OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Flake’s defiant surrender
Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
A Strive for Five campaign is meant to improve school attendance.
Showing up matters,
especially in school
I
t has been another month of distressing news for an Oregon
education system that continues to rank among the worst in
the country.
Administration after administration, from state govern-
ment all the way down to local school districts, have promised
reforms and improvement.
Yet new initiatives, new tests to measure progress, new man-
agement, new programs and new funding sources always seem
stymied — they lack follow-through, sending Oregon education
back where it started, though pointed in a different direction.
On Oct. 11, Oregon’s chief state schools officer Salam Noor
resigned under pressure from Gov. Kate Brown. That’s the
same governor who handpicked Noor to oversee the state’s
K-12 schools little more than two years ago. According to the
governor’s press secretary, Brown said she was no longer satis-
fied with Noor’s ability to execute her vision.
So back to square one for Oregon education. Back to the
back of the pack, at least for now.
From a local perspective, school districts received their
annual “report cards” the next day and they were a mixed bag.
In Clatsop County the grades were far from straight As, but not
among the failing marks either. But they show there is plenty of
room to improve in test scores, graduation rates and other per-
formance measures.
One standout statistic is poor school attendance, which
we recently spotlighted in a Daily Astorian story on Clatsop
County school districts’ fight against chronic absenteeism.
The state defines “regular attenders” as students who attend
at least 90 percent of the school year and most schools across
the state fall far below that level. Statistics show that students
who fall below that mark test well below those who show up
reliably, so showing up for class not only matters, it matters a
great deal.
Statewide, the num-
Accept only
bers are nowhere near good
enough, and unfortunately
legitimate
the Astoria School District
excuses —
closely follows the state
average, with nearly 20 per-
contagious
cent of students missing at
illness the
least 10 percent of possi-
obvious one.
ble school days last year.
That’s a 1 percent increase
Get your child
from the prior year. The
to class and
Seaside School District
led the county in chronic
the state’s
absenteeism last school
statistics, and
year with 24 percent of stu-
dents not regularly attend-
our community
ing, followed by Knappa
as a whole,
with 22.3 percent and
will no doubt
Jewell with 21.1 percent.
The Warrenton-Hammond
improve.
School District was at 14.5
percent, the lowest in the
county. Warrenton had posted a 9 percent chronic absenteeism
rate in 2014-15 that doubled to 18.5 percent in 2015-16 before
decreasing last year.
The Astoria district this year launched Strive for Five, an
attendance campaign with a goal for students to miss no more
than a week of school the entire year. Astoria Superintendent
Craig Hoppes says the campaign has raised awareness about
attendance, an issue the school district plans to highlight often
throughout the year.
That’s good — the disturbing absenteeism numbers need
great improvement.
Much of the education system can seem bureaucratic,
generic and random. But one of the best things we can do to get
our students through school is to get them to school.
Accept only legitimate excuses — contagious illness the
obvious one. Get your child to class and the state’s statistics,
and our community as a whole, will no doubt improve.
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
I
n 1911, in the midst of a debate
about whether Britain’s House
of Lords should willingly give
up its veto power
over legislation
or fight a doomed
battle to retain
its privileges, a
British peer, Lord
Selborne, framed
the debate for his
fellow lords this way: “The ques-
tion is, shall we perish in the dark,
slain by our own hand, or in the
light, killed by our enemies?”
A similar question has con-
fronted Republican politicians
throughout the age of Donald
Trump, and again and again they
have chosen to die in the dark.
This was true of Trump’s stron-
gest primary-season rivals, who
fought him directly and concertedly
during exactly one of the umpteen
debates and then, finding open war
hard going, chose to lose and bow
out as though Trump were a normal
rival rather than the fundamentally
unfit figure they had described just
a few short weeks before.
It was true of the party function-
aries, the hapless Reince Priebus
above all, who denied the residual
Republican forces resisting Trump
the chance to fight him one last
time in the light of the convention
floor.
It was true of the party’s leaders
in Washington, D.C., both the men
of savvy and the men of honor,
who came up with endless excuses
for why they couldn’t take on
Trump directly before he won the
nomination and put party over
conviction thereafter. It was true of
Paul Ryan; it was true even of John
McCain.
It was not true of everyone.
Mitt Romney and John Kasich
declined to fall on the sword of
party unity; so did George W. Bush
and his father; so did some gov-
ernors and a few junior senators,
Mike Lee and Ben Sasse and Jeff
Flake.
But what was notable about
these holdouts was that while
they refused to make the quietus,
to strangle their own convictions
in Trump’s ample shadow, they
declined many chances to keep up
the fight openly as well.
The nomination of a figure like
Trump, a clear threat to both the
professed beliefs of his party’s
leaders and to basic competence
in presidential government, is the
sort of shattering event that in the
past would have prompted a real
schism or independent candidacy.
But Romney couldn’t talk Kasich
into being that independent can-
didate, all the other possibilities
demurred — and then as a group,
the Republican resisters declined
to endorse anyone, neither Hillary
Clinton nor the Libertarian ticket
nor Evan McMullin, making their
opposition a private matter rather
than a public challenge to the
nominee.
Now, almost a year into the
Trump presidency, a similar
dynamic is playing out. There is a
small but significant Republican
opposition to Trump, but its leading
figures still don’t want to go to
war with him directly, preferring
philosophical attacks and tactical
withdrawal to confrontation and
probable defeat.
Bob Corker, part of the dying-
in-the-dark-isn’t-so-bad caucus
during the primary campaign
(and when he seemed to hope
for a Cabinet appointment), has
become a fierce Trump critic — but
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona., accompanied by his wife, Cheryl,
leaves the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Tuesday after announcing he
won’t seek re-election in 2018.
The Republican establishment,
like the House of Lords a century
back, has the feel of a fated and
superannuated institution that no
stratagem can save.
only after deciding to retire from
the Senate. George W. Bush and
John McCain have each given
speeches that read like broadsides
against Trump — but very general
critiques of his worldview, not
political attacks on the man him-
self. And now Jeff Flake of Arizona
has delivered a barnburner of a
Senate address about the civic costs
of the Trump presidency — while
simultaneously declaring that
because he can’t win his primary in
a Trumpified party, he won’t even
stay and fight it out.
To the extent that there’s a
plausible theory behind all of these
halfhearted efforts, it’s that resist-
ing Trump too vigorously only
strengthens his hold on the party’s
base, by vindicating his claim to
have all the establishment arrayed
against him.
But the problem with this logic
is that it offers a permanent excuse
for doing nothing, no matter how
bad Trump’s reign becomes. (“I’d
criticize him for accidentally
nuking Manila, but you know,
then Fox News would just make
it all about me …”) In the end,
if you want Republican voters to
reject Trumpism, you need to give
them clear electoral opportunities
to do so — even if you expect
defeat, even if it’s all but certain.
And an anti-Trump movement
that gives high-minded speeches
but never mounts candidates
confirms Trump’s claim to face
establishment opposition while
also confirming his judgment of the
establishment’s guts and stamina
— proving that they’re all low-en-
ergy, all “liddle” men, all unwilling
to fight him man to man.
If Corker really means what
he keeps saying about the danger
posed by Trump’s effective
incapacity, he should call openly
for impeachment or for 25th
Amendment proceedings — and
other anti-Trump Republicans
should join him. If Flake really
means what he said in his impas-
sioned speech, and he doesn’t want
to waste time and energy on a fore-
doomed Senate primary campaign,
then he should choose a different
hopeless-seeming cause and pri-
mary Trump in 2020. George W.
Bush should endorse him. So
should McCain, and Corker, and
Romney, and Kasich, and Sasse,
and the rest of the anti-Trump list.
They should expect to lose, and
badly, but they should make Trump
actually defeat them, instead of just
clearing the field for his second
nomination.
And not only for the sake of
their honor. The president’s GOP
critics should engage in electoral
battle because the act of campaign-
ing, the work of actually trying
to persuade voters, is the only
way anti-Trump Republicans will
come to grips with the legitimate
reasons that their ideas had become
so unpopular that voters opted for
demagoguery instead.
A speechifying anti-Trumpism,
distant from the fray, will always
be self-regarding and self-de-
ceiving — unwilling to see how
the Iraq War discredited both the
Bushist and McCainian styles of
right-wing internationalism, inca-
pable of addressing the economic
disappointments that turned voters
against Flake’s Goldwaterite liber-
tarianism and Romney’s “trust me,
I’m a businessman” promises. Only
in actual political competition can
the Republican elite reckon with
why it lost its party, and how it
might win again without succumb-
ing to Trumpian indecency.
I don’t expect this to happen;
indeed I think the GOP is more
likely to be renewed by someone
who currently supports Trump or
someone not yet active in politics
than it is by the men resisting the
president today. The Republican
establishment, like the House of
Lords a century back, has the feel
of a fated and superannuated insti-
tution that no stratagem can save.
In the end the Lords chose to perish
in the dark, to vote themselves into
irrelevance. Defiant retirements no
less than craven collaboration are
likely to carry the GOP’s present
leaders to the same unhappy
destination, the same ultimate
irrelevance.
But they are not there yet. And
men like Flake and Corker, who
right now have the not-quite-admi-
rable courage of men abandoning
the fray, still have time enough and
light enough in which to stand and
fight.