The Civil Majority Speaks

Last night I attended the Ashford Democratic Town Committee meeting. I'm an active member and I'm running again for the Region 19 Board of Education so there are always details about getting elected that need to be understood.

But at tonight's meeting I had asked if anyone was interested in drafting a letter of support for the public option. I had passed along a liberal critique [smirking chimp article] of Obama's political progress - a scathing commentary.

At our meeting, James Boster authored a letter that the committee by an overwhelming majority voted to send Rep. Joe Courtney, Christopher Dodd, Joe Lieberman, Nancy Pelosi, and others.

It is an letter of unequivocal support for Joe Courtney's work on health insurance reform and the inclusion of a public option in any bill to be considered.

I am both proud and humbled to be living in a community where the thinly veiled hate speech of a loud and intimidating minority is answered by an unwavering commitment by dedicated, tax-paying citizens to ensuring that Washington hears the convictions of a civil majority.

It is about time for all people of like-minded devotion to solving the health care reform crisis to speak out civilly and without compromise - pass comprehensive healthcare legislation with a public option that ensures cost containment and quality assurances.

New 911 Footage

In remembrance.

The Algebra of Health Care

Obama's wish list for Health Care governance was an exercise in good algebra and, quite frankly, a relief.

THIS IS WHAT I VOTED FOR.

Like the vast majority of Americans, I want health care to provide a universal safety net of care for every citizen. Schools cannot remedy children's poor health care or no health care care at all. Obama's plan as outlined will remove one of the key poverty related handicaps many students face. And that's a key to reducing family stress and personal insecurity in so many lives.

But something that critics fail to realize is that for such a plan to work, we cannot afford to cherry pick elements that are politically popular and dispose of the rest. Obama's plan recognizes the importance of algebraic planning.

Preventative medicine can balance the cost of reactionary and remedial treatment. That saves money.

Regulating insurance to eliminate health care caps and refusing service due to existing conditions yields a surprising by-product. That is that malpractice lawsuit awards will be reduced in scope because the victim of unanticipated circumstances will not need to worry about proper life-long care to the degree that they do today. The regulation will help balance the drivers of expensive settlements.

And critics (including MSM pundits whose shows are financed by drug companies) have been trashing the public option of a government insurance plan as a leftist concoction. This back-handed slander of the political left thinly veils the agenda in play.

The public option is first and foremost a government program. But so is the post office and FedEx makes a tidy profit nonetheless.

But aside from the non-profit nature of the exercise, there is gold in the details. The public option will for the first time establish a baseline set of standards for consumer protections. And that is key. This will eliminate the fine print gotchas that so dictates our current frustrations with health care. That alone eliminates needless bureaucracy and delayed payments as well as reduces the care-givers paperwork.

The whole is better than the parts as far as I can tell. Thinking parents will support this with enthusiasm. Healthier kids and peers mean fewer headaches for parents and fewer head-cases in schools.

Eloquent Review of the Obama Speech

This says it all.



This, too, says it all:

Obama Indoctrination Revisited

Here's a student response to the pre-emptive critics of Obama's school speech. Why aren't these kids on the air?

Jim Greer in a Nutshell

I spent a little time researching Florida GOP chairman, Jim Greer's complains and background. What I found is something that is quite different from the controversy that is being played out in the Main Stream Media. That is, the media has fallen for the bait - a series of absurd and unsubstantiated allegations about President Obama's address to school-children on Tuesday.

By taking Greer's charges at face value, the national media has been duplicitous in aiding and abetting in a GOP campaign to push the buttons of the most fragile sociopaths in America. Some of these people are parents as well as myopic paranoids. By the time the "controversy" has been identified as a lesson plan line item contributed by a teacher to the Department of Education as a suggested classroom topic, the broader lynch mob had saddled up and were in full gallop.

A Marc Murphy editorial cartoon perfectly captured the debate:



It is Barack Obama's turn to offer America's schoolchildren a Horatio Alger meme to live by.

So, it came as a shock to the Obama administration that they would be attacked on this front given the severity of the wars, healthcare reform, and the economy. In fact it came as a low blow primarily because it was an attempt to pre-empt Obama altogether as if he were not the President and as if he were a messenger rather than an author. And it came as a low blow because Obama's education policy is a rehash and escalation of the same old Bush policies that have produced a thirty percent dropout rate from American high schools.

A clue to the mystery of this sneak attack reveals that it was politically pre-meditated and wholly disingenuous. An anonymous poster to a Florida newspaper covering this story discovered a subtle political plagarism:

Anonymous said:
Two quotes complaining about the President giving the speech to schoolchildren: "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students," . . .."And the president should be doing more about education than saying, 'Lights, camera, action.'" And a second quotation, referring to the speech to school children as: "the arrogance of power," and that the White House should not be "using precious dollars for campaigns" when "we are struggling for every silly dime we can get" for education. The first quote is atributable to Rep. Richard Gephardt, then the Democratic majority leader in the House of Representatives. The second is from Patricia Schroeder, then a Democratic member of Congress from Colorado. Both were made as part of a Democratic complaint against President George HW Bush speaking to schoolchildren in 1991. How positively hypocritical huh? Funny and humorous to say the least.
posted on: 9/5/2009 8:27:36 PM

The problem is that Greer never acknowledges that he's throwing the words of Gephardt and Schroeder into the faces of an unsuspecting media, nation, and political base. In a single act of political bloodsport, Greer makes a fool of the media by brazenly manipulating and humiliating the commentators like Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, and even Fox News.

And how must the Republican base feel as he uses them as unwitting rubes repeating Democratic objections to a Republican presentation over a decade ago? Nor does Greer ever demonstrate the intellectual capacity to have authored this language. This was scripted with outside assistance.

In other words, the Obama administration was sucker punched with the unwitting aid of a MSM that craves these petty political food fights. And American schoolchildren are dragged into it as window-dressing and sympathetic "victims".

You might be wondering why Gephardt and Schroeder objected to Bush's speech. The Palm Beach Post blog documents Reagan and Bush's act:

By all accounts nobody called Bush a socialist or organized a boycott, and The Associated Press’s coverage of the speech appeared to be a neutral description of what the president had said, according to a Nexis search.

On the other hand, a story the next day in The Washington Post dwelt on the theme that the speech had been arranged in such a way to make the president look good:

The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props yesterday as President Bush delivered a live television address to America’s schoolchildren, the latest administration effort to demonstrate the president’s interest in domestic issues.

The administration had even more control over the highly telegenic speech — carried live from Alice Deal Junior High School by Public Broadcasting Service and Cable News Network — than it does over most presidential events.

Unlike most presidential addresses, such as last Friday’s arms control speech from the Oval Office, yesterday’s was handled not by the television networks but by a private firm paid by the U.S. Department of Education, administration officials said. The White House selected the camera angles and decided which pictures would be sent out, officials said.

The students in Cynthia Mostoller’s eighth-grade American history class said they were advised to wear soft-soled shoes so they did not make too much noise. They were told to pay attention to the president as he perched on a stool in front of Room 112’s blackboard, not the teleprompters in the back of the room from which he read his text.

Greer is a piece of work. But the story doesn't end there.

Greer himself has addressed school children and he did so mercilessly. Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel gives us a whiff of Greer's own educational screeds:

There once was a political operative who loved to tell crowds he had a simple way of explaining to children the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

"Republicans get up and go to work," he would tell his son. "Democrats get up and go down to the mailbox to get their checks."

This man not only talked to his son about Republican values, he went into public-school classrooms and talked about them as well.

That man is Jim Greer — the same Jim Greer who, as chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, just threw a nationwide hissy fit, claiming that the classroom is no place for politics and Barack Obama's "indoctrination."

One Seminole County mother, Barbara Wells, remembers the day Greer spoke to her son's sixth-grade class. "My son said he made some sort of Hillary Clinton joke," she recalled.

But you know what? Wells didn't pitch a fit.

She didn't call up the local TV station to scream about Republican indoctrination.

Instead, she advised her son: "Whatever you are told in life, remember there are two sides to every story."

In fact, Wells didn't even think much about Greer's foray into her son's classroom until she saw him on TV complaining about Obama.

There's no longer any question: Greer is a hypocrite.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether mainstream Republicans in Florida will allow him to drag them deeper into the divisive and irrational fringes of their party.

Mainstream conservatives, after all, are being left behind.

While they want to talk about real issues, like out-of-control spending, they are forced to watch their state "leader" make a buffoon out of himself in the national spotlight. This just two weeks after a former House speaker was allowed to rack up $170,000 in GOP credit-card bills on Greer's watch.

This country needs a healthy two-party system with smart debate.

But there's nothing healthy or smart about Greer's claim that the president's pep talk about succeeding in school was really an attempt to "indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda."

Presidents have been talking to schoolchildren ever since we've had schools.

Now, what about that GOP credit card debt? The debt that Greer likes to dismiss as no big deal - that debt. Let's just call it junket debt.

Well, that debt may have to do with GOP presidential campaign spending habits. In an article in the Miami Herald's NakedPolitics called, No room on the Palin plane, Greer charters his own, we get some insight into Greer's relationship with the Palin -cough- team.

Determined not to be left out of the party, RPOF Chairman Jim Greer flew a chartered plane to Sarah Palin's events in Clearwater and Southwest Florida today.

You see, Greer first realized that the Katie Couric interviews were political poison.

Greer told the NYT that: “I think the Katie Couric interview shows that she needs to be briefed more on certain aspects. She continues to be viewed very positively by the base of the party, but she needs to demonstrate that she’s got the knowledge and ability to be president should the need arise.”

Flash forward to a hockey arena in Estero, Florida, near Naples, where Greer just finished speaking to the crowd gathered to see Palin and he's now singing the praises of the Alaska governor. He called her "dynamic'' and said she understands what working Americans are going through "She makes more decisions in one day than Sens Obama and Biden make in a whole year."

RPOF spokesman Erin VanSickle doesn't want us making too much of this. "Lots of folks understandably want to travel with Governor Palin, and Chairman Greer is participating in her Florida events as part of the pre-program,'' VanSickle responded to an email.

Greer was treated like a leper by McCain and Palin and learned his lesson. A costly lesson for GOP donors but a lesson nonetheless.

On the day Sarah palin became dynamic day, the Republicans had a new spokesperson willing to say anything to ride with the big boys. Is it surprising that such a willing student would not be chosen for this act of political cowardice?

I'm not shocked.

Literacy Like the Greeks

As a well-known opponent to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and high-stress, high-stakes testing this report by Clive Thomson of Wired Magazine called Clive Thompson on the New Literacy is a refreshing point of view.

Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it's also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions.

Retardation as Political Loitering

I had to look up the origin of the word retarded to be sure I wasn't misconceptualizing the latest shameful Republican high jinx.

It's accurate. The latest Republican high jinx are retarded. It's intellectual loitering. Obstruction of civility and common decency. RETARDED.

President Obama will be addressing American school children in a televised event on September 8th. The most intelligent news coverage of this I could find comes from Yahoo News: Obama goes back to school

Last month, in an interview with 11-year-old student reporter Damon Weaver, the president announced his big back-to-school plan:

"I'm going to be making a big speech to young people all across the country about the importance of education; about the importance of staying in school; how we want to improve our education system and why it’s so important for the country. So I hope everybody tunes in."

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter to the nation's principals, inviting schools to watch the speech and included suggested classroom activities. But Jim Greer, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, came out swinging against the planned speech. An excerpt from his statement:

"The address scheduled for September 8, 2009, does not allow for healthy debate on the President's agenda, but rather obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with our President's initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates."

NBC spoke with Katie Gordon, a spokeswoman for the Florida Republican Party, who said the party's "beef" is with the accompanying lesson plans. The guide for pre-K through grade 6 suggests questions students think about during the speech, such as "What is the President trying to tell me? What is the President asking me to do?"

The plan for grades 7-12 includes a "guided discussion," with suggested topics: "What resonated with you from President Obama's speech? What is President Obama inspiring you to do?"

The Cato Institute, a public-policy research foundation, issued a press release entitled "Hey Obama, Leave Those Kids Alone," criticizing the "troubling buzzwords" in the lesson plans:

"It's one thing for a president to encourage all kids to work hard and stay in school – that's a reasonable use of the bully pulpit. It's another thing entirely, however, to have the U.S. Department of Education send detailed instructions to public schools nationwide on how to glorify the president and the presidency, and push them to drive social change."

Across the blogosphere, comments covered the spectrum, from critical to supportive, and from one student, a little anger:

"I sent my children to school to be educated NOT indoctrinated." — justamom

"The fact that people want to keep their kids from hearing the President of the United States encourage them to do well in school shows a true level of ignorance." — Firefey

"As an [sic] 9th grade student, I'd like to say that 1. I'm not sure why everyone is so scared that we'll all be brainwashed by the President ... 2. My school is one that is not allowing us to watch the speech, and quite frankly, I'm pissed." — Willbw

Both Presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan both gave speeches aimed specifically at students that were nationally televised. In 1989, Bush delivered a televised anti-drug speech, and Reagan's 1986 commencement speech and Q&A session was "beamed over public television into 171 school districts," according to the L.A. Times.

It's worth noting that schools are, encouraged, not required, to air the speech. The Houston Chronicle reports that one Dallas school district is leaving the decision to individual teachers. Susan Dacus, spokeswoman for the Wylie school district, says parents who don't want their children to see it can opt out.

The original article is much richer than my fair use excerpt, please do read it.

So... it takes a village of idiots to spin this into a conspiracy and because the Florida Republicans have nothing better to do they eagerly accept that challenge.

According to these people, listening to the President of the United States for fifteen minutes is going to turn punch-drunk from testing school populations into card carrying socialists who will demand higher taxes and intelligent conversation at the dinner table.

Easily frightened lemmings will have none of it. No, the Florida Republicans want to edit Obama's remarks before he says them because these mind-readers already know he's going to say the wrong things. The kids might even like somebody in office who doesn't treat them like nobodies.

As far as I can tell, this is just thinly veiled, hate motivated, nonsense. Obstructionist - retarded. We have to stop pandering to this stuff as if there's something to think about. There isn't a nano-spec of fact or even believable fiction in any of these absurd objections - just media noise. A tempest in an intellectual thimble.

Now, if Obama addresses school children after someone whispers that a catastrophe is occurring and Obama does nothing, then I'll be angry.

The Zero Rape Initiative

At Tuesday's Board meeting I attempted to introduce a concept that would ensure that regional autonomy would govern exactly who could have access to recruiting our students on the EO Smith campus and through school resources.

At issue was a revised edition of the region's equal access for recruiters policy. My contention was and continues to be that any school governed by an elected Board of Education has the right to set the local qualification for recruiters to be welcome to recruit.

At the top of my list of such qualifications is the insistence that any organization, university, or government agency be free of rape incidents for the past 12 months.

A vote was taken and the entire issue was voted down by everyone but myself.

The reason this even occurred to me is the story of LeVena Johnson's brutal death. David Love's story, LaVena Johnson: Raped and Murdered on a Military Base in Iraq bubbled up on my educational news radar.

The U.S. Army officially ruled her death a suicide, saying she shot herself in the head, case closed. But this is where the story begins.

Johnson's family knew something was wrong. They had talked to her on the phone a few days earlier, and she was in a great mood as usual, and was planning to come home for the holidays, earlier than expected.

Questions were raised when Johnson's family viewed her body. There were suspicious bruises, and while the military claimed that this right-handed soldier had shot herself in the head with an M-16 rifle, the gunshot wound was on the left side of her head.

But the truth began to make itself known when the family received the autopsy report and photos they had requested under the Freedom of Information Act:

The 5-foot tall, 100-pound woman had been struck in the face with a blunt instrument, probably a weapon. Her nose had been broken, and her teeth knocked back. There were bruises, teeth marks and scratches on the upper part of her body. Her back and right hand had been doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire. Her genital area was bruised and lacerated, and lye had been poured into her vagina. The debris found on her suggested her body had been dragged.

And despite all this mutilation, she was fully clothed when her body was found in the tent, with a blood trail leading to the tent.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, the Army has refused to investigate. Through an online petition, ColorofChange.org demanded an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

I investigated a bit further. A PBS documentary called Rape in the Military added evidence of a pattern of neglect on the subject.

Since NOW first aired its investigation into rape and sexual assault in the military last year, the Pentagon has released new reports in which one-third of military women say they've been sexually harassed. And the number of women reporting assault and rape has essentially remained the same—even though the military says it has invested serious resources to combat the problem.

I don't believe LeVena Johnson committed suicide. Furthermore, the military needs to fix the chronic rape and cover-up problem.

No School Board in this country should allow any branch of the government or any institution access to their student body for recruitment unless they can attest they've had a previous rape-free twelve months. This policy allows everyone equal access under these conditions and it allows for unfortunate incidents to be followed by remedial prevention.

Such a policy safe-guards all schools from institutions where chronic rape occurs.

The argument that zero rape history doesn't exist is bogus. The government routinely legislates impossible goals for schools yet the suggestion that they "aim high", "hold themselves to a higher standard", or reorganize because they fail is greeted by political nervous breakdowns.

As a society a zero tolerance for rape policy makes as much sense as an intolerance for drugs, bullying, unhealthy food, and so on. Let's keep repeat offending institutions away from our kids until they clean up their acts.

Just Get Me Out Of Here

It seems that Florida has a reverse drop-out problem. It's smarter students have figured out that the best way to get out of high school and move on with one's life is to drop-out early and just pass a GED exam to get a diploma.

Not a bad idea considering the NCLB dumbing down of curriculum. But Florida isn't going to let their hostages off this easy. The Shawshank Redemption schemes will be ended soon (from Fla.to Stop Giving Diplomas for GED Students by AP):

Florida is changing its policy on youths who opt for a GED to finish high school in less than four years.

Until now, those looking for a shortcut could earn the same diploma as others. But Education Commissioner Eric Smith says that's not fair, or necessarily legal. Department of Education lawyers researching another issue could find no state law authorizing it.

So Smith has notified school districts that all who take the General Educational Development test must now receive a high school equivalency diploma, just like dropouts who later go through the GED process.

The GED exit option started in 1988.

Eliminate the State Department of Education. Now's the Time!

A recent article in the Courant by Steven Goode called State Rules Schools' New Director Of Arts Lacks Certification reports that newly hired professionals may fall short of the mandatory job requirements:

The state Department of Education has ruled that a woman hired to be a districtwide director of arts for Hartford's public schools does not have the certification required to match the current job description.

Jackie Coleman, 41, has bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts and was most recently director of education for Hartford Stage, but she does not have an 092 administrator's license, which the state requires to hold a districtwide director position.

Tom Murphy, spokesman for the state Department of Education, said that without the state-required certification, which in most cases includes five years of classroom teaching experience, Coleman was not qualified to hold the position as it is described. Murphy said that if Coleman works without the appropriate certification, she would not be eligible to participate in the state teachers' retirement program and that the department also has the authority to fine Hartford for employing someone without proper credentials.

The Hartford Federation of Teachers had questioned Coleman's credentials, as well as those of former longtime Courant columnist Stan Simpson and chef/restaurateur Deborah Raviv, whom the district hired to be directors of Weaver High School's new journalism and media and culinary arts academies, respectively.

Murphy said the department would be reviewing their job descriptions and qualifications as well.

"We like to work with districts but these requirements were created by the legislature," Murphy said.

First, in these times of economic crisis, the very first cut in the State budget should be the complete and wholesale elimination of the Department of Education. This malfeasant band of overpaid, educational miscreants needs to be shown the door as quickly as they can be booted.

Secondly, the idiot legislators who pass these special interest protection schemes needd to back off and let some fresh air into the education system. By loosening the ingrown requirements for education positions, the state will not be lowering the qualifications but broadening the richness of candidates to do the job.

The last thing Hartford needs is more inbred incompetency running the show.

Christ, when will this state grow a brain?

Suspended for what!????

A story coming out of Georgia by Jim Wallace of WALB news underscores the abuse of law enforcement in schools. To describe this incident as over-the-top is inadequate to describe this horror show. The story includes a video worth watching.

Her father shows scratches on 11-year-old Treneashe Graddy's neck and back. She says she was thrown to the ground and arrested at Southside Middle School yesterday.

When school officials tried to take her picture for school identification, she refused because her hair was not fixed.

School Police Lt. Laniece Pope tried to force the girl to take the picture, and handcuffed and arrested her when she resisted.

"She put her hand around her neck, left a bruise around her neck. She handcuffed her, put her knee in her stomach and put her knee in her back, which caused injuries to her," said mom, Katrina Jackson.

The girl was charged with disorderly conduct, obstruction of an officer, and disrupting school. She is suspended today.

If this child was a dog, people would be lining up claiming "cruel and unusual punishment". Thirty years of right-wing education propaganda have reduced American school children to be considered less than human and not deserving the rights we bestow pets.

For the same police who trumped up the charges and committed the real crime to investigate themselves adds insult to injury. This is as unAmerican as torture.

Rick Green's Eye

Courant columnist Rick Green is a keen observer of very obscure, though important facts. In a recent blog posting he dusts off and shines a spotlight on an issue that must be resolved if Connecticut ever has a hope of containing runaway tax spending. He quotes DonKlepper-Smith, Governor Rell's economist:
There is a long-standing, red-herring argument that has been backed by symphony orchestra string sections about how poorly public sector employees are paid. In fact one is led to believe that to work in the government sector is to be doing the altruistic "public service" akin to feeding the poor in starving nations.

The bare and ugly truth is that the salaries, benefits, time-off, government perks, and pensions over time far exceed the economics of the private sector for the vast majority of Americans. Government itself, as a self-regulating and self-serving consumer of tax dollars has long been an economic pig wearing lipstick.

The size of government needs to be trimmed and the obscene excesses of compensation need to be brought under control.

Two decades ago, this problem was identified and swept under the rug. The prediction at that time was that government serving government spending would first collapse the free market economy and then finally implode it's own.

We are nearing the time of that implosion. The free market economy is bare and staggering.

Thank You, NEA

I had just about given up on the NEA as representing much more than a doormat for bad teaching practice and policy. Their silence during the Bush years borders on criminally insane as the No Child Left Behind social-engineering experiment decimated the minds and lives of generations of children.

Obama's misguided attempt to sugar-coat (with tax dollars and federal withholding extortion techniques) to extend that legacy has been refreshingly and shockingly rejected by the NEA.

All I can say is that it's about time. Here's NEA Attacks Administration's Education Reform Plan by Nick Anderson of the Washington Post:

The union, which boasts 3.2 million members, charged that Race to the Top contradicted administration pledges to give states more flexibility in how they improve schools. "We find this top-down approach disturbing; we have been down that road before with the failures of No Child Left Behind," the union wrote in its comments, "and we cannot support yet another layer of federal mandates that have little or no research base of success and that usurp state and local government's responsibilities for public education."

It added: "Despite growing evidence to the contrary, it appears that the administration has decided that charter schools are the only answer to what ails America's public schools -- urban, suburban, exurban and rural -- and all must comply with that silver bullet."

An Education Department spokesman had no immediate comment. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said repeatedly he wants to work with unions and not foist reforms on teachers without consultation.

When Obama announced the initiative July 24, Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, praised the administration's intentions to lift standards, raise teacher quality and turn around low-performing schools.

But he said performance pay, charter schools and links between student and teacher data raise difficult issues for his union.

That last issue prompted an NEA objection earlier this year, after Obama expressed his desire to grade teachers through the test scores of their students.

Van Roekel told the New York Times that his members were unhappy with such comments.

''When he equates teachers with test scores, that's when we part company,'' Mr. Van Roekel told the Times.

Self-serving as the arguments sound, the union is finally on the right page.

The empirical evidence shows that charter schools - despite cherry picking students - rarely perform any better than the even more crippled public schools they leave in their wake and compete with. Nor is the expense diminished.

And the NEA correctly asserts that more local control of schools, policy, and curriculum is healthy thing. For the Obama administration to get this wrong is a very bad sign and a disappointment in these quarters.

Urban School Teacher Quits, Writes WaPo Op-Ed Piece

A teacher named Sarah Fine has decided to leave the teaching profession after teaching at a charter school in Washington, DC. There are few surprises in her Op-Ed piece and even fewer in the comments sections of the Daily Kos and Washington Post.

In 2005, the year I started teaching, nearly a third of new teachers in the District of Columbia were recent college graduates who had enrolled in Teach for America or the D.C. Teaching Fellows program. Statistics suggest that many of these recruits have already moved on. Nationally, half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years, and in urban schools, especially the much-lauded "no excuses" charter schools, turnover is often much higher.

But there is more to those numbers than "burnout." That term is shorthand for a suite of factors that contributed to my choice to leave the classroom. When I talk about the long hours, for example, what I mean is that, over the course of four years, my school's administration steadily expanded the workload and workday while barely adjusting salaries. More and more major decisions were made behind closed doors, and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported. One afternoon this spring, when my often apathetic 10th-graders were walking eagerly around the room as part of a writing assignment, an administrator came in and ordered me to get the class "seated and silent." It took everything I had to hold back my tears of frustration.

The teaching itself was exhilarating but disheartening. There were triumphs: energetic seminar discussions, cross-class projects, a student-led poetry slam. This past year, my 10th-graders even knocked the DC-CAS reading test out of the water. Even so, I felt like a failure. Too many of my students showed only occasional signs of intellectual curiosity, despite my best efforts to engage them. Too many of them still would not or could not read. And far too many of them fell through the cracks. Of the 130 freshmen who entered the school in 2005, about 50 graduated this spring.

There is yet another factor that played a part in my choice, something that I rarely mention. It has to do with the way that some people, mostly nonteachers, talk about the profession.
"Why teach?" they ask.

Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it's unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it's not for the ambitious. "It's just so nice," was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.

I used to think I was being oversensitive. Not so. One of my former colleagues, now a program director for Teach for America, has to defend her goal of becoming a principal: "When I tell people I want to do it, they're like, 'Really? You really still want to do that?' " Another friend describes her struggle to make peace with the fact that a portion of the American public sees teaching as a second-rate profession. "I want to be able to do big things and be recognized for them," she says. "In the world we live in, teaching doesn't cut it."

As a software engineer who has watched this country denigrate the Information Technologies profession over the past decade, I have little sympathy for the self-pity. In almost all private employment, salaries have shrunk, benefits have disappeared, and retirement programs are non-existent.

Lots of people work hard and are unappreciated. Let's call it a tie.

But she is right in observing that schools are mismanaged. The Feds are largely to blame for this.

The remedy is not more pay or provincial recrimination but the elimination of NCLB and the Department of Education. They are THE most obvious problem.

What Some Kids Do On Their Summer Vacation

Video Games and more video games:

Gingrich on Adolescence

Interesting ideas;

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: