Stump Lane
in the dirt since history began

Well, assessing the legacy … It seems to me one things which we should be thinking about, is that [Vietnam war architect, Robert] McNamara represented all of those superficial qualities of brightness and intelligence and education that are so revered in our culture. This whole idea that you judge young kids today on the basis of what their test scores are, how smart they are, how much information they can digest, how much they can give back to you and remember. That’s what MacNamara was good at. He was bright and he was smart, but he had no moral intelligence. What strikes me as one of the many things we can learn from this McNamara experience is that we’ve got to stop revering these superficial qualities of brightness and smartness, and bring up a generation which thinks in moral terms, which has moral intelligence, and which asks questions not, “Do we win or do we lose?” Asks questions, “Is this right? Is it wrong?” [Howard Zinn]

Here’s what [Maine Governor] Baldacci said:

“We must continue forward with the reform of K-12 administration. We cannot allow Maine to be dragged backwards by a referendum [that would repeal recent school consolidation laws] that seeks a return to the expensive past. The way forward — the way to protect local schools and resources for the classroom — is to stop wasting money on unnecessary bureaucracies and administrations.”

[Kennebec Journal: On Maine Politics: Baldacci blasts school consolidation repeal]

YES REFORM K-12 administration. Stop wasting money on unnecessary bureaucracies and administrations. Consolidate school districts so that they can share administrative costs. But, how should a state go about doing such a thing? Who sits in the best position to make the difficult decisions in how to eliminate redundant administrative personnel, slash administrative budgets and weed out bureaucratic administrative inefficiencies? Who among us has the wherewithal to wield the hatchet and the scalpel?

School administrators. Superintendents and Principals. They surely know best which of their own will make the ultimate sacrifice. They, who reside high above the selfish antics of organizational politics, they alone, possess the fortitude and courage to slash their own budgets, to demote and fire themselves.

Wait, what? Is that in any way like fixing the economy by handing out billions of dollars no strings attached that can then be paid out in bonuses to the thieves and imbeciles who wrought the economic disaster in the first place?

What I am getting at is this: As budgets tighten in sparse economic times, and bureaucratic and administrative inefficiencies don’t magically economize themselves under School Administrative Reorganization (consolidation) laws, Art and Music teachers better hang on to your hats!

Princeton tops U.S. News rankings, again — …the magazine has responded to one complaint: that the rankings punish schools for enrolling low-income students. For the first time this year, U.S. News is factoring the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants into its calculation of a school’s “graduation rate performance.” — “Punish schools for enrolling low-income students”? Cry me a fucking river! Here’s some violin music. — Is this to say there is something inherently wrong with low-income students that disadvantages schools that let too many in? How about this: the rankings stop punishing schools that fail their low-income students, or schools that can’t/won’t root out certain forms of elitism. — [Dartmouth College was either punished or not punished enough to earn a ranking of 11th.] –

Here is a Sunday Blog Against Theocracy post that is not quite as concise as our Sunday posts would normally be.

Some people are very concerned and deeply moved by the decline of prayer in our public schools. Many seem to possess the misconception that prayer is not allowed, or has been outlawed in public schools.

But, guess what. Prayer is allowed in public schools. As a matter of personal freedom, it should be. Students may pray in school, so long as it is not disruptive of instructional time. Teachers and administrators, as well, may pray in school, so long as students do not feel compelled to join them if they do not wish to.

The reasons to reinstate, or allow, teacher/administrator led prayer time, in school are not grounded in an interest of personal religious freedom. These efforts are about indoctrination.

So, I stand in favor of your personal freedom to pray in a public school, while standing against indoctrination.

While we’re on it, maybe we should reconsider that little patriotic prayer students in public schools still feel compelled to recite every morning…

Technorati Tags:
target="_blank" rel="tag"
title="Find blog against theocracy posts on Technorati">blog against theocracy

This guy walks into a bar… only it isn’t a guy, it’s a State Representative, and it isn’t a bar, it’s the State House. Anyway, he doesn’t think college students should be able to vote where they reside:

… College students who claim [what, no "scare quotes"?] residency in Maine but spend summers or holidays in other states pose a threat to full-time residents, Knight said.

“What it does is disenfranchise Maine voters who are paying their taxes,” he said. “I want these kids to become part of the political process. But I don’t want them to determine who our governor is, and then head back to California or Michigan, or wherever they’re from.” [Kennebec Journal: College Dems protest plan to halt voting]

Uhhhh… Paying taxes is not requisite for voting. Stop measuring things in money, people! College students, especially ones attending the state universities and community colleges are stakeholders and should be allowed to vote on those-who-decide-how-much-they-will-pay-to-go-to-college here. Note to money-measurers: though it isn’t ‘paying taxes’ it is ‘paying tuition’ to the state.

Also, if I am not mistaken — correct me if I’m wrong [edit: I am partially wrong, see update below.] — when someone resides in a place 223 out of 365 days— more for students who keep off-campus apartments over winter break —which is more than half the year, then they become a legal resident and they aren’t just “claiming” residency. (There’s the scare quotes!)

Knight also accused Maine college students of committing large-scale voter fraud by casting absentee ballots while also voting in Maine elections.

“They laugh about it, it’s a joke,” Knight said. “They can overwhelm a community.”

Knight also said that he had no evidence to substantiate these allegations. [Emphasis added.]

The bolded part says it all, doesn’t it? Most of it, anyway.

Holy Fucking Shit. Anybody can really say anything they want to in today’s world, can’t they.

That’s egregious!

Disclosure: the Author may have once voted for Governor based solely on an unequivocal promise that the state budget was fine and there would absolutely be no need to raise tuition rates at the state universities and colleges, only to face a tuition increase immediately upon said Governor’s election. (Hey, that guy was saying anything he wanted to back then!) That was egregious!

UPDATE: As self-punishment for going off half-cocked earlier, the State of Maine residency requirements for student voter registration are now below the fold. As I read it, it looks like students living on-campus— who haven’t established residency in, say, an apartment —are already not considered legal residents for voting purposes. Which takes some of the wind out of that part of my argument. But, I will note that the determination is left to the municipality where the person is attempting to register; and I remember being allowed to vote in the town where I was living on campus, rather than my home town.

On the other hand, if you read the residency part of the tax code, (also included below the fold,) if the person earns income in Maine, regardless of residency, they must pay Maine taxes! Which kinda buggers that part of Knight’s argument as well. (more…)

Tradition, familial expectations and a year upon year, devilishly effective marketing campaign pretty much ensure that most of the people reading this will be expected and compelled to carefully select, purchase and distribute a good many gifts in the coming weeks. (Of course, to be fair you’ll receive some as well.)

So, amid the tumult of The Biggest Shopping Day of the Year™— this day that changes people; I mean it gets like Lord of the Flies out there —I ask you: why deal with all of that shit? Why not give (and request) charitable donations for the holidays?

Why not make charitable donations to organizations that work toward educating girls in developing countries?

Educating girls is an essential part of winning the fight against global poverty. On average, an educated girl boosts the income of her family and her community; has fewer, more healthy children; and is less likely to contract HIV/AIDS.

The benefits of girls’ education extend beyond the local community. Studies show that increasing the number of educated girls in a country fosters economic growth, promotes political stability and reduces health care costs. [NetAid: Educating Girls]

A quick, somewhat cursory internet search turned up the following groups that are engaged in this work. Suggestions for other organizations that should be included are welcome and will be added to the list. Pressing ‘CN’ will take you to the Charity Navigator report for the organization. Likewise, pressing ‘G.o’ will take you to the Give.org report.

• World Education (CN, G.o)
• Save The Children (CN, G.o)
• CAMFED (Reports not available.)
• Girls Global Education Fund (Reports not available.)

If you, Dear Reader, decide to contribute to educating girls this season, drop us a line in our underpopulated comment section. (Makes us feel like we’ve done something.)

Able-bodied, powerful (read: wealthy), English speaking, white males do not hold a monopoly on human potential. No matter what the test results imply.

That’s ultimately what we’re talking about, isn’t it?

The peculiar headline on this New York Times article declares Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study.

The “study” the headline refers to is one released Friday by the Education Department entitled Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling, and if you’ve read as far as the end of that title, you may actually be interested in reading the full study which can be downloaded and read at this link.

Bizarrely, the Times article avoids telling the reader what the study’s basis for comparison was. There’s a lot of talk about “performance” and “scores,” but it isn’t until paragraph 13, that the phrase “test scores” appears, and there is no further indication in the text of the article of what test scores the study actually studied; (though there is a link to a pdf file of the study on the NYT web site.)

At any rate, for clarity, when the article says:
“Students in private schools typically score higher than those in public schools, a finding confirmed in the study.”

…the article means:
“Students in private schools typically score higher— on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics tests given to public and private school students in 4th and 8th grades —than those in public schools, a finding confirmed in the study, which looked at the 2003 NAEP results.”

And the article says:

Students in private schools typically score higher than those in public schools, a finding confirmed in the study. The report then dug deeper to compare students of like racial, economic and social backgrounds. When it did that, the private school advantage disappeared in all areas except eighth-grade reading.

And in math, 4th graders attending public school were nearly half a year ahead of comparable students in private school, according to the report. [Emphasis added.]

If you’re like me, you’re interested in how a shill for private schools would spin this. Here is what Joseph McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private Education, an umbrella organization that represents 80 percent of private elementary and secondary schools, had to say about the findings:

Joseph McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private Education, an umbrella organization that represents 80 percent of private elementary and secondary schools, said the statistical analysis had little to do with parents’ choices on educating their children.

“In the real world, private school kids outperform public school kids,” Mr. McTighe said. “That’s the real world, and the way things actually are.”

Dang, Joseph, condescend much? That quote makes you sound like a priggish elitist snob. Very ‘private school’. Well played, chap.

I guess Joseph’s ‘real world’ is one in which one can flatly disregard systemic biases— based upon gender, race, “disability status” and “identification as an English language learner” —or at least dismiss such frivolous minutiae as inconsequential.

While this report would seem to confirm one of Your Montag’s most deeply held convictions, that public schools are not inherently inferior to private schools; and though I appreciate the political cannon fodder for use against the pro-voucher crowd, (I oppose pretty much anything that would take money away from public schools,) I must balk at the tendency of debating education policy based almost entirely on standardized test results. The fact that this type of study is even necessary seems to reinforce the misgivings I harbor about testing.

Standardized tests do nothing to fix the inequalities in our education system; they don’t measure understanding, critical thinking, creativity, or problem solving ability; and they may even do more harm than good through biases that perpetuate the very inequalities we wish to correct.

Test preparation is not education!

The Boondocks (first frame of today’s strip.) Click the image to read the rest of the strip.

Every civilization must decide what kind of education they will provide to their youngsters. Necessarily, this decision will be based on the needs of the society to survive and become stronger. It is also necessary that we continually evaluate our educational system and make sure it adapts to the changing challenges we face as a nation.

In our great nation, with our Utopian capitalist economy, the focus of our public schools has always been to produce the workers we needed to feed the Economic Machine. During the industrial revolution, these workers needed to be skilled and inventive people with a great deal of technical understanding. We also needed people capable of performing research and development of the new inventions and processes that would keep our institutions and nation growing and strong. It has never been enough to merely have skilled workers, however. Workers have traditionally been taught the importance of patriotism and loyalty. Our schools have always taught the various oaths, songs and rituals that a loyal citizen needs to know. The industrial revolutionary educational system needed to give students a strong foundation in science, technology and citizenship.

Today, our need for skilled labor and technical know-how has diminished. Our leaders of industry can now meet these needs much more efficiently by exploiting the available resources emerging in places like India and China. The Technocracy we developed over time has reached obsolescence. To meet today’s challenges we need personnel to provide support and services to our honorable business leaders; and personnel to provide the military might to leverage and exploit new resources, as well as maintain stability in the Mid-East where our most precious resource lies. With these needs in mind it is obvious that we need to change the focus of our schools. Training in the Sciences and technology must give way to more thorough indoctrination and citizenship training. The need for drones and grunts is far greater at this point than the need for intellectuals or skilled workers.

Essentially, what school does is provide students with scripts they can use in various situations to help them make decisions and solve problems. For instance a pre-schooler may intuitively develop a script to understand a certain aspect of the world such as, “if something moves, it is alive.” The child’s intuition is erroneous, so school teaches him a different script: “for something to be considered ‘alive’ it must exhibit movement, growth, reproduction, etc.” What we must ask is: in today’s world, it this a better script? It’s only a better script in the eyes of the Scientist. The problem with this script is that it requires the student to question, investigate and evaluate. We don’t need drones and grunts running around “questioning” things, or “thinking” about things. Today’s educators need to instill a simpler script, such as, “It moves because God wants it to move.”

I can hear the groans of the Science teachers already. They will resist this move to streamline the thinking in the Public Mind. But I ask you, do we really want Science teachers making Science curriculum for our schools? There is an obvious conflict of interest here. Science teachers will want to protect their notion of self-importance, and their job security. They will attempt to perpetuate confusion among average people with their scientific slight-of-hand, complex theories and scientific method. (The process that, by design, requires constant testing and verification – by, you guessed it, Scientists — just to approach a plausible understanding of the world.) To the average patriotic citizen, this would seem a vain and unsatisfying toil to undertake without regard to the truths that only present themselves through the miracle of faith.

On top of simplifying the scripts we give our students to mold their thinking about the world around them, we need also give them the tried and true scripts that inform them how to be good citizens. Such as: “businesses are the backbone of the community, and we should toil for them and patronize them to keep the economy strong,” and “when our great and just nation engages in war, the most selfless, patriotic thing we can do is enlist for the fight.”

In addition to the needed revisions to the Science curriculum, an even more intense program of standardized testing is required. Through standardized testing, we can in effect, set curriculum nationwide at the federal level by carefully selecting test questions. Teachers will have no choice but teach certain facts, and specific methods to equip their students to perform well on the tests, there simply won’t be any time for the “questioning” and “thinking” that we know to be so counterproductive. The result will be a new workforce, each worker equipped with exactly the same skill-set, knowledge-base and the same predictable thought-processes.

Through the physical education curriculum and team sports programs, we can encourage fitness as well as establish behaviors — submission to authority, group cohesion behind leadership elements — useful to soldiers both on the battlefield and in the workforce.

While Art and Music are nice diversions, the idea of teaching them in school is really rather quaint. It is impossible to create a standardized test that covers these areas; and ultimately, these subjects only lead to subversion and inappropriate expression.

All of these changes together comprise what I call The Curriculum Simplification toward Resource Homogenization Endeavor. I strongly urge legislators and educators alike to adopt these provisions immediately for no less than the future security of our noble empire is at stake.

There is a debate raging over the teaching of the theory of evolution in school in Science classes.

The hearings by the Kansas State Board of Education–.. ..–were set off by proposed changes to Kansas’s science standards intended to bring a more critical approach to the teaching of Darwinism.

If the state board adopts the new standards, as expected, Kansas will join Ohio, which took a similar step in 2002, in requiring that students be taught that there is controversy about evolution.

Kansas Begins Hearings on Diluting Teaching of Evolution

The controversy lies in the apparent contradictions between the scientific theory of evolution and the religious belief that human beings were created by God. While it may well be possible to reconcile the theory of evolution with a belief in God; unfortunately, the two belief systems cannot simply be compared. There is no scientific test for the existence of God, and appeal to faith has no place in the scientific method of investigation. For these reasons alone, and without the need to discuss the problems inherent in either concept, I conclude that creation has no more place in the Science classroom than Darwin has in Sunday school. If Creationists want their material introduced in school, it belongs in a comparative religion class. Intelligent Designers might get some play in a Philosophy class where logic can be applied to the theory. Keep it out of the Science room.

I have an idea. LET’S TEACH KIDS TO THINK CRITICALLY! After all that is the goal of the conference in Kansas– “to bring a more critical approach to the teaching of Darwinism.” I’m all for that. Let’s make school less about indoctrination, and more about learning how to think. Teach the scientific method of formulating a hypothesis, devising tests to prove or disprove it, and repeating the tests until a theory emerges. Explain that theories are often imperfect and require more tests to strengthen, alter or further define them as appropriate. Encourage students to think critically, even about long standing theories like that of evolution, and seek to test it in new ways. Warn students of the danger of predetermining their conclusions and getting faulty results by attempting to shoe-horn data to suit one’s hypothesis or an entrenched theory. Open students minds to the possibility that there may be some new evidence lurking around ready to be discovered, that could change everything.

The fact that this debate is happening is an indication to me that people haven’t been taught how to think right, and are too easily swayed by emotional arguments. It is foolish to think a scientific theory and a faith-based belief can be fairly compared in the same arena. It’s the old “apples and oysters” dilemma.

I fear that the public discourse on this subject of late is the work of power seekers using emotional arguments to motivate indoctrinated followers, to create tensions and divisions among a proletariat that has been conditioned to think a certain way. Sadly, it’s not critically.

From today’s Progress Report:
Progress Report, 3/24/05 – American Progress Action Fund

EDUCATION – FLORIDA BILL TARGETS “DICTATOR PROFESSORS”: Conservative Florida legislators are pushing a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities. The so-called “Academic Freedom Bill of Rights” legislation is yet another state spin-off of right-wing activist David Horowitz’s campus crusade to prohibit public and private college professors from introducing “controversial matter” into the classroom and shift oversight of college course content to state governments and courts. “According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities,” the University of Florida’s student newspaper reports. Students would also have the right to sue if they believe their professor is “singling them out for ‘public ridicule’ – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class.” The bill has two more committees to pass before it can be considered by the full House.

This is what Ward Churchill warns about when he says, “It’s been announced in pretty clear terms by both David Horowitz and Newt Gingrich that I am just the kickoff for a general purge they have in mind.. Academia is to be a cheering section for red, white and blue, as they define it, and it has no other function.”