least a couple of decades.
The United States has been drifting in this direction for quite some time. If Sino-U.S. bonhomie peaked in 2000 with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit to Beijing, his successors have all sought to recalibrate assumptions about Beijing’s benign rise. George W. Bush began his time in office with clear recognition of the need to counter China in Asia but was distracted by the 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama took the shift a step further, outlining a security “pivot to Asia,” but the presumed need to cooperate with China on economic and climate issues limited its implementation. Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy outlined the centrality of the Chinese challenge. Biden, in turn, doubled down on the China threat and articulated a more systematic U.S. response.
All presidents since Clinton signaled a strong desire for deeper strategic ties to India as part of the effort to restructure U.S. foreign and security policy toward Asia. Modi’s state visit to Washington this week is just the latest step in steadily growing U.S.-India relations, a process that has accelerated under Biden. [...]
Handwringing in the Indian political class prevented New Delhi from seizing the new opportunities with Washington under Bush, but Modi has now stepped forward to build a substantive strategic partnership. Put simply, the imperatives of a stronger U.S.-India partnership have been evident for more than two decades. The delay on the Indian side was about sorting out lingering suspicions about the United States. Today, Modi says there is “unprecedented trust” between the two nations’ leaders.
Peter Baker and Mujib Mashal of The New York Times explain why the Biden Administration is showering attention on Modi in spite of Modi’s authoritarian tendencies.
In granting Mr. Modi a coveted state visit, complete with a star-studded gala dinner, Mr. Biden will shower attention on a leader presiding over democratic backsliding in the world’s most populous nation. Mr. Modi’s government has cracked down on dissent and hounded opponents in a way that has raised fears of an authoritarian turn not seen since India’s slip into dictatorship in the 1970s.
Yet Mr. Biden has concluded, much as his predecessors did, that he needs India despite concerns over human rights just as he believes he needs Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and other countries that are either outright autocracies or do not fit into the category of ideal democracies. At a time of confrontation with Russia and an uneasy standoff with China, Mr. Biden is being forced to accept the flaws of America’s friends.
Two and a half years into his administration, the democracy-versus-autocracy framework has, therefore, become something of a geopolitical straitjacket for Mr. Biden, one that conveys little of the subtleties his foreign policy actually envisions yet virtually guarantees criticism every time he shakes hands with a counterpart who does not pass the George Washington test. Even some of his top advisers privately view the construct as too black-and-white in a world of grays.
Joanna Klimowicz and Ekaterina Lemonjava write for Gazeta Wyborcza (translated by Katarzyna Skiba of World Crunch) that the conflict at Poland’s border with Belarus over Belarusian Alexander Lukashenko’s flooding of selected EU countries with migrants is getting increasingly tense.
Polish authorities are arming themselves in preparation for provocations and hybrid attacks from the Belarusian border. Inhabitants along the border fear that the zone may be closed once again. And refugees, stuck between two armies, are fighting to survive.
From the beginning of this week, activists from various aid groups have noted greater numbers of troops, checkpoints, and air patrols, especially in the area surrounding the Białowieża forest, a national park located between the two countries.
This past weekend, Piotr Czaban, a journalist and activist from Podlaskie Volunteer Humanitarian Rescue, told Gazeta Wyborczaabout the route. Only 15 kilometers ahead of Hajnówka, a Polish border town, the police are stopping and checking every vehicle, whether they are entering or leaving the area, searching the insides and the trunks.
He said he didn’t remember such strict controls since a state of emergency was declared in September 2021, excluding journalists, humanitarian workers, and non-residents from entering the area.
Finally today, Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review interviews Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi about the media legacy of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
ALLSOP: You mentioned favorable coverage. After Berlusconi decided to jump into electoral politics, how did he use his media properties to maintain, harness, and wield his power?
FERRARESI: There’s two different things. He tended, throughout his political career, to try to lobby and to bend the laws in order to take advantage of, and profit more from, his media empire. That’s one big topic, in terms of the relationship between the media tycoon and the politician. Then there’s a different theme, which is how much he used his TV properties in order to promote himself directly, and to have favorable coverage. I think that’s undeniably true; he for sure exploited them. But was it like a North Korean-type propaganda machine, a Russian-type propaganda machine? No. We have many, many examples of heavily critical news programs within the Berlusconi media ecosystem. I’m not denying that, at the same time, there were specific programs that were used in a way that tended to praise Berlusconi. But the whole theory—which has been a big theory in Italy—that essentially Berlusconi, through his TV stations, sort of brainwashed Italian people so that they would vote for him despite him being what he was? I don’t buy it.
I’ve found it interesting that in the Berlusconi coverage, Italian and non-Italian media have been taking note of the differences between Trump and Berlusconi.
Have the best possible day everyone!
