Back in 1906, in the January number of "The Voice of the Negro," an impressive monthly out of Atlanta, an article appeared entitled "Who Are We?--Africans, Afro Americans, Colored People, Negroes, or American Negroes?"  It was written by J.W. E. Bowen, President of a seminary in the city. It's a measured discussion and worth reading in light of Harry Reid's now infamous comments.

Ward Connerly has a nice commentary on the controversy in the Wall Street Journal today. Connerly mentions the now-familiar ritual of a famous one who utters the wrong words and makes his phone calls to the judges that be (in this case, Obama, Julian Bond, Sharpton, Jesse Jackson).

What is most disappointing in the whole affair, though, is not that Reid used an outdated term with (for many) denigrating overtones; or that he regards the American electorate so lowly that he believes that "degree of blackness"...

In the Era of Big Government Revival, which includes the Bush years as well as today and may go on forever (people forget Clinton's successful downsizing policies, which were led by Al Gore), it's important to understand the delicate position of the federal official working on various social and behavioral ills. The War on Drugs is the clearest example. 

If you work in a federal agency prosecuting the war in one way or another, you have to be careful how you characterize the problem. First of all, the problem has to be grave and widespread. You can't demand revenues for minor problems. Second, the problem has to be one that can be dealt with by government action. If you don't show any signs of success, people won't support your office.

This puts you in the shaky position of claiming a pervasive evil and, at the same time, proclaiming, "We can eliminate it."

And then comes the tricky...

A few years ago, Fordham Foundation reviewed education standards in the states in five subjects--English, U.S. History, science, math, and world history. (See The State of State Standards, 2006.) For U.S. history, the following states received an "F."

Alaska

Arkansas

District of Columbia

Hawaii

Illinois

Kentucky

Maine

Michigan

Minnesota

Misssissippi

Missouri

Montana

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New Mexico

North Carolina

North Dakota

Pennsylvania

Vermont

Washington

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Wyoming

Eight more states received a "D."  Only Arizona, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, and New York got an "A."

The results help explain why every time the NAEP exam in U.S. history is administered to 12th Graders, more than half of them get the lowest rating ("Below basic" -- see here).

This is why the work of the National History Club is so important. (Web site here.) The...

In today's New York Times Education Life section is a short article entitled "The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor."  For those of us working in higher ed, especially in disciplines with lots of freshman sections, there is no "case."  It's a simple matter of money, and the trend has proceeded for years. As the article notes:

"In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty -- instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing."

Well, perhaps the recession is raising the pace, but not by much. The temptation to cut costs by hiring three adjuncts instead of one tenure-track prof is too strong for...

If people are looking for films to watch at home during the holidays and cannot bear another sighting of Meryl Streep, Matt Damon, Nicole Kidman, Leonardo DiCaprio . . .

A few years ago, to commemorate the 100th anniverary of cinema, the Vatican compiled a list of 45 great films, dividing them into categories of "Religion," "Values," and "Art."  (The list is here.)  A few selections will make Chronicle readers smile, such as Ben-Hur, Chariots of Fire, and It's a Wonderful Life. It chooses Little Women from 1933, not realizing, I guess, that the chracterization "Lovingly sentimental" is a fault, not a virtue.

But it also contains Wild Strawberries, 8 1/2, Intolerance, Citizen Kane, The Bicycle Thief, and other film-school standards. It calls Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc "the most convincing portrayal of spirituality on celluloid." It summarizes La Strada perfectly in one...

We've been talking about Kindles and other eReaders, as well as old-fashioned hardbounds and cheap paperbacks. Here and elsewhere, those who proclaim themselves advocates of the book and push more and more book reading on the young are cast as more or less quaint and nostalgic (or deluded) traditionalists (or pedants) fighting the inevitable tide of history.

They're right. The future is a digital one, reading included. In spite of their remarkable technological merits, most books will go the way of the phonograph. There is only one area in which cloth and paper volumes will continue. One hundred years hence, the only books to be bought in paper form will be those whose material reality adds something desirable to the text. If the physical thing doesn't provide something independent of the words it contains, no book will be necessary. An e-version will do. In those cases in which only...

Wednesday's op-ed by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal has a problem. Frank has written for the Journal for many months, his columns regularly denouncing Republicans for all kinds of venality and deceit even though they appear in the most prominent conservative editorial section in the country.  Indeed, the predictability with which Frank's pieces unfold and the sweeping broadsides he unleashes against the Bad Guys display a mind that has lost the measured observance of earlier, interesting analyses such as The Conquest of Cool.

But the problem this morning isn't one of excessive partisanship.  Instead, it's one of confusion, for here we have sure evidence that Frank misconceives of one of his central concepts: ideology.  The importance of ideology in Frank's thinking is clear from most all of his recent writings, especially What's the Matter with Kansas?, whose thesis is that...

One of the biggest stories in publishing right now is the promise and direction of eReaders.  In an industry starving for good news, the growth of the product is a godsend. Here's a piece in The Wall Street Journal that cites consumer research estimating 900,000 of the devices will sell this November and December. At Amazon, the Kindle has become the top-selling product. Other sellers, notably Barnes & Noble (the Nook) and Sony (the Reader), are joining the market now, too, though delivery time is frustratingly slow. Prices for the readers have dropped, and so have prices for best-sellers available for download.

The article contains a warning, however:

"Books are having their iPod moment this holiday season. But buyer beware: It could also turn out to be an eight-track moment."

The pace of advancement is so fast, that is, that today's devices may appear primitive if not useless a few ...

The Encyclopedia Britannica blog site has a series of articles on multitasking that are worth reading in full. Here, for instance, is a piece by Howard Rheingold entitled "Is Multitasking Evil? Or Are Most of Us Illiterate?" that asks for a middle ground in the discussion:

"Could it be that instead of a stark choice between the frantic pursuit of getting more done in less time at one extreme or demonizing multitasking at the other end of the spectrum that there is an as-yet undocumented literacy in the relatively unexplored middle, a partially mental and partially technical skill at deploying the appropriate attentional style with the appropriate media at the appropriate time?

"Or is multitasking unequivocally the mental equivalent of bingeing, an addiction to fragmentation, a seductive waste of mind we should discard, a habit that all decent people should eschew and discourage?

"The ...

If you attend any discussion of education policy, you find that it won't be long before money comes up. Point out how few students in this or that state or city fail to reach proficiency in math or reading, and among the first replies is a call to increase funding, to pay teachers a "living wage," to equalize funding in nice suburban schools and collapsing inner-city schools.

Those statements also carry a fair degree of resentment and indignation. The speakers I've seen have a tinge to their voice that suggests a crime has been committed against schools, teachers, and students alike. If you stand up and say something like, "But the United States spends more per pupil than any nation in the world," they look at you as if you have just spanked a sixth-grader.  The question isn't up for discussion. Schools need more money, period.

Here's an article in the recent issue of Education Next,...