Articles of Interest

~~~~>  Reaction Shots May Tell Tale of Debate

Bush's Scowls Compared to Gore's Sighs

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 2, 2004; Page A10

ALLENTOWN, Pa., Oct. 1 -- As Democratic nominee John F. Kerry criticized President Bush in the first presidential debate, Bush scowled, squinted, clenched his jaw and appeared disgusted as he hunched over his lectern -- images that were beamed into millions of American homes.

The episode was reminiscent of the first debate of the 2000 presidential campaign, when Al Gore's loud and pained sighs made the Democrat appear contemptuous and condescending, turning what could have been a victory into a political debacle for him. On Thursday night, it was Bush's aggravated demeanor that contributed to the impression that Kerry won the debate.

Body language can be more descriptive than actual language in presidential debates. No line from the 1960 debate was as memorable as Richard M. Nixon's perspiration. And President George H.W. Bush's glance at his wristwatch during the 1992 debate has endured beyond that night's words.

For the current president, the performance could be particularly damaging, because part of his advantage over Kerry is voters' perception that he is likable while Kerry lacks the common touch. Democrats on Friday moved quickly to maximize the damage. The Democratic National Committee posted on the Web a video titled "Faces of Frustration," showing Bush in various stages of consternation as he listened to Kerry. "He was defensive, annoyed, arrogant, even angry, and showed it," said DNC Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe.

Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton made the Gore comparison explicit. "If the sighs were what we remember from the 2000 debates, George Bush's smirk is what will be remembered this time," he said.

Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, dismissed the comparison. "I don't think that dog's going to hunt," Mehlman said here, noting that while Gore's sigh was not just a sigh because it reflected that candidate's haughty reputation, Bush enjoys a sunnier image. "President Bush is a very optimistic guy," Mehlman said. "The reaction to the scowl in the media is not what we're getting from the American people."

Still, Bush’s aides acknowledged privately that the candidate seemed imperious during the debate, and even Bush-friendly publications joined in the criticism. "Bush, throughout the evening, as Kerry spoke, had that pursed and annoyed look," Jay Nordlinger wrote for National Review Online. "I think it must have driven many people crazy."

Local coverage in battleground states such as Florida also dwelled on the presidential petulance. Kerry "looked mostly comfortable," the Orlando Sentinel reported, while "Bush, in cutaway shots as Kerry spoke, clenched his jaw several times."

Bush has flashed such expressions -- and worse -- at reporters when they ask him hostile questions. But the public has generally not seen the president's more petulant side, in part because he is rarely challenged in a public venue. He has held fewer news conferences than any modern predecessor, Congress is in his party's control, and he has a famously loyal staff. In rare instances when Bush has been vigorously challenged -- most recently in interviews with an Irish television journalist and a French magazine -- he has reacted with similar indignation.

As questions continued about Bush's demeanor on Thursday night, his aides have changed their explanation of it. On Thursday night, adviser Karen Hughes said: "On his face, you could see his irritation at the senator's misrepresentations." But by Friday morning, Mehlman said: "I don't know that he was irritated."

As with Gore's sighs, Bush's scowls were at first overlooked by many of the people covering the event. In the press room at the debate site at the University of Miami, the direct television feed of the debate did not have the telltale split screens and reaction shots that most Americans saw at home. Bush may have been so expressive in part because he thought the debate rules disallowed such reaction shots -- although the Bush campaign knew such rules would not be enforced.

At informal appearances, Bush's squint and slouch over the lectern can effectively convey Texas confidence, said Sonya Hamlin, a consultant on how body language affects communication. But in the formal setting of a presidential debate, it made him appear smaller and less commanding compared with a tall opponent who is standing straight up, she said. And his facial expressions conveyed insecurity, she said, raising the question, "When things get tough, is this what he does?"

In debates, Henson said, "You don't get mad if someone disagrees with you."

Staff writer John F. Harris in Washington contributed to this report.
 

~~~~> Americans Owe Much to Labor Unions

By Glenn Feldman

By every available measure, union members are better-clothed, better-fed, better-paid, and better-housed than non-union workers with comparable jobs.  They enjoy better and fuller access to health-care and prescription drugs.  They have safer and more dignified workplaces and a great deal more recourse when employers violate the most basic standards of justice and equity.  But the real success story is not what labor unions have won for the 12.9 percent of the workforce that they comprise, but what - through the expenditure of real blood, sweat, and tears -- they have been able to gain for the millions of Americans who do not belong to them.  For it is through the daily tribulations of their members, sometimes through the loss of actual lives and limbs, that unions set the bar for what others take for granted in the workplace.

Yet most Americans remain blissfully unaware of the gargantuan debt they owe the labor movement.  They are indifferent to - or worse yet contemptuous of -- organized labor, often without the most rudimentary knowledge of what it is unions do.  Once a year, on Labor Day, Americans will take the weekend holiday and grill out.  And politicians -- even the conservatives who are most opposed to the basic values that unions stand for -- will spew meaningless platitudes about the dignity of work in America, and then return on Tuesday to their usual program of decimating safety standards and workplace regulations so that companies can increase their bottom line.  For pure charade, Labor Day has come to rival January's Martin Luther King Day.

Far too many Americans take this approach to organized labor.  A majority of the MBA students I have taught can enumerate with child-like glee the Christmas list of goodies that awaits them once they go out and take a real job:  sick pay, overtime pay, vacation pay, health insurance, disability insurance, good wages, safety standards, pension benefits, prescription drug coverage, and more -- without ever once realizing that it is unions to whom they owe a massive thank you for setting the industrial standard.  Instead, they believe that an all-powerful and beneficent employer is responsible for willingly 'giving' these things to them.  And so the fable is brought full circle - replete with employer as Santa Claus.

But such stunning naivete is not the result of mere ignorance or even serendipity.  It is the fruit of a disciplined, organized, and well-financed campaign by conservatives throughout the country to browbeat, denigrate, and disparage organized labor.  It is an effort that has been especially acute in the American South - in places like Alabama -- where the region sold its soul and its public purse after the Civil War to attract outside capital to build an industrialized economy. 

Corporate welfare in the form of land grants, low or non-existent taxation, anemic educational spending and social services, and police, military, and judicial repression of organized labor became the tragic norm in the South- - along with the inculcation of a vague but deeply felt repugnance at the very idea of unions.  While both political parties have pushed free-trade policies that bite into union rolls, it is conservatives who take the lead in building the obstacles that cut the most deeply.  Membership is down 369,000 workers (from 13.3 percent of the workforce) in just the past year -- accelerating a 20-year slide in union membership.  Things are particularly bad in the private sector, where only 8.2 percent of workers belong to unions now-representing another dramatic decline.  Because Alabama is more industrialized than its neighbors, its membership figures parallel the national average rather than a lower southern figure.

Many have criticized the Bush Administration for waging a shortsighted, misguided, duplicitous, and fatally flawed war against 'terror' in Iraq -- and they are on solid ground in that assessment.  But no one can say a word against the other war the administration has been prosecuting, for they have fought it with frightening efficiency, steely resolve, a bottomless well of innovation, and limitless funding.  The only problem is that it has been waged against working Americans -- in unions and without.  To say the Bush Administration's record on labor has been appalling is to give it too much credit.

The White House and its Republican allies in Congress have tried to eviscerate safety and ergonomics standards, undermine the concept of overtime, privatize Social Security, and expand NAFTA to 34 Central and South American countries without worker and environmental protections.  They narrowly failed to pass a National Right-to-Work law that would have trumped state laws and allowed nonunion workers to enjoy the same rights, privileges, wages, conditions, and representation of union workers in organized workplaces -- but without paying a penny in dues.  The administration annihilated the collective bargaining rights of 230,000 federal employees in Homeland and Transportation Security while proposing the shifting of 850,000 federal jobs to mostly nonunion companies, destroying the right of postal workers to bargain, and opposing the Davis-Bacon law of prevailing wages as 'wasteful' and 'fraudulent.'  The 3-2 Republican majority on the National Labor Relations Board has announced plans to review the 70 year-old 'card check' procedure that allows workers to quickly and fairly indicate their preference for a union, and reversed a 2000 decision that ruled graduate teaching and research assistants were entitled to protection under federal labor law.  The Republican Congress refused to extend the unemployment benefits of the more than 2 million Americans who have lost their jobs on Mr. Bush's watch at the same time the President proposed cutting funds for dislocated workers and job training.  The administration's other policies are no less shocking: opposing limits on lead and arsenic levels in drinking water; running up the largest deficit (by far) in American history, a paralyzing burden that will be borne by the children of working Americans and theirs; cutting funding for education, Homeland Security, Head Start, nutrition programs for women, children, and infants, funding for children's hospitals by 30 percent, and the COPS program for extra police officers by 90 percent -- all while passing historically large tax cuts that will funnel 50 percent of the windfall to Americans making over 1 million dollars a year; opposing a strong patient's bill of rights and prohibiting Americans from buying Canadian drugs that are 33 to 80 percent cheaper; advocating $60 billion in tax breaks for companies that lay off workers and move jobs overseas while publicly praising the exportation of high-paying, unionized jobs and scrambling to figure out a way to classify hamburger-flipping as a 'production job' for purposes of employment statistics; giving HMOs $46 million in taxpayer money, three times the amount conceded to prior to passage of the bill; lowering air pollution standards and opening up millions of national park acres to logging in the guise of Clean Skies and Healthy Forests initiatives; opposing fuel efficiency standards on SUVs; and an abundance of policies equally hostile to working Americans and their families.

Through the 1960s a good number of working-class and middle-class southerners made up the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils, or acquiesced in their activities.  In this way, many ordinary people satisfied the powerful urge to feel better than somebody about something.  Since the civil rights movement, and the abolition of overt racism as a respectable past-time, many whites have gratified the deeply-rooted urge to feel superior by embracing the 'new racism' of moral and religious chauvinism and judgment of their neighbors.  It is a development that has not been lost on -- or discouraged by -- conservative political strategists anxious to swell the ranks of their voters.  And it is for this reason that unions have so often found themselves on the receiving end of conservative offensives.  Because it is labor unions, more than any other institution, that deliver votes, money, and workers to progressive (usually Democratic) candidates.  More than this, unions represent the best chance for working Americans to stay focused on real, substantive issues when making up their minds how to vote rather than being distracted by emotional red-herrings or being taken in by the pseudo-populist nonsense of 'compassionate conservatism.'

Yet even the union firewall has been far from foolproof.  The real tragedy that confronts us is that nearly 40 percent of all union households voted for George W. Bush in 2000.  If the same percentage does so again, they might consider the quicker and easier route of accomplishing the same thing:  taking a kitchen knife to their own throats.  Working-class and even middle-class people in America might have their reasons for voting Republican, but it is a flight of fancy to call them rational. 

Glenn Feldman is an associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  His latest book is The Disfranchisement Myth:  Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama.

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~~~~>  Graduate Students at University of Illinois, Chicago Campus are organized by the Illinois Federation of Teachers/AFT and Receive Recognition by the University

Teaching Assistants at UIC Certified to Bargain Collectively

The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB) has certified the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) as the collective bargaining unit for more than 1,200 teaching and graduate assistants at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  The bid for unionization came by a narrow margin, as 629 out of 1,236 eligible students submitted signature cards, without an election.

The ruling clears the way for professional bargaining teams representing the union, part of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the campus to begin negotiating an initial contract covering wages, benefits and work rules. The union filed its petition with the IELRB in April. UIC administrators learned of the ruling on Friday.

Excluded from the bargaining unit are research assistants, professional graduate assistants and clinical graduate assistants, whose duties are closely related to their professional training.  "We hope that the union will join us in a cooperative relationship that recognizes the needs of UIC's graduate students and maintains the high academic standards of its graduate programs," said Clark Hulse, executive vice provost for academic affairs and dean of the graduate college.  UIC enrolls more than 6,800 graduate students. From among them it identifies outstanding students and trains them to serve as teaching assistants, who assist the faculty in providing first-class instruction to UIC's 16,000 undergraduates.  Hulse said teaching assistants play an important role in undergraduate education.  "We hope that through a cooperative relationship between UIC and the GEO we will be able to help our graduate students in making their contributions to the academic strength of the university, successfully completing their courses of study, and moving forward in their chosen professions," Hulse said.

Contact: Bill Burton, (312) 996-2269, burton@uic.edu
 

~~~~>  Boarding Schools Nurture Low-Income Students

By: Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer

Lynnette Blackmon liked the small classes and energetic teachers at Maya Angelou Public Charter School in the District, but she was often hours late. "I had a big tardy issue," said the tall, slender 17-year-old.

Most schools try to persuade students to get out of bed in the morning by lowering their grades or giving them detention when they don't, but Maya Angelou is one of a small but growing number of schools that have a different approach to the problem. They invite teenagers who need extra help to live in school quarters.

Last year, Lynnette moved into a well-kept brick rowhouse on 13th Street NW -- one of three rented homes, each staffed with an adult resident supervisor, in which her school houses 15 of its 110 students. Not only did she stop being late, she said, but her grades rose, and she began to shed a crippling shyness.  Living with four other girls, she said, "forced me to interact with people."  A generation ago, American boarding schools were generally of two kinds: private institutions for the college-bound children of the wealthy, or state-supported facilities for children under court supervision.

But now a few private schools and charter schools, which are independent public schools exempt from ordinary rules and procedures, have set themselves up as boarding schools for low-income students who want many of the advantages and the support given to bankers' and lawyers' children at Groton and St. Mark's.

"At the residence, they make sure you do your homework," said Blackmon's friend and housemate Ingrid Nunez, 16. The students are in bed by 11 p.m., they said, and up in time to catch the Metro to school, a mile from the boarding home.

"Local philanthropists, educators, judges, clergy and others around the country are starting local residential schools rather than just despair of the conditions so many youth live in, and fail in," said Heidi Goldsmith, founder and executive director of the Washington-based Coalition for Residential Education. There are only about 30 such schools, public and private, in the country, but more are planned, she said.

Some experts think the idea makes sense. "Boarding schools can nurture a shared commitment to disciplined study and achievement," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California-Berkeley. "It builds a tighter community of learners, among dedicated teachers and students who gain a new sense of confidence. Rich parents who have sent their kids to boarding schools have understood this for centuries."

The movement toward boarding schools for low-income students has made some of its greatest strides in the District, where both Maya Angelou and the SEED Public Charter School receive an extra $14,000 in federal tax dollars each year for every student who lives on their premises.

SEED, a seventh- to 12th-grade school, has all 300 of its students living on a new campus in a low-income section of Southeast Washington, its dormitories as shiny and well-equipped as any New England prep school. The school's founders, Eric Adler and Rajiv Vinnakota, said they realized that the school would not work without government aid, so while raising millions in private funds to build the dormitories, they helped persuade Congress to add a boarding stipend to the D.C. school funding law.

The money is not limited to charter schools. "If Anacostia High School wanted to start a residential program, they could use the money," Adler said.

No other state or city provides such money, and that has led some schools to fail. A charter school in Massachusetts and one in New Jersey opened six years ago with residence programs like SEED's, but both schools have since closed.

"The residential components are the most expensive part of the total program," Goldsmith said. "If the youths are not wards of the state, bringing with them [federal] funds, then either the state, the locality or private funds must be raised."

Goldsmith's coalition includes public and private schools, some with histories dating to the late 19th century, and some as new as SEED and Maya Angelou.

Among those boarding schools most focused on teaching students from low-income neighborhoods are Girard College, a first- through 12th-grade school in Philadelphia; Happy Hill Farm Academy/Home in Granbury, Tex.; Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pa.; and Bethesda Home for Boys in Savannah, Ga.

Allison Boisvert, spokeswoman for Covenant Academy of Minnesota, a seventh- to 12th-grade school run by Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, said: "When children grow up in poverty and their parents grew up in poverty, they simply do not have the same access to anything, let alone education and understanding the rules of the dominant society. It then becomes our job to help children to be better prepared for a world that for the most part has left their parents behind."

Educators say many students thrive under 24-hour supervision. Maya Angelou co-founder David Domenici cited several alumni who were close to dropping out of high school but are now in college. But no test data so far show how such schools compare with others academically.

More than 70 percent of Maya Angelou graduates have gone to college in recent years. All 21 graduating seniors at SEED this year went on to four-year schools, and its average SAT score was significantly higher than neighboring regular schools. But on the achievement tests given to all D.C. students, the SEED and Maya Angelou results, like those of other city schools, are not very good.

The schools' students also struggle with the gap between the academic intensity of their school routines and the more relaxed rules they find when they go home on weekends to their families. Fuller said traditional prep schools have a similar problem, "since their students often come to see the insular world of ideas and knowledge as cut off from the problems and challenges facing real people back home."

Quentin Graham, the clinical psychologist on the Maya Angelou staff, said part of his job is to deal with this "clash with the premature independence that they have managed to establish outside the school."

He does it by talking often to students about all the rules they face, both in class and at the school residence. "There are very few people," he tells them, "who are able to operate successfully without following some rules."

Blackmon said the lesson makes sense to her.  "I like it here a lot," she said.

Get Connected: Web Site Links

~~~~>  Smithsonian Kids

The Smithsonian has collected more than 142 million objects—from flags and fossils, to sculptures and spacecrafts, to toys and tapestries.  There’s something for everyone at the Smithsonian.  Check out Smithsonian Kids for lots of fast, fun, cool, scary, patriotic, and beautiful things from the Smithsonian!  You can also send free E-cards to your friends!

http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/students/idealabs/smithsonian_kids.html

 

~~~~>  Mr. President

Did you know that Thomas Jefferson offered his own huge book collection as a replacement when British troops burned the Library of Congress?  Or that John F. Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected president—and the youngest to die in office?  Visit Mr. President to learn the facts about each of our nation’s presidents.
It’s a great place for browsing, research, or  homework help.

http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/students/idealabs/mr_president.html

 

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