Month: February 2012

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Religious Warfare

When I hear Rick Santorum invoking the political rights of people of faith, I hear religious warfare.  It is calculated to bring the evangelical right into his voting column and to alienate the more ecumenical believers of all religions.  And it attacks public education from kindergarten through college, because of its tolerance for all beliefs, whether they include worship of God or not.

This pandering has nothing to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Jesus’s teachings can not be construed as merging political life with religious life.  He is often quoted, referring  to paying taxes, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”  This statement alone seems to advocate the separation of church and state.

But there are other passages from the Gospels that show that Jesus was not an advocate of “religious warfare,” and these most deeply affect those who wish to follow his example.  Central to my religious education was the warning,

Do not judge or you, too will be judged. For in the same way as you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you (Matthew 7:1)

Raised as an evangelical, I constantly felt challenged by these words, because we were also taught we had been chosen for the Kingdom of God by our faith. How you do avoid judging those who were not chosen? It seemed like an impossible command to me. And this is where public schooling became crucial in my life.  In the first eight years of my schooling I was a minority group among Jewish classmates, and I struggled to view them as equals, when my church was teaching me they were excluded from the kingdom. Every day I had to face my judgment,  knowing that this was not what Jesus intended.

Finally I read ahead in the seventh chapter of Matthew, which is full of warnings against judging others. Jesus warns his disciples,

Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruits you will recognize them (Matthew 7:15-20)

Jesus spent a lot of words attacking the religious establishment of his day, arguing that they had a semblance of religion, but they had turned their backs on the most needy of their society: the poor, the prostitutes, the lepers. This teaching from Matthew suggests that even those posing as prophets might misrepresent God, and we should look to their fruits, the result of their work, as the crucial evidence of their intentions.  At the same time, we should respect those who produce the “good fruit,” because it could only come from a good tree.

To me this solved the problem of judging those of other faiths. I didn’t have to judge their theology, only the fruits of their labor. In fact, I should be wary of Christians who produced bad fruit because,

Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven (Matthew 7:21)

In this shocking passage, Jesus suggests that even pious church-goers might not be accepted into the Kingdom of God. The words we speak do not qualify us for the Kingdom, but the fruits of our labor.  This seems to turn the claims of some evangelicals upside down.  We should not be judged by our religious badges, but by the effects of our religious labor.

I came by these ideas slowly, even though they seem obvious to me now.  I have to credit my educational environment for bringing me there: public schools, secular colleges, and parents whose narrowness was always ready to include more people.  My mother said to me yesterday, “I expect to see my Jewish friends in heaven.” You would have to know my mother’s faith to realize what an enormous leap that was at the end of her life. But she was the one who kept me in public schools and supported my choice of a secular college.

I have nothing against private, religious or home schooling. Parents often choose these for the best motives. For me, however, the choice of public schooling and later, a secular college, were crucial to learning my place in the world. Without the questions, even the challenges to my faith, I would be more sanctimonious than I grew up to be. I would would be pitted against everyone who did not conform to my hermetically-sealed notion of the Gospel and my shrink-wrapped image of Jesus.  I would rather not be that person, and I owe it to public schooling that I am otherwise today.

Jesus was no politician. He did not play favorites, and he did not enjoy labeling people. Rather he enjoyed annihilating the categories of “unclean” and “Gentile” and “Roman” and accepted all who came to him. That is the spirit we should capture in public discourse, not the discourse of exclusion.

As Rick Santorum stokes the religious fires of the political campaign, I am looking for the fruits of his message. Does it bring more hate-language about Islam or other non-Christian faiths?  Does it attack tolerance as insidious “liberal teaching”?  Does it incite the most inflammatory voices of the campaign?  This kind of religious warfare should not drive our most important election.

This talk about breaking down the walls between church and state has  the potential to kindle religious warfare, and it should be condemned by God-fearing people.   And the supercilious dismissal of public schools and higher education should be noted as an oblique attack on the tolerance of diversity and the critical thinking that most of us owe to those formative institutions.

 

 

 

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Out lying

“Teacher Quality Widely Diffused” trumpets the headlines in the New York Times today (February 25, 2011). The headline and the article strongly suggest that the disadvantages of poverty and literacy-poor home environments are not critical influences on student performance on standardized tests. Rather that “teachers who were most and least successful in improving their students’ test scores could be found all around–in the poorest corners of the Bronx, like Tremont and Soundview, and in middle class neighborhoods of Queens, like Bayside and Forest Hills” (1).

The same article qualifies the results of the “value-added” assessment of students and their teachers by reporting “the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence level around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English. . .”  This technicality may be conveniently ignored by the Times, but it is more than an inconvenience to teachers who are now publicly evaluated by their students’ test scores.

The media, the Bloomberg administration and the Obama administration are so hungry to get the goods on bad teachers, that they are willing to sanctify any statistics that appear to support their case.  “Value-added” statistics are a clear improvement on evaluating teachers on the raw data of their students’ test scores, but with a confidence level that spans 53 percentiles in English, there is still much to question about publishing such data.

Suppose the verdict of a jury had a 53% variance with the truth?  Suppose the testing of a drug to cure HIV had a 53% confidence level of success? Suppose the computer models of an air assault on the nuclear resources of Iran had a 53% chance of disabling their nuclear program?  Would anyone take these risks? Are these test scores any less damaging of the reputation and the professional survival of a school or a teacher?

The cases that seem to fall outside the range of probability in the field of statistics are often referred to as “outliers.”  Outliers are often subjects of further experimentation, because they may speak to the validity of the data that falls within the confidence levels of the data.  Thorough scientists do not ignore outliers, because they may reveal flaws in their original hypotheses. They investigate outliers more rigorously to learn what they can from the deviations.

That is not what is happening with the “value-added” data offered up by the New York Public Schools. The data is being privileged with a public showing and sanctified by a headline like “Teacher Quality Widely Diffused.”  In criminal prosecution this would be called a “rush to judgment.”

In the media, we should call this “out lying.” The data is out, even though some of it may be lying.  It is all well and good for schools to use the data for discussion and give it further scrutiny to see what it really says. It is another thing to pretend that the data is evidence that poverty is not a mitigating influence on teaching.  This is what I get from “Teacher Quality Widely Diffused.”

Let’s not use blunt instruments to execute teachers. Let’s investigate the outliers, not lie about them.