Students Stuck Up at the Prom

Please take a minute to vote for two EOSmith students who participated in an aristic endeavor called "Stuck at the Prom". Holly Nelson designed and created matching prom outfits made of duct tape.

In this contest EO Smith can be awarded a cash prize to honor Holly's creativity, hard work, and courage (they attended the prom wearing these creations).

I've made the voting link easy (title link or):

http://tinyurl.com/s8g6n

Bing Xu and Holly Nelson's entry appears on PAGE 9 and is entry # 3781.

Enjoy the site and give them your vote. There are tons of enties so every vote counts! All the site requires is an email address after you make your selection.

And if the voting makes you feel good spread the word.

School 2.0, American Education on Learning Steroids

The latest ruling in Colorado that allows common law marriages for 15 year olds underscores an important phenomenon in American teenager's biology and cultural reality. Children are maturing faster than ever before.

This is not to imply that they're smarter or more capable of succeeding on their own - simply that they are different. Add to this reality the acceleration of technology that they swim in and we are looking at an entirely different sociological phenomenon.

Yet our schools haven't changed aside from cosmetic arguments and methodologies intended to obfuscate the shame second-class education being delivered on silver platters to the poor.

School needs to change forever.

First, the Jr high school years need to be recalibrated from grades 7 - 9 to 7 - 8.5. Teens should start high school in mid-year of eighth grade. They are old enough for it and the senior-itis that afflicts these teens will diminish due to the necessity of learning the new high school environments.

For the high schools, this half-semester is an opportunity to recalibrate the curriculum to learn about this class of students intimately with testing and guidance.

At the high school level, the same metric will apply. Second semester seniors will need to leave the building to perform their last semester. This means a semester of earning college money, directed study, or volunteerism. Again, senior-itis is eliminated, local businesses and non-profits acquire an inexpensive talent pool, and students get a taste of real life.

And, as long as we're re-inventing school, let's make NCLB testing optional. Those parents who want it for heir children can request it, those who don't can eliminate the headache, schools will save money and regain some interest. The true finding of NCLB testing is this: the more emphasis schools put on learning the so-called core competencies, the worse the result.

There's a good reason for this effect. Learning isn't an exclusive function of compartmentalized knowledge nor do children learn in a linear, progressive fashion.

The School 2.0 movement (I'm feeling my oats today), instead recognises that all children are unique and learn in symphonic harmony with the maturity of their biological and environmental stimuli. For curriculum this means eliminating hierarchical curriculum schemes with right-sized learning.

School 2.0 will require as much intensive upfront learning as communities can provide. Head-start programs, healthy eating initiatives, recommended entertainment venues, and nap time opportunities must become standard fare. Arithmetic will be mastered by grade 7.5 or remedite in the first year before taking higher math courses.

In the high schools, cross-departmental and cross-grade level learning initiatives must become at least 50% of every student's curriculum. And here, I can already hear the groan of teachers who will say, "We already TRIED that and it didn't work so get off our asses." Sorry, try it again, this time in harmony.

We'll develop School 2.0 together. Let's think and talk. The future's rushing this way.

Want an Educational Revolution?

I ask the question because here it is, Father's Day, and the household is obsessed with final exams.

I cannot help but think if we schedule testing the day after Mother's day that this country would finally wake up to the insanity of all this testing and so little payoff.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads cruising the internet instead of being served a cold beer.

Act to Preserve the Internet

The politics of big business can only destroy a good thing. The above link gives you all the information you need to know about what Congress is attempting to do to the internet. Don't let the internet become wholly manipulated by business interests.

What little Freedom of Expression that exists, exists thanks to the brave voices using the internet to keep Main Stream Media honest.

Here's an overview from Act For Change;

Fortunately, Senators Snowe (R-Maine) and Dorgan (D-North Dakota) have introduced S. 2917, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006. This bill will encode network neutrality into law by prohibiting telephone and cable companies from charging information providers premium fees on content. It will also prohibit preferential pricing for access tiers, and has a meaningful enforcement mechanism to deter network discrimination.

This is our last, best chance at preserving net neutrality -- so take action today!

Call to action
Tell your Senators to support S. 2917, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006.

Deadline: June 20, 2006

Project Gutenburg - 18,000 Free eBooks

For schools who operate on razor thin budgets and in poor communities where household incomes are also tight, the books offered here for the reading are a treasure.

The fact that people read web pages 25% slower than paper print may also incrrease a child's ability to grasp context and content - an experiement worth measuring by any educational specialists looking for a graduate thesis.

Technology Void in the Classroom

When Americans look for FAILURE, they need look no further than the myopic stupidity of No Child Left Behind. The national delusion that NCLB will somehow magically correct the social ills of public schools is no less insane than a half-dozen other Bush initiatives. The difference being that NCLB experiments not only with a few generations of children but does so at the expense of America's well-being.

There are still a few of us who care about the health of the nation and cringe at the self-destructive practices in American high schools. In my experience the following report is no exagerration. NCLB legislates a testing of teachers and students that emphasizes silo content specialties. Yet the modern world is expanding information theory in precisely the opposite way.

American school teachers need to understand information retrieval mechanisms, information organization and dissemination mechanisms, and dozens of other technical and organizational skills and methodologies far more urgently than they need to worry about becoming content specialists. There is neither time, money, or incentive for teachers to lift a finger.

NCLB is a toxic educational waste dump. Teachers are so buzy fretting over perpetual testing and frivilous factoid exercises that the students never learn how to learn, value information, think, intellectually breathe, follow their bliss, or become a real person. We are creating a Pinnochio generation of micro-managed, Fox News terrorized young people who are devoid of initiative, as technically illiterate as their teachers, and treated as easy pickings by credit vultures (the federal government being one of the hungriest predators).

A report in Information Week merely confirms the obvious.

Report: High Schools Fail To Meet Needs Of Tech-Driven World

Roughly only a quarter of U.S. high schools require students to take computer science courses, due in part to a misperception that computers are for video games and surfing the Internet, says a new report.

By K.C. Jones, TechWeb.com, Jun 12, 2006 12:10 PM

"The United States cannot ignore the fact that there will be a shortage of qualified candidates for the 1.5 million computer and information technology jobs by 2012," co-author of the report and CSTA President Chris Stephenson said in a prepared statement. "This report provides a call to action for a variety of audiences to help others acknowledge computer science as the fundamental field that it is."

-snip-

CSTA issued a statement saying the report should serve as a "wakeup call to the United States on how far behind it has fallen in treating computer science education as a core knowledge requirement for all educated citizens."

There is no doubt in my mind that sounding wake-up calls to the "What Me Worry" administration will produce little more than more really bad ideas, so I'm looking to responsible citizens to vote hard come November. Don't just send these political idiots a message, boot them the hell out of office like you mean it.

Unions are getting smarter

If Connecticut and Connecticut's schools are going to improve, the Teacher's Union needs to step up. The rate of technological change will not wait for teachers who think the future is a linear progression of missed opportunities that are of no consequence. Change matters.

When I'm begging that we embrace change, become masters of our school's destinies, and evangelize the benefits of technological change I often am greeted by indifference. Teachers, administrators, and too many others assume that there are no consequences for watching the world go by. They misread the historical trajectory of the world's wealth and our critical need to move.

Today's younger generation is being financially squeezed into a life of indenture to credit companies at the very time when our president and his band of merry buffoons are draining our ability as a nation to maintain our financial stability.

Within a single generation we may experience a generational political blowback that will include the outsourcing of teaching positions to foreign virtual education suppliers. The cost of education at every level is beginning to exceed the benefit. Teachers have to get the message. And that message is to row, to add value to education so that these kids are the world's best prepared thinkers.

We cannot afford to bicker or pass the buck. Let's work together instead of looking for handouts, five-year plans, or special dispensations. The future is here now. Let's embrace it, teach it, and own our destiny. The alternative is unacceptable.

There is hope in that the UAW is beginning to realize that unions must begin to exercise responsibility for making success happen here. Teachers should take notes. The national treasury is a bank vault full of debt.

From today's Courant:

UAW Chief: It's Time To Fight
Says Industry's Woes Require New Solutions, Union Involvement
1:35 PM EDT, June 13, 2006
By TOM KRISHER, Associated Press

In a speech to about 1,300 members at the UAW's 34th convention in Las Vegas, Gettelfinger seemed to be preparing the union for a different relationship with the troubled domestic automakers as they face challenging times.

"Like it or not, these challenges aren't the kind that can be ridden out," he said. "They demand new and farsighted solutions - and we must be an integral part of developing these solutions."

POP QUIZ: What kind of thinking must unions do?

The View from the Titanic or is it the Hindenburgh?

Art Skerker alerted us last week [click the link to see his blog entry] that the Federal House of Representatives eliminated the Enhancing Education through Technology (NCLB Title II, Part D) program that is “a program that provides teachers and students with the technology resources that are improving teaching and learning and allowing our nation to compete effectively in the 21st century workforce.”

Before we go any further let me just vent a little - WHEN WILL CONNECTICUT STOP VOTING FOR WORTHLESS REPRESENTATION LIKE ROB SIMMONS AND NANCY JOHNSON? WHEN? Oh wait, as long as we're mentioning worthless representation let's not forget, Joe Lieberman. Let's put it this way, students need not learn arithmetic to count what all these politicians have done for Connecticut. The answer is zilch, nada, "I don't know", or "None of the above".

Okay, I feel better now. But that leaves a giant yellow elephant standing in the national living room.

America is in real trouble people. The utter insanity of the Bush administration has so comprehensively dibilitated this nation's priorities, national wealth, and ability to compete that the future is looking grim as we slide head first into an abyss of bizarre psuedo-conservative politics.

MSNBC recently ran this story:

How Long Will America Lead the World? by Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

It is not just writers like Prestowitz who are sounding alarms. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, reflects on the growing competence and cost advantage of countries like China and even Mexico and says, "It's unclear how many manufacturers will choose to keep their businesses in the United States." Intel's Andy Grove is more blunt. "America ... [is going] down the tubes," he says, "and the worst part is nobody knows it. They're all in denial, patting themselves on the back, as the Titanic heads for the iceberg full speed ahead."

Much of the concern centers on the erosion of science and technology in the U.S., particularly in education. Eight months ago, the national academies of sciences, engineering and medicine came together to put out a report that argued that the "scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many nations are gathering strength."

Oh. And that quote is from the optimists. I bolded Andy Grove's comments in case you're speed reading. The sociopaths in the House of Representatives would do well to get their heads out of the political -cough- "troughs" long enough to to start funding education like it needs to be because the nation's welfare is truly at stake.

And if you're a voter, you damned well need to write these people, call these people, and run these people out of our government [and out of this country as far as I'm concerned] before they do any more real harm. We have got to take back the schools and regain our nation will to lead before it's too late.

And the hour is already late. Sound some alarms. We need better schools, better priorities, and better politicians. Business as usual is killing the country.

More Free School Tools: Google Calendar

You'll notice a new Region 19 Calendar on the left panel that will hold region 19 Committee dates, agendas and notes. The calendar will never be comprehensive but this is a vast improvement over the closed software solutions schools usually pay for expensively.

You'll notice that meeting places are mapped directly to Google Maps providing driving directions and so on.

By using Google Calendars, you can compare multiple calendars against each other listing as many events as you want to prioritise.

Meanwhile CABE is promoting a State of Connecticut boondoggle that can't do half as much and is costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands. Oh well, it's only money to burn.

Try the Googgle Calendar out. It will import your existing school Outlook calendar in a snap making it available to everyone in the community not just those on a local network.

Oh, and you can examine these calendars from your cell phone.

Technophobia in the Classroom

The rage today is to be lectured by corporations, politicians, and educationalists about the importance of students being 'exposed'to technology, learning the latest computer jargon, and so on. One would think that those doing the lecturing were technologically saavy themselves. They usually aren't.

This game of aggressive language that oozes the progressive vision of technological prowess has a sad underbelly of passive acceptance and even outright stonewalling when acts of conviction are required.

What most of these loud advocates for technology education usually are saying is that they want somebody else to teach, use, and learn something new - "we're 100% behind you all the way!" In practice many of these people will not raise a finger to help themselves or anyone else introduce new ideas, techniques, or classroom methods. Floating downstream, attending meetings, and arguing pointless bullet agenda items is filling enough for their palates.

This is too bad. The tsunami of changes rushing our way will consume us if we are incapable of understanding and coping with their consequences. What is coming in just a few scant years is nothing less than centuries of change compressed into years and months recursively. For the Federal or State government to legislate quaint political homilies as these waves of change crest is sinful.

Schools need to stop testing factoids and begin preparing students for dealing with massive streams of data, with an information society unlike anything imaginable, with enhanced human counterparts, and machines smarter than natural humans can ever be. Yes, curriculums need to begin to address learning in entirely different ways, emphasizing entirely different metrics. And it has to happen NOW.

The ability to skim and assess information quickly is more important than memorizing facts. The ability to be fungible is more important than conformity and comfortable familiarity.

And so teachers who don't practice open-minded attitudes toward innovations and who refuse to change or exercise new technologies are teaching the wrong lesson. Stonewalling, belligerence, and passive resistence are unacceptable role-models for students. We cannot preach our global preparedness while educating an intellectual labor force of technophobes. Teachers, administrators, and government need to be active partners in embracing change especially when it comes to school and curriculum innovations.

Free Software Preview: Google Spreadsheets

Click on the link to test drive Google's collaborative Spreadsheet.

This is where I want the Region 19 budget details to live, in a publicly readable spreadsheet that anyone can take a look at.

Also this is nice for math, science, and lots of other school projects and club accounting activities.

EO Smith Golfers Take Note:

Virtually Integrating Our Schools

I take the persistence of poverty in America as a given. Those who care about eliminating poverty and classism in America are powerless to change its inevitability and ubiquity. And the consequence of poverty is racism, benign bigotry, and poverty community schools hopelessly mired in failure.

Our society continues to condone and tolerate this phenomenon with a vengence. NCLB pogram advocates only obfuscate the tolerance and further nurturing of a convenient underclass. The political invention of "failing schools" neatly skirts the fact that poor children are hopelessly trapped in urban social warfare reservations.

Recent studies uncover the lie that a child in a failing school can simply transfer across to the next school to get out of a failing one. Failing schools are clustered in geopolitical constructs that may as well be prisons of poverty and violence for those trapped in the confines of these ghettos. To call the recent rash of shootings and killings in Hartford a tragedy is not enough. Even tragedy mourns when one tragedy begets another and another. Any conscientious human being is numbed by the slaughter of children randomly shooting children.

In the one-upsmanship of American society, racism and classism observe no color lines. Those who empower racism and poverty are as likely to be black or spanish middleclass citizens as white. In every case, the same arguments are made. The shiftless and lazy arguments that forty years ago slurred minority populations are now exercised without question toward helpless and politically impotent child populations. The arguments are so compelling that arming poor kids with guns so that they can thin the ranks is de facto social policy.

My words will not change a thing so I resign myself to the same profession that Jonathan Kozol endeavors to be, merely a witness. I have rarely found truth to be a worthwhile virtue but I exercise the reckless honor anyway, usually at my own expense.

Assuming that nothing changes [and very little has in my lifetime] these violent urban operas will continue to persist and feed the nightly news broadcasts with a profitable fill of blood and tears and empty homilies.

However there is something that liberal educational evangelists can do to at least virtually integrate the classrooms of urban fortress schools and that is to advocate for the wide adoption of collaborative educational tools. There is little or no expense involved. Numerous online tools exist that can allow students in suburban school sto collaborate on a like assignment in an urban school.

For example, an English class reading the same book, might ask students to individually be teamed up with a counterpart at another school and write an essay or produce a dialogue about what they read. Recent studies indicate that a student is more likely to communicate with a person online than a student sitting next to them. while many lament this phenomenon, it offers opportunity to teachers to use it to broaden discussions beyond their school walls.

I created a writeboard here and sent it to some random educators. Let's see if they're saavy enough to respond.

Region 19 Funny Pages

Sanity Permitted

The Popularity of High-stress Testing

One of the most disturbing phenomenon about the high-stress universal testing movement is the dogmatic appeal that it has fostered. In America, a country who so often describes itself as compassionate, caring, and Christian values driven, there is virtually no evidence of any such practice in education.

Today, educational practice is dictated more often by business consultants insisting that they aren't hiring American workers because they're uneducated rather than because they've sold their souls to cheap, inexpensive, and insecure foreign labor. And corporations reinforce these ideas as often as they can by sponsoring talk-show mouthpieces who hammer home the subversive idea that American children are lazy, underperforming, and overindulged.

By and large, none of this is true.

What is true is that the practice of education at its worst approaches the same cruelties and attitudes that propel our so-called wars on terror, drugs, and minority communities.

To subject every human being to high-stress anything assumes that not a single one might be harmed by the practice. No such evidence exists. Nor is there a compelling argument that children [or adults for that matter] can withstand year upon year of high stress, ever increasing workloads without cracking somehow.

Let me remind you I'm not speaking of concentration camps, we are speaking of education practice.

Monday, the Courant ran yet another article describing the victimization of children by adults and educational professionals who know better. You will find no heroes in education these days - they've long ago turned their back on the best interests of chidren for the praise of the roman crowds cheering for more pain.

Testing Policy Under Scrutiny
Requirements Upset Some Disabled Students
May 29, 2006
By ROBERT A. FRAHM, Courant Staff Writer

"Every time he walked in to take the test, he would have a seizure," she said. "Finally, I said no more testing until I can get an answer from somebody." She said her son cannot read or write at his grade level.

"How," she asked, "can you give him an eighth-grade test?"

That is exactly the kind of question top-level state education officials are asking about the impact of the pressure-packed annual test on at least a handful of disabled children with serious academic problems.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, those children are required to take the six to seven hours of mastery tests at their actual grade level - tests that parents and educators believe are beyond their ability to comprehend. As in the Bristol case, the results can be distressing.

If you have the stomach for it, view the results of the Courant poll. I'm assuming this poll represents the self-described "compassionate" society that has given us Bush and a daily more unimaginably atrocious scandal a day, every day for years. Someday an Education profession will look back on these years as the dark ages for children. Until then, the educational floggings will continue until corporations hire American kids again.

Procuring School Computers

I've had numerous discussions on this topic at Board meetings and privately. Bruce Silva gets it, few others do.

I have long advocated the following formula.
Invest in the most inexpensive PC equipment you can get that fits a need.
Invest in the best monitor you can afford [min. 17", 19" if you can swing it, flat screen].
Rotate PC boxes out every two years, monitors every three or four.
For laptops spend no more than $800/unit.

Everyone thinks I'm demented. School procurement policy is to by the best, most bulletproof item they can. They want it to last for years. That's all wrong.

As Kurtzweil points out in The Singularity Is Near, technology [especially PCs] is advancing at exponential rates. Actually faster. By 2009 or 10, the PC in the classroom will be smarter than any teacher in the school, equivalent to a humanoid tutor per student. Why invest long term in PCs that today are no smarter than a mouse?

The answer is to not invest heavily. Invest inexpensively and turn over older units to needy kids, as fund-raisers, or as donations. Every year from now on will mean profoundly improved machine intelligence that must not be confused with today's primitive products.

Also note that this article indicates schools can shop wisely and save big dollar amounts.

Look and learn from this snippet [click the link for the full story];

Your Money
Timing the Electronics Market for the Best Deal on a New PC
By DAMON DARLIN
Published: May 27, 2006

Some analysts had expected coming into the year that prices would actually go up slightly. Instead, the average price of a notebook computer dropped to $963 in April, an 18.5 percent decrease from a year ago, according to Current Analysis, which is based in Sterling, Va.

When an electronic device breaks through the $1,000 psychological barrier, sales take off. Samir Bhavnani, director for research at Current Analysis, said 37 percent more notebooks have been sold so far this year. About 60 percent of all notebook computers sold last month were priced below $1,000. He credits Dell, saying, "They love getting down in the mud."

Dell is running a promotion, which it bills as a celebration of its 22nd anniversary, with a $400 discount on PC's, plus a free monitor and free shipping.

Another statistic will tell you just how good consumers have it. While the number of notebooks sold is up 37 percent, revenue growth in the period is up only 15.5 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Companies are making less money on each notebook. Desktop computers are literally being given away. Retailers sold 14.8 percent more of them in the first five months of the year, but revenue declined 4 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Half of the computers sold for less than $500.

Consider the Hewlett-Packard Compaq Presario desktop offered this week at Office Depot. For $300 you get a PC with 512 megabytes of RAM and a 100-gigabyte hard drive. Office Depot tossed in a 17-inch CRT monitor and a printer.

"The material cost, before the printer, was around $400," estimated Mark Hill, Acer's vice president for sales in the United States. "It's crazy." Not that he's complaining. Acer has gained one point of market share this year by artful pricing.

So how does a consumer play this? As always with electronics, it is worth waiting. Expect even better deals around the Christmas season. But if you need to get one now, you certainly won't suffer. Deals will abound during the back-to-school season, which starts in June just as the school year ends.

On Teaching Science

The New York Times Editorial Observer has published some very interesting observations about why American Higher Education fails to produce more scientists. I can't help but think that the conclusions apply to secondary education as well.

The rabid legislators who concocted and condone the NCLB practice of anxiety, stress, and memorization are doing our children and society harm. They need to be voted out of office as soon as possible. And the institutions like the Department of Education both at the Federal and State levels are failed experiments as well.

These institutions should be decommissioned as soon as possible. The Bush administration has turned them into ugly, dogmatic, and cruel institutions meant to cause harm instead of serve the interests of children.

In the following excerpt you will note that learning is best performed as teamwork [something discouraged by high-stakes testing schemes] and that students are encouraged to stay until they learn the basics even if their grade is a 'C'.

There is no excuse for teachers, administrators, elected officials or anyone with a semblence of intelligence to continue to entertain the NCLB paradigm.

Read on, and take action.

Why American College Students Hate Science By BRENT STAPLES, Published: May 25, 2006

Science education in this country faces two serious problems. The first is that too few Americans perform at the highest level in science, compared with our competitors abroad. The second problem is that large numbers of aspiring science majors, perhaps as many as half, are turned off by unimaginative teaching and migrate to other disciplines before graduating.

Furthermore...

The new students are welcomed into a well-established community of scientists and scientists-to-be through a summer program that sets the stage for the next four years.

The students are encouraged to study in groups and taught to solve complex problems collectively, as teams of scientists do. Most important, they are quickly exposed to cutting-edge science in laboratory settings, which demystifies the profession and gives them early access to work that often leads to early publication in scientific journals. At the same time, however, the students are pushed to perform at the highest level. Those who earn C's, for example, are encouraged to repeat those courses so they can master basic concepts before moving on.

The laboratory approach keeps the students excited and prevents them from drifting off into less challenging disciplines. Indeed, according to Science, 86 percent of the Meyerhoff participants have graduated with science or engineering degrees. Nearly 9 in 10 of those graduates went on to graduate or professional programs, with a significant number earning M.D.'s or Ph.D's, or both.

Critics have sometimes accused the Meyerhoff program of cherry-picking bright students who would perform spectacularly well wherever they went to school. But the numbers suggest that the school's instructional strategy makes a real difference. Meyerhoff students are twice as likely to earn undergraduate degrees in science or engineering as similar students who declined the scholarships and went to school elsewhere. Most significantly, students who completed the Meyerhoff program are 5.3 times as likely to enroll in graduate study as the students who said no and went elsewhere.

The higher education establishment is generally startled to learn that more than half of the high-flying Meyerhoff students are black. This surprise stems from the unstated but nonetheless well-established belief that high-performing science students don't actually exist in the black community.

U.M.B.C.'s president, Freeman Hrabowski III, knows better. He has spent years expanding his school's access to high-performing minority students and has taken great pains to reassure black families that their children will be well looked after on his campus.

It has long been known that teachers' low expectations, particularly those related to race and racism, can depress student performance. At U.M.B.C., sustained success by minority students seems to have alleviated this poisonous problem. Faculty members who once looked askance when asked to take on minority students in their laboratories now clamor for them.

Off campus, meanwhile, the students are much sought after as research assistants and as candidates for summer internships. Those who finish their education and take their places in the ranks of researchers and professors often become powerful proselytizers for science.

The Meyerhoff model shows that a vibrant, well-structured science program can produce large numbers of students who excel and remain in the field. It has also debunked the myth that academic excellence and minority access are mutually exclusive goals.

Is Hartford listening? Is Connecticut listening? Is Washington listening? Can we finally get rid of the incipid representation in Washington that spends our tax dollars on dogmatic nonsense instead of learning?

C'mon, people, work with me here.

Sanitizing Our Children's Minds, More GIGO

I maintain the slim and slippery hope that this research is doing some good. The motto of American public k through 12 education could well be, "Ignorance is bliss".

American public education is run by a circle jerk of politicians who are a byproduct of the system they so despise. I am less upset with the lack of funding for mandates as for the lack of quality, if any, that the mandates represent. The legislation of education is a colossal and expensive failure that rewards publishers, test corporations, and a compliant education industry that is happy to go along to get along.

Tonight is especially trying. Ashford is a small town full of diverse, wonderful people who are always at the short end of the political stick. Our candidates stand no chance of competing with the larger towns to evrer get elected to state office regardless of the quality of candidates. We are held hostage to Tolland in the 53rd District and Mansfield in Region 19. The bigger towns roll in state money while the small towns try to make Lincolns scream. It seems nobody in the provincial politics outside of Ashford could see fit to vote for our candidate. I'm totally bummed - more braindead politics.

The same phenomenon exists in the world of textbook publishing, information is scrubbed so hard to please the big markets that nothing worth memorizing is left to memorize for testing purposes. The byproduct of textbook learning is equivalent to an exercise in anti-learning - our kids are dumber for the effort.

Here's a sample of A textbook case of failure, Politically driven adoption system yields shallow, misleading materials by Alex Johnson, Reporter, MSNBC, Updated: 10:05 a.m. ET May 16, 2006. Click the title bar to read the entire piece.

“This is where people miss the boat. They don’t realize how important the textbooks are,” Wang said. “We talk about vouchers and more teachers, but education is about the books. That’s where the content is.”

If America’s textbooks were systematically graded, Wang and other scholars say, they would fail abysmally.

American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated (so much so that some state legislatures are considering mandating lighter books to save students from back injuries) and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history.

Textbooks have become so bland and watered-down that they are “a scandal and an outrage,” the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank in Washington, charged in a scathing report issued a year and a half ago.

“They are sanitized to avoid offending anyone who might complain at textbook adoption hearings in big states, they are poorly written, they are burdened with irrelevant and unedifying content, and they reach for the lowest common denominator,” Diane Ravitch, a senior official in the Education Department during the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, wrote in the report’s introduction.

“As a result of all this, they undermine learning instead of building and encouraging it,” she added.

A closed market
The culprit is the system by which many states choose what books their students will read. Because the market is a small one, textbook publishers must cater to the whims of elected school board leaders in the biggest states that buy the most books: Texas and California, which control a third of the national market, the Association of American Publishers estimates.

Well, well, American Schools Get a Great Review

Recent articles in the Courant and elsewhere inform us that government statistics are being disseminated for the expressed intent of deceiving us [you don't say].

Today, we were told that the story about minority owned businesses doing so well was not only wrong but backward.

No surprise here. In my profession, Information Technologies, American workers are shafted routinely while the CBIA laments how hard it is to get good help - so, please send more docile, inexpensive labor from overseas to; sniff, sniff; help these poor companies purge themselves of workers nearing retirement.

Yeah, numbers can lie when you've got an administration that walks that walk.

So here's another example of the same thing about our so-called "FAILING" schools. No lie is too large to try to kill public education there's just one problem:

A snippet from: The Myth of America's Failing Schools by Tamim Ansary

Oddly enough, these numbers don't really support what "everyone knows." In the very year that A Nation at Risk was bemoaning a "rising tide of mediocrity," the NAEP seemed to show American students doing about the same as their counterparts had done 20 years earlier, even though the educational system had expanded tremendously and was serving, at that point, a far more diverse population of students, including many more with a limited command of English.

As for international comparisons, every four years, over the last decade, the NCES has participated in an international assessment called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). This report compares test results from 25 to 50 countries in various categories. It focuses only on mathematics and hard science because those subjects are culturally and linguistically neutral, so the same test questions can be given to kids of different countries. Data was collected in 1995, 1999, and 2003, and will be collected again in 2007.

What the numbers show
According to the TIMSS, the United States is not "dead last" (as journalist Charles Krauthammer so colorfully put it) but "dead-middle," or a smidgen above. In 2003, overall, it scored higher than 13 countries and lower than 11 others. The countries beating us included Latvia, Hungary, and the Netherlands. The ones we beat included Norway, Iran, and Slovenia. It's hard to see a pattern that correlates definitively to economic competitiveness here.

Besides, statistics are more ambiguous than they seem, because there's always a social context to numbers. Consider one troubling pattern that does emerge consistently in the TIMSS reports. American students rank above average in the fourth grade but drop below average in 12th grade.

What's going on here?
There may be several factors, but here's one that education writer Gerald Bracey points out. In many countries, toward the end of high school, students take a single high-stakes test that determines whether they will go to college and thereby determines what social class they'll be in for life.

Kids cram for that test as if their lives depended on it because their lives do. In South Korea, there's a saying that students who sleep four hours a night will go to college, but those who sleep five hours a night will not.

Japan has a whole second school system of jukus or "cram schools" that many students attend every day after regular school. Cram schools!

I find it interesting that in India, about 7 percent of the college-age population is in college. I'm thinking Indian students must work desperately in that last year of high school to squeeze into the 7 percent. American students are more lackadaisical because here about 63 percent of high school graduates go to college the next year and the others can go later--this is a country of second chances.

If you test two groups of students, one of which has been cramming for months and one of which hasn't, the former will score higher. But are they better educated? Will they know more in a year? Four years? Ten? It's not a given. A test score is a snapshot of a moment.

So you're left with a circular proposition, it seems. "Failing schools" is the explanation of a national problem. The national problem is finally the proof that the schools are failing. If that correlation is valid, we should see the perceived problems disappearing after school reforms.

Has this historically been the case? That depends on how you look at it. The former Soviet Union directed national resources into producing scientists and engineers during the space race era, but that doesn't necessarily mean Russia is better off today. Maybe "failing schools" is not the only explanation of the poor test scores problem.

The Velvet Military Draft

The Bush administration refuses to reinstate the military draft. Why bother?

The alternative plan is not only to force teenagers to enlist but to make as much money as possible doing so. As you know, college loans are no longer guaranteed reasonable rates of interest. Those borrowing will be paying that debt until they're in their late middle ages.

Now, comes news that this administration has found a way to punish families that save as well. From the Courant;

The kiddie tax was created nearly 20 years ago. It affects a child's unearned income - typically interest, dividends and capital gains. It does not apply to money that a child earns on a job.

As it now stands, the tax applies to those under 14. The first $850 of a child's unearned income isn't taxed. The next $850 is taxed at the child's rate. Anything above that is taxed at the parents' rate.

After children turn 14, investment income is taxed only at their rate, not the parents'.

Under the new tax bill, the kiddie tax would apply to those under 18. The change would be retroactive to the start of this year.

Here's how the change would affect a child's tax bill:

Assume that a 15-year-old's tax rate is 10 percent and that her parents are taxed at 35 percent.

If the teen has taxable interest income of $10,000, under current law her tax bill would be $1,123, said Bob D. Scharin, a senior tax analyst with RIA, a provider of tax information in New York. Once the kiddie tax age limit is raised, her tax bill would go up to $3,283, he said.

Soon the only teenagers who will be able to afford college will be those receiving GI benefits. Maybe that's the new draft, strangle higher education.