UC Irvine works to rehire Chemerinsky; OC Republicans make trouble

September 15, 2007

If you can figure some way to interpret this story in the LA Times as other than the Orange County Republicans don’t want a good, powerful dean of the UC-Irvine law school, let me know in comments. (This is a follow-up of my earlier post.)

This is one more case of Republicans working hard to keep education from being first rate, out of misplaced fear of what well-educated people can do. Uneducated peasants don’t contradict the priests, Jefferson and Madison observed. The OC Republicans know that.

Constitutional law is a good thing, they seem to be saying, so long as it never works to protect the poor, people accused or convicted of criminals, or citizens injured by corporations.

It’s an interesting barrel Chemerinsky has them over; much of the commentary, even among conservatives opposed to Chemerinsky’s views, has it that UC-Irvine will be unable to attract a first-rate dean, and a first-rate faculty, now that this ugly politics cat is out of the bag. If they cannot strike a deal with Chemerinsky to be rehired, they are in real trouble.

Let me say that I don’t put a lot of credence in the claims that pressure from outsiders is a strong motivating force in this crash.  Having worked for both Democrats and Republicans, I’ve seen this too often, and it has all the symptoms of big donor demands to take back a perfectly rational decision for unholy political purposes.  My experience, mostly from the Republican side, is that this is almost exclusively a Republican phenomenon, that big donors expect public institutions to which they donate to dance to their fiddlers.  (There are exceptions, of course.  But let me say:  Ray Donovan.)

Maybe he can negotiate to require the Republican politicians who oppose his hiring to attend a 1st year Constitutional law class that Chemerinsky would teach, and they would have to do it for a grade that will be published. That would be a huge win all the way around, I think:  Chemerinsky gets the job, UC-Irvine gets a the fast-track to high quality legal education, Republicans get a chance to know and understand Chemerinsky in the classroom, and some much needed education about the Constitution sinks into the Republicans.

Dream big, I always say.

Other sources:

Leave a Comment » | Academic freedom, Bill of Rights, College, Education, Education quality, Graduate study, Teacher Pay, U.S. Constitution | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Powershifthappens: Did you know?

September 7, 2007

You saw this last year, right?

It’s a new school year. Watch it again. Certainly it’s still a conversation starter for teachers — it maybe a good place to start conversations for students, too, in government, history, geography and economics courses especially.

Karl Fisch created the original version for a staff development session at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, Colorado. It’s gone around the world several times since then — more than 5 million viewings by some counts.

♦ Did you know that 5 million is barely more than the number of people who live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan areas?

♦ Did you know that 5 million is just 1/60th of the U.S. population (300 million)? That’s just 1.7% of the U.S.?

♦ Did you know that 5 million non-Jews also perished in the Holocaust?
♦ Did you know that the White House lost 5 million e-mails in two years? Did you know almost no one noticed?

♦ Did you know some estimates are that 5 million Iraqis are refugees as a result of the current conflict there?

♦ Did you know that the Apple iTunes Store passed 5 million hits — in June 2003?

♦  Five million is a lot — but maybe not enough.  Show this, and Fischer’s site, to other people you know who should be interested.

♦ Did you know that Karl Fischer has other thought provoking presentations?

Take a look. I may have more to say about it. It is, after all, deserving of further thought.

Leave a Comment » | Education, Education quality, History, Santayana's ghost, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Create panic, herd the stampede

September 6, 2007

In old western movies, the bad guys would try to get their way by stampeding the cattle herd of the good guys, knowing that the least that would happen is a lot of destruction, even if they couldn’t exactly control the stampede. Destruction, even mindless destruction, is good for bad guys — in the movies.

I’m not sure why that image popped into my mind this morning. I was reading about the vouchers election campaign in Utah, and then I was looking around the Strong American Schools (SAS) website  (“ED in ’08”).

Strong American Schools is a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, two of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world, have provided grant funding for Strong American Schools.
Roy Romer, the former governor of Colorado and most recently superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, is our chairman and lead spokesman.

At the SAS site I found an interactive map of the U.S., you can roll your cursor on a state and see that state’s graduation rate. ED in '08, campaign from Rockefeller and Gates Foundations

What’s the most-often stated reason for vouchers in Utah? Somehow, the schools are failing.

Which state in the U.S. has the highest graduation rates? At 84% of students graduating from high school, Utah leads the nation in that category. New Jersey is #2 at 80%, and most other states lag 10 to 20 points behind.

What are the Utah voucher advocates using to show “failing schools” when the state leads the nation in graduation?

If Utah leads the nation in graduation, with per capita spending on students in schools ranking near the bottom of the states over the last decade or three, what factor is pulling students from least spending to best graduation? It’s probably the teachers.

Excuse me while I wonder: Why are Utah voters (and the rest of us) in this hand basket, and where are we going in such a damned hurry?

5 Comments | Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Education success, School vouchers, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Carnival Catsup, back to school packet

September 6, 2007

No, the spell checker doesn’t do titles.

How long since we noted the Carnival of Education? Too long.

Education Carnival without a number at Dr. Homeslice
Education Carnival 131 at Education in Texas
Education Carnival 132 at Education Matters US!
Education Carnival 133 at The Red Pencil
Education Carnival 134 at MatthewTAbor.com
Education Carnival 135 at The Education Wonks

That’s about 200 blog posts whose titles you really ought to peruse, at least.

Welcome back to the chalkboard, eh?

Leave a Comment » | Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Education success, Teaching, Technology in the classroom, Tenure, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

“Teachers are morons”

August 31, 2007

Not my view.  Vox Day.  I can’t resist kicking his arguments when he’s down.

Agree or not? Put it in comments.

5 Comments | Education, Education quality, Education reform, Rampant stupidity, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Texas: Doomed or not?

August 28, 2007

Phil Plait said there is good news out of Texas, the state’s not doomed, since the State Board of Education members said they don’t want to force intelligent design onto the biology curriculum. P. Z. Myers says doom still lurks, since that statement is part of the strategy of doom planned for Texas by the Discovery Institute, which is now pushing a “teach the weaknesses of evolution” tactic.

Doomed or not? Where is the tie breaker?

The tie breaker, Dear Reader, is you.  Read the rest of the post to see what you can do to save Texas, and your state, too.

Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Creationism, Education, Education quality, Evolution, Intelligent Design, State school boards, Texas, Texas Freedom Network, Texas Lege, Textbook Selection | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Dreaming: Ideal set of classroom technology

August 19, 2007

What would your ideal classroom have in it, especially with regard to technology? Brian Smith wants you to tell him what you need, and what you want, and what you dream about — here, and here.

Pushing the corporation’s training into the 21st century, almost two decades ago for AMR Corp., the parent of American Airlines and SABRE (which has been split off subsequently), a group of us in the future-looking department benchmarked corporate and academic training and education. One of our trips took us to IBM’s training center in White Plains, New York — IBM then being considered rather the leader in corporate training and education (running neck and neck with Arthur Andersen; tempus fugit, o tempora, o mores).

IBM put us through a wringer designed to make us think hard. For one example, they asked us why we weren’t benchmarking our own pilot training, which they had benchmarked a few years earlier. Pilot training at airlines in the U.S. was the best in the world, one fellow noted: You hire people who already know how to do the job well, and you have the pick of the best; you train them in simulators and in an intense classroom situations; then when they go to the job, they have trained people behind them to make sure they do it all right; then you call them back every year to refresh with the latest technologies. (Most other training at airlines still is not up to the pilot training standards, which is good for safety as far as pilots are concerned; aircraft mainenance is close behind. One gets an appreciation for true concern about safety when studying that process. But I digress.)

Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Classroom management, Classroom technology, Education, Education quality, Education reform, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Teacher pay, Teacher unions — What teacher would switch places with Richard Cohen?

August 14, 2007

Richard Cohen, whom I regarded a good columnist when we lived in Washington, D.C., had made an odd turn in the past decade or so. Where normally he’d stand up for public institutions and the people who run them, he just sounds cranky lately. In short, he’s turned into a person who likes Bush Republicans. Oh, my, it erupted in his recent column which is just grousing about how much education costs in the District of Columbia, with an ambiguous, implicit claim that maybe there’s too much money going into education there.

(Well, maybe too much for the results gotten compared with a few suburban districts; not enough to boost performance on the tests.)

Jason Rosenhouse at Evolutionblog Fisks the column, Fisks Cohen, and generally supports teachers — it’s worth a read.

It’s worth a read especially if you’re one of those who, like Richard Cohen, think we should suppress the pay for teachers until they improve, ignoring all the lessons you might ever have learned about getting what you pay for, and about the economics of hiring the best, the brightest, or just the heroes necessary to make a change. Here’s part of Rosenhouse’s commentary:

But that is not the main subject of this post. Instead it’s that gratuitous slap at the unions that struck me. Cohen, like a trained seal, has learned that mindlessly bashing teacher’s unions will never get you into trouble. That is why he feels no need to provide any specifics about what, exactly, the unions are doing wrong. Instead, when it comes time to reveal those subtleties of the education problem about which Democrats need to be instructed, Cohen only produces this:

Only one candidate, Barack Obama, suggested that maybe money was not all that was lacking when it comes to educating America’s poor and minority children. Parents had a role to play, too. “It is absolutely critical for us to recognize that there are going to be responsibilities on the part of African American and other groups to take personal responsibility to rise up out of the problems we face,” he said. What? It’s not just a question of funding?

Parents! Of course! How could those money grubbing teacher’s unions and their slavish Democratic puppets have overlooked such a thing? All this focus on making sure schools have the funds to heat their buildings in the winter and patch the roof when it leaks, this crazy idea that a school using twenty year old textbooks needs money if they are to procure new ones or that science labs are not exactly inexpensive, and they simply overlooked that parents have a role to play in their children’s education. One can only hope the Democrat’s pay attention to someone as perceptive as Cohen.

::heavy sigh::

The U.S. is not alone.  Australia has some teacher pay and facility issues, too, according to Matt’s Notepad.  Another interesting read.

1 Comment | Education, Education quality, Education spending, Parents, Politics, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Oliver W. Hill, history maker, 100

August 6, 2007

Oliver W. Hill in 1999, when he was 92; lawyer in Brown v. Board case

Literally while writing the previous post about the importance of recording history before the witnesses leave us, I heard on KERA-FM, NPR reporter Juan Williams’ intimate, detailed and stirring story about Oliver W. Hill, one of the lawyers who brought one of the five cases that resulted in the historic 1954 reversal of U.S. law, in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (347 U.S. 483).

Oliver W. Hill died Sunday, in Richmond, Virginia. He was 100.

In 1940, Mr. Hill won his first civil rights case in Virginia, one that required equal pay for black and white teachers. Eight years later, he was the first black elected to the Richmond City Council since Reconstruction.

A lawsuit argued by Mr. Hill in 1951 on behalf of students protesting deplorable conditions at their high school for blacks in Farmville became one of five cases decided under Brown.

That case from Farmville offers students a more personal view of their own power in life. The case resulted from a student-led demonstration at Moton High School in Farmville. Moton was an all-black school, with facilities amazingly inferior to the new white high school in Farmville — no indoor plumbing, for example. While the Virginia NAACP failed at several similar cases earlier, and while the organization had a policy of taking no more school desegregation cases, the students’ earnestness and sincerity swayed Oliver Hill to try one more time:

On May 23, 1951, a NAACP lawyer filed suit in the federal district court in Richmond, VA, on behalf of 117 Moton High School, Prince Edward County, VA, students and their parents. The first plaintiff listed was Dorothy Davis, a 14-year old ninth grader; the case was titled Dorothy E. Davis, et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia, et. al. It asked that the state law requiring segregated schools in Virginia be struck down.

Davis was consolidated with four other cases, from the District of Columbia, Delaware, South Carolina, and Brown from Kansas; it was argued in 1953, but the Court deadlocked on a decision. When Chief Justice Arthur Vinson died and was replaced by the (hoped-to-be) conservative Chief Justice Earl Warren, Warren got the Court to re-hear the case. Because he thought it was such an important case in education, Warren worked to get a solid majority. The Court which was deadlocked late in 1953, in May 1954 issued the Brown decision unanimously, overturning the separate-but-equal rule from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) (167 U.S. 537).

Brown was the big boulder whose rolling off the hill of segregation gave power to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That decision and the horrible murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 inspired civil rights worker Rosa Parks to take a stand, and take a seat for human rights on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus in December of 1955, which led to the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by the new preacher in town, a young man named Martin Luther King, Jr. When the Supreme Court again chose civil rights over segregation in the bus case, the wake of the great ship of history clearly showed a change in course.

Oliver Hill was there, one of the navigators of that ship of history.

1 Comment | Bill of Rights, Civil Rights, DBQ sources, Education, Education quality, Education spending, Fourteenth Amendment, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, U.S. Supreme Court | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Textbook critic Norma Gabler, 84

July 26, 2007

Appropriate to a discussion of textbook approvals and the Texas State Board of Education comes this news: Norma Gabler died in Phoenix, Sunday. She was 84.

Norma and her husband Mel started the practice of nit-picking textbooks during the approval process, always pushing to get a Christian view inserted into books, especially science and history books. Eventually they founded a non-profit group to criticize texts, Education Research Associates, based in Longview, Texas. Despite the deaths of both Gablers, the non-profit will continue.

Steven Schafersman of Texas Citizens for Science alerted me in an e-mail. The Longview News-Journal carried the news of Mrs. Gabler’s death:

The 84-year-old Longview resident died Sunday in Phoenix, Ariz., after serving for decades as the public face of an effort to bolster both accuracy and conservative beliefs in public school textbooks. She and her husband, Mel, who died in 2004, began their work in 1961 in Hawkins after finding errors in a textbook of one of their sons.

They became nationally famous, and a Rice University professor who was head of the Texas Council for Science Education in 1982 said the Gablers were “the most effective textbook censors in the country.”

They founded the Longview-based nonprofit organization Educational Research Analysts, which describes itself as a conservative Christian organization.

Educational Research Analysts is dedicated to finding factual errors in textbooks, as well as to pointing out “censorship of conservative political or social views,” said Neal Frey, president of the organization who worked with the Gablers since 1982. The group’s work will continue, he said.

The Gablers’ work, he said, had national impact because Texas is such a large buyer of textbooks; what is approved here is often repeated nationally by publishers.

Update, August 2, 2007: Afarensis points us to NPR, who seem to speak admiringly of the dead. Awfully polite of them to do so, unless it’s getting in the way of accuracy.

Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Education, Education quality, History, History Revisionism, Texas, Texas history, Textbook Selection, Textbooks, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Condolences pour in: New chair at Texas State Board of Education

July 26, 2007

Some people would say the Texas State Board of Education is “troubled,” or maybe even (that journalistic clichéd kiss of death) “besieged.”

The agency it oversees, the Texas Education Agency (TEA), has a director whose term is expired, the agency has taken hits from almost every daily newspaper in Texas for cheating scandals on the state achievement tests which have been roundly ignored by the agency. The legislature voted to eliminate the Board’s showpiece tests, substituting tests that will have TEA personnel scrambling to make ready, and the legislators didn’t send enough money to buy all the textbooks the agency is obligated to purchase under the Texas Constitution. Meanwhile, Texas kids fall farther behind kids in other states. One member of the board is on the lam after refusing to answer a subpoena to a grand jury investigating whether he actually resides in the district he represents as required by law (he keeps a cot near his office in the district, but spends most time at his farm, outside his district — the farm where he claims residency for homestead purposes under Texas property tax law). Statistics out last week show Texas leads the nation in pregnancies among kids of school age, and a study shows that abstinence-only programs, pushed by TEA, are to blame for high out-of-wedlock-teen pregnancy rates.

But that’s just “business as usual” for the top education agency in Texas for most of the last decade or so. Many Texans might have been disappointed, but none were surprised when Gov. Rick Perry appointed Bryan, Texas, dentist Don McLeroy to be chairman of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE).

McLeroy’s politics sometimes appear to the right of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s education policies for the state of Georgia in 1864. McLeroy stared at Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg and a letter from four other Texas Nobel winners in biological sciences, all of them urging high academic standards for Texas students, and McLeroy voted instead against including evolution in textbooks, in 2003, and for including language pushing intelligent design. Someone, often alleged to be McLeroy, then telephoned publishers and warned them to tone down evolution and play up intelligent design in a fit of sore losership (no investigation was ever conducted). A “great quote” at McLeroy’s website explains (from Paul Johnson, End of Intellectuals):

The belief seems to be spreading that intellectuals are no wiser as mentors, or worthier as exemplars, than the witch doctors or priests of old. I share that scepticism.

Condolence notes stream into Texas from scientists and educators. P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula, Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy, the guys at DefConBlog, and Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, all cry the blues, and for good reason (read their accounts!).

The Dallas Morning News diplomatically expressed hope that McLeroy might rise above petty and partisan politics at a crucial time for education in Texas, in an editorial published over the weekend: [see below the fold]

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, State school boards, Texas, Texas Freedom Network, Texas Lege, Textbook Selection | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Don’t let lesson plans strangle kids’ serendipitous learning and creativity

July 25, 2007

Here’s a woman — a homeschooler no less — who understands that lesson plans aimed at a state test can seriously damage a kid’s education. My only caveat is that in formal classrooms, such serendipitous learnings are encouraged from well-thought-out lesson plans and a very well prepared teacher who can deviate to meet the hot, rising curiosity of the kids in the moment.

At least I hope that’s what she understands.  This post on teaching history, from the ancient and often inaccurate This Country of Ours, by H. E. Marshall, gives me the cause to reserve endorsement of this school.

2 Comments | Education, Education quality, History, Homeschooling, Lesson plans, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

They come in threes: Stooges, branches of government

July 25, 2007

Is it true that a survey shows more teenagers know the names of the Three Stooges than know the three branches of government?

Justice Sandra O'Connor, by Matt York, AP

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor warned the National Governors Association that lack of education — ignorance — threatens justice in the U.S. According to the Detroit News:

O’Connor said growing disrespect for judges and erosion of independence of the judicial branch are partly due to students not learning much about American government in school.

“The key to maintaining our system lies in the education of our citizens,” O’Connor told the 19 governors who stuck around for the final day of the summer meeting.

She added in her 12-minute speech that surveys have shown fewer teenagers can identify the three branches of government than can name the Three Stooges.

“Now I enjoy Larry, Moe and Curly, but” it’s distressing that students don’t know the most basic concepts of government, said O’Connor, a Reagan appointee who retired last year after 24 years on the high court.

But, the Three Stooges? That’s almost too perfect a quote. It seems even more fantastic when one considers that the Three Stooges are not broadcast nearly so much as they were in the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s. Where did O’Connor get that factoid?

  • Photo: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor by Matt York, Associated Press

Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments | 1789, Bell Ringers, Education, Education quality, Education reform, Harry Wong, History, Quotes, U.S. Constitution, Warm-up exercises | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Texas Education Agency: Trouble at the top

July 4, 2007

Steve Schafersman dutifully follows events at the Texas Education Agency, particularly with regard to textbook selection, and particularly with regard to biology textbooks. As head and chief instigator and chief bottle washer for the Texas Citizens for Science, he still gets little notoriety for the good work he does — all volunteer.

Shafersman says important stuff to know. So, when he sends along an editorial from the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram pointing out ethical and legal lapses at the agency which appear to be the work of the chief lawyer of the agency, one should read it. That lawyer, by the way, is probably in line to be the next head of the agency.

TEA has suffered from politicized leadership the last few years. Since Mike Moses left the agency, Texas education has drifted, and lack of leadership from TEA has not helped. Controversies over silly things are almost invited; serious issues, like cheating on the state’s graduation test, go unstudied and unremedied. I take the liberty of publishing the full editorial, below the fold — please read it, especially if you’re in Texas. Since Texas influences education so heavily, especially in textbook selection, everybody who has a kid in U.S. schools, who did have a kid in U.S. schools, who was educated in U.S. schools, or lives in a state that has schools, has a dog in this fight. Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Creationism, Darwin, Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Texas, Texas Freedom Network, Texas Lege, Textbook Selection | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

New assessment tool for teachers: Blowhard

June 27, 2007

Read about it here; slick as a whistle, if you ask me.

1 Comment | Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Education, Education quality, Testing | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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