$1 billion boondoggle: Bush’s reading program doesn’t work

May 2, 2008

From today’s New York Times:

By SAM DILLON
Published: May 2, 2008

President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on Thursday.

Read the study here:

Created under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, the Reading First program provides assistance to states and districts in using research-based reading programs and instructional materials for students in kindergarten through third grade and in introducing related professional development and assessments. The program’s purpose is to ensure that increased proportions of students read at or above grade level, have mastery of the essential components of early reading, and that all students can read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The law requires that an independent, rigorous evaluation of the program be conducted to determine if the program influences teaching practices, mastery of early reading components, and student reading comprehension. This interim report presents the impacts of Reading First on classroom reading instruction and student reading comprehension during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years.

The evaluation found that Reading First did have positive, statistically significant impacts on the total class time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program. The study also found that, on average across the 18 study sites, Reading First did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1-3. A final report on the impacts from 2004-2007 (three school years with Reading First funding) and on the relationships between changes in instructional practice and student reading comprehension is expected in late 2008.

1 Comment | Education, Education assessment, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Learning, No Child Left Behind Act, Politics, Public education, reading, Research, Teaching | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

DDT linked to testicular cancers in next generation

May 2, 2008

Rachel Carson’s careful citations in her book Silent Spring have been reinforced by a recent study that shows a more direct link between DDT and human cancers, contrary to claims by lobbyists, junk science purveyors and practitioners of voodoo science.

Another study suggests DDT causes damage to the reproductive organs of children of people exposed to the pesticide.  The connection is again to the daughter product, DDE.

Danger appears to result from exposure in utero or from breast feeding.  The Reuters India story said:

Researchers led by Katherine McGlynn of the U.S. government’s National Cancer Institute examined blood samples provided by 739 men in the U.S. military with testicular cancer and 915 others who did not have it.

The link between DDE and cancer was particularly strong with a type of testicular cancer known as seminoma, which involves the sperm-producing germ cells of the testicles.

If diagnosed, testicular cancers are among the most treatable.  It generally strikes men in their 20s and 30s.  About 8,000 new cases per year show up in the U.S.  In an average year testicular cancer kills 380 Americans.  The NCI study suggests about 15 percent of cases in the U.S. can be attributed to DDT exposure.

It is possible some of the men who later developed cancer of the testicles were exposed to DDE at very young ages — in the womb or through breastfeeding, the researchers said.

“In testicular cancer, there’s a fair amount of evidence that something is happening very early in life to increase risk,” McGlynn said in a telephone interview.

DDE remains ubiquitous in the environment even decades after DDT was being banned in the United States — and is present in about 90 percent of Americans, McGlynn said.

“The trouble with these chemicals is they hang around a long time. It’s in the food chain now,” McGlynn added. People who eat fish from contaminated areas can absorb it, for instance.

The study was published on-line in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on April 29, 2008, ahead of print publication.

Image from Testicular Cancer Diagnosis page at M. D. Anderson Center in Houston, Texas

Image from Testicular Cancer Diagnosis page at M. D. Anderson Center in Houston, Texas

Resources:

3 Comments | Accuracy, DDT, Environmental protection, Health care, History, Junk science, Public health, Rachel Carson, Research, Science, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Disreputable publishers: Falsehoods in print

May 1, 2008

Our usual free press in history discourse suggests that the press, especially the newspapers, were more partisan in the early days of our republic than they are now. American Aurora tells the story of newspaper editors being thrown in jail during the administration of John Adams, for example, for their excesses (which may merit being known as “rabid” excesses).

Regnery Publishing is today at least as inaccurate, if not as completely vitriolic, as any of the nasty newspapers published in the John Adams administration. Regnery is the publisher of Jonathan Wells’ mostly fictional, all incorrect account of biology, Icons of Evolution, for example.

Regnery once again pushes the bounds of propriety with a new book by Iain Murray with a title that tells all the author thinks he knows: The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About–Because They Helped Cause Them.

You can bet the conservative and anti-science, and anti-environmental protection blogs will light up with this book.

I see from the index on Amazon that I get a mention. I hope Murray claims I caused one of those disasters. You can bet that if he says it, the opposite is true.

In the past couple of months I have had a couple of opportunities to spend some time in libraries and with databases. Checking out the citations from Steven Milloy’s “100 things” about DDT list, I discovered not a single citation relating to DDT’s effects on birds was correct; those articles that did exist concluded opposite what Milloy claims. Some of the articles simply didn’t exist. Bet Murray doesn’t question a single claim from Milloy.

And, did you know that DDT problems were common items for newspapers through the 1950s? You won’t learn that from Murray’s book.

Update, May 2: I have a copy of the book (Regnery did not provide it); it’s worse than I had imagined. Examples: The quote from this blog is criticized as being inaccurate; the quote describes Bush administration policies in 2004 and corporate actions in Uganda to discourage DDT spraying which continue. Murray’s rebuttal discusses Bush administration actions taken two years later, but fails to note that they have not yet worked.

Worse example: Murray has an entire chapter accusing “environmentalists” of being asleep at the switch for damages to fish and other wildlife due to birth control pill residues in the water; he fails to mention that DDT causes exactly the same problems. He fails to note that DDT and especially DDE are endocrine disruptors usually cited as culprits in these cases. He fails to note that the issues are at the top of the list of environmental organizations involved in fish, river conservation, and pesticide safety issues. Regnery’s name is rapidly becoming synonymous with”wildly inaccurate and politically skewed.”

Alas, that’s what I got from a skim of the book before this evening’s meetings.

3 Comments | Accuracy, Business Ethics, DDT, Debunking, Ethics, Journalism, Junk science, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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