Another article on character education

Thanks to Cyndy for sending me this link. It appears the new meme is character education, and here is an example of one magnet school that uses a program based on another variant of character education.

Students walk into school, greet waiting teachers with a hearty look-you-in-the-eye handshake and assemble in the gym.

There, they stand at attention, say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the national anthem under the watch of soldiers from nearby Fort Eustis, who also inspect the kids to make sure they're wearing their proper uniforms.

A few children pass around a microphone and take turns leading the group in shouting slogans such as "I am someone special" and "Believe in yourself."

Thus began a recent day at the magnet school, which takes inner-city kids and teaches them how to set a formal table, resolve conflict and speak proper business English as well as solve a math problem. After only a five-week summer break, the students return to school Monday while most public schools in Virginia reopen in late August or September.

"What we're attempting to do is take these kids with great potential and make sure they realize it," said Walter S. Segaloff, businessman and founder of An Achievable Dream. "We want to have productive, law-abiding, educated citizens."

The results are absolutely spectacular: these are inner city kids. Test scores are high; not only that, 92% go to college and 8% go to the military. Wow: 100% of all the kids go somewhere, which makes me wonder, are there any kids that struggle with the program? What happens to them? Do they drop out before they make any impact on the numbers?

Out of curiosity, I did a brief search to see if I can find more about the people and funding behind "An Achievable Dream". It's a hybrid public-private venture, whatever that is, founded by a businessman, Walter Segaloff (scroll down). From what I can tell, they get money from businesses, local government, the DOE, and other interesting sources to help fund this program. He's won quite a number of awards for his program.

I have to admit I've already developed a jaundiced eye towards this program. It's hard for me to tell whether this is a for-profit venture and to know how much money this guy makes off this thing. However, he seems to have attracted plenty of money to the program. From its history, the program has expanded from an after-school program to a full-time deal.

I'm a bit concerned about this public-private thing. What is that anyway? Is there a board of directors? Who determines curriculum? Hard to say, but I'm concerned this may be the trend of the future, especially as public schools lose even more funding due to NCLB mandates.

Not only that, the whole military flavor of the school, while apparently quite effective, just bugs me.

Education platform

Brief summary, as found in the LA Times:

Education

Summary: Seeks tax credits for college tuition. Supports public school choice, in which families can elect which local school their child attends, as opposed to providing vouchers that can be used to pay private-school costs. Also favors charter schools, the Head Start program and professional development for teachers.

Excerpt: "We believe providing [educational] resources without reform is a waste of money, and reform without resources is a waste of time."

Here I go again, off-message as usual, but this sounds as though it comes straight from the bowels of the so-called centrist Dem's policy people. Time for high colonics if you ask me but I'm going to be patient (and hold my nose regarding the ed policy). Good thing we have news of this impulse in the NYT. It's long but worth your time if you're not in sync with this faction.

Lakoff transcript now available

Surprised to see it up so quickly. Note: also contains the Moyers interview with Kevin Phillips, who wrote the book American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.

Lakoff discusses reframing: how they do it, how we must do it. He provides examples they've used: tax relief, healthy forests, clean skies, trial lawyer, liberal. He points out if they need to do this type of reframing, then it must contain a weakness.

The response is to reframe their reframe, using our words and our values. I liked his reframe of trial lawyer: public protection attorneys.

Lakoff very quickly rattled off a bunch of progressive values we need to bring up, in order to counter their language: integrity, honesty, fairness, freedom, community, trust. He says it's important to say why we have these values and provide more detail about our connection to these values.

He says repetition is an important key to getting the message out. The conservatives do it; he says there's nothing wrong with doing the same.

He ends with another technique to reframe the reframe: use positive words to respond (i.e., do not negate what they say because then we are using their words).

Example: 'we are not safer (in response to Dubya's assertions that we are safer)' is not a good response since it uses their reframe. Much stronger is: More terrorists have been created...

All good stuff. I think we know these things intuitively but he's put it together in one place, and I'm glad to see he's trying to get his message out.

Barbara Miner on educating all children

NCLB is “like a Russian novel,” says Scott Howard, former superintendent in Perry, Ohio. “That’s because it’s long, it’s complicated and, in the end, everybody gets killed.”

In Barbara Miner's piece on NCLB.

The right to a free, public education is enshrined in the constitutions of all 50 states. That right is under attack by the Bush administration and its allies.

Using the club of its shamelessly misnamed No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Bush agenda punishes and sets up public schools for failure while promoting privatization schemes that funnel dollars to for-profit and religiously based programs.

At stake is not just the future of public education, but the very concept of a public sector that serves the common good. If public schools—in particular, urban schools—are decimated, can any other public institution survive the conservative privatization mania?

One quibble with her article, which goes for nearly all articles against NCLB: blindness towards one major supporter of this bill. I would say, for each mention of BushCo, please keep in mind the so-called centrist Dems also spawned NCLB and are still staunch supporters. Saying so-and-so voted for this bill doesn't help us or Kerry. This approach is maddeningly superficial and doesn't come close to addressing the more serious impulse towards corporate plundering supported by this Democratic faction under the guise of code words. The problem lies with the so-called centrist Dems, who are not going to let NCLB change substantially without putting up a nasty fight.

Education and the DNC

Sounds horrible that my expectations are so low but I don't expect much on education at the DNC.

For those who are similarly disheartened, here's news from Susan Ohanian about the ad placed in the Boston Globe by teachers and parents. I'm glad this group is speaking up. Take a look.

JOHN KERRY, JOHN EDWARDS and the DEMOCRATIC PARTY--
Teachers need your support to save our schools from the punitive law misleadingly labeled "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) and preserve access to education for all young Americans.

In less than three years, NCLB has moved forward the Bush administration plan to privatize America's public schools. Already more than 6,000 public schools are threatened with closure, and more than a million parents will soon be receiving letters notifying them that their neighborhood schools have joined Washington's failing schools lists.

Passed by a bipartisan vote, NCLB will close the majority of American elementary schools, or will allow them to be taken over by the state or profit-making businesses.

NCLB. . .


Shifts control of most aspects of education from states to Washington ideologues

Drives students and teachers out of schools and encourages lying about the facts

Limits and proscribes educational research

Bases all decision-making on test scores

Labels effective schools as failing and effective teachers as unqualified

Controls who may teach and how they teach

Mandates archaic methods and materials

Uses blacklists to banish professionals, institutions, methods, and books

Punishes diversity in schools

Is unconstitutional

Placed by sosvoice.org

Beyond the issue of (not enough) funding, which is a major distraction, the law itself needs drastic change. More on what's wrong.

1. The long- and short-term effects of NCLB will be devastating for American education.

NCLB is a law that is both negative and punitive: It is designed to force conformity and achievement of impossible goals through a system of punishments of local and state authorities, administrators, teachers, students, and parents.

During a period that extends from the present until 2014, NCLB will close or drastically change most neighborhood schools.

Schools labeled as failing (needing improvement) would be closed, taken over by the state, or turned over to private, profitmaking interests. Could the state take over the schools? That’s already happened in several big cities—Detroit, Philadelphia, and Newark among them—and no problems have been solved. The ultimate goal is to privatize American education. Will American parents let their neighborhood schools be taken over?

2. NCLB is the climax of a long-term campaign to privatize American education.

Within a neoconservative movement to privatize all aspects of American society, a heavily funded and well-organized campaign has created NCLB to discredit and destroy public eduation. There is no other explanation for the impossible, destructive conditions it imposes on the nation’s schools. Its enactment and implementation will wipe out a century and a half of progress in which American public education has evolved, with all its deficiencies, into the most successful and inclusive system the world had yet known.

3. NCLB is driving both students and teachers out of education.

There is already a dramatic increase in dropouts and pushouts from high schools due to increased high-stakes testing, the narrowing of curriculum, and controls on how and what teachers may teach. Many students are being driven out of high schools because they can’t pass the tests, get promoted from ninth to tenth grade, or earn a diploma. And many schools and school systems are hiding the data on the dropouts. This dropout rate will increase as NCLB reaches more punitive phases. In fact, the law sets up conditions in which it is to the advantage of schools to drive out low achievers. NCLB requirements lead to massive numbers of failing learners. Research shows that children who fail a grade are very likely to drop out of school before finishing high school.
Many highly professional teachers are leaving teaching or taking early retirement to escape being required to conform to aspects of the law that they believe make it impossible to teach in the best interests of their pupils. In addition, the requirements of academic majors in each subject they teach is causing certified secondary teachers to lose their certification and be labeled as unqualified. This is a particular problem in middle schools and in smaller rural secondary schools where teachers often are needed to teach multiple subjects.

4. NCLB centralizes control of every aspect of American education, including policy, methodology, curriculum, choice of text books, evaluation, and staffing, shifting power from local districts and states to a Washington bureaucracy.

NCLB establishes a national curriculum and methodology in reading and mathematics and other fields. Faceless bureaucrats in Washington are telling local schools which commercial programs and tests they may and may not use. The teaching of reading and math has been turned upside down with tired discredited methods and curricula being anointed as scientific, while the most effective methods and materials based on the years of research in and out of classrooms are marginalized and forbidden. This has produced an opposition to NCLB composed of states rights conservatives and academic freedom liberals.

5. NCLB defines what is and isn’t science.
Through a series of panels, laws, and mandates, the federal government has defined what is science so narrowly, that 95 percent of scientific study in education has been swept aside as unscientific and decades of research has been wiped off federal websites such as ERIC. NCLB and the antecedent Reading Excellence Act contain literally hundreds of redundant references in the law requiring conformity to that definition of scientific research as a condition of participation. Text materials, teacher certification, tutors, staff development, and curriculum must all be based on the same narrowly defined “science.”

6. NCLB makes scores on mandatory tests the basis of all major decision-making in the schools, including which schools are failing.

The fight for civil rights of the 1960s made it illegal to segregate pupils by race, color, sex, or creed. Testing remains the only legal way to discriminate in American schools. NCLB mandates testing of all pupils for all schools in all states from 3rd to 8th grade and at least once in high school.
NCLB requires schools to be labeled as “needing improvement” (that is, failing) on the basis of “adequate yearly progress” on test scores by each subgroup, including handicapped and second-language learners. If one subgroup falls short in any one area, the school fails. Furthermore, the bar is raised until in a dozen years all pupils in all subgroups must beat the “proficient level,” a term now used to describe the score achieved by less than 20 percent of all pupils. The National School Boards Association says that within a dozen years the vast majority of all schools in all states will be labeled as failing to improve.
Parents are denied their rights to withhold their children from testing; 95 percent of each subgroup must be tested or the whole school is labeled failing.
Costs to states and LEAs are far more than they receive. Several states, districts, and schools have opted not to participate. Every subgroup must achieve Adequate Yearly Progress. All states are also mandated to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Test companies and test-scoring companies are making huge profits while providing bad tests and errorridden scoring. Many states are desperately trying to massage the testing and their passing criteria to produce a higher success rate. But the feds have already put states on notice that they won’t let them ease the passing criteria and the law will eventually require achievements no state can finesse.

7. The law requires busing of pupils, at district expense, from non-improved schools to other schools.

Receiving schools must accept “NCLBs” regardless of space. In New York, a middle school has been forced to add more than 200 “NCLB” kids to their already full classrooms. Where is there a nearby school in Alaska or rural Arizona to send kids to? Even Mayor Daley in Chicago is complaining about moving hundreds of kids from failing school to failing school.

8. NCLB controls who may teach and not teach and how they
will be certified.

Federal standards are established which take control away from states in the name of assuring qualified teachers in every class. Requirements for teacher aides effectively close down heritage language programs. In Florida and certain other states, the state has called in teaching certificates and refused to reissue them. On the other hand, the federal government has funded a national board, which will certify people who can pass tests without having any professional education.

9. Enforcement of NCLB employs blacklists.

A list of who and what conforms and does not conform to NCLB criteria is being used to blacklist people, institutions, methods, and materials. Mostly this is accomplished without direct confrontation through using “scientific criteria” in funding reviews, but it is widely known whose names disqualify a proposal and which terms and programs are to be avoided. Conflicts of interest are the rule rather than the exception. For example, to be a literacy trainer in Arizona, one must pass a test that includes newly-banned terms such as miscue analysis and print awareness as wrong answers.

10. NCLB, the federal law, is unconstitutional, as it violates the Constitution, which leaves education to the states.

NCLB affects every child and teacher in every school in the United States. It establishes a national curriculum and methodology in reading and math.

For those who bash BushCo for this legislation, know that the so-called centrist Dems also support NCLB, which is probably why there is radio silence on the subject.

DNC coverage

I'm supposed to be doing something else but what can I say? The kids over here aren't fighting yet so I think it's okay for this little bit.

A feed for the Democratic Convention I like (I'm sure most know this already):
http://www.conventionbloggers.com/

Convention coverage at: http://hyperlincoln.blogspot.com/ by Iddybud and Anonymoses.

And the most interesting coverage so far (surely I'm not biased):

at the American Street

For instance, see Jenny's account of the first day.

Interrupting my radio silence...

Problems with the router meant no posting. Have been off-line this weekend but the problem has been resolved, whatever that means. I was even thinking about dragging me and the kid over to the library today so I could get at least get an explanatory post up. Am I nuts or what?

Truth be known, I'm more excited about bloggers being at the convention than the convention itself. I'm hoping the media doesn't turn negative on them, which Jay Rosen predicts may happen in a succeeding news cycle.

Our forte, as bloggers, is analysis of words and events, from afar. Bloggers being live, in person, is a new thing. Will bloggers adapt? I think so. I remember the Santa Monica Farmers Market disaster locally. We have a personal and fresh take to words, ideas and events that journalism, as an entity, can't match.

The most important thing is that bloggers are being taken seriously, or as seriously as the media can handle it. We are a threat to the status quo, and they know it, as can be seen by all the snide ways bloggers have been characterized.

Time for them to get used to competition; maybe it'll help the state of journalism as it is now.

My day is busy; I'll be online tonight, after everything is over.

Moyers: on why our democracy is in peril

By way of Chuck Currie's fine blog, we find another great Moyers' essay: on how the conservatives hijacked Christ and why our democracy is in peril.

OVER THE PAST few years, as the poor got poorer, the health care crisis worsened, wealth and media became more and more concentrated, and our political system was bought out from under us, prophetic Christianity lost its voice. The Religious Right drowned everyone else out.

And they hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor." The very Jesus who told 5,000 hungry people that all of you will be fed, not just some of you. The very Jesus who challenged the religious orthodoxy of the day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath, who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast, who raised the status of women and treated even the tax collector like a child of God. The very Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple. This Jesus has been hijacked and turned into a guardian of privilege instead of a champion of the dispossessed. Hijacked, he was made over into a militarist, hedonist, and lobbyist, sent prowling the halls of Congress in Guccis, seeking tax breaks and loopholes for the powerful, costly new weapon systems that don't work, and punitive public policies.

Let's get Jesus back. The Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight-hour work day. Let's get back the Jesus who caused Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop. The Jesus who called a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor - 10 years before the New Deal. The Jesus in whose name Dorothy Day challenged the church to march alongside auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. The Jesus who led Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.

That Jesus has been scourged by his own followers, dragged through the streets by pious crowds, and crucified on a cross of privilege. Mel Gibson missed that. He missed the resurrection - the spiritual awakening that followed the death of Jesus. He missed Pentecost.

This is a different essay, and I like it. Moyers writes more about religion and its connection with politics, manipulation, and personal beliefs.

But let's do it in love. I know it can sound banal and facile to say this. The word "love" gets thrown around too casually these days. And brute reality can mock the whole idea of loving one another. We're still living in the shadow of Dachau and Buchenwald. The smoke still rises above Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and East Timor. The walls of Abu Ghraib still shriek of pain. What has love done? Where is there any real milk of human kindness?

But the love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book of essays Justice and Mercy, where he writes: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind."

What I'm talking about will be hard, devoid of sentiment and practical as nails. But love is action, not sentiment. When the church was young and fair, and people passed by her doors, they did not comment on the difference or the doctrines. Those stern and taciturn pagans said of the Christians: "How they love one another!" It started that way soon after the death of Jesus. His disciple Peter said to the first churches, "Above all things, have unfailing love toward one another." I looked in my old Greek concordance the other day. That word "unfailing" would be more accurately rendered "intense."

Glenn Tinder reminds us that none are good but all are sacred. I want to think this is what the founders meant when they included the not-so-self-evident assertion that "all men are created equal." Truly life is not fair and it is never equal. But I believe the founders were speaking a powerful spiritual truth that is the heart of our hope for this country. They saw America as a great promise - and it is.

But America is a broken promise, and we are called to do what we can to fix it - to get America back on the track. St. Augustine shows us how: "One loving soul sets another on fire." But to move beyond sentimentality, what begins in love must lead on to justice. We are called to the fight of our lives.

The politics of love is spiritual.

Lakoff on Moyers' NOW

Tonight, Friday. Brancaccio interviews Lakoff.

Moonie Times likes NCLB!

Here's what the opposition says about NCLB and you have to go to the Moonie Times to find it. They like NCLB!

Schools act gets high marks at summit

About 200 educators at a national summit in Washington shared positive learning gains under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, in stark contrast to continuing complaints against the law by teachers unions.
The law's $3 billion in Reading First grants in the past three years has enabled schools to hire reading coaches to help elementary teachers boost language proficiency, said Sandy Granchelli, a coach from Coventry, Conn.

It should be noted they are reporting about a summit sponsored by the Department of Education. Can you bet you're not going to see much complaining there? Hell, what if it gets back and they get disinvited for the next year? Can't risk that.

Some other headlines I found on the same page of this article: 'Jobs, income growth enable customers', 'Terrorists testing jets, crews say', and 'Petition worker suspects threat'.

Is Kerry really good for teachers?

Check out the dkos discussion on the Washington Monthly article on education. It's probably the best discussion of this article so far, especially since it is such a blatantly rah-rah piece. I'm short on time. I'd like to follow up on this later.

Education could be a potent election year issue

So is education an election year issue? My short answer: it could be but it's not.

Too bad, because education could easily be an extraordinarily potent election year issue. The most powerful weapon the Dems could use is deliberately not in play. That would be, of course, opposition to NCLB.

Case in point: Florida.

Florida has been going through testing hell: they've got dual standardized testing programs providing conflicting messages about whether kids are putatively getting an excellent education or not. It's going to get worse over the summer.

WaPo has a summary, and it doesn't look good.

Those two programs -- one federal and one state -- are on a collision course this summer. That's when new test results could show that many of state's schools pass the Florida A+ standards while failing to show sufficient improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind rules. Failing to make progress on the federal standards would require the state to let the parents of students in failing schools transfer their children to better-performing alternatives.

Ninety-four percent of Florida's schools passed the state standards but only 13 percent passed the federal ones, according to a recent press release from Jim Davis, the Democratic congressman who represents Tampa and St. Petersburg. More than a few educators in Florida are worried that massive transfers could destroy the public education system in the state.

"I've said to the DOE and to the federal government that if you really tried to implement No Child Left Behind in Florida to the fullest extent as by the law it would cause total chaos in the state," said Frank Till, superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, the fifth largest district in the country. "There's no way you can find space for the kids at 1,700 schools."

If you take WaPo for it's word, you might believe education, as an election year issue, is taken seriously by the Dems.

Although there are no current polls ranking important issues, most political experts here say education will be toward the top of the list, along with health care and homeland security, and right behind Iraq and the economy. In recent weeks, political television ads focusing on education have followed visits from Kerry, Bush, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie - visits that all focused on education.

"It's going to be a big issue, just as it was [in the governor's race] in 2002," said state Democratic Party spokeswoman Allie Merzer. "Both Bush administrations have failed Florida's students incredibly."

Note: education in general is being discussed; however, NCLB is not (unlike the Democratic primaries, but that might have been due to other pressures).

If you check out any Kerry stuff on education (their site, their ads), and while I'm not privy to Florida's ads, I doubt they would be different, Kerry essentially sidesteps all issues regarding NCLB save for one. His standard answer: it needs more funding. On the other hand, he wants to help teachers. He wants to improve high school graduation rates. He wants to help college kids. All good stuff but zip, zero, nada on any detailed NCLB issue such as the code words, accountability and proficiency.

WaPo continues with evidence that NCLB really is making a huge negative impact on the states's voters and how parents are organizing against NCLB mandates.

Among the criticisms of NCLB in Florida -- opponents say that it de-emphasizes important subjects such as history and it is an unfunded federal mandate -- perhaps the most frequent and politically volatile is the charge that both tests are culturally biased. Many parents and activists are aghast at the numbers of African American and Hispanic students who are being held back or kept from graduating by failing scores on the FCAT. In heavily minority Miami-Dade County alone, according to a recent report by the Miami Herald, about 9,100 third graders -- or about 29 percent -- failed the FCAT and could be held back. Critics say the ultimate goal of A+ and NCLB is the undermining of public education and the advocacy of vouchers.

A group led by Victor T. Curry, the well-known pastor of Miami's New Birth Baptist Church, is calling for a boycott of Florida's tourism and citrus industries until A+ is changed or repealed.

Curry, who is also president of the city's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has also worked with another vocal critic, state Sen. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Miami), to organize protests against education policies at the state capitol in Tallahassee and at Florida International University in Miami.

"There is no one-size-fits-all solution for teaching children," said Wilson, who is African American. "I've seen children with 3.0 grade averages and activities and public service who have failed the FCAT and did not receive a diploma."

The fact is: opposition to NCLB cuts across party lines. Utahns dislike NCLB, and Utah is redder than red. If pushed, NCLB might be able to draw voters from the other side. Hey, this could make a difference in a battleground state. Imagine that.

As an aside, the Republicans have a totally different problem with NCLB. They are being blamed for NCLB problems, rightly so; their tactic is to go for the high road, use code words , and perhaps pray people believe their tripe.

And why is NCLB being downplayed? My take would get me into lots of trouble on the dkos diaries. Short answer: a certain corporate friendly anti-union Dem faction was actively involved in crafting NCLB along side the Repubs. Remember it was a bipartisan affair, and, not surprisingly, this faction still supports NCLB. Strongly. It's their baby, for goodness' sake. These guys are sitting pretty this election year because the way things are going, no candidate is voicing any effective criticism of NCLB. The way the two parties are acting evokes Nader's words: doesn't matter who you elect, you've got the same agenda. And fear of Dubya being elected I think has muted any criticism of the Dems in this department. Too bad for the kids.

Times like this makes me miss Dean. I will reiterate: I will vote for Kerry. But this dance around NCLB is extremely disappointing.

Questioning Riordan's leadership

Richard Riordan wasn't my mayor but he certainly made more news than most LA mayors and so he's definitely a politician I've noticed. Now that he's the state Secretary of Education and a bona fide FOA's (friend of Arnold), he's still making news. That last gaffe echoed all around the nation and rightly so.

Peter Schrag took this opportunity to write a bit about our messed up CA educational system.

Does the distractible Riordan - or indeed anybody in the Schwarzenegger administration - really understand how California's complex education system works or what it would take to improve it? Riordan, the governor's longtime friend, came to office in thrall to the one-size-fits-all theories of UCLA management professor William Ouchi, who's certain that if you just give nearly all budget control to school-site managers - the principal, teachers, parents - all will be well.
But neither Ouchi nor Riordan and his novice staff seem to fully understand what that entails: that it would tend to undermine the state's accountability system, put more burdens on overstressed principals, create inconsistent curricula from school to school and, in any case, be virtually impossible to pull off. To compound the problem, no one else in the governor's shop - or in Riordan's - has any extended experience with schools and the complexity of school policy.

While I don't always agree with Schrag, I thought he pinpointed one issue repeated by the more political savvy PTA moms I know: does Riordan know what he's doing? And what about Ouchi? These are scary thoughts when your kid goes to public school in California.

LA's Three Mile Island: The Rocketdyne meltdown mess

Bet you haven't heard about our very own Three Mile Island: here.

In 1957, Rocketdyne debuted the nation’s first commercial nuclear reactor, the Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE), which supplied electricity to over a thousand folks in the then-tiny town of Moorpark. The SRE experienced a partial meltdown in the summer of 1959, in which a third of the reactor core melted and lethal radioactive gases spewed from the unfortified building.

The SRE partial meltdown released 15 to 260 times more radiation to the surrounding environment than did Three Mile Island, according to the Santa Barbara-based law firm of Capello & Noël.

Glad someone is following up on this since I don't expect to see hide nor hair of this in the other local paper, the LATimes.

I need my coffee!

Please don't say this is true: coffee may hamper short-term memory. And I thought my problems came from lack of sleep.

But Miss Lesk and her colleague Stephen Womble, from Trinity College, Dublin, found it can hamper or boost short-term memory, depending on what you are trying to remember.

They divided 32 college students into two groups. One group was given 200mg of caffeine, which is equivalent to two strong cups of coffee, and the other was given a dummy drug.

The students were then asked to answer 100 general knowledge questions that had simple, one-word answers.

For example, one question was "Name the ancient Egyptian writing," with a target answer of "hieroglyphics".

For each question the student was given 10 words to look at before answering.

Between two and eight of the words were similar sounding to the answer, for example hierarchy sounds similar to hieroglyphics.

The other words were completely unrelated to the answer.

But wait! There's hope. Tiny details make the difference. Speaking of tiny, check out the sample size of the study: 32, meaning 16 in each group.

I guess I'll have to run down the article and check it out. Don't despair, coffee drinkers! I have a feeling this might turn out to be a false alarm.

Dean to speak at the DNC convention

Just got an email from Tom MacMahon, executive director of Democracy for America.

On Tuesday night next week, Governor Dean will speak in primetime to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. And immediately after his speech he will be talking to you.

The Governor is scheduled to speak on Tuesday night. Immediately after his remarks to a packed house at the Fleet Center and Americans watching at home, he will speak directly to Democracy for America supporters.

After you watch the speech, head straight for your computer and democracyforamerica.com.

You will be able to listen live on our web site as the Governor makes special remarks to supporters and takes questions from Dean Dozen candidates and grassroots leaders on a nationwide conference call.

I don't see specific info about the time Dean is speaking and whether it'll be televised. Count me relieved to see Dean is getting a chance to speak after all.

Our compassionate education president does it again

Dubya completely chucked the migrant family workers' education fund for their kids. It's certainly another blow for kids on the wrong side of the track. And what a safe and cowardly thing to do. I doubt their parents don't vote. Not only that, I'm wondering if cutting programs like these will please his base. Gotta get that vote, y'know, especially when it's looking a bit grim.

Funding is being eliminated for a federal program that pays the children of migrant workers across the country to stay in school instead of working in fields.

The Department of Labor program pays some young people minimum wage to stay in school while migrating with their parents, who travel across the country looking for seasonal farm work.

Coordinators in 31 states and Puerto Rico were told there was no money to operate the program this year, leaving them to find alternate sources, petition Congress or drop the program.

"This is a remarkable abandonment of the most vulnerable youth," said David Strauss, executive director of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs. "I don't know what's going to happen to those kids."

I'm afraid cutting programs like this is just the tip of the iceberg, if Dubya is re-elected. God forbid. Cutting the social net reeks of callousness and moral decreptitude, especially coming from a guy who wants to push character education.

Note: wrote this earlier today but I didn't have time to get it out. Summertime means I'm never sure when I'll be online. Gotta provide the quality family chauffeuring and other assorted tasks.

I see Left End of the Dial's covered this item already. Via Left End, Burnt Orange Report's got a post up as well. Go visit, please.

Arts education in peril

Not surprisingly, more news about gutting arts education in public schools.  

Under the NCLB, arts education was listed as a core subject for the first time in federal education law. But reports released over the past several months have documented that arts classes are getting squeezed out of schools because the federal law doesn't require that students be tested for their proficiency in art, music, dance or drama.

In addition, because many people see the arts as "academic frills," these classes often have been the first to be cut as cash-strapped school districts are forced to make tough budget choices.

As a result, art, music and other arts classes are at risk of becoming a "lost curriculum," said Brenda Welburn, executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education.

The evidence:

A recent report by the Council for Basic Education, a Washington-based education nonprofit, found that schools are spending substantially less time on the arts, as well as social studies, civics, geography, and languages since NCLB became law.

The report, billed as the first to examine how NCLB is influencing instructional time in key subject areas, said such a trend is worrisome in light of research showing that active involvement in music, art and other arts subjects helps students do better in more traditional academic subjects.

In addition, the report, titled "Academic Atrophy: The Condition of the Liberal Arts in America's Public Schools," found that schools with large numbers of minority students have been particularly affected by cutbacks in art education classes.

"Truly high expectations cannot begin and end with mathematics, science and reading," the report's authors stated.

The DOE response requires some sort of decoder ring.   

Michael Petrilli, a senior U.S. Department of Education official, said NCLB isn't meant to undercut support for the arts. "While accountability in the law is focused on reading and math, the two most basic subjects, there is a lot in the law that supports other academic subjects, such as the arts," Petrilli said.

"The spirit of No Child Left Behind is to make sure that every child in America gets the kind of well-rounded education once reserved for children of the elite," Petrilli added.

Orwellian tripe.

Petrilli needs to be pushed into providing more info on what he sees as a 'lot in the law' helping arts education.  Saying that the intent of the law is to provide a good education for all doesn't make me feel any better when the results say something else.

Dubya's Character Education Initiative

Not a joke.

Here's something not covered by the mainstream press so far: Dubya wants $25 million to fund something he calls 'character education'.  I'm guessing he'd rather have kids get character ed rather than arts ed.

Pointing to an upbeat federal report showing that conditions are generally improving for America's youth, President Bush is calling on Congress to fund his proposed Character Education Initiative. He wants to extend and intensify values programs for young people.

The president used his weekly radio address to ask Congress to authorize his $25 million request for the initiative, which is intended to teach values.

 ... snip...

The president's proposal calls for parents, schools, and government to work together to counter the influences of today's pop culture. The ideal would be for parents to connect with schools — and vice versa.

"It's not that (schools) don't want to be involved; it's just that they don't know where the line is," Richards said.

Certainly schools should be a place where good behavior — which is defined by honesty, respect, integrity — is encouraged and enforced."

As the president put it, schools can help turn kids away from a "if it feels good, do it" mindset.

Interesting take, given the Cheney incident and all the purported times Dubya flipped off his constituents.  

Certainly, this could beDubya's way of salvaging his sullied reputation as the education president as he caters to his base, the conservative Christian crowd.

Since this article provides  a few resources to check out, I did look.   I'll have to be fair; I went looking for trouble, and I couldn't find much that overtly shouted out that the agenda is teaching Judeo-Christian values.   Here is the link provided in the article.  And googling Dr. Lickona, I found this bio.   I did find he is an advocate for teaching abstinence as the proper moral substitute for sex-ed.

I was troubled by  the lack of transparency on the values they want to teach, of the definitions of the values to be troubling, and who would decide which values to be taught.  The whole thing could be dangerously close to a parochial school type of education yet we wouldn't know it. 

My take: when Dubya gets a dose of character education, then he would be in the position to recommend this to the kids.

Update: Education Week takes a look at character education (warning: registration req'd).

Implementation of a character education program can be contentious. One of the first questions people ask when learning that their school plans to implement a character education program is "Whose values are you going to teach?" (Brooks and Goble, 1997). Most character education programs in use today are based on the traits developed from the civic virtues found in the U.S. Constitution and the United Nations charter—as well as common civil and moral values such as honesty, courage, and respect for others. Advocating that honesty is better than dishonesty, or that free speech is better than censorship, rarely invites controversy.
What has developed from this basis varies by program. For example, the Character Counts program is based on the "six pillars of character": trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. Character Works, used throughout Georgia, emphasizes 38 character traits, one for each week of a typical school year, including courtesy, integrity, creativity, fairness, and accomplishment.
The Character Education Partnership has drawn up 11 principles of effective character education that schools can use to guide their efforts. The principles include the advice that the term "character" must be well-defined, that the program must be integrated into the curriculum, and that parents and community members must be involved (Lickona, T., Schaps, E., and Lewis, C., no date). The final principle is the need to assess the progress of the school involved in the program. But while there has been much anecdotal evidence about the effects of character education, not much in the way of scientifically based research exists.

This piece provides a nice background of the theoretical basis in psychology.  I'm not sure what to think of this whole thing.   However, this bill would provide more opportunities for businesses.   Here's Characterworks.

New book by Susan Ohanian

Here's another book I need to get. It's called Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Schools?.
 
Available at www.heinemann.com.

Where exactly did high-stakes testing come from anyway? Neither parents, teachers, administrators, nor school boards demanded it, and now many communities feel powerless to reverse its appalling effect on our schools.
Hot on the heels of the testing masterminds and peeling back layer upon layer of documentation, Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian found a familiar scent at the end of the paper trail. Corporate money. CEOs and American big business have blanketed United States public education officials with their influence and, as Emery and Ohanian prove, their fifteen year drive to undemocratize public education has yielded a many-tentacled private-public monster.
With stunning clarity and meticulous research, Emery and Ohanian take you on a tour of board rooms, rightist think tanks, nonprofit "concerned citizens groups," and governmental agencies to expose the real story of how current education reform arose, how its deceptive rhetoric belies its goals, and the true nature of its polarizing and disenfranchising mission.
Why is corporate America bashing our schools? Because it's in their interests&mdahs;not yours. What can you do to promote your best educational interests? Read this exposé and get ready to dismantle the education-reform machine.

Rejecting poisonous strategies

Thomas Frank, who wrote the book I really need to read  What's the Matter with Kansas?, provided an op-ed in the NYT last Sunday on the failure of the FMA .  His take: this could be a planned failure, a strategy to unite his base using the dynamic of us-versus-them.
 
eRobin at her excellent blog, Factesque, makes some very smart connections with Renata Brooks' thoughts on the use of fear and the induction of learned helplessness.

Building a Codependent Base
 
The coverage of BushCo's seemingly desperate reaching out to his grabby base has been getting a ton of coverage in the corporate press. Nobody has gotten it even close to right except Thomas Frank in his NYTimes op-ed analysis of the doomed-from-the-start FMA. 
 ... (snip)...
BushCo has been effectively combining this strategy of pandering not to the base's desires, but to their self-image as underdogs victimized by the elite, with one of his favorite linguistic strategies, instilling a feeling of "learned helplessness" in those same supporters.
...(snip)...
Dr. Brooks is talking about BushCo's positioning of himself as the only person able to stand between us and terrorist attacks, but she could just as easily be talking about BushCo the Culture Warrior. He survives politically on a campaign of fear in both foreign and domestic matters. And fear is a powerful drug with only one antidote. Dr. Brooks suggests that the only way for opponents to fight back is with a message of true optimism. I would add that the idea of an empowered community is also necessary to penetrate the Us vs. Them position that BushCo takes on every issue. Gov. Dean was on that path but couldn't hang on against the opposition press and Democratic leadership. Kerry*Edwards have been working to tell America whom they mean by "Us", but their pat message is too easy to pigeonhole and mock as insincere. They need to give Us a challenge to inspire community and offer an alternative to the fear that BushCo sews at every opportunity.

Important stuff because it's too easy for the media to not notice the manipulation. 

I'm chiming in here with my own take, in this not very well-written post  from awhile back when I was very new to blogging.  

Alice Miller, the psychoanalyst who broke from her ranks to publish her then groundbreaking theories, offers some interesting psychological insights, which she developed in her quest to understand how Hitler to come into power. The Truth Will Set you Free, published by Perseus Books in 2001, is the most recent of her books and probably the most accessible.
 
 Here, Miller discusses again how the traditional methods of upbringing involve “a vicious circle of violence and ignorance”, resulting in a child who develops as a survival tool a strong sense of denial. This incredible denial results in a powerful “emotional blindness” that makes it difficult for the adult to be open to other possibilities and belief systems because doing so would bring up those old traumas hidden in the past. The denial is perpetuated into the next generation unconsciously. The barriers to these old childhood beliefs can only be taken down only when the (socially unacceptable) journey is undertaken to reflect and revisit childhood memories honestly.Miller describes this type of parenting ”poisonous pedagogy”. It is:

“…the kind of parenting and education aimed at breaking a child’s will and making that child into an obedient subject by means of overt and covert coercion, manipulation, and emotional blackmail”.(p. ix in the preface of The Truth Will Set You Free).

Not coincidentally, I believe Miller’s poisonous pedagogy accurately describes the dark side of the more recently developed Strict Father family parenting model by George Lakoff in his book Moral Politics. (For an online summary of Lakoff’s work: see here but I challenge you to read his book, especially the chapters towards the end.) Since Lakoff is a cognitive scientist, he does not really discuss in depth the dynamics of how psychological damage is inflicted in order to maintain the Strict Father family system. But he does do a better job than psychology in describing the larger system.

Repeating: this type of parenting and worldview makes people extremely vulnerable to manipulation. This administration (and let's not forget the forces in the Democratic party) tends to push for policies which would recreate this type of environment.  Coincidence? Think not. 
 
NCLB is one example that fits both models, Lakoff's and Miller's, amazingly well: punishment rather than reward, drill and kill approach to education,  unreasonable 'proficiency' levels, demolition of public education  for it's own good. 
 
The prognosis, however, isn't good, in my opinion unless we get a more progressive public policy through.  The current policies will only create another generation of wounded.  Addressing the truth, if you follow this model, threatens to destroy the walls around the original wounding. It'll be hard to get through unless things are so bad, people are willing to question the status quo.
 
As for solutions, I know of only one sure thing: electing Kerry would be a good (not perfect) start. But seriously, I think the progressive agenda is generally more compassionate and more healing.  I'm leaning Green locally  but have no doubt, I will be voting Democratic in the national election.

Referral logs

Ha.  Here's a new one: 'texas strippers shari'.  That's a change; the usual in that genre has been 'naked granny having sex'. 
 
Sorry, not on this blog.

More on that Walmart deal

I admit lease-financing deals isn't something up my alley but my attention has been piqued.  I don't quite understand what's going with this Walmart and TX school trust fund deal, and it's really bugging me.
 
Thanks a bunch to eRobin for providing this link (registration req'd) on this Walmart deal. And thanks to Linkmeister for his link on leasing deals.
 
What I get: 
1.  Walmart wants to build a distribution center on public land.  The deal is: they will buy 240 acres from the state and build a store on this property. This is the weirdest part of the deal.  Why do they have to do this dance of buying the land and selling it back? Why not build somewhere else?
 
Not only that, I'm not sure for how much money the state is selling it to Walmart.  I'm betting it's dirt cheap.  I guess it doesn't matter because the state public education trust fund will then buy back the land and the building for $100 million.  Apparently this is a huge chunk of change to be used for an investment.   

2.  The state will lease the building back to Walmart for 30-40 years.  Over these 30 to 40 years, the state will receive rent payments totalling $187 million.  Anyone think this a good return on investment? 
 
My calculations if I take the numbers above: the state will earn $87 million over 30 to 40 years, which comes out to 2 to 2.9 million  per year in rent (remember, they spent $100 million to buy the land and store back).  I guess I was wrong because the media says rent payments will be around 4.8 million the first five years. 
 
There is a problem with the lease payments,  apparently favorable terms for Walmart especially when you take into account inflation.

Wal-Mart's lease payments would be 6 percent of the estimated $80 million per year for the first five years. That's roughly $4.8 million a year. Every five years, the payments would increase at a fixed rate of 10.4 percent, meaning that in the sixth year the payment would go up to nearly $5.3 million.
Those terms raised alarms for John Pouland, a Clinton administration official who once oversaw federal real estate management in the General Services Administration's Fort Worth office.
Pouland, who reviewed the agreement at the Star-Telegram's request, said the low rate and the failure to tie increases to the Consumer Price Index, as originally proposed, favor the retailer. Should inflation rise higher than 2 percent a year, the payments will lose ground over time.
"I think Wal-Mart worked over the state of Texas pretty well," Pouland said. "I think Wal-Mart clearly got the better end of the deal, all things considered."

3.  At the end of the 30 to 40 years, Walmart will buy the center back.  Not clear if they get the land back. 

After that, Wal-Mart must buy back the building for what the state paid or market value, whichever is higher.

4.  During this 30 to 40 year period, Walmart will be exempt from paying taxes on the land and the building but not on their inventory. Tax break is estimated to be 2 million.

The Permanent School Fund's tax-exempt status will help Wal-Mart save almost $2 million a year in property taxes. More than $500,000 in one-time infrastructure improvements sweetened the deal. At $55 million over 30 years, it's the largest government incentive package Wal-Mart has ever received, according to a national watchdog group.

5.  Note the secrecy involved in the dealmaking, which kept local people out of the loop.

Land officials say all local taxing entities, including the school superintendent, signed off on removing the property from tax rolls -- in identically worded letters whose text was crafted at the land office.
In keeping with the secrecy of the arrangement, the company receiving the concessions was never identified until Wal-Mart made its announcement in February.
Even when the Baytown City Council and Chambers County Commissioners Court authorized spending up to a combined $450,000 in infrastructure improvements in November, the mayor and county judge did not know the identity of the company or how big the eventual tax breaks would be, those officials said.
Nor was there much danger of the story leaking to the local press: Among those signing a confidentiality agreement was the editor and publisher of the Baytown Sun, Wanda Garner Cash, who also sits on the economic-development foundation board, the newspaper disclosed.
The secrecy and the long-term nature of the tax breaks rub Goose Creek school board member Weston Cotten the wrong way. He said he was unaware that the superintendent had signed the letter supporting the deal.
"I am very unhappy that our state government has decided to take away local control," Cotten said. "It affects my board, my school district. I feel like we should have known. These aren't white-collar [jobs]. They're not even middle-class jobs."
Then-Baytown Mayor Pete Alfaro said the school board members were not brought into negotiations because, unlike the Permanent School Fund, they could not offer tax breaks.
"They weren't in the loop," he said. "The only people they [Wal-Mart representatives] were looking for were people who could give them tax abatements."

Strange, strange, and strange.   Walmart is getting a favorable deal in exchange for their business. And this type of thing sounds more like a loan to Walmart and a way for Walmart to get out of paying taxes on their store.  I thought communities could expect some tax revenue from megacorporations to help out public education.  I don't expect megacorporations to need help from public education trust funds to get a business break.  But then, we're dealing with Walmart and with Texas, an unholy combination.  

A lesson for us?

About the horrible horrible fire in India killing nearly 100 kids who were trapped in their school: I'm so sorry such a horrific thing happened. 
  
Something about why this fire came to be caught  my eye .

The tragedy exposed the downside of India's "economic reforms" program, which saw a proliferation of ill-equipped private schools as the government cut spending on education to curtail its budget deficit.

Most private schools are in crowded buildings that often lack basic safety measures such as fire alarms and sprinkler systems. They rarely have playgrounds, athletic fields or open space.

I'm certainly not up on the Indian school system so I could be wrong on this. It sounds as though private schools have flourished in an environment where there isn't quite enough money for them to run properly.  Something about this seems strangely familiar: could this be our future? If so, I'm wondering if there is a lesson in this for us as well. 

ETS fails to score their tests correctly

Here's an example of the down side of testing: when the tests are scored incorrectly.  In this case, this is a case involving teachers' test scores. The scoring company: the famed ETS.  Hey, I remember them from way back when.
 
From Susan Ohanian's site:

About 480 people in Louisiana who passed a teacher licensing test administered by a private company were incorrectly told they failed, delaying or preventing some from getting jobs. The Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J., wrongfully lowered scores on about 4,100 teacher tests in 19 states. Louisiana had the third-highest number of teacher candidates affected, behind Ohio and Pennsylvania. Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard said the errors were "extremely disappointing" for Louisiana because "we have a chronic shortage of teachers in our state." The mistake has prevented many teacher candidates from being hired because a student must pass the exam, called the Praxis test, to be licensed.

Relying on part-timers to score tests appears to have problems.  And consider the consequences: this kept these teachers in Lousiana from being hired. If I was one of these teachers (4100 of them in the nation), I would be pretty ticked, to say the least, if this had cost me my job.
 
And it doesn't take much to extrapolate  here: hmmm.  Could we foresee problems with students' test scores? And let me see: who would 'pay' for the mistakes?

Would you trust this deal?

Walmart's involved in a supposedly mutually helpful association with the state of Texas, the purported goal being to help fund public education.  While the details seem fairly innocuous, I'm wondering why a corporation like Walmart even needs to get help from the state of Texas.

State Board of Education members Saturday supported a plan to invest up to $100 million in a proposed Wal-Mart distribution center.
The money would come from the state's school trust fund.
The proposal is backed by the Texas General Land Office.
Under a deal with the land office, Wal-Mart will buy 240 acres about 14 miles from the Houston Ship Channel, near Baytown.
The retailer will then build a two-million square-foot-facility.
The land office will buy both the land and the facility back from Wal-Mart for $80 million -- then ease it back to the company for 30 to 40 years.
The rent payments from Wal-Mart will total more than $187 million over the life of the 30-year lease and will go directly into the Permanent School Fund.
The fund sends money to public schools.
The project could create about 1,000 jobs.

Since I'm mighty suspicious of Walmart in general, I'd like to get more information about the details before I get excited about the generosity of Walmart and their concern for public education.

At least it didn't start as pilot program in TX

Ran across this piece about implanting chips in Mexican workers for security access.  I don't like this one bit. Can't they figure out another way rather than this invasive method?  Whose idea was this in the first place?

Security has reached the subcutaneous level for Mexico's attorney general and at least 160 people in his office — they have been implanted with microchips that get them access to secure areas of their headquarters.

Who made the chips? A Florida firm, it turns out.

The chips that have been implanted are manufactured by VeriChip Corp., a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions Inc. of Palm Beach, Fla.

And the chips are also being used for people for other reasons.

In addition to the chips sold to the Mexican government, more than 1,000 Mexicans have implanted them for medical reasons, Aceves said. Hospital officials can use a scanning device to download a chip's serial number, which they then use to access a patient's blood type, name and other information on a computer.

Implantable chips, the new growth industry.  Can't wait until the FDA approves their use in the US. 

Internalized classism

 On my post where I couldn't get a grip on why people vote against their economic self-interest, Cyndy and Cmdr Sue responded with some interesting points worth highlighting. 

From Cmdr Sue:
Yes, how DO people vote against their economic self-interest?The only thing I can figure is that they think they are better off than they are.I flipped through a great book at the bookstore the other day called Fat, Dumb, and Ugly: The Decline of the Average American, about how the stats in America have changed for the worst. The number of people who think they are in the top 1% of income? 19%. Figure that one out.
 
From Cyndy:
Everytime I try to figure out the mind-set I recall what Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse 5:

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, "It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be." It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" There will also be an American flag no larger than a child's hand--glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves".

Cmdr Sue is on to something.  Denial is certainly one way of dealing with being poor in an unforgiving and judgmental society.  Cyndy's passage points out why there is such denial: we've got massive self-hatred.  Self-hatred, denial: both are mechanisms to deal with shame.  And the bottom line is that in America, it has come to be that it's shameful to be poor.  
 
With those beliefs, comes a great deal of heavy baggage: you don't work hard enough, this is what you deserve, if you were a good person, you wouldn't be poor, what's wrong with you.  All part of the Calvinistic authoritarian Lakoffian Strict Father world view.   
 
Which reminded me of something. A professor I had in grad school had an interesting idea on why minorities in America can be just as racist  towards people from their own culture.  Why eat your own?  His answer: internalized racism.  When you adopt the values of the main culture, you might also end up adopting the racism towards your own people. It's a double-edged sword.  
  
So I'll propose a term for this phenomena: internalized classism.  I'm still not clear on how this whole thing poverty self-hatred thing took root and flourished in America although I suspect someone's written a book on that.
  
Speaking of books, this whole thing is a digression of this book  What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, which I'm glad to see is being discussed up and down the blogs. Good.   
 
Thomas Frank, the author, writes a post for those who haven't yet read the book.

Democrats shed the language of class warfare

Who is to blame for this landscape of distortion, of paranoia, and of good people led astray? Though Kansas voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is just as clear to me that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and -- more important -- the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?

This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies. Over the years it has enjoyed a few successes, but, as political writer E. J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that both parties have become "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests" and the old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters -- their traditional base -- the big brush-off, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy for Democrats would be difficult to invent. And the ruination just keeps on coming. However desperately they triangulate and accommodate, the losses keep mounting.
 
Curiously enough, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem to look forward to a day when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.

I was shocked to see he pinpoints the DLC. Thank you, Thomas Frank, for reminding us it's not just the Republicans involved in this whole thing. 
 
I really have to get this book.

PFAW comes through again

This is more like it.  The issue isn't just: 'we need to fully fund this bill'.  PFAW questions high-stakes testing.

High-Stakes Testing Leaving Some Behind?

Arguably, the most visible parts of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) are its accountability provisions. The most controversial of these are the annual, high-stakes tests used in many states to determine how well students learn and retain knowledge. Administered in third through tenth grades, these tests are used to ensure students have mastered the knowledge they will need to advance to the next grade. However, some educators believe these tests are leading to student frustration, increasing disinterest in school and even school dropouts.Research on such application of high-stakes testing has found that holding kids back does not generally help improve their grades and that retention increases their risk of dropping out of school. These findings have done little to curb their use.

They find evidence high-stakes testing is not the panacea touted which would improve public education.

Different groups are now looking into the situation in more detail. A Virginia child-advocacy group believes the state’s Standards of Learning (SOL) exam may be responsible for causing some students to drop out of school and has asked that a study be conducted to determine if a connection exists. I attached this following line to this paragraph. The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University has published a report entitled Losing Our Future that addresses concerns over what they call a crisis regarding graduation rates of minority youth. (http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu)Of course, testing can be a useful and valuable component of teaching and learning. Teachers prepare and regularly use tests to make informed decisions about what their students understand and retain through lessons, research, and study. Likewise, standardized tests allow schools and school districts to compare themselves with their peer schools and to make modifications in curricula and materials to better meet the needs of students and staff. These activities are necessary. But expecting all students to perform equally is naïve at best and, at worst misguided.In the continuing effort to make sure all children have an equal opportunity to attend high-quality schools with high standards for achievement and development, it is essential to make sure that tools designed to help students achieve success in school, do not turn students away from academics altogether.

As they point out, there is value in testing. I do agree. I'm not against standardized tests per se.   However, attaching punishing consequences to test scores is simply not fair.  These tests do not guarentee the kids are really learning.  They only show how well kids take the test.  But is it a measure of how well they've learned? Test scores are nowhere near  a complete measure of the quality of a child's education.  To attach such incredibly punishing consequences to test scores is beyond reason. 

Looking forward to educational nirvana

Sarcasm intended.  Check out this editorial from Ground Zero, Florida.

Perfect schools just 10 years away

.....(snip)

In some ways, it will be a shame if Mr. Bush isn't still president in 2014, because that year is shaping up as a moment of educational nirvana. That is the year when No Child Left Behind comes to fruition. Most people might not be aware of it, but No Child Left Behind means what it says. No Child. Every child must be able to read and do math on grade level.

Not now, of course. It's OK now to leave children behind for the time being. Can't expect to have every child with the program right away. But that slack is temporary.
I quote from the Florida NCLB Accountability Workbook: The Department of Education "has prepared a schedule for improvements in academic achievement in reading/language arts and mathematics that begins with the 'starting point' and concludes with 100% of the students being 'Proficient or Above' at the end of the 2013-14 academic year."

All the other states have similar provisions. They can mess around or dither, but the game's up at the end of the 2013-2014 academic year.

Unless there's some state version of Option 2 above, Jeb Bush won't be Florida's governor in 2014. He might, however, be president (or crown prince). Although NCLB is a federal law, Gov. Bush is largely responsible for its implementation in Florida. That's because the feds have left nearly all details and setting of standards up to the states. Kids have to make "adequate yearly progress," but each state can adopt its own definition of "adequate yearly progress."

But if every state can have different standards, doesn't that mean some will have higher standards than others, that kids considered to be with the program in some states will be deemed "left behind" in others? That's actually a strength, if you believe Education Secretary Rod Paige, who explained Tuesday in Orlando that No Child Left Behind "is a collection of state decisions." Mr. Paige's Web site offers an explanatory document titled "Stronger Accountability: The Facts About State Standards." That lengthy document boils down to this single line: "There are no national standards."

Roll those two concepts around in your brain for a minute. Stronger accountability. No national standards. Stronger accountability. No national standards. Except one. Whatever happens in the states has to happen by 2014. What's magical about 2014? For one thing, most people responsible for setting the deadline for educational perfection won't be around to live with the consequences. It is amazing how often politicians and bureaucrats set idealistic goals that somebody else will have to achieve and/or pay for.

And what about that 100 percent goal? Is there anybody anywhere who really thinks that 100 percent of children ever will be able to read and calculate on grade level? When I was in seventh grade, there was a guy named Boo-Boo who was promoted to eighth grade only because the science teacher accidentally knocked out one of his front teeth with a broken fishing rod. It wouldn't have happened except the guy sitting in front of Boo-Boo ducked when the teacher swung at him with the rod. (That's how we enforced discipline in the rural South where I grew up.) Boo-Boo didn't have the sense to duck. If the Boo-Boos of the world can't duck on grade level, how are they going to read and do sums on grade level?

Some states, as implicitly allowed by the no-national-standards law, simply will dumb down their grade-level expectations so that even toothless Boo-Boo can handle them.

Gov. Bush has pioneered a different way. In Florida right now, third-graders who can't pass the reading FCAT are retained in the third grade. Presumably, something similar will have to happen by 2014 to all children who can't meet the No Child Left Behind standards. Jeb's FCAT solution provides the perfect answer. The students are not left behind, they are kept behind. A semantic trick? A linguistic game? Of course. That's what "No Child Left Behind" always has been.

A fine editorial except the writer leaves out one key component: this bill enjoys bipartisan support, which is worrisome.  Troubling. Awful.  The corporate faction of the Democratic party has a death grip on this bill. They are not going to let go of it, no way. This means even if Dubya goes, we'll still have this bill and this particular faction to deal with post election. 

Malibu Creek State Park, Santa Monica Mountains
 
A favorite hiking destination...

Being assimilated by Walmart

Glen Ford of the Black Commentator recently gave a speech on how corporate values will destroy our dreams if we don't wake up.  Here's a bit:

During the last couple years we’ve been hearing a lot about a “global clash of civilizations.” We have our own clash of civilizations going on, right here in the United States. Essentially, civilization is the sum total of the expressed dreams of a people. It is their version – and vision – of what life is supposed to be. But in the United States, only one very small group is empowered to dream its dreams – to build its version of civilization.This group sees neighborhoods and cities and countries – the whole world – as its private Field of Dreams – places where they can make ever-increasing profits, at ever-diminishing cost to themselves. Forget about the rest of us.
Wal-Mart is the “model” for this brand of civilization. They lock up everybody else’s dreams in their Big Box. And, whatever they do, no matter how destructive – they call that, “development.”

Walmart is probably one of the worst ones but others come to mind, especially with regards to our kids, the next generation.  What about Disney ? Visions of blonde haired blue eyed Cinderellas in blue dresses come to mind: that's the Disney image probably branded in every child's mind. Corporations are attempting to co-opt our values, in doing so destroying our visions and dreams.  It's insidious, especially for our kids who are vulnerable to messages at school and from the media: TV, movies, so on.  Help them from being assimilated into the Borg of corporate values.

Exit exams in Alaska

From Susan Ohanian, news of a site  devoted to increasing communication about  education inequities in Alaska.  Here's more on their exit exam situation, and it's not a good thing.

It's the creation of a second-class society, this thing called the exit exam. Scores of students from specific cultures or demographic backgrounds will be given certificates of achievement starting this year instead of diplomas. But who would know it and who will help change it? Numbers released last month by Alaska's Department of Education and Early Development show that if today's high school students are given the Exit Exam and three retakes, then some troubling patterns emerge. Forty-six percent of Alaska Native students will no longer be receiving diplomas. Instead, the chosen form of a reward to students who finish high school will be the "Certificate of Achievement." Students from lower-income families will be also hit hard. A resounding 47 percent of these students will be unable to pass the exit exam and thus will be eligible for a certificate, should they remain in school to receive it. Finally, the group that loses the most will be bilingual or limited English proficient (LEP) students. For these students, a stunning 60 percent will never pass the exit exam and never know what it is like to finish high school with a diploma - even if they fulfill their school's requirements.

For those who say, well maybe they deserve this, they aren't learning well which is why they aren't doing well on tests and other authoritarian Calvinistic conservative worldview bull, here's a bit on what is actually on the test. 

Still, the state's practice exam, which is located online, just happens to show the same sense of bias against Alaska Natives, lower-income students and LEP students that I was talking about. In it you will find multiple illustrations using the toys of the middle and upper classes, questions about things like Palm Pilots, cell phones, long distance calling plans and traveling out of state. How often can these things be found in the Bush? Many villages have no need for Palm Pilots and 85 percent of them lack cellular access. In villages, there is often only a single long-distance calling provider, not a choice between two of them. The illustrations are inherently more unfamiliar to some of the state's students. Yet worse things happen. On the test, there is the implied idea that if you don't have these urban toys you haven't really succeeded as a student. Statements like "most students" have these things and "most people have cell phones handy most of the time" are on the practice exam.

Palm pilots and cell phones?  Hello.  If anyone thinks these tests are not culturally biased and fair, then they must live in an alternate universe where everyone is uppermiddle class with parents who are professionals and live in an urban setting. 

Rod Paige criticizes the NAACP

Rod Paige attacks the NAACP in the very safe WSJ, behind the subscription wall no doubt to keep the riffraff like me from seeing it.  Susan Ohanian has a copy of it on her site. His accusations ring true for me but not in the way he would like me to believe.

I have a message for the NAACP's Julian Bond and Kweisi Mfume, who have accused black conservatives of being the "puppets" of white people, unable to think for ourselves: You do not own, and you are not the arbiters of, African-American authenticity. I am a lifelong member of the NAACP. I have a great respect for the organization. Its historical leaders, all visionary thinkers, have been responsible for helping to advance the struggle of African Americans over the past century, making our nation a more equitable and race-blind society. Sadly, the current NAACP leadership has managed to take a proud, effective organization in a totally new direction: naked partisan politics, pure and simple.

It goes on.

In particular, Mr. Bond and Mr. Mfume have done a great disservice to our organization, and to the founders of the civil-rights movement, with their hateful and untruthful rhetoric about Republicans and President Bush.

Amazing. Projection.
 
Update: PFAW sees a larger picture, and I agree, this is part of the Dubya campaign to diss NAACP.

TALKING BEHIND THEIR BACKS: In instead of attending the convention and confronting legitimate criticism of his policies, Bush deployed officials this week to  blast (Seattle paper here)  the nation's largest civil rights organization. Most notably, education secretary Rod Paige  attacked (the NAACP in the Wall Street Journal)(warning: requires subscription  , calling its criticism of Bush's policies "counterproductive, damaging and a betrayal of the organization's own origins." Paige said the NAACP attacked No Child Left Behind "merely because of its origins in the Bush administration." Left unmentioned was the fact Bush  has not properly funded (Edworkforce report here)  his education initiative, with judges in some states finding "hugely insufficient dollars" going to all districts, " particularly those with poor minority students (nytimes here) ."

However, I take issue with their comment about funding, and I'm disappointed with their rebuttal. That's not the only problem with the current education bill; it punishes schools without providing money to help them improve and the sole focus is on a standardized test, a test which measures something but what? I'm not convinced standardized tests are complete measures of whether a kid is getting a good education or not. Blind acceptance of the 'power' of standardized test results scare me because I know these tests are flawed. They measure how well one takes the test but they don't accurately measure the 'I got a good education from this school' factor.