Region 19 BOE Gazette

Ah, Global Competition

2012-01-15T19:22:00.001-05:00

Global competition is often sited as the stimulus for the mind numbing arguments that we NEED standardized education or the sky will fall.

Here's a sample of what that globalized competition looks like:

and here's the backstory:

"And I say to her, you seem kind of young. How old are you? And she says, I'm 13. And I say, 13? That's young. Is it hard to get work at Foxconn when you're-- and she says oh no. And her friends all agree, they don't really check ages. The outside companies do have inspections, but workers told me Foxconn always knows when there's going to be an inspection. So what they do then, they don't even check ages then. They just pull everyone from the affected line, and then they put the oldest workers they have on that line.
You'd think someone would notice this, you know? I'm telling you that I do not speak Mandarin. I do not speak Cantonese. I have only a passing familiarity with Chinese culture, and to call what I have a passing familiarity is an insult to Chinese culture. I don't know [BLEEP] all about Chinese culture. But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were 14 years old, 13 years old, 12."

Mic Check: Occupy the DOE

2012-01-10T20:47:00.001-05:00

Here's a web site that announces a national action to opt out of high-stakes, high-stress testing.

We are requesting to everyone that this remain a PEACEFUL occupation with NON-VIOLENT actions.

Be sure to click the link and read the guidelines carefully. Given how the Obama administration has perversely botched education policy in this country, the very idea that people are still smart enough to protest is heart-warming.

FAIL: CT Superintendents Play Intellectual Hookey

2011-11-12T23:29:00.001-05:00

The Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents (CAPSS) recently issued a comprehensive set of recommendations in a document called NextED - Transforming Connecticut's Education System.

In examining the documentation, the Superintendent's get the right answer but cheat when it comes to the details. They haven't done their homework.

What they get right is that children need to learn at their own pace based on their personal intellectual, physical, psychological, and other maturities. After forty years of empirical educational evidence that this makes perfect sense, the superintendents agree. Rather than call them "slow" we'll defer to calling it "bureaucratic impairment syndrome". But identifying this self-inflicted, brain-deadening malady cannot excuse the poor scholarship.

You see, these folks are not really advocating anything along the lines of true personal learning, they are sugar-coating the toxic No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT) anti-child pograms of the Bush/Obama administration.

In computer programming, we talk about code smell. That is that the syntax and logic of a computer program is obviously lacking veracity just based on a superficial reading of the code. NextEd suffers from this precise problem. You can't get to a better education system based on their assumptions and recommendations. Their recommendations are an expensive and poorly thought-out prescription for guaranteed continued public education dysfunction.

Where do they go wrong?

First, they pander to the idea that CT public education "has been successful at providing access to a quality education for 150 years". If that were true there would be no "education gap" between suburbs and cities and this set of recommendations would not be necessary.

Second, their agenda reads like NCLB and RTTT, two disgraced, failing, and criminal programs that have been ram-rodded down the throats of State legislatures to marginalize local control of school districts.

The ideas are as stale as the vernacular. The superintendents want to "raise the bar", "educate all students with high standards", "using direct measures", "strengthen the State Dept of Education", and so on. This Orwellian slight of tongue is anathema to improving public education.

To get serious about educational reform this country needs to eliminate both the Federal and State Departments of Education. Preferably they should be tried for child abuse first and embezzlement of taxpayer funds for disingenuous appropriation of said funds.

Secondly, all of the recently passed education legislation that was passed based on NCLB and RTTT need to be repealed entirely. These laws prevent public schools from performing any kind of useful educational improvement. As long as education is based on high stress, high stakes testing regiments - nothing of their recommendations, good or bad, is likely to have the desired effect.

And maybe this is the point of such studies - exhaust the funds, write some flowery platitudes, and wait for the predictable fail.

University Math -> the University As a Rogue IRS

2011-11-12T21:55:00.001-05:00

A few days ago, Stephanie Reitz reported in the Courant that UConn had funded a study of "recommendations from McKinsey & Co., which it paid $3.9 million last year to suggest ways to cut costs and boost income as the school's state subsidies drop."

Wow. Four million dollars to find ways to cut costs or increase revenues. That's a pretty amazing amount of money to throw at such dare we say *obvious* recommendations.

Offer more year round classes!
Charge more for parking and busing
Eliminate sparsely enrolled majors
Consolidating technology
Centralized purchasing
Increasing ticket prices for popular sports
Reviewing sports budgets
Offering more online courses
More aggressive fund-raising
Staff attrition savings
Premium dorm room price increases

Really? This is what we get for four million dollars?

Here are my open source suggestions. If you think they're worth more than four million dollars then donate a dollar to the first charity you encounter after reading this.

Everyone with a brain knows that the true cost of education is in administration.

Eliminate 10% of the administration, topmost first. Consolidate accordingly.

Everyone familiar with the free ride program - that is that if a person works at UConn, their children attend tuition free - is a profoundly expensive and discriminatory -cough- "perk".

Eliminate the free tuition ride perks, they're discriminatory, expensive and unnecessary

It is not centralized purchasing that needs to be implemented, it is competitive purchasing that needs to be introduced.

Open the purchasing up to competitive bidding for quality products - quality need not be compromised, crony-ism needs to be eliminated

Privatize the University maintenance functions.

The keystone kop buffoonery that has become local legend must end. maintenance workers who drive 15 minutes back and forth to take 15 minute breaks, the Rube Goldberg repair of dormitory leaks, and other sordid tales is empirical evidence enough to rethink these positions and processes.

Repeat and rinse these recommendations every two years until the budget is balanced. Make education affordable by being serious about offering an accessible, affordable State University program.

The University system has no right to impose its own new taxes in the form of fees, new charges, or other subversive fiscal tactics. If the State can no longer afford the expense the Universities are incurring then those bodies need to tighten their budgets not act like an independent agency that is royally entitled to more State tax money no matter how they get it.

CT's private sector citizens have been taking massive cuts in pay and benefits while the public sector employees and institutions yawn as they plan their retirement homes in low tax havens leaving their scorched earth fiscal carnage to those who have already been kicked too often. It's time for everyone to share the economic realities facing the State and the nation.

Where did this kid go to school?

2011-10-09T01:10:00.001-04:00

To Hell with NCLB and Race to the Top, America needs to clone this kid's education.

Some Truth That will Fall on Deaf Ears

2011-09-18T14:22:00.000-04:00

Hat tip: ZeroHedge

WikiLeaks on Chinese Education

2011-08-28T12:31:00.000-04:00

A new wikileak exposes a cable from the US delegation in Chengdu, China, where a counsel met with a local representative of the World Bank's International Finance Corporation, for a candid one on one. What's most interesting is how poor the Chinese education system is.And what's of most interest in terms of the American system of education that is in such dire straits is that for over a decade American educators have been taking junkets to China to -cough- "study" the Chinese education system. All on the taxpayer dime of course. Nice "work" if you can get it.From ZeroHedge, here's the excerpt of interest;

"Terrible" Education System Is Main Impediment 11. (SBU) However, Lai identified China's "terrible" educational system as presenting a serious impediment toward achieving a shift to a more knowledge-based economy. The current system promotes copying and pasting over creative and independent thought. Lai said that the system rewards students for thinking "within a framework" in order to get the grade. He described the normal process undertaken by students when writing as essentially collecting sentences from various sources without any original thinking. He compared the writing ability of a typical Chinese Phd as paling in comparison to his "unskilled" staff during his decade of work with the IFC in Africa.

Video Primer for New School Board Members

2011-08-27T12:45:00.002-04:00

Ham-fisted Education ( We have Ways of Making Them Learn!)

2011-07-04T16:07:00.000-04:00

Once the Berlin Wall fell there were few challenges left for our military leaders. And about that same time the politicians began a "War on Drugs". This opened the floodgates of opportunity for the militarists to retire and establish a front for the *war* in our schools. School Principals, Superintendents, and administrators soon required a military background as well as a few education courses to "straighten schools out".

Over a quarter century later, teacher pedagogy has been reduced to animal trainer memorization exercises

And along the way, a lot of bad educational theory and practice followed. Here we'll examine the mytheme made popular by the conservative and centrist forces of the time and that is that if a child is having problems learning then what's needed is MORE work, ever HARDER Work, LONGER days, SHORTER vacations, MORE tests, HIGHER standards, TOUGHER discipline - MORE, HARDER, LOUDER!

And we should acknowledge that anyone who takes exception to this American gospel will be marginalized, ignored, and -gasp- labeled as a soft liberal wimp whose ideas aren't worth considering. And the Teachers Unions not only go along with the myth but they structurally reinforce the MORE, HARDER, LOUDER paradigm because it is an easy, no-brainer. If it fails, they point the finger at the parents who aren't tough enough, hard enough, draconian enough to *MAKE* the child love learning.

Nazi Germany were amateurs compared to the kind of standardized education we can ensure these days. Our children goose-step through more nonsense that any child in history and recent studies continue to show that its all wrong. In fact a case is being made that public education is hazardous to the health and well-being of children.

The Chicago Public Schools are providing some interesting studies. The New York Times reports that efforts to lengthen the school day there are having unintended consequences;

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and new leaders of Chicago Public Schools have been pushing for a longer school day and school year to help raise student performance. But last week’s state test results show that charter schools — which typically have more instructional time — actually have a lower percentage of students exceeding state standards.

So does the empirical evidence suggest a closer examination of the concept? Um... NO;

In 2014, the state test will switch to a new, more rigorous exam that aligns with the Common Core, a set of curriculum standards adopted by states across the country to better prepare students for college.

Ms. Donoso — who is replacing Charles Payne, the interim chief education officer — is responsible for developing the district’s curriculum strategy and working with school leaders to carry it out. Her main focus in the coming years will be the Common Core, which is intended to develop analytical skills beyond those currently tested on the ISAT.

Ms. Radner said the district “needs to step it up” or scores could crash when the new test is given in 2014, calling the change “the biggest shift I’ve ever seen.”

”We can’t be complacent,” she said “This is a whole different generation of standards and assessment.”

This is always the answer MORE rigor, if its failing we aren't trying hard enough - there's a whole new generation of kids who we can experiment on - the perverse dysfunction of hope.

Wait, there's more. EDWeek reports that Chicago tried herding students into college prep courses and that too is having unintended consequences;

Research has shown that students who take high-level course sequences learn more in high school and are more likely to attend and to perform better in college than students who do not take these classes. Yet despite the popularity of default-curriculum policies, we actually know surprisingly little about whether changing course requirements will necessarily lead to improved outcomes for students. This is because previous studies cited by many in the policy and reform communities do not fully correct for selection bias: that is, the fact that students who choose to take high-level classes are often the most motivated and high-achieving in their schools, and that the schools offering advanced courses are those with the capacity to teach them, and often are college-oriented in other ways.
"Default-curriculum reforms are not likely to work effectively without other significant and complementary policy efforts."

To inform state and district curriculum policies, and to address some of the limitations of the previous research, the Consortium on Chicago School Research and the University of Michigan have spent the last three years examining an effort by the Chicago public schools to implement a version of the default college-preparatory curriculum. The 1997 policy change ended remedial classes and mandated college-prep coursework for all students in four subject areas: English, mathematics, science, and social studies. Our study compares outcomes for cohorts of students in Chicago before and after policy implementation in English, mathematics, and science. What we found is sobering, to say the least.

First, the good news: The 1997 policy did increase student enrollment in college-preparatory classes in all three subject areas, and significantly reduced previous inequities in coursetaking by prior achievement, race and ethnicity, and special education status. The policy had no effects, however, on any of the major outcomes that default-curriculum reforms generally seek to affect: Test scores did not rise, nor were students more likely to take advanced mathematics classes beyond Algebra 2, or to complete advanced science classes.

Moreover, the policy produced a number of adverse unintended consequences: Grades declined, failures increased, and absenteeism rose among average and higher-skilled students. There also were no improvements in college outcomes, and those students who attended college were no more likely to stay there than students were before the policy change. High-achieving students were actually slightly less likely to attend college after the 1997 curriculum reforms were implemented.

The Chicago experience should serve as a cautionary tale for those who advocate for similar default-curriculum policies in their communities. Let us be clear: Curriculum requirements have important equity benefits, and can play a role in efforts to improve students’ high school experiences and their preparation for college. But default-curriculum reforms are not likely to work effectively without other significant and complementary policy efforts.
:
:
:
This raises an important point: As long as students are minimally engaged in their courses and attend school irregularly, policymakers should not expect substantial improvements in learning. Getting the content and structure of courses right is just the first step. Real improvements in learning will require states and districts to develop strategies that get students excited about learning, attending class regularly, and working hard in their courses.

Although our findings may be disappointing to default-curriculum advocates, we are not suggesting that such policies are misguided. Prior to 1997, the differentiated curriculum was clearly not serving Chicago students well; even when they took remedial coursework, large numbers of students failed those courses and eventually dropped out.

We argue instead that curriculum policies need to be accompanied by greater attention to instruction and stronger efforts to improve the academic behaviors—particularly attendance and studying—associated with better school performance. Without improved instruction and engagement, the promise of these well-meaning reforms is likely to go unrealized.

Paul Krugman reinforces the argument further;

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

But education is not only dysfunctional as a service to students, it is apparently equally dysfunctional for teachers at the University level. The Huffington Post reports;

Despite more than a decade of research showing the money has little impact on student achievement, state lawmakers and other officials have been reluctant to tackle this popular way for teachers to earn more money.

That could soon change, as local school districts around the country grapple with shrinking budgets.

Just this week, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the economy has given the nation an opportunity to make dramatic improvements in the productivity of its education system and to do more of what works and less of what doesn't.

Duncan told the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday that master's degree bonuses are an example of spending money on something that doesn't work.

On Friday, billionaire Bill Gates took aim at school budgets and the master's degree bonus.

"My own state of Washington has an average salary bump of nearly $11,000 for a master's degree – and more than half of our teachers get it. That's more than $300 million every year that doesn't help kids," he said.

"And that's one state," said Gates, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at a speech Friday in Louisville to the Council of Chief State School Officers. Gates also took aim at pensions and seniority.

"Of course, restructuring pay systems is like kicking a beehive," he acknowledged.

The article concludes with the following understatement;

"There's a relationship between education schools and teachers that is not particularly healthy," he [Erick Hanushek, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University] said.

On ewould think that University Education Departments would study the ways that children learn and don't learn and what they need so that the teachers they train can advocate and promote those things. Instead we find that they're paper mills that enrich teacher's paychecks but little more.

May be we need to *GET TOUGH*, demand *HIGHER EXPECTATIONS*, and *TOUGHER STANDARDS*.

Wait...

Universal Small Class Size is an Expensive Lie

2011-06-28T00:44:00.000-04:00

A number of years ago I studied the class size issue by examining national and international studies on the subject. The most interesting are locked behind the walls of academia and require JStor access. It was not and is not hard to understand why - the studies, one by one and cumulatively refute the veracity of the argument that small class size is a primary factor in the success or failure of children learning in the classroom.

These studies rarely see the light of day in the American discussion. I have added a tab on the home page that includes the best of them.

My analysis of these studies was and remains that class size *can be* meaningful in two cases. The first is in early elementary grades. Here very small classes can make a difference if the teachers involved are capable of making the most of small class size education. Not all teachers teach small classes well.

The second case are in classes at any level where the critical mass of students have exceptional needs either personally or due to the complexity of the subject matter. Certain art classes fall into this category. Remedial classes fall into this category.

I found no study that could claim that universally small classes yielded consistently superior students or learning experiences. Every study found that the anecdotal opinions of teachers were that they and the students were far better off in small classes yet no such thing could be discerned in comparing a small class to a larger class. The union propaganda never mentions this even though the STAR study and others make this point clearly. Disingenuously the union message is that class sizes are very important without saying that this assertion is based on teacher preference and not cost or learning effectiveness.

A new tsunami of evidence is washing ashore thanks in large part as a reaction to the propaganda wars between Diane Ravitch and her consumer groups and the political forces trying to reform eternally troubled schools.

Let's take a look;

Brookings recently released this report that concludes:

Because the pool of credible studies is small and the individual studies differ in the setting, method, grades, and magnitude of class size variation that is studied, conclusions have to be tentative. But it appears that very large class-size reductions, on the order of magnitude of 7-10 fewer students per class, can have significant long-term effects on student achievement and other meaningful outcomes. These effects seem to be largest when introduced in the earliest grades, and for students from less advantaged family backgrounds.

When school finances are limited, the cost-benefit test any educational policy must pass is not “Does this policy have any positive effect?” but rather “Is this policy the most productive use of these educational dollars?” Assuming even the largest class-size effects, such as the STAR results, class-size mandates must still be considered in the context of alternative uses of tax dollars for education. There is no research from the U.S. that directly compares CSR to specific alternative investments, but one careful analysis of several educational interventions found CSR to be the least cost effective of those studied.

Almost immediately the Brookings study was attacked by an organization called NAEP. Diane Whitmore Schazenbach asserts that the Brookings study...

conclusion is based on a misleading review of the CSR research literature. The report puts too much emphasis on studies that are of poor quality or that do not focus on settings that are particularly relevant to the debate on class-size policy in the United States. It argues that class-size reduction is less cost-effective than other reform policies, but it bases this contention on an incomplete accounting of the benefits of smaller classes and an uncritical, unexamined list of alternative policies. The report’s estimates of the potential cost savings are flawed as, in reality, schools cannot structurally reduce class size by only one student. Well-documented and long-term non-academic gains from CSR are not addressed. Likewise, the recommendation for releasing the ―least effective‖ teachers assumes a valid way of making such determinations is available.

Her criticism is hailed by Ravitch, Haimson, and others as if it is proof-positive that smmall class sizes are a panacea to the educational chaos. In fact, the criticism is both shrill and silly. Chingos of Brookings calls her out in a rebuttal;

The California and Florida evaluations certainly have significant limitations, but in my view they provide preliminary evidence that large-scale policies are unlikely to produce benefits as large as those found in Tennessee. But applying Schanzenbach’s standard for studies leaves us with no studies of these kinds of large-scale policies. It seems awfully hard to make a case for large-scale CSR policies if we know essentially nothing about their effectiveness.

Even more important than the effectiveness of a policy is its cost effectiveness. As Russ Whitehurst and I argue in our paper, the right question to ask about any policy is not whether it has any effect at all, but whether it is the most effective use of limited resources. Unfortunately, there is little rigorous evidence on the relative cost-effectiveness of various education policies. There is a clear need for such evidence, but in the meantime it seems unwise for policymakers to mandate widespread adoption of a costly policy with uncertain benefits.

CSR may well be cost-effective in some circumstances, especially if it is implemented in a targeted way. For example, a district may find it sensible to provide small classes for its most disadvantaged students or its newest teachers. But CSR mandates take exactly the opposite approach in that they apply across-the-board and take away schools’ autonomy to decide whether reducing class size is the best use of limited resources.

But Chingos gives the STAR study a pass as I do on its conclusions. Not all critics are so kind. It is not a foregone conclusion that classroom size reduction (CSR) truly makes a difference even when its cost is not part of the calculation.

Andreas Schleicher as profiled in the Atlantic reinforces Chingas' arguments.

He concluded that the best school systems became great after undergoing a series of crucial changes. They made their teacher-training schools much more rigorous and selective; they put developing high-quality principals and teachers above efforts like reducing class size or equipping sports teams; and once they had these well-trained professionals in place, they found ways to hold the teachers accountable for results while allowing creativity in their methods. Notably, in every case, these school systems devoted equal or more resources to the schools with the poorest kids.

And the Educational Writers Association just published some interesting studies about teacher effectiveness.

Are teachers the most important factor affecting student achievement?

This has become the default first sentence of many speeches and reports on teacher quality. Recently, it’s become common to clarify that teachers are the most important “school-based” factor in learning—a critical qualification, given that factors external to schools exert more influence overall on student achievement than any factors inside the school.

A famous 1966 study by James Coleman found that background characteristics such as race, parental achievement levels, and family income swamped most other factors studied as determinants of student test scores. Decades of research have confirmed this study’s general findings, with a 1999 paper estimating that 60 percent of variation in student achievement was attributable to such background characteristics. [1]

Researchers have been unable to link a significant share of the variation in student achievement—as much as 25 percent—to any particular input. Of the remaining share, attributable to what happens within school, researchers have linked most of that variation to teachers.

It is difficult to cite an exact figure on what percent of the variation in achievement observed is attributable to differences in teacher effectiveness. Three economists in 1998 estimated that at least 7.5 percent of the variation in student achievement resulted directly from teacher quality and added that the actual number could be as high as 20 percent.[2]

Researchers have found that school-based factors, including teaching, are more influential in math than in reading. A 1999 paper puts all in-school factors, including school-, teacher-, and class-level factors, at approximately 21 percent of the variation in 10th grade mathematics achievement. It further estimated that 8.5 percent was directly due to teacher effectiveness.[3]

Some researchers warn that other important factors that potentially affect achievement— such as the effect of principals and other administrators, and the interaction of teachers with the curriculum—have not been as carefully studied as teacher quality.[4]

It can be said:

Research has shown that the variation in student achievement is predominantly a product of individual and family background characteristics. Of the school factors that have been isolated for study, teachers are probably the most important determinants of how students will perform on standardized tests.

The myth of small class size will not go away for lots of reasons. But as we watch our state and national prosperity continue to evaporate we would be doing ourselves a favor to opening our eyes to the facts.

Education's Circular Firing Squad - What's the Plan, Diane?

2011-06-04T00:15:00.001-04:00

These days as union teaching jobs become ever more threatened on a daily basis, teachers unions and teachers are raising their voices, rattling their pencil cases, and running with scissors. What they aren't doing is demanding more efficiently run schools, right-sizing of staff, better curriculum, diversity of learning rather than centralised conformity, nor a host of other things that might actually transform public schools.

No, mostly they practice the mean politics of industrial revolution unionism. This consists of rabid attacks on the messengers and agents of inevitable and obvious change. It's a shill game that's predictable and disheartening.

On one hand are public school teachers - most of whom are truly hard-working, well-paid professionals who for far too long have allowed the union politics of "workplace rules", insatiable greed, and out-of-control legislated educational malfeasance to trump common sense.

Most recently, Jonathan Alter wrote an opinion piece that criticized Diane Ravitch's assertions about public education alternatives.

Alter's criticism's are spot on;

She uses selective data to punch holes in the work of good schools and turn reformers into cartoonish right-wingers. Her view is that we should throw up our hands and admit that nothing will change until we end poverty in our time.

That is defeatist, wrong on the facts and the mother of all cop-outs.

On twitter, Ravitch and her sympathizers respond by attacking the credibility and integrity of Alter as if he were a villan rather than yet another educated and informed stakeholder in the conversation about education.

Ravitch raises the disingenuous question of whether Alter has a conflict of interest;

Conflict of interest? http://www.salon.com/news/michael_bloomberg/?story=/politics/war_room/2011/06/03/bloomberg_alter_school_reform

Yet, Alter's criticism is not about Michael Bloomberg nor is it political in nature. On the other hand, as I've questioned before, where was Ravitch when the damage could have been averted? She offers endless platitudes that are as empty as hoping for world peace:

Families are children’s most important educators. Our society must invest in parental education, prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must improve; every one should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science.

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved. And that would be a miracle.

One has to wonder if she reads what she says. There's not a word about improving the public schools in any of that. It is as if she is saying, "it is what it is, keep paying teacher raises and benefits, look the other way when none of that makes a difference and keep buying into the status quo until some utopian event takes place to straighten it all out."

I am an ardent supporter of public schools. But they must transform themselves into effective and responsible institutions willing to fire ineffective teachers, right-size and adjust their curriculum to ever-changing circumstances, and serve the kids first and foremost.

Charter schools and alternatives aren't responsible for the hubris of the public schools - educators who profited for decades as the schools became ever more ineffective own that shame.

The Public School Technology Scam

2011-04-12T23:55:00.000-04:00

A recent entry on Slashdot caught my attention.

The Walking Randomly blog does a cost analysis of mathematical calculators that are often used in schools and finds them to be oddly technically deficient and profoundly expensive for what they do.

Furthermore the blog observes:

I (and many students) also have mobile phones with hardware that leave these calculators in the dust. Combined with software such as Spacetime or online services such as Wolfram Alpha, a mobile phone is infinitely more capable than these top of the line graphical calculators.

They also only ever seem to be used in schools and colleges. I spend a lot of time working with engineers, scientists and mathematicians and I hardly ever see a calculator such as the Casio Prizm or TI NSpire on their desks. They tend to have simple calculators for everyday use and will turn to a computer for anything more complicated such as plotting a graph or solving equations.

One argument I hear for using these calculators is ‘They are limited enough to use in exams.‘ Sounds sensible but then I get to thinking ‘Why are we teaching a generation of students to use crippled technology?‘ Why not go the whole hog and ban ALL technology in exams? Alternatively, supply locked down computers for exams that limit the software used by students. Surely we need experts in useful technology, not crippled technology?

So, I don’t get it. Why do so many people advocate the use of these calculators? They seem pointless! Am I missing something?

There is a simple truth staring us in the face when we wonder why our students seem stunted - they are often forced to use arcane technology to solve complex problems. Not only is this asymmetrically lame as a learning experience, it never actually solves the problem in a practical real-life way.

It's about time to examine the pseudo-monopolies certain technologies have created for themselves in our school systems. The comments that follow this blog include...

I suspect there’s a large number of nervous people at Texas Instruments. Surely they know that their huge profit margins that they’ve enjoyed from selling the same TI-83 calculator for the same price for 15 years (while everything else got cheaper) won’t last forever. I think you’ve identified their best hope – that standardized tests allow students to use certain calculators but not a computer. Even so, TI is probably moving the right direction by selling nSpire software for PCs, although I doubt the testing companies will allow that given all the other capabilities found even in the cheapest netbooks.

If we look past standardized tests, then you’re right – let’s not only teach students how to use crippled technology. The day after WolframAlpha was live, I showed it to every one of my classes. And in every class I got the same question: “Aren’t you worried that we’ll use this to cheat on our homework?” My answer was the same: “No, my real worry is that if you don’t know how to use this you’ll be at a disadvantage when compared to a student who does.” - Raymond Johnson

"Couldn’t agree more. I have always asked why I am not being taught the tools that I will use as an engineer. I agree that theory is important, but not teaching me these other tools is not good."

In the interest of balance there are many defenders of the simple calculator, but the question of why superior tools aren't taught remains an enigma.

How High Stakes Testing has Divorced Reality

2011-03-27T12:42:00.002-04:00

The educational community, such as it is today, is split about the use of high-stress, high-stakes testing. I've met a teacher or two in the past few years, who have helped develop and who have profited from preparing the testing regiments that are in use today. And behind them stand an army of companies whose very existence is owed to the process of standardized tests.

My conversation with them often goes something like this; if public schoolings primary objective is to assimilate children into the culture, to indoctrinate them with the principles of representative democracy, and to provide the children with the opportunity to learn what will be necessary for them to pursue their life's ambitions - why are we insisting on homogenized and, let's face it, arbitrary testing regiments that every child is forced to psychologically and academically pass?

And the answer is often that "we know best", "every child must absolutely without exception know this, that, and the other thing", and defensively, "*WE* have taken all of that into consideration".

But the fact remains that these arguments are both shallow and empty often driven by nostalgia, political agendas, and a hubritic ignorance that is ubiquitous in the teaching community (what we worry?).

The other way of thinking about testing is the way the best teachers have always used tests - as a metric of progress from where someone is to where *they* want to go and should go based on that inertia. For example, the cliche that, "schools need to keep raising expectations" is considered a political truth in this country.

And so schools try to oblige. Children who already have a love of reading are subjected to reading exercises that are mind-numbing. And over the years those who might be lifelong readers avoid the pain.

The expectations for an artist are different than the expectations for an athlete. a child who loves working with their hands have different expectations than those who like to research ancient history. And so all those natural expectations are sacrificed for artificial expectations. And with those artificial expectations come stress.

For the future young artist, they must put aside their love for subjects that they have no aptitude or love for. The same for the athlete, the musicians, dancers, cooks, plumbers, social workers and so on. In fact the standardized tests mostly serve the interests of politicians and bean counters, not the children.

And even in the political realm the pressure of standardized tests on poor, urban schools is nothing less than sadistic.

Which brings us to a couple of incidents this week that demonstrate how far wrong we've gone with the current testing practice.

First, a young girl- Isabella Oleschuk - an honors student runs away from home. The incident is described this way from this Courant article,

One question police did not answer is why Isabella ran away.

Brady, the superintendent for Regional School District No. 5, said he didn't have an answer, either.

"It's very perplexing," he said. "We saw her as a typical seventh-grader, a good student, with a circle of friends." Isabella is an honor roll student, he said.

The middle school's principal, Kathleen Fuller-Cutler, allowed students to respond to their classmate's disappearance in a positive way, Brady said. They decorated her locker, leaving messages of hope there and on her empty desks in her classes, he said.

The article claims the police could not figure out *why* Isabella ran away! In fact article after article are filled with descriptions of how fragile children are, how easily exploited they can be, HOW MUCH WE ALL CARE about children but few answer the obvious question, "Why did she run away?"

This article from the Connecticut Post tells us precisely why;

Beth and Roman Oleschuk are keeping their daughter home from school for now, said John Brady, superintendent of the Amity Regional School District.

"They want some time to regroup as a family. We'll provide tutoring if necessary, and then when Isabella is ready we look forward to welcoming her back to school in a way that is most comfortable for her.''

Brady discounted a statement by the girl's father that his daughter ran away because of pressure from taking the Connecticut Mastery Tests.

"That has us perplexed, because the tests ended on March 16, and this happened four days later," he said. "And we make it as normal as possible; the test is only an hour a day and there is no homework given during the testing period."

But a woman whose daughter is also a seventh-grader at Amity Middle School and is a friend of Isabella's said test pressure might have contributed to the girl's decision to flee.

"Those tests are hell for a typical kid, let alone these who are very bright but can't navigate the lunchroom," she said.

The woman, who asked that she and her daughter not be identified, said that the two girls and a few others like them have found each other in middle school and have formed a clique of their own. The woman said Isabella and her daughter are socially naïve and sometimes struggled with unstructured time during school like recess and time on the bus.

"They are super bright, but they don't handle things the way a typical kid would," she said.

An Amity district source said that Isabella does not receive special education services and has no identified social or behavioral problems. Assistant Chief Edward Koether said Orange police had not been called to the Oleschuk's Derby Avenue home for any reason until the girl was reported missing Sunday morning.

So how could the police not know? Why would all these concerned citizens dismiss the obvious?

You see if it was a bully then the police guns cocked, Miami Vice ready could take Brutus down. The community would be saved. Brutus could be shipped to Afghanistan to ply his stock-in-trade.

But the police aren't equipped to handle the bully they found - high-stress tests. They can't taze it, shoot it, rough it up.

So the only other explanation is that Isabella must have a special need - something MUST BE wrong with *her*. What other explanation could there be? Surely you've all seen the movie where the child is possessed.

And all those concerned citizens draw the line at testing. TESTING AM GOOD! So sayeth the LORDS OF TESTING. Yes, blah-blah-blah - children are fragile.... yada, yada, yada - but jamming standardized tests down their throats cures it all.

In America, the bully is testing and there ain't a damned thing anyone's going to do to bring it down.

The second incident involves a congresswoman from Alabama trying to legislate an easier-to-remember version of the mathematical PI.

Congresswoman Martha Roby (R-Ala.) is sponsoring HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, declaring the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be precisely 3. The bill comes in response to data and rankings from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, rating the United States' 15 year-olds 25th in the world in mathematics.

OECD is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2011, and the Paris-based NGO released its international educational rankings, placing the US in a three-way tie for math, equaling Portugal and Ireland, just beneath No. 24 Luxembourg.

"That long-held empirical value of pi, I am not saying it should be necessarily viewed as wrong, but 3 is a lot better," said Roby, the 34-year old legislator representing Alabama's second congressional district, ushered into office in the historic 2010 Republican mid-term bonanza.

Pi has long been defined as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius, a mathematical constant represented by the Greek letter "π," with a value of approximately 3.14159. HR 205 does not change the root definition, per se. The bill simply, and legally, declares pi to be exactly 3.

Roby, raised in Montgomery, Ala., is on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education.

"It's no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi," Roby said. "I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier."

Laughable as this sounds, it is telling. We no longer care about inquisitive minds, learning, offering children the opportunity to find their own bliss.

Children are pawns to the delusional races, test status rankings, and me-first pathologies that drive this monster.

Yes sir. Children are fragile. Now back to the competition.

Public Accountability Tool

2011-03-22T22:54:00.000-04:00

To understand CT's bloated public spending, one needs a tool like this:

http://www.ctsunlight.org/PayrollBranching/tabid/72/Default.aspx.

Connecticut Sunlight org is a very interesting site, enjoy.

Guidance Goes Digital

2011-03-09T23:21:00.000-05:00

EO Smith's own Douglas Melody has joined the ranks of bloggers. I couldn't be happier or more proud.

I'm actually a bit late to the grand opening of two blogs. One called Learning Matters and the other called Guidance Matters.

Who said you can't teach veteran educators new tricks?

Responding to Ravitch

2011-03-06T15:59:00.000-05:00

Diane Ravitch has a guest blog on Edutopia that once again reinforced my perception of her educational opinions as opportunist pandering. Her thinking is neither original nor thought-provoking but it is annoying.

Here's some of what she asserts:

Myth #2: Achievement Will Soar With Younger, More Enthusiastic Teachers

A second, related narrative asserts that teachers who work in the poorest schools are lazy and burned out; achievement will soar if only we can fire more of the older teachers and replace them with young, enthusiastic ones, especially those from Teach for America, who have only five weeks of training. But this demand runs counter to what we know to be true in every other profession: experience is a plus. Indeed, while the evidence is mixed on some aspects of education policy, it is unmistakably clear on this point: experience is one of the best predictors of teacher quality.

I responded to the whole set of arguments this way;

Ravitch is as much responsible for the way things are as anyone. For over thirty years she's served in positions of authority often double-talking.

Her *truth* is disingenuous. The so-called achievement gap is pure fiction, a statistical artefact of an education industry run amok. It is the coinage of a social-engineered subliminal class-ism. By warehousing the poor in urban encampments, the rest of America doesn't have to deal or interact with them. The real-estate pyramid schemes that have wrecked our economy were the engine that kept this phenomenon rolling profitably.

Educators have known for forty years that children of poverty environments cannot be lifted from that original state of ignorance and desperation by schooling alone. We can talk about this. The fact that Ravitch insists that we can't speaks to the real myth.

Myth #1: Educators are the solution to America's education crisis

They are not. They and their unions have long ago sold out the welfare of children for the negotiated comforts of cozy and disingenuous work rules that eliminate any possibility that schools can be managed for the best interests of everyone involved.

Numerous studies indicate that the insane escalation of spending on education shows flat if not negligible classroom returns. *That* is the real achievement gap and everyone paying the bill knows it.

Politicians who pander to the idea that schools should become homogeneous in achievement ignore the fact that in order for schools to get better we need achievement gaps. If there are no superior schools continuously pushing the educational envelope how can we get better? Since when is being academically "equal" a good thing?

We should be advancing education gaps in every subject and pedagogy, dropping the ineffective and adopting the proven winners. WAIT! That's against union work rules.

Myth #2; The false dichotomy of young vs old teachers. Here Ravitch is simply acting as a special interest lobbyist for preserving a seniority system that is cancerous to educational reform.

She isn't trying to elevate the debate, she's trying to derail intelligent discussion. Ravitch and her followers will insist class size is an important factor in children's education because *magically* teachers will spend more time individualizing classroom learning.

Anecdotally, teachers ALL insist this happens. Study after study disputes this assertion. Studies indicate that *the opportunity for individual attention* increases. Yet only teachers who already practice the art actually practice the art - a rare breed. Furthermore, studies indicate that some teachers are better with small classes and some are awful. Likewise with large classroom sizes.

What does seniority have to do with this? What? Why can't schools be managed to take advantage of teachers strengths and weaknesses? Why?

WAIT! Union rules.

Yes, Diane let's be honest. By all means. But you have a lot of catching up to do .

Indentured Servant Etiquette

2011-02-27T02:21:00.002-05:00

The Orwellian opera that is taking place regarding Unions, collective bargaining rights, and paying a fair share is sheer farce.

A few weeks ago the Region 19 Board of Education met with Bryan Hurlbert, Tony Guglielmo, and other state representatives. It was a sobering meeting involving the potential loss of traditionally dependable funds. To a man, these elected officials declared that whatever budget cuts, restraints, and adjustments had to be made WILL BE A SHARED SACRIFICE. For sure. No. Two. Ways. About. It. Uh-uh. A reporter from the Chronicle was there - look it up.

I drove home that night assured that the last thing that would ever be considered short of being threatened with the End Days would be "Shared" sacrifice. Not a one of these guys had the decency to be honest. Not one. It was a WikiLeaks moment. Everybody pretended that the big lie was going to magically be realized because we all clicked our heels together to suspend reality and didn't want to piss off the political greeters in the room.

A few days ago, Chris Powell of the Journal Inquirer pulled back the curtain on the scam. He writes:

While "shared sacrifice" lately has been the governor's slogan, on Monday it seemed that municipal employees and particularly teachers would escape sacrifice. Not only would the governor maintain current levels of teacher salary reimbursements (euphemized as "aid to local education") but in raising the sales tax he would give municipalities a small cut of the new revenue, most of which also will be paid in raises to teachers, which is where such "aid" and the liquidation of student services have gone for years.

Asked to quantify the sacrifice he would seek from the state employee unions, Malloy answered, "More than you think," elaborating that he'd be negotiating "very aggressively." Apparently for the first time he even threatened layoffs. He said his budget would be built on concessions from the unions, and if they didn't cooperate there would be either "a shredding of the safety net" for the poor or "thousands of people unemployed." Is the governor ready for a fight or at least a game of chicken with this unpopular but powerful group to give political cover to his tax increases?

Other than the hope that many of the infirm and indigent elderly could be diverted from nursing homes to less expensive care, the governor and his aides did not offer any big ideas about changing premises in state government. The touted agency consolidations, which will produce only trivial savings, are only a pretense of structural change.

But government in Connecticut being as ravenous as it is ineffectual, Malloy may be given credit just for trying to freeze it at current spending levels while the private economy collapses underneath it. And while no net tax increase can be good, no one in authority in state government before Malloy has concretely proposed to repeal many of the nonsensical sales tax exemptions, like those for haircuts and car washes.

And of course since the election campaign produced no big thinking, not much big thinking could have been expected from Malloy in the three months since. Staffing the new administration and assembling a budget that would simply feed the machine of government for another year is probably all any governor elected in such circumstances could do.

-snip-

Really, why must teachers always be treated like royalty and everyone else like peasants? Why is so much expensive public policy merely remedial, never getting at the cause of Connecticut's decline, from the high school courses taught to most students in the state university and community college systems, to the coddling and encouraging of fatherlessness done by the Department of Children and Families, to the pouring of money into the cities, which only disintegrate the more that is done in the name of helping them? Why is Connecticut government's only inviolable service not Malloy's vaunted "social safety net" but the provision of pensions to public employees?

What Powell fails to mention is that this is business as usual. In the past decade when America was attacked and jobs began to evaporate teachers and government officials never missed a raise. In 2008, when the financial world collapsed and Americans lost jobs, pensions, basic work place considerations, government workers and the education industry rarely if ever missed a raise. In fact, it is widely reported that they - like the billionaires they vilify pulled far away and ahead of the private sector taxpayer.

Sacrifice, humility, and frugal lifestyle habits cannot be taught by those who never experience the necessity.

For those who are private sector citizens who either have jobs or fixed incomes or who are poor, they will become the indentured servants to this new entitlement class of government and education employee. These entitled, unionized elite have become accustomed to a lifestyle fuelled by an endless supply of taxpayer funny money and they will not be denied.

Make no mistake about it, indentured servitude is where all of this is going but the story doesn't end there.

In Wisconsin, RI, and other places some politicians are doing what is necessary to avert catastrophe. They are taking on the self-insulated public service unions by firing teachers, freezing the automatic pilot cost increases of government, and otherwise attempted to halt or reverse the fiscal crisis this situation represents.

Twenty years ago, achieving and maintaining a balanced budget was the bromide that politicians correctly identified as a practice that could avoid the situation we find ourselves in today. Predictably, not a one of them actually operated that way and we are where we are. Along the way, the public sector special interests self-insulated themselves with pension guarantees and perks that will effectively make slaves of the rest of us.

So as a Democrat, a Liberal, and a private sector employee I find an insulting humor in the rhetoric being used by public sector unions to misrepresent and obfuscate the situation this country and most states are in.

There is no "teacher bashing" as Diane Ravitch and others would have you believe. The citizens paying taxes have a right to say, "this is what we can afford and no more". Do teachers really believe they can starve the community they "serve" and expect the starving to be grateful?

There is no "union busting" going on when decades of negotiations never result in "shared sacrifice", improved quality of government services, the economy of technological innovation, vibrant educational pedagogies, or rich, innovative programs that save money, right-size government, and return on taxpayers investment.

It is not the union being busted, it is the bully being taken to task. Unions that engage in anti-societal behaviors have no right to complain about being dissolved. America needs unions and workers rights to organize but the result cannot be soft terrorist organisations who care not a whit for everyone's Union - the United States of America.

Taxpayers are having their backs broken while unions claim that political chaffeurs making over $90k per year with benefits coming out their ears are essential employees (see: Rick Green here).

The rhetoric of the unions is industrial revolution redux and there is a lot of knee-jerk sentiment this generates. But the truth of the matter is that only shared sacrifice by all will get us out of this mess. Anything else is ham-fisted greed thinly disguised by disingenuous and wholly expedient claims of representing working families, the poor, and workers rights. The truth is that the unions are creating a class society in which the poor will get poorer, the working class will work for them first, and workers rights in the private sector will be those of servants indentured to paying the benefits of government and education's employees.

What Parents Across America Need to Know

2011-02-05T19:43:00.001-05:00

A new special interest group has emerged to join the misguided education conflict. It's called Parents Across America and on it's home page is a posting that explains; Why I Am Not A Defender Of The ‘Status Quo’ In Education. The post is written by a fellow blogger, Sue Peters. She says,

Help bring parents’ voices to the education debate and support progressive, positive, constructive education reforms that work.

In her writing she gets some things right but mostly she repeats 20th century teacher union platitudes and political talking points (see: Diane Ravitch's tweets). And while she "calls" for desirable changes, most of the remedies she suggests are precisely the prescription that got us where we are - at the doorstep of a public education system that is corrupt, intellectually bankrupt, and disingenuous in it's complicity.

Here's the response I submitted;

With all due respect, the status quo as you call it, is a far different phenomenon than what you describe.

You are absolutely correct in asserting that NCLB and it's perverse successor, RTTT, are educational abominations. But if it takes a village to raise a child then it took a nation of complicit, selfish, and ruthless special interest groups to so totally undermine the public schools of this country. And this includes teacher's unions.

Schools cannot mask this nation's rising caste system. The gaps that schools measure is the speed at which the rich have moved away from what is left of the middle class and the growing lower classes. To believe test scores is to believe the children of wealth are smart and gifted and that the children of poverty all have irresponsible parents and teachers who should be fired. But even that is not enough.

Nothing is left to chance in this brave new classroom. Grades need to be shaved to ensure that the children of privilege will make competition for entry into the good colleges and Universities a sure thing rather than a true comparison of worthiness. This system is not broken, it is finely tuned. It is intentional. It is sugar-coated with Orwellian goodness to disguise the ugly truth.

The fact of the matter is that teacher bashing is a natural political reaction by parents and tax-payers who are oblivious to the paradox that education policy has become. Like cult followers they are being promised something that the system is precisely designed to prevent - that is the opportunity of all children to realize their true potential. That idea is anathema.

And that idea is anathema because teachers unions have become self-absorbed with every issue except that which are healthy for children. Today, education lawyers consume every bit of intellectual oxygen with tread-worn, industrial revolution policies that prevent teachers from teaching in the name of workplace and employment entitlements. And enough is never enough when it comes to salaries and benefits.

The children's issues are treated as throw-away, sentimental platitudes used for political gaming. The platitudes are noble and the execution non-existent.

Privatised schools are not a panacea but the quality of education they represent is a breath of fresh air to those of us who do care about kids and education and teaching innovation.

The best thing parents can do is demand a end to the lies of class-size, funding, and federal control of schools. Demand an end to standardized testing regimes. Demand that every public school do it's best to increase the size of the so-called education gap so that we can know how good all schools can be.

The best things teachers can do is to stop whining and propose through their unions new workplace rules that allow innovative teaching and curriculum reform. Demand that your professional peers be held expeditiously accountable to termination if need be. And demand that schools exercise the best practices teaching can offer instead of the meager practices that still exist despite retarded education policy, brain-dead administrators, and a teacher's union that is better suited for day labourers than professionals.

The Critical Thinking Study Explains a Lot

2011-01-30T01:34:00.000-05:00

The election of the Obama administration signalled a death knell for enlightened public education. That much is clear. The Federal Dept. of Education ramrodded the States into passing some of the most perversely regressive education legislation ever conceived by man. And now, the ability of enlightened communities to break the totalitarian grip of federal interference in local education issues is functionally impossible.

The bottom line is that a national obsession with high-stakes testing has poisoned every public school still standing. It is an intellectual cancer that consumes every conversation about schools, learning, and metrics. To understand how this was allowed to get this far, one only needs to tune in to the debates about public and private schools. And what we might look for first is critical thinking on either side. You will soon realize critical thinking is almost wholly absent.

A new study reported in the Seattle Times, Study: Students slog through college, but don't gain much critical thinking by Sara Rimer of the Hechinger Report goes a long way in explaining the phenomenon. She reports:

Arum, whose book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" (University of Chicago Press) comes out this month, followed 2,322 traditional-age students from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009 and examined testing data and student surveys at a broad range of 24 U.S. colleges and universities, from the highly selective to the less selective.

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.

Combining the hours spent studying and in class, students devoted less than a fifth of their time each week to academic pursuits. By contrast, students spent 51 percent of their time — or 85 hours a week — socializing or in extracurricular activities.

The study also showed that students who studied alone made more significant gains in learning than those who studied in groups.

Some educators note that a weakened economy and a need to work while in school may be partly responsible for the reduced focus on academics, while others caution against using the study to blame students for not applying themselves.

Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.

Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."

Greater gains in liberal arts subjects are at least partly the result of faculty requiring higher levels of reading and writing, as well as students spending more time studying, the study's authors found. Students who took courses heavy on both reading (more than 40 pages a week) and writing (more than 20 pages in a semester) showed higher rates of learning.

I bolded the paragraph of interest because it is so shocking. Let's look at it again;

Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."

I can't think of a more important "occupationally relevant skill" than critical thinking. And the authors of the study can speculate all they like about making alibis as to why students in these areas are the poorest learners, the empirical evidence strongly suggests a serious disconnect here.

After all, how can professional educators become professional educators if they themselves are incapable of self-sustained learning? This is not a throw-away talking point. At a time when education policy insists on teachers becoming subject matter experts, this study indicates that liberal arts education produces the superior desired result, well-rounded educators who are capable of critical thinking AND learning. After all, that's what education should be about.

Let's circle back to the question of how education has gotten so far off track. For a long time I thought the hubris of systematic corruption that exists between education lawyers, legislators, school administrators, and the teacher unions was largely responsible for the disconnect between public education policy and the rhetoric of teachers and teaching.

In other words, the platitudes sugar-coat the closed, self-serving education system that thinly-veils public education. Parents respond most religiously to the platitudes while tax-payers rage at the insatiable appetite of the system to swallow tax dollars without so much as a hint of change or improvement.

But what about educators themselves? Is there a sincerity in their platitudes? Do they ever critically examine the politics of their positions to advocate in meaningful ways for children? I simply have not seen much evidence that there is a critical mass of educators who have the imagination, courage to question or propose substantial change to the status quo.

In a nutshell, this study goes a long way in explaining why public education is failing. It's failing because or educators are our poorest learners and thinkers. And, in my blog, that's a crisis.

Julie Amero's Husband Died Yesterday

2011-01-18T22:34:00.002-05:00

A few months ago Wes Volle, Julie Amero's husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was given but a few months to live and died yesterday.

Juie Amero, of course, was a substitute teacher whose life, Wes and Julie's life, was forever violated by procession of a demented judicial system that allowed disingenuous parents, magic accusations, bad cops, lazy judges, incompetent journalists, a lynch-mob public, and an unforgiving corporate culture to routinely toy with one person or another's lives.

A few years ago, Julie was falsely accused of a criminal act that she never committed. Wes Volle was not only her husband but he was her staunchest supporter and her guardian angel. Wes worked at Electric Boat and by everything I can ascertain was a fairly average fellow with no fights to pick with anyone.

After Julie was sentenced to a potential forty year sentence in prison (the prosecutor sadistically teased but 15 if they wink-wink played "the game"), certain journalists at the Norwich Bulletin began a smear campaign against Julie and her supporters that make the Salem Witch trials look like a high school musical. Wes fought back, writing letter after letter, valiantly defending his all too innocent wife. His words inspired us all.

After exhausting enormous time, money, and resources wrestling state government beast that has a bottomless budget of tax dollars to waste, a merciless and gutless bureaucracy, and brain-dead judiciary - Julie was spared. The cost was her ability to return to teaching, their savings, and the emotional and social stigmas that would haunt them long afterward.

Despite the state's abandoning their guilty verdict (the first time in CT's history), Julie would encounter the mean-spirit of innuendo and degrading whisper campaigns when she secured another job. Wes stuck by her through punishing times.

Wes is now gone.

Educational Nausea: The Systematic Retardation of Education

2010-11-28T02:09:00.001-05:00

You may be wondering why I post more infrequently about education issues and the reasons are actually more complex than the following explanation may imply.

I'm hypnotized by Diane Ravitch and Leonie Haimson. Ravitch is a lifelong bureaucrat/educationalist who spent decades serving the conservative think tanks from Reagan until just recently on educational matters. And Haimson runs or is somehow a principal in a New York organisation called Class Size Matters. I follow them both on Twitter and they're a bit of a tag team and mutual echo chamber.

Haimson's a lawyer and I started following her on Twitter because she had initially posted some interesting references on educational matters. I also visited the website of her non-profit and the lone thesis there seems to be that small class sizes are the most important school reform she could imagine. Well, I did the homework on this years ago and examined their reference links. Lo and behold, Haimson largely cites a study whose findings have been the basis of billions of tax dollars being spent on smaller class sizes based on a totally disingenuous interpretation of the study itself (the STAR study). So I wrote Leonie and pointed out the obvious problem - um, class size does matter pre-k to say, grade four and in certain circumstances beyond that but... you know the story. Anyway, since then far more links have been added to that site but none substantially change the logical conclusion of the original study.

I didn't expect her to change the name of the organisation (though it would be a good idea). In big cities where classes are larger than the mid-twenties, Leonie's argument is absolutely correct - classes should get down-sized to reasonable sizes. But for most of America's schools the prescription not only rings hollow but it has proven to be a pyrrhic and ineffective remedy for public school mediocrity - something Haimson seems to remain blissfully ignorant of.

Diane Ravitch, on the other hand, is a more interesting study. Here's an education professional who spent decades prospering and personally profiting from becoming a willing partner in the ranks of the Reagan and elder Bush regimes. And she flew under the radar with Clinton and the rabid Bush years. Nor was she a minor character on the national education scene. She was at all times in positions of authority or influence to suggest or even direct constructive educational policy.

But in the past few years she authored a book on education that outlines the history of American Education from her point of view. And since then she's cashed in quite handsomely, not by explaining the government mandated reforms she helped craft but rather by acting shocked (SHOCKED! I tell you) at how bad those reforms are. In fact, Ravitch has become the Teacher Unions best performance artist. Best friend of the teacher who is about to be evaluated, defender of public education, and able to leap tall NCLB legislation with a single binder. She's not superman, she's Wonder Where You've Been Woman! Resolving this seemingly obvious exercise in logic as epiphany for Ravitch is hard to wrap one's head around. How can one so -cough- "educated" have ever believed that the conservative attacks on education had veracity? It's a modern day Pygmalion story. A marginal, unimaginative conservative think-tank wonk transforms herself into the avenging queen of the eternally complicit teachers unions. I'm just in awe of the phenomenon.

Haimson and Ravitch largely Tweet criticism's of Obama's reform initiatives in a way that makes even me root for the reformers (who I think are as worthless as the Department of Education). The reason is that Haimson and Ravitch offer no legitimate alternative to Obama's bleak and bankrupt ideas. They all (ever single one of them) operate from the same lowest, meanest, and self-serving standpoints - nothing will get better for our kids, the fight is political, and its already decided.

When Ravitch Tweets a criticism of, say, a Gates education initiative I tweet back asking her for a better idea - none is ever suggested. Given her experience I expect dozens of ideas. What follows are silly and expensive notions that teachers work hard, it ain't so bad, and reform won't work. Haimson cheers her on. It's a tired and intellectually vacant act.

You and I know that schools need to change but the education legislation Obama ram-rodded through State legislatures drooling for Federal money has doomed the public schools to a future of indentured servitude to federal standards and Draconian handouts that are as devoid of legitimacy as Obama's presidential campaign. Nothing good is going to come of all of this.

We have reached a tipping point in our democracy in which the looniest presidential candidate cannot be worse than the one we have. And the critics who get the most attention are all profiteers.

Our government is increasingly becoming a closed system with the insiders being a privileged class and the outsiders being an inferior class of citizen to whom any and all forms of torture, humiliation, and marginalisation of wealth and rights is sanctioned. And so it has become with our schools.

Resistance is futile.

The Scientific Basis for Government Dysfunction

2010-11-07T19:20:00.000-05:00

At Tuesday's BOE meeting, we received a letter from a minority parent who objected to the school reporting racial breakout data to the government. The parent was actually concerned about potential profiling and, predictably, what gives the school the right....

At the Saturday retreat, Lou reported that the government requires the data. I asked what would happen if we didn't report it and Bruce assumed we'd lose federal funds.

I'm against this silly collection data because its distorting educational policy. Uniform racial differences have long been erased. The numbers of mixed individuals and families has exploded. The government is asking a question that has no meaning any more. Yet policy is driven by this crazed and seemingly eternal practice.

Crazy shit. Almost as crazy as Obama's education initiatives.

Why I'm Voting NO on the EO Smith Field Construction

2010-09-26T09:29:00.002-04:00

The last time this vote was taken the communities of Ashford, Mansfield and Willington voted No. And they did so largely because the project was too expensive. Although much has changed since then (the matter of a national economic meltdown that's politely called a 'recession'), relatively speaking we can still not afford to go forward with this.

Some personal insights:

After the last vote, the Board was slapped with a dose of reality and they briefly responded with the lucidity that the school budget itself needed to be brought under control. During that period of time, I was led to believe that teacher contracts would be negotiated with the realisation that we were in crisis and sacrifices would be made.

No meaningful concessions were made by teachers.

The same hope was held out in negotiating administrative contracts. No meaningful cost saving there either.

Surely cost savings could be realised with the maintenance staff! Nope.

The Board as a whole has no spine for sacrifice in the budget although they often make noises to the contrary. So when the last school budget was being debated I still held out hope that if meaningful wage and benefit concessions couldn't be realised at least we could stick to a zero or lower budget proposal. Nothing doing.

In fact the spreadsheets of possible lower than zero budget cuts turned out to be a red-herring. A small town in CT that actually tried to cut their school budget were told IT WAS AGAINST THE LAW!

That's right, the education industry wrote into legislation an immunity card for themselves that basically can be interpreted to read that no matter what happens to the economy of a community, that community in addition to suffering ALL of the economic woes that may befall them are responsible for maintaining the lifestyle educators have come to accustom themselves to during the best of times.

Sweet deal. That legislation was written by the same idiots who just passed Obama-inspired education legislation that will soon add millions in taxes to fund education initiatives that are failing all over the country as we speak ("its only money" - your money).

So. Athletic fields. Yes, they could use a lot of work. Can we afford them? NO.

I no longer trust the promises of Board members who claim to promote austerity while voting for ever larger budgets and stone-walling any attempts to restructure the school and its finances. We need to walk that walk first. We need to downsize staff. We need to stop doing the same things that have never worked over and over again in the magic thinking that this time it will be effective.

EO Smith is bloated with excess spending, micro class sizes, techno-phobic teaching practices, out of date equipment, and an aversion to improving the only thing that matters; the quality of learning for the students. For all of their good fortune, for all of their immunity from the economic woes of their neighbors, and for all of the empirical evidence that schools have to change, we are held hostage to begging for better education, for substantial change, and for our money's worth in what is being spent.

It's obscene. And athletic fields won't begin to solve those problems. Nor will more money, more empty promises, or one more attempt at trying the same thing over again expecting a different result, one more time.

We need change.

Why I'm Supporting Susan Eastwood and Joe Courtney

2010-09-26T00:04:00.000-04:00

I've known Susan Eastwood and her family for a long time. The last time Susan ran she lost by just a small number of votes. Afterward she went through a period of time believing she should have knocked on a few more doors. She was tireless in that campaign as it was.

Susan and I have honest differences of opinion. That's the sign of an political integrity. She listens and isn't afraid to push back when she disagrees.

But the real reason I'm voting for Sue is because she works so hard at doing the right thing. She already is involved in a handful of great causes that has included getting legislation passed to ensure school bus emissions don't affect the health of our children, open spaces, clean air, and more. She's exactly the kind of voice that's needed in the State Capitol to serve as an advocate for the part of the State that plans on staying green and open and decent.

She is enthusiastic, qualified, and she works her tail off for all of us and all to come. She's earned our respect and deserves our vote.

Joe Courtney is another Democrat worth voting for. I met Joe at a fund-raiser after he had lost to Rob Simmons. In those days that loss was hard to take. It looked as though Simmons riding the then high-flying coat-tails of George Bush would never be unseated. Yet Joe managed to do just that.

And he has served this community well. He worked hard to salvage and triage Obama's Health care bill. It would have been worse without his involvement. Joe is also one of the few Democrats who walks the walk. Like Kucinich and a handful of other representatives who put the promise of the American Dream first and foremost in his votes, Joe is our voice of integrity to Republicans and a tone deaf Democratic administration in Washington.

Joe is far more likely to give this administration a kick in the ass than Janet Peckinpah will. Joe's opponent is a career opportunist whose opportunities are often mired in controversy and scandal. For those of us who remember the stories of her adventures in New Haven while a news anchor there, it is hard to imagine she's got the kind of character Connecticut needs to represent it. And adding yet another opportunist to that already seedy environment seems like a bad idea.

I trust Joe Courtney and I feel safer that he's in Washington than someone whose only reason for running for office is little more than self-gratification.

And I hope that no one thinks these endorsements are partisan. I'm not happy with Democrats in Washington and in Hartford. The gutless and jaw-dropping stupidity being exercised in both places is inexcusable.

Susan and Joe aren't part of that mess and Republicans and independents need to take a deep breath and a leap of faith that all candidates aren't bad candidates. Courtney and Eastwood deserve your vote.

Why This Liberal Is Voting For McMahon

2010-09-19T00:01:00.006-04:00

While it's true that Obama's education policy is wholly asinine, that's not why I'm endorsing Linda McMahon for the CT Senate seat. Fact of the matter is that Obama has treated Democrats and Liberals like dogs for the time he's been in office. It's our own fault that we were had. We spent years trying to rid this country of what had been the dumbest and meanest federal administration of our lives. That is until Obama started hitting his stride.

I'm ashamed to be a Democrat. The party in power bears no resemblance to the local Democrats all over America who voted for change, who believed in Hope, and who thought Obama would be a smart president. While the Obama administration demonizes Tea Party politics, Sarah Palin, Fox News, and so on, I struggle to find anything redeeming, smart, or graceful in what the Obama administration is doing. I've come to dislike these idiots more than I disliked the Bush administration.

This is just the first of my endorsements for this coming election and I want it to send a message. Liberals and Democrats have choices. We're told to fear the alternative candidates but I don't. I didn't fear Bush or Chaney or the rest of that sordid bunch. We survived and thrived only to be stabbed in the back by a grand charade.

You see, normally I would vote Democrat barring a candidate who did not sit well. But the recent rash of stories about Obama's fund-raiser in Greenwich and other encounters has given me pause.

FireDogLake reported on Obama mocking Liberals and explains what it might mean to the administration.

One thing is for sure. Obama never would have expressed this kind of contempt for the base prior to his own election. He — and the DNC — are playing Russian roulette with the rest of the party, belittling the very people who show up and vote and do all the campaign grunt work in every race in the country. And for what? It all appears to be little more than an egotistical, thin-skinned taunt aimed at those they feel aren’t giving them the accolades the Democrats think they deserve.

Nobody in the history of electoral politics, and I mean nobody, believes that telling people to “get over it” will get them to the polls. (Well, nobody but Spiro Agnew.) And you can bet your bottom dollar that come 2012, when Obama’s own electoral future is on the line, that won’t be his message.

Well, I'll be at the polls come election day. I get more motivated every time I read an article about what's happening.

The Suburban Guerrilla blog gets it right.

...those of us left living on a wing and prayer thanks to your “half full”, half-assed economic policies just don’t have a sense of humor about our continuing plight. I know it’s been a long time since your mom got food stamps, but you might want to give that empathy thing some thought.

Speaking of empathy, Bill McKibbon at the Huffington Post reports on the experience of some college students who delivered some of the White House's original solar panels to the Obama administration thinking that it would make a statement. It did.

Now, let me say that I already knew Jean Altomare, Amanda Nelson, and Jamie Nemecek were special, but my guess is the bureaucrats hadn’t figured that out. Unity is out in the woods, and these kids were majoring in things like wildlife conservation. They’d never had an encounter like this. It stood to reason that they’d be cowed. But they weren’t.

One after another, respectfully but firmly, they asked a series of tough questions and refused to be filibustered by yet another stream of administration-enhancing data. Here’s what they wanted to know: If the administration was serious about spreading the word on renewable energy, why wouldn’t it do the obvious thing and put solar panels on the White House? When the administrators proudly proffered a clipping from some interior page of the Washington Post about their “greening the government initiative,” Amanda calmly pointed out that none of her neighbors read the Post and that, by contrast, the solar panels had made it onto David Letterman.

To their queries, the bureaucrats refused to provide any answer. At all. One kept smiling in an odd way and saying, “If reporters call and ask us, we will provide our rationale,” but whatever it was, they wouldn’t provide it to us.

It was all a little odd, to say the least. They refused to accept the Carter panel as a historic relic, or even to pose for a picture with the students and the petition they’d brought with them. Asked to do something easy and symbolic to rekindle a little of the joy that had turned out so many of us as volunteers for Obama in 2008, they point blank said no. In a less than overwhelming gesture, they did, however, pass out Xeroxed copies of a 2009 memorandum from Vice President Biden about federal energy policy.

I can tell you exactly what it felt like, because those three students were brave and walked out graciously, heads high and kept their tears back until we got to the sidewalk. And then they didn’t keep them back, because it’s a tough thing to learn for the first time how politics can work.

To say that the party is in the hands of assholes would be an understatement.

I'm not in the mood to vote for yet another right-wing, get-ever-tougher, and screw the country Democrat for Senator. Dodd and Lieberman have so screwed the State of Connecticut that it is unrecognizable. We are job poor, tax heavy, and politically brain-dead.

The next vision Richard Blumenthal has will be his first. He is a fine Attorney General but nothing more. It is an understatement to say he is uninspiring. In a crowd of grey suited bureaucrats, one would be unable to find him. This is not who I want representing me in Congress.

If Obama so loves conservative politics then Linda McMahon will teach him and hold him accountable. And one can only hope that when she's elected with the help of Liberals that she'll ring his bell as a 'thank you' gesture from us to him.

Deconstructing Education

2010-09-06T13:27:00.001-04:00

On Democracy Now, Lois Weiner identifies the origin of standardized testing regimes such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. She traces one of the first such efforts to the Pinochet regime in Chile who instituted it under military rule. Obama's technique has been to exploit the ingrown greed of local government's to cut the throats of its children and taxpayers to get federal funding for standardized testing programs.

The teacher's unions have spent a decade playing along with this nonsense largely because they could stick their heads in the sand because although it adversely affected the students, it caused no ripples in the mass march toward retirement.

And even today, as can be heard in Karen Lewis's criticism of Arne Duncan, the teacher's representatives do little more than demonize-the-other with personal attacks on Duncan and claims that the data is "unscientific", that Duncan is unfit, and so on. These are shrill and empty arguments.

This leave the system alone (don't blame us) or change it badly (standardized testing/teacher performance) shouting match leaves everyone stuck with a dysfunctional duality of choices.

As a longtime critic of both NCLB and RTTT, I am forever disappointed in the response of teachers unions to the challenge of improving schools. The knee-jerk solution is inevitably "more money" with less evidence for the assertion than charter schools can provide for their arguments. And so the public and weary taxpayers are held hostage to this siren song knowing full well that the last increase in spending was no more effective in improving education than throwing money to the wind.

It seems to me that if teachers union representatives are going to argue for scientific evidence that the Obama/Bush policies are failing then they need to honor the scientific evidence that class size has little or nothing to do with student success in school past grade four.

To claim that Obama/Bush are attempting to de-professionalize teaching is true. But the argument needs to demonstrate some more veracity. A teaching profession content to perpetuate non-scientific myths that are comfortable for union purposes also expose the problem of actually teaching scientific method, ethics, good citizenship, and so on. If teachers can ignore fact then why not students, government officials, and special interests?

It is not enough to complain about de-profesionalization when the teachers unions prevent the possibility for re-professionalization. Teachers have for too long allowed union lawyers whose only interest is a larger paycheck to define what professionalism means.

Can it mean that industrial revolution ideas of unionization can give way to an enlightened set of working engagement? Can't teachers unions suggest better models than the Obama/Bush dross? If so, when will they present such arguments?

Teachers unions have yet to become part of a better solution. They have yet to arrive with better ideas. And this is largely because they have cultivated a siege mentality that fosters the idea that any change is a 'concession'. And a union that has long entitled its longest standing members special privileges and treatment is as unlikely to improve the profession as the Obama/Bush policies will.

Teachers unions need to reinvent themselves as agents of intelligent change based not on profitable myths about children and education practice but on innovative and meritorious alternative pedagogies.

Running from the Global

2010-09-05T14:26:00.000-04:00

Contrast this video to Obama W. Bush's educational polices.

And ask yourself why UConn's Education Department is such a lap dog for bad education policy.

No Child Left Behind and Global Competitiveness from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

A New School Year Begins

2010-08-28T13:09:00.000-04:00

And, according to industry analysts, the stakes have never been higher, the responsibilities never greater;

Youthful Indiscretions and Information Deformity

2010-08-25T22:06:00.000-04:00

Google exec, Eric Schmidt assets that future generations will need multiple identities simply to survive. Just as "innocent until proven guilty" is no longer the case in America so will the life sentence become the paradigm for those who are unlucky, unwise, and too honest to lie.

In an interview Mr Schmidt said he believed that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrasssing photographs and material stored on their friends' social media sites.

The 55-year-old also predicted that in the future, Google will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives.

Using profiles of it customers and tracking their locations through their smart phones, it will be able to provide live updates on their surroundings and inform them of tasks they need to do.

"We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

He suggested, as an example, that because Google would know “roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are”, it could remind users what groceries they needed to buy when passing a shop.

The comments are not the first time Mr Schmidt has courted controversy over the wealth of personal information people reveal on the internet. Last year, he notoriously remarked: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Death March of the American Middle Class

2010-08-01T02:15:00.000-04:00

While the government continues to lavish money on itself, self-insulate its spending habits, and ensure an uninterrupted stream of pay increases that the rest of the country doesn't enjoy. Count the CT education industry as part of this seedy brotherhood.

In one story after another, the depth of despair that America's middle class is experiencing is self-evident. Yet there is a law in CT that school budgets can NEVER BE lower from one year to the next. Sweet deal.

Meanwhile, Edward Luce of the Financial Times writes,

Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.

The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe.

Combine those two deep-seated trends with a third – steeply rising inequality – and you get the slow-burning crisis of American capitalism. It is one thing to suffer grinding income stagnation. It is another to realise that you have a diminishing likelihood of escaping it – particularly when the fortunate few living across the proverbial tracks seem more pampered each time you catch a glimpse. “Who killed the American Dream?” say the banners at leftwing protest marches. “Take America back,” shout the rightwing Tea Party demonstrators.

Statistics only capture one slice of the problem. But it is the renowned Harvard economist, Larry Katz, who offers the most compelling analogy. “Think of the American economy as a large apartment block,” says the softly spoken professor. “A century ago – even 30 years ago – it was the object of envy. But in the last generation its character has changed. The penthouses at the top keep getting larger and larger. The apartments in the middle are feeling more and more squeezed and the basement has flooded. To round it off, the elevator is no longer working. That broken elevator is what gets people down the most.”

Unsurprisingly, a growing majority of Americans have been telling pollsters that they expect their children to be worse off than they are. During the three postwar decades, which many now look back on as the golden era of the American middle class, the rising tide really did lift most boats – as John F. Kennedy put it. Incomes grew in real terms by almost 2 per cent a year – almost doubling each generation.

And although the golden years were driven by the rise of mass higher education, you did not need to have graduated from high school to make ends meet. Like her husband, Connie Freeman was raised in a “working-class” home in the Iron Range of northern Minnesota near the Canadian border. Her father, who left school aged 14 following the Great Depression of the 1930s, worked in the iron mines all his life. Towards the end of his working life he was earning $15 an hour – more than $40 in today’s prices.

Thirty years later, Connie, who is far better qualified than her father, having graduated from high school and done one year of further education, makes $17 an hour.

Umair Hague, in the Harvard Business Review analyzes American jobs,

The median duration of unemployment is, today, more than double what's it been at any point in the last half-century, at 6 months and counting. It's what you might call the dwindling of the American Dream.

Reviving the ghost of the great John Maynard Keynes, economists from Paul Krugman, to Brad DeLong, to Martin Wolf, to Bruce Bartlett, are chalking up a jobless recovery to a lack of aggregate demand. I'd like to advance a suggestion: it's not just the quantity of demand that's problematic — it's also the quality of demand.
:
:
:
So one might raise their eyebrows, then, and reasonably wonder whether it's American preferences that are killing the American dream. If America has changed so much that what Henry Ford thought was eminently practical is now seen as hopelessly naive — well, then perhaps it's not just bankers, bonuses, and bailouts that are really behind the Great Crash.

Here's what I mean by that. Every time I buy something from your local big-box retailer, it's not that, as protectionists and "patriots" often claim, that I'm destroying an American job. In fact, it's worse: I just might be helping stamp out the idea that there should be jobs as we know them.
Consider: the bulk of that stuff is made, when we cut through the triumphant rhetoric of globalization, by people who are "sub(sub-sub)-contractors," enjoying few, if any, of the benefits we associate with "jobs" — security, tenure, benefits, labor standards, etc. And, of course, when those privileges are gained, production is simply moved to countries, regions, and cities where they haven't been.

Low quality demand, then, means that we buy cheap, but the price is invisibly steep: it ignites a global race to the bottom, what a complexity economist might call a dynamic equilibrium of negative consumption externalities, consumption that results not just in joblessness but a loss in the quality of jobs. The quality of a job is sparked by higher quality demand; or, valuing more than just the dollar price of a thing, but also its human and social impact. When we have low-quality demand, we have low-quality jobs. When we value McDonalds, the result is McJobs.

Michael Snyder of Tech/Ticker writes the consequences,

83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

Giant Sucking Sound

The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.

What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are "less attractive" than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.

So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.

What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.

Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.

But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.

The truth is that the middle class in America is dying -- and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.

Maybe you think that's the worst of it. No, its not. Chris Isidore of CNN recently reported on how corporate HR departments treat the unemployed,

"Most executive recruiters won't look at a candidate unless they have a job, even if they don't like to admit to it," said Lisa Chenofsky Singer, a human resources consultant from Millburn, NJ, specializing in media and publishing jobs.

She said when she proposes candidates for openings, the first question she is often asked by a recruiter is if they currently have a job. If the answer is no, she's typically told the unemployed candidate won't be interviewed.

"They think you must have been laid off for performance issues," she said, adding that this is a "myth" in a time of high unemployment.

It is not against the law for companies to exclude the unemployed when trying to fill positions, but Judy Conti, a lobbyist for the National Employment Law Project, said the practice is a bad one.

"Making that kind of automatic cut is senseless; you could be missing out on the best person of all," she said. "There are millions of people who are unemployed through no fault of their own. If an employer feels that the best qualified are the ones already working, they have no appreciation of the crisis we're in right now."

Given the economic crisis that's affecting tax-payers who aren't educators or government welfare queens, how can education costs be described as anything less than the looting of the unfortunate?

HistoryPin

2010-07-29T22:21:00.000-04:00

One of the more interesting new websites (HistoryPin) is a mashable application that allows individuals to add photographs of specific locations to that specific location.

The result is a set of photos that show a multiplicity of historical snapshots of a single place so that one can compare and contrast that place over time.

We Not Only Lost the Race...

2010-07-28T22:21:00.001-04:00

Connecticut's legislators sold out whatever shreds of integrity were left in the education system to -cough- compete for Race to the Top ~~extortion money~~ dollars. Our legislature licked the heels of Obama and Duncan and didn't even get a tip.

They convinced school boards across the state that they'd split the money up if everyone just shut up and played along. Having done the math, I knew and published what a load of malarkey that was. It was probably a key as to why Connecticut "lost" funding. The reason of course is that the state would have to live up to its deal and distribute the money.

Trouble is that the money is political funny money that is being directed at certain insiders but being laundered through the states to make it look like its going to, well, the other usual education crooks.

So the Feds instead did a back-door deal with CT funneling millions into the state in a side transaction that went unreported. That money has no strings attached.

Here's what the Courant reported;

Educators and legislators predicted that the state's failure to win a penny in the $3.4 billion Race to the Top education funding competition could delay some of the landmark educational reforms that the state legislature passed this spring.

Legislators and education leaders were uniformly disappointed to learn that Connecticut — for the second time — did not place among the 19 finalists announced Tuesday for federal school reform money.

The state had asked for $175 million, and is now worried that plans that include instituting a new high school curriculum and building a data system to track student achievement by grade will have to be postponed.

"It's obvious if the economy doesn't turn around and we continue to have dire fiscal straits in Connecticut, we will have to push back various reforms," said State Rep. Andrew Fleischmann, D-West Hartford, co-chairman of the legislature's education committee.

"We're going to have to find the dollars to implement this. We cannot create some kind of unfunded mandate for cities and towns that are already strapped."

Well, instead of feeling good that we dodged this steaming pile of education reform, all the knee-jerk idiots who passed L.E.G.I.S.L.A.T.I.O.N. that now encodes this stuff into CT law are wringing their hands about the inevitable TAX INCREASES this will bring and pretending that they "can't create some kind of unfunded mandate".

THEY ALREADY DID! ~~Idiots!~~ Our Bryan Hurlbert crowed in a recent mailing that he voted for money for education data collection. GEE. THANKS. I guess you never received the memo telling you to vote no because its a bait and switch scheme. We could use leadership with a backbone, not doormats for bad Obama policy.

Repeal these laws NOW.

Teacher Performance Pay

2010-06-20T22:31:00.000-04:00

A number of articles have appeared in recent weeks about incentive pay for teachers in public schools.

In the Atlantic, Dwayne Betts in Some Notes on Education offers these observations;

About a week ago The New York Times ran this article on teachers juicing their students' test scores. Specifically the article is about Normandy Cross Elementary school just outside of Houston, where teachers awaited the results of state tests knowing success came with a nice little bonus for them: $2,850. Long story short the tests came back too good to be true and after an investigation resignations started coming in. But did they do anything that goes beyond expectation? Tying teacher pay to student performance in this way seems doomed to fail, and the Times article cites sufficient examples of teachers playing with test scores to support that. But the main reason I see linking raises to test scores as a plan doomed to failure is because that system seems not to acknowledge how whatever you can teach a kid this year is tied to what they learned or failed to learn last year.

Of the many things President Obama has done recently, I'm most frustrated with what rarely gets discussed on national television: his education policy. He's not calling for a fundamental shift in the way we do education in the United States. He's calling for, among other things, reforming the NCLB act through improved assessments and an improved accountability system. Check out his plan here. The push for more assistance going to early education, and expanding Head Start, pre-school, and child care tax credits are all welcome moves. I have no idea where the money to pay for these initiatives will come from, though, but that's a different issue. What I'm considering here is whether improving assessments, the piece of his plan most relevant to teacher pay, will lead to more teacher's looking to nudge test scores is an issue.

SchoolFinance101's blog, on the other hand, cuts straight to the chase - litigation:

There are (at least) two very likely legal challenges that will occur once we start to experience our first rounds of teacher dismissal based on student assessment data.

Due Process Challenges

Removing a teacher’s tenure status is denial of a teacher’s property interest and doing so requires “due process.” That’s not an insurmountable barrier, even under typical teacher contracts that don’t require dismissal based on student test scores. Simply declaring that “a teacher will be fired if he/she shows 2 straight years of bad student test scores (growth or value-added)” and then firing a teacher for as much does not mean that the teacher necessarily was provided due process. Under a policy requiring that 51% of the employment decision be based on student value added test scores, a teacher could be wrongly terminated due to:

a) Temporal instability of the value-added measures

http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/1001266_stabilityofvalue.pdf

Ooooh…Temporal instability… what’s that supposed to mean? What it means is that teacher value-added ratings, which are averages of individual student gains, tend not to be that stable over time. The same teacher is highly likely to get a totally different value added rating from one year to the next. The above link points to a policy brief which explains that the year to year correlation for a teacher’s value added rating is only about .2 or .3. Further, most of the change or difference in the teacher’s value added rating from one year to the next is unexplainable – not by differences in observed student characteristics, peer characteristics or school characteristics. 87.5% (elementary math) to 70% (8th grade math) noise! While some statistical corrections and multi-year measures might help, it’s hard to guarantee or even be reasonably sure that a teacher wouldn’t be dismissed simply as a function of unexplainable low performance for 2 or 3 years in a row. That is, simply due to noise, and not the more troublesome issue of how students are clustered across schools, districts and classrooms.

b) Non-random assignment of students

The only fair way to compare teachers’ ability to produce student value-added is to randomly assign all students, statewide to all teachers… and then of course, to have all students live in exactly comparable settings with exactly comparable support structures outside of school, etc., etc. etc. That’s right. We’d have to send all of our teachers and all of our students to a single boarding school location somewhere in the state and make sure, absolutely sure that we randomly assigned students, the same number of students to each and every teacher in the system.

Obviously, that’s not going to happen. Students are not randomly sorted and the fact that they are not has serious consequences for comparing teachers’ ability to produce student value-added. See: http://gsppi.berkeley.edu/faculty/jrothstein/published/rothstein_vam2.pdf

c) Student manipulation of test results

As she travels the nation on her book tour, Diane Ravitch raises another possibility for how a teacher might find him/herself out of a job by no real fault of actual bad teaching. As she puts it, this approach to teacher evaluation puts the teacher’s job directly in the students’ hands. And the students can, if they wish, choose to consciously abuse that responsibility. That is, the students could actually choose to bomb the state assessments to get a teacher fired, whether it’s a good teacher or a bad one. This would most certainly raise due process concerns.

d) A whole bunch of other uncontrollable stuff

A recent National Academies report noted:

“A student’s scores may be affected by many factors other than a teacher — his or her motivation, for example, or the amount of parental support — and value-added techniques have not yet found a good way to account for these other elements.”

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=1278

This report generally urged caution regarding overemphasis of student value-added test scores in teacher evaluation – especially in high stakes decisions. Surely, if I was an expert witness testifying on behalf of a teacher who had been wrongly dismissed, I’d be pointing out that the National Academies said that using the student assessment data in this way is not a good idea.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act Challenges

The non-random assignment of students leads to the second likely legal claim that will flood the courts as student testing based teacher dismissals begin – Claims of racially disparate teacher dismissal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Given that students are not randomly assigned and that poor and minority – specifically black – students are densely clustered in certain schools and districts and that black teachers are much more likely to be working in schools with classrooms of low-income black students, it is highly likely that teacher dismissals will occur in a racially disparate pattern. Black teachers of low-income black students will be several times more likely to be dismissed on the basis of poor value-added test scores. This is especially true where a statewide fixed, rigid requirement is adopted and where a teacher must be de-tenured and/or dismissed if he/she shows value-added below some fixed value-added threshold on state assessments.

So, here’s how this one plays out. For every 1 white teacher dismissed on value-added basis, 10 or more black teachers are dismissed - relative to the overall proportions of black and white teachers. This gives the black teachers the argument that the policy has racially disparate effect. No, it doesn’t end there. A policy doesn’t violate Title VII merely because it has racially disparate effect. That just starts the ball rolling – gets the argument into court.

The state gets to defend itself – by claiming that producing value-added test scores is a legitimate part of a teacher’s job and then explaining how the use of those scores is, in fact neutral with respect to race. It just happens to have the disparate effect. Right? But, as the state would argue, that’s a good thing because it ensures that we can put better teachers in front of these poor minority kids, and get rid of the bad ones.

But, the problem is that the significant body of research on non-random assignment of students and its effect of value added scores indicates that it’s not necessarily differences in the actual effectiveness of black versus white teachers, but that the black teachers are concentrated in the poor black schools and that student clustering and not teacher effectiveness is leading to the disparate rates of teacher dismissal. So they weren’t fired because they were precisely measurably ineffective, they were fired because they had classrooms of poor minority students year after year? At the very least, it is statistically problematic to distill one effect from the other! As a result, it’s statistically problematic to argue that the teacher should be dismissed! There is at least equal likelihood that the teacher is wrongly dismissed as there is that the teacher is rightly dismissed. I suspect a court might be concerned by this.

Reduction in Force

Note that many of these same concerns apply to all of the recent rhetoric over teacher layoffs and the need to base those layoffs on effectiveness rather than seniority. It all sounds good, until you actually try to go into a school district of any size and identify the 100 “least effective” teachers given the current state of data for teacher evaluation. Simply writing into a reduction in force (RIF) policy a requirement of dismissal based on “effectiveness” does not instantly validate the “effectiveness” measures. And even the best “effectiveness” measures, as discussed above, remain really problematic, providing tenured teachers reduced on grounds of ineffectiveness multiple options for legal action.

Additional Concerns

These two legal arguments ignore the fact that school districts and states will have to establish two separate types of contracts for teachers to begin with, since even in the best of statistical cases, only about 1/5 of teachers (those directly responsible for teaching math or reading in grades three through eight) might possibly be evaluated via student test scores (see: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/pondering-the-usefulness-of-value-added-assessment-of-teachers/)

I’ve written previously about the technical concerns over value-added assessment of teachers and my concern that pundits are seemingly completely ignorant of the statistical issues. I’m also baffled that few others in the current policy discussion seem even remotely aware of just how few teachers might – in the best possible case – be evaluated via student test scores, and the need for separate contracts. But, I am perhaps most perplexed that no-one seems to be acknowledging the massive legal mess likely to ensue when (or if) these poorly conceived policies are put into action.

But the high-stakes testing regime affects more than teacher pay. Administrators too are pressured to meet scoring quotas that challenge their ethics. In a NYTimes piece called, Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Tests, Trip Gabriel reports on the NCLB's unethical and legally questionable underbelly:

For seven years, their school, Atherton Elementary in suburban Atlanta, had met the standards known in federal law as Adequate Yearly Progress — A.Y.P. in educators’ jargon — by demonstrating that a rising share of students performed at grade level.

Then, in 2008, the bar went up again and Atherton stumbled. In June, the school’s assistant principal for instruction, reviewing student answer sheets from the state tests, told her principal, “We cannot make A.Y.P.,” according to an affidavit the principal signed.

“We didn’t discuss it any further,” the principal, James L. Berry, told school district investigators. “We both understood what we meant.”

Pulling a pencil from a cup on the desk of Doretha Alexander, the assistant principal, Dr. Berry said to her, “I want you to call the answers to me,” according to an account Ms. Alexander gave to investigators.

The principal erased bubbles on the multiple-choice answer sheets and filled in the right answers.

Any celebrations over the results were short-lived. Suspicions were raised in December 2008 by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which noted that improvements on state tests at Atherton and a handful of other Georgia schools were so spectacular that they approached a statistical impossibility. The state conducted an analysis of the answer sheets and found “overwhelming evidence” of test tampering at Atherton.

Crawford Lewis, the district superintendent at the time, summoned Dr. Berry and Ms. Alexander to separate meetings. During four hours of questioning — “back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,” Dr. Lewis said — principal and assistant principal admitted to cheating.

“They both broke down” in tears, Dr. Lewis said.

Dr. Lewis said that Dr. Berry, whom he had appointed in 2005, had buckled under the pressure of making yearly progress goals. Dr. Berry was a former music teacher and leader of celebrated marching bands who, Dr, Lewis said, had transferred some of that spirit to passing the state tests in a district where schools hold pep rallies to get ready.

Dr. Berry, who declined interview requests, resigned and was arrested in June 2009 on charges of falsifying a state document. In December, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation. The state suspended him from education for two years and Ms. Alexander for one year. (Dr. Lewis, who stepped down as superintendent, was indicted last month on unrelated charges stemming from an investigation into school construction, which he denied.)

Dr. Lewis called for refocusing education away from high-stakes testing because of the distorted incentives it introduces for teachers. “When you add in performance pay and your evaluation could possibly be predicated on how well your kids do testing-wise, it’s just an enormous amount of pressure,” he said.

“I don’t say there’s any excuse for doing what was done, but I believe this problem is going to intensify before it gets better.”

And to bring this all into perspective, Seth Godin ponders the economics of education in The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer):

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it.

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is? While there are outliers (like St. Johns, Deep Springs or Full Sail) most schools aren't really outliers. They are mass marketers.

Stop for a second and consider the impact of that choice. By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their mission.

This works great in an industrial economy where we can't churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But...

InflationTuitionMedicalGeneral1978to2008 2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.

As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won't get fooled again...

This leads to a crop of potential college students that can (and will) no longer just blindly go to the 'best' school they get in to.

3. The definition of 'best' is under siege.

Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I've ever seen. Why do it?

Biggest reason: So the schools can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in US News and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share. Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?

4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.

College wasn't originally designed to merely be a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that's what it has become. The data I'm seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn't translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job or more happiness than a degree from a cheaper institution.

5. Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-reward policies on institutions and rewarded schools that churn out young wanna-be professors instead of experiences that turn out leaders and problem-solvers.

All of this spells an unhappy ending for a system that is already bankrupting the country.

Economics of the Minimum Wage

2010-06-17T20:01:00.002-04:00

Click the image to enlarge

Source: FixR

These Days

2010-06-09T00:18:00.000-04:00

CNN has run an interesting article that reports on the status of children's lives by Elizabeth Landau called, Children's quality of life declining, says report.

Children living in families in which neither parent has secure employment will rise to about 20 million this year, up 4 percent from 2006.

Also, many children live in households where all members do not have access to enough safe and nutritious foods. From 2007 to 2010, an additional 750,000 children are estimated to live in food-insecure households, the report said.

There is also potential for an uptick in obesity as families with tight budgets move toward lower quality food because of the recession, Land said. Healthy foods tend to be expensive, while processed and fast foods are cheaper and more readily available to some families.

Community engagement will go down as school districts reduce the employment of teachers and cut back programs. The amount of time spent in school may even go down; in 2009, Hawaii became the first state to move to four-day school weeks to save money in the recession.

One piece of good news is that health insurance coverage for children will not significantly fall, the report said, thanks to publicly financed health care programs. About 90 percent of children will be in families with some form of health insurance, the report said.

Chaotic childhoods have enormous implications for physical health, said Dr. Alan Kazdin, professor of psychology at Yale University and researcher at the Yale Child Conduct Clinic. Higher rates of cancer, liver disease, respiratory disease and other conditions have been found in people who grew up under stressful conditions, said Kazdin, who was not involved in the study.

I'm not sure that children's lives will, in fact, decline. Cutbacks in school budgets may simply serve to reverse or deter the damage education politics are playing on educational policy. Libraries may become more frequented. Children may actually have less disposable income to pour into vapid designer clothes and unhealthy fast food.

Which is not to say the recession is a good thing.

John Wooden Remembered

2010-06-06T21:14:00.001-04:00

I love this tribute to John Wooden. Boy, schools have forgotten everything he says in this piece.

The New Skinner Box

2010-06-01T23:01:00.000-04:00

Tonight we had a guest speaker from the UConn Department of Education who was selling a "framework" called PBIS. It's a massively scaled up version of the Skinner Box.

The theory seems to be that by treating schools as Operant Conditioning Chambers whose primary operating principle seems to be homogenizing the behavior of the more unruly population by assuming that the unruly are in fact behavior problems or worse and subjecting them to intensified peer group pressures in the form of a velvet glove token.

In education, three variables are always present: teacher, curriculum, and student. These days the student wears a target on their back as the agent to be changed - one way or the other. The feds have already hi-jacked curriculum decisions, and the States have passed laws that will soon lock-down teachers.

Some critics compare the Skinner Box to a cage. By the time educators are done with the model Guantanamo will look like a country club because at least the prisoners can pray.

Random Stuff

2010-06-01T01:15:00.000-04:00

I've had to restrain myself from posting about some recent incidents that disturbed me deeply.

It's a funny thing. Years ago, when certain political forces wanted to demonize liberals, I decided to defend that point of view vigorously. I simply stated what I believed would be a true liberal viewpoint and stuck to my arguments.It wasn't a knee-jerk union point of view nor was it a particularly wide-eyed caricature of the genre. It was simply respectful of people who were and are intelligent and politically disenfranchised.

Over the years I've been called all kinds of names and got banned from the old Charlie Rose forum, the Talking points Memo forums, and got bored with a dozen others. Freedom of Speech is no more protected in this country or on the internet than in most wannabe totalitarian territories. In my experience, it was never the right wingers who wanted to shut me up for giving voice to unpopular opinion, it was the rank and file democrats and republicans who are quite comfortable with a world they've learned to take advantage of. Don't upset the gravy train. Don't ask us to think and don't question the cultural myths.

These days I'm surrounded by individuals who purport to care about education but have no stomach for anything more than the status quo and spending money (money never cures anything because we always have to spend more and more is never enough). Many simply count the days until they're safely free of it, pensioned, and ready to promote the union line while serving on their school boards.

The news is awash with the horror that the oil and gas industry watchdogs were eager and willing lap dogs when it came to rigorously being vigilant about small things like safety, ethics, and conflicts of interest.

But I'm not surprised at all. The oil and gas industry watchdogs are no different than most organizations expected to oversee highly profitable enterprises. Floating downstream is an American way of life for a lot of people and its a career path as well. Go along to get along to go along.

I've been writing for years about the student debt reality and looming crisis. Very few parents ever read to warnings and fewer care. Washington wants every student to go to college (and incur backbreaking debt). It's all in the name of equality.

This NY Times article by Ron Lieber spells it out;

Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.

Citibank gave Cortney Munna $40,000 in loans, though she had already amassed debt well into the five figures. It was like the “no doc” loans that home buyers used to get in over their heads.

Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.

This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.

Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.

Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn’t have a lot of good options for digging out.

It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it’s a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting.

But perhaps the biggest share lies with colleges and universities because they have the most knowledge of the financial aid process. And I would argue that they had an obligation to counsel students like Ms. Munna, who got in too far over their heads.

How many people are like her? According to the College Board’s Trends in Student Aid study, 10 percent of people who graduated in 2007-8 with student loans had borrowed $40,000 or more. The median debt for bachelor’s degree recipients who borrowed while attending private, nonprofit colleges was $22,380.

The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more than $40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That’s a ninefold increase over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars.

I've also blogged long and hard about the perils of the Bush/Obama education reform scam. most recently gullible legislators passed a slew of bad law pertaining to educational policies that are being coerced by Washington bureaucrats. They dangle lotto ticket chances to receive parts of federal dollars aimed at education.

But recently Connecticut was awarded some federal money. Everyone thinks it stays in the state and creates or -cough- saves jobs here. No such luck. NCLB/RTTT appears to be a finely tuned money laundering scheme that awaards money to individual states giving the impression that the staes are dictating the terms of the engagement but the CT DOE website reveals the money is funneled to, um, TEXAS!

Read it and weep. And if you connect a few more dots you'll realize that RTTT is a covert, up from the bottom establishment of a National Identification database that not only identifies you from school age activity on but tracks you as an individual. Your freedom to re-invent yourself will not be tolerated, the data the government collects - good, bad, or indifferent - will forever define your freedom.

Here's a anti-Nazi propaganda piece produced during WWII. It may as well be the RTTT blueprint;

No, I have no interest in Hitler, or nazis, or any of the militarism involved in the cartoon. Strip those themes out and you expose a framework of state controlled education that is intolerant of "failing" students, the weak will be left in government [school] hands, and "marching and heiling" could easily be "memorizing and being tested" for global competition.

We are already far down the road to a reality that is a centralized control over school, curriculum, and personal identity that will doom our children for decades.

Maybe if we pretend its not happening it will go away.

My guess is that no one cares about what the government is doing with Race to the Top but I'll get a dozen complaints about the Disney YouTube video.

IT'S A METAPHOR!.

The Bogey Man

2010-05-18T23:53:00.000-04:00

CT Legislature Poisons the Schools

2010-05-02T01:53:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, the CT legislature passed more poison pill education laws. Grace E. Merritt and Amanda Falcone of the Courant report:

The bill establishes a more rigorous high school curriculum designed to better prepare students for college and to compete in a global economy.

The new standards mean students would have to earn a minimum of 25 credits to graduate, up from 20, including two language credits and one more credit each in math and science.

Students also would have to take end-of-year exams for core courses to ensure that they've learned the material. Seniors would be required to complete a multidisciplinary "capstone project" before graduation — which would spell the end of coasting during the second semester of senior year.

The new requirements wouldn't take effect until the Class of 2018, a concession made to make the bill more palatable to opponents who characterize it as another unfunded mandate in a poor economy.

"We certainly are not going to be in this economic condition … too much longer," Gaffey said.

Besides, he said, the bill is designed to help the state win millions in federal stimulus money from the Race to the Top competition, which officials hope might bring as much as $192 million to Connecticut.

Having failed to win any of the federal money in the first round of the Race to the Top competition, the state is revising its application to try again June 1. The state is hoping the new bill will strengthen the application by demonstrating the state's commitment to school reform.

The bill would also establish a new framework for teacher evaluations that would use indicators of student academic growth in assessing performance. The State Board of Education would work with an advisory board of representatives from teachers unions, school boards and state and local education leaders to develop the evaluations.

"I believe that this is a very reasonable approach to teacher evaluation at the present time," said John Yrchik, executive director of the Connecticut Education Association, the largest statewide teachers union.

There is no doubt that Connecticut politicians will sell their souls and the wallets of their constituents on the flimsiest excuse to spend more tax money. There are no responsible adults involved. Nor do they seem to read the newspaper.

On that same day, Steve Goode of the Courant reported on Hartford's Rawson school (Parents, Students Say Hartford School Spirals Out Of Control).

Tamara Golding moved into a house across the street from Rawson School last March, feeling lucky that her son and daughter would attend a beautiful school that just completed a $33 million makeover.

These days she has a different view of the school.

"Pretty on the outside — hell on the inside," she said.

Parents and teachers say student behavior at Rawson, a pre-kindergarten through Grade 8 school on Holcomb Street, has spiraled out of control.

Fights are commonplace: boys fighting boys, girls fighting girls, even boys fighting girls.

Current and former students say that alcohol and marijuana are being brought into the school and that students are engaging in sexual activity in stairwells and isolated areas.

Bathrooms, frequent sites of assault, are locked. Students are escorted to the bathrooms, which students and parents say are decorated with gang symbols.

There are three security guards for the 750 students, and parents say they fear for the younger children's safety.

Bullying inside and outside the school is a regular occurrence, students and parents say. Last Wednesday, according to one student, a group of students committed random assaults inside the building. The day culminated with an after-school assault on a teenager who came to Rawson to pick up his younger brother and escort him home.

The boy, Andrew Manning, 15, was beaten by four young men at the corner of Holcomb and Cornwall streets and taken by ambulance to St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, where he received a dozen stitches to close a gash in his forehead. He also had a concussion and an eye injury. The attack was interrupted by a man who stopped his pickup truck.

"If we don't stop this, something really tragic is going to happen," said Golding, who acknowledged that her daughter, Jazzman Smith, an eighth-grader, is currently suspended from the school for a disciplinary problem.

Let's see, where's the disconnect?

The legislature wants to up the ante in terms of required credits. How will this close he achievement gap we see in full bloom here? The THIRTY-THREE MILLION DOLLAR renovation apparently hasn't helped. MAYBE MORE MONEY WILL HELP! But I don't think so.

Oh, and what about that idea of preparing more and more kids for college? Seth Godin's blog has an interesting response (The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer)). He lists five reasons higher education's desirability is fading

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is? While there are outliers (like St. Johns, Deep Springs or Full Sail) most schools aren't really outliers. They are mass marketers.

Stop for a second and consider the impact of that choice. By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their mission.

This works great in an industrial economy where we can't churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But...

2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.

As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won't get fooled again...

This leads to a crop of potential college students that can (and will) no longer just blindly go to the 'best' school they get in to.

3. The definition of 'best' is under siege.

Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I've ever seen. Why do it?

Biggest reason: So the schools can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in US News and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share. Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?

4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.

College wasn't originally designed to merely be a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that's what it has become. The data I'm seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn't translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job or more happiness than a degree from a cheaper institution.

5. Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-reward policies on institutions and rewarded schools that churn out young wanna-be professors instead of experiences that turn out leaders and problem-solvers.

Even the village idiot can do this math. Herding students into a lifetime of debt for higher education makes no sense. Nor does upping the ante for admission.

And chasing Race to the Top dollars is like passing legislation to give the federal government a new way to tax you.

This legislature needs to be fired. Every stinking one of them.

Tea Party Revisited

2010-04-11T09:49:00.000-04:00

I received a response to a previous post about the more responsible Tea Party voices across this nation. And ConnecticutMan1, a fellow blogger, laments that

...and I note that while we could find common ground on what the important issues are we certainly have a huge chasm between what we see as the solutions. But not all of them are even willing to have that rational discussion. They are purposely disruptive and just shouting over others.

I am less interested in the shouting matches than the issues themselves. Regardless of how much any two people may disagree about a solution, if a solution actually resolves an issue then who cares who suggested it? I think the point I'm trying to make is that I hear legitimate concerns being expressed by Tea Party advocates and as much as I wouldn't want to socialize with certain people, that doesn't mean they don't deserve to be heard.

I've grown tired of the attack politics of all sides. It's fair to parody and satirize about anything. It's wholly a different level of disagreement that has each group trying to personally destroy the other. If a group of people want to identify themselves as something new, I say have at it.

On the other hand, the too-large-government issue IS a concern to lots of people. As is excessive taxation. And while I strongly disagree with the more militant Tea Party enthusiasts to threaten violence, I can understand their growing frustration and contempt for the existing political parties.

Runaway government spending has to stop. And mean-spirited government spending cuts that hurt the innocent and dispossessed is not a solution. Government and education can be modeled to scale back without sacrificing quality. But that means that we all grow up. That means that protecting the fat cats in government and education needs to be addressed.

The poor are not our enemy, the entrenched obsolete bureaucrat who is self-insulating and feather-bedding their own position and paycheck are the ones that need to surgically removed from further damaging this country's ability to economically heal.

The issues of the Tea Party don't go away by demonizing them. And this country doesn't recover by ignoring the problems so painful that even hermits are marching in the streets.

The best way to dissolve the Tea Party is to effectively address the issue of reducing the size of government and its attendant spending habits.

Let's all stop shouting and get serious about solving this crisis before some misguided idiot starts getting trigger happy. Quite frankly, while I abhor the Palin-ization of that movement, I think their concerns are as important as any we face.

Educational Black-Ops?

2010-04-07T23:00:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while the math doesn't add up or something is so subtly out of place to be unnoticeable but like a paper cut refuses to stop throbbing.

I was reading a Rick Green's Courant blog about the Avon school budget called, Avon Parents Support Public Schools -- and Higher Taxes.

Intriguing. And there in the comments section I found a cliche that is like that paper cut.

In any event, the median property tax burden for those in single family houses in Avon is 5.56%. That is 70th highest of CT's 169 towns for FY 2008-09 tax payments. Their median state income tax burden rank is 11th highest of CT's towns.

This is the fuzzy math of the education entitlement funding myth. In other words, someone out there is gaming the economic statistics to imply that any of our communities are obligated to tax a certain percentage of income for public education whether it needs it or not.

And worse still, tax whether the town can afford it or not.

In Region 19, we have such a pattern of tax abuse. Because towns pay per student ratios of the regional school budgets, there are always towns paying more or less than the other. And the game is that no town should ever pay less than the year before. For example, this year, an EO Smith budget that desperately needs pruning isn't getting it. The magic reason? Mansfield already has reached a zero increase in EO Smith funding.

Heaven forbid that the finance committee actually consider what is best for all three towns regardless of such nonsense.

But all across Connecticut, taxpayers are being bludgeoned by a tax engine that works just this one way - always spend more and more and more.

You've been conditioned to believe that's better for kids.

That's not always the case.

More on the Black Ops soon (still fact finding).

A Tea Party Worth Listening To

2010-04-06T23:25:00.002-04:00

I am proud to announce that the Region 19 BOE Gazette is a link on the page of one of Nebraska's most prestigious Tea Party blogs; Don't Let Me Stop You.

I've linked to them under the political links section here as itself the Nebraska Tea Party.

This has forever been a blog that celebrates the disenfranchised voices in politics, culture, and education. And I ruthlessly skewer the status quo with as much satirical candor as I can muster on a tired evening.

But this blog started during the Bush/Cheney regime and something I have never said but need to is that as fiercely as I objected to their policies I cannot say that this blog was ever threatened in any way, implicit or explicit. Not once.

First this speaks to the strength of the First Amendment and those of us who exercise it with religious trust. But secondly, it speaks to the American character - even the hard-core neo-cons back off from trying to muzzle another citizen speaking their mind.

As I said, I'm proud that Tea Partiers link to this, a most-liberal blog. Not because they agree but because we can agree and disagree and fight through issues that move us.

It is important for those of any party or persuasion to lighten up enough to recognize our common interests so that we can be sure that those things don't become collateral damage. And its important for us to disagree enough to create the sparks that illuminate a step in the right direction.

And for as often as this blog has been called provincial and partisan, the truth of the matter is that it has always represented those whose voices represent a broad and rich spectrum of people who have every right to be heard and respected. I'm proud of that too.

Modeling Academics

2010-03-28T21:30:00.001-04:00

There is a common practice that seems to be a pattern that takes on mythical significance. And that is that last year's school budget expenditures with the exception of co-incidental changes dictate next year's curriculum and budget make-up.

Furthermore, next year's budget is considered flat when it entirely accommodates the slope of increases in staff salary and benefits. So it is not unusual to hear Board members euphemistically say the the budget stays the same from this year to next or it doesn't cost us any more. In fact the unconscionable increases in salary not only increase costs, they compound the cost year over year assuming there's no intervention.

But given the economic environment, suburban schools in CT need to get smarter about school. In other words, we need to begin modeling every school every year. That means that the tight coupling of curriculum to spreadsheet budgets needs to be decoupled.

Based on the local fiscal tea leaves, communities need to determine what they can afford and settle on a figure that is fair to the average taxpayer. That's the budget part.

Whatever this sum, the skeleton key to creating next year's academic infrastructure needs to be a school model of what's important to the school.

A Captain Obvious list of necessities includes:

bare bones services mandated by law
mandated curriculum offerings
fixed and inevitable costs (heat, water, fuel, books, supplies, consumables)
core sports costs
bare bones enrichment curriculum offerings
bare bones administrative costs

A second tier of expenses might include near and dear offerings and special programs that are successful and unique. Also included may be periodic offerings such as a bi-annual AP course in an esoteric subject.

The final component might be:

non-core sports
supplemental courses
poorly performing courses or departments
vanity offerings or department silos that can be pruned without a loss of fundamental mission

This kind of modeling ensures that the quality of the school's academic offering can degrade gracefully in terms of cost without affecting the quality or integrity of the school's mission.

Schools that are growing can scale up intelligently and scale back equally intelligently. This is different but related to strategic planning. Modeling is about generating cost effective education and agile academic year-to-year continuity so that curriculum stay s fresh and vital.

Mary Glassman Gets It!

2010-03-25T16:25:00.000-04:00

Mary Glassman not only gets it but she gets it right the first time.

Do any of you appreciate that as much as I do? OMG, a politician that advocates for children to read at the third grade level because that is scientifically sound. That's right, she looked at the facts and is advocating policy based on the facts.

Not feelings, not what's politically popular, but facts. Obviously she has no chance of winning but I want to be one of the first people to endorse her. Christ, it's like winning the lottery to find somebody who knows what the hell they're talking about AND is running for office.

Check out CT Bob's video (if you listen to one political video this year, this is it) ;

WE ARE NOT WORTHY.

Really.

How much?

2010-03-25T00:45:00.000-04:00

This, a twitter from Diane Ravitch about an hour ago.

The case against NCLB: no gain in NAEP reading scores for 8th graders from 1998 to 2009. The NCLB generation. Billions wasted.

Small comfort. Obama's Race to the Top is little more than re-branded NCLB funded to the hilt. More tax dollars being shoveled into a money sink that is pointless.

Our educators lecture us about math and science yet are incapable of actually using it themselves. And accountability is for other people's failures not programs like NCLB that have empirically done more harm than good for children.

Billions. Educational Fraud. No relief in sight.

What a country.

My ADTC Resignation Letter

2010-03-24T12:17:00.001-04:00

March 24, 2010

Dear friends and others,

Please accept my immediate resignation from the Ashford Democratic Town Committee. Until very recently, I have had the great pleasure of sharing the good company and goodwill of many of you. I plan on remaining a lifelong friend of those who are.

However, I can no longer support national candidates who solicit my time, money, and psychic energy to get elected and then turn around and marginalize or wholly lock-out points of view near and dear to my heart. I plan to dedicate those resources to ensuring that those people never again take advantage of my concerns as a citizen.

More importantly, as a Board of Education member I find myself serving with other members of the Democratic persuasion who chronically misrepresent our community. I find their indifference to the community of Ashford's best interests AND Region19's best interests unconscionable. Again, as someone who has dedicated time, energy, money, and goodwill toward both the Democratic party and the election of said individuals, I can no longer justify continuing to to so.

Our Region is being fiscally bankrupted by Board members whose cynical disregard for the plight of children in their own communities is obvious and unrelenting. I cannot and will not support any candidate from any town who is willing to stab the people who depend on them in the back.

Furthermore. our regional economics need to be addressed seriously and with all due haste. No one in any town, regardless of how complacent they may believe they are, can afford *not* to have the ability to vote for a reduction in the coming year-to-year budget. Families already hard hit by the national economy have a Constitutional Right of Self-Defense (the vote) to protect themselves from bureaucrats who are indifferent to watching their families suffer.

Every thinking citizen in our towns needs to demand that the right to vote on a one-percent decrease in the Region19 budget. The voters trusted me when I was elected and I trust them to do what's right for themselves.

The time is now. The pickpockets are at your door and on your Board. You can choose to save your communities or not. You can choose to play politics or not. But once the money is spent and the clouds roll in - DO NOT CLAIM YOU DID NOT KNOW THIS IS THE CASE.

With great memories and great regret,

Frank Krasicki

Best. Movie. Ending. Ever.

2010-03-23T23:36:00.000-04:00

I saw Samson and Delilah as a child and it was one of those stories that stuck with me.

There's a moral here.

Hartford Goes South Park

2010-03-23T14:27:00.000-04:00

The epidemic of stupidity that's coming out of the State House in Hartford is threatening to engulf the entire State in a cesspool of ignorance that will not easily wash clean. The fine line between farce and maliciously moronic legislation is being tested (daily).

Steven Goode of the Courant reports that,

A bill proposed by a city legislator calls for residency restrictions for registered sex offenders that would make it virtually impossible for them to live in Hartford.

State Rep. Kelvin Roldan's bill, which went before the judiciary committee Monday, would make it illegal for registered sex offenders to live within 2,000 feet of a public or private school or day care facility.

According to Hartford police, 547 — or 96 percent — of the 568 registered sex offenders living in the city are within 2,000 feet of a school or day care provider. If the bill is passed, the restrictions would not apply to those who already live in permanent housing within the restricted zone. It would affect anyone living in a temporary shelter with 60- and 90-day housing limits and any offender who moves into the city after Oct. 10.

Roldan said the law would help keep registered sex offenders out of situations that might cause them to commit another crime.

"This is all about the safety of our children," Roldan said.

But Public Safety Commissioner John Danaher said he believes the provision could cause problems for police and other agencies required to keep track of offenders.

"It is our belief that it would create a situation that they would have no place to live, causing them to go underground," said Danaher. "It would create a problem for law enforcement because we want to be able to know where they are."

Right. It's all about the safety of -cough- our children. So where oh where will these people go? UNDERGROUND???? I don't think so. They will go to suburbia. That's right, the place that has no social service infrastructure or police forces who can deal with keeping track of these social misfits.

This law like so many of the "not in my back yard" legislations is evil. Evil like the episode of South Park called Night of the Living Homeless. Wikipedia's synopsis may have been the template for this legislation.

While talking to the survivors, who have clearly become paranoid, Kyle finds a pamphlet on the ground, which advertises South Park as a "haven for the homeless". He realizes the Evergreen townspeople got rid of their homeless by convincing them to migrate to South Park. The children realize that they must get rid of the homeless because, as Kyle reasons, their parents are as stupid as the people of Evergreen, and South Park would fall apart just like Evergreen did.

The law I would like to see introduced is one that would ban bad legislators from coming within two hundred miles of CT. The air would smell so much sweeter.

Flatly, Plutocratic Racism

2010-03-21T13:14:00.001-04:00

Tom Friedman's latest column in the New York Times, America’s Real Dream Team is yet another disingenuous euphemism for advocating high-tech job piracy in the United States. He has become the master of a form of subliminal racism that insists all Asians are good at math (and/or science), all American children are dolts (and parenthetically the public schools are idiot factories), and that Americans are not only incapable of competing worldwide, we aren't even smart enough to let smart immigrants become our benevolent guardians. He writes;

Linda Zhou, Alice Wei Zhao, Lori Ying, Angela Yu-Yun Yeung, Lynnelle Lin Ye, Kevin Young Xu, Benjamin Chang Sun, Jane Yoonhae Suh, Katheryn Cheng Shi, Sunanda Sharma, Sarine Gayaneh Shahmirian, Arjun Ranganath Puranik, Raman Venkat Nelakant, Akhil Mathew, Paul Masih Das, David Chienyun Liu, Elisa Bisi Lin, Yifan Li, Lanair Amaad Lett, Ruoyi Jiang, Otana Agape Jakpor, Peter Danming Hu, Yale Wang Fan, Yuval Yaacov Calev, Levent Alpoge, John Vincenzo Capodilupo and Namrata Anand.

No, sorry, it was not a dinner of the China-India Friendship League. Give up?

O.K. All these kids are American high school students. They were the majority of the 40 finalists in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, which, through a national contest, identifies and honors the top math and science high school students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems. The awards dinner was Tuesday, and, as you can see from the above list, most finalists hailed from immigrant families, largely from Asia.

Indeed, if you need any more convincing about the virtues of immigration, just come to the Intel science finals. I am a pro-immigration fanatic. I think keeping a constant flow of legal immigrants into our country — whether they wear blue collars or lab coats — is the key to keeping us ahead of China. Because when you mix all of these energetic, high-aspiring people with a democratic system and free markets, magic happens. If we hope to keep that magic, we need immigration reform that guarantees that we will always attract and retain, in an orderly fashion, the world’s first-round aspirational and intellectual draft choices.

This isn’t complicated. In today’s wired world, the most important economic competition is no longer between countries or companies. The most important economic competition is actually between you and your own imagination. Because what your kids imagine, they can now act on farther, faster, cheaper than ever before — as individuals. Today, just about everything is becoming a commodity, except imagination, except the ability to spark new ideas.

If I just have the spark of an idea now, I can get a designer in Taiwan to design it. I can get a factory in China to produce a prototype. I can get a factory in Vietnam to mass manufacture it. I can use Amazon.com to handle fulfillment. I can use freelancer.com to find someone to do my logo and manage by backroom. And I can do all this at incredibly low prices. The one thing that is not a commodity and never will be is that spark of an idea. And this Intel dinner was all about our best sparklers.

I look at that list of so-called immigrants and see the names: Linda, Alice, Angela, Lynnelle, Kevin, Benjamin, Jane, Katheryn, Paul, David, Elisa, Peter, and John Vincenzo, and I think to myself that we're looking not at new immigrant families suddenly storming the intellectual frontiers of America but second, third, or fourth generation American families of Asian descent who attend public schools getting the attention they richly deserve.

Friedman is never gracious enough to tip his hat to the public schools that nurture this talent.

And by emphasizing the last names of the winners strictly in Asian and Indian terms, he asserts a racist and dangerous propensity for disregarding the Italians, Irish, Poles, Israelis, and the multitude of other legal immigrants who ARE JUST AS SMART, JUST AS HARD-WORKING, and what have you. Friedman's monologue is as anti-American as I can imagine.

What this contest demonstrates is the success of America's melting pot of talent, not the cherry picking of talent from overseas. He misses that point. ALL. THE. TIME.

But that's not his biggest blind spot. There is no such thing as competition in an asymmetric contest. Magic isn't whats happening in his delusional celebration of 'free' markets. Economic chaos is what's happening. Ecological disaster is happening. Child labor is happening. American jobs are being plundered and our nation in depression is what's happening.

How about putting reality into your imagination once in a while, Mr. Friedman?

Oh, btw, readers will note that the winner did not come from that list. Just sayin'

Education's Marketing Crisis

2010-03-19T13:11:00.001-04:00

You can't make this stuff up. If I did I'd lose all creditability.

A couple of days ago, high school graduate and Governor, Jodi Rell appointed a new panel to -cough- provide recommendations for closing the "achievement gap" our national euphemism for the urban internment camps that warehouse the poor, unfortunate, and chronically criminal or unbalanced elements of our society. I've cited studies about this in this blog before.

And I'm sure all of you are familiar with the overseas junkets that waste taxpayer's money in studying schools in places like India and China where universal education is, well, not universal. But boy oh boy is sure makes for a nice expenses paid vacation for the bureaucrats who ~~take advantage~~, er, go to learn.

Well, this panel is nothing like that. According to Grace E. Merritt's reporting in the Courant,

The group's membership was carefully crafted, he [Steven J. Simmons of Greenwich] said, almost entirely comprising current and retired bank and insurance CEOs, along with three members of education and community foundations.

"I thought about the best way to do this and came to the conclusion that the idea that would make most sense is to have a commission of folks who were familiar with education but did not have a particular point of view or represent a particular interest group," Simmons said. "This gets some business folks together who are experienced at solving problems and have been the heads of their companies."

There's nothing as refreshing as a group of CEOs whose salaries and life experiences are so comfortably made possible by warehousing the poor in cities away from the yacht clubs, docks and four star restaurants they've grown so accustomed to. In fact, as CEOs one of the ways they "solved problems" is by keeping wages low, marginalizing non-conformists, stifling any hint of cultural diversity, resisting affirmative action, outsourcing jobs, promoting a police State mentality that ranks CT as one of the highest states of incarceration, driving the American economy to an era of depression, and other such feel good solutions.

Like me, I'm sure you can't wait to see their recommendations for closing the achievement gap.

It should be noted that the panel is...

Led by Steven J. Simmons of Greenwich, who is chairman and CEO of Simmons/Patriot Media and Communications, the privately funded commission will hold hearings, visit public schools, study research, and travel to see how other states have solved the problem.

That's right. Marketing - not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that maybe a person familiar with housing discrimination, social inequality, or say, EDUCATION might be the person to lead the panel. Just sayin'.

But Connecticut's Teacher's Unions are advertising as well. And their commercials prove how bad science education is in this country. In their commercials, they claim small classroom sizes are important to teaching children. Yet no study has conclusively proved any such thing. It's true that it is a pervasive social myth that forces schools to over-staff but there's no science to it.

For shame.

Follow the Money

2010-03-17T01:20:00.000-04:00

The State Capitol is abuzz with stories about money. Lots of money. This article by Don Stacom of the Courant states,

The $30 million is relatively small change in a state that gives more than $2.7 billion a year to towns and cities. But for many small towns, it's a big share of their state aid. They don't get the hundreds of millions in school aid and social services grants that go to big and mid-sized cities, and road maintenance is one of their biggest expenses.

"It's a big part of a small town's budget," Kent First Selectman Bruce Adams said Monday. "We're getting $135,000 — for a small town, that's a decent sum."

WOW! Thirty million dollars to repair roads. But what's that other number? HUNDREDS of MILLIONS in school aid and social services grants! Hundreds of millions. That's a serious chunk of change for a small number of CT large cities.

One would think AFTER DECADES of this kind of spending - BILLIONS of tax dollars that we could safely say schools in urban CT areas are well-funded. I guess not.

In a different article by Christopher Keating we find that the burbs and small towns are so broke that Mayors Asking for a Regional Sales Tax.

Similar retail tax plans have failed in the past when the proposals would have given the communities with the malls all of the money. Under the latest plan, the money would be shared by multiple communities through the regional planning organizations. In Hartford, that would be the Capitol Region Council of Governments, which has 29 towns as members.

During a public hearing Monday, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and mayors pushed the concept in front of the legislature's tax-writing finance committee. Lobbyist Gian-Carl Casa said the towns need new solutions and new approaches at a time when municipalities can no longer rely on the cash-strapped state to give them additional aid. Nationally, 23 states allow cities and towns to levy sales taxes, and Connecticut's towns need the same authority, he said.

"They need the tools to do it themselves," Casa said. "We think its time has come."

With the state's budget woes expected to increase in the 2012 fiscal year, Casa said the state needs to try new ideas that would change the Land of Steady Habits.

"The need for revenue diversity is acute," Casa said. "What you're hearing from local officials is really a cry for help."

But House Republican leader Lawrence Cafero of Norwalk rejected the idea, saying that the state and towns should be thinking about cutting spending before raising revenue. One idea would be to install a 5 percent statewide sales tax and then allow the 1 percent municipal tax to keep the overall rate at the current 6 percent.

"It's more taxes to the general public," Cafero said of the proposal. "Everything is an add-on in this place. We don't need extra taxes now. I want to hear them talking about cutting spending."

In the same way, CBIA — the Connecticut Business and Industry Association — is lobbying against the bill at the state Capitol.

"You're creating numerous new jurisdictions" for sales taxes, said Eric George, a CBIA lobbyist. "Connecticut is a difficult state to do business in now. This is not going to help. This just isn't the right answer. The first thing you need to do is create more efficiencies."

Mayors and first selectmen throughout the state, however, say they have been cutting spending for years to minimize local property tax increases. Some mayors have testified that they have cut more from their budgets — as a percentage — than the legislature has cut from the state budget in Hartford.

Again, what we're hearing is more taxes that will do nothing to benefit Region 19. No, this is throwing more HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS at the same places who've already squandered BILLIONS.

Oh, well - CT politics. Right? Right.

And I've already documented how corrupt the federal funding of schooling is here and here. The politicians at the State Department of Education know it's a scam but its one that pays very well.

To top it off, United Technologies let the cat out of the bag by declaring the State is too expensive to do business in. In an article called, UTC Chief Financial Officer: Connecticut Too Expensive To Do Work, Eric Gershon of the Courant reported,

Connecticut's biggest private employer is determined to do more of its work outside its home state and other "high-cost" locations, top executives said Friday at an investors' conference in New York.

"Anyplace outside of Connecticut is low-cost," United Technologies Corp.'s chief financial officer, Gregory Hayes, told Wall Street investment analysts — paraphrasing previous remarks by another UTC executive, Jeff Pino, president of Sikorsky Aircraft.

"Even if work has to stay in the U.S., there are opportunities to reduce cost by moving out of those high-cost locations," Hayes said.

Nowhere in the article was the ever present CBIA trotted out to lecture CT residents that it is the public school's fault for all things economically failing. NO UTC finally figured it out. It's too expensive. Good for them. Even a broken clock is right once in a while.

So what else is the State concerned about? School "reform" 'options". Grace E. Merritt elaborates in the Courant;

Hundreds showed up for legislative hearings on a dozen major school reform proposals Monday that would significantly change the way public schools operate, from the way teachers are evaluated to parents' ability to shut down failing schools.

Students, advocates and others filled four overflow rooms to listen to 62 people testify on the bills. Several speakers spoke in favor of changing the way charter schools are funded. Currently the state pays $9,300 to charter schools for each student who attends — significantly less than the nearly $14,000 average paid to a traditional public school.

Francheska Calderon, a senior at Amistad-Elm City High School, credited her charter school with changing her from an angry girl worried about how others saw her to a student focused on achievement. She said that 100 percent of her senior class has been accepted to a four-year college.

"Charter schools deserve to be equally funded, not just 75 percent of what traditional public school students are given," Calderon said.

Advocates, such as the ConnCAN education reform group, said the state pays twice for the same charter school student: once to the local school system for a student that the system no longer educates, and once to the charter school.

The proposal calls for school systems to pay for their students who attend charter schools, a formula that would require towns to pay thousands, even millions more to cover charter costs.

Another bill calls for teacher performance evaluations to be tied to how well students perform in school.

The bill calls for building a database that would track students through college. Evaluators would look at how well students performs to determine how effective the teacher is.

The Connecticut Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union, said it favors solid, research-based reforms but said that the proposed system focuses too narrowly on test scores and might "scapegoat teachers for society's ills." It would penalize teachers who, for example, have a gift for motivating low-achieving or difficult students, they said.

Another major item was the so-called "Parent Trigger" legislation, which would allow 51 percent or more of parents from a school that has failed to make progress for three consecutive years to petition for intervention. During the hearing, many testified that they felt parents have no say and have had to watch their children attend failing schools, sometimes for generations.

Yeah, the charter school students look to be underfunded IFF you ignore the fact that charter schools serve the most capable and not the least capable students. The students with disabilities, handicaps, psychological problems, and so on [in other words the most expensive to service] are left to the public schools who are then attacked for receiving more funds. Sweet argument for the charter profiteers. Equal funding equals big profits on low maintenance students.

The bottom line for Region 19 is that our towns will continue to be underfunded as the State sinks deeper in debt and buries us in higher taxes. In Hartford, they will spend millions following the expert advice of dropouts and spineless politicians playing Washington's game of spending money to increase the cost of education.

An I the only one tired of this recipe?

Oh, Curriculum!

2010-03-15T12:36:00.000-04:00

Sunday the New York Times reported on the textbook curriculum changes that were made to appease the State of Texas special interests. As usual, the changes are both dogmatic and intended to imprint students with ceratin myths that make open-minded learning and thinking difficult.

Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made.

The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board’s makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others — one Democrat and one conservative Republican — announced they were not seeking re-election.

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

No sooner had the article been published than a twitter feed dedicated a parody of these changes was established. Twitterers from all over the country have added their own changes using a tag of #texastextbookfact to identify their entries.

Here are a few:

Texas was the first state to recognize the value of the Negro race to high school athletic programs

Mountain top removal mining puts everyone on the same economic playing field.

Slavery was an ambassador program meant to bring people to America to save them from poverty and socialism.

Women should have the right to choose between paper and plastic.

Adam & Eve waited til they were married before the consummated their love.

You are only required to be able to count as high as your largest ammo clip.

Every time you shoot something, an angel gets its wings.

Racial disparities in sentencing are the fault of activist judges.

native americans welcomed americans as liberators

If you enjoy snarky humor just type #texastextbookfact into the twitter search app and it will begin listing the latest Texas revisions to American History, Science and Math.

Deconstructing The American Dream

2010-03-11T10:38:00.004-05:00

There's a John Lennon tune, one of his last with the lyric, "There are no problems - only solutions".

The quality of the solutions America has come to embrace have sucked us into a death spiral. Corporate pranksters with money enough to influence legislators unconscionably tinker with policies that toy with the needs and desires of citizens. Legislators surround themselves with self-serving experts who have no interest in the public good and eliminate wholesale class of solutions that would enrich this nation as a whole for the sake of a few who could care less if America disappeared into history's ashes.

Today, Herbert Kohl writes in Philadelphia Public School's Notebook an essay on Opportunity to learn, rush to equity. In the article he describes how a reasonable and coherent program to introduce equity in schools nationwide was turned into the systematic , system-wide cancer that NCLB and Race to the Top have become. And he tells us what could have been.

Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities dramatically documents the lack of opportunity presented to many poor children. Taking off from there, we raised the issue of how to negate those inequalities. The question that droves this analysis was: Do all children have the same opportunities to learn?

We were careful to avoid the question of poverty, family background, etc. because we wanted to make strictly educational arguments. We wanted to focus specifically on the conditions of schooling and make the opportunity to learn an equity issue. In this context we wanted to create a series of measures of equity, amongst which were:

* What are the facilities necessary to promote equitable learning?

* What is an equitable ratio of students to teachers?

* What is the range and scope of a learning program that promotes equitable learning – this would include the arts, opportunity for athletics and cultural learning, Advanced Placement courses, science labs?

* What are the credentials teachers are expected to have to produce excellence in learning?

* What kind of wages and working conditions contribute to educational opportunity for children?

* What kinds of supplies and equipment must all school have access to (textbooks, computers, etc.)?

* What kind of standards and measures should be used to measure a school’s effectiveness as an equitable learning institution?

* What role should parents and community organizations play to ensure that schools in their communities are equitable?

There were other conditions, but the idea was to establish a base for what was equitable based upon an analysis of successful public schools across the nation.

We did not want to tie this notion into variables that had to do with conditions outside of the context of schools, as we wanted educational solutions to educational problems. In other words, we wanted to assert that, when given the resources, schools across the country could deliver excellent, equitable education.

We were not advocating a single standard, so much as a series of baselines.

We have to ask ourselves how this got so perverted.What progressives of that time - Wellstone, Kohl, Koziol, and others were advocating was that schools all be instrumented with infrastructure, personnel, pedagogy, and curriculum that offered ALL students the opportunity to learn and allowed all schools to contribute their best efforts toward improving the human condition.

There is no explicit or implicit promise that EVERY child will literally be exactly equal in test score to another in lock step periodic progression ignoring all individual spirit. there is no mention that schools can be failures or that teachers be "held accountable" for anything more than pedagogical self-improvement. And there is no prescription that in the nation's poorest cities, modern school cathedrals should substitute shiny new buildings for vacant curriculum, demoralized personnel, and absurdist expectations.

Yet that's precisely what we have. Not only that WE KNOW ITS A FRAUD. Let me repeat that. WE KNOW ITS A FRAUD and yet we keep throwing money, goodwill, and political capital into something that can only harm public education. In this Democracy Now interview, Diane Ratvich, one of the architects of the draconian solution exposes what it has matured into:

JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the things that you’ve pointed out many times is that the entire testing system of the country right now is rife with corruption and with fraud—

DIANE RAVITCH: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —because you basically have every state deciding its own test standards, and they keep reporting that their kids are doing better. But then every time the national government does a national assessment test, these same states are not improving.

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, this is the great legacy of No Child Left Behind, is that it has left us with a system of institutionalized fraud. And the institutionalized fraud is that No Child Left Behind has mandated that every child is going to be proficient by the year 2014. Except they’re not, because no state and no nation has ever had 100 percent of the children proficient. Kids have all kinds of problems. And whether it’s poverty or a million things, there’s no such thing as 100 percent proficiency.

But every year we get closer to 2014, the bar goes up, and the states are told, “If you don’t reach that bar, you’re going to be punished. Schools will be closed. They’ll be turned into charter schools.” That’s part of the federal mandate, is that schools will be privatized if they can’t meet that impossible goal. So in order to preserve some semblance of public education, the states have been encouraged to lie, and many of them are lying, and so we see states that are saying, “90 percent of our kids are proficient in reading,” and then when the national test comes out, it’s 25 percent.

AMY GOODMAN: Diane Ravitch, we said at the top of this segment that the Department of Education announced sixteen finalists for its first round of the “Race to the Top” competition. They’re going to deliver something like $4.35 billion in school reform grants. And the Washington Post is reporting almost all of these finalists got money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In your book, chapter ten is called “The Billionaire Boys Club.” Explain.

DIANE RAVITCH: “The Billionaires Boys Club” is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations—the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations—Gates, Broad and Walton—are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the US Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding.

The Obama administration appointed somebody from the NewSchools Venture Fund to run this so-called “Race to the Top.” The NewSchools Venture Fund exists to promote charter schools. So, what we’re seeing with the proliferation—with this demand from the federal government, if you want to be part of this $4 billion fund, you better be prepared to create lots more charter schools. Well, it’s all predetermined by who the personnel is. And, you know, so we see this immense influence of the foundations.

And I think that with the proliferation of charter schools, the bottom-line issue is the survival of public education, because we’re going to see many, many more privatized schools and no transparency as to who’s running them, where the money is going, and everything being determined by test scores.

So the whole picture, I think—I just wish that people wouldn’t refer to this as reform, because when we talk about “Race to the Top,” we’re talking about a principle that is antithetical to the fundamental idea of American education. The fundamental idea, which has been enshrined at least since the Brown decision of 1954, was equal educational opportunity. “Race to the Top” is not equal educational opportunity. It is a race in which one or two or three states race to the top to have more privatized schools, more test-based accountability, more basic skills, no emphasis on a broad curriculum for all kids, and no equal educational opportunity. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s also not the role of the federal government to do what’s being done and to call it reform.

We cannot say we don't know what's going on. It's time to stand up and demand it stops. That starts with a call for the resignation of Arne Duncan and a request that progressives snap-slap our legislators into an ethical deconstruction of the monstrosity that Federal and State educational policy has become.

Make no mistake about it, these people are idiots and that won't change. But thinking adults need to rescue our taxes and our public schools from further buffoonery.

Education Budgets as Ponzi Schemes

2010-03-10T09:25:00.004-05:00

Today's School Boards are presiding over a sea-change in budgeting. Baby-boomer educators are retiring in large numbers and being replaced by the younger generation and boy, this is a good thing in many, many cases.

So, in attending Board meetings you'll hear that the school is "saving" money". That's hard to argue with. Saving money means that that money can REDUCE the budget - the taxpayers should see their education taxes lower.

But that's not how the system is being gamed. What happens year over year is that the so-called savings are rolled back into the coming year's budget. Fair enough. Maybe that pays for some increases. Maybe. Again, as a taxpayer one would think that that would mean that the school budget requires NO INCREASE because [simple math]:

Last Year's Budget - retiring teachers = New Budget + increased expenses = NO TOTAL BUDGET INCREASE

But that's not how the system is being gamed either.

Every year without fail what happens is:

Last Year's Budget + savings of retiring teachers + increased expenses = New budget greater than sum of all of last year's budget including "savings"

Let's put this into perspective. You give your child a five dollar bill to go buy bread thinking its cheaper than five dollars but five dollars is sufficient because maybe somebody's price-gouging.

The kid goes to the store and says, "Dad, good news! The bread's on sale for four dollars!"

Dad thinks, Great, I have enough to by a cup of coffee.

The kid gets home with the bread. "Where's the change?"

"Change? I had to borrow money to buy the bread. It costs six dollars by the time I got to the cash register. They hired a new bagger to help the cashier and the price of bread went from four dollars to six dollars."

Now Dad has no coffee today or tomorrow.

"Don't worry Dad, the bagger really needed the job."

Race to the Gurney

2010-03-09T14:17:00.003-05:00

Mark Benjamin of Salon is reporting on the details of water-boarding technique used on prisoners in America's custody. It is this meticulous attention to detail that separates us from mere barbarians and it is this culture into which our children will learn their adult civic lessons.

Enjoy.

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."

Did the report say "incompetent"? It won't be long before we'll have a Washington inspired Race To The Gurney competition for public schools.

Institutional Tough Love - Reduce the Upcoming Budget

2010-03-08T00:18:00.008-05:00

I received a critical comment for my Hitler parody video today on YouTube. It reads:

I don't know who created this, but clearly it's a grandstanding person who is trying to curry favor by advocating cuts and fiscal prudence for an already underfunded school. As such, the author appears to be more part of the problem than part of the solution, IMHO.

I'm the grandstanding person he's talking about. The critic must think there's something appealing about advocating budget cuts in education. There's not. My wife and many neighbors are teachers. They earn and deserve every penny.

But getting elected to a School Board carries responsibilities that are a double-edged sword. We have to do right by the students and the community. The critic assumes our school is underfunded. And in the psychedelic world of educational economics this is always true. It is an American meme to believe schools are underfunded. The unions, parents, teachers and administrators will all swear on stacks of holy books that this is the problem. And far too many Board members believe their job is simply to escalate and spend endlessly like rich aunts and uncles - visiting dignitaries with no responsibilities except to be loved for their largess.

In fact the idea of cutting a school budget is so antithetically imprinted on Board members that every year I sit through at least one near nervous breakdown monologue about how emotionally unprepared that school board member is to imagine cutting the school budget. No Hollywood drama can ever express the angst that goes along with these discussions.

I pass along cogent and what I believe are compelling arguments for cutting the budget. And the argument I receive far more than any other is that teachers don't make as much as billionaires and CEOs. It's hard to argue with that. By that metric teachers are really making a lot less.

But I don't live in a town of CEOs and billionaires who we can shake down for pocket change that will pay for the substantial increases in our expenses.

I know better than that but the education industry is deaf and blind to the human condition outside their world. In fact, our teachers have NEVER gone a year without a substantial raise in the past decade. In a decade where most working Americans have seen zero income growth, teachers here operate as if its too damned bad. Cough up more taxes. Ditto for administrators making six figures more or less. Teaching shared community sacrifice is something abstract that doesn't happen here.

The fact of the matter is that EO Smith is spending money as if this were the Roaring Twenties rather the Depression era of the new century. These days the unemployed are unionizing to get relief.

It's been only a month that a union for the unemployed has come into existence through an ingenious grassroots organizing campaign. In case you haven't heard about it, the union's name is "UR Union of the Unemployed" or its nickname, "UCubed," because of its unique method of organizing.

UCubed is the brain-child of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), whose leaders feel that the millions of unemployed workers need a union of their own to join in the struggle for massive jobs programs.

The idea is that if millions of jobless join together and act as an organization, they are more likely to get Congress and the White House to provide the jobs that are urgently needed. They can also apply pressure for health insurance coverage, unemployment insurance and COBRA benefits and food stamps. An unemployed worker is virtually helpless if he or she has to act alone.

Joining a Cube is as simple as it is important. (Please check the union web site: http://www.unionofunemployed.com ). Six people who live in the same zip code address can form a Ucube. Nine such UCubes make a neighborhood. Three neighborhood UCubes form a power block that contains 162 activists. Politicians cannot easily ignore a multitude of power blocks, nor can merchants avoid them.

There is not a day that goes by that the State of Connecticut is either deferring pension payments or raising fees on citizens, or cutting local aid. In an economic climate in which the taxpayer is being squeezed from all sides the teachers and administrator's contracts project unbridled avarice and greed. If I were complaining about price gouging of oil companies, electric bills, or a local crook no one would claim I was part of the problem.

I'm not a tea-bagger and I have better things to do with my life but as long as I'm serving I owe the public an opportunity to insist on a cutback this year and for the next few years. Its not a message, its not malicious. It's necessary.

The community needs to set the amount that a school can spend and then the process of seeing what that sum affords can begin.

Frugal Funding

2010-03-04T01:41:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, Tom Friedman reported a conversation with Intel's CEO Paul Otellini looking for yet another cheap shot criticism of American public schools. Otellini deflected the opportunity.

Instead Otellini, offered a series of fairly pedestrian prescriptions that advocated the usual tax break rhetoric one would expect from a corporate lobbyist. But the closing statement in Friedman's column of Otellini's concern about changing the course of a company during economic crisis is worth examining in the context of education.

“Having run a company through a major transition, it’s a lot easier to change when you can than when you have to,” said Otellini. “The cost is less. You have more time. I am a little worried that by the time we wake up to the crisis we will be in the abyss.”

This year I have taken a very strong stand on reducing the EO Smith budget. I'm hoping to convince the Board that a one percent year to year reduction is in order. And my reasoning echoes Otelllini.

I think we need to be preemptive about managing costs that are spiraling out of control. And I also have no intention of waiting for the next crisis to paralyze our communities. That's not the time to have this conversation.A friend of mine brought a recent speech by NJ Governor Chris Christie to my attention.

...we can no longer continue on a path where we say we are going to reduce spending at the state level but we are not going to give you any tools to do that at the municipal level and the school board level.

By the same token I am tired of hearing school superintendents and school board members complain that there are no other options than raising property taxes. There are other options.

You know, Marlboro, after a two year negotiation, they give a five year contract giving 4.5% annual salary increases to the teachers, with no contribution, zero contribution to health care benefits.

But I am sure there are people in Marlboro who have lost their jobs, who have had their homes foreclosed on, and who cannot keep a roof over their family's head there is something wrong.

You know, at some point there has to be parity. There has to be parity between what is happening in the real world, and what is happening in the public sector world. The money does not grow on trees outside this building or outside your municipal building. It comes from the hard working people of our communities who are suffering and are hurting right now.

...[snip]...

I would love to tell you that municipal aid will stay level, but it's not. And it's not because we don't have the money. So you need to prepare. You need to prepare for what's coming down the line because we have no choice but to do these things.

And so we need to get honest with each other. In this instance, the political class,for which unfortunately all of us are a member of, the political class is lagging behind the public on this. The public is ready to hear that tough choices have to be made. They're not going to like it. Don't confuse the two. But they are ready to hear the truth.

In fact, they find it refreshing to hear the truth.

They are tired of hearing, don't worry I can spare you from the pain, because they have been hearing that for a decade, as we have borrowed and spent and taxed our way into oblivion.

We have done every quick fix in the book that you can do. And now we are left, literally holding the bag.

Leadership should be about making tough decisions. I'm not hear to tell you that anything you are going to have to do as mayors, council people will be easy. But I firmly believe after spending the last year traveling around the state of New Jersey, talking to regular citizens, that this is what they are expecting us to do.

They are also expecting us to ferret out waste and abuse. But they also know that old song that waste and abuse is going to balance the budget is an old and tired one, and it's not going to.

...[snip]...

We need to understand we are all in this together. And you know, all of you know in your heart, what I am saying is true. You all know that these raises that are being given to public employees of all stripes, we cannot afford. You all know the state cannot continue to spend money it does not have. And you all know that the appetite for tax increases among our constituents has come to an end.

And so the path to reform and success is clear. We know what it is. We just have to have the courage to go there. What we are doing is showing people that government can work again for them, not for us. Government has worked for the political class for much too long.

There's no time left. We have no room left to borrow. We have no room left to tax. So we merely have room left now, to do this. We are all reaching the edge of a cliff. And it reminds me a bit of that part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where the had a seminal decision to make. So what did they do? They held hands and they jumped off the cliff.

We have to hold hands at every level of government, state county, municipal, school board. We have to hold hands and jump off the cliff.

I firmly believe we will land and we will be fine. It does not mean it will not be a scary ride on the way down. And it does not mean there won't be moments of fear and moments of apprehension.

But for certain, the troops of the decades of overspending and overborrowing and overtaxing have gained on us. So the ruination of New Jersey's economy, and of the quality of life we want all our citizens to have, is certain if we do not take this course.

It's time for us to hold hands and jump off the cliff. It's time for us to do the difficult things that need to be done and to stop playing the petty politics of yesterday, of lying to the people telling them they do not have to pay for it because someone else will.

We are going to make the leap because that's what people elected me to do. We are going to make the leap because it is the responsible thing to do. We are going to make the leap and we are going to do it together because that is what leadership demands for us. That is what the responsibility of the offices we hold requires of us.

Connecticut is in the same economic condition as New Jersey. A few details will vary but Gov. Christie's speech is true and urgent.

In order for Region 19 to survive the current economic malaise and to eventually recover, our community needs to constrain the budget severely this year. It's unpleasant and it will be uncomfortable but its necessary for the sake of all the communities involved.

EO Smith will have larger class sizes and parents, students, and teachers will holler but quite frankly these class sizes are already being experienced at the elementary school levels because of the strain the EO Smith budget puts on local budgets. And class size is a far more important metric at the elementary school levels than they are in high school.

EO Smith, its teachers and students can handle it. If tax-payers can handle adversity then our schools and children need to learn to as well.

EO Smith has a chronic problem that needs our attention. The track and field needs rebuilding. I cannot support a referendum to fund that rebuilding unless our Region 19 budget is brought into a significantly constrained scope.

I have served on the Board for over four years and in all of those years generous spending habits dictated budget. For the foreseeable future we need to change that formula so that EO Smith spends only what is frugally budgeted.

In a recent essay on abundance called "How Abundance Breaks Everything", Clay Shirky provides some insight in how we can manage the economic changes we're going through.

It’s easy to say “preserve the best of the old and combine it with the best of the new,” but in revolution, the best of the new is incompatible with the best of the old. It’s about doing things a whole new way.

Spending less money will have its challenges but those challenges are opportunities to re-invent the way we deliver education. We cannot reduce the budget and not change the way we do business. That is an implicit consequence of that decision.

I've given you my viewpoint. This is what I'm voting for and why. As citizens you need to think about all of this and make your voices heard.

I'm listening but this year I'm not voting to spend any more money than we can afford unless I hear some damned good arguments to change my mind.

Serpico - All Over Again, Adil Polanco - American Hero

2010-03-03T10:22:00.004-05:00

Jim Hoffer at an NY ABC affiliate is reporting on the covert practices of Police in one NY Precinct. Given the nature of the practice, it is likely a viral practice within all urban police communities and it is symptomatic of the way that society is being micro-managed by the self-appointed government bureaucrats who want to be our jailers.

This video is a tribute to the fine art of journalism done right:

Officer Adil Polanco is doing something so ethical that he reminds us of who police used to be.

When Officer Adil Polanco dreamed of becoming a cop, it was out of a desire to help people not, he says, to harass them.

"I'm not going to keep arresting innocent people, I'm not going to keep searching people for no reason, I'm not going to keep writing people for no reason, I'm tired of this," said Adil Polanco, an NYPD Officer.

Officer Polanco says One Police Plaza's obsession with keeping crime stats down has gotten out of control. He claims Precinct Commanders relentlessly pressure cops on the street to make more arrests, and give out more summonses, all to show headquarters they have a tight grip on their neighborhoods.

"Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them?" said Officer Polanco.

Polanco goes on to explain to Hoffer the effect this has on urban youth. The same urban youth public schools and teachers are being "held accountable" for. The math lessons they are learning in the streets will be hard to overcome.

Eyewitness News asked, "Are you telling me they're stopping people for no reason, is that what you're saying?"

"We are stopping kids walking upstairs to their house, stopping kids going to the store, young adults. In order to keep the quota," answered Officer Polanco.

"Yeah, they locked us up for nothing," said Zebulun Colbourne.

The Colbourne brothers say they and three other friends were the victims of quotas. All were arrested a few months ago after one of them had fallen while racing each other.

Eyewitness News asked, "You fell and that's how you hurt your eye?"

"Yeah, and they just wanted to arrest us. I told them I fell but that didn't matter to them," said Elijah Colbourne.

All five were accused of engaging in tumultuous and violent conduct that caused public alarm, given a summons for unlawful assembly and locked up overnight.

Eyewitness News asked, "So you're locked up waiting to see the judge, right?"

"Yeah," answered the Colbourne brothers.

Eyewitness News asked, "Then what do they do?"

"We don't see the judge, they let us out the back door after they kept us for a day and some change," said Elijah Colbourne.

The charges were dropped, but Officer Polanco says the patrolman still got 5 summonses toward their monthly quota.

"At the end of the night you have to come back with something. You have to write somebody, you have to arrest somebody, even if the crime is not committed, the number's there. So our choice is to come up with the number," said Officer Polanco.

Hitler Finds Out About EO Smith's Budget

2010-02-28T13:48:00.003-05:00

WebCamGate: Who Watches the Watchers?

2010-02-25T01:00:00.002-05:00

The WebCamGate case in which the Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia, PA developed and authorized the use of software to visually monitor students using school issued computers off school grounds is raising new questions very day.

There is every indication that the laptops issued to students at the Harriton High School in that district were instrumented to act as virtual stalkers. This news report confirms that students believed they were being surreptitiously monitored by someone at the school.
What becomes immediately obvious, even from this limited student testimony is that these students are not hardened criminals and the cracked voice fear that this one student had and the legitimate concern for the privacy of his family's lives is chilling. The behavior of the web cams as described is more like that of a peeping tom than a tracking system.

Another youTube video explains the parents concern:

Again, the school's explanations that only 42 instances took place sound like fiction based on the fact that numerous students reported the web cam activity AND the vice principal who somehow is accused of confronting a student about "drugs" (Mike and Ike candies). This is not only a case of spying but defamation of these student's character and the vice principal's character.

The fact that this boy's family is also politically connected (Hillary Clinton) is another aspect of the case. Was this family being set up because of their political convictions? Dirty tricks? It's been known to happen.

But the vice principal's denials of culpability are troubling. If she didn't authorize this intrusion, who did? And why did the school ignore the previous concerns?

This has become an example of a real-life Truman Show and the details continue to unfold. Today, all leads point to the school's technician,.Mike Perbix.

Who's Your Daddy?

2010-02-23T00:51:00.005-05:00

An incident in Pennsylvania is receiving the scrutiny of the FBI and with good reason. The incident is being called WebCamGate by the mass media. Education Week summarizes the details in an article post by By Dan Hardy, Derrick Nunnally, and John Shiffman of the Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT).

Blake Robbins, 15, said in the suit that an assistant principal confronted him last November with a photo from the laptop—supposedly evidence he was involved in "improper behavior" in his Penn Valley house.

The teenager has said that he was holding Mike & Ike candy in his hand, and that the assistant principal thought they might be drugs.

The system was triggered 42 times this school year, in an attempt to track lost or missing computers, school officials say.

District spokesman Douglas Young yesterday repeated that the security program was developed to help recover lost or stolen laptops, and added: "This included tracking loaner laptops that may, against regulations, have been taken off campus."

Furthermore, the article goes on to assert that the administration had been previously confronted by individuals concerned about the legality and ethics of the software;

More than a year ago, two Harriton High School student council members privately confronted the principal when they learned that the school could covertly photograph students using the laptop's cameras.

When Kline said it was true, the students told the principal they were worried about privacy rights, and asked questions about other kinds of monitoring. Could, for example, the school system read saved files on their computers? At a minimum, the student leaders told the principal, the student body should be formal warned about any surveillance.

But nothing happened, according to other council members who were briefed afterward, and the student leaders returned a short while later to once again tell the principal that they were greatly concerned about a potential invasion of privacy. Again, nothing happened.

Kline and district spokesman Young did not respond yesterday to requests for comment about the meeting with the principal.

A class action lawsuit has been filed and justifiably so. The software called LanRev has been downplayed as little more than a security software program that helps the school track stolen laptops. But the school is not a law enforcement agency. If the laptops were indeed stolen instead of simply removed from school for home use then the school should have reported them stolen and allowed the police to handle their retrieval.

But that's not what happened. Instead, the school officials did precisely what bureaucrats with too much time on their hands and the opportunity to overstep their authority always do. Like the script of a bad movie they activated the webcam of the laptops of students, collected those snapshots, and apparently confronted at least one student who was eating candy that looked like pills as a drug user.

Here at the Gazette we are shocked by nothing that school officials get involved with. As Einstein is quoted as saying, "the difference between genius and stupidity is that stupidity has no limits."

What concerns us more is the fact that the LanRev software can be and may have been used in a much more pernicious fashion. You see, contrary to the sugar-coated, law-abiding explanation that the administration has painted of this software, it can be used to for criminal behaviors that have the potential to incriminate the end-user (e.g. a student, teacher, administrator, and so on) instead of the true criminal. In other words, in the hands of a disgruntled technical help desk employee, an innocent target's life can be irreversibly harmed. This video details in very technical terms the scope of this software's reach:

To translate that into plain language, this software can covertly alter just about anything on a client machine so that the user can be spied on, the machine used to download pornography or act as a cracking platform, and more. Everything and anything can be compromised including your antivirus, spyware, and malware products.

This software has no place in schools. Innocent families, teachers, employees, or relatives can get entrapped in Julie Amero type nightmares that occur only because software with the same ability to maim a life as a gun is being put into the hands of fools.

And today this is only a school incident. But this stuff poses a political and terrorist threat as well. Imagine the havoc this kind of software can play in a Senator's office, at Homeland Security, the Pentagon, or maybe a foreign diplomat, the UN, and so on. You won't know the Cam is on or the microphone and maybe a background script is working to dump or access confidential information.

The FBI needs to take a long, hard look at this stuff.

Should Teachers Unions Pull Out of Urban Schools?

2010-02-22T10:31:00.003-05:00

There is a time to cut your losses. It seems to me that teachers unions are not only losing the fight to provide a quality education in America's cities but they are being unfairly and irreparably harmed for the effort. It may be time to pull out.

Let the philanthropists, oligarchs, big city politicians, urban right-wing parent organizations, and profit-seeking educational entrepreneurs have at it - ALL OF IT.

The teachers unions would be wise to retreat to the places where education can be practiced sanely. A place where expectations are matched by parental attention, an audience that's receptive, and with sufficient resources to do the job.

It will not be long before those who inherit the task will be calling for an end to standardized tests as a metric of success. In fact they'll be angry that public schools with unions have an unfair advantage in providing superior product. It'll be called class warfare and racist and unfair. It'll be a fun lesson in educational pragmatism.

You might be wondering why I make such a suggestion. The latest NYTimes article called The New Poor by Peter S. Goodman about poverty is a start;

Some poverty experts say the broader social safety net is not up to cushioning the impact of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Social services are less extensive than during the last period of double-digit unemployment, in the early 1980s.

On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply.

“You have very large sets of people who have no social protections,” said Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They are landing in this netherworld.”

So what's the netherworld look like you ask. In No Child Left Behind as an Anti-Poverty Measure by Jean Anyon & Kiersten Greene we find out;

For more education to lead to better jobs, there have to be jobs available. However, there are not now, nor have there been for more than two decades, nearly
enough jobs for those who need them. Labor economist Gordon Lafer demonstrated that over the period 1984 to 1996—at the height of an alleged labor shortage—the number of people in need of work exceeded the total number of job openings by an average of five to one. In 1996, for example, the country would have needed 14.4 million jobs in order for all low-income people to work their way out of poverty. However, there were at most 2.4 million job openings available to meet this need; of these, only one million were in full-time, non-managerial positions (2002).

Furthermore, the jobs the U.S. economy now produces are primarily poverty-wage jobs—and only a relative few highly paid ones—making it increasingly less certain that education will assure that work pays well (Anyon, 2005). Seventy-seven percent of new and projected jobs in the next decade will be low-paying. Only a quarter of these are expected to pay over $26,000 a year (in 2002 dollars). A mere 12.6% will require a college degree, while most will require on-the-job training only. Of the 20 occupations expected to grow the fastest, only six require college
degrees—these are in computer systems and computer information technology fields, and there are relatively few of these jobs overall (Department of Labor, 2002).

Gender discrimination can work to reverse—or even eliminate—wage gains that accrue to individuals with more education. Female high school graduates earn less than male high school dropouts. And women with post-bachelor’s degrees earn less than men who have just a bachelor’s (Lafer, 2002; Mishel, Bernstein, & Boushey, 2003; Wolff, 2003). If you are female, more education does not necessarily mean higher wages.

Race as well can cut into the benefits of further education. A study of entry-level workers in California, for example, discovered that Black and Latino youth had improved significantly on every measure of skill in absolute terms and relative to White workers. Yet their wages were falling further behind those of Whites. In this example, the deleterious effects of racism outweighed the benefits of education, with minority workers at every level of education losing ground to similarly prepared Whites (Lafer, 2002).

Various other economic realities—such as lack of unionization, multiple free trade agreements which outsource jobs, and increasing use of part-time workers — cut across the college-wage benefit, lowering it significantly for large numbers of people, most of whom are minorities and women.

Even a college degree no longer guarantees a decent job. One of six college graduates is in a job paying less than the average salary of high school graduates (Anyon, 2005). Between 8.8% and 11% of people with a bachelor’s degree make around the minimum wage. This means that an increasing number of college graduates—about one in ten—is employed at poverty wages (ibid.). Even the education levels of welfare recipients are high. The share of welfare recipients who
have high school degrees has increased from 42% in 1979 to more than two-thirds (70%) in 1999 (U.S. General Accounting Office, 2001).

These realities suggest that the promise of good jobs and better pay underlying NCLB is a false one for many people—especially low-income minority students and women—because for them educational achievement brings no guarantee of economic success.

Consider, finally, that the vast majority of low-income students who do attend college do not have the funds or other supports to complete their bachelor’s degree. The majority of low-income students who attend college are forced to withdraw, and only 7 percent of very low-income people attain a bachelor’s by age 26 (Ed. Trust, 2004b).

In addition to these economic realities, there are federal policies that contradict the implicit premise of NCLB that higher educational achievement leads to good jobs. Minimum wage policy and job training policy are two examples.

What this makes plain is that public schools are being pressured to provide career education for careers that don't exist or that pay no more than minimum wage. And what of the college career tracks? Given the dropout rates and the fiscal burden of a lifetime of loan payments, does it serve society's best interest to herd students to college for a life of indentured servitude?

It is time for teachers unions to take a stand. Pull out of the urban quagmire and demand that any union teacher who is enlisted be assured of educational diplomatic immunity from the political toxins at work.

Unknown Artist: Nina Paley

2010-02-20T19:29:00.001-05:00

Paley created Sita Sings the Blues. Enjoy.

For more on Nina see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK9LGN6xHNE&feature=channel

Reading Is Fundamental (RIF)... And Dead (RIP)

2010-02-18T23:06:00.003-05:00

A number of sources are reporting that the Obama education budget is doing exactly what the Bush administration couldn't. That is kill successful and effective reading programs.

All in the name of closing the education gap of course.

Donalyn Miller in EdWeek blogs:

Last week, policymakers announced that the Fiscal Year 2011 federal budget increases funding for education, but a closer look at the proposed budget indicates that direct funding for effective literacy programs such as Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), Literacy Through Libraries, Even Start, Ready to Learn TV, Striving Readers, and the National Writing Project (NWP) will cease under the new budget. Money historically allocated to support these programs will be folded into a larger, competitive grant program offered to states.

Let the politicians know how you feel about this.

When Did the Food Drop Off the Table?

2010-02-13T18:08:00.001-05:00

This is a stunning and sobering presentation about the loss of Home Economics and Cooking Classes in schools.

Steel Cage Learning

2010-02-10T12:34:00.004-05:00

The decades old mantra of getting tough on public schools is reaching a fever pitch. And a consequence of that fever is that children and parents are cracking under the stress of it all.

Just yesterday it was reported that child was given the equivalent of a water-boarding torture because she could not recite the alphabet for her dad.

According to a police report obtained by CNN, Tabor's girlfriend called police to their home in Yelm Sunday because Tabor had dunked his daughter's head in the kitchen sink. Yelm is about 65 miles south of Seattle.

According to the police report, Tabor admitted to holding his daughter in the sink because she was afraid of water, CNN reports.

When investigators asked the little girl about the bruises on her back and scratch marks on her neck, she told them "Daddy did it."

"It was hot, the water was hot. I told him I would say my letters then!" the girl told police, according to the police report obtained by CNN.

In Detroit, citizens well indoctrinated in the get tough lynch mob mentality are calling for the jailing of teachers and administrators who are blamed for the city's low test scores.

The Detroit scores on the progress test were the lowest in its 40-year history. The sample of students included 900 of Detroit's 6,000 fourth-graders and 1,000 of the district's 6,000 eighth-graders.

Sharlonda Buckman, CEO of the Detroit Parent Network, called for jailing and civil lawsuits against anyone in the city's educational system that is not doing his or her share to help properly educate children.

"Somebody needs to go to jail," she said in a tearful address to 500 parents gathered Saturday for the organization's annual breakfast forum. "Somebody needs to pay for this. Somebody needs to go to jail, and it shouldn't be the kids."

But, increasingly school is becoming a police state that entraps kids in a legal quagmire that makes a fool of everyone. In New York students indeed go to jail for the silliest of reasons.

A 12-year-old Queens girl was hauled out of school in handcuffs for an artless offense - doodling her name on her desk in erasable marker, the Daily News has learned.

Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling a few words on her desk Monday while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, she said.

"I love my friends Abby and Faith," the girl wrote, adding the phrases "Lex was here. 2/1/10" and a smiley face.

But instead of simply cleaning off the doodles after class, Alexa landed in some adult-sized trouble for using her lime-green magic marker.

She was led out of school in cuffs and walked to the precinct across the street, where she was detained for several hours, she and her mother said.

"I started crying, like, a lot," said Alexa. "I made two little doodles. ... It could be easily erased. To put handcuffs on me is unnecessary." Alexa, who had a stellar attendance record, hasn't been back to school since, adding, "I just thought I'd get a detention. I thought maybe I would have to clean [the desk]."

"She's been throwing up," said her mom, Moraima Camacho, 49, an accountant, who lives with her daughter in Kew Gardens. "The whole situation has been a nightmare."

There are even studies claiming that smacking children is a healthy exercise.

Professor Gunnoe questioned 2,600 people about being smacked, of whom a quarter had never been physically chastised.

The participants' answers then were compared with their behaviour, such as academic success, optimism about the future, antisocial behaviour, violence and bouts of depression.

Teenagers in the survey who had been smacked only between the ages of two and six performed best on all the positive measures.

Those who had been smacked between seven and 11 fared worse on negative behaviour but were more likely to be academically successful. Teenagers who were still smacked fared worst on all counts.

Parenting guru Penelope Leach disagreed with the findings.

'No good can come from hitting a child,' she said. 'I do not buy this idea that children will learn positive behaviour from being smacked.

'The law says adults hitting adults is wrong and children should be protected in the same way. Children are people too.'

The assault on children and schools is becoming a crisis and organizations such as Stop Schools to Jails are responding. Stop Schools to Jails has issued a free action kit that helps anyone interested in the issue to begin taking action. In it you'll learn more.

Across the United States, there is an ominous trend that is cutting short the opportunity to succeed for huge numbers of children and youth. Zero tolerance policies and practices are, in many instances, pushing young people off of the academic track and onto a track to prison. This approach, which was originally intended to address the growing concerns over school safety, has been expanded to include overly harsh punishments for behavior that has no bearing on safety. Students across the country are being pushed out of school through the over-use of out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests, mostly for minor misconduct. While this trend is harming children and youth of all ages and races, it weighs most heavily on children of color, who are being pushed out or thrown out of school at alarming rates.

School districts are not acting alone. In most places, school districts have teamed up with law enforcement to create this “schoolhouse to jailhouse track.” School districts are literally delegating their responsibility for school discipline to police, resulting in a large number of incidents that are now handled by school police and juvenile courts that could be – and were once – handled by a trip to the principal’s office or a call home to a parent. If the schoolhouse to jailhouse track is not stopped now, there will be serious negative consequences for generations to come.

It's important to look at their material and get involved.

Racing to the Top, Wherever That Is

2010-02-08T10:15:00.002-05:00

Arne Duncan's Race to the Top is coming under increased scrutiny because improprieties keep springing up faster than test scores.

Late last year, Pro-Publica published an article asserting that education funding was being appropriated for "Phantom School Districts" - a phrase that could be synonymous with a money laundering operation.

In Kansas, 11 school districts that no longer exist are on the U.S. Department of Education’s distribution list for stimulus funds. They are set to receive nearly $600,000.

We found these school districts when Kirby Ross, managing editor of the Phillips County Review in Phillipsburg, Kan., alerted us that our county-by-county stimulus tracker [1] included two districts in his area that didn’t exist. That prompted us to do some more digging.

We checked more states and found that other consolidated or dissolved districts were on the list. In Missouri and Iowa, a handful of closed districts were listed as receiving stimulus funding.

That doesn’t mean stimulus checks will be arriving to empty buildings. In instances where money is allocated to a closed district, it typically is divvied up among the districts where the students now attend.

States must notify the Department of Education when districts are dissolved or merged. We asked the Department of Education why the list of districts receiving stimulus funds included closed districts, but we did not hear back. We’ll let you know when we do.

I don't need to remind you that this is the same Federal government operation that wants to control every aspect of our schools.

Also late last year, the neo-con dirty tricks campaigns against public education started floating sensational news stories emphasizing how illiterate our high school students are. Nate Silver at the FiveThirtyEight blog examined one such claim in Real Oklahoma Students Ace Citizenship Exam; Strategic Vision Survey Was Likely Fabricated.

It turns out that I was not the only person who had doubts about the survey. So did Ed Cannaday, the State Representative from Oklahoma's 15 House District.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Cannaday told me he was shocked when he heard of the results, which had received widespread media attention. "When I saw the statistics, I was just flabbergasted and said it cannot be true," he told me.

There were two items in particular that sent up warning flags for him: the one claiming that only 23 percent of the students knew the identity of George Washington, and another that claimed that about one in every ten students had listed the two major political parties as "Republican and Communist".

"Given the dialog of today, if they had said Republican and socialist, then maybe," Cannaday told me. "But communist -- that's just not something that you throw out there any more. I don't think Sarah Palin even used that term."

Cannaday, age 69, would be in a position to know. Before entering the State Legislature three years ago, he had spent decades in education, first as a teacher in a large public school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and then in Oklahoma where he set up an alternative school. After a stint in private business, Cannaday returned to classroom, first as a teacher and then as a principal, and then -- finding he missed the one-on-one interaction with his students -- as a teaching principal at a small school in House District 15. He now serves on the House's education committee in Oklahoma City, and continues to pay regular visits to the schools in his district. "Most schools like to have me once a month," he says, to talk about legislation pending before the state.

Cannaday therefore had little difficulty setting up an experiment: he arranged to have all the seniors in the 10 secondary schools in his district take the Strategic Vision/OCPA survey. Cannaday tried to replicate the Strategic Vision survey to the greatest extent possible. The same exact questions were used, and as in the case of the original survey, the answers were open-ended rather than multiple choice. The survey was administered to a total of 325 seniors, including special education students.

Cannaday's survey however, found his students doing just fine: They answered an average of 7.8 out of the 10 questions correctly. By comparison, the high school students that were purportedly surveyed by Strategic Vision had gotten just 2.8 out of the items correct. 98 percent of the students on Cannaday's survey -- not 23 percent -- knew that George Washington was the first President. 81 percent -- not 14 percent -- knew that Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence. 95 percent -- not 43 percent -- knew that the Democrats and Republicans are the major political parties. There was just no comparison between the two.

The entire article is worth a read. The assault on public education in the name of accountability, closing achievement gaps, and school profiteering is not lost on students who are learning at their own expense that the game is rigged against them.

And that brings us to the latest scandal, transparency in Arne Duncan's Department of Education.

Alexander Russo's blog at Scholastic, This Week in Education raises a number of disturbing questions.

I have now heard the same thing from three independent credible sources - the fix is in on the U.S. Department of Education's competitive grants, in particular Race to the Top (RTTT) and Investing in Innovation (I3). Secretary Duncan needs to head this off now, by admitting that he and his team have potential conflicts of interests with regard to their roles in grant making, recognizing that those conflicts are widely perceived by potential grantees, and explaining how grant decisions will be insulated from interference by the department's political appointees.

Over the last several months a national education reporter, a senior manager at a national education research organization, and the head of a national nonprofit working in the field all volunteered that the Department's senior officials know exactly who they want to get RTTT and I3 money - in brief, the new philanthropies' grantees and the jurisdictions where they work.

These three hold positions of some responsibility. None have been prone to exaggeration in the past. They are not colleagues. They run in entirely different circles, live in entirely different parts of the country, and work in very different parts of the K-12 education space. They all relayed conversations with colleagues about the problem.

We do know that the Secretary benefited from a strong relationship with the new philanthropy in Chicago. We know that the Secretary is high on charter management organizations and the new teacher development programs that benefited from the new philanthropy. We know that RTTT czar Joanne Weiss was senior staff member at New Schools. We know that Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement Jim Shelton was a senior program education officer at the Gates Foundation and NewSchools. We know that both managed investments in the organizations' Duncan favors.

Anyone who remembers the Reading First fiasco is familiar with the pattern.

There's more at the link. And Frederick M. Hess writing in The Enterprise blog of The American Enterprise Institute adds,

The larger issue here, of course, is not merely whether Duncan should have announced the identity of the judges (though the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli offers a terrific explanation of why he should, from the perspective of a Department of Education veteran). The larger question is how the department is proceeding on RTT. Let’s remember to keep that question in context. The administration has unprecedented discretion due to the $787 billion stimulus package, more than $100 billion of which is directed to education. Given the control over this kind of money, as well as the terrific intuitions that undergird RTT, it’s essential that the administration does everything possible to reassure observers that it is operating in a credible, non-political fashion. Part of having unprecedented sums of money is the need to embrace unprecedented levels of transparency. That includes reaching out to skeptics and moving with particular thoughtfulness when it comes to the process. In fact, for all the criticism that the Department of Education justly received under Bush for insularity and a lack of transparency, the names and affiliations of the growth model pilot peer reviewers and the differentiated accountability pilot peer reviewers were disclosed prior to the reviews taking place.

Yet, after President Obama’s assurances that “politics won’t come into play” in the RTT process, after Duncan’s claims about how he’d recruit “disinterested superstars” to judge RTT, and after comments from RTT chief Joanne Weiss on the “unprecedented level of transparency” of the process, the reality has been otherwise. Last summer, the 19(!) RTT priorities appeared pretty much out of nowhere—with the dictate that states would not be rewarded for successes in data systems or teacher quality alone, but would be required to check all 19 boxes in sprawling applications if they were to seek funds. The advisers for the RTT evaluation were named and secretly convened last fall. The 58 reviewers were selected from 1,500 applicants in a process that was never made clear. The department has never explained what constitutes a “conflict of interest” for potential reviewers. The department never announced that reviewers had been named or when or how they’d be trained. Indeed, it took Education Week’s intrepid Michele McNeil to finally leak that story, before Duncan responded (and not in an official department announcement, but in a blog post!).

Again, the link version offers many more references and should be used for further exploration.

What's already clear to every school child in the country should be becoming clear to all of us, the race is gamed. And its not gamed for the benefit of anyone we know.

Teaching Tools: Art Resources

2010-02-07T17:34:00.003-05:00

I've been coing across an increasingly braod range of interesting art sites that offer open source resources for art teachers.

Today, I discovered UBU.com that is a central repository for outsider art. This link features hundreds of films and interviews with artistswho deserve far more attention in high school art classes than they receive.

Over at MugTUg.com, I found this HTML 5 browser based painting program called Sketchpad.

And over at the O'Reilly site is this handy-dandy web color chart for digital designers.

Fiscal Gymnastics

2010-02-03T00:14:00.003-05:00

EO Smith has had the misfortune of falling victim to the collapsing economy at exactly the wrong time. About three years ago, just prior to the economic collapse, the Board discovered that the athletic fields behind the school were deficient and needed extensive repair. The track is the most critical component that could no longer be merely patched.

It is dangerous and requires significant drainage and field reconstruction to be sustainable. The longer the Board investigated the field conditions, the more the realization that the lack of water and limited scope of the existing fields dictated a comprehensive proposal.

After soliciting bids and a three town education campaign a bond issue was presented to the public and they voted 'no'. Since then we've had to bus our track and field activities out to Tolland.

It's humiliating and expensive and largely a direct result of the general economy.

Last night we discussed a revised proposal - a $2M dollar plan that cuts deeply into the comprehensive repair plan and reduces the scope to what is sufficient and absolutely necessary.

Even at this reduced level, the tax burden to a reeling tax base will be challenging to pass. And for all the talk of "shovel ready" funds being made available by the Feds, those monies are gobbled up by the special interests of the State and don't apply to schools caught in the middle.

And while urban schools are built and rebuilt perpetually by State and federal funds, suburban schools must afford their own infrastructures in addition to being responsible for the entitled schools.

State government and education are now cannibalizing each others budgets to continue the lifestyles they've become accustomed to. In the meantime, our track and field are more unlikely than ever to be realized until the economy significantly improves.

Deconstructing NCLB

2010-02-02T12:10:00.002-05:00

The New York Times reports [Obama Seeking Sweeping Change in 'No Child' Law by Sam Dillon] that the Obama administration is revising No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I suspect such changes are more the result of reality finally catching up with the mean spirited political fantasies that NCLB marketed to an all too gullible public.

"The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, foreshadowed the elimination of the 2014 deadline in a September speech, referring to it as a “utopian goal,” and administration officials have since made clear that they want the deadline eliminated. In recent meetings with representatives of education groups, Department of Education officials have said they also want to eliminate the school ratings system built on making “adequate yearly progress” on student test scores.
“They were very clear with us that they would change the metric, dropping adequate yearly progress and basing a new system on another picture of performance based on judging schools in a more nuanced way,” said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators, who attended one of the meetings.
The current system issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.
Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools.
A new goal, which would replace the 2014 universal proficiency deadline, would be for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.” Currently more than 40 states are collaborating, in an effort coordinated by the National Governors Association and encouraged by the administration, to write common standards defining what it means to be a graduate from high school ready for college or a career."

Imagine a plan from the Bush administration being labeled 'utopian'. No, expecting every school to qualify as non-failing in a rigged system is not utopian - it is blissfully and maliciously devoid of reason.

And the secondary goal of NCLB that we magically close the education gap is equally insane yet remains intact in Arne Duncan's Big Adventure called Race to the Top.

Children will continue to be mis-educated in America because it is politically profitable to do so. Obama and Duncan are no less dependent on the public's gullibility than Bush was.

Like Bush, Obama and Duncan's social engineering experiments are the usual American lab rats, the poor. Unfortunately, NCLB and its succeeding educational cancer, Race to the Top are beginning to deform all American schools and that is not a good thing.

By myopically treating the symptoms of urban poverty as if all American schools were the disease, we are overdosing on standardized tests, memorization, and militaristic behaviors of conformity. Our children can barely breathe without special services and they certainly are not allowed to play, think, or mature without first asking permissions.

Urban school reform enthusiasts who profit from the deception that schools can fail are the buffoons that Washington embraces to dictate school 'reform' policies. It will not end well.

Treason of the Supreme Court

2010-01-26T12:08:00.002-05:00

The recent Supreme Court decision to treat collaborative entities as equivalent and equal to a citizen of this country is an act of treason. And it is an act of treason because the American people who can dream an American Dream no matter how much money they have are now marginalized by a Corporate Dream that can expend as much money as is necessary to control public policy - the rights of man.

And so actors such as Osama Bin Laden can now subliminally influence federal and state elections in ways that are wholly unhealthy for the democracy.

This decision flushes away in one misguided conservative-activist decision the American Republic. Every educated person in the world should be fearful of the consequences of this decision.

Teaching Tools: English, Language, and Expression

2010-01-24T12:08:00.004-05:00

The teaching aids for reading and writing has come a long way since the simple vocabulary drill programs were introduced. But in many cases, the programs that most useful to teachers lock schools into proprietary tracks that force yearly subscriptions to be renewed over and over again for little more than cosmetic effect.

In this post, I want to enumerate a number of open source alternative applications that cash-strapped teachers and schools can consider.

Digital Comic Strips

Digital comic strips satisfy a whole range of student interests - creating their own short narratives (micro-stories), writing dialog (how does what one character respond to another), and so on. All of this is reading and writing fundamentals with a whole lot of creativity sprinkled in.

The first program is called strip generator and it allows students to add pre-defined characters to comic strip panels and add their own dialog. I've used it in this blog on a number of occasions and its both easy to learn and fun to use.

Another program that's web-based is from ReadWriteThink. And it allows students to choose fixed numbers of panels, drag and drop characters, word balloons and objects into the panels and print out their cartoons. This program is considerably more constrained and elementary than Strip Generator but nonetheless useful.

Open Source Screenwriting Application

I recently discovered Celtx, a program that is intended to be used by professional screenwriters and movie producers. It offers the ability to create storyboards, comics, and more. It has a set of very useful videos to introduce teachers and students to what's available.

It goes without saying that this program is a high school and college level application (this doesn't preclude gifted teachers and students in lower grades giving it a go).

Now, this is a rich product suite that has school pricing options that can be purchased. However, the beauty of this product is that every student can download a free version at home and it works on Windows, OSX, and Linux!

The other feature that English teachers in particular will like is that the characters that students write into their stories can be assigned voices that will play back the dialog. This is often a critically missing component of writing - that is, hearing what your writing sounds like.

"I Have A Dream!" and This Ain't It

2010-01-18T13:02:00.003-05:00

The struggle of Humanity for social justice is far too often expressed as a litany of unapologetic platitudes. There is a degrading transformation of an ideal into a disposable sentiment that reduces holidays such as today into little more than another excuse to waste away our lives in the opiates of mass media, gaming, and vacant social networking.

Today, more than any other day, should expose the schemes to close the so-called educaton gap for what they are, an evil social engineering experiment run amok.

Today, Bush's NCLB scheme is called Race to the Top and it is wrapped in the Orwellian language that has plagued education for decades. If we have the courage to talk about these policies in plain english then we could expose their hidden agendas.

The Race to the Top in plain English is a government policy that intends to create the illusion of social equality and justice by providing a test score metric showing that all school children have approximately identical scores in English and math.

The schools will do this so that poverty and housing discrimination can remain intact because we aren't looking to solve inequality, poverty, adequate housing, job training, urban violence, black market drugs or the victimization of the poor to loan sharking. No, equality will be demonstrated in school test scores. And these scores will be used as a tool to establish social classes such as those found in India and China.

Social classes will have all of the corrosive and toxic benefits of racism without any of the fuss people like Martin Luther King would rail against.

There are those who say that Race to the Top is an inappropriate label for this education policy but it is precise in far more ways than educators imagine.

Maintaining racial segregation is at the "Top" of the priority list. The plan is to keep the urban environments warehouses for the poor and underclass citizens. Let them shoot each other, disease each other, and poison each other with social dysfunction. To have a Top is to celebrate a bottom and there is no plan to change where that bottom is.

And to Race to the Top is to Race up a social class hierarchy that excludes the undesirables. The tools of the race are weighed grades, segregation, and a social appetite for permanent poverty.

Martin Luther King's Dream was buried with him. What remains is a social fabric that self-insulates and distances itself from dreams that aren't consumer dreams and bumper sticker intellectualism.

Updated: Race to the Happy Meal

2010-01-07T23:24:00.010-05:00

Tuesday the Board got together for a special public meeting to discuss whether or not to participate in the CT Department od Education's Race To The Top grant application.

The initial information we received was both sketchy and dubious.

I started putting together a FAQ sheet to make sense of the monetary implications of what the State was suggesting. Here's the updated version of that:

Region19 Race to the Top (RaTTT Race) Fact sheet

Region 19 was "invited" participate in the RaTTT Race Connecticut Grant submission. We are being told that if we agree,
"Our District can expect up to $66,000 over the 4 year period for participating should we decide to participate in the grant. The allocation is based on the Title I funding formula."

Update:

CT applying for $175M to be spent over Four Years

50% of those funds ($87.5M) get disbursed to participating "Districts" based on the title 1 formula

The RTTT Title 1 fund distribution sheet takes every potential participating district and shows *the maximum* potential Title 1 sum *if all districts participate* AND *the grant is fully funded*.

If all that were true then Region 19 *might* get $66,924 over four years

That means:

~~$66,000 / 4 years = 16,500/year~~
Corrected: $66,924 / 4 years = $16,731/year

~~$16500/year / 1262est. EO students/year = $13.08/yr./student~~
Corrected: $16,731/year / 1262est. EO students/year = $13.26/yr./student

~~$4.5B / 50 states = $90M/ state if averaged~~
Fixed: $4.35B / 50 states = $87M/state - flat average

Note that CT is requesting twice the sum of an evenly distributed grant sum across all states!

~~$29.5M (CT grant) / $87M avg state grant = $0.327777778/$1 of an avg state grant~~
$175M (CT grant) / $87M avg state grant = $2/$1 of an even state distribution of funds

The RTTT allocation tables that Region 19 received are based on the grant request sum that is clearly double what one might expect as a dollar for dollar expectation based on evenly distributed funds.

If we adjust the State's estimates to simply reflect that each state may receive a fair share sum then:

Instead of $175M, we'll start with the evenly distributed sum of $87M. And since just 50% of that amount applies to the Title I funding, we are talking about dividing up 43.5 million over four years. That's a little less than $10M.

~~$29.5M RTTT State grant / 4 years = $7,375,000/year (for all CT schools)~~

~~$7,375,000/year / 1658 schools in CT = $4,448.13/year/school~~
$10M per year / 1658 schools in CT = $6,031 per school

But we'd also have to adjust EO Smith's expected sum from $66K over four years to $33K over four years or $8,250 per year - less than $1 per student.

I must caution everyone that this fact sheet is napkin math until proven otherwise.

But finally, the money in many big cities will be funneled directly into the city to be -cough- dispensed. In other words, it may go toward potholes instead of classrooms.

As you can see, our district has virtually nothing to gain by this formula that is obviously dedicated YET AGAIN to -yawn- close the education gap whatever in hell that means.

So much of the Board discussion concerned whether or not our participation or non-participation would hurt the State, cause retaliatory action against the district, or somehow deny us participation in something bigger than... well, money.

And we had a lively discussion about all of these things and more. In the end the vote was unanmously against getting involved. We will politely decline our participation.

However, the State DOE's proposal is shoddy and quite frankly, disingenuous. Connecticut is probably in good company. I examined some other state's public documents and the Race to the Top more accurately looks like a race of blind people in a muddy mosh pit.

Most states have slapped together a bundle of existing, largely platitudinal existing programs that could use some additional funding.

Thankfully, our State DOE is incompetent enough to put together a proposal that is transparent in its agenda and unsupportable in its legal splendor.

Those who sign up for this death march will have their school budgets plundered by Hartford bureaucrats who should be fired and their Department boarded and turned into an abandoned building. That would signify just how vacant this State's education policies are.

Sign This Contract NOW!

2010-01-06T00:19:00.003-05:00

The Board of Education received a -cough- invitation from the Department of Education to sign a Race to the Top Contract with them that allows the State Board of Education to ignore the needs of the Region and allow them to spend every red cent of multi-millions on Urban school Districts and, um, themselves.

The Board gave these documents the attention they deserve. Here's a re-enactment:

Amy Goodman On Saying Goodbye

2009-12-30T23:04:00.003-05:00

In a wonderful interview by Laura Flanders of Amy Goodman, Goodman talks about the five things that are important to do when saying goodbye to a dying loved one.

1. Thank you

2. I forgive you

3. Please forgive me

4. I love you

5. Goodbye

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T18:53:00.000-05:00

Hosing Mother Earth

2009-12-22T01:17:00.004-05:00

Last week ended in the disastrous Copenhagen Summit where Obama in a dramatic, last minute effort to salvage an international climate agreement not only failed but reinforced the perception that is is no more in touch with the international community than George W. Bush was.

On PBS, Ray Suarez ends his summary of the talks by implying that only the big countries need negotiate climate change controls - that too many voices only result in chaos.

And yet, the drama of all of these political machinations seem hollow after listening to Fareed Zakaria interview Nathan Myhrvold.

The first order of business is to start the cooling process so that the island nations aren't sacrificed, so that Africa does not become a wasteland, and so that the cold weather species survive.

The second order of business is to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere by making it useful.

None of this requires much more than an investment in technology and imagination. The Obama administration needs to get on it and stop the grandstanding. Our kids need a planet to live on after graduation.

Kill the Bill, The Liberal View

2009-12-21T00:26:00.005-05:00

There is a lot of disinformation about why a Liberal might want to kill the health care bill. We are told the democrats must pass it or be embarrassed. In that case let us embarrass ourselves.

There is no doubt in my mind that the passage of this bill is a toxic recipe for fiscal and political carnage. American workers can hardly afford to spend their income on junk insurance provided by ruthless and unrelentingly greedy insurers. There will be no swift or compassionate regulators to correct inequities.

And it is clear that a nation challenged by runaway unemployment and diminishing wages will be even harder pressed to afford quality education funding. This bill is a cynical gaming of the system and the wholesale plunder of the incomes of every American with an income.

The obstinate buffoonery of what passes as the Republican party in Washington only compounds the matter and obfuscates the fact that Liberals want to kill the bill to get it right not to gut it.

But getting it right means that the Obama administration needs to stop treating Liberals as if they are insignificant and inconsequential. Krugman says Liberals projected their values onto Obama who was an obvious conservative.

There’s a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn’t the man progressives thought they were voting for.

But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that

(a) There wasn’t a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders
(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive

Actually, my problem is not that I mistook Obama for a Liberal or Progressive but that I believed what he said. And now I know that his rhetoric is as empty as the cost controls in the health care legislation.

Jame Hamsher in Commondreams.org writes the ten reasons this bill must be killed;

1. Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations - whether you want to or not

2. If you refuse to buy the insurance, you'll have to pay penalties of up to 2% of your annual income to the IRS.

3. Many will be forced to buy poor-quality insurance they can't afford to use, with $11,900 in annual out-of-pocket expenses over and above their annual premiums

4. Massive restriction on a woman's right to choose, designed to trigger a challenge to Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court

5. Paid for by taxes on the middle class insurance plan you have right now through your employer, causing them to cut back benefits and increase co-pays

6. Many of the taxes to pay for the bill start now, but most Americans won't see any benefits - like an end to discrimination against those with preexisting conditions - until 2014 when the program begins.

7. Allows insurance companies to charge people who are older 300% more than others

8. Grants monopolies to drug companies that will keep generic versions of expensive biotech drugs from ever coming to market.

9. No re-importation of prescription drugs, which would save consumers $100 billion over 10 years

10. The cost of medical care will continue to rise, and insurance premiums for a family of four will rise an average of $1,000 a year - meaning in 10 years, your family's insurance premium will be $10,000 more annually than it is right now.

The link provides documentation of the claims.

Kill the Bill, Start a New Party

2009-12-17T12:14:00.005-05:00

Last night I listened to Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interview environmentalist Sunita Nurain in a brilliant conversation that begins to crystallize some things about the Obama administration that are disconcerting.

Both Goodman and Narain grope to understand why Obama, from whom so much was expected, is failing in leadership quality on the order of George W. Bush. Narain describes Obama's improvement in terms that if Bush was a kindergärtner then Obama is no more than a first grader in terms of climate change policy.

Narain's most brilliant prose is in the phrase that the world's problems "are all in small stories". That describes the issues in the United States as well.

As we triangulate Obama policy across other issues we find the same pattern.

Marcy Wheeler at FireDogLake warns us of the dire consequences that will result in the passage of the Lieberman emasculated Health Bill [please follow the link to the entire argument - it is compelling and important]:

I believe that if the Senate health care bill passes as Joe Lieberman has demanded it–with no Medicare buy-in or public option–it will be a significant step further on our road to neo-feudalism. As such, I find it far too dangerous to our democracy to pass–even if it gives millions (perhaps unaffordable) subsidies for health care.

20% of your labor belongs to Aetna

Consider, first of all, this fact. The bill, if it became law, would legally require a portion of Americans to pay more than 20% of the fruits of their labor to a private corporation in exchange for 70% of their health care costs.

Consider a family of 4 making $66,150–a family at 300% of the poverty level and therefore, hypothetically, at least, “subsidized.” That family would be expected to pay $6482.70 (in today’s dollars) for premiums–or $540 a month. But that family could be required to pay $7973 out of pocket for copays and so on. So if that family had a significant–but not catastrophic–medical event, it would be asked to pay its insurer almost 22% of its income to cover health care. Several months ago, I showed why this was a recipe for continued medical bankruptcy (though the numbers have changed somewhat). But here’s another way to think about it. Senate Democrats are requiring middle class families to give the proceeds of over a month of their work to a private corporation–one allowed to make 15% or maybe even 25% profit on the proceeds of their labor.

It’s one thing to require a citizen to pay taxes–to pay into the commons. It’s another thing to require taxpayers to pay a private corporation, and to have up to 25% of that go to paying for luxuries like private jets and gyms for the company CEOs.

It’s the same kind of deal peasants made under feudalism: some proportion of their labor in exchange for protection (in this case, from bankruptcy from health problems, though the bill doesn’t actually require the private corporations to deliver that much protection).In this case, the federal government becomes an appendage to do collections for the corporations.

Mind you, not only will citizens be required to pay private corporations. But middle class citizens may be required to pay more to these private corporations than they pay in federal and state taxes. Using these numbers, this middle class family of four will pay roughly 15% in federal, state, and social security taxes. This family will pay around $10,015 for their share of the commons–paying for defense, roads, some policing, and their social safety net share. That’s 15% of their income. They will, at a minimum, be asked to pay 9.8% of their income to the insurance company. And if they have a significant medical event, they’ll pay 22%–far, far more than they’ll pay into the commons. So it’s bad enough that this bill would require citizens to pay a tithe to a corporation. It’s far worse when you consider that some citizens would pay more in their corporate tithe than they would to the commons.

And, finally, while the Senate bill does not accord these corporate CEOs a droit de seigneur–the right to a woman’s virginity the night of her marriage–if Ben Nelson (and Bart Stupak) get their way, it would make a distinction in this entire compact for how the property of a woman’s womb shall be treated.

Single payer for the benefit of corporations

And for those who promise we’ll go back and fix this later, once we achieve universal health care, understand what will have happened in the meantime. The idea, of course, is to establish some means to get people single payer coverage (before Lieberman, this would have been through a public option or Medicare buy-in) and, over time, expand it.

In fact, this bill will move toward single payer, too–though not the kind we want. For the large number of people who live in a place where there is limited competition, this bill will require them to get health care through the oligopoly or monopoly provider. It’ll work great for the provider: they will be able to dictate rates. But the Senate bill allows these blossoming single payer providers to keep up to 25% of the benefit in profits and marketing costs, and pass little of that benefit onto citizens. If we make private corporations our single payer, how are we going to convince them to cede control when we ask them to let the government be the single payer?

The reason this matters, though, is the power it gives the health care corporations. We can’t ditch Halliburton or Blackwater because they have become the sole primary contractor providing precisely the services they do. And so, like it or not, we’re dependent on them. And if we were to try to exercise oversight over them, we’d ultimately face the reality that we have no leverage over them, so we’d have to accept whatever they chose to provide. This bill gives the health care industry the leverage we’ve already given Halliburton and Blackwater.

Howard Dean's arguments are equally compelling:

And we find the same pattern in education policy where Arne Duncan's Race to the Top is an educational cure that is worse than any disease education may have.

It is time to begin looking for alternatives to this train wreck of a presidency. For Liberals, progressives, and Libertarians the empty Republican party vessel may be worth retrofitting into a party that incorporates the best candidates and ideas of such a coalition to contend in 2010 and 2012 with Presdential, Senatorial and House candidates worth voting for.

It looks as though Schools Matter is making the same case.

Betrayal of a Nation

2009-12-16T16:11:00.004-05:00

Obama seems to be using a page from the Bush family playbook. When George W. stole the 2000 election, he governed as though he had won a landslide victory. the only thing that mattered was the exercise of unrestrained power in the single-minded pursuit of a personal, not national, agenda.

An article in Salon magazine by Glenn Greenwald called White House as helpless victim on health-care calls into question whether Obama's administration is just the next all too familiar such runaway political machine.

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferious email backlash -- easily -- was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama's occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it. From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage. Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional "centrists." Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

Let's repeat that: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place." Indeed it does. There are rational, practical reasons why that might be so. If you're interested in preserving and expanding political power, then, all other things being equal, it's better to have the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry on your side than opposed to you. Or perhaps they calculated from the start that this was the best bill they could get. The wisdom of that rationale can be debated, but depicting Obama as the impotent progressive victim here of recalcitrant, corrupt centrists is really too much to bear.

In short, Liberals specifically and Democrats in general are being played for rubes and fools while those who have driven the country into bankruptcy continue to fiddle away in Washington with no regard for the people who worked so hard to elect them.

For educators, this is a clue that the policies coming out of Washington will be sugar-coated with platitudes about "what's good for kids" but are raising eyebrows in the progressive education community [Diane Ravitch, EDWeek, Bridging Differences - Race to Nowhere:].

I don't know about you, but I am getting sick of the rhetoric of the Race to the Top, as it implies the very opposite of "equal educational opportunity." But "equal educational opportunity" is so...yesterday, so now we shall all "race to the top," to see who can get there first. Who can privatize the most schools? Who can close the most public schools? Which district can replace the most public schools with charter schools? Who can compel their teachers to focus intently on those pesky math and reading test scores? Who can boot out the most teachers whose students didn't get higher scores than last year? Who seriously believes that this combination of policies will produce better education?

We try not to be New York City-centric, but so much is happening in this city that it is hard not to see it as a bellwether. After all, NYC not only was a faithful representation of No Child Left Behind, but it is now outfitting itself to be a faithful representation of the Race to the Top. This is not a hard transition because NLCB and the Race to the Top are really the same, except that President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's "Race" has nearly $5 billion as a lure to persuade states to climb aboard the express train to privatization.

In the past few days, Chancellor Joel Klein has announced that he is closing nearly two dozen public schools. Some of these schools are the anchor in their communities; some have long histories as gateways for immigrant children. In recent years, the Department of Education decided that it does not like large high schools, so it has been closing them down and sending their lowest-performing students to other large high schools, which then have lower scores and more disciplinary incidents. Some of the large high schools were beyond saving, but most could have been improved by a thoughtful plan of action, including smaller classes, better supervision, and the kinds of resources that hedge-fund managers pour into "their" charter schools. Unfortunately the data-driven MBAs at central headquarters know nothing about instruction and curriculum or about any strategies that might improve a school. They have no school-improvement strategy. What they know best is how to shut down schools, and in this they will find funding and encouragement from the Obama administration.

As soon as the central administration decides to close a school, it is a fait accompli. New York City has a rubber-stamp "board" of 13, with a majority appointed by the mayor, serving at his pleasure; it approves every executive decision, with only a single dissenting vote (the heroic Patrick Sullivan, a public school parent). Public hearings are pro forma; no decision is ever reversed. Parents and teachers may protest 'til the cows come home, and they can't change a thing. Their school will be closed, the low-performing students will be dispersed, and either new small schools or charter schools will take over their building. Some of the schools that will close are, funnily enough, small schools that were opened by Bloomberg and Klein only a few years ago.

Does anyone believe that this sorry game of musical chairs will improve education? Does anyone in Washington or at central headquarters grasp the pointlessness of the disruption needlessly inflicted on students, families, teachers, principals, and communities in the name of "reform"? Do these people have no shame?

Shame is for those who have the audacity to feel shamed. Obama seemingly has none.

The Virtue of Blogging

2009-12-12T10:53:00.003-05:00

I've been a long-time blogger and advocate of blogging at least at the high school level. so it comes as no surprise to me that the virtues of blogging are getting recognized by the scientific community.

In a recent article in Scientific American entitled Blogging -- It's Good for You by Jessica Wapner the therapeutic value of blogging is explored.

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Flaherty, who studies conditions such as hypergraphia (an uncontrollable urge to write) and writer’s block, also looks to disease models to explain the drive behind this mode of communication. For example, people with mania often talk too much. “We believe something in the brain’s limbic system is boosting their desire to communicate,” Flaherty explains. Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls our drives, whether they are related to food, sex, appetite, or problem solving. “You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,” Flaherty notes. Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.

And recently, the New York Times in an article called M.I.T. Taking Student Blogs to Nth Degree by Tamar Lewin reported that MIT and many other prestigious undergrad and graduate schools are embracing blogging.

Dozens of colleges — including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale — are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.

But so far, none of the blogs match the interactivity and creativity of those of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they are posted prominently on the admissions homepage, along with hundreds of responses from prospective applicants — all unedited.

Not every admissions office has been so ready to welcome uncensored student writing.

“A lot of people in admissions have not been eager for bloggers, mostly based on fears that we can’t control what people are saying,” said Jess Lord, dean of admissions at Haverford College, which posted student bloggers’ accounts of their summer activities this year, and plans to add bloggers this spring to help admitted students hear about campus life. “We’re learning, slowly, that this is how the world works, especially for high school students.”

M.I.T.’s bloggers, who are paid $10 an hour for up to four hours a week, offer thoughts on anything that might interest a prospective student. Some offer advice on the application process and the institute’s intense workload; others write about quirkier topics, like warm apple pie topped with bacon and hot caramel sauce, falling down the stairs or trying to set a world record in the game of Mattress Dominos.

Posting untouched student writing — and comments reacting to that writing — does carry some risks. Boring, sloppily written posts do nothing to burnish an institutional image, college admissions officials say, and there is always the possibility of an inflammatory or wildly negative posting.

The MIT Bloggers page link.

A college blogger site called CollegeBlender aggregates the blogs of college students from around the world.

The Balloon Boy Presidency

2009-12-11T00:55:00.004-05:00

I just finished watching President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. I don't know that I've ever witnessed a sadder event that didn't involve human tragedy.

In accepting the prize, Obama compellingly argued that he neither deserved it nor understood it nor felt any obligation to its earthly intention. For the months leading up to his election, we shared Obama's campaign of HOPE and believed his rhetoric to signify a significant political intellect.

In Oslo, Obama's speech could have been delivered by the Orwellian errand boy, George W. Bush. Obama's message justified and romanticized war as our only comforting peace. His references to mankind extended no further than the borders of the United States and his historical context for action was no broader than the experience of an entitled black man empowered through his vicarious associations with actual civil rights activists.

This year's award of the Nobel Peace Prize is a hoax no grander than that of the balloon boy whose family's dream was to live life on a reality show. Obama too wants us to believe that the war he wages affects the television reality where humans observe the world instead of engaging in it. Obama's idea of Peace is getting re-elected and not giving the perception of being weak.

Like the boy who was never in the balloon, Obama was never in the movement that elected him. Tonight the Obama that was hiding in the barn in Kansas arrived like a Jerzy Kosinski character walking into a situation that he had no context for being in. The Peace Prize could have just as well been given to a General or Comedian or a barnyard animal.

His speech was awkward and disturbing. I felt as though I was watching the wrong channel or that maybe a conservative group had invented an anti-YES men and had fooled the audience.

The air of HOPE has leaked out of Obama's balloon. He tells us WAR is PEACE, that insurance companies can tax citizens, and that we are Racing to the Top for education.

This is not the man I voted for and he's not the man the Nobel Peace Prize committee thought he was.

What we are left with is yet another empty suit.

Refining Educational Terror One School District at a Time

2009-12-10T18:40:00.006-05:00

About a month ago, I wrote a satiric entry called Why Torture Doesn't Work at Guantanamo but Works in Public Schools.

Today I received a comment to this entry that transcends and legitimizes the assertions of the original post (OP).

The Hillsborough County, Fla., public school district has introduced a ninth-grade "reading" course that actually is an SAT-prep course that grades high school freshmen on their ability to improve on SAT practice tests.

Not only does this strike me as highly unusual, but the grading scheme makes little sense.

Children must score higher on each practice to get an A. If they score high and repeat that but don't improve it, they get a B. No matter how high their score, if the score drops next time around, they get a C.

Thus, my straight-A daughter, who is taking challenging courses and has always scored highest in reading-related subjects, is flirting with a C grade that will affect her grade point average. I am curious as to whether other public school districts are doing something similar.

The theme of this should be familiar. It is the punishment the Greek Gods bestowed upon Tantalus whose name is the origin of the English word tantalize.

The punishment is described in the Homer's Odyssey, Book of the Dead [Robert Fagles translation].

And I saw Tantalus too, bearing endless torture.
He stood erect in a pool as the water lapped -
parched, he tried to drink he tried to drink, but he could not reach the surface.
no, time and again, the old man stooped, craving a sip,
time and again the water vanished, swallowed down,
laying bear the caked black earth at his feet -
some spirit drank it dry. And over his head
leafy trees from high aloft,
pomegranates and pears, and apples glowing red,
succulent figs and olives swelling sleek and dark,
but as soon as the old man would strain to clutch them fast
a gust would toss them up to the lowering black clouds.

And so as educators who know better continue to eternally raise expectations like the fruit above Tantalus' head and remove the access to recess, art, phys.ed. and all the things children crave more than the next test, we need to ask ourselves what we've become and why our educational policy reads like a recipe book for torture written by the gods.

There Is No Future [God Save the Teen]

2009-12-09T01:32:00.003-05:00

Detroit, this nation's urban crisis epicenter, just got it's NAEP test results back. Here's what Marisa Schultz of the Detroit news reports about the test results.

"These numbers are only slightly better than what one would expect by chance as if the kids had never gone to school and simply guessed at the answers," said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban school districts. "These numbers ... are shocking and appalling and should not be allowed to stand."

The test results are so concerning to the welfare of Detroit that Casserly flew to the city to brief the media, along with DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, ahead of their release. Unless the community takes action to fix these urgent academic problems, "this city has no future," he said.

"Only a complete overhaul of this school system and how students are taught should be permitted at this point, because the results ... signal a complete failure of the grown-ups who have been in charge of the schools in the past," Casserly said during an interview with The Detroit News.

The test scores, Bobb said during a press conference Tuesday morning, further demonstrates the district faces an "an academic emergency" and needs an overhaul of its academic plan. And while Bobb indicated the scores were an indication of a systemwide failure, it was clear he placed much of the responsibility at the feet of the Detroit School Board.

These results are no surprise to me nor to anyone who teaches in Michigan. The kids whose answers are so wrong as to defy random guessing are no more ill equipped to handle math than the politicians and bureaucrats whose knowledge of educational reform is equally blissfully wrong. To be surprised is nothing more than an admission of ignorance or malicious indifference.

The test scores are a measure of poverty, despair, and urban decay - nothing education can magically remedy.

The adults will point fingers, spend money, huff and puff about higher standards and accountability and raising expectations - they'll provide all the easy rhetorical excrementation that the public loves to shower in. What they won't do is ask the right questions, examine the science, or actually solve any problems. This is all a well-known and familiar soap-opera that's played out in Connecticut for most of my life.

The so-called reform advocated for schools these days is largely a moronic exercise that raises drop-out rates, reduces teaching to a pet training rigor, and further entrenches public schools in losing and self-immolating education testing strategies.

The Obama administration's Race to the Top is a bigger fraud than Bush's No Child Left Behind disaster largely because it will involve flushing billions of dollars and what remains of the American taxpayer's goodwill toward education away for a pocketful of lint.

The urban crisis has obfuscated the educational needs of this nation thoroughly. We no longer care about learning or educational veracity. We are caught in a vortex of trying to solve the issues of poverty with the wallpaper of testing our children into intellectual submission. And the result is an educational cancer that is dragging the best schools into the gutter while the worst schools are abandoned faster than passengers fleeing the Titanic.

The public school system may never recover from the Obama administration and the country will regret the loss assuming its smart enough to notice.