Let's Get Physical

Last night we had a Board meeting in which we discussed some new cost estimates for our athletic fields. This is a hotly debated issue primarily because we have an older facility whose fields are in the autumn of their life-cycle and although the track is the most pressing need the rest of the fields are racing toward obsolescence as well.

The issues are complex. The fields serve a multiplicity of users - high school and community sports teams, gym classes, and community players. Cost [e.g. local taxes] is an obvious flash point.

The following recent stories illustrate just how twisted the public dialogs on this subject can get.

The first story is a narrative about a disabled girl denied a diploma for being unable to perform a physical exercise she's incapable of doing.

Brittany has Ichthyosis, a rare skin disorder. According to Ms. Amos, "Her skin flakes and falls off all the time. She itches and scratches most of the time, her feet and hands crack open, and she has very little hair and wears a ball cap most of the time." Because of her condition, Brittany cannot walk or run far in the sun, and, said Ms. Amos, she submitted a dermatologist's note stating that she would be unable to run a mile during her fitness course. The family was told that the fitness course does not accept doctor's notes in order to excuse a student from an activity.

Ms. Amos says her niece was not notified that she wouldn't get to graduate until just four days prior to the ceremony. "On Thursday morning before graduation on June 3rd, 2008, she went to school for Baccalaureate practice and was told she would not graduate because of the fitness course," said Amos. "I feel like since Brittany looks like she does and is not popular, even though she is an honor student, they just did not care about her."

Brittany didn't let the school's decision prevent her from moving forward and obtaining her diploma. She's since completed a fitness course online, said Ms. Amos, and has received her diploma. Brittany was even able to participate in a graduation ceremony despite Lake Wales High School's decision to bar her from graduating with her classmates.

Wow. It never ceases to amaze the public how dumb and inflexible so-called educational institutions can be but the story ends with the victim taking a physical education class online!

Let's take a closer look at that phenomenon. The New York Times story, Public Schools Begin to Offer Gym Classes Online by Sam Dillon describes the phenomenon.

One of the first schools to offer physical education online, in 1997, was Florida Virtual School. It is now the nation's largest public online school, with 21,000 students taking at least one course. Personal fitness, the online version of the state's physical education requirement, was the school's most popular course last year, attracting 4,500 students. (Second-most popular was economics, with 2,400 students.)

Abbie Modaff files workout reports from her computer at home.

Some students, including a blind teenager in Miami and a student in Melbourne, Fla., who was recovering from a kidney transplant, signed up because their health problems prevented their taking regular gym classes, said Jo Wagner, one of Florida Virtual's lead instructors. But Ms. Wagner said most students took the course to free their schedules for foreign languages and other electives at their traditional schools.

The same pattern holds in Minneapolis, where Abbie Modaff, a sophomore, is taking her second semester of online gym this summer. The daughter of self-described "strugglingly middle-class" parents, she signed up last spring to open time in a schedule snarled with English, Latin, biology, world studies and advanced mathematics classes, not to mention horseback lessons, soccer games and concert band.

This summer, Abbie has been training for a triathlon, so she has e-mailed reports on swimming, biking and jogging workouts to her instructor, Tamara Cowan, who is teaching online gym to 31 Minneapolis students this summer from a friend's home in Sacramento.

"When I'm not feeling like I'm about to die, running can be incredibly good," Ms. Modaff wrote to Ms. Cowan in one workout journal in July.

Last spring, when Ms. Modaff sought to use her horseback rides to fulfill some workout requirements, Mr. Goodrich balked. But using a heart monitor, Ms. Modaff documented that her pulse frequently surged to a pounding 170 beats per minute as she flexed her legs and torso to guide her horse through a dressage course. Mr. Goodrich assented.

"She showed us that her heart rate was elevated, and her muscle strength was improving," he said.

Because the class has faced much questioning, the district issues heart monitors, requiring that students send pulse data to teachers and that parents sign the workout reports.

Mr. Goodrich and Ms. Cowan are also on the lookout for cheats. Mr. Goodrich recently sat on his couch in sweat pants and a T-shirt, and, peering into the screen of his Macintosh, signed on to the school district's Web site. He found 31 student e-mail messages documenting recent workouts. There was also a message from a student who pleaded the equivalent of "my dog ate my homework."

"I have just got back in town for three days and then I will be gone for three days," the student wrote to Mr. Goodrich. "I am trying to get as much work done as possible. Thanks."

Mr. Goodrich checked the student's preliminary grades and found she was hopelessly behind with her assignments. He would send her a warning, he said, and predicted she would fail the course.

About 20 percent of the students dropped out of online gym in the spring, said Jan Braaten, the district's lead physical education instructor.

"Even though we told them it would be as hard as or harder than traditional P.E., some thought it was going to be a cakewalk," Ms. Braaten said.

Even the course's author, Brenda Corbin, who writes curriculums for the Minneapolis district, was dismissive at first.

"I refused to be a part of it," Ms. Corbin said of her initial reaction a year ago, when Ms. Braaten and district administrators approached her about writing the physical education course.

"How do you know they're really working out?" Ms. Corbin said she asked.

But she later changed her mind. "I was uninformed about what you can do over the computer," she said.

I don't know about all this. Confusing physical therapy with physical education or treating recreational hobbies such as horse-back riding with sport is not an educational exercise per se. That is to say, that although your heart may race faster for performing the activity, one could argue that watching a scary movie makes one heart race as well. Does a person deserve "credit" for that?

The distinction is important because of the concerns raised by the following news item about a study from Britain.

While 70 per cent of parents said their own greatest childhood adventures were among rivers, trees and woods, only 29 per cent of today's children said their favourite play experiences were outdoors.
Not all child's play: Wrapping youngsters in cotton wool is not preparing them for setbacks and contributing to the rise in mental illness in young people

Child's play: Wrapping youngsters in cotton wool is not preparing them for setbacks in adult life

While 73 per cent of seven to 12-year-olds could surf the internet unsupervised, 42 per cent were not allowed to play in their local park without an adult.

A third could not ride a bike to a friend's house or play in their local streets unsupervised.

But the survey of 1,030 children and 1,030 adults found many parents were too busy to watch their children playing.

Adrian Voce, director of the charity Play England that carried out the research, said: 'It's not the end of the world if a child has an accident.
Resilience: Children can adapt

Resilience: Children can take a bit of rough and tumble

Playing is an essential part of growing up and adventurous play that both challenges and excites children helps instil critical life skills.

'Constantly wrapping children in cotton wool can leave them ill-equipped to deal with stressful or challenging situations they might encounter later in life.

Three times as many children are put in hospital each year from falling out of bed as from tumbling from a tree, the researchers said.

At EO Smith, the goal of many people involved with the school is to get our kids out into the sun exercising in a social atmosphere.

Demonstrably healthy. What a concept.

Horse Penis Virus

There's a very good sex ed video for teens to be found here.

A Post-modern Hipster Defends Himself

I came across yet another article attempting to label the latest generation of kids who are discovering themselves and their culture in the context of the global cultural tsunami.

Written by Douglas Haddow and entitled Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, the author does what cultural critics always do.

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over.

What is more interesting is this response from someone named Sam that calls the author on the perspective of the article. It is interesting because of the constant criticism aimed at young people being able to read, think critically, and write literate responses to written material. Here's Sam's commentary:

Ok. I'm a little angry about this article, but I'm not going to start flaming all over the place just because I can. I have a couple of problems with this article that I'm going to present here. Because I can, and because I believe in being constructive.

First of all, I am repulsed by the fact that in a way, the author does exactly one of the things he attacks about hipsterdom... all throughout the article, there is this barrage of pointing out what is wrong with hipsters and their "culture," and does so from the perspective of being "outside looking in." He says, "I'm not a hipster" by doing so. But then, the last two paragraphs, he starts using "we" all the time. And it's the last two paragraphs that are written more poetically, more elegantly, finding beauty in tragedy. If you're not going to include yourself in the bad stuff, you don't get to be a part of the beautiful part of your article.

Second, this focuses on the incredibly superficial aspects of hipsterdom that have ad infinitum and ad nauseum plagued popular culture in Western Civilization. Yeah, these kids (I'll actually say "us kids," because I think anyone who saw me on the street would lump me in) are superficial, obsessed with looking cool and blah blah blah. Maybe it's me, but that seems to be a defining description of every teen and twenty-something that has come before me. Let's face it. Hipster "culture" has become big enough to be considered mainstream. So now it just has to suffer from the vacuousness that comes from that.

And you know something? Hipster culture is not remotely as ineffectual as it is being made out to be here. Lots of them ride fixed-gears, it's true. Even more ride SOME kind of bike. But, the last time I checked, we have a huge environmental crisis that was caused by... what was it? Oh. Driving cars. And these kids aren't driving cars. They're not riding buses, or subways. They're getting around with their bodies, which produce no environmentally detrimental waste. What's another good thing hipsters have done for the world? Well, it seems to me that a good deal of them are vegetarians. Many are even vegans. I don't feel the need to point out why those are good things.

And it is disgusting to insist that hipsters are creating nothing new. They make clothes, they start collectives, they make media, and their eclectic taste in music has led to the musical mash-up genre.

A lot of these points have already been made by others posting here, so I'm sorry for being repetitive. But hey, it's a comments section, right?

And also, I know I started referring to hipsters as "they" instead of "we" and "us." It just sort of happened that way. I resign myself to the criticism that is due, I suppose.

Got Justice?

Scientific American recently ran a piece called Who Will Die? Computer Predicts Which Death Row Inmates Will Be Executed

New system finds that education level is more of a factor than race or severity of crime by Larry Greenemeier. The major thesis and finding of the computer analysis is:

Capital punishment is legal in 36 states, but that does not necessarily mean all of the condemned will be executed. Some will languish behind bars for life and others may actually be exonerated and set free. Now researchers say they have built a computer system that can predict with 92 percent accuracy which death row inmates are most likely to be executed, a development they hope will lead to a fairer appeals process.

According to the system, the death row inmates most likely to be executed are those with the lowest levels of education. The researchers, from Texas A&M University–Texarkana and Loyola University New Orleans, report in the International Journal of Law and Information Technology, that neither the severity of the crime nor race—the latter of which is often cited as a key factor in convictions—are reliable forecasters of a prisoner's fate.

The system consists of 18 computer processors designed to analyze data the way that a human brain does—by studying one set of data and comparing it with another data set to find similarities and differences. In this case, researchers fed the system information about 1,000 death row prisoners, including their sex, age, race, highest year of school completed, the state in which they were incarcerated, and whether they were ultimately executed or spared. Once the system had established patterns (of traits most prevalent among the executed) from this initial pool, the researchers fed it similar information about 300 more prisoners (leaving out whether they had lived or died). The system, using logic it had developed from the first set of data, correctly predicted the outcome for 276 (92 percent) of the prisoners.

The system's success "has serious implications concerning the fairness of the justice system," says Stamos Karamouzis, dean of Regis University's School of Computer and Information Sciences in Denver, who led the 2006–07 study when he was a professor of computer and information sciences at Texas A&M. "People against the death penalty use the results of this work by pointing out that the nature of the crime has nothing to do with whether you're executed or not."

The article drifts off topic which is too bad because this is a truly disturbing pattern.

What it can mean is that prisoners are intellectually incapable of defending themselves from a system looking for easy sacrificial victims. And by easy we're talking about those who are easily fooled by the tricks of a system that preys on their logical and cognitive vulnerability.

Given the accuracy of the projections, it is not hard to imagine who is being added to the death list. Take a class roster from the failing schools, tally the number of projected criminals based on population and do some math. Today's inner city dropouts are dead (predominantly) men dropping out of schools happy to see them go so that the standardized test scores look good.

Punishing Students for Comparison Loan Shopping

The NYTimes reports that students who comparison shop may be getting punished with higher student loan interest rates.

How did it come to pass that 18-year-olds were vulnerable to paying more because they shopped around? To answer that question, and develop strategies for credit score damage control, you need to know a bit more about the worlds of student debt and credit score algorithms.

Borrowers took out $17.1 billion in private sector loans in the 2006-7 school year, according to preliminary College Board figures. Part of what makes private loans different from other student loans is that rates can range wildly, by several percentage points, even with one lender.

To quote a rate, lenders check an applicant’s credit history. And every time a shopper asks a lender for a rate quote, it can show up as another inquiry on a credit report.

Lots of inquiries send the wrong signals to the formulas that create the popular FICO credit score that Fair Isaac administers, namely that borrowers may be applying for multiple loans because they’re financially troubled and potentially going bankrupt.

While Fair Isaac has mined years of data to determine that people making a bunch of mortgage and auto loan applications over a short period are almost always innocently shopping for a loan, it hasn’t declared student loan shoppers similarly safe.

One reason is that the company doesn’t have a big pile of private student loan data to mine. These loans are relatively new, and not many people shopped around for the best rate before the student loan scandals erupted.

So, in theory, how much could credit scores fall when people shop for loans? Fair Isaac says that each inquiry will generally not cause more than a five-point drop, though it may be more for a student with a short credit history.

Lenders generally check credit reports with only one of the three main credit bureaus. If a lender examines only one such report, an applicant avoids damage on the other two bureaus’ records. Then again, if all the lenders check with the same credit bureau, the damage may be especially high there.

Brian Eno, David Byrne, Free MP3s, WOOT!

Here's the link to sign up for the free songs.

Can Gambling Studies Teach Us Something About Education Metrics?

A recent study [Why play a losing game? Study uncovers why low-income people buy lottery tickets] as to why the poor gamble so much comes to some interesting conclusions.

A new Carnegie Mellon University study sheds light on the reasons why low-income lottery players eagerly invest in a product that provides poor returns.

In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel subjectively poor bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets as a comparison group that was made to feel subjectively more affluent. The Carnegie Mellon findings point to poverty's central role in people's decisions to buy lottery tickets.

"Some poor people see playing the lottery as their best opportunity for improving their financial situations, albeit wrongly so," said the study's lead author Emily Haisley, a doctoral student in the Department of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. "The hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim and buying lottery tickets in fact exacerbates the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape."

The researchers influenced participants' perceptions of their relative wealth — or lack thereof — by having them complete a survey on their opinions of the city of Pittsburgh that included an item on annual income. The group made to feel poor was asked to provide its income on a scale that began at "less than $100,000" and went upward from there in $100,000 increments, ensuring that most respondents would be in the lowest income category. The group made to feel subjectively wealthier was asked to report income on a scale that began with "less than $10,000" and increased in $10,000 increments, leading most respondents to be in a middle or upper tier.

Participants, who were recruited at Pittsburgh's Greyhound Bus terminal, were paid $5 for completing the survey and given the opportunity to buy as many as five scratch-off lottery tickets. The experimental group purchased an average of 1.27 lottery tickets, compared with 0.67 tickets bought by the members of the control group.

A second experiment reported in the paper found that indirectly reminding participants that, while different income groups face unequal outcomes in education, jobs and housing, everyone has equal chances of winning the lottery induced an increase in the number of lottery tickets purchased. The group given this reminder purchased 1.31 tickets, compared with 0.54 for the group not given such a reminder.

It seems to me that an unexpected consequence of NCLB's metrics (aside from being bogus) is that they label schools as failures. Instead of creating a perspective of the school within a context of the norm.

Secondly, students in poor school districts might score better if they were encouraged to study because their IQ indicated they were far more normal within the school population than any other signals in their lives might lead them to believe.

Academic Referencing of Material

I just discovered a free software tool that plugs into the browser and helps students collect, manage, and cite research sources.

For those of you who aren't parents or who haven't yet gone through the chaos of having little Johnny or Jane in agony over their research papers and their sources, this tool is sure to be a necessity.

It is called Zotero. It is a download that plugs into the browser and it was developed by George Mason University.

Beautiful. See the video tour here.

Are Four Day School Weeks Inevitable?

The rising cost of fuel and food are forcing many communities across the country to consider and adopt four day school weeks to save money and resources.

In this Reuters article entitled Schools eye four-day week to cut fuel costs by Rebekah Kebede we get a glimpse of an imminent future.

Facing a crippling increase in fuel costs, some rural U.S. schools are mulling a solution born of the '70s oil crisis: a four-day week.

Cutting out one day of school has been the key to preserving educational programs and staff in parts of Kentucky, New Mexico and Minnesota, outweighing some parents' concerns about finding day-care for the day off.

"For rural school districts where buses may travel 100 miles round-trip each day, there certainly are transportation savings worth considering," said Marc Egan, the director of federal affairs at the National School Boards Association.

Egan said about 100 schools in as many as 16 states have already moved to a four-day school week, many to save money on transportation, heating and cooling.

Free 3-D Modeling Software

Caligari, makers of TrueSpace, are giving their product away. Free software, free instructional videos and so on. They were bought out by Microsoft and apparently this is a goodwill gesture and a welcome one at that.

For art instructors worldwide this is great news. And for School 2.0 advocates this is an opportunity to create virtual school environments.

What Ever Happened to Nim Chimpsky?

This interview with Elizabeth Hess, author of Nim Chimpsky, The Chimp Who Would Be Human is absolutely fascinating reading. It is a follow-up on one of the most tragic stories I have ever come across, a chimp who was taught sign-language and eventually abandoned to the fate of a lab rat.

Natasha Mitchell: And still talks that way today, years later.

Elizabeth Hess: Years later, yes.

Natasha Mitchell: He even got to a point where he drank beer and smoked.

Elizabeth Hess: Yes, it was the 70s so you know it wasn't uncommon for Columbia students to be hanging around at night smoking pot, and Nim loved pot and eventually developed his own sign for give me a joint. You know chimps have the same vices that we have. Nim started the day for his entire life with a cup of coffee and as he grew older was often grumpy if he didn't get it.

Natasha Mitchell: Elizabeth Hess it's hard to believe then that this was in fact a scientific project. So what was the training regime going on for Nim in the middle of all this?

Elizabeth Hess: Terrace felt initially that he was going to have a lot more control in the Lafarge house than he had and Nim was sort of socialised to be the centre of attention and indeed he was and you know they are great entertainers. I mean by the time he was two months he was scaling the walls and hanging on the chandelier.

Natasha Mitchell: In all this he was going to school every day. What was the regime and what sort of progress did he make?

Elizabeth Hess: Well in the beginning all the Lafarges went and they themselves took a course in American sign language and there were meetings to determine which word Nim would learn that week and there was a criteria, he would have to use the word spontaneously five times, three people had to witness it before the world was actually put on his vocabulary list. After he was about two or three months old he started picking up words very rapidly.

Natasha Mitchell: But there was still a lot of anxiety wasn't there about the scientific rigor of the project because for a start they were trying to control for all the chaos in the domestic home of the Lafarges and things got very tense there. But also the question was, was Nim really learning sign language in a way a human child learns language?

Elizabeth Hess: Yes.

Natasha Mitchell: And comprehends what they are actually articulating?

Elizabeth Hess: Well yes, how do you prove what a chimp is doing and why, and how do you know whether Nim has learned a word of whether Nim is imitating a word. And one might ask how do children learn, I mean when a child says his or her first word is it because they are mimicking the word Dad-dah or is it because they are looking at their father and think that's the person's name. So Terrace set up an artificial classroom at Columbia University where Nim was expected to go in and take off his coat and hang it up on a little hook and sit down at a desk and do some work.

Natasha Mitchell: Which Nim didn't enjoy very much at all.

Elizabeth Hess: Plan B was a disaster. Nim became anxious and upset and wild and at one point they actually had a punishment box that had no windows for a time out period. And of course this is something they would not do to a human being but they thought they could do it to Nim because he was a chimp. And it's sort of one of the first sort of breakdowns in the philosophy and ideology of project Nim.

Natasha Mitchell: Yes, they said too human for a cage, too wild for a house at one point. Domestic chaos reigned in the Lafarges, things really fell apart there and Nim was transferred to a grand mansion on massive grounds in New York City, really nothing short of a surreal scene that you paint in the book, because not only was there Nim, the sort of man of the palace all these people students, scientists, recruited to Project Nim came to live with him in this place.

Elizabeth Hess: Dellafield was this 21 room Georgian mansion on the Hudson River and there were ponds and there were rose gardens and it has been empty for a number of years because Columbia University couldn't really figure out what to do with it and it was incredible.

Natasha Mitchell: Nim developed some extraordinary relationships in that house, he even appeared on Sesame Street in that time.

Elizabeth Hess: He did and Terrace was projecting this extraordinary success, Nim's vocabulary was growing week by week. Within a year he had a vocabulary of 75 to 100 words and at that point they started to get some deaf people involved in the project which was quite critical because Nim had not been around any natural signers, so at Dellafield the project took on a whole culture of its own.

Natasha Mitchell: Things progressed but then things also started to get out of control and this was an experience common to many of the chimps, I gather, housed with regular families. As chimps got a little bit older things really started to go pear-shaped. What happened to Nim?

Elizabeth Hess: I think Terrace realised that Project Nim was not only taking over his life but ruining it. There was a certain point where Terrace decided that he had more than enough data to prove that Nim had learned language and Nim, you know I think he had 20,000 combinations of signs documented and recorded from Nim, he was combining his signs, he was using words in a way that initially Terrace really believed was not unlike the way humans used language and the way children learn language. And I think he felt well I've got more than enough data, it's too hard taking care of this chimp and he called an end to the project.

Natasha Mitchell: He really shocked people, didn't he, because he published a paper in Science a year after that, or in 1979, where he ultimately reported on the project as being a failure, really all a load of bollocks and Nim had just been mimicking, not speaking.

Elizabeth Hess: He had also really boasted his success all over the media and no one was prepared for him to say not only was Nim not using language but all of the other researchers in this field have also been hoodwinked, not just me, they are all fools, none of these chimps are using language, they are all mimics.

Natasha Mitchell: It became dubbed the 'clever hands phenomena' didn't it?

Elizabeth Hess: Exactly and for those people are in the field who had these ongoing projects they lost their funding virtually immediately.

Natasha Mitchell: His conclusion was crucial though wasn't it, because in effect if he'd declared the project a success he would have undermined the use of chimps as experimental subjects across the board, across science, because he would have been suggesting that chimps are sentient, intelligent beings, very much so, capable of communicating consciously with humans using a human language.

Elizabeth Hess: That's absolutely true and I think initially Terrace had no idea how radical the concept was, simply to take a research animal out of the cage, out of the laboratory and into the human family. And now it's really conclusive, not only chimpanzees are sentient but all kinds of animals are talking to each other that we never admitted had any language at all until the last decade. But I think for Terrace, I think he felt going further in to the mind of the chimpanzee, which ultimately he would have had to do with Project Nim, was not a direction he wanted to go in.

Natasha Mitchell: Now Nim had never spent time with other chimps or even communicated with then before so life back in a primate centre in Oklahoma was altogether new. And in 1982 he was sold off along with his brothers to a New York University Medical Research Laboratory LEMSIP, using chimps for hepatitis research. All hell broke loose when the story leaked with red hot media coverage, a Boston attorney even claimed that allowing this to happen to Nim was like selling Bambi for dog food. And the new researchers had never seen a chimp like Nim.

Elizabeth Hess: Yes, I mean Nim -- here in this research lab were these...cages that are like the size of large refrigerators, hang from the ceiling with individual chimps in them and the technicians who take care of them walk below them and you know Nim and the other chimps are signing to them, they want a cigarette, they want a drink, they want attention, they want to talk, they want to communicate. And the technicians went to the head of LEMSIP and said, there's something strange about these chimps they are trying to communicate with us. They used sign language with each other, you know the chimps that signed, that gave birth, they taught their offspring some signs.

Natasha Mitchell: Where does Nim Chimpsky's story end. He got out of the experimental lab -- where did he live out the rest of his life?

Elizabeth Hess: Well eventually a very prominent animal activist named Cleveland Amory, who became fascinated with the case, purchased him and brought him to a multi-species sanctuary in Murchison, Texas. Ultimately they got a friend for Nim who was an ex-circus chimp named Sally Jones, who was smaller than Nim and they were inseparable. Sally actually died before him and Nim grieved very intensely for Sally and she was replaced by three chimps and that was a very wise move because Nim then had a little family. But Nim was waiting for his breakfast snack one morning in Texas then he signed to the caretaker who was on her way to the kitchen to bring him some cantelope and in fact she recalls that he signed the word hurry, by the time she came back with the fruit he was lying in his cage and he had had a massive heart attack and he was rushed to the hospital and he actually died on his way to the hospital.

This is obviously a short excerpt from a longer interview that is absolutely compelling. Please do read the entire piece.

There's a Lot of Ways to Get It Wrong

The Courant is applauding this year's CT Mastery Test results in an editorial laced with misunderstanding and ignorance. They share the delusion of educators and administrators who prop up and profit handsomely from the high-stakes, high-stress testing industry.

What else can they do? Like all-good compliant enablers they buy and perpetuate the unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable assertions of an education community dedicated to blind ignorance and unlimited profit. Called "Learning to Improve" - no, I'm not making that up -the editorial dutifully and patronizingly congratulates the system.

Higher scores on the annual Connecticut Academic Performance Test — in some cases increasing by double digits — are an indication that multiple efforts to boost student achievement are paying off.

Statewide, the percentage of high school sophomores meeting state goals increased in three out of the four subjects — math, science, reading and writing — over 2007. Only reading scores stayed the same. White, black and Hispanic students all showed gains.

Hartford students, among the lowest-performing in the state, made impressive strides in the percentages achieving "proficiency" or better — although that designation is still a level below state goals.

Although the trend is heartening, the gap between the scores of white students and minorities, and between low-income communities and affluent ones, persists. So must the strategies that are showing promise.

Yeah, presumably they are waiting for that utopian moment of intellectual singularity when all students rich or poor, formerly smart or challenged all get precisely the same score thus proving that the "gap" could be overcome.

That moment of intellectual mediocrity is apparently something the schools are striving for, the two-faced graduate, half Alfred E. Neumann and half-genius in everyman, a marching, compliant, ready-for-industry, test-proven, interchangeable widget that we can finally be proud of.

I know, you get teary eyed just thinking about it.

The blatant, obvious, in-your-face-fact that the schools are being blighted by this war of test scores is of little consequence. Like Iraq, the murder, mayhem, chaos, and ubiquitous corruption are a small price to pay for the opportunity to show -cough- progress.

And in a fitting tribute to the absurd, the Courant takes an opportunity to celebrate schools that taught nothing more nor improved their students an iota but managed to find a way to make the test a more palatable poison.

Improvements made in Canton, whose sophomores now rank among the top in the state, should be a model for all districts. One innovation was to spread out the testing schedule so that students took only one of the nine CAPT test segments per day rather than trying to cram them all into five days. Special education students were particularly helped by this change, according to Principal Gary Gula.

That's got to have every school principal in the state saying, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Yes sir. And now that innovation will be used in the next round to some even more progress toward the illusion of teaching kids something - usually an illiterate state employee's idea of what's important.

No, not coffee breaks or not answering the phone! Something that can be tested like -um- "You're having crumpets with the Oneupsman family, do you use a salad fork or a dinner fork?"

Nutritional Transparency

There is mounting evidence that early childhood nutrition has a much to do with test scores as anything parents or teachers teach. This study, The Impact of Nutrition during Early Childhood on Education among Guatemalan Adults explains some recent findings.

Our results indicate significantly positive, and fairly substantial, effects of the nutritional
intervention a quarter century later. These include: increased grade attainment by women via increased likelihood of completion of primary school and some secondary school; speedier grade progression by women; higher scores on reading comprehension tests for both men and women; and higher scores on nonverbal cognitive tests for both men and women. Thus we provide solid evidence that at least one type of preschool intervention—improved nutrition—conveys longterm benefits that do not fade away over time in a developing country context. The results suggest that anti-poverty interventions that include improving the nutrition of preschool children
may have more substantial and persistent effects than are commonly recognized. Further, the evidence that early nutrition has an effect on subsequent educational attainments underscores the value of a lifecycle approach to schooling that includes the preschool period (Cunha et al. 2005).

Rather than spending money on more standardized tests we should insist early childhood nutrition programs that ensure sound minds and bodies and we need to insist on transparency in school meal programs so that students all use the cafeteria in exactly the same manner without obvious class differences.

Exterminating Individuality

The saddest story on the internet in recent weeks is yet another Texas brainstorm. In School Board: Boy Can't Go To School With Long Hair by Elizabeth Scarborough, we learn that an elementary school somewhere in Texas has an asinine policy about kid's hair length.

But there's an Indian boy who doesn't want his hair cut "because it tells me how long I've been here". For those of you unfamiliar with Joseph Campbell or the Jungian ideas about a priori myth tales, this boy, assuming he wasn't coached into making such a statement may be making one of the most soulful comments any of us have ever heard.

In fact I'll go so far as to say it is religious in the sense that it may represent a purity of spiritual understanding about himself that the school board is ignorant of. One would think that in Texas, the state that loves lecturing the nation about religious rights and prayer in school is denying this child's manifestation of prayer because the sky will fall if a young child has long hair in school.

These people wouldn't recognize God if he kicked them in the ass.

The Home Invasion Invitation

Today the Forth Amendment was eliminated from the Bill of Rights.

The Forth Amendment is metaphorically referred to when an American believes that their "home is their castle". And despite the subprime mortgage meltdown this amendment applies to every home and not just property.

Today that is little more than homily and signals yet another desecration of the flag and country by the political powers that be.

For schools the elimination of this Bill of Rights amendment to the Constitution creates a bit of a crisis for social studies teachers.

Do all of the amendments after the Forth now get renumbered? If they do a lot of textbooks need revising.

And can anyone claiming to be an authority now walk through your home uninvited? And what rights exist for homeowners who attempt to protect themselves from such ambiguous home invasions? For parents this will be particularly troubling when you find invaders in the home searching your screaming children's room. Fear not, it's all in the name of political expedience.

It's another sad day for what's left of America but what's new?

The Crack in the Cosmic Cage

A few months ago, an excellent article in the New York Times discussed fear in children. Called Joy of Fright: Old Chillers That Should Scare (but Not Terrorize) the Kids, Wendell Jamieson observed the effect of 1940' fright films on his son Dean.

So for the last several weeks he and I have watched a series of clever horror movies from the 1940s, including a few exciting recent releases. I’m happy to report success. Dean has learned to allow his imagination to frighten him, and he doesn’t seem any the worse for wear.

As a bonus he has also learned some lessons about cinema. He can now tell, almost instantly, when a character appears who was created solely for the purpose of being killed. And he has even learned some lessons about life, like this one: When you are alone with the bad guy, and he is pouring you a drink, and he asks if anyone knows that you came to meet him, you always answer: “Yes, yes. Everyone knows! I told everyone I know that I was coming! Totally.”

Unfortunately the monsters that exist in today's world are far more frightful than those of a healthy active imagination.

Dozens of articles warn or complain of helicopter parents who oversee every movement a child or teen might make. And parents do so not because they are intolerant of their children but because society has become so. Parents come in a multiplicity of archetypes these days but one category distinguishes those who hover.

The Wobegon sect insist on creating and maintaining social class differences. They advocate entitlement and hover to insulate and ensure every social advantage. They are often by-products or principals in the education system. One can sit in just about any academic awards ceremony at any school in the country and note, scorecard fashion that those who are considered worthy of awards are related to those who work within the school system. Education in America has manufactured an education entitlement caste, self-insulated, and self-insulating.

The Jedi sect hover for other reasons. The vampires, witches, and monsters of this world have become institutionalized, unmerciful, ruthless, and far more depraved than any child or young adult can cope with.

The collapsing U.S. economy demonstrates how coarse and vulgar the unwitting are treated in today's society. People are duped into becoming credit slaves, enjoying short-term gain for a lifetime of obligatory servitude.

Young adults are seen as armies of victims waiting to be exploited by creditors, politicians, and educational paper mills. The insatiable desire evoked by these monsters is no longer the sexual fantasy of being swept away by a stranger. Today, the cultivated desire is consumption, immediate gratification, and extreme, accelerated thrill.

I am strong and unflinching advocate that television and media need to offer adult themes for adults and that open forums offer free speech even when the speech offends. Unfortunately, open forums are intolerant of ideas that challenge the status quo. Censorship killed the Charlie Rose forums. Talking Points Memo for all its sanctimonious "truth"-telling is intolerant of unflinching liberal viewpoints. The New York Times closed their forums when its vocal readership pointed out their hypocrisies.

By diminishing of free speech through the privatization of the most democratic communication channels, children and teens cannot learn how the system truly works, how it takes advantage of people, and how it neutralizes citizenship. By controlling free speech, critical thought is eliminated except to argue manufactured talking points.

Frank Rich at the New York Times laments our descent as he provides a film review of Wall-E.

Humanity is not dead in “Wall-E,” but it is in peril. The world’s population cruises the heavens ceaselessly on a mammoth luxury spaceship that it boarded in the early 22nd century after the planet became uninhabitable. For government, there is a global corporation called Buy N Large, which keeps the public wired to umpteenth-generation iPods and addicted to a diet of supersized liquefied fast food and instantly obsolete products. The people are too bloated to walk — they float around on motorized Barcaloungers — but they are happy shoppers. A billboard on the moon heralds a Buy N Large outlet mall “coming soon,” not far from that spot where back in the day of “Hello, Dolly!” idealistic Americans once placed a flag.

And yet these rabid consumers, like us, are haunted by what paradise might have been lost. How can they reclaim what matters? How can Earth be recolonized? These questions are rarely spoken in “Wall-E,” but are omnipresent, like half-forgotten dreams. In this movie, a fleeting green memory of the extinct miracle of photosynthesis is as dazzling and elusive as the emerald city of Oz.

One of the great things about art, including popular art, is that it can hit audiences at a profound level beyond words. That includes children. The kids at “Wall-E” were never restless, despite the movie’s often melancholy mood and few belly laughs. They seemed to instinctually understand what “Wall-E” was saying; they didn’t pepper their chaperones with questions along the way. At the end they clapped their small hands. What they applauded was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out.

You have to wonder what these same kids make of the political show their parents watch on TV at home. The fierce urgency of now that drives “Wall-E” and its yearning for change is absent in both the Barack Obama and McCain campaigns these days.

Jedi parents who hover, hover because of the comprehensive dangers our society has amassed against individuals, the free-thinkers, and the sacred.

The life-blood of freedom is free-speech yet the message of Wall-E could be construed as disruptive of school activity and censored and punished. In Sunday's Courant, Frank D. Lomonte enumerates the assault on free speech of students in Reaching To Stifle Students.

In one recent case, lawyers for Connecticut's Region 10 school district, serving Burlington and Harwinton, actually convinced the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that Avery Doninger, then a Lewis S. Mills High School junior, could be punished for using a blog — created on a home computer on personal time — to encourage the public to lobby school administrators to overturn a decision that threatened a student-organized concert. Although the student regrettably used a coarse word to refer to the administrators, it was not the mild expletive that decided her fate; it was the fact that, in the court's view, Doninger "disrupted" school by escalating the concert dispute to involve the public.

What a miserable civics lesson for a 17-year-old who, as even the school conceded, was an otherwise exemplary student. Asking public officials to take precious time out of their day to actually answer calls and e-mails from parents who question their management of the school is such a "disruption" that it justifies suspending the First Amendment. In what country?

Thankfully, this bizarre and frightening view of our Constitution remains an aberration.

A U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania recently rejected the same argument that prevailed in Connecticut, wisely observing that — if students misbehave online in ways that violate the rights of others — that's a private matter with private remedies.

Why should we be concerned for the "rights" of a student to call the principal a bad name? Because court decisions can live on forever, and they can be misapplied in mischievous ways.

What about the student who learns that the coach has been molesting female students — a scandal that undoubtedly would provoke a "disruptive" level of discussion at school? Many principals refuse to let students publish such "adult" matter in the school newspaper — and now, if the radical expansionists get their way, the principal can constitutionally add: "If I catch you talking to anyone about this — anywhere, any time — you're expelled."



In a landmark 1963 case, the Supreme Court said elegantly that "First Amendment freedoms need breathing space to survive." Today, thanks to decisions like Morse, too many courts are affording the breathing space to the censor — especially when that censor is a school. They're willing to let schools punish innocent conduct for fear of second-guessing the principal's authority.

Well, principals who abuse their disciplinary authority need second-guessing. And if schools want to put court-approved muzzles on our kids, then we'd better speak for them — loud and clear.

To be muzzled is to be a slave to the political hucksters who run the schools, the government bureaucracies, and the above-the-law corporations who shamelessly will take advantage of every individual weakness a child, young-adult, or unwitting adult may have.

Dissent across the globe is being reduced to a silent scream whose avenues of expression are being systematically eliminated. Jedi parents know this all too well. If they hover, it is to protect their children from an all-too blood-thirsty world.

The crack in the Cosmic Cage is not an accident.

Guess Who's Tampering with the 2008 Presidential Election?

My, my, my. The dirty tricks never end. For Independence Day Margaret Spellings has announced which States will enjoy relaxed NCLB protocols. Of the seventeen states that applied, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, and Ohio were -cough- chosen.

Given the electoral importance of these states, one cannot help but wonder aloud how tax money that pays for federal bureaucracies can be so cynically and shamelessly targeted toward the unethical influencing of federal election sentiments.

The Department of Education has been and continues to be out of control as myopic and partisan organization that seemingly has no accountability to anyone. By manipulating the NCLB program, it now seeks to eliminate voter dissatisfaction with education policy in precisely the states that can electorally swing the election.

This deserves a federal investigation for tampering with public funds and trust.

Amen

A Victim of Child Abuse Speaks

Political Satirist Barry Crimmins has posted a powerful blog entry that discusses what a victim of child abuse feels about punishing the perpetrator. In his own words:

Unfortunately the ominously shadowy Alito either doesn't care or knows nothing about what looms over child rape victims or he'd stop carrying polluted water for neo-cons and use his power to help shape a less oppressive and less brutal society. Child abuse thrives when authoritarians rule -- authoritarians like Samuel Alito. Abused kids are already freaked out enough without having bloodthirsty men in robes boohooing their inability to take a life for an eye. Alito has inveighed against compassion at every turn but now we're supposed to believe that this pro-torture reactionary is thinking first of children? To employ a term Sanctimonious Sam despises, spare me.

Many people are so overwhelmed by the thought of child abuse that they'll do just about anything to change the subject when it is mentioned. The most common device these subject-switchers utilize is the ultimate decree. They'll say, "I think if someone gets caught abusing a kid, they should be rounded up and killed! Case closed!" Once you proclaim that you're in favor of executing pedophiles, what else is there to say? You have advocated sweeping them under the ultimate rug and that's that. Problem solved. The problem, that is, of having to discuss child abuse.

Pronouncements of lynch mobsters notwithstanding, I wouldn't have wanted my rapist put out of his own misery and into mine. I started life without blood on my hands and I aim to keep it that way. Had the man who raped me on numerous occasions not died in prison while serving his third term for sexually abusing very young boys, I might have gone to see him. My personal revenge would have been to show him that I did not become what I resisted, that I hadn't grown into a cruel and heartless man. I would have told him that he inflicted a burden upon me that almost killed me, and not just when I was nearly asphyxiated during his savage assaults. I'd have told him of the encumbrance I dragged along with me for decades that, through hard work, I had managed to lighten. In short, I would tell him that although he inflicted a lot of pain upon me, he had not succeeded in ruining me. Then I would tell him that I was sorry that he had such a miserable and wasted life. Finally, I would ask him why he thought he had ended up doing the things he did. Maybe I would have discovered some context for the man, even if I had to sort it out of the manipulative lies for which pedophiles are deservedly notorious.

I couldn't do any of this because by the time I figured out who had raped me, he was dead. The news of his demise did not cheer me. I just thought of the end of his awful life in a cruddy jail cell and wondered what led to such a waste. At least I didn't miss my chance to confront him because he had been killed in my name.

People who support executing rapists of children fail to consider a crucial issue-- the age of the victims. The victim in one of the cases the Supreme Court examined was eight years old when she was raped. That would make her twelve or thirteen right now. She has enough of a challenge in front of her without having the state presuming it should kill on her behalf. When I finally dealt with the horrors of my childhood, I had enough brutality to reconcile without adding an execution to the list. Unlike the poor child in the aforementioned case, the perpetrator of the crimes against me was not a member of my family. I can't imagine what it would be like to have to deal with having had one of my parents' siblings killed to settle a score for me. I can imagine that such a state action could cause a very large schism in a family, a schism that (to one extent or another) would trace back to the victim. This would place yet another burden on the child -- in large part because adults wanted to make a grandstand play that would help distract everyone from considering how such a crime might have been prevented in the first place. Sorry we left you alone with that evil man but to make up for it, we had him killed!

Almost everyone wants to avoid this subject and who can blame them? Breaking silence about child abuse is so damned disquieting. When, as an adult, I began dealing with what happened to me, I talked to close friends about it. A very few were just great and couldn't have been kinder. Numerous others had the same question for me. They'd ask, "Are are you talking to anyone about this?"

I'd think, "Yeah, I thought I was talking to you. But clearly you believe I should only speak to people who are paid $150 an hour to hear about this shit. I guess you don't understand that it's tough for me to trust strangers -- particularly strangers who sit there and only say 'hmm' every 15 or twenty minutes. It can be kind of nerve-wracking. After you do that, it could be kind of nice to speak to a trusted friend."

The "are you talking to anyone" people were a bargain compared to the lynch mob advocates, particularly for me. I'm hampered by prejudice because I oppose the death penalty for anyone. Even if I were to be murdered, I would not want my killer executed. You can't kill someone without making someone else into a killer. I cannot see how anyone could ever justify that.

Even if I supported the death penalty, I wouldn't want child rapists killed simply because they were once children themselves. In all likelihood they were abused children. While most victims of childhood sexual assaults don't grow up to become pedophiles, the vast majority of pedophiles were sexually abused as children. Who knows what would have happened to me if I had been raped a few more times, or a few years later, and had been tricked into believing I'd been acting on my own initiative? Would my social contract have been completely voided? I can't say. Life gets pretty damned nuanced when you can consider yourself a lucky childhood rape survivor.

I encourage everyone to read the entire piece by following the link. In a world of flotsom and jetsom, the courage and wisdom of this piece deserves and demands your attention if only for a moment.

More Doctored NCLB Studies

The Thomas B Fordham Institute recently released a report entitled High Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB that wanders off based on a political agenda and an astonishing misreading of data to advocate modifying NCLB to serve high-end learners, excellence, and the ever-panderific "we need to challenge students even more" meme. The lack of anything more than anecdotal evidence never deters the hyperbole of the political agenda this report is selling.

Considering the number of professional educators responsible for this anal-retentive masterpiece, one would have assumed that somebody bothered to proof-read and correct some of the more psychedelic assertions being made in the report.

For example, Finn describes the reason that poor, Hispanic, and Afro-American students who scored well on the eighth-grade 2005 math NAEP as being "luck" rather than because they shared an educated households profile when growing up like their other academic peers.

This report is yet more bad science from an educational establishment grown corrupt and unaccountable for education's entrepreneurial fraud known as NCLB.

The Institute's neocon-driven report distorts the public dialogue about NCLB with the intention of selling the public a newer, more expensive NCLB scheme.

The premise of the entire report is based on blindly accepting and naively interpreting NCLB test results as being meaningful measures of intellectual progress by students rather than say a measure of students and teachers becoming far more accomplished at drilling for and taking tests.

On page 5 of the report a number of inaccurate portrayed visual representations of the data are used to proclaim "No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is working precisely as designed". If you examine the data more carefully you'll note that not only doesn't NCLB do what its supposed to do but it statistically shows that it adds virtually no value to the system at all.

In these figures, if we ignore the initial ramp up to high stress testing mandated by NCLB we can see that both the 10th percentile and the 90th percentile are virtually flat-lining from 2002 until 2007. What marginal "achievement" is made is within the scope of statistical error given the sample size. Figure A, a (bad) graph of NAEP scores during the NCLB years indicates that between 2002 and 2007, the 10th percentile of students added 4 points and the 90th percentile added 4 points where 263 is the high score.

The report leads us to believe that this 2 point gap reduction between high and low learners over 5 years is both significant and worth the millions of wasted dollars, millions of wasted hours on high-stakes testing regiment, and chaotic devastation of arts programs that have followed in the wake of NCLB. And to add insult to injury we're expected to believe that this microscopic improvement in test taking skills will make these kids more competitive in the global marketplace.

Indubitably, this marginal result also negates the thesis of the study that high end learners are being short-changed by the drain of resources now consuming the test score improvement "gains" of our lowest achievers. What is more precisely documented in the details is the bankruptcy of NCLB and the retardation of education dedicated to all students.

Worse still is the assertion in a section called Amending NCLB that a majority of teachers "favors a proposal to amending it to add another mandate". Left unsaid is that teachers are never asked anywhere in the study whether or not NCLB should be eliminated. By selectively co-ercing respondents to amend NCLB or not amend NCLB the study falsely claims that teachers have no other opinions of the law.

And, to be clear, this neo-con education manifesto is manufacturing and promoting more expensive mandates to be added to NCLB. Once they deliver the federal mandate they intend to blame liberals for the expense.

Why education philanthropies continue to fund bad science is sinful. That these studies are largely political sado-pedagogical exercises is more saddening.

The report insists NCLB is narrowing the irrelevant gaps used by educators and bureaucrats to fund their wacko education schemes. Yet the high-achiever that they define under NCLB is the same high-achiever that existed before NCLB, accountability bunko-schemes, and the cruel bigotry of neo-con high-expectations rhetoric. Yes, high-achievers are the white children of the educated well-to-do who are great reading and math standardized test-takers.

Surprised? If you are you must be an education major or graduate of an American university with a teaching degree. That population never seems to get their own professional studies performed and interpreted accurately.

Math and science is not just challenging to students these days.

Teaching Open-mindedness

The New York Times in an op-ed piece called Your Brain Lies to You By Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt raise some interesting points about presenting data to individuals who may have their minds made up.

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.

In another Stanford study, 48 students, half of whom said they favored capital punishment and half of whom said they opposed it, were presented with two pieces of evidence, one supporting and one contradicting the claim that capital punishment deters crime. Both groups were more convinced by the evidence that supported their initial position.

Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods about Coke — or about a presidential candidate.

Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.

Consumers of news, for their part, are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce beliefs they already hold. In a replication of the study of students’ impressions of evidence about the death penalty, researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with their beliefs.

In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true.

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Holmes erroneously assumed that ideas are more likely to spread if they are honest. Our brains do not naturally obey this admirable dictum, but by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps we can move closer to Holmes’s ideal.

I can't help but come away with the impression that social studies classes should take this to heart and create more exercises in which students with strongly held convictions be asked to advocate the opposite side of the coin occasionally rather than just debate in the comfort zone of their own preconceptions.

Re: Educrats

An op-ed piece by D. Dowd Muska appeared in The Chronicle on Saturday called Educrat. Muska speaks for a growing number of taxpayers in questioning the enormous costs of public education.

The numbers on spending are stunning. Several years ago, a legislative investigation found that between 1981 and 2001, Connecticut’s government-school expenditures, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. Enrollment growth was less than 10 percent.

The teacher-student ratio in Nutmeg State government schools is lower than the national average. The share of non-instructional staff in the system is high -- 13 percentage points above average. And with educrat earnings and benefits in the exosphere, spending per student ranks near the top. (Only New Jersey and New York spend more.)

It’s likely that many “do it for the children” activists aren’t aware of these figures. A recent opinion survey discovered that Americans have little understanding of how much revenue funds government-run schools. The average answer to pollsters’ query about per-pupil spending in respondents’ local districts was $4,231 -- less than half the accurate sum. In addition, respondents underestimated average teacher salaries in their states by over $14,000.

Researchers William Howell and Martin R. West concluded: “Americans think that far less is being spent on the nation’s public schools than is actually the case. The vast majority of the public thinks we spend amounts that can only be described as minuscule, and almost 96 percent of the public underestimate either per-pupil spending in their districts or teacher salaries in their states.”

On the rare occasions when Connecticut’s educrat lobby concedes that taxpayer support of its empire is vast, we’re told such spending is the cause of the state’s high-performing students.

But the outcomes of Connecticut’s government schools aren’t as stellar as defenders of the status quo would have us believe. Skeptics cite Nutmeg State students’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The test, first given in 1969, is a rigorous examination of elementary students’ competency in core subjects.

Connecticut’s NAEP scores are unimpressive. In 2007, 53 percent of the state’s eighth graders were “proficient” in writing. A mere 37 percent were proficient in reading. And only 35 percent were proficient in math.

Those figures don’t quite jibe with the far-less-demanding Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), which unlike the NAEP, is not overseen by a bipartisan panel of experts from across the nation, but by the state’s Department of Education. CMT scores show that those same eighth graders are doing terrific: 83 percent proficiency in writing, 76 percent in reading, and 81 percent in math.

A 2006 analysis by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation found that the quality of Connecticut’s academic standards was pathetic -- only seven states did a worse job setting criteria for command of basic subjects. (Connecticut’s math and English standards both received grades of “F.”)

I had not realized the disconnect between public perception of the economics and the reality.

Muska gets the economic arguments right though I would argue that the metrics of student success are wrong-headed and indicative of a degenerative pedagogy driven by the madness of the federal Department of Education.

Be that as it may, Muska's economic arguments should be be taken seriously at face value. Education salaries increases are a runaway windfall for the public school employees. The argument that teachers would be much more comfortable in the private sector is a fraudulent argument in an age where the average American worker gets a 0 - 2% raise, faces continuous threats of layoff and outsourcing, and so on.

Teachers and government employees need to recognize that their salary increases are not entitlements but paid for by taxpayers who have not fared well for the past ten years or so.

The Spring Art Show

I had the opportunity to visit the EO Smith Art show last Tuesday evening and it is a big hit.

Paintings, drawing, ceramics, jewelry and computer art are featured by dozens of young craftsmen and artists and the work is fabulous.

Anne Lorch, Tammy Glaeser, and Steve Marks-Hamilton deserve a virtual round of applause for both inspiring and guiding these students.

Anne is retiring and will be fondly remembered by all.

As I was making the rounds however, I was informed by her peers that Tammy Glaeser, our newest art faculty member, had made a very good impression for her contributions in computer art, painting, and fresh ideas.

Jailing Our Children

Sunday's Courant features a great opinion piece called Criminalizing Kids by Abby Anderson. While many states are reconsidering treating kids like adults, others allow tasering of even elementary school students. Connecticut having jailed its black minority population is now mining the next judicially impotent population - children.

NCLB coupled with the advent of a laissez-faire, zero tolerance for inalienable rights police state is parading children through the court system with a gusto Anne Frank fans will immediately recognize.

From the article:

Schools have strong incentives to jettison "problem children" and few incentives to help them. Their low test scores decrease federal funding. Their behavior means that teachers have to spend more time helping children develop socially and less time drilling for standardized tests.

Children can be removed from classrooms through arrest, suspension or expulsion. More than 3 million children are suspended or expelled from U.S. public schools every year. During the 2006-2007 school year,Connecticut children missed 152,850 school days — 418 years — because of suspensions and expulsions. Kids who aren't in school can't keep up academically. Suspension and expulsion are, therefore, predictors of school failure and of eventual incarceration. Most suspensions and expulsions are not for violent behavior, but for school policy violations such as truancy. (Yes, the punishment for truancy is being made to stay home.)

Children of color, boys and students in urban districts are at greater risk of suspension, expulsion, arrest or dropping out. In the nation's largest urban school districts, fewer than half of students graduate. A report by Johns Hopkins University labeled 9 percent of the schools in Connecticut "dropout factories" because they had a yearly promotion rate of 60 percent or worse between 2004 and 2006. That spells devastation for those communities.

High school graduates make far more money than peers who don't complete 12th grade. Higher educational attainment is associated with better health by a number of measures. And graduation means a sharply decreased likelihood of ever ending up in prison, where more than two-thirds of inmates lack a high school diploma.

Contrast the zeal for prosecuting children with the apathy that Dennis Kucinich's impeachment resolution has received and it is obvious that America cares little or nothing for justice but secretly enjoys inflicting pain compliance techniques to anyone of any age who might not click their heels to the plutocracy.

I have no doubt the no tolerance pleasure principle will not go quietly back into the neo-con madhouse that spawned it.

Sleep and School Start Times

A new study suggests that teens who sleep later, sleep more. Science Daily in, High School Students With A Delayed School Start Time Sleep Longer, Report Less Daytime Sleepiness, reports:

The study, authored by Zaw W. Htwe, MD, of Norwalk Hospital's Sleep Disorders Center in Norwalk, Conn., focused on 259 high school students who completed the condensed School Sleep Habits Questionnaire. Prior to the delay, students reported sleeping a mean of 422 minutes (7.03 hours) per school night, with a mean bed-time of 10:52 p.m. and a mean wake-up time as 6:12 a.m.

According to the results, after a 40-minute delay in the school start time from 7:35 a.m. to 8:15 a.m., students slept significantly longer on school nights. Total sleep time on school nights increased 33 minutes, which was due mainly to a later rise time. These changes were consistent across all age groups. Students' bedtime on school nights was marginally later, and weekend night sleep time decreased slightly. More students reported "no problem" with sleepiness after the schedule change.

"Following a 40-minute delay in start time, the students utilized 83 percent of the extra time for sleep. This increase in sleep time came as a result of being able to 'sleep in' to 6:53 a.m., with little delay in their reported school night bedtime. This study demonstrates that students given the opportunity to sleep longer, will, rather than extend their wake activities on school nights," said Mary B. O'Malley, MD, PhD, corresponding author of the study.

It is recommended that adolescents get nine hours of nightly sleep.

Many schools already start school later during high-stakes, high-stress test days to improve scores.

But treating studies like this to jimmy test scores diminishes the importance of the findings. Kids who need rest can do better at school with later openings.

American Public Schools and the Needham Question

I read a fascinating article the other day that documented the work of Joseph Needham who studied and wrote about something that interested him all his life; why, in the middle of the 15th century, did Chinese civilization suddenly cease its superior progress?

Needham never fully worked out why China’s inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its totalitarianism.

With its unreformed one-party system, its rote-learning in schools and state control of big businesses, “new China” is hardly a haven for innovative thinking. Yet the Chinese continue to fret about the Needham question. A Communist Party chief of a middle school in central China recently said that it deserved deep thought and that the answer lay in an education system that fails to emphasise improving “character”. A former government minister also referred to Needham’s lament that China had produced no idea or invention of global impact for more than 500 years. Its contribution henceforth, the official said, should be “harmony”.

In the United States we have a shrinking middle-class, a government hell-bent on becoming more and more totalitarian every day, and finally a school system driven by rote-memorization, stultifying state-control, and an intolerance of creativity from teacher or student.

The signs all point to trouble. Does anyone care?

40 Years of Neo-Con Court Appointments and Now THIS

This story comes with a hat tip to a fellow Julie Group member. After forty years of ultra-conservative packing of courts which has resulted in Lady Justice wearing the scales of Justice like a dunce cap instead of a metric of fine balance of law, comes this nugget.

A Connecticut judge is doing for law enforcement what Reagan, Bush, and Bush have done for the courts - dumb them down to near moronic states of competence. From the New York Times, METRO NEWS BRIEFS: CONNECTICUT; Judge Rules That Police Can Bar High I.Q. Scores:

In a ruling made public on Tuesday, Judge Peter C. Dorsey of the United States District Court in New Haven agreed that the plaintiff, Robert Jordan, was denied an opportunity to interview for a police job because of his high test scores. But he said that that did not mean Mr. Jordan was a victim of discrimination.

Judge Dorsey ruled that Mr. Jordan was not denied equal protection because the city of New London applied the same standard to everyone: anyone who scored too high was rejected.

Mr. Jordan, 48, who has a bachelor's degree in literature and is an officer with the State Department of Corrections, said he was considering an appeal. ''I was eliminated on the basis of my intellectual makeup,'' he said. ''It's the same as discrimination on the basis of gender or religion or race.''

Maybe this is just another good excuse to stop raising standards in high school. Instead of creating Jackass home videos, the Darwinian-challenged drop-outs of tomorrow will be issued tasers, badges, fast cars, and a license to kill, menace, and trample the Constitution because hiring intelligent officers is bad for business.

Will Someone Please Tell This Kid the Bill of Rights is Dead?

Its Avery Doninger all over again...

64-Bit Wireless Atheros Using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

I finally got back to attempting to get the wireless capability working on my Toshiba A215-54747 64-bit Turion laptop equipped with Atheros wireless. The following instructions build on the shoulders of others whose recommendations were gleened from Ubuntu's own forums.

My value add will be to introduce as much clarity to the process as I can to what worked for me.

Prerequisites (silly as some may seem):

The Toshiba has a built-in toggle switch mid-way under the front edge of lighting that enables wireless. You can tell its activated when an orange LED is lit just under the edge of the front of the unit. Make sure its on.

You will need to have a wired internet connection to update the system and to download wireless application necessities. Connect your laptop until wireless installation is completed.

Many instructions talk about the Atheros Hardware access Layer (HAL) driver found under System->Hardware Drivers. It can be disabled or enabled. If enabled it will simply say Not in use after we're done.

Let's be sure that the system is up-to-date. Open up a command line terminal (application-> Accessories -> Terminal) and type:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

In that same Terminal window type: ifconfig

You will get a series of lines about network devices.

The important line we are looking for looks like: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn

The hexadecimal numbers in the nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn sequence are the MAC address for your wireless card. Write this down and put it to one side.

In the same terminal window type: pwd

This will show you your home directory - something like home/your_name

This is where we will move all our downloaded software.

Make sure your browser preferences send downloads to your desktop.

Now we will prevent the default driver from intercepting our desired driver. In the Terminal window type exactly:

echo "blacklist ath_pci" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Close your terminal window.

Download the following to your desktop (so we can see that we have the right stuff).

Open firefox and go to:

http://blakecmartin.googlepages.com/ar5007eg-64-0.2.tar.gz

You will be asked to save the file so do so.



Go to:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net

Click on Downloads and download the latest stable version of the product.

Close your browser. You should now see two tar files on your desktop.

On the main Ubuntu menu click Places->Home which will open up your home directory. Drag and drop both tar files there.

Open another Terminal window. You will be in your home directory. We will now install the 64-bit wireless driver and the application.

Type exactly:

tar xvf ar5007eg-*.tar.gz

then:

tar xvf ndiswrapper-1.53.tar.gz

In both these commands the file names must match the file names of the tar files you downloaded.

Finally, type:

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential

sudo apt-get install ndisgtk

Install the wireless driver:

On the Ubuntu menu, click System->Administration->Windows Wireless Drivers

Her you will click Install New Driver and navigate to the ar5007eg-64-0.2/ar5007eg directory that holds the net5211.inf file. Click on the .inf file.

In the terminal type:

sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

Once in the file add the following line:

pre-up/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 hw ether nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn

where the nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn sequence is the MAC address you captured from your machine at the very beginning of these instructions. Save the file.

If you have difficulty saving the file go to the /etc/network directory and change the permissions on the interfaces file using chmod to let you write to the file.

Disconnect the hard wire internet connecton. Restart the system.

After the restart, on the Ubuntu menu, locate the internet connection micro-icon (a set of bars or repeating terminals) and set it to wireless.

This worked beautifully in my experience.

When Times Get Tough, The Tough Get Weird

The title of this entry is a Dr. Hunter S. Thompson quote but it applies to an article in today's Courant called, High School Doesn't Have To Take Four Years by Lewis M. Andrews.

The argument Andrews makes is based on Leon Botstein's argument:

Botstein's original case for early graduation was based on academic and social concerns, not fiscal issues. With a rigid structure inherited from the 1830s, he argued that the "traditional high school is an out-of-date strategy and system" that accommodates neither fast nor slow learners, leads to boredom and even delinquency, ignores the relative physiological maturity of modern adolescents and fails to take advantage of new learning technologies.

But today we can add to Botstein's list of reasons the tax savings that could flow from providing high school students with incentives to voluntarily graduate early. Consider:

With per-pupil costs for high school ranging from a low of $9,000 in distressed cities like Bridgeport to nearly $18,000 in wealthier suburbs, the Yankee Institute did a study in 2007 ("Free College for High School Students," available at www.yankeeinstitute.org) showing how much each Connecticut town could save by paying its students to graduate in three years.

Using the latest available census and per-pupil expenditure data from the Connecticut Department of Education, the Institute found that if just 25 percent of all the state's secondary students received a full, two-year community college scholarship (or $5,000 cash equivalent) for finishing high school early, more than $58 million would be left over annually to reduce property taxes.

Like most other states, Connecticut sets high school graduation requirements in terms of courses met, not years attended, and towns as diverse as Middletown, West Hartford and Westport already have written policies on early graduation, although none yet offer an incentive.

-snip-

Unfortunately, the political price for enacting most dual-enrollment programs has been the creation of a redundant payment system. Municipalities still include money in their high school budgets to pay for the places of students who have skipped their senior year and gone to college with the funding provided by taxpayers. For property taxpayers to benefit, the school budget must reflect the reduced cost when a student has either graduated early or, if still technically enrolled in high school while taking a full college course load, is no longer receiving district services. A school will not realize any saving until a large enough number of students skip senior year to allow for a reduction in classes.

True, some school districts might initially resist rewarding early graduation because of the state's Education Cost Sharing program, which supplements education budgets in distressed cities on a per student basis. The fear would be that graduating a substantial numbers of students early could mean a loss of revenue from the state. Prosperous towns get little ECS money, but might worry about damaging popular athletic programs, if some students left after three years.

In fact, Connecticut education statutes give school boards considerable flexibility in offering credit for outside learning. A senior could theoretically move on to the first year of college while remaining technically enrolled in high school at no instructional cost and even participate in sports programs — much the way home-schooled students are currently entitled to participate.

While the national education debate focuses on such contentious issues as vouchers and national testing standards, a simple policy of incentivizing Connecticut high school students to effectively graduate early could expand educational opportunity, combat classroom boredom and help the most disadvantaged afford at least two years of college — all the while providing tax relief to hard-pressed homeowners.

What I find fascinating about almost all the education arguments that are heatedly discussed in the public forums of the Main Stream Media is that the discussions virtually never involve the argument that something might be good for the students except as a co-incidental by-product of a let's save money argument.

Here, the argument that the "traditional high school is an out-of-date strategy and system" that accommodates neither fast nor slow learners, leads to boredom and even delinquency, ignores the relative physiological maturity of modern adolescents and fails to take advantage of new learning technologies." is entirely accurate yet it is not until real estate prices in wealthy suburbs are threatened that anyone from the Department of Education on down uses it.

What's important is that high schools are out-moded but largely because of government policies that treat children like prisoners of war in a battle between neo-con iron-fist tactics and sensible and humane education theory.

A front page story in the same issue of the Courant examines the code of silence among the medical profession when it comes to charges of pedophilia against a professional peer. Entitled Reardon Victim Goes Public, Blasts St. Francis Hospital it describes the nod-and-wink collusion:

There are much higher stakes than money here — like truth, accountability and healing. That's why I'm handing in my John Doe card today. Too much of the money, unfortunately, goes to the lawyers.

"This," one of them told me, testily, referring to their legal assault on St. Francis, "does not concern you."

What a coincidence. St. Francis Hospital has been taking the same dismissive tone for years. I know what the lawyer meant; I'm not the one who filed the sworn statement. But my mother, now 75, may well be the lawyers' winning Powerball number because her testimony could elevate the 100 or so lawsuits already filed against the hospital into a monster payout.

Going public with my story, I hope, will mean substantially more than money for all the victims ignored or discredited for so many years — all those afraid to speak up or whose stories were rejected, sadly, by parents too horrified and shamed to admit they delivered their child to a pedophile.

The deluge of child pornography discovered last year behind a false wall in the basement of Reardon's former home on Griswold Drive in West Hartford isn't the only evidence to corroborate the horrors of the past four decades. Among the hidden reels of film and boxes of slides, West Hartford police also discovered a manila envelope, in a brown cardboard box, containing incriminating documents that, until a month ago, I did not know existed.

My name is on those documents.

They include: the sworn complaint filed by my mother, Marcia Hunt of Wethersfield, detailing the afternoon Reardon photographed me and another boy; a formal letter to Reardon from Joseph S. Sadowski, then a St. Francis neurosurgeon and chairman of the Hartford County Medical Association's Ethics and Deportment Committee, who handled the complaint; an undated "memorandum" from Sadowski summarizing the complaint in greater detail; Reardon's 15-page rebuttal; and, finally, a terse statement from my mother's attorney, the renowned Hartford criminal lawyer James N. Egan, saying criminal charges would not be filed.

A boy's word against a prominent physician would have had no chance in court in 1970. Sadowski, who died in 2001, assured my mother Reardon would be stopped. My mother trusted Sadowski. He was her doctor, a respected neurosurgeon who had operated on her back recently. She told him what happened to me as she sat in his office adjacent to the hospital at 1000 Asylum Ave. during a follow-up visit after her surgery. He's the one who suggested she file a complaint with the ethics committee.

Sadowski was a prominent, powerful physician at the hospital and within the Hartford medical community. My mother believed she had taken the ultimate action — until 1979, the medical association was the top agency governing physicians.

Only in 1993, after multiple complaints against Reardon prompted state health department hearings, did we realize the hospital's chief of endocrinology and growth-study mastermind had gone unchecked for decades.

We were devastated. But without the documentation of our complaint, what could we do? How do you avoid losing when you know you can't win?

Professional educators in this country are in a similar predicament today. Complaints about NCLB are largely ignored because too many in the education profession play the collusion game with the demented but all-powerful Bush administration.

Our high school students and taxpayers are being mis-served but money isn't why. It is this country's children who bear the brunt of this society's conditioned reflex to distrust the schools by blaming them for all of society's ills.

Schools need to change, yes... a thousand times yes but because it is right, because the system is dysfunctional as nothing more than a test dispenser, because our children are being intellectually and psychologically maimed by it.

Our political system is broken when today, just as years ago with the medical profession, educators can ignore good practice and continue to cover up the cancer that is NCLB because it's easy... no one will know... it will never happen again... it will go away on its own...

When I think about wasted money I think about the profession I care about turning its back on the facts, on the children, and on their own integrity.