Education at the Brink

A majority nobody wants to be a part of

2006-07-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

Is this a sign that government is doing more to help or that poverty is on the rise? Maybe both are true.

I'm not sure if he's my favorite Dem candidate for '08 yet or not, but John Edwards talks a lot about the problems poverty creates. One of those problems is poor educational performance. If people are serious about improving education for all children, they must also be serious about eradicating poverty.

Two tasks

2006-06-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

Thought-provoking article in the Dallas News today. Starts out with a story of a girl who graduated with a 3.0 or thereabouts, got to college and had to take four remedial courses. She's not alone. Not by far. Estimates range from 50% to 87% for schools that don't adequately prepare students for college.

But why?

The answer lies partly in the unique history of American education, according to Michael Kirst, an education professor at Stanford University.

"We built two mass, disconnected systems. The K-12 system built up on its own, and higher education grew away from it," Dr. Kirst said. Over time, they've developed in "splendid isolation" of each other.

In England, Germany and many other developed countries, the two systems developed together. They have a long history of cooperation. For instance, together they create tests for college admission and placement, Dr. Kirst said. And here?

Many states require students to pass a test built on their state's curriculum – in Texas, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills – to graduate from high school.

But to get into many colleges, students must take the ACT or SAT, tests that were created by national companies and that don't really reflect the skills states require for graduation.

This is a problem-- and a big one. But I think the biggest problem is holding power. We need to align k-12 with college but we've got to make sure more students finish high school at all first.

One solution to the alignment problem in Texas was to require four years of math and science. That's great for colleges but could that increase our already disgustingly low graduation rates?

We've got two tasks for our public high schools -- graduate more students and help more students get ready for college -- which are often at odds with each other. We've got to make sure those tasks enforce each other, not cancel each other out. This can't be a zero sum game.

The real education gap

2006-06-23T09:14:00.000-07:00

There's always a lot of talk about gaps in education, but one gap isn't talked about enough: the gap in teacher quality between poor and rich schools.

States have two weeks to comply with the latest requirement of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and come up with a solution to what U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings calls teaching's “dirty little secret”:

The disparity in teacher quality between poor, largely minority schools and their more affluent, white counterparts.

...

A recent Education Trust report revealed large discrepancies in teacher qualifications in Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin between poor and rich schools, and between mostly white schools and mostly minority ones.

In Ohio’s poorest elementary schools, for example, one of every eight teachers is not considered highly qualified, but in the state’s richest schools, that number falls to one in 67 teachers. In Wisconsin, schools with the highest minority student populations have more than twice as many novice teachers as schools with the lowest numbers of minority students.

Anyone who has read this blog regularly -- or did before my most recent sabbatical -- knows how much I deplore NCLB's high stakes testing. But -- and I have to pause here to think about how long it's been since there's been anything nice to say about anything even remotely related to the Bush Administration -- this emphasis on the gap in teacher quality is so unbelievably overdue and important. I'm ecstatic that NLCB is shining a light on this insidious problem.

Who'da thunk that the Bushies would be the cause for what could be an excellent discussion of race and class in our (apologies to John Edwards) two Americas.

¿Como se dice “shameless pander” en español?

2006-05-04T12:37:00.000-07:00

I stole the title from Think Progress. Now that that's out, check out the story: Lamar Alexander has filed a resolution that the National Anthem should be sung only in English. He blasted Bob Dole in '95 for taking a stand against bilingual education.

Whose side are you on, Senator? Dumb question. Whosever side is most expedient, of course.

Tell it like it is

2006-05-03T08:35:00.000-07:00

Congressman George Miller, the ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee (OK, so it's education and the workforce, forgive me) has an excellent feature on the Committee website that allows students to share college funding horror stories that will be entered in the congressional record.

Have a story to tell, go here.

And be sure to spread this far and wide.

Pop out

2006-05-03T07:26:00.000-07:00

Score one for diabetes prevention. Nice work, Bill.

Update: Here's why this is so important.

Memo to education companies

2006-05-02T08:47:00.000-07:00

DON'T HIRE BILL BENNETT!!!

District cuts its ties with Va. companyBy Susan Snyder
Inquirer Staff Writer
The Philadelphia School District said yesterday it would sever ties with K12, the Virginia company that came under fire earlier this school year after its cofounder made controversial comments about aborting black babies.

The company's $3 million contract to provide elementary science curriculum materials expired yesterday, and the School Reform Commission will not extend it, as the administration originally had planned to do, officials said.

A majority of commission members voted in November to honor the contract - eliciting an outcry from some community members - but indicated they would review it when it came up for renewal. None of the members who supported the contract in November returned calls yesterday to explain why they opted to discontinue the relationship with K12.

"The commission considered whether to terminate the contract at that point even though it would have meant a financial penalty, and the majority said they were not willing to do that," district spokeswoman Cecilia Cummings said. "As of today, the contract is no longer in play."

Cummings declined to say why.

"I can't comment beyond that," she said.

The controversy started in September when William Bennett, cofounder of K12, said on his national radio show: "If you wanted to reduce crime... you could abort every black baby in this country."

This ain't your momma's Kindergarten

2006-05-01T10:59:00.000-07:00

A great article about the changes in kindergarten. The upshot? Naps are out.

Just begging for a court case

2006-05-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

Odessa school officials are moving forward with their plans for a Bible class. Now, I've said many times on this blog that I'm all for teaching religion in schools if it's done in an, ahem, fair and balanced kind of a way -- that is, if it is comparative religion, or religion as literature. But if it's going to be done successfully, we need some model classes that are prepared by religion professors at the highest levels, that can bring perspective and evenhandedness to the teaching approach.

So where better to kick things off? Why, Odessa, of course!

ODESSA — Dozens of students have already signed up and district administrators are testing a pilot course as a West Texas school district prepares to offer a high school class on the Bible, officials said.

The Ector County Independent School District approved the elective course in December, despite opposition from critics who condemned the course as Christian proselytizing instead of education.

About 60 students from two high schools have signed up for the course, which will be offered next fall, district spokesman Mike Adkins said. The semester's schedule includes the class for each period of the day, but that could change depending on demand, he said.

...

Ian Roark, the district's social studies coordinator, is taking the online version of the course to test out the curriculum. He described the course as "non-devotional" with a focus on history and culture related to the Bible.

The district selected a course developed by North Carolina-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools that uses the King James version of the Bible.

Critics said the selection showed favoritism toward Protestant Christianity.

Roark, who will oversee the implementation of the course, said students can use any version of the Bible they're comfortable with.

"Basically you are free to use whatever version of the Bible you and your family would like for you to use as a student," he said.

I definitely would like to know what this National Council on Bible Curriculum is all about, but the use of the King James version -- even if it is optional -- raises red flags all over the place. When I took religion courses in college, no professor would ever use the King James version, except to point out its flagrant distortions.

$2,000 for this?

2006-04-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

Watch out, Texas teachers. The Texas Legislature has you in their crosshairs. While a $2,000 across-the-board pay raise is bandied about (that would put Texas within $5,000 of the national average-- whoopee!), there could be a steep tradeoff:

Sen. Florence Shapiro, the Plano Republican who heads the Senate's education committee, said she plans to attach a proposal that increases accountability for Texas schools to her chamber's version of a tax overhaul.

One proposal — to reconstitute campuses deemed academically unacceptable two years in a row — is tougher than what the federal law requires. Under Shapiro's plan, a campus intervention team would decide which, if any, of the existing faculty could remain.

If the school has had the same principal for the past two years, that principal must go.

The school also could be subject to management from a private, nonprofit company or face being closed.

"How can you leave a school open that's failing our children?" Shapiro said. "If a school has been low-performing for at least two years, in my view, that's a bad school."

There it is. Privatization. Privatize everything. This is the answer to all of our nation's ills, to the drown-our-government-in-a-bathtub crowd. It's worked oh so well in so many other areas, right? Yeah, right.

And further, this is a great incentive for teachers to go to the hard-to-staff schools. Hey, go here, work your but off for two years and then you, too, can be unceremoniously fired!

This is clearly the stuff of genius.

Can you spell overreaction, boys and girls?

2006-04-17T22:19:00.000-07:00

Disgusting. Literally.

Calling bullshit

2006-04-17T21:45:00.000-07:00

Getting sick of seeing report after report from right wing think tanks go unanswered? Well, the Think Tank Review Project is for you (and me). ASU and CU researchers are teaming up to provide a counterpoint to ideological bullshit trumpeted as scholarship. It's often anything but and the TTRP will expose them when they're... shall we say, stretching the truth.

From Stateline.org:

“Calling these reports to account brings more discipline to what's become kind of a 'wild west' of scholarly writing," said University of Illinois education professor Christopher Lubienski, one of the participants in what is being called the Think Tank Review Project.
It plans to provide policymakers and the news media with "expert reviews" of major education studies within two weeks of a report's release.

Think Tank Review Project co-director Kevin Welner, who also heads the Education and Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the reports that will be scrutinized are generally generated by private think tanks. While they often gain media attention and influence policymakers, they have very little credibility among academic researchers, he said.

Many think tanks were founded to advance particular political agendas and have become adept at presenting ideological arguments disguised as research, Welner said.

"Reporters and policymakers are not in the position to do their own detailed analysis of the methodology and data when they read these reports, so they're left to just trust the institutions that produce them," Welner told Stateline.org.

"Think tank" usually refers to an organization that claims to be a center of research and analysis of public policy issues, according to Sourcewatch.org, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy. But it said "many think tanks are little more than public relations fronts... generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors."

There really is too much of this going on. It's fine for think tanks to produce PR materials and to lobby policymakers, but when they pawn their materials off as "science" and "research" they're being disengenuous. They rarely use peer review processes or accepted academic methodologies and so they shouldn't be allowed to claim the mantle of science or scholarship.

Donors Choose

2006-04-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

I've heard of this before but was reminded of it by the incomparable Al Franken Show.
Check it out. It's a great way to do something for a classroom or school in a very directed, consumer-oriented sort of way.

As Jonathan Alter described it on the show: "At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund."

Reverse the Raid

2006-04-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

Sen. Durbin and Rep. Miller have introduced the Reverse the Raid on Student Aid Act of 2006.

Republicans have cut $12 billion in student aid. They're trying to rein in the deficit -- how's that been going lately? -- by screwing students. Nice. Fits right in with their vision for America. Screw everybody (except the rich, give them tax cuts).

If you're pissed off, sign the petition. If you're not, what the f%$# is wrong with you?

We jest because we care

2006-04-08T19:23:00.000-07:00

Tom DeLay To Pursue Corruption In Private Sector

April 5, 2006 | Issue 42•14

STAFFORD, TX—Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who is facing several ethics violations and felony charges, announced Tuesday that he will resign from Congress in order to concentrate on corruption in the private sector. "I can say with a clear lack of conscience that, after 21 years of public disservice, I have done everything I could to the American people," DeLay said in a televised statement to constituents. "I have a lot to offer the corporate world, such as money laundering and influence-peddling." DeLay added that, before assuming his new irresponsibilities, he looks forward to spending more time alienating his family and cheating on his wife.

Busted!

2006-04-08T19:10:00.000-07:00

The drug war sucks. But a dozen students in South Dakota just made a mil from it. Here's a more mainstream news article about the same unbelievable story.

That Fourth Amendment seems to be hanging on for dear life.

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

The new math

2006-04-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

Kids need financial literacy. The rates of young people racking up credit card debts and declaring bankruptcy are going through the roof. And with the recent cuts in student financial aid, that problem will get far worse before it gets better.

So what's a school to do? Already cash strapped and struggling to pay teachers adequate salaries and buy textbooks for traditional subjects, many schools are accepting financial materials from banks and investment houses free or charge. This raises serious potential problems. It reminds me way too much of the Channel One fiasco that was part of the reason Mr Abramoff is looking at 5 to 10.

From the Wall St. Journal:

All of this is fueling a debate over the appropriateness of using educational material developed by banks, financial advisers and credit-card issuers, since they have a vested interest in getting their marketing message in front of future customers. "Teachers become suspicious when materials have a logo," says Robert Duvall of the National Council on Economic Education, a New York nonprofit, nonpartisan group for improving economic literacy.

Troy Krogman, a high-school economics teacher in Spearfish, S.D., didn't pass out any branded handouts when a Wells Fargo banker guest lectured last year about bad check-writing among college freshman, because he was concerned the company was trying "to involve itself in the lives of kids before they get banking assistance."

Companies like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch & Co. say they are sensitive about issues like these, but hesitate to remove their names from materials they invested time and money developing.

I can understand that, too. This isn't exactly charity but it can't be bald marketing either. There's a very fine line between the two. I think the companies -- and I'm sure this will sound out of character for me -- should be allowed to develop brand awareness by putting their logos on materials they develop and pay for, but I don't think they should be able to advertise particular products, like free checking accounts or no-fee mutual funds or whatever. Part of the reason I think they should be allowed to use their brand -- no, all of the reason -- is that I feel so strongly that this should be an absolutely necessary component of any education.

I like the compromise struck in the last graf of the WSJ article:

Companies and educators are starting to develop some solutions. The Idaho Financial Literacy Coalition asks corporate speakers to sign a so-called nonmarketing agreement, stating they will maintain a "nonselling approach" and "will not solicit clients" during presentations.

In a perfect world, schools would have all the money they needed to develop their own materials. Need I remind anyone, this is decidedly not a perfect world. And it'll be a lot less perfect for a lot of people without adequate financial education.

Student protests

2006-04-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

Austin school officials are insisting that students not walk out on April 10. I can understand their position, but I think it's wrong. As an Austin Statesman reporter put it:

As the debate over federal immigration laws and the student walkouts continue around Central Texas and nationwide, school administrators and civic leaders are facing a conundrum: After years of telling young people they can change the world, what do you do when they try to prove you right?

It's a great point. Here's another from Drive Democracy, a liberal Texas blog:

We shouldn’t expect school administrators to just say, “Go ahead, skip school.” But, at the same time, effective civil protest must always be of a form that can’t be ignored. Peaceful? Absolutely. But rendered harmless, conducted in a way the authorities can simply ignore and smile weakly at, protests become invisible. These students are too smart for that. The invisible become easy victims.

Students should protest. Aren't we constantly teaching them that when we crack open the history books to the 1950's and 60's. Injustices, if ignored, will persist. So punish the students, but do it in a way that they understand that what they are doing is a vital part of American political life, not in a way that will scare them into the apathy that most Americans practice so assiduously.

Petition request

2006-04-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

Some progressive Texas groups want you to sign a petition. Consider these three facts:

(1)Texas has declined from 32nd to 40th in spending on education in the last 5 years
(2)Texas now spends $1500 less per student per year than the national average
(3)Texas teachers now are paid $6800 less per year than the national average

If that doesn't make you mad, I don't know what will. Sign the petition here.

Turn 'em over... but to whom?

2006-04-03T10:24:00.000-07:00

An article from Saturday's Baltimore Sun details the Maryland Legislature's vote to hold off on a plan to privatize 11 Baltimore public schools. Conspicuously absent from the article is any mention of who was going to take over the schools or what their plans for the perenially failing schools might look like.

This is symptomatic of so many education issues. At first blush, the solution sounds obvious: "What, only 5% of kids passed the algebra test? That's despicable. Shut 'em down. Turn the school over to someone else!" But then, who is that someone else? Why would anyone want to run a school with only a 5% passing rate? Do they expect to make a profit? Are they missionaries? What's their plan? Once these questions get answered, the obvious solution becomes anything but.

Charter problems

2006-04-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

An excellent NYT piece today does an excellent job examining some of the underlying problems with charter schools. They don't recommend what would seem to be an obvious solution: more rigorous standards for applicants. Once these schools open, it is very painful for students, teachers, families -- whole communities -- when they shut down. And all too often, they do shut down.

Worse than Arkansas?

2006-04-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

Texas will be coming back for a special legislative session to fix the mess some call "the school finance system." It's less a system than a patched-together hodgepodge of local taxes coupled with state sales tax. Added together, it equals significantly less than what school districts need to meet the standards required by the state.

In contrast to the image every has of us Texans, though, there is some awareness that there is a world outside of our borders. The Dallas Morning News ran an AP story about Arkansas' very similar problem:

The assembly's focus will be answering the state Supreme Court's 2005 ruling that Arkansas had not adequately funded education for the state's 450,000 students. The state faces a Dec. 1 deadline to address problems with the current funding formula.

Legislators are looking at an additional $132.5 million in funding over the next two years for the state's 251 school districts, plus a $90 million appropriation for repairing crumbling school buildings.

There is a significant difference though. In Texas, the Supreme Court warned that Texas schools were close to inadequacy but not there yet. The only aspect of the Texas system ruled unconstitutional was a statewide property tax -- and that appears to be the only thing the Texas Legislature wants to fix. Most of the Republican leadership down here has pledged whatever "fix" comes from a special session will be "revenue neutral." That is, no new money.

If you're a Texan, and you have any young children near the computer screen, please move them away because what I'm about to say is almost too horrible for even adults to consider:

If Arkansas invests in their schools and we don't, it is entirely possible that we might fall behind Arkansas. I shudder to think about it.

More on Bar

2006-03-24T17:13:00.000-08:00

"It's strange that the former first lady would want to do this. If her son's having a rough time of it, couldn't she write him a check?" said Daniel Borochoff, founder of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a Chicago-based charity watchdog group.

Good question. (via Crooks and Liars)

Neil Bush in education?

2006-03-24T04:29:00.000-08:00

I knew one S&L criminal was into educational software, but two?

Turns out Bush family ne'erdowell Neil Bush is peddling pedagogy these days. And don't worry, it appears to be every bit as shady as his dealings during the S&L scandal.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush made a donation to Houston schools to support Katrina evacuees. So far, no problem. But she specified that the money must go to buy software from Neil's company. Now, I understand a mother wanting to help her son, but is this charity for Katrina victims (remember, by the way, that Bar once said living as refugees in the Astrodome was "working very well for them") or is this charity for a son who just can't ever seem to pull his life together? I've got my opinion.

But it gets even worse. From the Houston Chronicle:

There are 40 Ignite programs being used in the Houston area, and 15 in the Houston school district, said Ken Leonard, president of Ignite.

Information about the effectiveness of the program, through district-generated reports, was not readily available Wednesday, according to an HISD spokeswoman.

Two years ago, the school district raised eyebrows when it expanded the program by relying heavily on private donations.

In February 2004, the Houston school board unanimously agreed to accept $115,000 in charitable donations from businesses and individuals who insisted the money be spent on Ignite. The money covered half the bill for the software, which cost $10,000 per school.

The deal raised conflict of interest concerns because Neil Bush and company officials helped solicit the donations for the HISD Foundation, a philanthropic group that raises money for the district.

So he was raising charitable money using Daddy's connections-- and then directing the charity to himself! Wow, I knew this was a dysfunctional family, but c'mon!

And, while we're at it let's throw in a crazed Russian tycoon. Why not?

Last year, Neil Bush reportedly toured former Soviet Union countries promoting Ignite with Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky.

According to the Times of London, Berezovsky, a former Kremlin insider now living in Britain, is wanted on criminal charges in Moscow accusing him of seeking to stage a coup against President Vladimir Putin.

Anybody else get the sense that Neil Bush should be nowhere near children?

Yet another bright idea!

2006-03-21T15:05:00.000-08:00

Do they really imagine this will work? Oh yeah, these are the same people that thought they could privatize social security and democratize Iraq. Almost forgot. I guess it's not too much of a leap then for them to imagine they can solve the teenage drug problem through testing. Gosh, these people are just full of bright ideas!

W.House pushes more schools to drug-test students
19 Mar 2006 14:03:49 GMT

Source: Reuters

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON, March 19 (Reuters) - Student athletes, musicians and others who participate in after school activities could increasingly be subject to random drug testing under a program promoted by the Bush administration.

White House officials say drug testing is an effective way to keep students away from harmful substances like marijuana and crystal methamphetamine, and have held seminars across the country to promote the practice to local school officials.

But some parents, educators and school officials call it a heavy-handed, ineffective way to discourage drug use that undermines trust and invades students' privacy.

"Our money should be going toward educating young people, not putting them under these surveillance programs," said Jennifer Kern, a research associate at the Drug Policy Alliance, a non-profit group that has frequently criticized U.S. drug policy.

Requiring students to produce a urine sample or hair sample for laboratory testing is a relatively recent tactic in the United States' decades-long "war on drugs," along with surveillance cameras and drug-sniffing dogs in school hallways.

For more, click here. Hat tip to Pink Dome, which also had this excellent post.

Georgia Bible School

2006-03-21T07:58:00.000-08:00

This one is a difficult one for me, because I love religious literature. The Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Koran, the Dhammapada, and the Tao de Ching are all excellent reads.

So when Georgia passed state funding for a class on the Bible as literature, one part of me says, why not? And the other -- the cynical, well-informed part -- knows that these kinds of things are often Trojan horses for evangelicals.

I agree with this sentimenet:

While the bill specifies that the courses must be taught in an “objective and nondevotional” manner, the exclusion of other religious books makes it objectionable, Maggie Garrett, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, has said.

If Georgia really wants to teach religion as literature, why not include otehr religions?

(Via Governing magazine.)

Florida House tries to circumvent Supreme Court, institute vouchers

2006-03-16T13:33:00.000-08:00

Story here. Via Texas Freedom Network.

Thank you, Kansas

2006-03-16T13:24:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, I think Texas is backwards in its attitudes. Then, Kansas makes us look reasonable. Thanks, Kansas.

Kansas has yet again made itself a laughingstock. I sometimes wonder if they're trying to look stupid. If so, they're doing a helluva job.

Parents will have to sign off before their students can take a sex ed course. It's about empowering parents, according to the author of the proposal. Why not empower them more? Why not have them sign off on everything taught at school?

The last sentence of the article puts it all in perspective:

In November, after a debate that attracted worldwide attention, the board adopted standards that treat evolution as a flawed theory.

I guess next they'll be teaching manifest destiny as gospel truth. Damn, I guess I shouldn't give 'em any ideas. They're capable of anything in Kansas.

Never ever

2006-03-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

Yet ANOTHER reason why test scores should never -- ever -- be the single measurement of a person's worth, intelligence, or aptitude.

(Just in case you needed another reason.)

Pearson fails SAT

2006-03-10T05:44:00.000-08:00

Freak accident or part of a long, continuous series of stories just like this one? You decide.

By the way, Pearson blamed the problem on "excessive moisture" in their facility here in Austin, Texas. I can tell you, folks, unless they had some leaky faucets, there has been hardly any moisture at all -- much less excessive -- in Austin for about a year now. Most of Texas is in the midst of a painful drought.

This is a strange story and should certainly lead to some more much-deserved chinks in high-stakes testing's armor.

The mistakes, which the company, Pearson Educational Measurement, acknowledged yesterday, raised fresh questions about the reliability of the kinds of high-stakes tests that increasingly dominate education at all levels. Neither Pearson, which handles state testing across the country, nor the College Board detected the scoring problems until two students came forward with complaints.

"The story here is not that they made a mistake in the scanning and scoring but that they seem to have no fail-safe to alert them directly and immediately of a mistake," said Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "To depend on test-takers who challenge the scores to learn about system failure is not good."

These were not the first major scoring problems that Pearson has experienced. The company agreed in 2002 to settle a large lawsuit over errors in scoring 8,000 tests in Minnesota that prevented several hundred high school seniors from graduating. It also has made significant scoring errors in Washington and Virginia.

After those problems, company officials had assured clients that they had vastly improved their quality control. But the new problems on the October SAT turned out to be the most significant scoring errors that the College Board had experienced.

Pearson said yesterday that the SAT errors, which affected 4,000 students out of 495,000 who took the October test, arose partly because of excessive moisture that caused the answer sheets to expand before they were scanned at the company's large test-processing site in Austin, Tex.

Another constitutional crisis

2006-03-09T10:02:00.000-08:00

We're facing a constitutional crisis here in Texas over school funding and a Supreme Court decision that the system is illegal.

Now we get to welcome another state to the club:

Concord – A superior court judge handed a victory yesterday to Londonderry, Nashua and 16 other school districts, ruling the state’s latest school funding plan is unconstitutional.

Justice William Groff ruled that past New Hampshire Supreme Court rulings in Claremont cases make it clear the new law, contained in House Bill 616, fails to clear even the first of four hurdles the courts set for the Legislature.

“The Legislature has completely failed to fulfill its constitutional duty,” to define a constitutionally adequate education, Groff ruled. As for determining the cost of an adequate education, he said, the Legislature, “has abdicated its duty.”

Change in Texas

2006-03-08T14:57:00.000-08:00

Texas House Public Education Committee Chairman Kent Grusendorf lost in a Republican Primary election yesterday.

Grusendorf was in the leadership's camp, a camp that advocated no-new-money for schools, vouchers, and other assorted unsavory "ecucation reforms." His opponent, Diane Patrick, is an education professor at UT-Arlington and a public education advocate.

Could the tide be turning within the Republican Party? Could the moderates be reasserting themselves?

Wal-Mart reaches out to blogs

2006-03-08T14:55:00.000-08:00

Wal-Mart may be seeking you out, fellow blogger, to carry their water. Don't do it. Apparently, they're reaching out to try to spread the message of how wonderful they are in the blogosphere. Lord help us.

G-d help us

2006-03-06T13:33:00.000-08:00

Yet another reason why vouchers are a bad idea. What if the people who wrote the curriculum discussed in this column wrote it for all students!?

G-d help us (no pun intended).

Where ed policy meets campaign finance reform

2006-03-06T11:26:00.000-08:00

I wrote last week about the Republicans' sugar daddy in Texas, James Leininger. Over the weekend, the San Antonio Express News (which by the way, just might be the best newspaper in Texas) did a thorough piece on the San Antonio native.

He's spent over $3 million on state primary elections in this election cycle alone! That's a mind boggling figure for one person to have kicked in. Why's he doing it?

With a privately funded San Antonio voucher program poised to expire, and policy and political trends potentially making chances even bleaker for the controversial idea after next year's regular legislative session, some say this election is a make-or-break time.

So comes the war's escalation.

Leininger, 61, says that for him, it's all about improving the chances of saving inner-city children from low-performing public schools. His critics say vouchers would damage public education for all children.

What's more, critics say his infusion of more than $3.2 million so far in this year's primaries — with the majority going to the five targeted legislative seats — signals a disturbing effort by one man to buy democracy.

"It's unprecedented and more government than any one human being ought to be able to buy," said Tom "Smitty" Smith of Public Citizen, a private watchdog group. He called Leininger the "poster doctor" for campaign finance reform.

What the article doesn't get into is Dr. Leininger's religion. And it is an issue here. Dr. Leininger is a devout Christian, which is fine, but he wants public money to go to private Christian schools, which is not. If Leininger is successful tomorrow -- he would need most of his 5 House candidates and a conservative Democrat in the Senate to win -- he might just get his publicly funded voucher program after over a decade of trying.

SCOTUS unanimous against gay rights

2006-03-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

Rumsfeld v. FAIR has been decided. And the result was no surprise.

What was a surprise was that the justices ruled unanimously that law schools must allow military recruiters even though the military discriminates against gays. (Many law schools have anti-discrimination policies for recruiters.)

The so-called "don't ask, don't tell" rule is a sham and will one be looked back on with shame. I'm starting to get the feeling, though, that there will be a lot of decisions from the Roberts court that will be viewed unkindly by history.

MLK said the arc of history is long but bends towards justice. Sometimes, I'm not so sure.

Land for schools

2006-03-03T15:45:00.000-08:00

Having trouble funding schools? Hey, I've got an idea... Why don't we sell off federal park lands?

Chalk this up to yet another brilliant plan from the assorted geniuses otherwise known as the Bush Administration. This is the first time I've ever bought into a trickle-down theory: the intelligence of our commander-in-chief is trickling down through the federal bureaucracy.

Kudos to Sens. Wyden (D-OR) and Craig (R-ID) for standing up to the madness.

Big Brother is everywhere

2006-03-03T13:52:00.000-08:00

Be careful what you say, teachesr. Or as Joe Thomas would say, shut up and teach!

Teacher on leave for anti-Bush remarks

Friday, March 3, 2006;
Posted: 9:56 a.m. EST (14:56 GMT)

AURORA, Colorado (AP) -- About 150 high school students walked out of class
to protest a decision to put a teacher on leave while they investigate remarks
he made about President Bush in class, including that some people compare Bush
to Adolf Hitler.

The protest came Thursday as administrators began investigating whether
Overland High School teacher Jay Bennish violated a policy requiring balancing
viewpoints in the classroom, Cherry Creek School District spokeswoman Tustin
Amole said.

I love this especially in the context of the previous post on evolution. It would seem conservatives want students exposed to a wide range of "opinions" on science but when it comes to politics... oh no. Definitely not. The hypocrisy is stunning.

At least we're not Oklahoma

2006-03-03T13:48:00.000-08:00

As bad as things seem politically in Texas, at least we're not Oklahoma:

OKLAHOMA CITY - While other states are backing away from teaching alternatives to evolution, the Oklahoma House passed a bill Thursday encouraging schools to expose students to alternative views about the origin of life.
The measure, passed on a 77-10 vote, gives teachers the right to teach "the full range of scientific views on the biological or chemical origins of life." The measure stops short of requiring the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside the theory of evolution in science classes.
Its author, Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said evolution is taught in some classrooms as if it were scientific fact although the theory, developed in the 19th century by Charles Darwin, is neither observable, repeatable or testable and is not solid science.
"They are getting a one-sided view of evolution," said Kern, a former teacher. "Let's teach good honest science."

I think I'm sick.

$500 g's for a statehouse race?!

2006-03-02T12:55:00.000-08:00

The guy's even crazier than I thought!

James Leininger, voucher nutjob, has personally contributed $500,000 to one state House campaign. Are you kidding me?

Political contributions from a San Antonio doctor to a Longview man trying to unseat the local state representative have surpassed a half-million dollars.
Republican Mark Williams has raised more than $500,000 from Dr. James Leininger of San Antonio, a staunch school voucher supporter.
According to Williams' campaign finance reports, between Dec. 31 and Feb. 25, he's raised a total of $527,381— $504,886 from Leininger.
The money is directed to the Texas Republican Legislative Campaign Committee, in which Leininger is the main contributor, giving 96 percent to Williams' campaign during that period.
...
Williams is trying to unseat Tommy Merritt, R-Longview, in Tuesday's Republican primary and has criticized Merritt for being ineffective during his 10 years in office.
"There's no such thing as the Republican Party anymore," Merritt said. "It's the Leininger party. That's a lot of money just for one seat in the Legislature."
An Austin-based political analyst has said in a state representative race in rural Texas, donors usually raise between $60,000 and $100,000 in a well-funded campaign. Reports from July 1, 2005 to Feb. 25 show Merritt has raised about $166,000.
"It's just about controlling the Legislature and intimidating the Legislature and bullying the Legislature," Merritt said of Leininger's contributions. "This is about intimidating the voters and ... being a predator to the voters using huge sums of money to turn voters away from the polls, to discourage individuals from running for office and being public servants."

Education a key factor in state races

2006-03-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

Great article in the Austin Statesman today about the role education policy is playing in the state primaries next week.

One thing is for sure, education is important to the vast majority of people. Republican policies to defund public schools are overwhelmingly unpopular. Politically motivated and engaged parents and teachers are only starting to understand their power to shape the Legislature.

Chairman Weirdo

2006-03-01T15:07:00.000-08:00

Apparently Texas House Public Education Chairman is against teaching about gays in schools but has no problem with placing drawing of nude men locked in an embrace on tables at a Republican Women's Club.

Is this a sign of desperation in his primary? Texas politicos are watching this race closely.

The chairman, Rep. Grusendorf, is a voucher supporter and consistently puts forward anti-teacher, anti-public education bills. His opponent, an education professor and former school board member, is pro-public education and is backed by parent and teacher groups. If she wins the primary, the right wing education agenda could be in serious trouble.

The primary is March 7.

Uh-oh, Blago

2006-03-01T12:21:00.000-08:00

Turns out when Gov. Blago was on the Daily Show, he didn't know it was a fake news show. At one point, he turns to an aide and asks "is he teasing me?" Shame on the aide for not knowing that he was. But his mistake is to our benefit. It makes the segment that much more funny.

Buying the Legislature

2006-03-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

One man, James Leininger, has spent $2.35 million on races for the Texas Legislature in '06 so far. That level of spending (on the primaries no less) is unheard of according to most Capitol observers.

Why's he doing it? In a word, vouchers.

Over $1 million has gone to the campaigns of five Republican primary candidates running against moderate R's who voted against vouchers. Of the total money those five have raised, Leininger has contributed 90%.

The Dallas Morning News has the story of how one man is trying to buy the Legislature. Money quote:

"We've never seen numbers like this, as far as percentage of support from one entity," said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign money.
"The Leininger PAC has showed that the Texas campaign finance system is totally out of whack," Mr. McDonald said. "One person should not be able to bankroll a slate of candidates.
"These candidates will become private representatives, not public servants."

I'm back

2006-02-26T20:10:00.000-08:00

I'll start getting back in to posting this week. Needed a break to establish some new routines. Thanks to everyone who emailed encouraging me to write again. Your thoughtfulness is much appreciated.

I can't think of a better way to get back into this than to point to this unbelievably inspiring story about a special ed student who had his chance to shine, and made the most of it. This is a must-see video. (Hat tip to my new favorite sports blog, Burnt Orange Nation.)

Sayonara

2005-12-19T13:44:00.000-08:00

Going on vacation for two weeks, so posting will be sporadic. Check out the blogroll at right to keep up with all that's going on in the edusphere.

Happiest of holidays to everyone, and Happy New Year.

Heaven help

2005-12-17T08:19:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the long hiatus. End-of-the-semester-madness is over, though.

Looks like a creationism battle is inevitable in Texas, too. A local Houston news station had this story on how many teachers are already teaching it. And worse, a battle to put "intelligent design" into the state's science standards is probably on the horizon:

Officially the state's science curriculum for public schools does not recognize intelligent design, only the theory of evolution, which leaves science teachers like Debbie Cobb in a tough spot.

"Our kids can come in believing in intelligent design and I can't even mention it," Cobb said.

So how does she handle it?

"I'm very careful how I put things," she said. "I don't say, 'alright guys, God created the universe.' I don't say that because I'm teaching science. I personally believe that. What's that got to do with what I'm teaching?"

Several other teachers and education consultants who spoke with 11 News said intelligent design is already being taught by any number of Texas public school teachers, despite the official state curriculum. And some believe that curriculum itself could soon be challenged.

"I think you'll see a lot of these candidates talking about the issue," said Kathy Miller.

Kathy Miller with the liberal watchdog group Texas Freedom Network said Christian conservatives are using intelligent design to get religion into public schools.

God help us, (No pun intended.)

Someone's been talking to W, but was it God?

2005-12-09T17:06:00.000-08:00

From the Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC—Telephone logs recorded by the National Security Agency and obtained by Congress as part of an ongoing investigation suggest that the vice president may have used the Oval Office intercom system to address President Bush at crucial moments, giving categorical directives in a voice the president believed to be that of God.

Enlarge Image
President Bush sits at his desk in the Oval Office, where he received messages from an intercom voice identifying itself as "God" and thought to have been Vice President Cheney (below).

While journalists and presidential historians had long noted Bush's deep faith and Cheney's powerful influence in the White House, few had drawn a direct correlation between the two until Tuesday, when transcripts of meetings that took place in March and April of 2002 became available.

In a transcript of an intercom exchange recorded in March 2002, a voice positively identified as the vice president's identifies himself as "the Lord thy God" and promotes the invasion of Iraq, as well as the use of torture in prisoner interrogations.

A close examination of Bush's public statements and Secret Service time logs tracking the vice president reveals a consistent pattern, one which links Bush's belief that he had received word from God with Cheney's use of the White House's telephone-based intercom system.

Gotta love the Onion. (Hat tip to Dan Froomkin of the Wash. Post.)

Gimmicky solutions are no solutions at all

2005-12-07T20:47:00.000-08:00

My dad pointed out this beautiful column by Newsweek's Anna Quindlen. She argues that, get this, teachers aren't paid enough.

While the idea is not unusual, the eloquence employed in its defense is:

In recent years teacher salaries have grown, if they've grown at all, at a far slower rate than those of other professionals, often lagging behind inflation. Yet teachers should have the most powerful group of advocates in the nation: not their union, but we the people, their former students. I am a writer because of the encouragement of teachers. Surely most Americans must feel the same, that there were women and men who helped them levitate just a little above the commonplace expectations they had for themselves.
At the end of his book ["Teacher Man"; Frank] McCourt, who is preparing to leave teaching with the idea of living off his pension and maybe writing—and whose maiden effort, "Angela's Ashes," will win the Pulitzer—is giving advice to a young substitute. "You'll never know what you've done to, or for, the hundreds coming and going," he says. Yeah, but the hundreds know, the hundreds who are millions who are us. They made us. We owe them.

Amen. And it's not enough, Quindlen writes, to do what is presently fashionable and propose some modest, limited "merit pay" plan:

Unfortunately, the current fashionable fixes for education take a page directly from the business playbook, and it's a terrible fit. Instead of simply acknowledging that starting salaries are woefully low and committing to increasing them and finding the money for reasonable recurring raises, pols have wasted decades obsessing about something called merit pay. It's a concept that works fine if you're making widgets, but kids aren't widgets, and good teaching isn't an assembly line.

McCourt's book is instructive. Early in his 30-year career, he's teaching at a vocational high school and realizes that his English students are never more inspired than when forging excuse notes from their parents. So McCourt assigns the class to write excuse notes, the results ranging "from a family epidemic of diarrhea to a sixteen-wheeler truck crashing into the house." Pens fly with extravagant lies. You can almost feel the imaginations kick in.

The point about tying teaching salaries to widget standards is that it's hard to figure out a useful way to measure the merit of what a really good teacher does. You can imagine the principal who would see McCourt's gambit as the work of a gifted teacher, and just as easily imagine the one who would find it unseemly. Tying raises to pass rates is a flagrant invitation to inflate student achievement. Tying them to standardized tests makes rote regurgitation the centerpiece of schools. Both are blind to the merit of teachers who shoulder the challenging work of educating those less able, more troubled, from homes where there are no pencils, no books, even no parents. A teacher whose Advanced Placement class sends everyone on to top-tier colleges; a teacher whose remedial-reading class finally gets through to some, but not all, of a student group that is failing. There is merit in both.

Indeed there is. This column is a keeper-- one to come back to when making arguments for increased teacher pay and against short-sighted, quick-fix, widget-centered solutions.

Teachers need a better salary; spare the gimmicks.

Universal Pre-K

2005-12-07T20:29:00.000-08:00

Too many kids -- especially poor and middle-class kids -- have very little stimulation when they're three or four years old. Their minds are absorbing everything around them; problem is, all too often there isn't much around them.

The LA Times ran an Op-Ed today from Professor David L. Kirp today that cites a new study from the National Institute for Early Education Research:

The research examined the effect of a good preschool experience on the academic skills of children entering kindergarten in five states representing a cross section of the country. Its findings are eye-opening.

On vocabulary tests, children who attended state-supported preschools scored 31% higher than a similar group of youngsters who didn't participate — the equivalent of three months of learning. On tests of early math skills, the state preschoolers outscored their peers by 41%. A recent study of state pre-kindergarten classes in Tulsa, Okla., showed essentially the same result.

Kirp also cites research from a longitudinal study of a preschool program in Michigan:

The landmark study of Perry Preschool tracked a group of poor African American youngsters from when they attended pre-kindergarten in Ypsilanti, Mich., in the early 1960s until they were well into middle age.

The findings are astonishing: a $17 return to the individual and society for every dollar spent on their early education. Those who went to Perry were considerably more likely than children who didn't attend preschool to have graduated from high school and married, significantly less likely to have gone to prison multiple times and to have been on welfare. They're earning an average of $20,800 a year. That's 25% more than similar children who lacked the preschool experience — enough of a difference to lift them above the poverty line.

Given the hundreds of billions spent on education every year, the few billion it would cost to give Pre-K to every child in America hardly seems like a lot. And the return would be astounding.

Universal Pre-K is the single most affordable, practical, and smart policy that could be enacted to improve education in America today.

Something's got to give (or the budget blues)

2005-12-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

The Heritage Foundation released its latest budget analysis last week (executive summary here; hat tip to the Dish). According to the conservative think tank, federal spending under Republican leadership has gotten out of hand. (Surprise, surprise-- where were these guys four years ago?) And of course, tax breaks for America's beleaguered billionaires didn't help the situation.

If you rely on government spending for anything at all -- and if you think you don't, you're wrong -- you had better brace for bad times. Something's got to give.

One curious quote from the analysis:

The 2006–2050 budget picture is even more dismal. Because of the cost of fully funding Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, leading long-term budget projections have calculated that federal spending will increase from the current 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to a peacetime high of nearly 33 percent of GDP by 2050.[1]

Peacetime high? What's to suggest that we'll be in peacetime in 2050? Given recent speeches by prominent Republicans (and some prominent Democrats for that matter) it sounds like we've reached a century of Orwellian permanent war. Forget federal spending on education, national parks, highway infrastructure, or health care. We won't get it if things continue. War is expensive. Permanent war is crippling, both to soldiers and to our long-term national economic health.

All of this impacts education directly because as the deficit rises and as the costs of foreign wars continue to escalate, our schools will lose out. If that happens -- that is, if this country doesn't change leadership at the ballot box soon -- the knowledge and skills of our citizenry will decline and as our citizens go, so goes our country.

Court Watch

2005-12-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

The Supremes ruled that a part of Social Security checks -- 15% -- can be withheld to pay student loans.

They also heard arguments about a case that has received a lot of ink lately. They will have to decide if law schools that have anti-discrimination policies for employment recruiters must let military recruiters in to their job fairs. The feds claim they can withhold funding if they do not. All sorts of issues are tied up in this -- free speech, gay rights, privacy, disrimination in the military -- so it should be especially interesting to follow.

Preliminary analyses based on lines of questioning point to a decision in favor of the military.

Measuring progress

2005-12-07T17:43:00.000-08:00

Jenny D wanted someone to explain the controversy about growth models. It seems she thinks that measuring progress in schools and districts makes more sense than establishing a benchmark that all schools must meet no matter where they started. How crazy!

Just kidding. In fact, it's the only approach that makes sense. I've advocated it for a long time. Recently, the Spellings Education Department apparently came to its senses and announced that the growth model will be used in 10 states to determine Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). This is definitely a step in the right direction.

Jenny D points out some research that shows that measuring improvement works quite well. Go to her post for more info.

New Advocate is up

2005-12-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

Joe at Shut Up and Teach posted the newest Advocate Weekly. As always, informative stuff and excellent highlights from some of my favorite blogs. Thanks for keeping up the good work, Joe.

The Lord hates idiots

2005-12-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

A professor who planned to teach that -- gasp! -- creationism is wrong received a fairly un-Christian rebuke yesterday.

To the attackers: I'm fairly certain the Almighty hates your guts as much as the rest of the country does. Morons.

Is the iron in our food a metal?

2005-12-05T22:38:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post highlights a really cool service from something called the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It's a website called Ask a Scientist. Students can submit science questions to scientists and researchers and get a reply. Very cool.

(By the way, the question in the title of this post is one that was submitted to the site. They're working on the answer.)

Virtually worthless

2005-12-05T19:29:00.000-08:00

Think virtual schools are a good idea? They may prove to be. One thing they aren't -- at least for the moment -- is profitable. I think it's a highly questionable proposition that they will ever be profitable, but for now, they're nowhere close. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

With a contract to open the first statewide virtual high school before them, the mood of the members of the Waukesha School Board at their January 2004 monthly meeting was effusive.

A cost simulation showed that the school - called iQ Academies at Wisconsin - could start generating as much as $1 million for the school district by the 2006-'07 school year.

School Board members gushed.

"Pretty sweet," board member Daniel Warren said about the numbers.

A little more than a year into the iQ's operation, however, the school has yet to come close to matching the board's high hopes.

Expected to run $1.2 million in the red by next summer, the school faces possible closure unless administrators show they can stop the financial bleeding.

"There are not a lot of options," Warren said in a recent interview. "One option is to not proceed in the third year, to shut the program down because it's not working financially for us."

What has happened with the Waukesha school caught not only its board members but other school officials in the state off-guard.

And it raises questions about a previously uncontested notion about virtual schools - that they save money.

"I think the assumption was everybody saw it as a quick way to make a dollar. And it's not," said William Harbron, superintendent of the Northern Ozaukee School District, which runs the Wisconsin Virtual Academy.

There's at least one company that still thinks virtual schools will eventually make money and is banking a lot on that theory: K12. Formerly run by Bill Bennett (till the outcry over his suggestion that aborting black babies would reduce crime rates forced the company to break ties with him), the company is still trying to turn a profit off of on-line classes:

As it has expanded to become the country's largest operator of online public schools, K12 has yet to turn a profit, said Jeff Kwitowski, the company's director of public relations.

But much of that is because the company is still developing its product, a full K-12 online curriculum with associated materials, he said.

"We're not looking to make profit off the management side," Kwitowski said. "Our product is where we're going to eventually be successful. . . . Then we're going to, I think, see our product kind of take off and sell itself as districts are saying, 'Hey, this is great stuff.' "

It better be really great stuff or K12 is in really big trouble. I think there is a market for virtual classes, but I think that market -- for now -- is very small. The K12s of the world are trying to create a market with their product rather than creating a produce for a market that already exists. That's hard to do. There is very little demonstrated need for virtual classes no matter what K12's PR people say. The numbers don't lie. Districts should absolutely hold off on developing anything more than extremely small-scale pilot projects until there is no doubt that there is a need for the product.

Voucher money stolen... oh, and they don't work even when they're not stolen

2005-12-04T10:29:00.000-08:00

The NASB reports on theft of voucher funds in Florida and a report in Ohio that shows vouchers students scored no differently than their peers in public schools.

Can we please put this half-baked, overly simplistic, illogical, ideological, lunatic scheme to bed and focus on real substantive educational issues?

High stakes testing... in England

2005-12-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

Seems our friends across the pond are struggling with the implications and consequences of high-stakes testing, too. The results of the national exam in England were recently published leading to near-universal condemnation of the practice from teachers.

A sample from the article on the BBC website:

The head of the General Teaching Council, Carol Adams, said: "We know from our discussions with parents and from research that many parents feel that league tables are irrelevant in helping them judge how well the school is meeting the needs of their child.
"Yet the high stakes of testing and league tables mean that it is difficult for teachers to take a rounded approach to learning."

She called for "a radical overhaul" of the current assessment regime.

The Teacher Support Network charity said 70% of primary school teachers who responded to a survey it conducted said league tables had a negative effect on their wellbeing.

Nine per cent said they had a positive impact, however, by giving them goals to work towards.

A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said they would stay.

Martyr teachers, by definition, don't last

2005-12-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

Don't miss Ms. Frizzle's excellent rumination on KIPP schools and teacher-martyrs. (Via Tim at Assorted Stuff.)

Essential reading

2005-12-04T09:46:00.000-08:00

There's new blog in the progressive edusphere (new to me, anyway). It's from the Coalition of Essential Schools, one of my favorite organizations that works for educational change. Their blog is a collaborative one called, simply, the Essential Blog. Time will tell if it lives up to its name.

(Hat tip to Practical Theory, which has also been added to my blogroll at right.)

Par for the course

2005-12-01T20:57:00.000-08:00

The uber-right wing WSJ editorialists praised the recent Texas Supreme Court decision in an editorial earlier this week. It appeared in the Austin Statesman today. It's an abominable article.

First of all, they claim that "Texas spends nearly $10,000 per student." According the latest statistics (from 2003) from the state's education agency, that figure is actually less than $7,000 per student (click here, see line 67). But why concern ourselves with mere facts? They're so unnecessary.

The WSJ wrote that "the judiciary has flatly rejected the core doctrine of the education establishment that more dollars equal better classroom performance." Really? Justice Hecht, writing for the majority, stated: "Public education can and often does improve with greater resources, just as it struggles when resources are withheld." Soudn like a flat rejection to you?

I could go on at length with other distortions in the editorial but you get the idea. It's a shame that facts -- and the words of the actual decision itself -- are so irrelevant to the WSJ. They have a point of view that I, of course, disagree with, but it's hard to even consider an opposing viewpoint when the opposition uses distortions as willfully (ignorantly?) as the Journal did.

It's an awful editorial that lacks evidence to support its claims. But then, what more would you expect from the Wall Street Journal editorialists? It's par for the course for them.

Moral victory

2005-12-01T20:13:00.000-08:00

The National Council of Churches has composed a litany of moral reasons why NCLB should be opposed. It is one of the best explanations of the problems of No Child that I've ever read (and, as you might imagine, I've read a lot-- too many probably).

A sample:

The No Child Left Behind Act blames schools and teachers for many challenges that are neither of their making nor within their capacity to change. The test score focus obscures the importance of the quality of the relationship between the child and teacher. Sincere, often heroic efforts of teachers are made invisible. While the goals of the law are important—to proclaim that every child can learn, to challenge every child to dream of a bright future, and to prepare all children to contribute to society—educators also need financial and community support to accomplish these goals.

Beautiful. And the rest of it is as elegantly and succintly stated. Check it out here and the press release here. (Hat tip to Jim at Schoolsmatter, which is, by the way, one of the very best edublogs out there. Is it school smatter or schools matter? Hmmm...)

Maybe this will give students a reason to vote...

2005-11-30T21:51:00.000-08:00

Hey, I've got an idea to make America even greater than it already is. You ready? Here it is: Let's make college education even more expensive so that fewer people can get high paying jobs! Hell, China and India can provide all of the high-skill jobs anyway, right?

Such is the logic it seems of the Republican leadership in Congress. The new budget includes cuts to student loans so severe that "an average student borrower with $17,500 in loans would pay an estimated $5,800 in additional interest payments." Ouch.

But man, those tax cuts for the rich sure are gonna be sweet. It'll trickle down to those indebted students, right? And think how happy China and India will be!

The culture of corruption, alive and well in Ohio

2005-11-29T21:58:00.000-08:00

Jim Horn at Schools Matter has an interesting post about uber-privatizer David Brennan. The constitutionality of his for-profit charter schools is a pending question before the Ohio Supreme Court-- the same Ohio Supreme Court that consists of six justices that have taken campaign contributions from Brennan.

Can you say "culture of corruption," boys and girls?

Things fall apart

2005-11-28T19:24:00.000-08:00

Would it be too corny to say that our judicial system is falling apart?

Gatesifying Austin schools

2005-11-27T15:40:00.000-08:00

The Gates Foundation's controversial high school redesign initiative has now fully landed in Austin schools. A few years ago, the Austin school district began the redesign process, which includes splitting big schools into smaller ones, on its own. Now the Gates Foundation is helping to pay the bill; more accurately, they're paying $1.5 million of it.

Austin's NPR station broadcasted a brief story on it Friday. They mention in the story that math scores at the so-called Gates schools are flat, while reading scores are up slightly. What they don't mention is what effect, if any, the redesign process is having on holding power, or the ability of the schools to keep kids from dropping out. I haven't seen any data (I'd be appreciative if anyone who has would post a link in the comments) but my guess is that retention rates go up when the schools are smaller. Math and reading scores aside, that would be a supremely important accomplishment.

I'll be watching the Gatesifying of Austin schools closely.

Republican rip-off

2005-11-26T21:40:00.000-08:00

Rep. Pete Starks (D-CA) makes some forceful arguments against the Republican budget cuts/tax cuts in an In These Times editorial:

Since 2002, Republican budgets have cut nearly 7,000 slots for children in low-income families to receive Head Start services. These cuts were made despite studies demonstrating that Head Start children are more likely to graduate from high school and are less likely to repeat a grade. Head Start students are also less likely to commit a crime than low-income children who do not attend Head Start. But such empirical findings mean little to a party that prefers its policies based on faith.

After slashing Head Start budgets, it seems only logical for Republicans to next target poor mothers with children under 6 years old. A recent Republican budget proposal would require these mothers to double their weekly work hours from 20 to 40 in order to remain eligible for job training and vocational education. Yet that plan fails to provide $10.5 billion for childcare funding that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated would be needed for mothers to afford to work the longer hours and maintain their benefits. The blatant hypocrisy would be comical if it weren’t true.

As our children—unprepared for the challenges they’ll face—reach public schools, they will get less help than ever before. After taking credit for “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), President Bush and his Republican allies wasted no time in underfunding the Act, thereby ensuring schools could not meet new, stricter achievement standards. As of June 2005, the House Republicans have shortchanged public schools by $40 billion since the passage of the much-lauded NCLB law. At the same time, yearly progress tests created by NCLB to determine if individual students are improving in math and reading show almost a quarter of schools failing to show improvement on state student tests.

If those weren’t enough obstacles to place in front of our children, the Republicans want to force the average student borrower to pay an additional $5,800 for college. The single most effective springboard to a well-paying job is a college degree. So, this year the Republicans are proposing $14.3 billion in cuts to federal student aid programs.

It is clear that children and young people are the biggest losers in the Republican raid of the Treasury. If you're a parent, or a kid, or someone who cares about kids, you should be pissed.

Pay for it yourself

2005-11-24T16:59:00.000-08:00

It's Thanksgiving so I'm not going to write much about it, but the NYT this morning reported on the case brought by some Michigners against the Bush Education Department over NCLB spending. The judge ruled, in essence, that unfunded mandates are OK. This could be seen as a precedent in the separate case brought by Connecticut.

For more, here's the article.

Supreme Irony

2005-11-22T22:14:00.000-08:00

The Texas Supremes ruled in the landmark school finance court case yesterday. Their 7-1 decision was a mixed bag.

They ruled that the system of local property taxes in which just about every district in the state imposes the same tax (the maximum allowed $1.50 per $100 of valuation) is unconstitutional. The Texas Constitution specifically outlaws a statewide property tax. They got that part right.

Then they ruled that the public school system is adequate. This point is arguable, but I can understand that decision. But they also ruled that facilities funding is equitable. This is beyond ridiculous. It is indefensible and, in the long run, this Court will lose a lot of credibility with the public on this one. There is no reasonable definition of equitable that could allow for the rich suburban palaces of learning (see Highland Park) and the dilapidated hovels that pass for "facilities" in some of Texas's rural and urban communities to be considered as substantially equal. It's a mind-bending stretch-- a stretch that makes this state's High Court seem, well, high. Or just stupid.

Still, because the Supremes ruled that the basic mechanism for funding schools (property taxes) is unconstitutional, the whole system will have to be overhauled. What comes out the other end of this judicial-legislative death dance is anyone's guess. My hunch is that I won't like it. Whatever that solution might be, though, the Court gave the Lege until June 1 to figure it out.

A different approach

2005-11-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

In Britain, parents of bullies could be fined one thousand pounds for their children's bad behavior.

Of course, nobody has a problem with this -- on the surface. But dig deeper and, as usual, the devil is in the details. I remember when Texas was tryihg to ban bullying and some lawmakers defined it as "anything causing emotional distress." And I thought it'd be pretty easy to convict most math teachers daily. And don't get me started on some of the Republican politicians in this state. Emotional distress doesn't begin to describe what they do to me.

The BBC article doesn't mention how the Schools Minister pushing the punishments goes about defining bullying.

Laughing about global warming

2005-11-17T20:20:00.000-08:00

If you want to be educated and entertained at the same time -- and who doesn't? -- don't miss Larry David's comedy special Earth to America this Sunday night (7pm CST) on TBS. From Salon's preview:

The global warming yuk-fest has an all-star roster, featuring Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Cameron Diaz, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Ben Stiller, among many others. Writers from "The Daily Show," "The Simpsons," "King of the Hill" and "Everybody Loves Raymond" conspired to help with the event, which will be staged live at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

A snippet from Salon's interview with Larry David:

I loved your "Why I Am Marching" post on the StopGlobalWarming.org Web site, where Laurie is organizing a virtual march on Washington to protest climate change.

What it says is: "The virtual march is a perfect opportunity for the lazy man to do something good without having to expend any effort. This thing was made for me."

It seems you've been dragged kicking and screaming -- or at least protesting -- into the role of environmental advocate by your wife. Is it safe to say that you wouldn't be discussing this issue if it weren't for her?

I started out doing this to support my wife, but you'd be surprised: The more you're around a subject, the more it starts sinking in. You can't help it, it's just by osmosis. It's discussed in my house 24 hours a day. So, I'm becoming educated about this issue just by living in this house, as are my kids. And it's become impossible now that I'm educated about it to completely turn my back on it, the way I do about most things.

What are some of your environmental concerns -- or neuroses?

Well, my toilet paper's been changed. That's been a hell of a struggle. Laurie switched brands on me so it doesn't use the virgin trees.

You prefer the fully quilted variety?

Yeah. I'm finding [the other kind] a little rough.

If you're an interested and very lazy activist, you, too, can go to stopglobalwarming.org and add your name to the petition.

But don't change your toilet paper. That seems a little extreme.

Finally! An explanation for...

2005-11-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

... Pat Robertson.

Katrina's silver lining?

2005-11-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the Christian Science Monitor is a bit premature to call the restructuring of New Orleans' school system "Katrina's silver lining." A lot remains to be seen before we can determine that. Of course, New Orleans schools were bad on so many levels that it would be hard not to improve on them. But with conservatives directing rebuilding money to ill-conceived voucher programs, I wouldn't bet on an improvement.

Muslim schools in France

2005-11-15T16:28:00.001-08:00

As cars and buildings burned throughout France during the last weeks, many people wondered how the rage of young Muslims could be addressed and dissolved.

US News & World Report asked if Muslims schools might be part of the solution. The questions raised by such a solution are questions that must be asked in any society that values religion, diversity, tolerance, and universal education.

This is an article you shouldn't miss.

Micscellany: Spanking and sleeping

2005-11-15T16:14:00.000-08:00

Just a couple of tidbits:

The Attorney General re-asserted the right of Texas school districts to use corporal punishment. (This is 2005, not 1805, right? Just checking.)

Dr. Ferber is revising his theory: Maybe not answering your baby's cries in the night isn't such a good thing after all...

SCOTUS rules on special ed case

2005-11-15T15:20:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday in favor of a school district that was sued by parents who were dissatisfied with their child's special education program. Essentially, the majority in the 6-2 decision ruled that the burden of proof is on the family, not the district. Justice O'Connor wrote the decision for the majority. Justices Breyer and Ginsburg each wrote separate dissents..

Another voucher school bites the dust in Milwaukee

2005-11-14T21:48:00.000-08:00

From tomorrow's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

State denies funds for school

Northside High fails to qualify under voucher plan rules
Taking the next step in a new strategy for enforcing rules on schools in Milwaukee's private school voucher program, the state Department of Public Instruction has notified a school that opened this fall it does not qualify to receive public money.

...

Northside High raised eyebrows even before it opened because [CEO Ricardo] Brooks was a key official of Academic Solutions, a large voucher school that the DPI ordered closed last winter, and because the school is located in space previously used by Academic Solutions. Under new regulations for the voucher program, leaders of schools ordered closed cannot open another voucher school for seven years, but Brooks applied to open Northside before the rule went into effect.

Northside received a voucher payment from the state in September of $309,611.25, based on having 194 qualifying students, according to the DPI. Voucher payments are made four times a year.

Under tightened rules, DPI has been increasing its oversight of private schools with voucher students, based on whether they are complying with rules on financial practices, other operating practices or safety and now on whether they meet the state's definition of a private school.

Another wedge issue they can't win

2005-11-14T15:55:00.000-08:00

Even Rick Santorum doesn't think creationism qualifies as science. Well, at least, now he doesn't. You don't think that maybe has anything to do with the fact that the ultra-right wing Senator losing badly in the polls for his race next year and just saw eight pro-creationism school board members voted out right in the center of his state, do you?

Nah, it's principles, not politics, right? Uh, yeah. Maybe not. From the Beaver Creek Times (no really, it's from the Beaver Creek Times):

BEAVER FALLS - U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said Saturday that he doesn't believe that intelligent design belongs in the science classroom.

Santorum's comments to The Times are a shift from his position of several years ago, when he wrote in a Washington Times editorial that intelligent design is a "legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in the classroom."

But on Saturday, the Republican said that, "Science leads you where it leads you."

... [Last week, televangelist Pat] Robertson warned residents, "If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected him from your city."

Santorum said flatly Saturday, "I disagree. I don't believe God abandons people," and said he has not spoken to Robertson about his comments.

Though Santorum said he believes that intelligent design is "a legitimate issue," he doesn't believe it should be taught in the classroom, adding that he had concerns about some parts of the theory.

Earlier this summer, President Bush said he favored teaching intelligent design in the classroom.

With Santorum running for re-election next year, and with Bush and the Republican Party taking some significant hits in public confidence in recent months, Santorum insisted he is not trying to distance himself from Bush.

No matter what he says, he is distancing himself from Bush and the wingnut faction of the party that he is beholden to. Only problem is that Santorum is such a posterboy for that very faction that it will be hard to convince anybody that he's moderate.

One thing's for sure. The right has handed us progressives a wedge issue they can't win. The public doesn't want creationism taught in science class. And Republican politicians are figuring that out. Now they have two bad options: abandon the wingnut base and go after the sensible middle or stay with the base and lose the middle. I'll take either one.

(Hat tip to Pluto on Daily Kos.)

No-bid contracts for schools

2005-11-14T15:48:00.000-08:00

In case you -- like me -- missed this NYT article, you should definitely read it. It's amazing but, at this point, depressingly unsurprising. This is the kind of thing that used to drive people crazy with outrage; now we're just used to it.

A no-bid contract was given to a well connected builder of portable buildings to provide classrooms for Mississippi children in the Katrina zone. From the NYT:

...[T]he classrooms cost FEMA nearly $90,000 each, including transportation, according to contracting documents. That is double the wholesale price and nearly 60 percent higher than the price offered by two small Mississippi businesses dropped from the deal.
In addition, the portable buildings were not secured in a concrete foundation, as usually required by state regulations because of safety concerns in a region prone to hurricanes and tornados.

The classroom contract has already prompted a lawsuit from one of the Mississippi companies and a government investigation.

"The fact that natural disasters are not precisely predictable must not be an excuse for careless contracting practices," David E. Cooper from the Government Accountability Office, told Congress recently. In testimony submitted this week, Mr. Cooper said, "We found information in the corps' contract files and from other sources that suggest the negotiated prices were inflated."

There's got to be a special place in Hell for people that profit from catastrophes. I haven't read the Inferno in a few years -- anyone know which ring that was?

Read blogs, but read books, too.

2005-11-11T17:51:00.000-08:00

I'm a day late for buy Joanne Jacobs' new book day but I figure I ought to point out Our School anyway. While I often disagree with her, Jacobs' blog is one of the oldest and best edublogs out there. I read it often and I appreciated very much that she linked to my blog only a few days after I started it.

So buy her book or at least go to amazon and think about it.

Message to Dover: God hates you

2005-11-10T20:30:00.000-08:00

You've probably already heard about Pat Robertson's love for the good people of Dover, Pennsylvania following their rejection of the eight board members who instituted a creationist curriculum. But just in case you haven't:

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."

"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.

Get it? God hates you. Way to go, Dover Pa. You heathens. You scum.

I've got to say, so many people get up in arms about Robertson, but I love him. He makes us progressives look even more sensible than we already are and religious conservatives look even more crazy than they already are.

Keep up the good work, Pat. We should give you a salary. Oh, I forgot, you're already making millions scamming charitable donations. But I suppose God loves you, huh?

Poverty on the rise

2005-11-10T19:52:00.000-08:00

There can be no doubt that achieving success in schools is dependent on a variety of factors. There can also be no doubt that child poverty leads to failure. These studies from the National Center for Children in Poverty provide a stark look at a truly dire situation.

The first is a study on children in urban environments. 51% of them live in poverty (3% more than 5 years ago). That's nearly 9 million kids. Until poverty is adequately addressed no amount of education reform will make a significant difference.

The second study focuses on the children of immigrants, an increasingly large population in America's public schools. While immigrant children do have access to public education, they have little or no access to other federal assistance that could improve their school experience.

(Hat tip to the Moving Ideas Network.)

Whose Wars?

2005-11-10T19:14:00.000-08:00

This is not an endorsement; I haven't seen the materials. But I've been impressed with other articles and projects of Rethinking Schools, a Milwaukee organization originally formed to battle vouchers in their city. More recently, they've put together a 72-page teaching guide to the Iraq War called "Whose Wars?"

I've struggled -- as I think most socials studies teachers have -- with teaching about the Iraq War. I present the geography of the country, the history, the geopolitics involved. But most importantly, I want the students to think deeply about the issues and make up their minds about its justification.

But it's hard to get around the facts: there were no weapons of mass destruction and there was little (if any) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. And now we have 2,000 dead and 15,000 wounded veterans. It's hard to skirt around those facts and still maintain any sort of honesty with students.

And yet, like every American, I want to hold out hope that maybe -- somehow -- Iraq will work out. I know, I know, it's probably not going to happen. Iraq will probably degenerate into a civil war and we'll have to get out of there: Mission most definitely not Accomplished. But how do you explain that to a 12-year old?

I'm interested to see how the people at Rethinking Schools go about doing that. You can read the introduction here.

Veteran and Congressional candidate hates NCLB

2005-11-09T20:40:00.000-08:00

Everyone's talking about Democratic victories today, including one in red state Virginia. So could it be possible that Texas could become a little more purple, too?

If we get more candidates like David Harris, we'll have a great chance. Major Harris is back from a 14 month tour in Iraq and is challenging Smokey Joe Barton in Texas's 6th Congressional District in 2006. He's got a steep hill to climb because Barton is well connected. Of course, some of Barton's connections (like those to DeLay) will be a distinct disadvantage for him.

But back to Harris: In an interview with a blogger who is tracking the congressional race, Harris said No Child Left Behind is nearly criminal. Here's pare of the exchange:

DS: What is your position on No Child Left Behind?
MDH: I think NCLB borders on criminal.

DS: Are you aware of the "Sneak-n-Peek" provision in NCLB, and how do you feel about it? (Info on the SNP can be found at leavemychildalone.org)
MDH: Not only do I know about it, I have been participating on panel discussions in the community to talk about recruiting abuses. Children have the right to make up their minds on their own and recruiters that target them and their families do the military a serious injustice. I have a hard time figuring out why more parents aren't speaking out about this issue.

DS: How do you feel about rising tuition rates at public universities? Do you have any ideas about how to keep college affordable?
MDH: Its so sad because its becoming cost prohibitive to go to college. We should have a system that allows every student to get a college education, regardless of income level. This is where the lotto money should go, and allow everyone the ability to go and pay on a sliding scale at public universities.

DS: Do you support repealing Bush-era provisions which prevent students with misdemeanor drug convictions from receiving federal student aid in the form of loans or Pell Grants?
MDH: I do support that because everyone deserves a chance to better themselves, and rise out of the system and poverty that cripples too many that have gone before.

In those answers, Harris hits all the right chords. I'm looking forward to hearing more from him. For more information on Harris his candidacy, check out his website.

Maureen Dowd right here in Austin

2005-11-09T20:08:00.000-08:00

For any of you Austinites out there, don't miss Maureen Dowd's lecture next week. Details here.

Conquests in Cali

2005-11-09T20:05:00.000-08:00

For news and firsthand accounts of the victories in California over the Governator (an electoral girly man?) I direct you to Shari and to Eric Mar, President of the San Francisco Board of Education.

Democracy can be rough some times

2005-11-09T11:49:00.000-08:00

Eight members of the Dover School Board who voted for the teaching of creationism in science class were voted off the board yesterday.

From the CBS/AP article:

"My kids believe in God. I believe in God. But I don't think it belongs in
the science curriculum the way the school district is presenting it," said Jill
Reiter, 41, a bank teller who joined a group of high school students waving
signs supporting the challengers Tuesday.

I think there's an emerging consensus around his now. Teach creationism in philosophy and religion classes, teach science in science classes. I hope other school board members learn a lesson from all this. In this country, you're free to worship however and whatever you want, but you can't make others do the same-- especially in science class.

Election Day

2005-11-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

Continually updated results on NJ and VA Governor races here.

Abstinence updates

2005-11-08T18:04:00.000-08:00

Abstinence-only educators had a conference last week. Laura Donnelly at TomPaine.com was not impressed:

It was a big weekend for abstinence-only education. The unproven and unscientifically supported education method got its own first-ever national conference—sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services , no less!—in Baltimore to evaluate how it's working. The results were inconclusive—only one study has found that teens exposed to abstinence-only education programs embrace the idea of chastity, and there's no evidence yet that they actually follow through with it—but the conference's main purpose, as I see it, was simply to put a lot of abstinence-only educators together in one room and let them reinforce each other. It's a lot easier to drown out science that way.

She also tells of protestors at the conference and at the headquarters of Family Research Council in Washington. The protestors at the FRC were dressed in full-body condom costumes. My guess is the staff of the ultra-right FRC will be having nightmares for the rest of their lives.

In other abstinence news, Sen. Lautenberg's amendment that would require abstinence only programs to at least provide medically accurate information faces a battle in the House. The good people at NARAL have a petition ready to sign if you're interested. (Hat tip to tompaine.com again.)

And the Denver Post reports that abstinence groups are heading to college! Look out UC-Boulder... I will say this, it appears based on the representation of the college group in the Denver Post, that the abstinent students aren't trying to push their agenda on others, nor are they trying to misinform or scare anybody. They're trying to create social networks of students that are abstinent. At the end of the day, this is a good thing. There is a lot of pressure on young people to have sex and many of them simply aren't ready it for it. They shouldn't feel like they have to.

Abstinence is a good idea for teens and college students. Teaching only abstinence, however, is not.

Budget Battles

2005-11-08T17:20:00.000-08:00

Behold the Budget Battle Royale!

The Republicans in the House have a steep hill to climb to pass their controversial budget which includes cuts for school lunch programs and student loan assistance, according to the Washington Post.

...[F]or now, Republicans concede they are well short of the votes needed to pass a bill that would require longer work hours to qualify for welfare, allow states to impose new costs on Medicaid beneficiaries, cut assistance for child support enforcement, trim student loan spending, cut back agriculture supports, and curb eligibility for food stamps.

The Senate last week narrowly approved legislation that would trim about $35 billion from the budget over five years, but that bill largely avoided the direct cuts to beneficiaries of federal anti-poverty programs contained in the House budget measure. Those proposed cuts have created strong misgivings among some Republican moderates, especially since a five-year, $70 billion tax cut is awaiting action that would more than offset the savings in the budget cuts.

The Democrats are stepping up to challenge this mean-spirited budget package:

House Democrats have compiled lists of committee votes for cuts to agriculture, student aid, child support and health care programs, as well as for oil drilling in the Alaska refuge, that Democratic leaders vow to use in next year's midterm congressional elections.

"This is going to test whether moderate Republicans are really moderate," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "There are a ton of people who will have a day of reckoning coming."

This week, Democrats will hold a conference call with a Wisconsin college student to talk about student loan cuts and will serve lunch at a District school to highlight the budget's impact on subsidized school lunches. They will also stage a mock hearing to tar the entire budget as an effort to finance tax cuts for the rich on the backs of the poor.

It'll be interesting -- if not depressing -- to see how moderate Republicans vote on this. Either way, it's a win for the D's. If they moderate R's vote for what will surely be an unpopular budget, they are that much more vulnerable, as Emanuel points out. If they vote against it, we're spared an awful budget bill.

Update: The Hill provides more details about Democrats' plans to combat the budget in the court of public opinion:

House Democrats and their allies are planning a weeklong assault on the GOP’s proposed budget plan, hoping to kill an impending vote on budget cuts and highlight internal division within the Republican Conference.

...
Rep. John Spratt (S.C.), ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, plans to hold the mock hearing tomorrow. Many of the caucus’s most senior members, such as Reps. Charlie Rangel (N.Y.), George Miller (Calif.) and John Dingell (Mich.), will likely participate in the hearing, which will probably take place in one of the rooms in the Capitol controlled by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rather than the committee’s usual room in the Rayburn House Office Building, said a spokesman for Spratt.

Headlining the event will be Georgetown University freshman Reggie Douglas, a former member of his high school’s NAACP board, who will talk about how the proposed budget measures will affect him personally. Joining Douglas on the witness stand will be representatives from various special-interest groups addressing potential cuts to child support, agriculture programs and Medicaid.

At the mock hearing, Democrats plan to argue that the spending cuts will be used to fund tax cuts rather than reduce the deficit; that the cuts will threaten vital services such as Medicaid, student loans, child support and food stamps, some of which benefit hurricane victims; and that the budget resolution will still increase the deficit even after these cuts are taken into account.

...
Aside from the mock hearing, other members are heading up separate events this week.

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and possibly the Congressional Black Caucus will hold an event on the Capitol steps to talk about “Republicans’ misplaced priorities,” according to a House Democratic aide.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and members of the caucus’s 30-Something Working Group are planning to serve lunch at a school in Washington to call attention to Republicans’ planned cuts in the school-lunch program.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) will host a conference call for reporters with a Wisconsin college student who is poised to lose student financial aid under the GOP plan.

On the floor, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) plans to coordinate a series of one-minute and special-order speeches throughout the week lambasting the budget plan.

Democrats will likely criticize the cuts using variations on internal talking points distributed last week.

According to Pelosi’s Morning Message Points from last Thursday, Democrats will tie the budget cuts to the plight of Hurricane Katrina survivors.

“Republicans are moving forward to impose even greater sacrifice on Katrina families with a fiscally irresponsible budget that cuts student loans, healthcare and rural programs,” read one bullet point.

The Emergency Campaign for America’s Priorities, a labor-funded group aligned with Democrats, continues to pursue moderate Republicans in their districts, targeting 38 lawmakers in 16 states with press conferences and ads.

Bad Karl

2005-11-07T20:38:00.000-08:00

Karl just can't seem to get it right these days. From the ever vigilant -- and supremely ethical -- Borowitz Report:

ROVE CAUGHT CHEATING IN WHITE HOUSE ETHICS CLASS
Top Aide Seen Looking at Cheney’s Paper During Pop Quiz

Just days after President George W. Bush ordered the White House staff to take what was called a “refresher” course on ethics, his top aide Karl Rove was caught cheating during the first pop quiz given in the course, the White House confirmed today.

According to Marisa Clomens, the teacher who taught the refresher course, Mr. Rove was clearly seen craning his neck to copy answers off Vice President Dick Cheney’s paper during the pop quiz.

“Once I saw Mr. Rove looking at Vice President Cheney’s paper, I told him to put down his pencil and asked him to stay after class,” Ms. Clomens said. “I had him write ‘I will not leak the name of CIA officers’ one hundred times on the blackboard.”

Nationalized hysteria

2005-11-07T20:30:00.000-08:00

Don't miss Diane Ravitch's critique of NCLB in this morning's NYT. She is a standardista and has been since she served in Reagan's Education Department so her argument is not against testing. Rather, she believes the key flaw in NCLB was the law's allowance of localism. Each state has different tests. Each state has been lowering their standards to raise their achievement levels. And thus, it's hard to really get a sense of what's going on out there-- even for people who study this stuff.

Thus, Ravitch argues for a nationalization of testing. In a perfect world that would make perfect sense. But this, need I remind you, ain't a perfect world. The high-stakes associated with testing would only get higher with a nationalized test as states would be pitted against each other even moreso than they already are thus increasing the amount of instructional time solely focused on test preparation. Until this country's education establishment begins to put test scores in some perspective, this is a bad idea. Compelling, but bad nonetheless.

Blair's popularity fading ... with his wife

2005-11-07T20:06:00.000-08:00

Cherie Blair has created a bit of a stir in England by highlighting the role a free university education played in her life. From the BBC:

In this month's edition of barrister's magazine Counsel, Mrs Blair remarked: "The truth is if I hadn't had the funding from the state to go to university I would have worked in a shop."

Her husband, Prime Minister Tony Blair, did away with universal college in 1998. Her remarks have been interpreted -- misinterpreted according to Downing Street -- as critical of her husband's policies on college funding:

Responding to Mrs Blair's comments, Ed Davey, the Lib Dems education spokesman, said: "I warmly welcome Cherie Blair's recognition that a free university education was vital for her and, by implication, vital for tens of thousands like her.

"It's a terrible tragedy that her husband has decided to pull up the ladder of opportunity behind him.

"The prime minister seems to be an ever more isolated figure.

"It is no longer just his Cabinet colleagues and Labour backbenchers who are increasingly critical of this government's policies, the growing sense of disillusionment is also clearly felt by his wife."

President Scrooge

2005-11-07T19:58:00.000-08:00

Colleges and universities that generously waived tuition for victims of the hurricanes will not be reimbursed if the president's miserly budget is passed.

From the University of Virginia's Cavalier Daily:

Although U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced in September that President George W. Bush would ask Congress for funds to help institutions of higher education affected by Hurricane Katrina, colleges and universities that have taken in affected students were not allocated funds in the $17 billion emergency spending plan Bush submitted to Congress Oct. 28.

The proposal announced by Spellings would have asked Congress for $227 million, which would have covered a portion of affected students' tuition at host institutions and deferred loan payments.

Many expected colleges and universities that took in hurricane victims to receive funds in an effort to alleviate the financial burden of enrolling students without charging them full tuition and room and board.

The University has waived tuition and academic fees for students from schools affected by Katrina but is charging room and board. According to University Spokesperson Carol Wood, the University currently is absorbing the costs of educating displaced students.

The University made the decision to waive tuition immediately after Gov. Mark R. Warner amended state policy that prohibited public institutions from waiving tuition, according to Director of Student Financial Services Yvonne Hubbard.

This decision, Hubbard said, was not necessarily based on the expectation that the government would step in to cover the lost revenue.

"You do what you think is right for the people involved at the moment and you go with it," Hubbard said.

Anybody from the Bush Administration want to explain how this is the right thing to do?

Blaming and punishing teachers

2005-11-07T19:39:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, California will vote on several propositions, some of which could potentially do great harm to California's education system.

Proposition 74, or the Confuse the Issue by Blaming and Punishing New Teachers Initiative (as Shari at An Old Soul calls it), would increase teacher "tenure" from 2 years to 5 years. In fact, tenure is tentative in California and, despite what the right-wing teacher-haters say, they CAN be fired-- but not as arbitrarily as they would like. There has to be evidence and documentation now. In the right-wing utopia, administrators could fire teachers according to their personal whim.

Hey everyone, I've got an idea! Well, let's see, there's like this huge teacher shortage so let's blast teachers, take away what few rights to hold on to their underpaying jobs that remain left to them, and see if we can get a lot more teachers! Brilliant, huh? Welcome to right-wing bizarro world.

Prop. 76 also is on the ballot along with a slew of other non-education but equally egregious initiatives. I'll leave it to Shari to explain. More tomorrow once the results are in...

Update: Nice editorial on Prop 76 here. (via NSBA's Board Buzz.)

More executive disorder in Texas

2005-11-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

Last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry issued an executive order which diverted $10 million of federal funds for math and science education into a controversial teacher incentive program.

This is the second pre-primary gift from Perry to the right-wing. In August, Perry ordered that 65 cents of every dollar be spent on "instructional expenditures." Nobody's quite sure how to make that happen considering there is no new money for education in Texas and the same costs for transportation, building maintenance, librarians, and security (to name but a few) still exist.

The new executive order has pissed a lot of people off, as the Houston Chronicle pointed out in an editorial yesterday:

DESPITE the prodigious self-promotion that went into Texas Gov. Rick Perry's announcement that he was using his executive power to order merit pay for some Texas teachers, its size is distinctly underwhelming. Perry's entire statewide budget of $10 million is considerably less than what the Houston Independent School district merit pay program will cost for one year.

...

Teacher union leaders have consistently opposed bonus pay plans linked to tests scores because the criteria for receiving bonuses can be easily manipulated by school principals to reward favorites and punish mavericks. Simply assigning advanced students to particular instructors can rig the system in their favor. Houston Federation of Teachers President Gayle Fallon says Texas teachers' base pay is about $6,000 less than the U.S. median pay for instructors, and Perry's plan won't make a dent in that disparity.

"I understand that the fad of the moment is to try and do these merit pay schemes," Fallon said, "but the bottom line is none of them work until you have a good base salary."

Alief school board President Sarah Winkler expressed similar sentiments to the Chronicle's Jason Spencer: "I think we need to get everyone's salary up to an equitable level before we start giving rewards here and there."

Perry's likely opponents in the upcoming gubernatorial contest also were unimpressed with the merit pay plan. Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn chided Perry for failing to realize that all Texas teachers, not just those in low-income schools, are underpaid. Democrat Chris Bell derided the governor's plan as treating instructors "like glorified hall monitors."

It's too bad Perry didn't provide the leadership during the series of special sessions this year to secure a fair and adequate system for financing public education, one that would pay Texas teachers a competitive salary. His merit pay executive order is better than nothing, but just barely.

Maybe Perry could issue an executive order to bring Texas teacher salaries up to the national average.

Don't hold your breath.

Thoughts on the end of the Scopes-Monkey Trial, Part II

2005-11-06T20:26:00.000-08:00

The 21st century Scopes-Monkey trial ended last week. The decision should be an interesting one to read but it will most likely be appealed no matter what the outcome.

Incidentally, last week I saw John McCain on the Charlie Rose Show. Rose asked him about 'intelligent design' and McCain asserted that it should be taught in schools. What's wrong with allowing dueling theories to be discussed and argued about in schools? Let kids hear it all and decide for themselves, he said.

I was beside myself that Rose didn't follow up on that point. Yes, of course, let them hear it all, but not in science class. Science class -- and I know I'm going out on a limb here, forgive me -- should be a place for science. Remember those elementary school lessons where you learn the difference between fact and opinion? Apparently a lot of people don't.

Opinions are great. There are a wide diversity of them and they should be explored fully in religion and philosophy classes. But let's leave science class for actual science. And please spare me the comments about how intelligent design is science. It's not. It's creationism dressed up as science, but it's not science.

Why party do you trust..?

2005-11-06T20:09:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if it's a sign of weakening support of NCLB, continued opposition to vouchers, or just an overall malaise for Republicans generally, but an ABC News poll shows that when asked "Which party do you trust to handle education?" 55% said Democrats while only 32% said Republicans.

Lessons for Republicans:

(1) No Child Left Behind is a failure,
(2) Vouchers are no way to improve public schools,
(3) Lying is wrong. (Oh, and it's not good for poll numbers either.)

From the 'too little, too late' file

2005-11-06T20:00:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't this have been a good thing to do, oh... i don't know ... LIKE IN JANUARY OF 2001?!?!

President Bush, reacting to the indictment of a high-level White House aide in the CIA leak case, has ordered his staff to get a refresher on ethics rules.

In a memo sent to all White House aides, the counsel's office said it will hold briefings next week on ethics, with a particular focus on the rules governing the handling of classified information. Attendance is mandatory for anyone holding any level of security clearance.

"There will be no exceptions," the memo said.