QuickReads

Teach the children well
Teach what students need to learn, measure whether they're learning it and continuously refine lessons to improve results. The kids will learn. Citing education research and results, Mike Schmoker lays out the way to boost achievement. And it's not rocket science.

Achievement is primarily a function of two things: (1) What we teach and (2) how we teach. . . .

I recently completed a study of five school districts and a number of schools that do something startlingly simple but effective: They carefully examine their year-end or state assessments and then, very deliberately, build most of their curriculum around these assessed standards (Schmoker 2001). One of the first discoveries teachers in these districts make is that even norm-referenced tests largely consist not of irrelevant "lower-order" skills, but of incontrovertibly essential, core standards — all of which are best taught in meaningful, authentic contexts. Even Grant Wiggins, a prominent voice for authentic performance assessment, points out that the very best kind of education promotes success on state and standardized tests (1998, 320)

In these five school districts, teachers create, share, and refine lessons and strategies that are deliberately aligned to the assessed standards. They take pains to ensure that teaching is aligned with instruction. All of them get exceptional results.

In Brazosport Independent Schools near Houston, Texas, teachers actually map out, week by week, which assessed standards will be taught. They then develop teaching materials and lessons that target these standards, with more time and emphasis being given to the lowest-scoring skills. More than 90% of every subgroup in every school — poor kids, minority kids, even special education students — now meet state expectations in reading, writing, and math.

I highly recommend this article.
7/13/2002

It's an experiment
TAP says there are "gazillion secular reasons" why vouchers won't work. Daryl Cobranchi points out the red herrings.

Public schools have not demonstrated an ability to improve. Vouchers are not a promise; they are an experiment. I don’t believe anyone knows what will happen if they become widespread. I think we do know what will happen if they don’t: If nothing changes, nothing changes.

How many years should parents wait for their child's public school to improve? One year? Three years? Five years? Middle-class parents wait about three weeks -- while they're checking out the alternatives.
7/13/2002

Parents with choices
Jacqueline Kjono writes that parents stop being passive when they're paying for a program:

I am a billing clerk for a school-aged child care program. One of our sites is in a very poor neighborhood. Before welfare reform, when most parents were fully subsidized, it was very difficult for our staff at that site to get any feedback from parents about what they liked and didn't like about the program.

As welfare reform has been phased in, those parents are more and more likely to have large co-pays attached to their subsidy, and they started making very specific complaints about policies they didn't like, staff members that would show up late, etc. Once we knew what the specific problems were, we were able to start fixing them.

Before, when it was a free program, parents didn't think it was their place to criticize. Now that they have to pay for part of it themselves, it gives them a very real sense of power and authority.

Some teachers look at these parents in poor schools who feel so helpless and intimidated by the system and assume they are not involved at school because they don't care. Voucher programs give those parents the power and authority to have an opinion, state it clearly to school administrations, and act if their concerns are not dealt with.

Low-income parents will learn to make choices about their children's schooling, if they have choices to make.
7/13/2002

Life challenges
Stanley Park worked to help support his family when his immigrant mother got breast cancer. So did Blanca Martinez. Park scored 1500 on his SATs. Martinez scored 1110. Only one got in to Berkeley and UCLA, which now give credit for "life challenges" -- as well as grades and test scores. It was Martinez. Park was rejected by both schools.

The University of California's new admission system is supposed to equalize opportunity, giving a boost to students who've overcome hardships to get nearly as far as advantaged students. But, as Friday's Wall Street Journal reports, the challenges of Asian-Americans and whites don't seem to rack up as many admissions points.

UCLA includes "immigration hardships, living in a high-crime neighborhood, having been a victim of a shooting and having long-term psychological difficulties" in the list of disadvantages that lead to an admissions advantage, reports the Journal. (Let's hope all those shooting victims don't end up rooming with the psychologically challenged.) It also helps to attend a low-performing high school that offers few advanced classes and to be raised by a low-income, poorly educated single parent.

Why not use a simple, reasonably verifiable measure of disadvantage, such as family poverty? UC studied that, but it didn't help middle-class Hispanics and blacks. A Hispanic legislator, Marco Antonio Firebaugh, explains to the Journal:

"We found that using poverty yields a lot of poor white kids and poor Asian kids."

The current system favors students who sign up for UC outreach programs, which are located at low-rated high schools with large Hispanic and black enrollments. Outreach workers -- who also decide on admissions -- coach students on how to write essays that maximize their disadvantages.

I don't think anyone objects to giving a nudge to kids who've had to work harder to get to college than the average middle-class student. But this is more than a nudge. Hispanic students accepted by UCLA average 1168 on the SATs; the Journal found a girl who made it with a 940. UCLA's whites average 1355 and Asians 1344. That's a big gap. And Hispanic students have taken easier classes in high school; they've been held to lower expectations. That's not their fault. But it's a real disadvantage they may not be able to overcome. I hope the Journal follows up to report on the graduation rates for students who are both life-challenged and academically challenged.
7/13/2002

Infecting Sesame Street
Bert and Ernie will have a new pal: an HIV-infected muppet. In South Africa, where the new character will be introduced, this may make sense. An awful lot of African children are infected with the AIDS virus. They could use some understanding.

Here, pregnant women are given drugs that protect their babies from infection, drastically lowering the number of infected children. So why ask pre-schoolers to cope with a difficult and scary issue that's a non-issue for all but a few children? If the goal is to teach compassion, create a muppet with a more common ailment: Down's Syndrome, cerebral palsy, perhaps juvenile diabetes.

About 15 ago, I saw an educational video on AIDS for elementary school children. It told kids they didn't have to worry about getting AIDS because they were too young to have sex and weren't using needles to take drugs. So what about Mommy and Daddy? Will they die from AIDS because they're having sex? What about diabetic kids or parents who inject insulin? Are they going to get AIDS? Get specific, and you're explaining sodomy to the sandbox set. Stay vague and you're scaring them for nothing.

David Janes, who assumes an adult HIV muppet for the U.S. Sesame Street, suggests a name and back story. (Read down; the link doesn't work.)

Also on the entertainment front, the former star of "Murphy Brown," Candice Bergen, says she agreed with Dan Quayle in his Murphy-bashing speech: Fathers are essential.
7/12/2002

Laying blame
Despite the "Blame Islam" headline, Jonah Goldberg basically agrees with John Derbyshire it's not fair to blame an entire religion for the evils some commit in its name. But it is fair to condemn the Saudi's intolerant Wahhabi brand Islam, which cheers the deaths of Jews, Christians, Hindus and other infidels.

Read both these essays. They're quite good.
7/12/2002

God and Allah
FoxNews.com put my blog highlights on the front page with a God vs. Allah headline and the e-mail is pouring in. In response to the pledge lawsuit and University of North Carolina's Koran requirement for freshman orientation, many complain of unequal treatment: Christianity (with Judaism as its Western sidekick) is banned from the public square; other religions are OK.

Liz Ashby is a '98 graduate of the University of North Carolina, which is requiring freshmen to read part of the Koran for a discussion during orientation.

I corresponded by e-mail with the dean of student affairs who insisted that this "required reading" isn't required, but merely "suggested." However, I pointed out that if one person even hinted at a student in Chapel Hill to read the Torah or the Bible, the liberal wackos would have a field day.

Islamic terrorists killed two people I went to college with in the WTC attack. Both of them now have scholarships to UNC in their memory. I wonder how they would feel knowing that their beloved Carolina is embracing Islam - the religion that their murderers killed them in the name of. It makes me sick.

Alex Avilez wonders at the response if the Bible were required reading for non-Christians at a public university:

Or better yet, let's require all students entering colleges to read the Constitution of the United States. You know, that country that says take the Christian god out of the schools but leave in the religion of atheism and other eastern religions.

John Palmer asks if the judges who overturned the pledge of allegiance have witnesses swear on the Bible to tell the truth, "so help me God."

By contrast, Alan Foreman doesn't see a problem.

Don't you or anyone else realize that in many English literature the Bible is required reading? The Bible does not represent everyone's religion in this country. The use of religious texts in literature classes is not to teach the religion. Universities have religious studies programs for that. The point is to treat these texts as literature and that's it. What's so wrong with that?

As I wrote before, students who want to understand Islam should read the Koran as part of a class in religious studies, history, literature, whatever. But UNC isn't requiring the Koran for a class. This is a PC activity for freshman orientation. As Alexander Pope wrote: "A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring."

Update: John Derbyshire says it another way:

Seeking enlightenment, I tried reading the Koran. This didn't get me very far. Frankly, I found the thing unreadable. It seems to have no narrative thread, like the Gospels or the historical books of the Old Testament. It reads, in fact, like the boring bits of the Bible: Deuteronomy, or Revelations, or one of the more tiresome prophets.

I don't know that this really signifies, though. Other people's scriptures are always a tough read. I had a go at some Buddhist scriptures once; they were pretty darn boring, too. The Analects of Confucius, which I actually have read all the way through, is in my opinion a seriously dull book. The thing about scriptures is that they are not to be taken like any other book. You have to soak yourself in them, preferably from early childhood.

Drink or soak, but don't dabble.
7/12/2002

Collegiality in college
Faculties are considering collegiality in tenure decisions, and that may be hurting aggressive women, writes Tamar Lewin in the New York Times. I'm curious what the professors in Blogville think of the story: Is collegiality a vague catch-all that lets male departments keep out outsiders? Or not.
7/12/2002

Inside start
James Lileks helped with his going-on-two-year-old daughter with her bear coloring book:

I’m pleased to announce that she colors within the lines. Perhaps this cliche has gone out of style, but for many years the idea of coloring within the lines was adopted by smug post-adolescents as a byword for conformity; coloring outside the lines was a sign of creativity, proof that one wasn’t going to abide by the old-school strictures of your repressive coloring book establishment, man. “Coloring within the lines” was shorthand for internalizing all those rules that kept us repressed. Well. You have to learn to color inside the lines before coloring outside the lines constitutes an accomplishment. The line is there for a reason.

Yes.
7/12/2002

High on plop
Malaysian addicts have found a new high: fresh cow dung. Dung sniffing is cheap and not yet banned by the country's super-strict drug laws. But government officials want to criminalize dung sniffing before it catches on. (It's the sulfur fumes.)

Trade Minister Rafidah Aziz was quoted in The New Straits Times newspaper as saying she wanted the government to deal with addicts who sniff cow dung, glue and even polystyrene smoke.

You'd think dung sniffing would be its own punishment.
7/12/2002

Pledge pawn
It's not just politicians who love the pledge of allegiance. So does the little girl whose father brought the lawsuit, claiming she was coerced into pledging allegiance to one nation "under God." The girl's mother, who has full custody, says her daughter is a church-going Christian who has no problem with "under God." The atheist father, who brought the lawsuit, makes a revealing comment:

(Michael) Newdow said that taking an 8-year-old to church doesn’t mean the girl is choosing to be religious -- and at any rate, it doesn’t matter what the child believes.

"The main thrust of this case is not my daughter, it’s me.

Newdow falsely claimed his daughter was the "injured" party when he filed his suit; the appellate court could throw out the case, writes Howard Bashman.

Of course, the issue is still real. There must be an atheist child in America who feels coerced by "under God," even if Newdow's daughter isn't the one. But I'd hate to see the pledge changed. I'm inclined to go with the analysis that the secular purpose -- instilling love of country -- outweighs the incidental reference to God. I don't think we'd add "under God'' today, but I can't believe we need to take it out. And if we do, children won't be able to sing "America the Beautiful" in school either. We've got to defend "America the Beautiful."
7/11/2002

Weak-man dictatorship
I think this is true:

To the realpolitik set, the Arafat equation was very simple: a strongman state was a better bet than a weak democracy doomed to collapse into chaos. But, in launching the intifada, Yasser blew up his own raison d’être. You can’t warn ‘Après moi le déluge’ when the deluge is already in full flood.

By Mark Steyn in the Spectator.
7/11/2002

CEOnistas flee to Mexico
Thanks to Andrew Hofer, I found this hysterically funny SatireWire piece on the flight of the CEOnistas.

Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.

"They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenues," said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso. "Right in front of my daughters."

Calling themselves the CEOnistas, the chief executives were first spotted last night along the Rio Grande River near Quemado, where they bought each of the town's 320 residents by borrowing against pension fund gains. By late this morning, the CEOnistas had arbitrarily inflated Quemado's population to 960, and declared a 200 percent profit for the fiscal second quarter.

This morning, the outlaws bought the city of Waco, transferred its underperforming areas to a private partnership, and sent a bill to California for $4.5 billion.

There's more. Plus a photo of Martha Stewart in a bandit's mask, made from recycled Christmas wrapping.
7/11/2002

Science lab in the bathroom
Aurora Charter High's students study in a warehouse. They use the bathroom -- the only place with a sink -- as their science lab. In what will be a test case, the small charter is sueing its local high school district, Sequoia, demanding help to pay for facilities for students who'd otherwise attend district-run schools. Proposition 39 says districts must fund "reasonably equivalent" facilities for its students who attend charter schools.

After beginning the 2000-01 school year outdoors in a park, Aurora moved to an old furniture warehouse, which is now scheduled to be demolished. The $3,000-a-month rent has come from the pool of money the school gets to pay teachers and buy supplies.

Renovating a new site would cost $125,000, with rent of $250,000 a year, estimates Aurora's director. Sequoia says that would drain money from its schools, and that it shouldn't have to pay anything to a school it didn't charter. Two new charters will be opening in the district, bringing the total to four, none of them authorized by Sequoia.

On the law, Aurora is solid. The Legislature decided charter schools don't have to be chartered by their home district; it was clear districts would be very reluctant to authorize the creation of new schools to compete for their own students. Proposition 39 said districts have a responsibility to local public school students, whether they attend district-run or charter schools. Sequoia may not like the law, but I can't see the judge rewriting it for them.

Whether the law is fair is another question. Obviously, it's more cost-efficient to put lots of students in one building; in that sense, a network of small charters is a drain on resources. However, it's hardly fair to make Aurora use operating funds to cover rent, while Sequoia gets full funding for operating costs and capital costs.

Sequoia is complaining that if all the proposed charter high schools in its district reach their full capacity, the district will lose 20 percent of its funding. But they'd be losing 27 percent of their students. And the two existing charters predominantly serve high-cost, hard-to-educate students, though that might not be true of the new schools.

Sequoia is a high-wealth district with a significant minority of low-income students. It has managed to dissatisfy many parents, of all races, colors and creeds, which is why charter schools are springing up. Should the district be protected as it now exists? School choice is supposed to be about change, not about protecting the status quo.
7/11/2002

Gadfly goodies
Education Gadfly, which has taken over Fordham Foundation's Selected Readings on School Reform (SR2), is filled with goodies this week.

Chester Finn gives rave reviews to the report by the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education, though he fears it won't be implemented.

Forty percent of special ed students -- 80 percent of those labeled with "specific learning disabilities" -- aren't disabled, the commission estimates. They just haven't learned to read. And they're not likely to catch up in special ed programs either. After all, nobody's accountable for their success once they're labeled. The commission wants to focus special education on results, with an expectation that extra help should enable children to catch up. The report says:

"The Commission finds that many children who are placed into special education are essentially instructional casualties and not students with disabilities."

That's the key, writes Finn:

America should come to view the educational inadequacies of millions of its daughters and sons not in terms of organic problems inherent in the children but rather as the fallout from unsound, inept or ill-conceived instruction by adults. This doesn't mean that nobody has a true disability. . . . But that doesn't contradict the Commission's main message: Start to view special ed chiefly in terms of preventing and remedying education gaps rather than as a system for coping with children who were born with problems that schooling can do little about.

American Educator's summer issue argues for "A Common, Coherent Curriculum," with an article comparing math education in the U.S. and overseas. Hint: They're coherent; we're not.

"The Cleveland Voucher Case" is written by an entrepreneur who started two non-religious private schools for voucher students. The $2,250 cap on vouchers forced him to turn the schools into charters.

Put Reading First summarizes results of the National Reading Panel's report on how best to teach reading in elementary school.
7/11/2002

Bill's boy?
Idle gossip from the National Enquirer via The Scotsman: Paul Pearson, the ex-husband of an ex-girlfriend of Bill Clinton's wants a DNA test to see if the ex-president fathered Anthony Pearson, who's now 20.

Paul Pearson’s ex-wife, Dolly Kyle Browning, a friend of Mr Clinton since childhood, admitted to a 17-year affair with the former president prior to giving birth to Anthony in 1981.

Poor Anthony.
7/11/2002

The rich get cleaner
VodkaPundit's got a great rant on the end of the world.
7/11/2002

Mediocrity for all
Geez, I forget to blog a local story, and Best of the Web beats me to it.

Gilroy High's three top administrators quit to protest a plan to offer honors English and history classes to 9th and 10th graders. Though the honors classes will be open to all students, the administrators said the program will lead to segregation.

They worry students from Spanish-speaking households -- 65 percent of Gilroy High's 2,300 students -- won't enroll in honors classes even if they can do the work because their parents aren't aware the classes exist and won't push their children to take them.

Of course, the school could inform the parents and push the students. If necessary, the administrators could have placed all A and B students in honors, unless their parents requested easier classes. Or don't they have Hispanic students who have As and Bs?

Maybe not. Gilroy starts tracking its students in second grade; students who started school without English fluency aren't likely to be in the top track. By 9th grade, they're almost certain to be behind. Offering honors classes in high school is a smart idea. Even smarter: Stop picking the winners in second grade. Give all elementary students a chance to prep for the high school honors track.
7/10/2002

Left behind
As I'd predicted, few students in low-performing schools will be able to transfer to better schools under the "Leave No Child Behind" Act. Good schools tend to fill up.

Baltimore school officials said yesterday they will offer 194 places this year for 30,000 students who are in schools designated as low-performing and are eligible to transfer to a better school.

The city, like other school districts around the nation, is required to give parents whose children are in schools that have been classified as "failing" the choice of moving them to another school or providing extra help, such as tutoring after school, on Saturday or with a private company.

Baltimore kept transfer slots low by deciding students could move only to schools with decent test scores. The district doesn't have too many of those: only 11 elementary schools and no middle schools.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, school officials are trying to discourage transfers, the Washington Post reports.

When the program first was announced, some middle class parents in receiving schools appeared nervous about the prospect of their children rubbing shoulders with low-income children, but school officials put on the full court press to discourage student transfers. During the application period, school spokesman Brian Porter told the Potomac Gazette, "If we had our druthers, we would not be doing this program. We're doing everything possible to keep the families at their home schools."
7/10/2002

Vouchers galore
Education Week covers the newly invigorated school choice debate. and links to old and new voucher stories.
7/10/2002

Deregulating special education
Special education can't be reformed under the current regulatory restrictions, concludes a Cato policy analysis.

IDEA's central failure is the complex and adversarial process required to determine the size and nature of each disabled child's entitlement to special services. Recognizing that the educational needs of disabled children differ widely, the act mandates that each child's "individual education plan," or IEP, be created out of whole cloth by his or her local school district in a series of meetings.

The process mandated by the statute has not only failed to achieve its purpose of ensuring an appropriate education to each disabled child. It has marginalized the parents it was intended to empower and has created a barrage of compliance-driven paperwork so overwhelming that special educators are driven to quit the profession.

Affluent, educated, aggressive parents learn to work the system to get services for their children; without pushy, savvy parents, disabled students are likely to be under-served.

Senators from both parties praised the recommendations of a commission which looked at how to improve IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).
7/10/2002

Classroom criminals
Infinite tolerance is the rule for New York City school employees convicted of criminal offenses reports the Daily News. Overlawyered spotted the story.

Daniel LaBianca, chief of outside funding for School District 14 in Brooklyn, pleaded guilty in 1999 to helping private school officials embezzle millions in federal aid for poor children. Three years later, he still holds his New York public school job -- and has a $10,000 raise to boot. A Daily News review of the seven cases since 1999 in which the Board of Education filed to terminate tenured school teachers or administrators with criminal convictions found that in every case, the crooks stayed in the school system.

All cases must go to arbitration, and the union fights for every last crook.

One teacher "concealed his arrest for harassment from school officials, used obscenities in class and lived with a former student who bore him a child." The arbitrator gave him a one-month suspension.

Years ago, I covered three cases where school districts tried to fire employees convicted of crimes against children. There was a teacher who tied up and molested a boy. But it wasn't one of his students or on school grounds. There was a school psychologist who repeatedly called a little girl with cancer and told her she was going to die; he thought the girl had told her mother not to date him. The victim wasn't one of his students and he didn't harass her in performance of his duties. Finally, there was the administrator who sicced his large dog on his neighbor's crippled child. To be fair, I think he meant the dog to attack her mother. The girl, who was badly mauled, wasn't one of his students, not on school grounds, not related to his work, etc. I think all three eventually were forced out. But it took forever and cost a lot of money.
7/10/2002

What's a meme?
For my fellow non-techies who've found themselves in Blogland sort of like Dorothy found herself in Oz: A meme is like an idea, only, uh, more so. Harlan Sexton sent me several definitions:

American Heritage Dictionary: A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. [Shortening (modeled on gene), of mimeme from Greek mimma, something imitated, from mimeisthai, to imitate. See mimesis.]

Jargon File: By analogy with "gene"] Richard Dawkins's term for an idea considered as a replicator, especially with the connotation that memes parasitise people into propagating them much as viruses do.

Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through, for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to produce a new idea involving elements of each parent
idea.

The term is used especially in the phrase "meme complex" denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organised belief system, such as a religion. However, "meme" is often misused to mean "meme complex".

Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has become more important than biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.

So, watch out for those meme complexes.
7/10/2002

The no-hopers
What a bizarre anti-voucher column in the Washington Post. A teacher writes that vouchers are bad because some kids have uncaring, incompetent parents who'd never get it together to use a voucher.

The lucky ones will flourish in private schools made richer with public dollars, while the unlucky will be abandoned in our doomed public schools.

Her example, Michael, missed four months of school because his aunt shipped him back to his mother and she didn't bother to enroll him. So, yes. Vouchers won' t help Michael. Public schooling hasn't helped Michael. Public school funding could double, triple, quadruple: It won't help Michael. He's doomed by his upbringing.

But there are lots of other students who aren't doomed -- unless they're stuck in one of those "doomed public schools.'' (And private schools aren't made richer by taking high-need students who have only a $2,250 voucher, as in Cleveland.) As Education Weak and VodkaPundit observe, the logic is: Keep all students in bad schools because some kids have bad parents. That is bad logic.

I'm writing a book on a charter school that targets under-achieving Hispanic students. Their parents are the ones this teacher thinks can't make a choice. Most are poorly educated. They don't understand the system. They don't speak or read English well. But they're not stupid. Unlike Michael's mother, they care deeply about their kids. If they have a choice, they will use it to seek a better school for their kids.
7/9/2002

Zero tolerance for cookies?
Banning sweets in school could lead to even more obesity, British experts say, after parents complained about their primary school's healthy snack policy. Parents feared their children's crisps and biscuits -- chips and cookies to us -- would be confiscated. Apparently, American kids aren't the only ones porking up due to lack of exercise.
7/9/2002

Meme vs. meme
Despite my fuzziness about what "meme" means, I think N.Z. Bear's post arguing that we're at war with a meme is great. He compares a meme to an infectious computer program.

While an argument can be made that we should be making war on the Terrorism meme --- which I’ll define quickly here as using violence and the threat of violence against civilians to impose change upon societies or governments --- we’re not. Instead, we’re really at war with IslamicFacism, which tends to run side-by-side with Terrorism in many people, but is clearly a distinct meme of its own. The particular variant of IslamicFascism we’re facing today has its roots in Wahabism, hit its stride in the past few decades, and even managed to take over an entire state via the Taliban --- for a while. It’s a nasty, nasty meme --- nasty for those that oppose it, as it basically leaves zero room for compromise, preferring war without end, and nasty for those who fall under its control, as it drives inexorably towards a kind of stone-age tyranny.

Bear says positive memes like PreserveFreedom, DefendInnocents and CreateProsperity are more powerful than negative memes, such as DestroyIslamicFascism. Our memes can lick their memes.

Read the comments section too.
7/9/2002

Integration and vouchers
In yesterday's Wall St. Journal, education researcher Jay Greene predicted the "new legal and political front" in the anti-voucher campaign will be the claim that vouchers exacerbate segregation. It ain't so, says Greene, who's studied private schools that accept vouchers in Milwaukee and Cleveland. Students in public schools are more likely to be taught in classrooms where more than 90 percent of students are of the same race; they're less likely than private schoolers to eat lunch with a classmate of a different race.

Vouchers promote integration because they enable students to move out of their segregated neighborhoods to attend better schools, writes Greene. Here's an interesting point:

... Because the private schools more effectively reassure parents that discipline and safety will be maintained, parents are more willing to try racial mixing in private schools than they are in the (Cleveland) area's public schools.
7/9/2002

Fat targets
Through Moira Breen, I discovered Carey Gage's Cognocentric, which debuts by fisking an Australian idiotarian. Nice technique.

She also links to MedPundit, who comments on the "Big Fat Lie" article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. MedPundit says we're getting fatter because we eat more calories than we burn. Low-fat diets hurt if they trick people into ignoring the calories in those muffins. OK, I knew that.

Eric Raymond, who tries to eat like a caveman, says dieting is a religion: Note how "sinful" is never used by the sophisticated except to describe chocolate.
7/9/2002

Religion of peace
Andy Freeman is dubious about colleges adding courses on Islam:

Suppose the context is "Islam is a peaceful and good religion, so let's see out how they could have been driven to do things that
look 'bad' to untrained Western eyes, such as yours, dear students, but are actually justified, if not actually good."

I'd be more impressed if they actually had a useful program on Western Civ.

And, I wonder why they don't plan to do anything on how Mohammed came to power. Good strategy/tactics, and awareness of his opponents, and a brutality, towards defenseless losers, that would have made Romans turn squeamish.
7/8/2002

Cave tapes
Now there's proof Osama was framed by George W. Bush and his master, Ariel Sharon. On Right Wing News.
7/8/2002

Bubble haiku
Read "Worldcom Haiku" on Winds of Change.
7/8/2002

Unscientific Americans
Jay Leno's joke is on the mark:

 "Here's something shocking. According to a study by the National Science Foundation, 70 percent of Americans do not understand science. Here's the sad part: 30 percent don't even know what 70 percent means."

I'm not sure if I could define a molecule. It's, uh, small. But it's scary that Americans are trying to decide about health risks, cloning, nuclear waste and a host of other issues when two-thirds of us don't understand the scientific process.
7/8/2002

Globalization reduces poverty
Globalization has reduced poverty, concludes a study commissioned by the European Union.

Far from creating poverty as critics claim, rapid globalization of the world economy has sliced the proportion of abject poor across the planet, according to a controversial new study released on Monday.

It says that freer commerce, epitomized by the cutting of tariffs and the lifting of trade barriers, has boosted economic growth and lifted the incomes of rich and poor alike.

"The proportion of the world's population in absolute poverty is now lower than it has ever been," the study, written by a group of respected economists for the London-based Center for Economic Policy Research, says.

Fifty-five percent of the world's population was poor in 1950; globalization cut that to 24 percent by 1992. The least globalized continent, Africa has fared the worst. (AIDs and wars may be the major factors.)

The European Commission, the EU's executive body, isn't happy about the results.

"In many respects, the findings will prove controversial, at least to those outside the circle of professional economists, contradicting as they do certain deeply held beliefs about the negative consequences of globalization," (Commissioner) Prodi wrote.

Will the EU bow to the opinions of the ignorant?
7/8/2002

Big Fat Lie
Americans may be getting fat because we're not eating enough fat, writes Gary Taubes in the New York Times Magazine (via Volokh). The obesity epidemic started in the '80s, after the government told Americans to eat more carbohydrates and less fat. We're eating less fat, yet we're getting fatter. Now scientists are wondering if Dr. Atkins was right to prescribe a high-protein, high-fat, low-carb diet. After 30 years, they're just starting to study it.
7/8/2002

The Resources Bomb
Will the earth "expire by 2050" due to overuse of resources? Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, though eager to move to one of those new planets we'll be colonizing, links to Reason's Ronald Bailey, who slashes and burns the doomsday claim of enviro-seer Mathis Wackernagel. (Great name.) Bailey says we're not just getting richer; we're getting smarter. Jesse Ausubel, who directs the Human Environment program at Rockefeller University, predicts a Great Restoration of natural habitat in the 21st century due to technological advances.

H.D. Miller also kicks the World Wildlife Fund's neo-Malthusianism on Travelling Shoes.
7/8/2002

Talking points
In her where's-the-center post, Jane Galt lists 17 rules for intelligent discussion, among them:

4) Stop whining about what happened in the past. If politics were nice and perfectly fair every time, it wouldn't be politics, it would be nursery school. Clinton is out of office. I don't care what he did or did not do with any number of women, and I don't care what the Republicans did to him. It was five years ago. Get a new topic. Ditto the 2000 election. If Gore runs against Bush and loses then, you're going to look a little stupid. . . .

7) People should not be referred to as "Fascists", "Marxists", "Communists", "Nazis", etc. unless they are actually devotees of the schools of political thought, or members of the political parties, that those labels describe. Many people will be surprised to learn this, but those terms actually have specific meanings, which are not "The political orientation of anyone who strongly disagrees with me." . . .

14) No one is much moved by exhortations to the effect that they're just selfish and mean. First of all, it's rarely true, except in the case of Objectivists, and they don't care.

I'd add to #7 a codocil saying: Don't claim a bad thing is just like the Holocaust unless it involves the deliberate murder of millions of people. In fact, it might be a good idea to ban analogies entirely. So few people use them wisely.
7/8/2002

Sen. Parker, D-The City
Sarah Jessica Parker of "Sex and the City" fame wants to be a senator from New York or California when she retires from acting. Qualifications: She once dated John F. Kennedy, Jr.
7/7/2002

New e-d-b-l-o-g
Samizdata's Brian Micklethwait warms up on phonics in preparation for his soon-to-be-created education blog. Apparently, the Brits call it "synthetic phonics."
7/7/2002

Axis of Loons
Great rant by the ex-Sgt. Stryker:

The more I think about it, the more I realize we're not really fighting a war against fanatical Islam. We're fighting a war against half-retarded conspiracy theorists. I read the Moussoui, or "Mouse" as I call him, thinks his judge is going to orchestrate some complicated scheme to kill the follicly-challenged 20th Hijacker. That Egyptian 'tard who shot up the El Al counter at LAX thought there was some Jewish conspiracy to give Egyptians AIDS by sending HIV-infected prostitutes into the land of Pharoah.

Read enough of this crap, and it begins to dawn on you that these goobers are merely foreign equivalents of our own homegrown dipshits who fear a U.N. takeover of the United States and other such nonsense. The language is the same. The situation is stock X-Files gibberish: Only a few enlightened people know the Truth about the Rube Goldberg-like machinations of shady international brotherhoods bent on world domination.

Solution: Merciless mocking.
7/7/2002

Pop goes the presidency
Radley Balko's soda-pop-Coke analysis of the presidential race is kind of eerie.
7/7/2002