News Miner 3
Notes on Holtorf and being an American, social studies and economics standards, Denver schools, and more.
Welcome to my third “News Miner” for Pickaxe! I hope you’ll sign up to the email list. I make articles here free to read; I hope some readers also become paid subscribers. Here I discuss Colorado politics and culture; see also Self in Society for my broader commentary.
A Reply to Holtorf on Being an American
According to young conservative activist Weston Imer, Rep. Richard Holtorf recently said the following:
Hundreds and hundreds of red blooded meat eating God fearing gun toting red blooded Americans were at Bandimere speedway today at a red wave rally to change Colorado. Kyle, you don’t understand anything about what this rally and being an America is about. Because you are a leftist, socialist, progressive, sexual harasser, anti American media midget.
I have several responses to this.
1. Kyle Clark is a very good, competent, and fair journalist. The reason that he frequently reports critically about Colorado Republicans is that, objectively, they frequently richly deserve critical reporting. This continual mockery and defamation of Clark by various Colorado Republicans is sick and dangerous. I wrote a detailed column about this a couple years ago.
2. It is amazing to me that so many Republicans enthusiastically embrace the tactics of Progressive radical Saul Alinsky, whose strategies I quoted some years ago: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. . . . One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.” Regional Republicans often cast Clark in the role of lead demon in their hall of devils.
3. “Being an American” is not about agreeing with Holthorf ideologically. It is about peaceably living and working in this country. It is about recognizing that our national strength comes from our diverse, immigration-driven population.
4. I agree there is something deeply American about loving race cars, insofar as car racing arose as a reaction to alcohol Prohibition. Law-breaking in response to unjust laws is deeply American. Of course, today’s Republicans almost uniformly champion the new Prohibition of drugs, which promotes cartel and gang violence, corrupts police departments, and results in people dying of tainted and impure drugs.
5. When it comes to toting guns, maybe Holtorf should mind his business before smearing others.
Social Studies Standards
In my new column for Complete Colorado, I go through some of the Colorado standards for social studies.
My main problem with the standards is not so much what they include or fail to include, but that a lot of them are jargon-filled bullshit. . . . Although the state standards have become fodder for the culture wars, the fact is that they are almost entirely irrelevant to classroom instruction. We can fight over the pretentious word salad of the standards all we want, but it will not make teaching any better or any worse. Thankfully, as a homeschooling parent, I can ignore all that nonsense when it comes to my son’s education and get down to the business of real learning.
Economics Standards
While looking over the proposed state standards for Colorado schools, I noticed that the section for first grade says that “prepared graduates” should be able to “evaluate how scarce resources are allocated in societies through the analysis of individual choice, market interaction, and public policy.”
I realize that’s fairly standard, but that treatment of economics sucks. It treats “resources” as if they’re just sitting around waiting to be “allocated.” Of course that is not remotely how the economy works. Instead, resources are produced by some person or organization (including, sometimes, the government). Then privately produced resources either are “allocated” by free exchange or “expropriated” by force.
Trouble in Denver Public Schools
I’m not sure who Transform Education Now is, but the group recently requested student performance data from Denver Public Schools, and the results are alarming. TEN reports:
Of students who took DPS Interim assessments, just 12% of 3rd grade students were meeting grade level benchmarks in literacy. Just 5% of black third graders and 5% of latino students who are reading on grade level. 30% of white students are meeting benchmarks, revealing a gaping 25% gap between white students and students of color.
Thankfully, TEN also provides the raw data from the district, which offers important caveats:
Specific to literacy, interim assessments are not designed to measure all facets of a student’s ability to read. They are not accountability assessments and should not be used to evaluate school or teacher performance. . . . The 24% of students scoring Meeting or Exceeding in literacy on Interim 1 and the 34% of students scoring Meeting or Exceeding in math on Interim 1 does not represent all district students, nor does it mean that the remaining percentage of students are not going to be performing on grade level by the end of the school year.
So we’ll take the data with a grain of salt. Still, insofar as the data reveal anything useful about student performance, they are disturbing. We should note that older students generally did better. But there are really sharp differences between Black and Hispanic kids versus Asian and “white” kids.
It would oversimplify things to say (even assuming the data reveal anything useful) that Denver schools are failing (non-Asian) minorities, although that is the tempting conclusion. There is a lot going on in children’s lives that affect their performance at school, far beyond what happens in the classroom. It is safe to say at least that Denver public schools are not robustly helping most minority students catch up and succeed.
Quick Takes
Grandmas Chasing Bad Guys: Yup, it’s a thing, as Luke Zarzecki reports. My take: Police need to do a better job so elderly women aren’t tempted to help them. I do worry that this sort of civilian anti-crime work can morph into hassling some people for no good reason.
Health Costs: The Colorado legislature declined to give physician assistants more authority. As I Tweeted, “Health care is too expensive and, by God, Colorado legislators are going to keep it that way.”
HOA Power: I have long defended Home Owners Associations as a way to contractually handle various problems of property held in common, such as shared greenbelts and pools. I have also argued that HOAs should be able to regulate speech visible from common areas. That hardly means anything goes. The Denver Post discusses “a rash of foreclosures filed over the past 15 months by the Master Homeowners Association for Green Valley Ranch” that, on their face, seem highly abusive.
Insurance Costs: Due to “to stricter insurance mandates and many waivers available through Colorado’s Medicaid programs” specifically for autism care, some families move to Colorado specifically for those benefits, reports Colorado Newsline. I’m not a fan of forcing people to subsidize others’ health care via higher insurance premiums.
Bigotry: The Southern Poverty Law Center tags 18 Colorado organizations as “hate groups” (as of 2021, via Axios Denver). In 2020, hate crimes in Colorado spiked to record levels.
Age of Adulthood: Recently Rep. Lauren Boebert Tweeted, “We require people to be 21 to purchase alcohol beverages, and 21 to purchase tobacco products. Why is it so unreasonable to require people to reach a certain level of maturity before making life-altering decisions about their sexuality and identity?” Anti-gun activist Shannon Watts reasonably adds guns to the mix. My response: So long as the government forces people to register for the draft at age 18, people should get their full set of adult rights at that age. If we repealed the draft, I’d be comfortable raising the usual age of adulthood to 21, so long as people easily could be judicially declared independent prior to that age. But then we also have to talk about when we charge people criminally as adults.
Tina Peters: Kyle Clark has the latest about the conspiracy mongering by Tina Peters and her associates, including Mike Lindell. “Peters, who faces felony charges for alleged tampering with voting systems,” shut down a particular legal defense fund over “alleged Colorado ethics law violations,” Clark reports. The Denver Post offers more details about Peters’s shenanigans.
Governor’s Race: The Republican front runner for governor remains Heidi Ganahl, whose campaign so far has been terrible. Another candidate is Danielle Neuschwanger, who pleaded guilty to driving while impaired. She was “charged with misdemeanor domestic violence assault,” but the charges were dropped. The man involved in that incident has an active restraining order against Neuschwanger. This is all according to the Colorado Sun.
Election Sanity: Hey look! There are some sane Republicans in Colorado! The Daily Sentinel ran the headline, “County clerks demand evidence of election fraud” from those claiming the election was fraudulent. Marina Zimmerman, who, I fear, is destined to lose to Lauren Boebert in the primary, Tweeted, “I 100% stand with these County Clerks. It’s time to end these opportunistic attacks on them by extremists for political and personal gain.”
A Free Press: Maybe this was just trolling, but a Mesa County Republican recommended the following resolution: “The Republican party supports the registration and regulation of journalism to protect against the Marxist agenda.” On its face this is socialism in the name of fighting socialism. Thankfully, Republican leaders in the area denounced the proposal. Corey Hutchins has details. (Also, thanks to Hutchins for the note about Pickaxe.)
Fabricated Child Abuse: This story is astonishing. A Moffat County, Colorado, child caseworker allegedly fabricated child welfare reports. “Investigators found at least 50 cases containing falsified details, including many in which [the caseworker] never made contact with the children or parents,” the Colorado Sun reports. Obviously it is extremely important to get this sort of work right, and I am shocked that the caseworker got away with so many apparent misdeeds. Where is the oversight?
Marijuana: Every Democratic representative from Colorado voted in favor of a recent measure to decriminalize marijuana federally; every Republican voted against it. Yet again, Republicans are for liberty and local control except for when they’re not.
Republican Marijuana: A Republican candidate for Colorado’s senate sold “drugs on the side”—specifically marijuana—when younger, reports the Times Recorder.
False Claims: No, Heidi Ganahl,Colorado schools do not teach sex-ed to kindergarten kids. No, Mike Lindell, Colorado law does not allow infanticide (details).
Served: Mike Lindell getting served with a lawsuit is the only good news regarding the Lindell-led election conspiracy rally of April 5.