Pew on Science

A new PEW study on America's state of Science standing in the national psyche is complete.

I find the study to be flawed and misreported in a number of ways. One section of the study asks respondents fairly pedestrian questions about science which Americans largely answer correctly and another section that asks so-called textbook questions. Unsurprisingly fewer respondents get the textbook questions correct. The commentary of the report implies that the textbook questions are "more complex science topics", a dubious characterization. One could argue that the textbook material is last century's idea of complex (nuclear age vs information technology questions).

In fact, the most profoundly disturbing aspect of this report is the utter lack of recognizing the importance of computing to science (a topic for another blog).

In Scientific American, the study is handed down without any critical thinking and that becomes an invitation to bash American public school science education.

Given that American science is still the envy of the rest of the world one has to wonder why Americans still accept and perpetuate the idea that American science education is in crisis.

As this blog has repeatedly pointed out, American business interests have used science and math bashing as a public relations ploy to pass legislation to exploit foreign workers at the expense of American workers.

The latest such insulting allegation came from a broadside from Vineet Nayar, a so-called respected CEO of yet another IT services outfit from India.

The official wanted to know why HCL, a $2.5 billion (revenue) company with more than 3,000 people across 21 offices in 15 states, wasn't hiring more people in his state. Vineet's short answer: because most American college grads are "unemployable." (In fairness to HCL, the company recently announced plans to open a delivery center in another state, North Carolina, and invest $3.2 million and hire more than 500 employees there over the next five years under a Job Development Investment Grant.)

Many American grads looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich, Vineet said. They're far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland to spend their time learning the "boring" details of tech process, methodology, and tools--ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like.

As a result, Vineet said, most Americans are just too expensive to train--despite the Indian IT industry's reputation for having the most exhaustive boot camps in the world. To some extent, he said, students from other highly developed countries fall into the same rut.

In an interview following his presentation, Vineet said HCL and other employers need to have a greater influence on the tech curricula of U.S. colleges and universities, to make them more real-world and rigorous. For the most part, he said, those institutions haven't been receptive to such industry partnerships.

More broadly, Vineet echoed the concerns expressed by other CEOs, including SAS Institute's Jim Goodnight and Cisco's John Chambers, about the failure of the U.S. education system to prepare the country's next-generation tech workforce (a subject Goodnight and others will dive into at the InformationWeek 500 Conference, Sept. 13 to 15).

Beyond the need to bolster competencies in math, the hard sciences, and basic problem solving, U.S. schools at all levels must place a greater emphasis on global history, foreign languages, and other subjects that prepare students for jobs and life outside this country. How many grads of U.S. colleges are ready or even willing to work abroad? Vineet asked rhetorically. "We need to define the American dream to be more global in nature," he said.

The unholy alliance of corporate greed teamed with offshore job pirating firms has over-saturated the American democracy to the degree that American public education has been thrown under the bus along with the American worker.

With American science STILL, AS ALWAYS leading the world in innovation and progress, Americans continue to be denigrated, demeaned, and insulted by the corporate global job raiders.

The truth is that American students continue to shine in math and science at all educational levels and the proof is in the pudding. And American students continue to pursue the American dream of freedom, prosperity, and personal happiness with the same vigor of their forefathers. They have nothing to apologize for.

American workers have the right to earn decent wages in their own country from the fruit of their own ingenuity. It is not Americans who are out of line here, it is incivility of the those who lecture us instead of working to create self-sustaining opportunities in their own countries.

Weighted Grades; Point Shaving and Moving the Goalposts

I'm going to have to deconstruct the weighed grading issue over a number of posts so bear with me.

At issue is a proposal to add further weight to Advanced Placement (AP) courses at EO Smith. Currently weighed grading applies to all of our grades with 'A' level courses getting the greatest weight and diminishing returns for lower level courses. To some degree I'm still trying to wrap my head around the existing weighed grade policy and in doing so I embarked on a crash course in the subject over the past week or so.

Here's what I learned. I'm going to gloss over a lot of peripheral arguments that result in circular logic exercises. So the fact that different teachers and different subjects are, well, different - harder, easier, more rigorous, less rigorous is an immutable and inevitable consequence of the teaching endeavor. Or is an AP course here better or worse than an AP course elsewhere? Therefore... um, the quality of grades are relative to their dispositions. That won't change. Ever. And it doesn't change the issues at hand.

There are other back story and philosophical navel gazing issues I won't discuss either by the same logic.

To dive into the issue of weighted grades is to unlock a Pandora's box of myths and eternally unresolved educational puzzles. At the heart of the matter are two institutional hot button issues; grade-inflation and what grading actually means.

To high school students who tightly couple their ambitions to exclusive schools these questions are but nuisance and noise. Like the television commercials in which people waiting for tax refunds scream, "I want my money and I want it now!", students today demand grades that richly endow their GPAs with seemingly impeccable credentials.

Yet, in Excellence Without a Soul, Harry R. Lewis, former Harvard Dean, explains Harvard's admissions peculiarities;

Because so many applicants present high grades and test scores, Harvard makes admissions decisions with the aid of non-numeric information. What might catch the imagination of an admissions committee when considering one student but not another can be hard to divine. As often as not, admissions officers look for a capacity to make the absolute most of the available opportunities. A student who has achieved the maximum with limited opportunities is more promising than a student who has achieved more in absolute terms but less relative to what was possible. Some see in this philosophy a flawed sort of "comparable worth" theory of admissions. Is fine poetry by a student of parents who do not read books more worthy than an excellent science project by a child of two biology professors?

It is understandably difficult for parents and applicants to recognize that admission is not a game with prizes granted to students with the longest resumes. Achievements of the past may provide evidence of promise for the future, but the objective of the admissions process is to invest in the future, not to reward the past. The laborious recruitment and selection process, with all its contradictions and disappointments and balancing of imponderables, is an attempt to create a community of individuals who, after living and studying together for four years, will go on to change the world for the better in all kinds of different ways.

Peterson's guide, after a lengthy explanation of the 4.0 and weighted grade practices adds this aside,

It gets better. When considering your GPA, college admission officers might un-weight and then re-weight it according to their own scale. Why? In order to arrive at a better comparative method!

So clearly, college admissions officers are faced with a tsunami of GPAs coming in, all that reflect either the integrity of the institutions issuing the grade or the degree to which an institution games the system using weighted grades to jockey higher GPAs than the next school's graduates.

So while Peterson's describes the college admissions process as unpredictable, it is more precisely the cacophony of thousands of university's trying to fairly compare asymmetric GPA scores. This results in two pragmatic qualifiers.

First, college entrance exam test scores that represent uniform peer to peer comparison's can come to the fore.

Second, the institutional integrity of the sending school (as well as other eclectic factors) also are applied to the GPA numbers an admissions office sees. If former undergrads performed well, then the quality of the GPA being evaluated may hold a greater value (aside from straight numerics) than the GPA of a school whose undergraduates consistently are accepted due to inflated GPAs and under-perform once accepted.

But to address former Dean Lewis's assertion that there is an altruistic (for lack of a better term) component to admission to the most selective schools is to some degree a antithesis for students and schools who believe that by out-weighting the competition in terms of GPA sums they are earning their admission or should be rewarded for their herculean efforts or that there is an unfairness to a system in which they win the race but lose the prize of their 'dream' school admission fantasy.

The fact that stacking the weighted GPA deck is discounted as though it didn't exist is blasphemy to students and parents who insist that their child in some extreme circumstance will lose consideration from the ranks of one institution or another because of a tenth of a point that the high school could ensure with added weight to this or that course. In the shadow of high drama, it is not just irony at play in this process.

A scholarship judge in the National Association for College Admission Counseling writes in Don’t dwell on your GPA – it’s not a point of distinction.

Nothing angers the high-ranking students (and their teachers) more than this one, but Uncle Josh has some bad news for you, and you’re not going to like it. However, you do need to accept it because it’s true, and I know it’s true because I write the scholarship checks and your teachers don’t. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? OK, here goes:

Your GPA doesn’t really matter that much. If at all.

So the argument comes back to academic integrity of the sending institution. But history shows that institutions are largely incapable of stopping grade inflation or reforming the inertia in play today.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, in an Article entitled, Just Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check, Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley report:

Those who believe that grade inflation exists say that when colleges do try to hold grades in check or make professors accountable, they usually fail.

Among the contributors to the new volume [Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education (State University of New York Press)] is Mary Biggs, an English professor at the College of New Jersey, who sees little hope for those trying to stem the tide.

"Once grade inflation has taken hold," she says, "it develops its own constituencies and acquires a heavy weight and powerful momentum of its own."

Huanxing Yang and Chun Seng Yip, in a study of grade inflation assert,

Hence to be precise, our usage of grade inflation implicitly assumes some form of dilution, i.e., grade inflation, for our purposes, is the phenomenon of passing off a bad student as a good one, by awarding him the same grade as the good student.
-snip-
We call this a Gresham’s law for grade inflation: that bad grades drive out good.
This is because grade inflation takes on a contagious character: inflating schools mutually reinforce each other’s practices. Furthermore, with some minor technical assumptions, we show that the equilibrium is unique. Our equilibrium also has the result that schools with higher reputations will grade-inflate more. The contagion effect may suggest how the momentum for grade inflation in the later 1960s and 1970s came about. We also show that grade inflation can be related to measures of inequality between good jobs and bad jobs. The greater the inequality between good and bad jobs, the greater the extent of grade inflation. In other words rising grade inflation seems to be related to the rising skills premium documented in the last
three decades.

One of our most striking implications arises from our welfare analysis. We demonstrate that the social planner’s optimum implies that there ought not be any grade inflation. Thus agents in a world with grade inflation are worse off than in a world without grade inflation.

Furthermore, the presence of disciplined schools, who for some exogenous reason do not practice grade inflation, will curb the extent of grade inflation amongst the other (undisciplined) schools.

What does a disciplined high school grading policy look like? Here's Mamaroneck high school's (New York) faq sheet on grading::

Q: Why doesn't Mamaroneck weight grades as some other high schools do?

A: MHS has never weighted AP or Honors level courses. The counseling department feels that our policy does not place our students at any disadvantage in reference to college admissions. The grading policies and transcript of MHS are well established and understood by selective colleges and universities. On several documents sent with each application it is stated that we do not weight grades. Thus, it is clear to colleges how to evaluate our students. Colleges look closely at transcripts and understand the level of difficulty and challenge of student programs. Furthermore, colleges often disregard averages provided by high schools and re-compute the GPA's using their own policies.

In the past I have seen several studies, reports Nick Kourabas, which indicate that rank in class is not changed significantly by weighting of grades. Many high schools have moved away from weighting of grades because averages become ridiculously high. This is especially true in times of grade inflation. Because we do not provide exact rank, this should not be a huge issue.

Also,you could make a case that weighting of grades places average students, underachieving students, and students with learning difficulties at a disadvantage. Not only are they judged negatively because they are not taking honors and advanced placement courses, but with the weighting of grades their averages would be deflated in value. The pressure to be in honors and AP courses would be greatly increased by weighting of grades. We feel students should be encouraged to take harder, more challenging courses. However, increased pressure to do so because of weighting is not necessary and probably unhealthy.

Wow. Refreshing. EO Smith needs to hold the line on this issue. I'll explore this a little more in coming posts.

The Alliance for Climate Education

It looks like high school students are starting a flash mob movement to educate the world about the perils facing their generation:

Interesting ADHD Research

An interesting hypothesis about yperactivity in boys has been published in New Scientist. The article called, Time moves too slowly for hyperactive boys by Andy Coghlan is worth a read.

What to most of us seems like a short stretch of time would drag unbearably for someone with ADHD, says Katya Rubia of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. Her team's research, reported this week, adds to a growing body of evidence for the importance of time perception in a wide range of psychological disorders.

ADHD affects around 5 per cent of children globally, most of them boys. Studies relating to the disorder have focused on patients' short attention spans and impulsive behaviour. But ADHD is characterised by a shortage of dopamine, which is known to affect time perception, so Rubia and her colleagues wanted to know if this was the source of the kids' problems.

The researchers used MRI scans to show that 12 boys with ADHD had less activity than usual in the frontal lobe, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, all areas of the brain known to be crucial for time perception. These boys were also worse than 12 other boys at estimating how long circles appeared on a screen before vanishing.

When they were given the drug methylphenidate, aka Ritalin, which boosts dopamine levels and is used to treat ADHD, brain activity in the ADHD group became indistinguishable from that of the healthy boys. "Ritalin enhances brain regions that are important for time perception in ADHD children," concludes Rubia. The results are published in a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, which is devoted to time perception (DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0014).

Rubia believes this is evidence that faulty time perception causes the major symptoms of ADHD, by making children perceive even short periods of inactivity as inordinately long and boring. Because novelty-seeking and risky behaviour increase dopamine levels, children with ADHD may be become hyperactive as a way of "self-medicating" with dopamine.

Worse Than Bush: The Collapse of All Hope of Reforming Public Education

Arne Duncan's handling of the Department of Education is a nightmare.

For educators and children advocates not even the Bush administration's dysfunctional Department of Education compares to the vacant ignorance being exercised there today.

Rather than remediation of NCLB, Duncan has ratcheted up the toxic rhetoric.

Rather than reform, Duncan insists on ham-fisted conformity to NCLB, the pedagogy of educational failure.

The Ed.gov YouTube videos claim to be listening yours yet disallow any commentary, ratings, or ability to report the rhetoric as "offensive" and it is offensive.

Obama has arrived not as a liberator of educational dross but as just the next generation of public education's malfeasance.

As the Who, once sang;



Of course, getting fooled again and again and again is education's best practice. This is a profession that never tires of administering yet one more test to the infinite collection of tests that all point to the conclusion that schools aren't to blame nor can cure the economically disadvantaged. So instead we turn the children of the poor into circus animals and ask that they jump ever higher and through more hoops.

SAD.

Unknown Artist: Nyle

I discovered this brilliant piece courtesy of Dy/Dan's blog. The notes on the video say:

This video was filmed in one take, with audio being recorded simultaneously with the film. The video features Nyle (www.nyleraps.com) and is produced by Last Pictures (www.last-pictures.com) and 194 Recordings (www.myspace.com/194recordings)

Nyle "Let The Beat Build" from Nyle on Vimeo.

Moviemakers: Youth Rights Media

I came across a New Haven based student group calling itself YouthRightsMedia.org that has the audacity to practice movie making.

They've already shedding light on police profiling of students in New Haven and have squarely taken aim at the school system as well.

Good stuff.

All Hail, "Accountability"

Never does a day go by without an article somewhere in America trumpeting "accountability" in education. So we test and test and test some more to come to the very same conclusions and percentages that have shown up for decades. When there are variations, the conclusions are are found to be fraudulently calculated.

So it comes as no surprise that the federal government that is so insistent upon school accountability, uniform standards, and homogenized outcomes is lucky to find its ass with both hands. More specifically, where trillions of dollars have evaporated to. Watch and weep:

The Math and Science Scam

The New York Times has a debate on the value of foreign technology workers that's worth reading.

Norman Matloff in Suppressing Wages With Younger Workers, provides an insight as to why studies of American education always imply that Americans are illiterate in these areas.

A core problem with the H-1B program is its impact on older U.S. workers. The median age of H-1B workers is 27, and since younger workers are cheaper, employers use H-1B to avoid hiring older (i.e. over age 35) U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Human resources departments routinely exclude the applications of older workers on the grounds that the applicants have experience beyond the range stated in the job ad. Proposals to grant green cards in lieu of H-1B visas are thus misguided, as they would still swell the young labor pool.

The hiring managers have a “gotcha” for the younger applicants too, rejecting them as lacking job experience in some special (but quickly learnable) skill.

The industry lobbyists note that 50 percent of Silicon Valley startups have been founded by immigrants. But since immigrants make up half of Silicon Valley engineers, the lobbyists’ figure merely shows that entrepreneurship rates of immigrants and natives are the same. There is no evidence that the displacement of American workers has produced a net increase in startups.

The world’s “best and brightest” should be welcomed, but most H-1B workers are not in that league. Meanwhile, many of our own best and brightest are squeezed out of the market once they become “expensive.” The industry’s
claim that American kids don’t study enough math and science is a red herring, and is rank hypocrisy, with the layoffs of thousands of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who were math and science whizzes as kids.

What Norman fails to observe is that high tech jobs were one of the job sectors in which [American] women reached and exceeded income parity with their male counter-parts.

This blog has long asserted that the math and science studies were largely manufactured to justify increased legalized job pirating practices.

Math and science teachers deserve an apology for being falsely accused of incompetence. On the other hand their complicit silence is unfortunate and sad.

The Triumph of Ignorance

Ken Dixon reports in the Connecticut Post that Bill seeks to reduce size of school no-drug zones.

The current school-zone law dates back to the late 1980s, when the surge in crack cocaine resulted in a spike in urban violence and reactions from the General Assembly. Early versions of the legislation created 1,000-foot zones around schools and later laws expanded the area and included public housing, then day care programs.

"A lot of young people were killed in drug shootouts, et cetera," Lawlor said, noting that the sale and possession of drugs in the zone results in mandatory three-year and two-year prison terms, respectively.

Under the legislation, which next moves to the House,
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the hours the school zone would be in effect would include days and nights of organized student and community activities.

"I think we're all well aware that schools are used for a whole host of reasons, all throughout the year, day and night, by adults, children, et cetera," said House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk.

Lawlor gave the example of a homeless man smoking marijuana in back of a school at 3 a.m., in the summer, when school's out, as an example of the current law's heavy penalties.

Another example would be someone caught with a small amount of marijuana in their home, a block away from a public housing project.

Sen. Edwin A. Gomes, D-Bridgeport, a committee member, said the current perimeters "just don't work." He said that constituents of his would like added penalties to shield children in parks that are located away from schools.

"Our kids need to be protected as well as the kids in the projects," Gomes said. "These perimeters they're talking about, they just don't work."

No, the perimeters not only don't work but they are detrimental toward preventing the exposure of kids to drugs in general.

I have blogged and commented on this issue repeatedly and i'm glad to see even this glimmer of progress.

These perimeter laws have done nothing but raise the ante for minor offenses to the draconian thresholds of federal offenses reserved for mass murderers. In urban areas, these perimeters bleed into each other creating megalopolis-sized no-drug or whatever "zones". The presumption that urban populations will stop taking drugs, reading porn, or doing whatever is so delusional that the legislators creating and passing such legislation should be strapped into straitjackets and dropped off on a deserted Pacific Island.

You can walk into almost any school in America today and "find" drugs. As a society, we have exercised a radical, demented right-wing agenda for -cough- "solving" the drug problem. The blind, rabid ignorance of drug wars, wholesale intolerance, and blissful, self-righteous ever-so-toughness has resulted in an escalation of ever-more dangerous drug options, extreme escalations of violence, crime, and social dysfunction, and the costly incarceration of pedestrian, self-medicating innocents.

i hold out no great hope that society will get much smarter but Lord knows we could use an epiphany that includes tightly regulated de-criminalization and heavy taxation of marijuana, a serious effort to contain and de-escalate the dependency of hard-core addicts on heavier drugs, and the elimination of severe penalties aimed at those who are most incapable of coping with their life situation.

There is no cure for imperfect humanity but that doesn't mean that humanity's best instincts should be pushed aside to satisfy mankind's meanest.

In the Wake of Bush

The myopic lunacy and inexcusable inhumanity of the Bush policies continue to bob up in intellectual dead pools all over America.

In education, this blog documented, in no uncertain terms, the rabid psycho-religious zealotry that was applied to educational practice with an all-too compliant establishment blessing.

Today's New York Times article, Strip-Search of Girl Tests Limit of School Policy by Adam Liptak documents the eventual dead cat's bounce of one such fiasco - the zero tolerance paradigm.

Adam B. Wolf, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Ms. Redding, said her experience was “the worst nightmare for any parent.”

“When you send your child off to school every day, you expect them to be in math class or in the choir,” Mr. Wolf said. “You never imagine their being forced to strip naked and expose their genitalia and breasts to their school officials.”

In a sworn statement submitted in the case, Safford Unified School District v. Redding, No. 08-479, Mr. Wilson said he had good reason to suspect Ms. Redding. She and other students had been unusually rowdy at a school dance a couple of months before, and members of the school staff thought they had smelled alcohol. A student also accused Ms. Redding of having served alcohol at a party before the dance, Mr. Wilson said.

Ms. Redding said she had served only soda at the party, adding that her accuser was not there. At the dance, she said, school administrators had confused adolescent rambunctiousness with inebriation. “We’re kids,” she said. “We’re goofy.”

The search was conducted by Peggy Schwallier, the school nurse, and Helen Romero, a secretary. Ms. Redding “never appeared apprehensive or embarrassed,” Ms. Schwallier said in a sworn statement. Ms. Redding said she had kept her head down so the women could not see that she was about to cry.

Ms. Redding said she was never asked if she had pills with her before she was searched. Mr. Wolf, her lawyer, said that was unsurprising.

“They strip-search first and ask questions later,” Mr. Wolf said of school officials here.

Ms. Redding did not return to school for months after the search, studying at home. “I never wanted to see the secretary or the nurse ever again,” she said.

In the end, she transferred to another school. The experience left her wary, nervous and distrustful, she said, and she developed stomach ulcers. She is now studying psychology at Eastern Arizona College and hopes to become a counselor.

There is a claim in the arguments being made that "reasonable people can disagree" about such methods. I beg to differ. The Supreme Court needs to unequivocally reject the notion that anything goes in the pursuit of uncovering imaginary crimes in educational settings.

Kids have rights of speech, person, privacy, and an excuse for behavior that is not mainstream and that is that these are kids who are not fully formed in body, mind, or soul. That does not make them criminals except in the minds of deranged politicians and their eager lackeys who make careers out of getting ever-so-tough with anyone except their own special interest groups.

Crocodile Lip Service

According to a New York Times article by Kelley Holland called Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?, we are asked to believe that MBA students will receive an ethical basis for performing their duties. I'm skeptical.

The master’s of business administration, a gateway credential throughout corporate America, is especially coveted on Wall Street; in recent years, top business schools have routinely sent more than 40 percent of their graduates into the world of finance.

But with the economy in disarray and so many financial firms in free fall, analysts, and even educators themselves, are wondering if the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades.

“It is so obvious that something big has failed,” said Ángel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. “We can look the other way, but come on. The C.E.O.’s of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, ‘Well, it wasn’t our fault’ when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership.”

Critics of business education have many complaints. Some say the schools have become too scientific, too detached from real-world issues. Others say students are taught to come up with hasty solutions to complicated problems. Another group contends that schools give students a limited and distorted view of their role — that they graduate with a focus on maximizing shareholder value and only a limited understanding of ethical and social considerations essential to business leadership.

Such shortcomings may have left business school graduates inadequately prepared to make the decisions that, taken together, might have helped mitigate the financial crisis, critics say.

“There are extraordinary things taking place in business education, and a lot that is very promising,” said Judith F. Samuelson, executive director of the Business and Society Program at the Aspen Institute. “But what’s the central theorem of business education? It’s wanting.”

Government Twitters

The Committee on Education and labor has released their twitter details!

“Like President Obama and Speaker Pelosi, I believe that greater transparency in government is critical and will continue to use new media to open up our committee’s work to the public. I’m pleased to announce our use of another tool, Twitter, to inform the American public about the important work we are doing to rebuild our economy, strengthen our middle class, and improve the lives of America’s children, students, workers and families,” said House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-CA).

“I believe government works best when it is transparent and information is accessible to all. I want to ensure that the public can easily keep tabs on what the Committee is working on. Our website is a resource for stakeholders, students, teachers, the media, and citizens around the country. This is another tool to help make government work better for the people we are serving,” stated House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN).

Twitter is a micro-blogging and social networking service that provides its users the ability to send and receive updates, known as “Tweets”, from individuals and groups they choose to follow. A tweet is a text-based post or short message of up to 140 characters. Twitter allows anyone to create a free account.
For more information visit:

* House Committee on Education and Labor (@edlabordems)


* House Committee on Science and Technology (@SciTechCmte)

* House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (@HouseTransInf)

* House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming (@MarkeyMemo)

The Recovery Paradox

President Obama's team is attempting to resuscitate the American economy with a huge influx of money. To listen to the government administrators talk about the spending of this money, one would think its intended not to save the free market system but to ensure that that bloated government positions that have brought this government to the verge of bankruptcy will be able to continue sucking the life out of taxpayers.

Governor Rell, teachers union representatives, and others speak of "saving jobs" instead of right-sizing government and the obscene paychecks, benefits, and wholesale waste of the existing structure.

The double and triple dipping of multiply retired individuals is draining jobs and resources away from those who have yet to be so fortunate.

At a time of dropping enrollments, it is only appropriate that schools right-size their staffing needs. The myth of eternally smaller classroom sizes needs to be re-examined objectively.

And public schools need to have the option of offering credit for privatized instruction in areas where private initiatives can economically produce similar results.

If the bailout monies are squandered attempting to protect the vested interests this country will economically collapse. We need practical and honest government and education, not more of the same old games.

It is not government that needs or deserves the bailout, it is the middle-class, free market taxpayer who has been raped by the ever more expensive and extravagant excesses of the closed market public servants (an oxymoron these days).

Heroes Fall from Grace

As Rick Green mentions in his blog, the witch trial story continues. I'm not going to call it the Julie Amero story anymore because Julie has been cleared.

Today, she and her supporters are being hounded by a group of misguided Norwich police personnel who demonstrate so little regard for the rule of law that one could easily mistake them for criminals.

As I reflect on all of this, Julie's husband, Wes Volle, is an unsung hero in this story. Throughout Julie's very real and considerable ordeal he remained steadfast in his belief in Julie's innocence and supported her through some very tough times. He's a for real hero. The walk these two walked was never an easy one and remains difficult.

I have never met either Wes or Julie. i missed the great dinner date with Alex and the gang in Boston. But in the correspondence we all share online, I have always been blown away by the good cheer and graciousness of both of them. Julie's critics take a demented satisfaction that she will never teach again in CT.

This is a punishment for the students she should be teaching. There's a decency about Wes and Julie that shines like a bright beacon of hope to everyone who's been falsely accused. They never let the bastards get them down.

And that brings us to the bastards. It's been weeks since Julie negotiated her freedom from the charges and further legalities. One would think that that would end the finger-pointing. It didn't.

Julie was offered a couple of opportunities to speak on the mainstream media about her ordeal and she did to the degree she could articulate the very technical issues involved.

This seemed to infuriate the Norwich Police Department and at least two of their officers. Detective Lounsbury, whose misleading testimony in the first place caused Julie's reputation great harm, decided that he would begin a campaign to punish Julie no matter what the court decided. So he started a blog that named his targets; Julie's staunchest supporters. And as if the blog's enumeration of intended victims wasn't enough he decorated his blog profile with a picture of himself holding an automatic rifle presumably because he's more competent using it than he is using a computer.

Needless to say, the ethical justification for a policeman hounding someone after the case is settled makes zero sense. And that remains consistent with the initial charges. They, too, made zero sense.

The damage being done is non-trivial. After the 9-11 crime, the service providers in our society were touted as unsung heroes. Law enforcement in particular was granted extra-legal consideration. And in the hands of fools such power is not only misused but it is abused against truly innocent citizens.

In Julie Amero's case, a badly written and misguided law was passed as a vehicle for preventing children from being exposed to pornography in school. It escalated the penalty for pornography on school grounds to a federal crime and allowed authorities the nod-and-wink power to enforce the law unconditionally.

The unintended consequence is that administrators who confiscate porn from a student and leaves it in their desk could be charged with endangerment or the ever-popular "not doing enough" to protect students. Art teachers accused of impropriety by a puritanical parent are also in danger. The possibilities are endless and include the black-mailing of teachers or administrators by planting porn in their desk or on their computer. Termination guaranteed.

The law allows power-drunk police to become accuser, jailer, and judge - no questions asked.

In Julie's case the villain was not human. It was a cyber script that the school failed to filter and could not contain. Nor did they understand it. For this they relied on Detective Lounsbury, the local 'expert'. His failures are well-documented here, at the Julie group, and in blogs across the globe. Today, largely because Lounsbury refuses to accept truly expert analysis, he barks at the moon on his blog of hapless redemption.

I guess no one at the Julie Group would be very upset if it were merely Lounsbury howling his way into obscurity. But Lounsbury has a fan club. Like a salt-and-pepper crime team, another officer takes every opportunity to disparage Julie and her supporters.

Like a blow-hard at a diner, he insists that Julie's story has not been vetted. No, he insists, Julie like all the other perverts, weirdos, and Norwich psychos he's run into could be guilty.

Why didn't she just... [know that Norwich's citizens are loony enough to believe after all her efforts to get the machine attended to, she would be accused of a felony]. Yes, this fellow performs tag-team triage for Lounsbury to float claims against Julie that are thinly veiled defamation assertions.

When the nation's local police drift so far astray from the law, civility, honor, and common sense it is time for citizens to take notice and pull the plug.

Lounsbury and his sidekicks should be thanked for reminding us all that a badge doesn't make a hero. It doesn't even guarantee due process.

Throwing Money at 'Education'

I welcome more funding of education infrastructure projects and increased aid to college-bound students. The New York Times is reporting (Stimulus Plan Would Provide Flood of Aid to Education by Sam Dillon) the tsunami of money that's being targeted for education. CT's share is near the bottom (what's new?).

The formulas by which the stimulus money for public schools would be allocated to states and local districts are complex, but take into consideration numbers of school-age children in poor families. The level received per student would vary considerably by state, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation, a research group that monitors education spending. New York would be among the biggest beneficiaries, at $760 per student, while New Jersey and Connecticut would fall near the bottom, with $427 and $409 per student, respectively. The District of Columbia would get the most per student, $1,289, according to the foundation’s analysis.

The foundation contends, however, that the formula does not effectively allocate the most money to states with the greatest need.

In recent years the federal government has contributed 9 percent of the nation’s total spending on public schools, with states and local districts financing the rest. Washington has contributed 19 percent of spending on higher education. The stimulus package would raise those federal proportions significantly.

The Department of Education’s discretionary budget for the 2008 fiscal year was about $60 billion. The stimulus bill would raise that to about $135 billion this year, and to about $146 billion in 2010. Other federal agencies would administer about $20 billion in additional education-related spending.

“This really marks a new era in federal education spending,” said Edward Kealy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a coalition of 90 education groups.

The bill would increase 2009 fiscal year spending on Title I, a program of specialized classroom efforts to help educate poor children, to $20 billion from about $14.5 billion, and raise spending on education for disabled children to $17 billion from $11 billion.

Those increases respond to longtime demands by teachers unions, school boards and others that Washington fully finance the mandates laid out for states and districts in the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, and in the main federal law regulating special education.

“We’ve been arguing that the federal government hasn’t been living up to its commitments, but these increases go a substantial way toward meeting them,” said Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

Frederick Hess, an education policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, criticized the bill as failing to include mechanisms to encourage districts to bring school budgets in line with property tax revenues, which have plunged with the bursting of the real estate bubble.

“It’s like an alcoholic at the end of the night when the bars close, and the solution is to open the bar for another hour,” Mr. Hess said.

The bill would, for the first time, involve the federal government in a significant fashion in the building and renovation of schools, which has been the responsibility of states and districts. It includes $20 billion for school renovation and modernization, with $14 billion for elementary and secondary schools and $6 billion for higher education. It also includes tax provisions under which the federal government would pay the interest on construction bonds issued by school districts.

Mr. Duncan said the bill’s school renovation provisions would create a “huge number of construction jobs,” because so many school buildings need repairs.

But Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California and the ranking minority member of the House education committee, said, “By putting the federal government in the business of building schools, Democrats may be irrevocably changing the federal government’s role in education in this country.”

In higher education, the bill would increase spending on Pell Grants, the most important federal student aid program, to $27 billion from about $19 billion this year.

What disturbs me is the very idea that No Child Left Behind - the worst idea affecting children on this planet - is being funded.

The funding it needs is dissolution.

Please god, pull the plug on this monstrosity of an education program. It deserves not a penny of public funding. Furthermore, school budgets need to be tightened not sustained at unsustainable levels. Taxpayers are no longer employees with disposable incomes. Education cannot become an entitlement program of unlimited benefits and runaway costs when the private sector is crippled.

Spare Change

I just discovered a set of videos on YouTube that are wonderful examples of how seamless global art can be.

Thanks For the Memory

Drug manufacturers are now promoting memory enhancement products that are being developed for Alzheimer patients as a recreational and educational supplement.

The Telegraph in an article called 'Memory pill' that could help with exam revision could be available soon by Lucy Cockcroft reports;

Both have "cognitive-enhancing effects" which are aimed at treating patients with age-related memory loss.

Steven Ferris, a neurologist and former committee member of the Food and Drug Administration in the US, has predicted that a milder version will be available for healthy consumers as a "lifestyle pill" available over the counter.

Dr Ferris said: "My view is that one could gain approval, provided you showed the drugs to be effective and safe. It could be a huge market."

There is anecdotal evidence that mind-improving drugs are already being taken in Britain by healthy users.

Provigil, used to treat narcolepsy, is being taken by some students to help them stay awake, while Adderall XR and Ritalin, treatments for attention deficit disorder, are being used to help promote concentration.

A spokesman Adderall XR said: "We get a lot of calls from college campuses asking about it.

"There are risks though. It can raise blood pressure, people shouldn't do it."

The Department of Health said it was not illegal to buy the medicines over the internet, but it was not recommended.

Barbara Sahakian, professor of clinical neuropsychology at Cambridge, said: "It's hard to quantify the scale of the phenomenon but it's definitely catching on.

High-stress, high-stakes testing is once again producing unintended consequences.

The Death of Judaism

I have become an advocate of teaching religion/philosophy in school. In raising my own boys I have been ashamed of much of what they've been exposed to in Roman Catholic churches. The message of the New Testament is used to sugar-coat generations of bad theology.

I read a New York Times article recently about the Wall Street scam artist Bernie Madoff who bilked billionaires of their fortunes. The most disturbing thing about the article was the same post-modern hodge-podge of pseudo-Judaic belief and practice Christianity suffers from. Heaven, hell, destiny, free-will, money, chosen people, ethics, faith and more all get thrown into the cultural blender to produce quaint television sit-com prognostications.

The garbled, absolutist drivel that is spewed forth has little or nothing to do with the study or reverence of God, it's just god-noise to make a buck and justify the means.

This past week, a story caught my attention that deserves this country's attention.

The story is about a doctor in Gaza who witnessed his daughters being killed. Gaza by the kindest of definitions is a concentration camp that the world has no righteous indignation about. Nobody who believes in the right to life cries out when children are herded into building for "safety" and then shelled to death. Real children rarely count in today's religious vernacular.

The excuses for these behaviors are tried and true and there will be no accountability. The Torah, the basis for Western law, might be a source of wisdom in times like these. But its too late. Judaism itself seems to be buried in the rubble of the Gaza disgrace.

And the disgrace is on everyone's head. There is no excuse for what goes on there by any party (and there are more than two). The perpetual killing sprees and blood feuds are sub-human exercises. War used to have an honor to it. Today, the Powell Doctrine is taken to the extreme. The use of overwhelming technological force on populations that can barely feed themselves and are being slowly strangle dto death should not be considered inspired tactical genius. This is the stuff of humanity that has abandoned rather than embraced religion, it is the mark of a beast and not a civilized man.

The agony of this doctor for his murdered children should summon some kind of moral indignation in anyone theist or atheist who can still think and connect the information with a sensibility that values both human life and the dependency of children on the behavior of the adults in charge.

War is no excuse for inhumanity.



Schools need to somehow dust off the lessons about the sanctity of human life if we are to survive. The next generation needs to get off this treadmill of hatred, barbarism, and self-immolation.

Starting the New Year Right

My apologies for seeming to ignore this blog. I've actually been very busy with my art (see: http://arttube.blogspot.com ) and I promise to return to the subject of education sooner than later.

However, today I received a very nice comment on a technical set of instructions I wrote over a year ago about getting 64-bit Ubuntu wireless to work on a laptop. What is so odd to me is that after all these years, the heavy-duty technical community still has trouble understanding usability and documentation issues.

Hand-holding is essential for all but the technically savvy to understand. And hand-holding is hard-work, just like good teaching.

Anyway, compliments are always appreciated here.

The Importance of Pronunciation

High school students are all encouraged to take a foreign language to qualify for college eligibility.

A careful emphasis on pronunciation is advised when one is traveling overseas using their newly acquired skills.

Tracking Santa

I just discovered a very nice Norad application that tracks the progress of Santa.

You can get it here.

Things Schools Forget to Teach

I came across an interesting blog a few weeks ago that talks about the things that should be, but aren't, taught in schools. I urge you to read the linked blog for details but here's a list compiled from the Positivity Blog.

The 80/20 rule – also known as The Pareto Principle – basically says that 80 percent of the value you will receive will come from 20 percent of your activities.

Parkinson’s Law - You can do things quicker than you think. This law says that a task will expand in time and seeming complexity depending on the time you set aside for it.

Boring or routine tasks can create a lot of procrastination and low-level anxiety. One good way to get these things done quickly is to batch them.

First, give value. Then, get value. Not the other way around.

Be proactive. Not reactive.

Mistakes and failures are good.

Why do people give up after just few mistakes or failures? Well, I think one big reason is because they beat themselves up way too much. But it’s a kinda pointless habit. It only creates additional and unnecessary pain inside you and wastes your precious time.

Meeting new people is fun. But it can also induce nervousness. We all want to make a good first impression and not get stuck in an awkward conversation.

The best way to do this that I have found so far is to assume rapport. This means that you simply pretend that you are meeting one of your best friends.

Use your reticular activation system to your advantage.

But the thing that I’ve discovered the last few years is that if you change your attitude, you actually change your reality. When you for instance use a positive attitude instead of a negative one you start to see things and viewpoints that were invisible to you before. You may think to yourself “why haven’t I thought about things this way before?”.

Gratitude is a simple way to make yourself feel happy.

Don’t compare yourself to others.

80-90% of what you fear will happen never really come into reality.

Don’t take things too seriously.

If your memory is anything like mine then it’s like a leaking bucket. Many of your good or great ideas may be lost forever if you don’t make a habit of writing things down.

In pretty much any experience there are always things that you can learn from it and things within the experience that can help you to grow. Negative experiences, mistakes and failure can sometimes be even better than a success because it teaches you something totally new, something that another success could never teach you.

Whenever you have a “negative experience” ask yourself: where is the opportunity in this? What is good about this situation? One negative experience can – with time – help you create many very positive experiences.

The False Learning

I have repeatedly blogged about the wholesale failure of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to address the needs of children and society. NCLB is little more than a thinly disguised national policy to destroy public school education that has succeeded.

The ubiquitously accepted and promoted meme that high-stress, high-stakes testing of memorized (and largely worthless) factoids is a pseudo-religion among the educated and uneducated alike. Chances are this policy will not change under Obama ensuring the intellectual collapse of our nation along side its economic bankruptcy.

A better policy would be to promote learning for learnings sake. This is not as altruistic a venture as might be assumed.

In a Telegraph article called, Learning by heart is 'pointless for Google generation' by Murray Wardrop, he summarizes the revaluation of meorization.

...for today's youngsters, tedious rote learning is pointless because such basic facts are only a mouse click away via Google, Wikipedia and online libraries, according to writer and businessman Don Tapscott.

Tapscott, author of the best-selling book Wikinomics and a champion of the "net generation", suggests a better approach would be to teach children to think creatively so they could learn to interpret and apply the knowledge available online.

The Canadian business executive said: "Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is.

"Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don't need to know all the dates.

"It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google."

Tapscott dismissed the idea that his approach is anti-learning, instead arguing that the ability to learn new things is more important than ever "in a world where you have to process new information at lightning speed".

And he believes that the old-fashioned model of education still prevalent in today's schools, involving remembering facts 'off pat', was designed for the industrial age.

He said: "This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn't deliver for the challenges of the digital economy, or for the 'net gen' mind.

"Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time."

Tapscott added the brains of today's youngsters work differently to their parents', and that multi tasking with digital devices, such as using the internet while listening to their MP3 players, can help them to develop critical thinking skills.

Ofsted has reported that pupils' knowledge and understanding of key historical facts is not good enough to enable them to "form overviews and demonstrate strong conceptual understanding".

Shadow Schools Secretary, Michael Gove, has recently attacked "the move away from fact-based learning", arguing that "knowledge, intellectual capital, is what makes educational progress possible".

Faux Teachers

The Dallas Daily News in Texas is exposing a Dallas school district that is supplying phony Social security numbers for foreigners being hired by the district to teach bilingual classes:

"There's no way we should be doing that kind of stuff," Ms. Olson said. "Even if your intention is good to help employees get paid, you can't use inappropriate procedures to do that."

Stopgap approach

The investigative report, obtained by The News through a records request, found "that the inappropriate procedure of assigning false SSNs has been systemic for several years" within DISD's alternative certification program, which prepares new teachers for state certification when they don't have traditional credentials.

A call Thursday to DISD's alternative certification office was not returned. In recent years, DISD has hired people from various countries, including Mexico and Spain, to deal with a shortage of bilingual teachers.

The fake numbers were assigned as a stopgap to expedite the hiring process, the report says. The numbers were supposed to serve as temporary identification numbers until employees received real Social Security numbers. Once employees got the real numbers, they were supposed to tell district officials so the fake ones could be replaced.

The investigation found no indication that the fake numbers were provided to the Teacher Retirement System, the Internal Revenue Service or the Social Security Administration.

However, according to the report, a sampling of several fake numbers showed that they had been included in a July quarterly report sent to the Texas Workforce Commission.

Also, when investigators reviewed a sampling of personnel files, they learned that the fake numbers were entered on Department of Homeland Security and IRS forms. The forms are not transmitted outside the district but are made available to the appropriate federal agency upon request.

In July, the district discovered that 26 of the false numbers were in use after matching DISD employee Social Security numbers with the Social Security Administration database. The numbers were already being used in Pennsylvania. DISD officials did not know Thursday whether the practice had caused problems for anyone holding the legitimate numbers.

The district's investigative unit, called the Office of Professional Responsibility, began looking into the fake numbers after the Texas Education Agency's division of educator investigations advised the unit in July that it had discovered the district issuing false numbers in 2004.

That year, the TEA division became aware of the practice when DISD faxed copies of about 100 new Social Security Administration cards for foreign citizens – most of whom had been assigned district-issued numbers – and asked TEA to replace the old numbers, according to the investigative report. The state office told DISD at the time that it's illegal to make up Social Security numbers and pass them off as legitimate, the report says.

'A mess'

Doug Phillips, TEA's director of investigations and fingerprinting, said his office believed the district had stopped the practice because there was no evidence that it continued. He said Thursday that he didn't know which laws forbid issuing fake Social Security numbers.

"We just knew it looked bad and smelled bad," Mr. Phillips said. "That was the first time we'd ever heard of that one."

Ah, but it gets even better...

A research service has found another link to social security tampering from within the education system...

For the past year more than 2,000 New York children have been interacting with online tutors who claimed to be from Texas but were actually based in India. The 250 tutors were hired by a private company under the federal No Child Left Behind program.

An investigation by the U.S. Department of Education revealed the tutors were never screened with required fingerprint and background checks before they began working with the children, according to a report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation, Richard Condon.

Mythili Sridhar, a co-owner of Socratic Learning Inc, the company that supplied the offshore tutors, admitted in a letter that the tutors did not live in Texas. Ms. Sridhar, who trains the tutors, wrote that they "tutor from there homes," failing to correctly spell the word "their," according to the New York Sun.

"Socratic blatantly violated its contract and we are suspending their contract pending further action by the state," a Department of Education spokesman, Andrew Jacob, said. "We will notify parents of any students who enrolled with Socratic Learning this fall they should select" a new provider.

The company's Web site advertises its primary service as "online one-on-one tutoring with highly qualified college degreed instructors." Last year, the department reminded the company to send a list of its online tutors but it never did so, the report said. Outside providers of tutoring services are required to submit a list of their employees to an electronic database maintained by the Department of Education, which then conducts the background checks.

In November, Carmela Cuddy, an official from the education department's Office of Personnel Investigation, advised Socratic Learning that it would not grant security clearance to any staff members who didn't have Social Security numbers.

The Bush Depression Saves CT Schools From State 'Reform'

Yesterday, the Courant reported that the State is far too broke to spend any more money on bad ideas the State's Department of Education reforms.

The much-touted effort to improve quality and standards at high schools across Connecticut has fallen victim to the state's dismal economy.

Bowing to financial pressures, state Education Commissioner Mark K. McQuillan said officials will put off implementing the changes for another two years.

As recently as last month, officials had hoped to move forward with the reform effort, and planned to begin implementing the changes next fall, starting with 20 to 25 school districts at a two-year cost of $16 million. They argued that the tough economy made it even more important to invest in changes to make high school students better prepared for higher education and the workforce.

But as state budget projections grew bleaker, McQuillan said it became clear that any costly new initiatives would not be viable.

"That $16 million is simply out of reach now," he said.

Thank God. The only thing better would be the complete dissolution of the State Department of Malfeasant Education. These bastards having been screwing up Connecticut Education expensively, publicly, and embarrassingly for far too long.

Time for the State to really save money and get rid of these parasites.

Julie Amero is Free!

After 534 days of waiting for a decision, Julie Amero's sentence has been reduced from the original, potential 40 year prison sentence to a $100 misdemeanor.

The belated arrival of justice is a welcome relief for all of us who have supported Julie's innocence. She and her husband Wes can now, finally, begin life anew.

But in those 534 days, Julie was treated like sex criminal and lost a job at a local Hardware supply chain when the employees of that store decided to presume guilt instead of innocence. And Julie's life was a life of fear that some irrational soul might attempt to cause physical harm.

Justice is just a reminder that innocence exists. But it is the responsibility of the state to ensure that Julie's life is made whole after the ravages false witness and the effects of that on her pregnancy, self-worth, and livelihood.

See: Rick Green's blog.

Education in an Economic Depression

The Boston Globe is running an interesting speculative article about how the next economic depression will differ from the last century. Called Depression 2009: What would it look like?

Higher education, another big expense, would probably take a hit as well. Students unable to afford private universities would opt for public universities, students unable to afford four-year colleges would opt for community colleges, and students unable to afford community college wouldn't go at all. With fewer applicants, admissions standards would drop, with spots that once would have been filled by more qualified, poorer students going instead to wealthier applicants who before would not have made the cut. Some universities would simply shrink. In Boston, a city almost uniquely dependent on higher education, the results - fewer students renting apartments, going to restaurants and bars, opening bank accounts, buying books, taking taxis - would be particularly acute.

A depression would last too long for unemployed college graduates to ride out the downturn in business or law school, so people would have to change career plans entirely. One place that could see an uptick in applications and interest is government work: Its relative stability, combined with a suspicion of free-market ideology that would accompany a truly disastrous downturn, could attract more people and even help the public sector shake off its image as a redoubt for the mediocre and the unambitious.

. . .

In many ways, though, today's depression would not look like the last one because it would not look like much at all. As Warren wrote in an e-mail, "The New Depression would be largely invisible because people would experience loss privately, not publicly."

In the public imagination, the Depression was a galvanizing time, the crucible in which the Greatest Generation came of age and came together. That is, at best, only partly true. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has found that, for many, the Depression was isolating: Kiwanis clubs, PTAs, and other social groups lost around half their members from 1930 to 1935. And other studies on economic hardship suggest that it tends to sap people's civic engagement, often permanently.

"When people become unemployed in the Great Depression, they hunker down, they pull in from everybody." Putnam says.

That effect, Putnam believes, would only be more pronounced today. The Depression was, famously, a boom time for movies - people flocked to cheap double features to escape the dreariness of their everyday poverty. Today, however, movies are no longer cheap. Nor is a day at the ballpark.

Much of a modern depression would unfold in the domestic sphere: people driving less, shopping less, and eating in their houses more. They would watch television at home; unemployed parents would watch over their own kids instead of taking them to day care. With online banking, it would even be possible to have a bank run in which no one leaves the comfort of their home.

There would be darker effects, as well. Depression, unsurprisingly, is higher in economically distressed households; so is domestic violence. Suicide rates go up in tough times, marriage rates and birthrates go down. And while divorce rates usually rise in recessions, they dropped during the Great Depression, in part because unhappy couples found they simply couldn't afford separation.

In precarious times, hunkering down can become not simply a defense mechanism, but a worldview. Grant McCracken, an anthropologist affiliated with MIT who studies consumer behavior, calls this distinction "surging" vs. "dwelling" - the difference, as he wrote recently on his blog, between believing that the world "teems with new features, new things, new opportunities, new excitement" and thinking that life's pleasures come from counting one's blessings and appreciating and holding onto what one already has. Economic uncertainty, he argues, drives us toward the latter.

Gates Education Foundation 1.0 Fails, What Next? You'll Be Sorry You Asked.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. writing in Forbes magazine updates us on the thinking of the Gates Foundation and gives us some insight into their failure to make a difference (aside from spending big bucks on a lot of dubious programs). Was the Gates Foundation interested in education or just indoctrinating more schools with Windows based systems? The question is worth asking because the outcomes are so weak that the only measurable effect is publicity for the Gates brand name.

There's much to like in the new plan, beginning with the foundation's confession that version 1.0, focused on creation of small high schools, didn't turn out very well, save for several networks of high-performance charters such as KIPP, Yes-Prep and Achievement First.

Version 2.0 continues the Gates emphasis on successful high-school completion and college-readiness for disadvantaged young people and adds a parallel thrust toward college completion. It features laudable--and measurable--targets for both.

It includes welcome attention to developing national standards and tests, markedly strengthening education data (stay tuned for the Fordham Institute's own contribution on that front next week), enhancing research into "what works," accelerating the development and use of education technology and strengthening teachers across multiple fronts. Incorporated therein is piloting of performance-related pay and tenure systems.

Two cheers are surely deserved. It's too early to know, however, whether a third is warranted. For what was emphasized in Seattle, and in the materials released so far, is mostly an educator's (and student's) version of education reform, not a parent's, taxpayer's or policymaker's version. Indeed, the word "parent" scarcely appears, nor "choice," "charter" or "governance," nor much by way of politics, policy or finance.

Though Version 2.0 includes a few controversial items--national standards and performance pay foremost among them--it's generally non-confrontational and educator-pleasing, even teacher-centric. (It seemed particularly odd, given the praise lavished on KIPP et al, to find no mention in the documents of building more high-quality charter networks or the policy surroundings and human-capital arrangements in which these can flourish.)

Yet again, schools are being corrupted by the infusion of high-rolling foundations financing national testing schemes that have yet to produce an iota of improved educational practice. And performance pay plans? Come on. If Gates can't release bug-free software with performance pay, waht are the chances...?

I'd call the new initiative Dumb Ideas 2.0.

While it is their money to burn, it is our schools and children used as sacrificial lambs. I'd rather suffer with creative under-funded schools than luxury, centralized memorization boot camps, but that's just the educator in me talking.

The Fordham Institute is a neo-con -cough- "think-tank" artifact of the bad-old Bush administration's policies that Gates helped finance. It will be interesting to see if Obama embraces the urban education myths of NCLB that institutions like this hood-winked the public with for the past twenty years or if Obama steers into programs that actually meet the needs of children.

I'm not holding my breath.

Along Came Bob Rose

In my education reading I include a visit to the Courant's Education section and I browse and sometimes contribute to the readers comments.

Recently I came across an interesting entry and received permission to reproduce it here. Here is our correspondence in full.

Would you mind if I blogged about your recent Hartford Courant response about the Montessori results?


Frank,

I would be delighted! I've been trying to get someone interested in this for years. On my listserv we are in the process of proving the idea once again.

FYI, I will append a three-page description of our original study below, and I'll also attach the same document as an MS Word attachment. (In case the number columns in the Table don't print out straight in the email version.

It's almost unbelievable that no one has ever checked out this simple idea!

Best,

Bob
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In 2002-2003 I did on on-line survey of “Teachers Applying Whole Language” to test my belief that teaching children to write the alphabet to a definable level of fluency (incorporating both rate and legibility), and to my pleasure, I found an overwhelmingly positive correlation. The following school year (2003-2004) I started my own Internet listserv, and recruited five kindergarten teachers who wanted to help me reproduce the findings. The results were just as positive.



I wrote to the editors of about a dozen education and educational psychology journals, describing our controlled study and the only positive request for a manuscript submission was from the manuscript editor of the Harvard Educational Review. (The assistant editor of one well known journal simply emailed me, “That couldn’t possibly be true!”)



I immediately submitted a slightly different draft from the one that follows, but it was summarily rejected by the referees of the H.E.R.



As far as I know, this is (surprisingly) the only study of a possible relationship between early practice printing alphabet letters and subsequent reading success. The five kindergarten teachers involved are trying to spread word of this method privately, but so far with no success. Between the five, they have over a century of classroom experience, and I could share their email addresses with you, if you like.



Most K-1 teachers are aware that their students who are best at reading are also best at printing. However, they are not aware of the causal relationship between early printing practice and the avoidance of subsequent reading problems.



I believe the general public believes that school curricula already have fluency criteria for printing letters in K-1, and would be surprised to learn the fact that they do not.



I hope you will post the following study in the hopes someone will attempt to reproduce it. If there is truly a massive positive correlation between early printing fluency and subsequent reading success (as long as “dyslexia” has not already supervened), I believe it will be one of the most important social science discoveries in history.







THE WRITING/READING CONNECTION

By Robert V. Rose, MD (retired)

Submitted March 15, 2004



Abstract



The possible relationship between practice printing alphabet letters and learning to read in the earliest grades has not been adequately explored. The present article describes preliminary evidence that this relationship may be important, and that reading difficulties may relate directly to inadequate printing practice in kindergarten and first-grade



Historically, many authorities on the subject of literacy instruction have stressed the importance of adequate practice in printing alphabet letters. The first-century Roman writer and rhetorician, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (ca A.D. 35-98?) wrote that with regard to becoming literate, “Too slow a hand impedes the mind.”

In 1912, Maria Montessori wrote, in effect, that teaching young children to print letters is easy, that it is easy to teach children to read after they have practiced printing alphabet letters, but that it is difficult to teach children to read if they have not practiced writing them. 1

Marilyn Jager Adams noted that prior to the onset of the twentieth century the “spelling drill” was the principal means of inducing literacy for several millennia. 2

More recently, several published authors have called attention to the dearth of research on the possible link between printing practice and the acquisition of literacy in young children, but objective studies of the relationship are still lacking.3, 4

This author has made the assumption that emphasis on practicing printing alphabet letters increases the fluency with which children can print them. It was therefore decided to examine the relationship between fluency at printing the alphabet in preliterate children, and their subsequent success in learning to read well.

This method suffers the disadvantage of requiring children to be able to recite the alphabet in order to print the different letters both legibly and at a rate sufficient to demonstrate that they have practiced enough to have become “printing fluent.” However, it was considered superior to other methods of assessing fluency in printing alphabet letters in young children.

Such children have limited attention spans. It was therefore decided to measure the number of alphabet letters children write during a timed twenty-second interval, and multiply that number by three in order to obtain a “letters-per-minute,” or “LPM,” value for each child.

During the early months of 2002, five first-grade (second year of school) teachers were enlisted from teacher-related internet listservs, to do a cooperative study of the relationship between fluency in writing the alphabet, and concomitant reading skill.

The printing rate of each child was listed by teachers submitting classroom data, and each was matched by the subjective teacher assessment of the child’s relative reading skill. The assessments were A, B, C, D and E, to designate “excellent”, “above average”, “average”, “below average” and “possible reading problem”, respectively.

A total of 94 children in five first-grade classrooms were studied. When the letter grades were converted to numbers (4, 3, 2, 1, 0), “average relative reading ability” could be determined for subgroups of students, defined as printing at different rates.

Among the sixteen children who printed faster than 40 LPM, the average reading score was 3.6. Among the 33 children who printed from 30 to 39 LPM, the average was 2.9. For the 26 children writing at 20-29 LPM, it was 2.3. For the 21 children who wrote more slowly than 20 LPM, it was 1.6.

During this current school year, a number of kindergarten (first year of school) teachers have submitted series of similar studies on their classrooms to the k1writing listserv, accessible at www.yahoogroups.com. By the end of February, 2004, a total of five teachers had submitted serial data on a total of 106 kindergarten students, including data for the month of February.

The relative reading skills of the kindergartners were ranked according to a three-level system: “reading better than grade level”, “doing well at grade level” and “lagging behind expectations”. In the opinions of their teachers, six children were already reading at second-grade level or above.

Statistical analysis of the correlation again yielded similar results. Among the eighteen children who printed the alphabet faster than 40 LPM, 72% were “above grade level,” and only one was “lagging.” Among the eighteen children who wrote more slowly than 20 LPM, none was above grade level in reading skill, and half of them were “lagging” in this regard.

A tabulation of these findings is revealing. It is informative to look down the column of LPM figures for these 106 children, and observe the correlations. These data are presented in Table One.

The correlation between reading skill and fluency at printing alphabet letters in kindergarten and first-grade is readily apparent. This correlation was known to each of the experienced [kindergarten] teachers participating in this study even before the study was done. The experiment, then, was designed to answer the question as to whether this correlation is one of causation, or merely coincident with some other unidentified factor.

The kindergarten teachers involved have each been able to achieve a level of printing fluency that is considerably above what is generally achieved by American kindergarten students. The printing rates of their kindergarten children are comparable to the rates of the first-grade students in the original study, whose teachers had NOT been previously monitoring printing rate. If the cause of the correlation were in the opposite direction, and it is having learned to read which drives printing fluency, then one would expect the correlation to weaken in classrooms where printing fluency has been intentionally contrived. However, we here see the correlation has persisted intact.

This year, each of the kindergarten teachers has been making a dedicated effort to induce objectively measurable printing fluency in the students as the school year progresses. Each of the five kindergarten teachers has emphatically proclaimed that this practice is found to be immensely helpful in turning young children into readers.

A number of the classrooms have high percentages of poverty and minority children, and none of the children could read at the beginning of the kindergarten school year. It was found that printing fluency, which we arbitrarily defined as 40 LPM or faster, is achieved at different times by different children, and that such fluency is an excellent indicator of when children will learn to read, as well as indicating which children have become successful at reading at any particular point in time.

It was also observed that printing fluency gradually improves in almost all cases with continued practice writing the alphabet letters. Failure to cooperate during the time allocated by teachers for dedicated printing practice seems to be the main limiting factor in the development of printing skill.

None-the-less, our data suggest that fluency in writing the letters of the alphabet is a reasonable goal for all normal children by the end of first-grade.

But it appears that printing fluency does not at all correlate with reading ability much beyond the first-grade level. One teacher submitted data on 54 fourth-graders (fifth year of school), demonstrating no difference at all in the median alphabet-printing rates between children who had been formally identified as reading below grade level, and the other students.5

It is also apparent that printing skill is by no means a necessary prerequisite for literacy. Many children learn to read before they are fluent at printing alphabet letters. On the other hand, virtually all children who lag in reading skill in K-1 are dysfluent printers. That this lack of skill is remediable through continued dedicated practice, extended over time, appears to be of fundamental importance.

If the attainment of fluent ability to print alphabet letters in the earliest grades generally assures early success in reading, this fact challenges some current theoretical conceptions regarding the nature of reading disabilities.

Our evidence suggests both that printing fluency confers the ability to name random letters more rapidly than 40 per minute6, and that the ability to phonetically write words fluently, possible only after the attainment of fluency in printing letters, confers phonemic awareness.

Adams wrote, “It has been shown that the act of writing newly learned words results in a significant strengthening of their perceptual integrity in recognition. This is surely a factor underlying the documented advantages of programs that emphasize writing and spelling activities.”7

Montessori also considered practice writing alphabet letters to be crucial, and wrote, “We shall soon see that the child, on hearing the word, or on thinking of a word he already knows, will see, in his mind’s eye, all the letters, necessary to compose the word, arrange themselves. He will reproduce this vision with a facility most surprising to us.”8

While such rhetorical explanations of the value of writing practice have been seen as nebulous in the past, converging advances in the fields of pattern recognition by artificial intelligence and of the cerebral physiology involved in visual pattern recognition and categorization may render them more plausible.

It is emphasized that these studies are limited and preliminary, but their results underscore the pressing need to either confirm or disaffirm their apparent implications.

The author wishes to acknowledge the participation of the classroom teachers who did and submitted these comparison studies on their students. They are Libby Rhoden, Pasadena, Texas; Sue Fisher, Kailua Kona, Hawaii; Ann Vasconcellos, Homewood, Illinois; Helen Wilder, Middlesboro, Kentucky; Nancy Creech, Eastpointe, Michigan; Ruby Clayton, Indianapolis, Indiana; Alice A. Pickel, Phoenix, Arizona; Lori Jackson, Mission, South Dakota; Lalia Kerr, Nova Scotia; Jennifer Runkle, Ohio.





















TABLE ONE



Kindergarten Students Printing Level in Letters Per Minute (LPM)





LPM rate:

> 40 LPM 30-39 LPM 20-29 LPM < 20 LPM

78** 39** 33** 27** 24* 18*

72** 39** 33** 27** 24* 18*

66** 39** 33** 27** 24* 18*

60** 39** 33* 27** 24o 18*

60* 39** 33* 27** 24o 18*

57** 39** 33* 27** 24* 18*

54** 39* 33* 27* 21* 18 o

54** 39 o 33 o 27* 21* 15*

51** 36** 30** 27* 21* 15*

51** 36** 30** 27* 21* 15 o

48** 36** 30** 27* 21* 15 o

48** 36** 30** 27o 21* 15 o

48** 36** 30** 27o 21* 12*

48* 36* 30* 24** 21* 12 o

48* 36* 30* 24* 21* 12 o

42** 36* 30* 24* 21 o 6 o

42* 36 o 30* 24* 21 o 3 o

42 o 30* 3 o

30*







In the opinion of respective classroom teachers:



KEY: o lagging in reading skill

* on level

** above level in reading



References:







1. Montessori, Maria. The Montessori Method, Dover Publications, 2002, pp.266-7



2. Adams, Marilyn Jager. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print, MIT Press, 1990, p.388



3. Sofia Vernon and Emilia Ferreiro. "Writing Development: A Neglected Variable in the Consideration of Phonological Awareness." Harvard Educational Review 69:4 (1999): pp.395-415.



4. Groff, Patrick. "Teaching Phonics: Letter-to-phoneme, Phoneme-to-letter, or Both?” Reading and Writing Quarterly 17 (fall, 2001): pp.291-306.



5. Data provided by Marianne Morin, Watkins Glen, New York.



6. Data on kindergarten classroom correlation between letter-naming and printing fluency provided by Sue Fisher, Hawaii.



7. Adams, Op. cit., pp.230-231

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Bob Rose

rovarose@aol.com

151 Sharp View Lane

Jasper, Georgia, USA 30143

Mr. Obvious Endorses...

I assume the people who read my blog are intelligent so I suspect I'm preaching to the choir but here are my endorsements nonetheless.

It is hard to imagine anyone voting for the McCain/Palin ticket. I can't fathom the kind of self-inflicted masochism that could make sense of the inane buffoonery that Palin has brought to American politics.

This celebration of ignorance and flat-out stupidity is the antithesis of what American education is supposed to prevent yet this woman somehow was granted a 4-year college degree. This is alarming on many levels. First, that degrees come this cheaply and secondly that there is a voting constituency that "thinks" that utter nonsense is knowledge.

Obama is a clear winner though I still have serious reservations about his education policy. NCLB must end. Period.

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I started supporting Joe Courtney when I met him at a fund-raiser after he had lost a congressional election against Rob Simmons. At that time, Joe had published a scathing article explaining what was wrong with the Bush administration at a time when the country was in love with Bush.

Since then Joe came back to unseat Simmons and is a strong, successful congressman for Eastern Connecticut. His background in the Connecticut legislature on health care will become invaluable as the Democrats work to make sense of such legislation.

Joe is the only choice on the ballot. The republican challenger is a throwback to the Bush years. Good riddance to them.

Vote Joe.

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Bryan Hurlburt is just so damned squeaky clean and smart that it makes a city raised boy like myself want to dishevel his hair just once. Bryan and I have become friends after I campaigned hard for Susan Eastwood.

Bryan has done a great job in the Connecticut legislature for the area and deserves re-election. He's far better qualified than the republican challenger so that makes the choice even easier.

Now the fact that I like Bryan doesn't preclude the fact that I petition him at every chance I get to make CT government smaller and to have CT government spend less on Ct government. Nothing is more important to sustainability over time.

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Finally, good luck to Al Franken in Minnesota.

May Elizabeth Dole and every other idiot complicit in the Bush reign of terror lose big.

And may the rat-bastard Joe Lieberman forever remain a pariah to the Democratic party. Rot in hell, Joe. May your cellmates be Bush, Cheney, and Rice.