May 2002
Guess what?
Palm Beach County high school students can
pass district-wide history finals by answering 23 of 100 multiple-choice
questions correctly (via Best
of the Web). Apparently, there are only four choices. A principal
says students who guess blindly would average 25 correct answers. Students
who get more than 50 right will get an A.
The final exams for American
and world history classes replace teacher-written exams and count for
20 percent of the semester grade. School district officials wrote the
exams to cover state-mandated units on women's history, African-American
history, Africa, the Holocaust, etc. It's not clear the exams cover dead-white-male
history too. -- 5/31
Life
Danny Pearl is a father. Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered Wall Street
Journal reporter, gave birth
to a boy in Paris. His name is Adam. -- 5/31
Mindful memorization
Commit these words to heart: Not
all memorization is rote memorization. Knowing
things and thinking about things are not mutually exclusive, writes Claudia
Winkler in the Weekly Standard.
This conflation of mindless,
blab-school, learning-by-rote with the necessary, if sometimes painful,
committing of information to memory has a sordid effect: to dress up
ignorance as superior thoughtfulness. Implicitly, it disparages the
intake of knowledge--once the very essence of classroom learning--as
an activity fit only for drones.
"Critical thinking"
is breathing. Knowledge is oxygen. -- 5/31
Prospicient speller
The new National
Spelling Bee champ isn't home schooled! But Pratyush Buddiga, the
first public school student to win since 1999, represents the other over-represented
category, Indo-Americans. The 13-year-old won on "prospicience."
The finals were broadcast live in ESPN.
In the final day of competition,
contestants successfully worked their way through "kakemono,"
"caulicolous," "stultiloquence," "culgee,"
"hermeneutics," "soavemente" and "toreutics,"
among others.
Others were felled by "verticil,"
"badigeon," "batture," "throstle," "roriferous,"
"tiralee," "objicient" and "icteric," not
one of which I could spell and none of which I could define.
Eric
Olsen gets emotional
about spelling bees despite his inability to spell Cincinnati, or however
it goes. Instapundit came
in 28th in the National Spelling Bee as an instakid. -- 5/31
Uncle John's Explainers
In response to my quest for meaning in Uncle
John's Band, Kirk Parker writes:
They Were On Drugs.
He says Dylan's "The Mighty
Quinn'' makes no sense either. No! Surely not!
Meanwhile, Robert Wright says:
Jerry Garcia, bless his
pickled heart, was no Bob Dylan -- or even Bob Hunter. Garcia wrote
Uncle John's Band and like Twain's "wingless wild things,"
it's devoid of meaning.
However, this annotation
of the lyrics claims Hunter wrote the song.
Jim Breed, on the other hand,
claims not worrying anymore is a logical response to "danger at your
door.''
Worry clouds one's mind
as to how to deal with the danger. If we are capable of banishing the
terror associated with worrying and accept that we are, indeed, in a
pickle, then we are prepared to deal with the danger.
I disagree. If worrying leads
to action, it prevents a feeling of terror. Worrying is useful.
When I was in Literary Club
in high school we'd analyze song lyrics like poetry, but I think we did
the Beatles -- "Eleanor Rigby" compared to "Richard Cory,"
for example -- rather than Jerry Garcia. I also remember our next-door
neighbor coming over and demanding that my sister and I explain "The
Mighty Quinn" to him. "It doesn't make any sense!'' he said
with considerable indignation. We told him it wasn't supposed to make
sense. "Why not!'' he said.
Because They Were on Drugs.
-- 5/31
Vocational vacuum
Jim Breed, an engineer, also weighs in on the question of making all students
take college-prep courses.
It seems to me that the
guys in the blue collar neighborhood in which I grew up mostly liked
working with their hands and the ones who took the shop classes did
better in life than the ones who weren't college bound but took the
college material anyway. I think vo-tech education in this country is
a joke. I work with laborers and assemblers that would have been better
served by high schools that trained them for the work they are doing
than the ones they went to, the ones that pretended to prepare them
for college that they weren't going to anyway.
I think the key phrase is
"pretended to prepare." Many students think they're preparing
for college and discover, late in the game, that they're not qualified
for anything. They can't read well enough to understand a college textbook
or an auto repair manual. -- 5/31
Amusing the students
And Robert Wright describes the grueling end-of-the-year schedule in his
middle school. The school year is 180 days, he says.
Today I spent one of those
180 days on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with my students. It wasn't my
idea. My teaching team planned it and I had to go along or call in sick.
No literature today.
And there probably won't be much literature tomorrow. Most of my students
will be at Raging Waters with their choir class.
Another team took their students to see the new Star Wars film.
Instrumental music students went to Disneyland a couple weeks ago.
Great America is next week. -- 5/31
.
Trash
Lisa Snell got better trash service when she
could choose between seven pick-up companies. Now she's stuck with the
amnesia-ridden bozos who got the county contract. At least she can buy
her way out of the local public school, which is meeting its improvement
targets but remains well below average.
Unlike the poor-performing
trash collector, El Cerrito Elementary's contract will most likely never
run out.
This is why education privatization is better than the status quo. It
introduces some accountability into the system. An education service
provider, like Edison, has a contract with actual requirements for performance.
And when they fail to meet those performance measures everyone hears
about it and some districts or schools cancel their contract.
However, in a real market,
Edison wouldn't have a contract with the school district; customers --
parents -- would determine which schools stay in business.
When school districts,
school boards, or state governments choose an education service provider,
it is no different than the city choosing your trash hauler or your
cable service. If you have a complaint, you are at the mercy of the
government agency that selected the provider. -- 5/31
Blame the test
Los Angeles Unified doesn't give low-income students trained teachers
or equal resources, so the students can't
pass state-mandated tests. So says the LA school board, which voted
"to study alternative assessments for gauging student academic achievement."
San Francisco's school board passed a similar measure. The LA Times reports:
In Los Angeles, the sharply
worded measure criticized the Stanford 9 and high school exit exam for
discriminating against students with limited English skills.
What do they think? That employers
will celebrate the alternative excellence of kids who leave high school
without being able to read or write in English? That colleges will not
discriminate on the basis of ability to do academic work in English?
The measure also said
that district schools in poor and minority neighborhoods have fewer
resources--including a shortage of materials, college prep classes and
certificated teachers. Relying on such tests, the proposals said, unfairly
penalizes students in these schools.
"There are huge inequities that exist in this district for poor
children and immigrant children," board member Genethia Hayes,
one of the measure's sponsors, said during the meeting.
And who's responsible for creating
those inequities, Genethia? Would it be . . . the school board that runs
the district?
An Education
Trust West report backs enrolling all high school students in college
prep classes unless they request otherwise. Minority students who've taken
a college-prep sequence like California's A-G requirements do much, much
better in college than those who've avoided rigorous classes.
However, San Jose Unified is
quoted as a success story. More students are graduating with the A-G courses
required by the state university system. But the report doesn't mention
that a third
of seniors weren't on track to graduate at the start of their final
year. Half of Hispanics hadn't earned enough credits. Students are cramming
in extra courses -- tough for kids who haven't been able to handle the
normal workload -- hoping to graduate in June.
In National Review, Casey Lartigue
tells school choice critics: I'm
rubber and you're glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks
to you. -- 5/30
We're not the scared country;
we're the scary country
P.J. O'Rourke's Orange
County Register column tracks Jonah
Goldberg's thoughts on who should be scared of whom. Only O'Rourke's
role model is Godzilla, while Goldberg cites Superman and the Hulk. --
5/30
The crow's tale
Reading Lileks' economic analysis of "Ten
Apples Up on Top'' has inspired me to ask for help from the blogosphere.
At Tuesday's rehearsal, while the altos were learning their part in "Uncle
John's Band,'' I was examining the lyrics with my fellow soprano, Debby.
We got pretty far with the death motif and I was pretty sure this "Uncle
John" is a Christ figure, but we had a lot of questions. Why, for
example, are the first days the hardest days? And why should one stop
worrying if there's danger at the door? Wouldn't worry be appropriate?
Please advise. -- 5/30
What about Edison?
Chester Finn helped develop Edison's
school design, but left the company several years ago. He says many sensible
things about Edison's strengths and weaknesses, and its importance to
the school choice movement, and concludes that Chris Whittle is smart
enough to save the company.
Never forget that the
teacher unions HATE Edison and the other EMO's and are doing their best
to subvert and bankrupt all such ventures.(There are rare and limited
exceptions, such as Dade County, Florida.) They are also looking to
safeguard their members' jobs. The upshot is that the unions lay down
conditions before a school district (such as Philadelphia or New York)
can engage Edison at all, and these conditions may prove fatal both
to a school's instructional effectiveness and to the profitability of
its parent firm. Retaining highly-paid but poorly performing teachers
is usually the big challenge.
I think it will be almost impossible
for Edison to succeed in Philadelphia, given the hostility and hysteria
of the anti-Edison forces. If the company has to employ union teachers,
it will be absolutely impossible to run effective schools. I wouldn't
bet the farm on Edison's survival either. These days investors like a
for-profit company to run a profit. -- 5/29
How many foxes on chicken
coop board?
Under a proposed bill, AB2363,
California's school board would be run by people strongly invested in
the status quo, with five of 11 members directly employed in public schools.
The board would include three public school teachers, one principal at
a low-performing school, one non-teaching public school employee, two
public school parents, one school board member and one public school student.
Only two of 11 members would represent the general public, and one of
those would need expertise in teaching students who aren't fluent in English.
Who would qualify but a teacher or former teacher? The bill by Assemblyman
Marco Firebaugh, D-Los Angeles, has passed the Assembly and will be assigned
to the Senate Education Committee. The good news is that the governor
isn't likely to sign it.
Update: Ze'ev Wurman quotes
a former state board of education member saying, "I particularly
loved the idea of an administrator from a failing school . . . Who would
want a successful person to make policy?"
The governor
is not a toaster, the Riverside Press-Enterprise tells the California
Teachers Association. The union gave $1.3 million to elect Gray Davis,
and he hasn't done what they wanted. They put in the bread and never got
the toast. But there's no "agency for political donors to go to with
consumer complaints when they don't get their money's worth." --
5/29
We're all in this together
James Lileks watched New York City's 9-11 documentary and noticed the
people who watched with horror
as the twin towers burned, and desperately sought news of missing relatives.
I was also struck, again,
by the variety of people standing on the street below, or holding out
pictures of missing loved ones. A Hispanic woman and son; an Asian couple;
a Black gay man - arent these supposed to be the people marginalized
and oppressed and devalued by society and the media? What are they doing
on a documentary made by a giant media conglomerate? Could it be they
all worked in the same place and got along, and that every single interaction
wasnt shaped and defined by Race and Gender and Shoe Size and
all other forms of polarizing identity?
It says something about America that you cant blow up an average
skyscraper without killing people of every race and creed on the planet.
-- 5/28
Biology of blogging
John Hiler describes the ecosystem
of weblogs. -- 5/28
So that's how it happens
Palestinian gunmen sent to Italy in the Church of the Nativity deal are
threatening to explode,
Al Bawaba reports. They can't take the humiliation of being watched
by the Italian police.
The three Palestinians
granted exile in Italy after the Israeli army siege of Bethlehem's Church
of the Nativity risk cracking under the strain of being so closely monitored,
one of them told La Reppublica on Monday.
"When we arrived in Italy I asked the head of the Italian security
service responsible for us not to track us too closely. I told him,
at least give us some personal space and autonomy or we could
just explode, Khaled Abu Nejmeh told the daily. -- 5/27
Found: A teen-age virgin
Newsweek finds teen-age
girls who are happy, successful, respectful of adults and not worried
about being popular. Then the reporter interviews a blonde "Wendi"
who's popular and shallow. The girls who go to Bible class turn out to
be virgins. Barbie look-alikes classify oral sex as "third base."
Which proves what? You can go on a high school campus with 2,200 students
and find just about any kind of kid you want. -- 5/27
Memory
I watched the 9-11 memorial show on HBO last night. What hit me hardest
was the helicopter pilot who saw a man waving a towel from a window but
couldn't land his helicopter, the white dust covering the people fleeing
from the towers' collapse, the volunteer rescue workers marching down
the street in their ratty T-shirts, the mayor's aide talking about her
firefighter husband, the people lining the streets to cheer the men on
the bulldozers and fire trucks.
HBO's "In
Memoriam" site lists the names of the victims. When I clicked
on the "click here to view the site," it happened to start with
"I" names and then go to "J." So I saw that four of
the dead were named "Jacobs."
After Sept. 11, I started to
fly my flag every day. But I worried about coming home late and having
it out there after dark or in the rain. The Girl Scouts trained me too
well in flag etiquette. So I taped a cardboard flag in the front window.
(I got it at a Stanford football game.) It's been there ever since. New
York City is officially ending its mourning period on May 30. And I've
noticed my window flag has faded in the sun. I think I'll take it down
today or on the 30th. Or should I wait for Osama's DNA to be identified
from the bones in his last cave? -- 5/27
Last words
The New York Times' "Fighting
to live while the towers died," relies on phone conversations,
taped messages and e-mails from workers trapped in the World Trade Center.
. . . the words from the
upper floors offer not only a broad and chilling view of the devastated
zones, but the only window onto acts of bravery, decency and grace at
a brutal time.
More than 50 people fell or
jumped from the north tower, the Times estimates. -- 5/26
Teen sex
The Blogosphere has discovered teen sex via a US New article, "Risky
Business." Glenn Reynolds
says it's normal
for teen-agers to want sex and uses "ephebophilia"
in a response to his hate mail. Moira Breen says girls don't
seem to be enjoying it; they go along to have and keep a boyfriend.
I think she's got a point, especially for younger teens. Katie Granju
of Loco Parentis notes that the real issue is "Irresponsible
Idiot Sex." And there a lot more links on Instapundit.
I pretty much agree with everybody,
especially about irresponsible idiot sex.
I talked to a number of teen-age
focus groups about 10 years ago for a series on teen-agers' attitudes
toward sex. I asked boys this question: How would the average boy respond
if his girlfriend told him she was pregnant?
A group of white and Asian-American
boys at an affluent high school answered in unison: "Abortion! Abortion!"
A Hispanic, black and white
group at a Boys' Club in a low-income neighborhood also answered in unison.
They said: "Leave her! Leave her!"
Then I sat in on a sex education
presentation at the county's school/jail for girls. Some of the inmates
were mothers already. The presenter asked: What does a boy say when he
wants you to have sex with him. Instantly, they replied: "I love
you.''
Kids aren't stupid. They just
act like they're stupid.
I think the key to sex ed,
drug ed, etc. is to teach two-year-olds this key lesson: Actions have
consequences. By the age of three or four, they can move on to the second
step: Think about the consequences before you act. Once they've got that
down, the rest is trivial. -- 5/26
Europe vs. U.S.
Europeans and Americans no longer agree about the utility and morality
of power,
writes Robert Kagan.
Europeans believe they
are moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules
and transnational negotiation and cooperation. Europe itself has entered
a post-historical paradise, the realization of Immanuel Kant's "Perpetual
Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history,
exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international
rules are unreliable and where security and the promotion of a liberal
order still depend on the possession and use of military might.
. . . The German lion
has lain down with the French lamb. The new Europe has succeeded not
by balancing power but by transcending power. And now Europeans have
become evangelists for their "postmodern" gospel of international
relations. The application of the European miracle to the rest of the
world has become Europe's new mission civilisatrice. If Germany can
be tamed through gentle rapprochement, why not Iraq?
I can answer that one: Because
Hitler's dead and Saddam Hussein is alive.
Kagan notes that Europe can
reject force because the U.S. hasn't.
Most Europeans don't acknowledge
the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended
on the United States not making the same passage. Instead, they have
come to view the United States simply as a rogue colossus, in many respects
a bigger threat to the pacific ideals Europeans now cherish than Iraq
or Iran. Americans, in turn, have come to view Europe as annoying, irrelevant,
naive and ungrateful as it takes a free ride on American power.
It's not much of an alliance
anymore. -- 5/26
On duty in The Stan
Here's a British reporter's impressionistic view of U.S. soldiers
at Afghanistan's Bagram air base. Among other things: Every Meal Ready
to Eat includes a small bottle of Tabasco sauce. At each morning briefing,
a major recites the number of days since Sept. 11 and reads a brief obit
of a victim from the New York Times web page. Due to my no-obscenity
policy, I can't quote directly, but look for the three English phrases
taught to an Afghan soldier named Crazy. -- 5/26
Charter challenge
Education Week's three-part series, "Changed
by Charters," discusses the impact of charter schools on the
public education system and profiles the first for-profit education management
company to actually make
a profit. It's not Edison,
which is desperately trying to raise money to stay afloat. -- 5/26
Say cheese
Go ahead and have that slice of pizza,
says JunkScience.com debunker
Stephen Milloy. Don't let the nattering nabobs of nannyism put you off
your feed.
Yes, pizza contains fat
and salt; these key components make pizza and many other foods taste
good. But salt and fat aren't necessarily the dietary bogeymen portrayed
by fun-food haters.
Good news for a Memorial Day
weekend. -- 5/25
Identity potluck
What's your ethnic
identity? Instead of checking German, Irish or Italian on Census forms,
more Americans are writing "American," reports the Washinton
Post. -- 5/25
Foxblog
My weekly Fox weblog -- a bee
extravaganza -- is available for reading. It has some new material
on why I think home-schoolers are winning scholastic contests. -- 5/24
Drop-out prep
Every kid's supposed to go to college
these days. But most won't earn a degree, Dan Walters writes in the Sacramento
Bee.
Fewer than 10 percent
of those entering high school will have obtained four-year college degrees
a decade later. Indeed, about a third of those freshman class members
won't even graduate from high school, some of them because of unrealistic
expectations about college.
Some legislators want to boost
funding for vocational ed. But they're swimming against the tide. Sen.
Richard Alarcon, D-Los Angeles, has introduced a bill requiring all students
to take college-prep classes approved by the state university system,
known as the A-G requirements, unless parents sign a waiver.
The laudable goal is to force
all high schools to offer the A-G sequence. But the courses are bound
to be dumbed down if they're filled with unprepared, unmotivated students.
My book is about a college-prep
high school that targets underachieving Hispanic students; most students
enter with a D or F average. Preparing these students for a true college-prep
curriculum is a huge challenge. If students and parents aren't motivated
to get serious about schooling, it's impossible. -- 5/24
Congressional choice
Heritage zings Congress members who send their kids to private
school while voting against vouchers for low-income students in low-performing
public schools (via the Volokhs).
Of course, the legislators
are paying for private school with their own money. But liberals don't
accept the distinction between public and private funding when they hit
conservatives for wanting welfare
mothers to work or study for 40 hours a week while praising married
moms who forego a paying job to stay home with their kids. Personally,
I think the question of who pays is very relevant. Your choices
are your business --until I'm asked to pick up the bill. -- 5/24
Kill thy neighbor
Buried in a Monitor story on Israel's recruitment of collaborators
is an amazing statement by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in
Gaza (PHRMG):
During the first intifada,
which began in 1987, about 1,000 Palestinians died in fighting with
Israeli soldiers and settlers. Research by PHRMG suggests a similar
number were killed by their own people under suspicion of collaboration
but just 45 percent of those killed were rightfully accused.
Many suspected collaborators are simply gunned down in the street
by vigilante groups. The PA turns a blind eye. The label is sometimes
used as an excuse for extra-judicial killing designed to settle old
scores. -- 5/24
What the numbers mean
Education Next features
a discussion on value-added analysis with articles by Dale
Ballou, Anita
Summers, Jay
Greene and Don
McAdams. -- 5/24
They don't name 'em Bertha or Adolph anymore
"Madison" is the second most popular name -- for girls.
"Jane" is down to 365.
Virginia Postrel's column on how names
wax and wane in popularity is a lot of fun. And I found the Name-o-Meter
addictive. It says that "Joanne" is very '50s, but "Joanna"
is fashionable. -- 5/24
In the woods
The D.C. police claimed they searched Rock Creek Park for Chandra Levy's
body. But they didn't
search a wooded area only a mile from the building she'd called up
on her computer. It was too far off the path. So, they thought the killer
would leave the body in a convenient location? -- 5/24
Victims of compassion
A reader speculates that Mexican-American students are held back by
low expectations. In his high school, students who spoke English as a
second language were segregated in special classes that focused on celebrating
culture, not meeting academic goals.
Many
of the same students were in the ESL classes from the beginning of junior
high all the way through high school. Although most of them could actually
speak English just fine, there seemed to be few expectations on them
to do so. The primarily white teachers, instead of focusing on teaching
them English and helping them move into regular classes, seemed much
more concerned with planning "cultural" events.
. . . There didn't seem to be any accountability to get work done .
. . I remember thinking that they weren't treated much differently than
the special education kids . . . It often seemed to be the white teachers
who would feed the idea that the students were victims, while many of
the Mexican-American parents wanted their children to work hard and
learn English.
What kind of backwards
world is it when those who treat adolescents like helpless children
are seen as compassionate, and those who actually want the same students
to learn the tools to succeed here are seen as racist? -- 5/24
Where in the world is Calvin
McCarter
A 10-year-old
home-schooled boy from Michigan won the National
Geographic Bee Wednesday by identifying China as the location of the
Lop Nur nuclear test site. Four of the top 10 competitors were home schooled.
(See "Bee mail'' below.) National Geographic reports:
A survey of this years
contestants showed widespread admiration for President Bush and the
job hes doing, and a desire to be president themselves one day.
Here are some sample geography
questions. -- 5/23
Uneducated = poor
Stop the presses! Or the electrons, or whatever. Mexican-American
households earn 40 percent less than non-Hispanic whites because they're
less educated,
says a Public Policy Institute of California report.
What's interesting is that more education leads to more earnings for second-generation
Mexican-Americans, but not for the third generation, which has even more
access to schooling.
Immigration experts and
community groups say Mexican-American children often must attend schools
that lack up-to-date textbooks, credentialed teachers and access to
computers, hampering the group from improving its lot as quickly as
previous waves of immigrants.
Did the second generation get
better schools than the third? I don't think so. Something else is going
on here that has more to do with culture than number of computers in school.
-- 5/23
Autonomous automatons
Market-based education reform --charter schools, vouchers and other
choice proposals -- are leading to progress, writes Peter Berkowitz in
the Weekly Standard. So why are alleged progressives so hostile? It's
not just the debt to the teachers' unions, he argues.
Homogenizing liberalism
wants all individuals to be autonomous free agents who have transcended
narrow communal and religious attachments and who are bound together
by their shared capacity for reason and choice. The achievement of this
kind of autonomy, contends the homogenizing liberal, is not merely a
good but perhaps the highest good: both a benefit and duty of citizenship
in a liberal state. In order to ensure that each individual lives up
to the demands of citizenship so understood, it is necessary, homogenizing
liberals conclude, to rely upon the state, which alone has the resources
and reach to rescue children from negligent or sectarian parents and
instill, through public education, autonomy.
But some parents have different
educational goals for their children.
When we hear expressed
the fear that private schools (particularly private religious schools)
fail to promote autonomy as the highest good, we must ask how the liberal
state's interest extends to mandating the highest goods that students
and their parents must hold dear. Those who care for themselves and
their friends and their family, who obey the law, and prefer stamp-collecting
or fly-fishing or attending church services to spending their evenings
and free weekends engaged "as critical interpreters of our shared
political traditions" also deserve our respect. -- 5/23
Elementary thongs
Ten-year-old girls are
ready for thong
underwear with cherries, says Abercrombie & Fitch, which is selling
the sexy undies as part of a clothing line aimed at girls 7 to 14 years
old.
The thongs are adorned
with the images of cherries and candy hearts and also include the words
"kiss me" and "wink, wink." They are appropriate
for girls as young as 10 years old, according to a company spokesman.
The shock factor helps Abercrombie
sell clothes. It just gets more and more challenging to find a taboo to
violate. -- 5/23
Victim
Hollis Considine says the Stanford Daily quote I cited below was unfair
to Rene Girard.
Girard suggests that
Osama bin Laden provides an object of blame which unifies the country,
without comment as to whether that blame is justified or not. His technical
definition, in his books, of "sacrificial victim" is that
object upon which an entire community's blame and opposition concentrate,
thereby stilling internal strife.
Considine sees Girard as undermining
the terrorist's exploitation of victim status to justify horrible acts.
I replied that "sacrifice,"
"victim" and "scapegoat" imply innocence in normal
English usage, while the word for an object of hate or blame that unifies
a community is "enemy."
Considine replies that philosophy
uses "technically defined shadows of normal words."
It is particularly
irritating to see (Girard) misrepresented as a typical example of the
moral imbecility of the academy when his philosophy is currently taught
for the explicit purpose of understanding the motivations of OBL in
order to achieve moral clarity by examining and understanding why OBL's
justifications aren't.
I have some trouble following
this. It seems to me that when academics engage in public discussion they
should employ the normal, low-tech meaning of words, lest nobody but their
own students will know what they're saying. -- 5/23
Bee mail
Mark Shawhan:
Having a good vocabulary,
knowing your Greek and Latin roots, etc, is certainly important; but
by the time you get to the final rounds of the National Bee, for example,
there are words
from so many different languages and so many possible spellings (even
if you know your roots), that you have to rely on your memory, even
if you have a great vocabulary, etc.
Judging by the link he provides,
to the rounds in the '97 bee, Indo-American students are as over-represented
in the National Spelling Bee as home schoolers.
To
do well in spelling bees requires a good vocabulary, an ability to handle
pressure, and a fair of amount of practice and drill. None of those
have much to do with whether one is being educated at home or in a public
school; they have far more to do with the level of involvement of parents
in their child's life.
Ken Summers is a spelling bee
and Math Counts parent.
I want my own kids to
do well but not be national champions. I want them to study hard for
roots and derivations, but memorization of obscure words is time better
spent elsewhere. This is even more important in math competition. As
a MathCounts coach, I pressed students to concentrate on principles
and how to apply them to a variety of problems. National competition,
though, requires memorizing shortcuts due to the time aspect. I am not
willing to have students concentrate on shortcuts except for a few that
are very common and useful. As they work a variety of problems, they
generally recognize shortcuts on their own; more importantly, they learn
to draw deeper connections between different type of problems. This
may not make them national champions now but it serves them far better
in the future. -- 5/23
Uses of depression
Chris Huttman writes that the high rate of depression in college students
may relate to the utility of the diagnosis.
I've heard of more than
one kid who gets terrible grades, claims depression, gets a letter from
a shrink, and voila, the university forgets about the bad semester.
Not just notes a withdrawal -- completely wipes the (bad) slate clean.
If depression is a Get Out
of Screw-ups Free card, why not be blue? -- 5/23
Sooo fun
One Democratic staffer asked others if the rhetoric of a Bush-bashing
Social Security op-ed was factual. The reply was sent by mistake to a
Republican staffer. The National Republican
Congressional Committee will release it tomorrow.
. . . "not entirely
factually accurate . . . Talk about scaring seniors -- this may be a
little over the top. But it is sooo fun to bash Republicans.:)
Just keep that e-mail list
updated. -- 5/22
Harvard's jihad
One of the speakers at Harvard's commencement will call for graduates
to engage in an "American
Jihad,'' reports Matt Yglesias. Zayed Yasin is a former president
of the Harvard Islamic Society. No doubt he'll offer an Islam-is-peace
definition of "jihad." Not the kill-the-infidel version depicted
in the video of Danny Pearl's murder. -- 5/22
Osama killed for our sins
From a Stanford Daily article on a science and religion "dialogue,"
comes this mush-minded
moral equivalence.
We live in a sacrificial
world, (French Professor René) Girard said. The function
of sacrifice is to protect society from violence.
Translated into modern times, Girard suggested that Osama bin Laden
may be the sacrificial victim of societys need for scapegoats.
Later in the story:
Our amazing ability
to generalize and represent each other is the root of all evil,
said Terrence Deacon, biological anthropology professor at Boston University.
Along with this comes the potential for great destruction through the
perversion of moral reasoning, he said
For example, it's a perversion
of moral reasoning to equate a mass murderer with a "sacrificial
victim." -- 5/22
Voucherizing special ed
Let parents decide how
to educate a disabled child, argues Cato's David Salisbury. He proposes
giving parents of a "special needs" child a voucher "limited
to what the public school normally pays for a child with a similar disability."
Parents could choose the local public school, another public school or
a private school.
Children with disabilities
have individualized, specialized needs. So, allowing parents to shop
around for the best option makes sense. Choice for parents is the best
way to serve the diverse needs of children with disabilities.
The cumbersome processes associated with IDEA impose enormous costs
on school districts, requiring them to spend funds on IEP meetings,
record keeping, administrative reviews, and settlement costs for parents
that sue. According to the American Institutes for Research, school
districts spend about $4 billion a year on central office special education
administration.
Red tape costs wouldn't vanish:
There'd be a lot of meetings to decide who qualifies for special ed and
how much the voucher should be worth. But it would be simpler and cheaper
than the current mess. -- 5/22
Union compromises
California's teachers'
union has backed down on a bill to make curriculum and textbook selection
part of collective bargaining. The compromise bill requires school boards
to heed the textbook recommendations of advisory committees made up of
teachers and board members. --5/22
High confidence
I'm getting tired of linking to Jeff Sackmann's Confidence
Man. It's good every day. He's prolific too.
College kids report high rates
of depression?
Could be that it's more socially acceptable to admit to depression these
days, says Sackmann.
He links to Mark Goldblatt,
who explains why the SAT's
validity is underestimated: It's highly predictive of college grades
at the margins, but the test is used to screen out students at the margins.
That is: Students with SATs under 750-900 SATs don't apply to the same
colleges as students in the 1350-1600 range.
It's this very screening
process, however, that undermines the SAT's ability to predict grades
and graduation rates since it ensures a relative homogeneity among students
at any given college. Once the pool of students is narrowed to those
who scored between, say, 1100 and 1300, then variables such as home
environment, discipline, and maturity which the SAT cannot measure
tend to override the statistically minor deviation between, say,
a 1130 student and a 1170 student.
On the NAACP's demand to close
the racial learning gap, Sackmann agrees with USA Today that learning
starts
at home. Or doesn't, if an uneducated, immature, overwhelmed single
mother doesn't read and sing with her child. "More than half the
racial learning gap shows up in kindergarten assessments,'' writes USA
Today. Sackmann writes:
I'd bet that this "half
the racial learning gap" is even bigger than it sounds. By age
five, not much learning has been done. Additionally, kids who are good
at school are more likely to be motivated to keep getting better; similarly,
kids who start to think that they aren't cut out for school will get
worse. My instinct, then, is that the learning gap expands not because
schools discriminate against (or fail to serve, or whatever) anyone,
but because learning gaps expand.
At last, a chance to disagree!
A lot of learning is done by age five. By conversing with adults, children
learn to use language. By playing, they learn to understand the laws of
nature: Drop the spoon and it will fall. By watching TV endlessly, they
learn passivity. -- 5/22
Do bee, do bee, do
In response to the item on home
schoolers doing well in national spelling and geography bees, Mark
Shawhan pointed out that bee excellence isn't a factor of good schooling.
Now a Columbia student, Shawhan competed in the National Spelling Bee
as a middle schooler, as did his brother.
Based on that experience,
what largely matters in qualifying for a spelling bee (and doing well
once you get there) is drill, rather than learning. In the National
Spelling Bee, for example, only the first couple of rounds use words
that a middle-schooler could be legitimately expected to know on their
own (and I'm speaking as someone with what I'd like to think of as a
strong vocabulary); after that, knowing the spelling of words is primarily
a matter of having studied them. . . I would think that the more flexible
scheduling of home-schooling (not to mention the ability to alter the
homework load, if all parties think it desirable) would make it easier
to find the time for drill, practice, etc.
Shawhan also remembers home-schoolers
as being less social and more likely to stick with their parents during
Bee Week.
He's certainly right that home-schoolers
have an advantage in flexibility, and I can't quarrel with the contention
that such bees favor memorization. However, I've noticed in doing crossword
puzzles that memory is not enough. I use my knowledge of word structure
in the English language, including its borrowings from Greek and Latin,
to analyze my options and predict the correct spelling of unfamiliar words.
Surely, a champion speller must do this.
Of course, my only spelling
bee experience came in Mr. Parker's fourth grade class at Ravinia School.
After I'd won, Mr. Parker tried to spell me down. It took quite a while.
He thought he had me with "ricochet" but I knew it because of
the "Rick O'Shay" comic strip. He finally got me with "feign."
-- 5/22
Supremely unconstitutional
University of Michigan Law School uses a racial
quota to admit minorities, writes Stuart Taylor Jr. in Atlantic Online.
He predicts the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the Sixth Circuit's 5-4
"diversity" ruling; a broad decision would throw out racial
preferences at unversities all over the country.
Michigan estimates three out
of four of its black, Hispanic and American Indian law students wouldn't
have been admitted under a color-blind policy. Taylor quotes Danny Boggs,
one of the dissenting judges:
Under-represented minorities
[blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians] with a high C to low B undergraduate
average are admitted at the same rate as [white and Asian] applicants
with an A average with roughly the same LSAT scores.... The figures
indicate that race is worth over one full grade point of college average
or at least an 11-point and 20-percentile boost on the LSAT.
. . . 10 under-represented minority students, each a child of two-parent
lawyer families, are considered to be diverse, while children whose
parents are Chinese merchants, Japanese farmers, white steel workers,
or any combinations of the above are all considered to be part of a
homogeneous (and 'over-represented') mass.
Taylor used to support racial
preferences in university admissions to prevent "resegregation,"
but he's changed his mind:
The academic elites who
run the top universities have shown that when given a green light to
discriminate a little bit, they discriminate a lot.
According to this, it took
court-stacking
in the Sixth Circuit to get a majority for racial preferences. -- 5/22
They're coming for your
doughnuts
Col. Sanders is under attack. The Frito Bandito is on the run. The
Battle of the Bulge -- the culture
war of the new century -- has begun, reports the New York Times.
The battlefield is the
American diet, particularly that of the nation's teenagers.
The two biggest states, Texas and California, are moving toward phasing
out junk food in schools, as are many school districts in other states.
Lawyers who pioneered suits against tobacco companies have set their
sights on what they call Big Food as the next target. Class-action lawsuits
have been filed in New York and Florida contending that processed foods
with little nutritional value have misled consumers. The lawyers filing
these suits hope to do to Mega Gulps and Twinkies what they did to Joe
Camel and tobacco.
This week Congress took up legislation, the Obesity Prevention and Treatment
Act, that would start a campaign to improve the eating habits in the
nation, where more than 60 percent of adults are overweight.
Fat Fighters and "Big is
Beautiful" defenders share the same mindset, writes Jacob Sullum
in Reason: Put Big
Government in charge of obesity. As far as they're concerned, we're
all children, unable to decide whether we prefer sloth, chocolate and
pudge to aerobics, lettuce and lean.
Neither seems to consider
the possibility that people are simply making ambivalent choices in
a world of tradeoffs, where food tastes good but too much makes you
fat, where exercise is a bother but helps you stay lean, and where it's
good to be thin, other things being equal. They rarely are.
If your food and exercise decisions
are the business of the legislature and the courts, what isn't?
And whether it's tobacco, guns,
HMOs or Twinkies, the goal is to use the judicial system to "exact
tribute from corporate pariahs,'' argues Cato's Robert Levy.
Overlaywered.com
says odds are gambling is next. At a conference on gambling addiction,
Scott Harshbarger, who heads Common Cause, predicted lawsuits, saying,
"There is a dramatic public health cost, there is a dramatic social
cost" to gambling.-- 5/21
So much for merit pay
Cincinnati teachers voted overwhelmingly to reject
a merit pay plan, reports the Enquirer, despite their union's claim
it suppports pay-for-performance.
Under the comprehensive
evaluation, which occurs every five years, teachers are assessed on
17 standards. The evaluations include prearranged and surprise
observations by peer evaluators and administrators. Teachers must also
prepare a portfolio of student work, records of parent conferences and
phone calls, and personal written reflections on their teaching.
The union was heavily involved
in negotiating the plan under a previous president, Rick Beck, reports
the Educational
Intelligence Agency. Yet 96 percent of members voted "no."
-- 5/21
Home to bee
While home-schooled kids make up 1.7 percent of U.S. students, they comprise
21.8 percent
of national geography bee competitors, 10.9 percent of national spelling
bee competitors. -- 5/21
History isn't required to
repeat itself
The reflex panic
of American Jews isn't justified, writes Leon Wieseltier in an excellent
New Republic essay. Hitler is dead. The U.S. is a free, pluralistic country
where anti-Semitism has no legitimacy. Israel has an army, a navy and
a nuclear arsenal. And Arafat is no Amalek.
"As I've said before,"
Nat Hentoff told New York magazine, "if a loudspeaker goes off
and a voice says, 'All Jews gather in Times Square,' it could never
surprise me."
Call me a simple soul, but it could surprise me. The Jews that I see
gathered in Times Square are howling at Nazis in Mel Brooks's kick lines.
Hentoff's fantasy is grotesque: There is nothing, nothing, in the politics,
the society, or the culture of the United States that can support such
a ghastly premonition. His insecurity is purely recreational. But the
conflation of the Palestinians with the Nazis is only slightly less
grotesque.
Read the whole thing. --5/20
Perma-links
Someone -- Tres Producers? -- was abusing Sullivan for not having perma-links,
and I thought: Gee, I should have perma-links. So, techies, what would
you suggest? I'd like to add a comment function too, if possible. I use
Dreamweaver, if that helps. My brother doesn't think I can use Moveable
Type on account of the server. Whatever that means. --5/20
Summer school blues
What should failing students do in the summer? "Grapple
with thought-provoking questions," says Alfie Kohn. Learn
the basics, says Jeff Sackmann of Confidence Man. And, if you don't
want to spend your summer sweating fractions, do your work during the
regular school year. Students who've learned the basics can move on to
those thought-provoking questions. They'll do fine on standardized tests
too.
Kohn professes sympathy for
poor, minority kids, who are the mostly likely to be flunking their classes
and required to attend summer school. I feel sorry for students who are
passed on from year to year without the skills and knowledge they'll need
to qualify for college, vocational classes, a decent job or even a lousy
job
Sackmann's right about "collective
learning" (group projects) too. They only work when all group
members are equally motivated, and not always then.
In sixth grade, my daughter
did a pyramid project with a boy who was an excellent artist. He did all
the drawing, practicing a skill he'd already mastered. She did the research,
planning, math and writing. -- 5/20
Darth Vader's managerial
and military shortcomings
PejmanPundit's Star
Wars rant, though
long, is very funny. I love seeing a rational mind run amok.
At the Battle of Yavin,
the Death Star rotates the planet in order to get to the Yavin moon
with the Rebel base, and destroy it with a laser blast. Query: Why not
just blow up the planet? It gives you a clear shot at the moon. Why
wait to orbit the planet to get to the moon? For that matter, once you
blow up the planet, you don't even have to fire at the moon--the sudden
lack of the planet's gravitational pull on the moon, as well as the
resulting meteor shower, will be more than enough to ruin the Rebels'
day. Just don't enter into planetary orbit, blast Yavin proper, and
the moon is fooked. Is this so hard? -- 5/20
Single-sex schools
Neophyte edu-blogger Jeff
Sackmann sacks Ellen Goodman's single-sex
sophistry.
In a more perfect world,
there would be no need for this discussion of single-sex public schools:
charter schools and the like could offer single-sex schooling as one
alternative. When Paige offers this plan for more "flexibility,"
that is surely the direction he points.
There's no proof single-sex
schools boost achievement or
self-esteem, reports the Washington Post.
Though studies on the
subject exist, the results are mixed. Some, for example, show that girls
do better in academics, athletics and social situations in all-girl
programs and that their self-esteem improves. But a 10-year study in
Australia found that self-esteem in girls and boys who had been in single-sex
classes initially declined when they started going to coed classes,
but then rose to new heights.
"The research on the issue is quite inconsistent, and one cannot
draw scientific conclusions with any confidence," said Judith Kleinfeld,
professor of psychology at the University of Alaska.
Common sense says single-sex
schooling will benefit some children but not others, which gets back to
Sackmann's point about parental choice. -- 5/19
Enviro-saps
A trio of foolish
environment writers are exposed by Anthony Woodlief, who is dead right
in his analysis. Journalists must learn science, statistics and economics
to report intelligently on environmental issues.
Smug Susan had a similar
tell, as we say in poker, which was most clearly on display as she answered
a question from someone with the audacity to ask how she knows the difference
between real science and junk science. Susan furrowed her disapproving
brow and replied: "Well, I can trust the coal mining industry who
says they aren't hurting animals, or I can trust this guy in the woods
who has studied animals his whole life."
Good reporters don't trust
anyone. -- 5/18
Home schoolers rule
Home-schooled students regularly win national spelling and geography bees.
Now a team of home-schoolers known as Family
Christian Academy has won the National High School Mock Trial championship.
Friday's Wall St. Journal editorial celebrates the victory, noting that
it's outmoded to call home schoolers drones.
. . . an issue of the
alumni magazine of the Ivy League's Brown
University quotes a dean describing home-schoolers as the "epitome"
of Brown students. "They are self-directed, they take risks, and
they don't back off."
My daughter competed on her
high school's mock trial team for three years. In her senior year, they
won the county and placed fifth in the state. So I can vouch for the rigors
of Mock Trial, which requires students to understand the law, argue persuasively
and think on their feet. No drones need apply. -- 5/18
Flagging patriotism
Students at England's Warwick University can't
fly England's flag of St. George (red cross on white background) during
the World Cup, lest they offend foreign students who've chosen to study
in England. -- 5/18
Foxblog
This week's blog
highlights are on FoxNews.com. -- 5/18
End of teaching history
I hated "social studies" in school. It was all about the
three principal products of hither and yon: Saskatchewan was wheat, oil
and . . . cattle? It was hard to care. I loved to read history though,
especially American and British history.
In "Anti-Social
Studies" in the Weekly Standard, Kay Hymowitz argues that American
students don't know much
about history because their social studies teachers don't believe
in teaching history. The
National Council for Social Studies (NCSS), a teachers' group, promotes
curriculum
standards that are obscure, impenetrable, vast and trivial, Hymowitz
writes. There's much on personal identity and cultural sensitivity, little
on government, nothing on history.
Such references as there
are to government--"Describe how public policies are used to address
issues of public concern," for example--exist in some hazy realm
of ur-citizenship that could apply to the Democratic Republic of Korea
as easily as to our own. While it's true that high school students are
expected to be able to "explain the origins and continuing influence
of key ideals of the democratic republican form of government, such
as human dignity, liberty, justice, equality, and the rule of law,"
this task is 78th in a series of 87, given no more salience than such
pressing civic goals as knowing how to "construct reasoned judgments
about specific cultural responses to persistent human issues" or
how to "analyze the role of perceptions, attitudes, values, and
beliefs in the development of personal identity."
Elsewhere, NCSS teachers equate
patriotism with racism, Hymowitz says. They don't try to teach a common
American identity. Either you're a "niche American" -- African-American,
Hispanic, etc. -- or you're a member of the global community.
Now, this familiar multiculturalism
has begun to give way to something known as "global studies,"
a sprawling discipline that encompasses world history, current events,
world religions, geography, ecology, and world economics.
With all that, it's no wonder
kids don't have time to learn about the Boston Tea Party or the New Deal.
However, I'm not holding out high hopes for the Bush administration's
plan to boost civics
education, which the Washington Post promises won't include vulgar
flag waving or shouts of "U.S.A." These days civics education
means coerced community service, which disrespects the "spirit
of liberty," as Mark Steyn puts it. Democracy demands more than
learning how to bag canned food or pick up trash at the beach.
For content-rich world and
American history, Chester Finn of Education
Gadfly recommends the Core
Knowledge books. I like story-teller Joy Hakim's "History
of US." She thinks reading history should be fun. --
5/17
Fear factor
In some countries,
dissidents risk losing liberty or life if they speak out. In others, they
risk criticism. As Matt
Welch suggests, there is a difference. Peter
Briffa and Pejman
and Damian
Penny take down a Guardian writer who thinks New York City is turning
into Brezhnev's
Moscow. -- 5/17
Freddy Kruger's dysfunctional
family
Explosive growth in divorce rates built an audience for
teen slasher movies, theorizes Pat Gill, a professor of media studies
at the University of Illinois.
In all of the films, starting
with the trendsetter "Halloween" in 1978, the focus is on
kids who have to save themselves and others "because the parents
arent there," Gill said. Even when they are, "they are
stupid, they are selfish, they dont listen, they dont seem
to care about their kids. Or if they do care, they are unable to help
their kids face the nightmares of the everyday world."
The kids who become victims are similarly selfish and flawed, Gill noted.
The kids who survive are those who care about others and play the parental
role. These were themes that not only reflected on the absent parent,
but on perceived excesses of the "Me Decade" of the '70s,
she said. -- 5/17
Eye of the beholder
Maxwell Smart was a more devious spy than those Israeli
"art students" caught
selling overpriced art, writes Flit. He's got a link to a Drug Enforcement
agent's report, which
seems to prove conclusively that the Israelis were working in violation
of their tourist visas and misrepresenting made-in-China schlock as their
own art.
I feel implicated myself. Thirty
years ago, my brother Peter sold wind chimes door to door, pretending
to be earning money for college, in a similar but all-American scam; he
might have hit some drug agents' homes. And someone with his name appears
in the report. My cousin lives in the same town in Israel as one of the
art sellers; her daughter served in Israeli intelligence. I once had an
Israeli tour guide who was a demolitions expert and served in Lebanon,
like one of the art sellers. Could this be a coincidence? -- 5/16
Blanking out the news
The New York Times hasn't seen
fit to print a review of William McGowan's "Coloring the News,"
observes Nat Hentoff.
Unlike Bernard Goldberg's
bestselling Bias, McGowan's Coloring the News has received generally
favorable reviews, even in such papers as The Washington Post and the
Los Angeles Times, which are sharply criticized in his book. But the
influential New York Times Book Review has so far ignored McGowan's
indictment of much of the pressan analysis that, as Peter Schrag,
no right-winger, says in the Columbia Journalism Review, "has focused
attention on important and troubling issues."
The Times has a history of
banning its critics from its pages, says Hentoff, who was shunned for
dissing a book co-written by then editor Abe Rosenthal.
In a puff
piece on Nina Totenberg (via Romenesko),
I learned that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiated
at the reporter's wedding in 2000. Totenberg, who covers the court,
said it's not a conflict of interest because she's known Ginsburg for
a long time.
"I'm not a monk and
I don't live in a cocoon. I live in Washington. I needed a judge to
officiate at our wedding, so I asked Ruth Ginsburg."
Insider? Moi? -- 5/16
The men who are hunting
Al Qaeda
For a Marine colonel's description of the fighting
in Afghanistan and other blog highlights, go to American
Digest. The anonymous Marine says that commandos from Britain, Australia,
New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada are joining Americans
on raids. He also tells
the story of the Navy SEAL who was knocked out of his crippled helicopter
during Anaconda.
Meanwhile, Roberts crawled
from where he fell about 200 feet or yards (not certain which) to hide,
activated his emergency beacon. --60 + heavily armed Al Qaeda in the
area. When the rescue helo came back, a machinegun opened up on
it as it came in. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Roberts
totally disregarded his safety and attacked it with a handgun and his
grenades. He was killed in a close quarter firefight, incredibly
outnumbered and outgunned. -- 5/15
Attack of the killer Vegans
Unremitting Verse features an animal-loving
assassin's ode.
Through gently rolling
countryside
I often take my strolls;
I love to watch the tender mares
Attending to their foals,
I love the woodland creatures wild,
The squirrels, rabbits, voles
And if you do not love them too,
Ill drill you full of holes.
That's just the first verse.
-- 5/15
Highly effective pay
"A
gold star for merit pay" in the Chronicle of Higher Education
(registration required) reports on plans in Chattanooga to use Tennessee's
"value-added" assessment of teachers to link pay to effectiveness.
The best idea: Teachers who win high ratings would qualify for a bonus
for teaching high-risk students at a low-performing school.
Teachers ranked "highly
effective" by the state (according to their students' test-score
gains, averaged over a three-year period) will receive $5,000 salary
bonuses if they move into one of Chattanooga's high-priority schools.
Highly effective teachers already in those schools will receive $5,000
bonuses simply to stay put. -- 5/15
More mud on Gray
Davis got a $260,000 check from the pipefitters'
union after a pro-union ruling that will prevent plastic pipes from
replacing copper in homes.
Davis promised prison guards
he'd close privately run prisons.
That includes the state's only
minimum security prison for women.
Update: Tom Perry of Isntapundit
blogs on the virtues of plastic
pipe. Instapundit
has become an instaplumbing site too. It's the hot new blogging topic.
-- 5/15
Princess Pim
"What
Pim and Diana had in common,'' writes Ian Buruma in the Guardian,
was the habit of poking "a stuffy, complacent, out-of-touch establishment
in the eye."
The governing elite of
the 18th-century Dutch republic was a patriciate, known as regenten.
These worthies, who emerged from the Amsterdam merchant class, were,
on the whole, liberal-minded and decent men. They governed in a civilised,
paternalistic manner. They knew best what was good for the people, and
they did not expect their judgment to be questioned. Their natural heirs
are the social democrats who defined the vaunted Dutch consensus, which
Fortuyn
tried to bust wide open.
Regenten technocrats
"now govern in most democracies, from Britain to Japan," writes
Buruma.
Update: Richard Leed thinks
Buruma is full of it.
Buruma's parallel is ridiculous,
saying that the 'natural heirs' of Dutch patriciate in the ancient and
lamented Dutch Republic are the modern social democrats who tried to
repress Fortuyn. First of all, it is simply bad history to make a connection
of a modern movement with one that has long since disappeared, as the
Dutch Republic has. Secondly, and most absurdly, the victim of the previous
political murder in 1672 was John deWitt, the leader of the patriciate
against the theocratic Calvinists and the aristocratic Orangists. If
there is any 'natural heir' to the patrician toleration of people like
Arminius and Rembrandt, it is Fortuyn himself, not the unsociable and
undemocratic social democrats. -- 5/15
Blue-collar universities
Not all universities are hotbeds of political correctness, writes Rebecca
German, a science professor at University of Cincinnati," a large,
urban, largely commuter school." In her department, professors are
hired based on objective criteria -- number of published articles, courses
taught -- and an assessment of the quality of their research and the courses
they're qualified to teach.
My experience suggests
that group-think, left-bias etc is relatively rare among science profs
and students. The students I teach, often the first generation of their
working class families to go to college, are far more concerned with
jobs, the future, and what they are learning.
I was just typing up notes
from a discussion at the charter school I'm writing about. The students
-- mostly Hispanic, mostly working class -- refuse to excuse stealing
to feed one's family. A boy says there's lots of help for people in need.
A girl remarks, "Welfare is a kind of stealing." Another boy
says, "Get a job!' All three hope to be the first in their family
to go college. -- 5/15
The Nazi at the end of the
chatroom
I like Mike Malone's "Tyranny
of the Twit." -- 5/15
Jews out of San Francisco
State?
San Francisco State's president says the university will crack down on
rioters who surrounded Hillel students and yelled "Get
out or we will kill you" and "Hitler did not finish the
job" after a pro-Israel rally. The Hillel members were wearing T-shirts
with "peace" written in English, Hebrew and Arabic. Let's see
if SF State follows through.
This SF Chronicle story reports
an upsurge
of attacks on Jews and Arabs in the Bay Area. Actually, Jews and Jewish
buildings are the victims of all the recent attacks, except for a church
arson.
A recent fire at the Beth
Jacob Synagogue in Oakland and the destruction last month of the predominantly
Palestinian Antiochian Orthodox Church of the Redeemer in Los Altos
Hills -- both arson, authorities believe -- have fueled suspicion and
resentment between Jews and Arabs. No arrests have been made.
Local rabbis immediately condemned
the arson and promised to help
rebuild the church, which had hosted a series of discussions between
Jews and Arabs. -- 5/14
Course requirement: Agree
with the prof
At the University of South Carolina, Women's Studies 797 is required to
earn a graduate degree in women's studies. Classroom participation counts
for 20 percent of the grade. FIRE
(Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) reports on the professor's
Guidelines for
Classroom Discussion, which require that students:
acknowledge that
racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized
forms of oppression exist. Students must assume that people
-- both the people we study and the members of the class -- always do
the best they can. The Guidelines also stipulate that we
are all systematically taught misinformation about our own group and
about members of other groups, that this is true for members
of privileged and oppressed groups, and that students must agree
to combat actively the myths and stereotypes about our own groups and
other groups.
In short, students mustn't
challenge the professor's ideas. -- 5/14
Computers confuse classroom
Students who used computers in social studies class scored substantially
lower on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) history
exam, compared to students who didn't use a computer in class. So
says the Education
Intelligence Agency.
In the 4th grade, students
who used computers at school for social studies every day scored a whopping
47 points lower that students who "never or hardly ever" used
computers at school for social studies. The margin for both 8th and
12th graders was 24 points. The trend was virtually unbroken for all
three grade levels: the more frequently you used a computer at school
for social studies, the lower you scored. Conversely, students who used
the Internet for research projects scored much higher than those who
did not. The lesson here seems to be that computers should be used as
an enhanced library tool, but that their use in classroom instruction
for history is counterproductive. -- 5/14
No cap and gown for job-bound
graduates
San Fernando Valley high schools won't let graduating seniors participate
in graduation ceremonies unless they "commit"
to college, trade school or military training. Someone needs to be
committed, but it's not the students. -- 5/14
Corrupt but moderate
Debbie LaFetra is a connoisseur of San Jose Mercury News editorials.
She writes:
For all the scandals that
are piling on Gov. Davis, the thing that bothers me most is that the
Mercury News could win a Pulitzer for uncovering the most corrupt government
since Tammany Hall and the editorial board still wouldn't endorse Simon
in November. Instead, the endorsement for Davis will read something
like, "With great reservations, we reluctantly endorse Gov. Davis
for a second term. Simon has x, y and z positive traits, but he
is just too extreme to govern the diverse population of California.
We hope Davis will do better and urge you to give him another chance."
Same for all the major dailies in the state (except the Orange County
Register).
She could be right. If I were
advising Simon, I'd tell him to work on his image as a moderate, sensible,
ho-hum, non-drooling conservative. Say nice things about minorities. Say
you'll leave abortion law alone. Study McCain tapes. -- 5/14
Giving the chop to Indian
names
Admiration,
not derision, motivates the choice of names for a school's team, writes
Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle. In a Sports Illustrated
poll, 81 percent of Native Americans surveyed didn't want to see teams
stop using Indian names.
Yet Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg's
anti-mascot
bill bans the use of Redskins, Indians, Braves, Chiefs, Apaches and
Comanches, and gives a state panel the right to ban other names deemed
offensive to a minority. "Aztecs" aren't specifically banned:
San Diego State doesn't want to change its team name, which many Mexican-Americans
see as honoring Aztecs. The school did replace "Monty Montezuma"
with the more dignified "Ambassador Montezuma."
Stanford stopped being the
Indians when I was an undergrad. When a student poll failed to choose
a substitute -- "Robber Barons" was my favorite -- the university
adopted its color, Cardinal. Like the That Other School Crimson. My Native
American roommate hated Prince Lightfoot, who did a phony Indian dance
before the football games, but had no trouble with the team name.
In Minnesota, an animal rights
group wants the Austin High Packers
-- named for workers at the nearby Hormel meat-packing plant -- to become
the vegetarian Pickers. -- 5/13
Character assassination
The Dutch media is feeling guilty about demonizing
Pim Fortuyn, writes the Times of London.
Many papers noted that
the scenes of mass mourning, hysteria and anger at the media were reminiscent
of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Pim Fortuyn was made an outcast by politically correct Netherlands,
Professor Dr B. Smalhout, a columnist in de Telegraaf, the biggest selling
Dutch daily, said.
He was depicted as a fake professor, a second Hitler . . . a neo-Nazi,
a narcissistic homosexual and a political outcast. Practically all the
media took part, it was the fashionable thing to do, to have a go at
Professor Pim.
Pim as Princess Diana? -- 5/13
Another chance for martyrdom
Saddam Hussein has offered Yasir Arafat "safe
haven" in Baghdad, if the Palestinian leader is exiled by Israel.
Such a deal. -- 5/12
Scandal avalanche
Day after day, Gov. Gray Davis is being hit with scandal stories about
cronyism,
no-bid
contracts, a $25,000
donation from Oracle, a payoff to the prison
guards' union and asking the teachers' union for a $1
million contribution while discussing union-backed bills in the governor's
office. This has got to hurt.
Update: Davis invited Berkeley
students to meet with him -- in exchange for a
$100 campaign donation. In th same Chronicle story, Democratic insiders,
speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, complain of being shaken
down by the governor.
"I'm not naive. .
. . We've contributed quite a bit of money and sat next to him at dinner,"
said one prominent California chief executive officer who said he has
given more than $25,000 to the governor. "I know people give money
to get access."
But the CEO said his own disillusionment began when, hoping to press
Davis on a policy issue, he was told by Davis' staff that the governor's
ear was also getting bent by out-of-state business interests -- who
gave bigger checks.
"It was so direct. It's, 'These guys are giving me the money, and
I've got to listen,' " the CEO said. "This is entirely about,
'If you give me money, I will do this for you'."-- 5/12
Groupthink U
Michael Hyman went to college
in the late '60s. Intolerance for conservative ideas is nothing new, he
writes. Hyman thinks fear of being shot in a rice paddy motivated anti-war
protests, but old anti-warriors prefer to think of themselves as courageous
idealists.
Remember the slogan "Girls
say yes to guys who say no!" These guys are now sitting as department
chairs.
Mara Williams writes on the
uniformity of academic thought:
In my department, most
of the professors like to fish. They always look for people who "fit"
the department and it seems that people who fish "fit" particularly
well. They also like people who drink beer. Unfortunately, that leaves
those of us who don't drink or fish out of the running for jobs here.
Departments are chummy like that. All companies discriminate to a certain
extent against employees who don't fit their vision of what a good "lug
nut polisher" (or whatever) looks like. This is especially true
in academia where you spend the rest of your life working beside the
people in your department.
Eve Kayden was at the Haverford
speech that inspired Christina
Hoff Sommers to write on the lack of intellectual diversity on campus.
The worst part is that
most students didn't see her views as reasonable, or even as being a
threat. They saw her as a joke - a right-wing lunatic who should be
either ignored or made fun of. In truth, I think they couldn't even
understand what she was saying.
Go to Angry
Clam for the latest on explicitly biased Berkeley course offerings.
-- 5/12
Dworkin and anti-Dworkin
My review
of Andrea Dworkin's "Heartbreak" and Wendy McElroy's "Liberty
for Women'' is up on the San Jose Merc site. -- 5/12
Alive
Mona
Charen's oldest son was hit by a car. It looks like he'll live; it's
not clear yet how seriously his brain was injured.
Twenty-one years ago, I was
sitting in a neonatal intensive care unit at Stanford, watching the monitors,
wondering if my daughter would live or die. The odds were very bad. But
two young doctors, Keith Kimble and Bill Benitz, refused to give up on
her. And Allison refused to give up.
I just got back from touring
Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford
with my mother. Dr. Benitz, now head of neonatology, was our guide. He'd
sent me an e-mail three years ago in response to a column I wrote about
Allison's high school graduation. He remembered Allison because she was
the sickest baby he'd ever treated who survived. "She's a tough kid,''
he said today.
Allison is studying at Oxford,
so she couldn't make it. (It turns out she went to Palo Alto High with
one of the OxBlog guys,
who I'm now planning for her to marry.) I told Dr. Benitz that Allison
never went through the stage of thinking the world wasn't good enough
for her. No alienation. No depression. No black turtlenecks. She's happy
to be alive.
I wish for Mona's son the gift
Allison received in the first days of her life: a fighting chance.
Today's my mother's 75th birthday.
Last May, she and my father were both hospitalized. (They wheeled him
in to her hospital room for a birthday dinner on matching trays.) This
year, they're back in action. Tough parents too. -- 5/10
Fox reads
You can read ReadJacobs
highlights on FoxNews.com. At the moment, the headline on the Views
page says "matt'' instead of "mat." I'm trying to get it
fixed. -- 5/10
Not so special
On Education Gadfly, Jay Greene critiques a special
education myth: Schools aren't burdened with more disabled students.
They're classifying more normal but low-achieving students as learning
disabled, using very fuzzy criteria. Schools get more money for learning
disabled students, yet don't spend much to "treat" them. The
diagnosis also exempts students from accountability testing, reduces expectations
about their performance and covers up education malpractice, Greene writes.
He suggests a solution.
Making all special education
students eligible for vouchers not only expands the options available
to them and their families, it also provides a disincentive to public
schools to over-diagnose students, since public schools will not want
to lose these students to private schools.-- 5/10
Exemplary but not effective?
Students don't learn more when taught by board-certified teachers, according
to a Tennessee
study. Critics charge the National Board for Professional Teaching
Standards (NBPTS) measures how well teachers conform to progressive education
theories, not to how much progress their students actually make. In most
states, teachers get substantial bonuses or raises for earning NBPTS certification.
Tennessee measures teacher effectiveness through "value-added"
analysis of the gains in student test scores. For students taught by 16
NBPTS-certified teachers, only 14 percent of scores were rated exemplary,
while 10 percent were deficient. None of the teachers earned a bonus by
Tennessee standards, which require producing 115 percent of a year's growth
in three core subjects for three consecutive years. -- 5/10
Quindlen, uncut
Anna Quindlen's reference to her children's "textbooks'' having
fewer "uncut pages'' probably refers to "consumable" workbooks
with pages that can be torn out, writes Mary Anne Kania. She's another
10 of 11 scorer on the
intelligence test, so I suspect she's right.
Virginia Postrel says air feels
softer in humid weather. So Quindlen may feel a softening on the East
Coast. Here in California, the air gets dryer in summer.
Carroll Bloyd lives in Minnesota,
where ferocious cold dulls the sense of smell.
The arrival of spring
brings both floral scents and the ability to smell them again. And these
springs scents do seem soft after the harshness of winter. -- 5/10
Knowledge-based kvetching
Sonoma State tried to please
critics by replacing the militaristic "Cossacks" with Jack London-inspired
"Seawolves" but found new critics who complained the name honors
Nazi U-boat commanders. Timothy Sheridon finds the bright side. Kvetching
requires knowledge.
Specifically:
* There was a world war in the early 1940s.
* Germany was one of the nations involved
* Germany was one of the bad guys.
* The bad guys running Germany were called Nazis
* The German Navy had U-boats
* U-boats have captains (commanders)
* The U-boats patrolled the North Atlantic in a operating structure
known as a wolf pack.
Holy (deleted), I didn't realize they even taught these details any
more. Since the academy discovered that the text of the classic
history writings was oppressive, one doubts the need to disclose
mere technical details of the actual machinery. I suspect extra
credit for watching the History Channel is probably in order.
According to the National Assessment
of Educational Progress, two out of 10 students in grades four and eight,
and one out of ten students in grade 12 reached the proficient level on
the 2001 history exam.
The average student scored at the basic level in grades 4 and 8, and scored
below basic at grade 12. -- 5/10
Two Minute Hate
Steve Sailor of UPI rounds up European elites' reaction to the murder
of Pim Fortuyn: He
had it coming.
Fortuyn was popular
among immigrants, according to a Dutch survey cited by the Christian
Science Monitor.
Strangely enough for a
politician running on an anti-immigration platform, a recent poll in
the leading Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, focused on his popularity
among immigrants. According to the survey, many immigrants approved
Fortuyn's breaking of longstanding taboos in Dutch politics and his
role as catalyst in opening discussion about underlying tensions between
native Dutch residents and the immigrant population.
The article states that his popularity among those groups was for "putting
the finger on the sour wounds, stimulating debate, and giving immigrants
their own responsibility back as real citizens." Nearly 2 million
people in this densely populated country of close to 16 million are
ethnic minorities almost 800,000 of Muslim origin, mainly from
Morocco and Turkey.
The key phrase is "their
own responsibility as real citizens."
My brother Peter lived in Amsterdam,
six to 10 years ago. Many of his friends were immigrants from around the
world -- Indonesia, Surinam, Pakistan, Morocco, India, etc. -- who he'd
met in Dutch class. Few had steady jobs, perhaps because few were there
legally. But the ones he knew had left their homelands to escape the dead
hand of the past, not to establish their culture in a colder country.
-- 5/9
Chocolate falsely maligned
The enviro-whiners have gone too far! Now they want a warning
label on chocolate. -- 5/9
United hypocrites
James Lileks interprets the U.N.
debate on the latest resolution condemning Israel. It turns out Sudan,
which enslaves its Christians, is upset about the siege at the Church
of the Nativity. -- 5/9
To kill a dodobird
Damian Penny reports that black teachers in Nova Scotia want three
books removed from school libraries: "To
Kill a Mockingbird," "In the Heat of the Night" and
"Underground to Canada'' (about two black girls escaping slavery).
The books are offensive, the teachers say, because they include characters
who use the "n word.'' -- 5/9
Finally, an important online
test
Like Andrew Hofer, I got 10
out of 11 on this intelligence
test. -- 5/9
Union reformers
Peter Schrag writes on the backlash
to school reforms from the teachers' union and from get-tough rules running
headlong into reality.
In Chicago, the teachers' union
will run
two failing schools; the board of education will take over two different
schools slated to be closed for persistent failure. The union plan is
expensive: Teachers will earn more for teaching a longer school day and
classes will be limited to 20 students. The union may have to raise money
from foundations, as well as prioritizing its discretionary spending.
-- 5/9
Huh?
"Doing Nothing"
in the summer made Anna Quindlen a writer, she asserts in Newsweek. So
American kids should hang around being bored instead of going to soccer
camp or computer camp. Typically, she seems unaware of low-income and
working-class kids who spend their afternoons and summers watching TV.
But it was the first scene-setting paragraph that left me puzzled.
Summer is coming soon.
I can feel it in the softening of the air, but I can see it, too, in
the textbooks on my childrens desks. The number of uncut pages
at the back grows smaller and smaller.
Uncut pages? In Victorian novels,
people have to cut the pages of a book as they read. But that went out
early in the 20th century, and it's now the 21st. What is she talking
about? Is this some weird East Coast private school thing?
I also wonder about that "softening
of the air," which seems like a pretentious way of saying that it's
getting warmer. And if boredom makes the writer, why didn't ennui teach
young Anna that "the wheels inside that fuel creativity" is
a mixed metaphor? -- 5/8
Brainless boycott
Nat Hentoff lambastes five black law professors at the University
of North Carolina who boycotted
a discussion with Clarence Thomas, who came for a day-long visit in
March. Marilyn Yarbrough argued that Thomas, as the Supreme Court's only
black justice,
has ``lent cover'' to
his conservative colleagues by joining their ``anti-progressive'' decisions.
``Since we are all black,'' said Yarbrough, ``we did not want to lend
cover to him. We have welcomed justices we disagree with, such as Antonin
Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor.'' However, joining Thomas, she explained,
would have been seen as an endorsement, or at least a tacit approval,
of his views.
In their righteous self-approval,
these law professors clearly had no idea they were failing their students.
Here they were, in fundamental disagreement with Justice Thomas on a
number of crucial constitutional issues and in front of their students,
they could have challenged him directly. Talk about being role models
-- to all their students -- as professors with the intellectual equipment
to confront such a powerful figure in the law!
It's OK for white justices
to disagree with black academics, but blacks must toe the line. And, since
all blacks think alike, the black profs can't be in the same room lest
they be seen as thinking like Thomas. -- 5/8
From the teacher's desk
Mark DiBois, a veteran Georgia teacher, defends tenure after at least
three years of teaching, and says his state has a workable process for
removing bad teachers.
The truth is that administrators
have to get off their collective rumps and do their job effectively
and in case you haven't checked lately most of them don't like doing
that.
Glenn Sacks, a former high
school teacher, blames the "Teacher's
Code of Silence" -- and lazy administrators -- for keeping incompetent
teachers on the job.
Robert Wright weighs in on
the supply issue. He and his wife, both teachers, each spend about $1,000
a year buying classroom supplies.
The last time I ordered
Kleenex, 10 years ago, I had to order through the district warehouse.
They refuse to reimburse you for anything the warehouse carries. And
they wouldn't let me order just one box. It had to be a case. Where
am I going to store a case of Kleenex?
Wright ordered a class set
of Paul Zindell's "The Pigman." The principal said he thought
the book was better for 8th graders than 7th graders.
All I have to do is to
get the English department to classify all of the novels we have or
intend to purchase by grade level and have the department decide that
"The Pigman" is most appropriate for 7th grade. We're talking
about a list of 80 novels. The English department can barely agree on
what day it is. So, that's why I'll be buying 30 copies of "The
Pigman" out of my own pocket. I think they go for $6.95 a piece.
Anything over $25 needs prior approval. -- 5/8
Time matters
School spending doesn't correlate well with school performance, according
to a Pennsylvania analysis
by Standard & Poor's (via SardonicViews).
Seven of the state's 501 districts posted above-average scores for low-income
students for three years running. How? Maximize
instructional time, minimize disruptions, make no excuses. --
5/8
Traffic
Michael
Levy and Ross Nordeen e-mailed
me to say that if I use Instapundit's correct e-mail address, Alexa will
show that InstaProf is the 68,172nd
most visited site on the Net. My 780,766
still has Ben Sheriff's Layman's
Logic beat, but not his rugby site. The key is to lure Alexa Toolbar
users, who seem to be a rugby-loving lot.
Via Nordeen, I found a test
of my Blogger
Archetype. He is a Rebecca Blood. I am archetypically Sullivanesque.
But I don't know how to post the graphic, so you'll have to take my word
for it. -- 5/8
Bomber's logic
Luke Helder, the alleged Rural Delivery Bomber, has been arrested
in Nevada. In a non-exploding letter
to the Badger Herald, a University of Wisconsin newspaper, he tried
to explain his philosophy: Death doesn't exist. Government control is
bad. So is punctuation.
"I will die/change
in the end for this, but that's ok, hahaha paradise awaits!" the
letter read. "I'm dismissing a few individuals from reality, to
change all of you for the better, surely you can understand my logic."
"Dismissing from reality"
seems to suggest more than just blowing the hands off farmers and mailmen.
But Helder's dad and an old school buddy do their best to put pipe
bombs in a positive context.
Cameron Helder, Luke's
father, said his son is attempting to make his political beliefs heard.
"I think he's just trying to make a statement about the way the
government is run," he said.
Molly Webb, a UW-Madison junior who went to high school with Helder,
said he might have a drug problem, but she believed this was not the
source of his anger. "I think he just wanted to get his message
out there," she said. "He's not the kind of guy who would
hurt anyone."
Because death doesn't exist.
I don't think Helder will have
a freedom of expression defense, but insanity looks like a good bet. Apparently,
he was dismissed from reality some time ago, only nobody noticed. -- 5/7
Bad clone pun here
Tell your senator
you oppose criminalizing therapeutic cloning research. -- 5/7
The $100,000 hello
Gov. Gray Davis is notorious for mixing campaign
fund-raising with state business, writes Daniel Weintraub in the Sacramento
Bee. -- 5/7
Letters to the blogger
Jim Miller responds to
the "Rah, rah, rah for the Cooperative Ferns'' post:
The Portland Oregonian
bans Indian names in its sports pages. This meant that a team from a
reservations school could not be referred to by its name, which was
"Braves." Poor people just didn't realize it was offensive,
but the Oregonian set them straight. BTW, one name which does bother
me, "Redskin," is used by a number of teams from Indian schools.
I suppose the PC people would claim that is false consciousness.
Joachim Klehe writes on his
drug of choice:
I buy my chocolate (for
medicinal purposes only, of course) from El Ray Chocolate, the U.S.
distributor for high
cocoa content chocolate from Venezuela. Excellent selection, even
better service, and highly recommended! -- 5/7
Sound of one lobe flapping
Christina Hoff Sommers calls for action to nurture intellectual
diversity on university campuses.
In a recent talk at Haverford
College, I questioned the standard women's studies teaching that the
United States is a patriarchal society that oppresses women.
For many in the audience, this was their first encounter with a dissident
scholar. One student was horrified when I said that the free market
had advanced the cause of women by affording them unprecedented economic
opportunities. "How can anyone say that capitalism has helped women?"
she asked.
The woman who'd invited Sommers
was accused by to students of providing "a forum for hate speech."
Few conservatives make
it past the gantlet of faculty hiring in political-science, history,
or English departments. In 1998, when a reporter from Denver's Rocky
Mountain News surveyed the humanities and social sciences at the University
of Colorado, Boulder, he found that of 190 professors with party affiliations,
184 were Democrats. There wasn't a single Republican in the English,
psychology, journalism, or philosophy departments. A 1999 survey of
history departments found 22 Democrats and 2 Republicans at Stanford.
At Cornell and Dartmouth there were 29 and 10 Democrats, respectively,
and no Republicans.
David
Horowitz writes that universities fund left-wing speakers -- and find
last-minute excuses to cancel his talks.
At Vanderbilt, the university
annually provides roughly $130,000 for left-wing agitations, including
the visits of left-wing speakers. This is balanced by $0 for conservative
groups and speakers. Ironically, the faculties of these schools are
strong proponents of campaign finance reform in the political world
they dont control. -- 5/7
The history of me
The prize-winning essay in Prentice Hall's "What History Means to
Me'' contest is
flabby, trite and dull, Jeff Jacoby writes in the Boston Globe. Students
are trained to write about their feelings, not to research and analyze
events outside their own experience.
It discusses not history
but Lee herself (''How have Sputnik and other satellites influenced
my character and personality by what I see and hear every day?'') .
. . The 2000 grand prize-winner, Julija Zubac, wrote about how ''as
a little girl in faraway Europe, I easily recognized a historic place
when I saw one. There was something so incredibly fascinating about
walking along old streets or crossing a bridge that had been crossed
for hundreds of years.'' Andrew Goodman-Bacon concluded last year's
winning essay with ''My personal values and many of my wonderful opportunities
are because of history - to me, history means me.''
It's not that high school students
can't write about history. The Concord Review
publishes students' research papers. But facts are out in education.
Narcissism is in. -- 5/7
No exit
On Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson and readers debate
the "transfer"
of the Palestinian population from the West Bank to Jordan, Syria and
Lebanon. Rep.
Dick Armey endorsed this the other day on "Hard Ball." I
think the idea is insane. There are 2
million Palestinians on the West Bank, another million in Gaza. They
don't want to go and nobody wants to take them. Peaceful transfer is impossible.
It would take a real massacre on a massive scale to move them.
Yes, I know Kuwait kicked out
300,000 Palestinians during the Gulf War. But none of them thought Kuwait
was their homeland. And if a Palestinian state isn't economically
viable, well, that's their problem. -- 5/7
Dubious trafficking
Reading Privateer's
Savage Warblog, I came across Alexa.com's
traffic ranking gizmo: readJacobs.com is the 780,766th
most heavily visited site on the Net. But Alexa claims I outrank Instapundit,
which is ridiculous. Plus it says six sites are linked to readJacobs,
which is much too low. And clicking on the links thing gives 722 other
sites. So I'm a bit dubious about Alexa's accuracy, but give it a try,
blogfellows. If you like the numbers, believe them. And write glowing
reviews of your blog favorites.
I may be kicked out of the
Cabal of Amalgamated Warblog Profiteers: Donations through Amazon have
sunk to virtually nothing. It's my own fault for not mentioning the tip
jar in a long time. Well, it's over there on the left, readers.
Who was The First Blogger?
The Roman satirist
Juvenal, writes Dr. Weevil. -- 5/7
Rah, rah, rah for the Cooperative
Ferns
California's PC enforcers want to ban the Braves, ax the Redskins and
-- while they're at it -- consign to the rubbish heap of history the Fighting
Irish, Fighting Scots, Vikings, Spartans, Romans, Normans, Saxons and
Gauchos.
A proposed bill would allow
two state boards to ban
team names that might be offensive to a race, ethnicity, nationality
or tribal group. That could doom the Torrance High Tartars, Huntington
Park Normans, Alhambra Moors, Beverly Hills Normans and Loara Saxons,
reports the Los Angeles Times. The mascot of my daughter's alma mater
-- Palo Alto Vikings -- could be in trouble. It would take only one complaint
to refer the name to the state.
The bill's sponsor, Assemblywoman
Jackie Goldberg, wants to ban all names based on human groups. "My
own personal view is that there are too many animals, symbols and colors
that won't offend anybody," she said. "I would always err on
the side of caution." Goldberg forgets the animal rightsers are going
to complain about demeaning animals by using Lions, Tigers, Bears, etc.
as mascots. Gangs have laid claim to the colors red and blue. Someone's
always going to be offended.
Coachella Valley High
School picked the Arabs because the area is rich with date trees imported
from the Middle East. The Hollywood High School Sheiks were named in
homage to the 1921 Rudolph Valentino movie. And Rim of the World High
School in Lake Arrowhead chose the "Fighting Scots" because
the school, on the edge of Highway 18, feels as if it's perched in the
Scottish Highlands.
Names chosen because of the warrior-like images they conjure up -- the
Moors, after all, invaded Spain in the 8th century -- are criticized
for the warrior-like images they conjure up.
Sonoma State University dumped
the name Cossacks earlier this year, after complaints it was too militaristic.
Now there are complaints about the new name, Seawolves. Meant to honor
a Jack London character, to some it conjures up Nazi U-boat commanders.
Bill Leonard writes:
How about companion bills
to outlaw stupidity in legislators and their staffs, and to automatically
remove from public office any elected official or government bureaucrat
who shows by word or deed that he or she really does not have enough
to do? -- 5/6
Chocolate dreams
"I'm still waiting for the study proving that chocolate is good for
you," I wrote. I wait no longer! Faithful readers Michael
Levy, Ken Summers and Lorne Becker have sent me links to the research
of my dreams. Chocolate is good for the heart,
reduces blood
clots, boosts antioxidants,
prevents arterial
plaque -- and fights tooth
decay! It's like the scene in "Sleepers,'' when Woody Allen wakes
up and discovers that hot fudge sundaes and steaks are the health foods
of the future.
My grandfather was in the candy
business. You know those malted milk balls, Whoppers, that come in a milk
carton? His product. According to my mother, he "invented the modern
malted milk ball." (He figured out how to aerate the malt.) Hershey's
bought the company about five years ago, but I still look for Whoppers
at movie theaters. -- 5/5
Truth filter
Charles Johnson uses his Ersatz
Intelligence Algorithm to translate an interview with a Hamas leader.
-- 5/5
Strong words
Who should supply "peacekeeping" troops to stand between the
Palestinians and Israelis? Fred
Pruitt suggests Belgium or Luxembourg. Or else mobilizing the U.S.
State Department's 335th Heavy Strongly Worded Statement Brigade. -- 5/4
Fade of Gray
Just when he's up for
re-election, Gov. Gray Davis is being hit with scandal stories involving
shredding,
a "no-bid
contract for unneeded software and a claim by the teachers' union
that he's opposing their bills because they refused to give Davis a $1
million campaign contribution. I think the union charge is false:
Davis cares about his education reforms and doesn't want to see them destroyed.
But his years of manic fund-raising are coming home to roost. California's
next governor could be Clark Kent. I mean, Bill Simon. He'll benefit from
the too-rich-to-steal image. -- 5/4
Unfair equity rules
Gender equity in college sports is unfair,
argues Jessica Gavora in the Chronicle of Higher Education (link may require
registration). The government's Office of Civil Rights interprets Title
IX to require that the number of male and female athletes must be proportional
to the number of male and female students -- not to the number of students
wanting to play sports. To keep a money-making, alumni-pleasing football
team, colleges must eliminate men's teams in other sports.
Bucknell University has
announced it will drop wrestling and men's crew as varsity sports, eliminating
44 men's positions. Seton Hall and the University of St. Thomas have
dropped their wrestling teams. Iowa State University has eliminated
baseball and men's swimming. The University of Nebraska at Lincoln has
also axed men's swimming and diving, leaving only three of the institutions
in the Big 12 conference still participating in the sport. And those
are just a few of the institutions that have cut men's sports to comply
with the proportionality test of Title IX.
The University of Wisconsin
at Madison had 429 male athletes in 2000, 425 female athletes. Federal
civil rights officials demanded UW add 25 women because 53.1 percent of
students are women.
Many
colleges and universities attract more women than men. Yet female students
-- especially older women returning to finish a degree -- are less motivated
to play competitive sports than males. So male athletes lose the chance
to complete while women's teams have trouble filling their rosters.
Thanks to Iowa's status as
an early caucus state and its passion for wrestling, George W. Bush may
tell the Office of Civil Rights to lighten up on quotas. -- 5/4
One box of pens per year
Over on the Patio,
Martin Devon is wrestling with school
funding: Do you spend more to improve second-rate schools? Or is it
just throwing good money after bad? He posts e-mail from an Ohio
history teacher who has to buy her own supplies once her annual box
of pens, chalk and paper clips runs out.
Denying supplies is a hidden
tax on dedicated teachers, who will spend what it takes to get the tools
they need. The less dedicated do without. But Devon's right to wonder
about priorities. With more than $8,000 per student -- lavish by California
standards -- the district should be able to fix the copier.
The most convincing answer
I've seen in the "does money matter" debate is that more money
will make a pretty good school better but will not improve a bad school.
So, what does improve a bad school? Usually, nothing. Sometimes
a dynamic principal with power to make changes can turn a school around.
Unfortunately, such leaders are rare. They get squashed by the system,
not promoted. -- 5/4
Drink deep, earn more
Boozers
make the big bucks, according to a new University of Calgary study
that found moderate and heavy drinkers earn more than sippers or abstainers.
Another study concluded that mildly
depressed women live longer than the eternally perky. So the way to
be wealthy and healthy is to be soused and sad. I'm still waiting for
the study proving that chocolate is good for you. -- 5/4
Quick Reads Fox
If you want the thrill of reading Quick Reads on FoxNews.com,
this is your chance.
-- 5/4
Instant tenure for teachers
Here's a really bad idea: Make it even harder to weed out ineffective
teachers. California teachers' unions are pushing a bill, SB
1968, that would give tenure to new teachers after two years -- and
it's really more like 18 months -- unless the district can show cause
to dismiss the novice. A two-person panel, one from the school board and
one from the union, would hear appeals. In other words, new teachers who
aren't very good but aren't outrageously bad will get tenure because it
will be too complicated to get rid of them. And they'll be there forever
with no incentive to improve.
On the flip side: Why is it
so hard to keep good teachers on the job? Read Jay Mathews in the Washington
Post on a falsely accused
teacher's ordeal. -- 5/3
Talking Bubba
Peggy Noonan
once predicted Bill Clinton would have a TV
talk show called "Here's Bill" after he left the presidency.
Now she explains why it won't happen: it's too much work and Hillary won't
let him.
She doesn't want her
husband in a job that would put him back on the media radar screen on
a daily basis. She knows that if he had a TV show he'd wind up in the
kind of trouble presidential spouses aren't supposed to get into. And
she intends for him one day to be a president's spouse.
If I were a TV exec, I'd be
dubious about hiring Clinton. He loves to talk but he doesn't like to
shut up. And I'm not sure that he's got that much personal popularity
left with the American people. He's no Oprah. Howard
Kurtz says the Clinton lovers and haters would watch, giving "Here's
Bill" a 100 percent share. But for how many days? -- 5/3
Moira blogs
Moira Breen's Inappropriate
Response is back. -- 5/3
Investing in schools
Giving money to schools is harder than it looks, writes Chester Finn,
introducing a series of articles on education
philanthropy. --
5/3
Sore losers
Eric Olsen says the
Arabs don't hate Jews. They hate everybody who makes them look like
pathetic losers. (He uses less polite language.) That's why we're the
Great Satan and Israel is only the Little Satan. And Europeans don't want
to kill Jews, just sneer at them. I think he's right. -- 5/2
Passing
Zenflea
is Jewish but can pass for Nordic -- if she doesn't wear a star of David
necklace. Asparagirl looks
Jewish, but might not if she lightened or straightened her hair.
I read John Hersey's "The
Wall'' about the Warsaw Ghetto when I was a teen-ager. Afterwards, I looked
in the mirror and wondered
if I could pass. Maybe, I thought. But then I wondered about the rest
of my family. I didn't think my parents or my sister could pass. So I
decided to share their fate, no matter what. Then I remembered I was living
in a Chicago suburb. Nobody was coming to get us.
My daughter looks Scottish
or Irish, with maybe a trace of Dutch. Not Jewish, certainly. But she
does have a star of David necklace, which she wears occasionally. I thought
of asking her not to wear it when she flew to England. Instead I told
her to clobber anyone who caused trouble on the flight.
She's now studying in Oxford,
home of Oxblog, a new addition
to BlogWorld written by expatriate Americans. -- 5/2
The Sept. 11 excuse
In possibly the stupidest exploitation of the Sept. 11 attack, New York
politicians and unions are trying to block the opening of new charter
schools. John
Fund writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Democratic legislators
and state teacher unions are pushing the argument that the attack's
aftershocks on the state budget should block the opening of any new
charter schools--independent public schools that operate with more flexibility
and freedom--for two years. "Charter schools drain precious resources
from public schools," says Assemblyman Paul Tonko, an upstate Democrat.
"This extraction of funds could result in multimillion-dollar shortfalls
for local school systems." His bill would stop the opening of a
dozen charter schools in the state that have already been approved for
operation. To date, only 32 charter schools have been allowed to open,
in part because of bureaucratic resistance.
New York charters get 70 percent
of normal school funding. -- 5/1
Popping the populist bubble
While taking out Demo-hunk John Edwards, Mickey Kaus explains why populist
rhetoric falls flat. Most Americans don't think "powerful forces"
are in their way. Where there are such forces at work, "often they
are powerful forces and special interests within the Democratic party."
For example, Edwards says "forces inside Washington work against
people'' in the ghetto. Kaus writes:
It's not easy to blame
the modern problems of ghetto residents on the decisions of elite Washington
insiders -- unless they were the Washington insiders who gave us the
old welfare (AFDC) system despite what were the repeatedly-expressed
objections of the voters. (Even the race discrimination that created
the ghettos wasn't, and isn't, a Washington force.) But if there are
political "forces" holding back ghetto kids today, they surely
include the teachers' unions, which prevent reform of existing inner-city
public school systems and fight attempts to replace them with something
that might be better.
And voters get that. --
5/1
Learning English
News flash: Immigrant students taught in English learn
English a lot faster than students taught mostly in their native language.
Results are in from California's
new statewide English
Language Development Test.
Twenty-five percent of
English learners in specialized immersion programs statewide scored
high enough to be considered fluent. Nine percent of students in bilingual
programs, receiving some instruction in their native language, scored
at the same level.
Students waived into bilingual
classes tend to speak less English and come from poorer families than
those in English immersion, say bilingual ed defenders. That accounts
for some of the difference in results.
The test also shows that districts
are slow
to reclassify students as fluent: While 24 percent of "English
Learners" tested as proficient in English, only 9 percent were moved
out of the program. -- 5/1
California gets wimpy on
failing schools
Three years ago, 430 low-performing
schools in California were given more state money to fund improvement.
The schools were supposed to show progress or face a state takeover. Now
the state is wimping out, reports the Sacramento Bee.
The state quietly has
lowered its performance demands and expanded its penalty options for
the 122 campuses that declined in student achievement last year and
are subject to seizure if they repeat that dismal showing this year.
Put simply, a school could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in
state money, see its test scores fall each of the past two years and
still not be taken over by the state or see a single teacher or administrator
transferred.
Lowering the improvement criteria
should drop the number of sanctioned schools to three dozen this year.
That's still more than the state education department is prepared to handle.
Most failing schools will face a "soft sanction." A team
of education consultants will write an improvement plan and advise on
implementation. Soft, yes. But where's the sanction? Where's the accountability?
Bush's "No Child Left
Behind'' law demands that high-poverty schools show improvement or lose
Title I federal aid. The feds will have to hang tough on accountability.
Otherwise, nothing will change. -- 5/1
Inner-city churches become
schools
With the help of vouchers, tax credits or privately funded scholarships,
inner-city churches are preparing to educate
poor children, according to Tamara Henry of USA Today.
Inner-city Christian
churches across the nation are quietly opening their own schools and
making other preparations for an expected flood of neighborhood children
who may soon have government dollars to pay for their special brand
of private education.
The churches are taking charge in some neighborhoods because congregations
and ministers are convinced that public schools neglect local children
and because they believe students are more likely to succeed academically
if they receive religious training.
Henry cites a security guard
who sells his blood four times a month to pay the difference between full
tuition and his son's privately funded scholarship to Christian Academy
of San Antonio. -- 5/1
Junking science
When scientists try to debate
pseudoscientists, they tend to get slimed by little green men from
UFOs, writes Lawrence Krauss in the New York Times.
Although it is probably
true that there is far more that we do not know about nature than that
we do know, we do know something! We know that balls, when dropped,
fall down. We do know that the earth is round and not flat. We do know
how electromagnetism works, and we do know that the earth is billions
of years old, not thousands. . . .
Science is not a democratic
process. It does not proceed by majority rule and it does not accept
notions that have already been disproven by experiment.
Scientific
literacy remains low, according to a National Science Foundation report;
70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process.
The NSF survey found that 60 percent believe in psychic powers, and 30
percent think UFOs are space visitors. Half think early humans co-existed
with dinosaurs.
Oh, and we're importing increasing
numbers of foreign-born scientists and engineers. -- 5/1
Our thing
HappyFun Steve Neal has posted a photo of the Blogger
gang who gathered at his house last weekend. Everyone is smiling pleasantly,
except for me. I appear to be screaming for more beer. And there was plenty.
Neal also blogs on the Saudi
ad campaign, which quotes President Bush saying the Saudis have been
"nothing less than cooperative.'' A voiceover declares:
"Read the editorials,
tune in to the Sunday morning news shows or listen to talk radio if you
want opinions. Listen to America's leaders if you want the facts."
The ad was written by Americans
who don't seem to understand American psychology. We don't sit around
waiting for "leaders" to tell us "the facts." Especially
not politicians. Well, maybe it's a rope-a-dope strategy, as in rope the
dopey Saudis into spending millions of dollars for a useless ad campaign.
"The People of Saudi Arabia
-- Allies Against Terrorism" is the tagline. HappyFunPundit suggests
more credible alternatives, such as:
"Saudi Arabia --
Now with 40% less treachery!"
"The House of Saud -- We suck, but we have a lot of money."
"Saudi Arabia -- Come for the oil, stay for the beheadings."
-- 5/1
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