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,
Advertisement
Quantcast
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.