Dana Goldstein

2012: The Year in Review, Education and Beyond

Education story of the year: The Chicago teachers' strike. American teacher unionism was founded in Chicago in the late 1890s, as female, largely Catholic elementary school teachers resisted centralization policies--standardized testing, a uniform curriculum, numeric teacher evaluations--pursued by a male, Protestant bureaucracy. So it was fitting that the loudest cry of protest against contemporary standards-and-accountability school reform emerged in the Windy City this September, as teachers resisted professional evaluation tied to student test scores, closures of neighborhood schools, and the expansion of the charter school sector. You can read my history of Chicago teacher unionism here.

The strike has had a few interesting results. First, it raised the profile of Chicago Teachers' Union leader Karen Lewis, who is a less compromising and more leftist figure than Randi Weingarten, president of the national American Federation of Teachers. Second, it brought to the public's attention the tension bewteen increasing test-score pressure on teachers and schools while cutting budgetary support for art, music, counseling, school psychologists, and the many other crucial, yet more holistic services schools provide. Third, it resulted in a compromise contract with both progressive and regressive features. More funding for social support services, especially in high-poverty schools, is a good thing. Continuing to backload teacher salaries and bonsues, though, will not make the profession more appealing to ambitious young people or career-changers. Yet it is encouraging that CTU agreed, at least in theory, to professional evaluations that include evidence of student learning. Now the devil will be in working out the details, particularly on what role standardized test scores will play, and how to evaluate teachers of currently non-tested subjects and grades, like art, music, PE, and kindergarten.

 

Magazines of the Year: Tomorrow and Jacobin.
 

Education research-finding of the year: Teachers matter, and not just for academics. A study by economists Raj Chetty, Jonah Rockoff, and John Friedman found that teachers who consistently improve their students' standardized test scores also help children avoid teenage pregnancy, get to college, and earn higher incomes. But there is a crucial caveat to this finding: The study was conducted in a low-stakes setting, in other words, among teachers whose pay and evaluation were not tied to test scores. The researchers admitted in their paper that when tests do become high-stakes, there is an increased risk of score manipulation, which can occur either through teaching-to-the-test or outright cheating. In high-stakes settings, test scores become less reliable and, therefore, their link to better life outcomes for kids could be compromised.

 

Under-reported education trend of the year (and decade): Sociology used to be the academic discipline with the most influence over public education policy. Today that discipline is economics. On the upside, we now have more data about children's academic and life outcomes. On the downside, education policy-makers are paying less attention to aspects of children's lives that are more difficult or impossible to quantify, such as parental involvement and comfort with diversity.

 

New York restaurant of the year: Pok Pok. We only had the patience to wait in line for this place once, but it was so, so, so worth it. A close runner-up is Battersby, where I had two wonderful meals. Another year, another few reasons never to leave Brooklyn. 

 

Book of the year on How We Live Now. Twilight of the Elites, by Chris Hayes. This bracing book about "America after meritocracy" has implications for every area of policy-making, but is especially sharp at deconstructing myths we tell ourselves about education: that test scores measure aptitude and that elite schools serve the common good.

 

Education story to watch in 2013: The roll-out of the Common Core. Will the movement to implement shared national academic standards remain bipartisan, or will conservatives and Republicans increasingly turn against it? Will schools implement the Core faithfully, or will myths about the standards--like the false idea that they cut out fiction reading--persist?  

 

Albums of the year: "Break it Yourself," by Andrew Bird. "Sun," by Cat Power. "Channel Orange," by Frank Ocean. "The Idler Wheel..." by Fiona Apple. "Shields," by Grizzly Bear.

 

Education book of the year: My favorite was Saving the School, by Michael Brick.

 

A book to pounce on in 2013: The absolutely masterful Hope Against Hope, by Sarah Carr, the definitive account of education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, told through the eyes of a student, a teacher, and a principal. A gripping narrative with deep historical and political ramifications. 

 

Cultural controversy of the year: The battle over the future of the New York Public Library's main branch, at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. Should this world-class research institution ship several million books to New Jersey, and open space for a lending library? Should architect Norman Foster, known for his glass additions to historic buildings, be let loose on this Beaux Arts masterpiece? I work there almost every day, and I still can't decide how I feel about it. 

 

TV Show of the Year: "Girls." Feminists are funny. 

 

#longreads of the year: This past spring, the magazine that launched my career, The American Prospect, experienced a terrifying brush with death. I'm so glad donors and subscribers have helped The Prospect continue its work, because under editor Kit Rachlis, it has published some amazing writing. Monica Potts' "Pressing on the Upward Way" is a compassionate, beautifully-constructed portrait of rural poverty in Eastern Kentucky. Equally stirring was Gabriel Arana's "My So-Called Ex-Gay Life," which not only told Gabe's personal story of surviving "ex-gay therapy," but also broke news by revealing how the psychiatrist who pushed to define homosexuality as a mental illness, Robert Spitzer, has come to regret and retract his previous work.

Documentary of the Year: "Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry," by Alison Klayman.

Personal Highlight of the Year: Pacific Street. With this guy.

Happy New Year, folks. 

Checking-In on the Legacy of Michelle Rhee's Teacher Reforms in Washington, D.C.

A new report from The New Teacher Project, "Keeping Irreplacables in D.C. Public Schools," takes a look at how Michelle Rhee's controversial IMPACT teacher evaluation program has fared since she left the district in 2010. Under IMPACT, teachers are rated according to a number of measures, including multiple annual classroom observations by administrators, as well as teachers' individual students' academic growth, as measured by district and classroom-level tests. Teachers who agree to forgo certain job security protections, and who rate in the top category, "highly-effective," are eligible for annual bonuses between $2,000 and $25,000, as well as eventual raises in their base pay and promotions to "distinguished" and "expert" teacher status. 

There have been some significant changes to IMPACT under Chancellor Kaya Henderson, such as bonuses for effective teachers who agree to teach at the lowest-performing, highest-poverty schools; a renewed focus on holistic measures of teaching excellence, including "commitment to school community;" and fewer classroom observations throughout the year for teachers whose fall observations earn high scores. So is IMPACT working? Are great teachers staying in DC, and are bad teachers being replaced by better ones? 

According to TNTP's anlysis, DC retains about the same percentage of its top-fifth-rated teachers--88 percent--as four other, unnamed school districts whose practices the organization examined as a control group. Where DC stood apart was in the percentage of its lowest-performers--55 percent--it laid off, compared to 6-21 percent in the four other districts. Because the average first-year teacher peforms better under IMPACT than the average low-performing veteran, TNTP concludes these high turnover rates are justified, despite the worry that they could depress morale among the teacher corps. (Overall, more experienced teachers are more likely to be highly-rated; about three-quarters of DC's highest-performing teachers under IMPACT have more than three years of experience in the classroom.)

Now for the less encouraging news. Less than half of high-performing DC teachers received positive feedback, public recognition, or additional responsibilites from their principals. These are less than stellar management practices. And highly-rated teachers continue to work disproportionately at schools with fewer poor children. (It is unclear why this is the case: because it is easier to score well on IMPACT if you work in a middle-class school; because many effective teachers avoid high-poverty schools: or some combination of both and other factors.) 

The chart below is one of the most sobering in the report. High-performing DC teachers who do choose to leave the district often cite the IMPACT bureaucracy as one reason for doing so. This dovetails with reports that up to 40 percent of DC teachers who earned IMPACT bonuses have rejected them, in part because they are unwilling to lose their seniority protections under a system many see as capricious. On the other hand, as the chart notes, "DCPS rarely loses Irreplacables because of dissatisfaction with their compensation." In most urban districts, pay is a big cause of teacher turnover, since educators can expect raises if they decamp to deep-pocketed suburban schools.

So administrators still have some work to do to improve the professional culture within DCPS schools. And what about kids? This paper did not examine student acheivement, but results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show very modest improvement in DC over the past three years, though the District continues to demonstrate some of the largest race and class-based achievement gaps in the United States. The results of IMPACT over the longterm should be measured not only in teacher retention rates, but also in whether--as the program's proponents have claimed--overhauling teacher evaluation and pay will lead to significant gains for kids, both as measured by test scores and by more holistic factors, such as safety, better student discipline, a broader array of curricular and extracurricular options, and parent satisfaction. 

Read the full report from TNTP here.

In Los Angeles, a Promising and Progressive School Reform Plan Is Under Threat

Between periods at Crenshaw High School in South L.A., May 2011.

Let's say a certain school's reform plan has yielded measurable academic gains (especially for disabled students), a decrease in student suspensions and expulsions, and is enthusiastically supported by the principal, teachers, and many parents. The plan has also garnered national interest, attracting funding from a major philanthropy and the Obama administration, too. This school is by no means perfect; Latino students, in particular, need significant help. And the school in question has a history of outspoken activism, with parents and teachers partnering to demand better textbooks and technology, and some teachers closely-affiliated with their union and loudly opposed to popular reform strategies such as merit pay tied to student test scores. Should this school's reform plan be halted by a district administration with a different agenda, or allowed to continue its experimentation? 

This isn't a hypothetical case, but the real story of Crenshaw High in South Los Angeles, which I reported on earlier this year, and which now faces a district-imposed "reconstitution."

Crenshaw is a high-poverty, predominantly African American school that has followed a unique reform blueprint called the Extended Learning Cultural Model. Led by a group of visionary teachers--and financed by the Ford Foundation and a federal School Improvement Grant--the Crenshaw model split the school into several themed academies ("social justice;" "business") and reorganized the curriculum around neighborhood problem-solving. What does this mean in practice? Students worked with university researchers to examine local health and nutrition issues; graphed the relationhip between school truancy rates and incarceration rates; and interned at local non-profits. They read Our America, a book about life inside a troubled Chicago housing project, and openly discussed racism and classism. Interim principal Sylvia Rousseau worked closely with teachers to raise academic rigor across the curriculum and implement the new Common Core standards. But as I wrote in February:

What’s controversial about the Crenshaw reform agenda is that it is explicitly political. It asks students to think critically about the social forces shaping their lives and to work actively to improve their low-income neighborhood. Poor children often hear that they need to do well in school in order to escape their communities. What if, instead, kids understood that doing well in school could help them become more effective advocates for their families and neighbors?

The man who became L.A. schools superintendent in April 2011, John Deasy, has quite a different orientation toward education reform. He has been affiliated with the Gates and Broad foundations, which--while both very supportive of the Common Core--tend to focus more attention on tying teacher evaluation and pay to student performance than on ensuring the curriculum is "culturally-relevant" to poor children's lives. Gates and Broad are also heavily invested in charter schools, while Crenshaw is a traditional, large comprehensive high school--the kind many education reformers believe is outmoded and should be phased out. So in part, it is no surprise that on Oct. 24, Deasy notified Crenshaw that he intends to halt the school's existing reform agenda, divide Crenshaw into three magnet schools, and ask the current teaching and administrative staff to reapply to their jobs.

There are a lot of great things about magnet schools, so I'm eager to hear more about what Deasy and his team have planned for Crenshaw. Deasy also says he wants to see more Advanced Placement and potentially International Baccalaureate classes at the school, which could be excellent ideas, and potentially worked into Crenshaw's existing reform plan. But what's discouraging about this news is that the district seems determined to paint Crenshaw -- in many ways an underdog success -- as an abject failure. Under its Extended Learning Cultural Model, Crenshaw actually met or exceeded state academic growth targets for most of its students, and earned broad-based community and even national support. Its School Improvement Grant is administered at the state level and tied to Crenshaw's current reform plan, not the agenda Deasy hopes to implement, which raises questions about accountability for federal dollars.

Everyone in the field of public education has his or her favored reform methods, from merit pay to vocational education to year-round schooling to giving every kid violin lessons. But if district leaders don't allow other experts' ideas to come to fruition over the course of years, not months, new strategies can never be fully assessed, nor scaled-up if they work. Before its current reform plan was in place, Crenshaw had five principals in nine years. This school is desperately in need of some stability, and as I saw when I sat-in on professional development trainings last year, the current staff is deeply comitted to seeing its reform project through, and unusually self-reflective about the work they are doing. What's more, the explicitly activist, social justice lens through which these educators teach their students is increasingly rare in public schools in 2012. Yet a lot of smart people, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Lisa Delpit, have observed that disadvantaged students learn more when their curriculum reflects, at least in part, their own histories and struggles, and shows them how education can serve not only their own individual interests, but those of their communities, too.

The whole saga at Crenshaw reminds me of the sad story of another creative public high school that bucked the prevailing reform winds of the day: Feinstein High, in Providence, Rhode Island. Feinstein was founded as a Ted Sizer-inspired “Essential School” organized around the principles of civic engagement and volunteer work. Serving just 360 students, Feinstein was highly nontraditional: It stressed long-form writing, not test scores, and there were no sports teams, class periods, or even grades. Every student had every teacher’s cell phone number, as well as a laptop they could carry between home and school. Although test scores were uneven, Feinstein demonstrated consistently impressive graduation and college-going rates compared to other high-poverty high schools in Rhode Island. For awhile, the school was recognized as a rare success story within an otherwise failing district. In 1999, the Gates Foundation gifted Providence $13.5 million to experiment with creating more small neighborhood high schools, using Feinstein as one model.

Over time, however, Gates, disappointed with stagnant test scores and graduation rates at some Foundation-funded small schools, decided to change his focus. In 2005, he stopped funding non-charter small schools and began investing heavily in school choice and standards-and-accountability reforms, such as charter schools and data-driven teacher evaluation. As the largest private foundation in the world, the Gates Foundation’s priorities are powerfully influential over the entire non-profit sector, and certainly help shape federal and state education agendas, too -- in part through the seeding of Foundation alumni, like Deasy, in important policy-making jobs. It didn’t take long for Feinstein to fall out of favor with Rhode Island’s political and philanthropic elite, and in 2010, despite emotional protests from students and teachers, the Providence school district shut Feinstein down.

Now the same thing could happen to another school with a nontraditional reform agenda, Crenshaw High. But there are as many ways to reform education as there are principals, teachers, students, and parents comitted to doing this very difficult work. The cause of school improvement would probably benefit from a political environment in which educators were more often allowed to break the mold of the most established and popular reform strategies, especially in cases where doing so has already yielded positive change for children.

To learn more about the fight at Crenshaw, check out Crenshaw Cougars Fighting Reconstitution. After the jump, I have posted Superintendent John Deasy's letter to the Crenshaw staff. 

The Real Boston Busing Story

Mayor Thomas Menino says school busing is unpopular and outdated. So why are 10,000 Boston children on a waiting list to be bused to higher-quality schools? 

Check out my report at Atlantic Cities on Boston's contentious school zone reorganization process.

On Algebra, High Expectations, and the Common Core

I'm currently working on a long article about the Common Core, which focuses mostly on the new standards' implications for the humanities. But while I was reporting the piece, one thing I heard from critics of the Core was that is might be dangerous to connect high school graduation requirements with the Core's expectation that all students conquer algebra. Why? Because, in the words of Anthony Carnevale of the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce, "Education reform has stalled on Algebra 2. The more you demand it, the more drop-outs you have."

In today's New York Times, Andrew Hacker agrees that algebra is unnecessary for most students, though he doesn't mention that because 48 states and territories are planning to adopt the Common Core, the energy in school reform is tilting very much in favor of algebra. Here's the crux of Hacker's argument:

To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.

Shirley Bagwell, a longtime Tennessee teacher, warns that “to expect all students to master algebra will cause more students to drop out.” For those who stay in school, there are often “exit exams,” almost all of which contain an algebra component. In Oklahoma, 33 percent failed to pass last year, as did 35 percent in West Virginia.

Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. In New Mexico, 43 percent of white students fell below “proficient,” along with 39 percent in Tennessee. Even well-endowed schools have otherwise talented students who are impeded by algebra, to say nothing of calculus and trigonometry.

California’s two university systems, for instance, consider applications only from students who have taken three years of mathematics and in that way exclude many applicants who might excel in fields like art or history. Community college students face an equally prohibitive mathematics wall. A study of two-year schools found that fewer than a quarter of their entrants passed the algebra classes they were required to take.

“There are students taking these courses three, four, five times,” says Barbara Bonham of Appalachian State University. While some ultimately pass, she adds, “many drop out.”

Hacker suggests that instead of algebra, students should be required to take statistics, a type of math that he sees as more influential in the political and business worlds. He'd like students to spend less time on polynomials and more time learning how the Consumer Price Index is calculated.

There's a strong argument to be made that math is taught poorly in many schools, with little attention paid to how most people are likely to use numbers in the real world, or how math is applicable to economics, the sciences, and government. But this argument also has a disturbing slippery slope quality; if teenagers find any somewhat obscure task difficult (like reading Shakespeare or doing library research), should they be allowed, or even be encouraged, to avoid learning it? A great teacher can often spark interest in a subject a student thought she would never enjoy. One reason to have more rigorous academic standards is to leave open the possibility of that magic happening more often for more young people, and to make sure unfair streotypes about who is "academic" don't prevent kids from discovering unexpected passions. 

These debates are ultimately about tracking: whether it's fair or desirable to expect all K-12 students to work through the same academic standards, or whether it makes sense, especially in the high school years, to do some sorting according to students' interests, strengths, and weaknesses. Many high schools, of course, already sort students through honors, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate tracks; the goal of the Common Core is to get all students performing at those levels.

In other Western nations, such as Germany and Switzerland, it would be considered absurd to say that all 16-year olds should be spending their days learning the same stuff. Nevertheless, that is the tenor of current mainstream education reform thinking in the United States, and I expect we'll be arguing loudly in the coming years over whether that ideology is admirably idealistic or willfully naive. 

Diverse Neighborhoods and the Charter School Movement

My colleague Sarah Garland has written a wonderful piece for The Atlantic about a local/federal/charter school partnership to racially and socioeconomically integrate the East Lake neighborhood of Atlanta. Across the country, more and more charter school movement leaders are realizing that if charters serve only poor, black, and Latino families, they will limit their potential educational reach, and will leave themselves open to criticism that they are reifying the segregated nature of American public education. Here in New York, for example, Eva Moskowitz's controversial Success Academy charter network will soon open two new schools in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Cobble Hill, where many white and college-educated families live. An explicit goal of the schools is to attact a student body far more diverse than that of the typical "no excuses" charter school. In the process, charter advocates hope to increase the base of political support for charter school expansion.

But as Sarah writes, the successful Atlanta charter she reported on, Charles Drew, is not a "no excuses" or "strict discipline" type school. Unlike the Success Academies, Drew embraces progressive pedagogy and does not overtly obsess about discipline or testing:

Drew is not one of the "no-excuses" charter schools where young children march in formation through the hallways and teachers give out demerits when students don't maintain eye contact. At Drew, children wiggle and dance through the halls, hugging teachers as they pass and laughing with their friends. Standardized testing is a focus, but not the only focus. It's the sort of school that might attract suburban middle-class parents.

"We're trying to instill a sense that you're taking responsibility for your educational experience," says Don Doran, the principal at Drew. "It's hard to do that if you come out with a whole lot of rigidity."

I've visited a number of "no excuses" charter schools, and some of them do seem like very happy places, despite the emphasis on rules. That said, as I reported from Rhode Island last year, the "no excuses" model does present significant challenges for middle-class families, who tend to prefer less drilling and test-prep; more art, music, and extracurricular activities; and more opportunities for parents to get involved in shaping school policy. As the charter school movement looks to expand beyond the poorest zip codes, it will be interesting to see whether more charters end up looking like the progressive Community Roots in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and fewer like KIPP, a national network of "no excuses" schools.

That said, using progressive pedagogy and enrolling white-collar families does not guarantee that a charter school will attract broad-based political support. Community Roots, for example, experienced strong opposition to its proposal to open a new middle school, which the city eventually approved. The teachers' union and some neighborhood parents objected to the charter taking over space currently alotted to a traditional public school that serves a high proportion of special-needs students. These arguments over real estate and whether charter schools "cream" easier students to teach aren't going away, especially in the nation's most diverse and expensive cities. 

Cities are Growing Faster than Suburbs for the First Time Since the 1920s

Over at Slate, I discuss why that could be a good thing for public education -- if policy-makers don't miss the opportunity to lessen the racial and socioeconomic isolation of poor, non-white children.

By the way, every time I write about the benefits of integrated schools, someone asks whether going to school with poor children hurts the academic achievement of middle class kids. It does not, as long as the classroom doesn't "tip" to become majority high-poverty. Rick Kahlenberg discusses some of the research here. On the social benefits of integration for all kids, I recommend the work of Amy Stuart Wells.

Discussing Educational Inequality With Chris Hayes

Chris Hayes is getting a lot of flack for his Memorial Day episode, in which he grappled seriously with war, peace, death, and memory. I'm going to outsource commentary on that to Conor Friedersdorf, but really, Chris should be lauded for hosting a show that deals with issues like education policy with more nuance than any other show on television. I was lucky enough to be part of Chris' panel on Saturday, where we discussed racial and socioeconomic segregation of schools, teachers' unions, and other crucial topics. Here are some clips.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

Exciting News About My Book

I am absolutely delighted to announce that today I signed a contract with Doubleday, a division of Random House, to publish my book. The working title is The Teaching Wars: A Political History of America's Most Controversial Profession, and it should be on shelves sometime in 2014. (Yes, this is a long process!)

Since the birth of the public school system, there has always been a contention in American politics that something is wrong with the teacher corps, and that it must be reformed and reconstituted. During the 1830s, Common School reformers like Horace Mann believed too many transient, uncommitted young men were teachers; by the turn of the century, urban good government types were alarmed that 80 percent of teachers were women, whom they considered undereducated and unambitious. The Red Scares of the 1930s and 1950s led to nativists pushing thousands of teachers out of the classroom in retaliation for their involvement in left politics; by the late 1960s, Black Power community control activists were critiquing teachers and their unions from the left, arguing that the people who worked inside public schools were disrespectful of disadvantaged students' cultures, neighborhoods, and families.

My book will track the politics of public school teaching all the way up to the present day, and show how teachers have been at the absolute center of every social movement that rocked the United States, from feminism to organized labor to Civil Rights to the Great Society. Teachers' closeness to these controversial movements has made the profession itself controversial, and this controversy means public school teaching is often maligned in the public discourse. When this discouraging conversation about teaching is paired with the sometimes chaotic atmosphere inside under-resourced, badly managed public schools, the result is that many potentially great educators are dissuaded from choosing teaching and sticking with it. And all this noise detracts attention from the real policy challenge, which is recognizing, rewarding, and scaling holistic teaching excellence, which already exists in at least one or two classrooms in almost every public school across the country, no matter how disadvantaged its student body.

There's way more I'm thinking about, drawn from history, social science, and contemporary reporting inside schools. But I'm going to resist the urge to say more right now, because I really need you to buy the book when it comes out -- and I'm sure the ideas are going to evolve a lot as I write.

I'm very lucky that my editor at Doubleday will be Kris Puopolo, who has worked with a long list of writers I admire, including John Farrell, Megan Stack, Joby Warrick, David Hoffman, and Eugene Robinson.

And while I'm expressing thanks, my agent, Howard Yoon, is a ridiculously talented editor, negotiator, and mentor. The book was born in Sam Freedman's deservedly famous non-fiction book writing class. And this project would not exist without the Schwartz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, the Puffin Fellowship at the Nation Institute, and the Spencer Fellowship at Columbia University.

This means I'll be blogging a bit less over the next 18 months, as I spend most of my time working on the book and doing occasional magazine features. But as always, I love hearing ideas and reading recomendations from readers, so please keep in touch via the comments section.

Have a great weekend.

In Defense of Peter Beinart

Please head over to The Nation to read my essay on Beinart's important new book, The Crisis of Zionism:

Beinart accurately diagnoses the central challenge for the 21^st century international Jewish community: how to come to terms with “the shift from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power.” In other words, if Jews do not learn to wield our newfound military, political, and economic strength ethically—showing the same concern for Palestinian and Arab-Israeli minority rights that we hope gentiles will show for Jews—then we, as a people, have failed to learn the painful lessons of Jewish history.

What I found most revelatory about The Crisis of Zionism was the way in which Beinart appeals not just to Jewish political liberalism, but also to our faith. The holy books of Judaism are filled with portents about what happens when Jews abuse power, Beinart notes. After Persia’s Jews toppled Haman, the anti-Semitic royal advisor, they slaughtered 75,000 people in retribution; our texts recount that both the Babylonian and Roman destructions of Jewish empires came in the wake of Jewish moral decadence. “Our tradition insists that physical collapse was preceded by ethical collapse,” Beinart writes.

Read the whole thing.