Political strategists of all stripes have been pulling their hair out over the last year about the seeming fragmentation of the US into five voting blocs – progressives, Democratic Party faithful, centrists, GOP faithful, and the so-called Tea Party. The reason this is so problematic for US politics is because the United States has a voting system known as First Past the Post, used exclusively in only a smattering of countries with functional governments. Comparativists call the different forms of group identification in the US and in other states where parties are purely ideological “cross-cutting cleavages” – essentially the idea is that party identification will be fluid because parties aren’t allowed to purposefully represent one ethnicity or religious group. So, a committed Roman Catholic might believe strongly in the Puritan value set of it being everyone’s responsibility to care for the weaker brother – Jesus referenced this in the Beatitudes – and thereby identify best with the Democrats. Or, that same Roman Catholic might decide that protecting the rights of the unborn is the most important thing this election cycle, and so will vote with the Republicans.

The beauty of this system is that it balances group identification to prevent our political system from becoming overly fragmented. But in 2010, my America looks very different. Disillusioned voters on both sides, upset with a lack of leadership in Washington, are flocking to their respective pundit classes to be told the way of the future. Now, with a balanced and responsible Fourth Estate, this would be workable. But talking heads on the right such as Glenn Beck (the keynote speaker at CPAC 2010) and Sarah Palin are passing themselves off as mainstream, and in efforts to both widen the tent and make more cash, have refused to exclude even the dangerously crazy from their faithful following.  It is irresponsible to pretend that attacks from “birthers” pretending that there is something to contest about the first African-American president’s birth certificate are anything less than racist. However, it is equally irresponsible to write these conspiracy theorists off as some kind of fringe movement.  Although their ideas are certainly not typically associated with the mainstream, they seem to have found the perfect blend of ambiguity and populism to bring as many people in as possible, whether out of terror at the health care bill (“ObamaCare”) or out of fear for Obama’s tax hikes (while actually, the opposite is true).

It is fair to assert that these groups will be somewhat marginalized by the realities of the 2010 election. However, it doesn’t necessarily take a huge amount of people to push mainstream candidates out of the way. New York’s 23rd District was nearly hijacked by a Conservative Party candidate after he won support from Beck and Palin. And the dearth of leadership and epidemic of opportunism in the GOP right now is so desperate, it is not unrealistic to anticipate a new Republican Party after 2010, tied to the coffin of Ronald Reagan and some amorphous agenda focused on tax cuts and smaller government – as long as we keep the government’s hands off my Medicare.

Amidst seemingly international pressure to have Plans for After College, I am applying to Teach for America.  “At the very least, it’s a paycheck and full hours,” one friend points out.  I encounter two camps regarding TFA.  The first are academic types that say “TFA is a great opportunity,” pointing to the acquired professional and graduate study qualifications the program allows, not to mention the “real world” experience.  I counter that if I currently am not gaining real world experience, to please unplug the back of my neck from the motherboard and pull the hose out of my throat. The other camp comes more from my colleagues: “I heard TFA is really fucking hard.  I knew someone whose friend dropped out.

Sitting in the office of a professor whose opinion I highly value, I popped the question: “So, what do you think of Teach for America?”  “I love it,” he responded, referencing a former student of his who completed the program while gaining an expensive accreditation from a local university, made affordable by TFA. “It’s really fucking hard though,” he added.  “No easy stuff.”

Upon closer examination, it is difficult to pinpoint what is “so fucking hard” about TFA, when, in fact, what you do is quite simple: you teach, and nobody who teaches does so because it is easy.  As a four-year Woodward School for Technology and Research veteran, having co-run the program in 2007-2008, and currently involved in nuturing personal long-term relationships with specific students and their families, I can vouch that the rewards for such time-alotment are often retrospective, best reflected upon after a good meal and a nap.  Hearsay, however, can be gold when it comes to “life transition programs” such as TFA, and one thing that I hear is that corps members quit, or become discouraged because they feel impotent to fight the greater forces at work in their respective classrooms.

The K student liaison to TFA came into my Shakespeare class Fall Quarter to plug the upcoming application deadline.  She recounted a story of two public high schools in the same Chicago school district.  One was well funded and in a wealthy area, and a majority of the students performed well on national tests, and the expected number went on to higher education.  The other high school was more urban, poorly funded, and [I believe] serviced a predominantly ‘minority’ community. An astoundingly low percentage of the students there åperformed well on national tests, and very few went on to higher education, let alone graduated or passed an equivalency exam.  And this was why we were supposed to join Teach for America.  I sat in the back of the room and screamed “DOESN’T ANYBODY REALIZE THAT THERE ARE LARGER AND SYSTEMIC ISSUES AT PLAY HERE?  THEY’RE IN THE SAME FUCKING SCHOOL DISTRICT.  THERE SHOULDN’T BE A SINGLE FUCKING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO SCHOOLS AND THEIR STAFF!”

I brought up my “plugging the cracks in the dam” theory with my trusted professor.  He nodded and said “Oh, yes.  I see now.  Yes.” and then he nodded again.

In May 2009, U.S. Secretary of Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Detroit “ground zero” for education, though he added that he felt “‘a sense of real hope … [that] people here understand’ the importance of education and the need for reform.” That following December, Detroit Public Schools learned that their students set the nation record for inferiority on the National Assessment for Educational Progress.  69% of the fourth graders and 77% of the eighth graders participating in the hour long exam scored “below basic” on math.  The Freep mused,

“The results are perhaps the most damning indictment to date of a district already pummeled by reports of poor graduation rates, labor disputes, financial collapse, and even gunfire in the hallways.”

The buck stopped at the school district administration, and then Lansing-appointed “emergency financial manager” Robert Bibb took the Washington and deposited it into the district’s waning coffers.  “Just one of three of DPS fourth-graders, the test suggests, can correctly subtract 75 from 301, given a choice of three answers,” the Freep observed.

In the print edition of the Free Press I picked up that evening, one column opined that this was the district’s fault, while one blamed the teachers.  Another vaguely asserted a connection between parental involvement and educational success, and all parties agreed that this, above all else, was not the student’s fault.  There was even a nice graphic to illustrate how two-thirds of Detroit’s publicly-educated fourth- and eighth-graders were stumped by 301-75 = ___.  (My iPhone calculator says ’226′).

And I’m thinking: this isn’t one person’s fault.  This isn’t just bureaucratic vacuousness, or teacher inanity or family fatuousness or a student’s lack of respect for him or herself: this is everyone’s fault.  Every person who has ever meaningfully encountered these kids is to blame for this pathetic academic showing–including the students themselves (though we are all so much a product of our environments).

In an age where Washington plans to spend $663.7 billion on the DOD (not including $42.7 billion allotted to the Department of Homeland Security) compared to $46.7 billion on education–and $164 billion to cover the interest on our national debt–Teach for America employs around 7,300 college grads to help fill and ameliorate the nation’s classrooms, none of which are located at the academic “ground zero” of Detroit.

The final application deadline for 2010 is February 19.

The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of The Kosmopolitan Online.  They reflect the personal opinions of the author.

Well, everyone worried about Ted Kennedy’s death and what it would mean to any meaningful change to the health care system in the United States.  Apart from all the unwarranted hysteria about the Kennedy curse (he was old and he died…), I thought the press handled it pretty well, including The Kosmopolitan Online, which wrote a couple of nice editorials on Ted’s contributions to the Senate and how he was a one-man filibuster and so on and so forth.  I have to admit I never liked the guy, but staunchness and constancy aren’t very well spoken for in our representation, apart from on the extremely local level.  The paradigmatic Kennedy contributed a lot to health care reform while he was alive; he contributed even more by dying, creating an inamorata around which the Democrats could rally.  Democratic zeal for health care after his death is what got the legislation this far.

But now it’s fucked.

In an impossible victory, Scott Brown (R) defeated Martha Coakley (D) approximately 53 to 47 percent to take the late senator’s seat in Massachusetts.  The usually overwhelmingly democratic Massachusetts shocked the polity by electing to the senate the 41st member of the GOP, which keeps alive the Republican filibuster for the Senate health care bill.  President Obama’s first year in office is shot (unless he’s out of the country), and Democrats can wave goodbye any hopes of an expeditious piece of legislation.

Martha, Martha, Martha

I would understand if Martha Coakley had been in some kind of drug scandal and lost the election; I would understand if she was an ineffective campaigner.  No, I think Martha Coakley is another name for President Barack Obama and His Administration…Most democrats seem to have lost a little faith in their “change is coming” mantra, with frustration permeating throughout the House and Senate at the longevity of this convoluted health care bill.  Granted, the death of the champion probably didn’t help, but someone famous once said that things will one day be judged by the content of their character instead of outward appearances.

Scott Brown’s campaign platform makes the election even more painful for democrats to swallow: he actively opposes the health care legislation in the House and Senate.

It doesn’t help that Obama had a bad year.  What makes things worse is that he knows and admits that the year was bad, calling the Christmas Day attack of the Northwest airliner “a systematic failure” on the part of the administration.  The economy’s positive response to the senatorial election can almost entirely be attributed to increased faith in drug companies which would otherwise have been negatively impacted by the President’s health care package.  That’s sickening.

I think it’s funny that Scott Brown once posed nude for Cosmopolitan – it means we’re breaking down this crusty, white male paradigm of “what a politician should be” (iniquitous, venal, etc.).  I just wish Scott Brown was a (D).  Sigh…