How did she do it? How did she save so much water?
Vicki advises Texans on planting their gardens, and for the 20 years or so we’ve known her, she’s been spreading the word, and sometimes spreading the mulch and fertilizer, about xeriscaping with native plants. “Xeriscaping” means landscaping that relies on natural water, rain and dew, instead of irrigation from a hose.
Vicki has been at the same place for all that time, but the establishment’s name has changed — the nursery in Cedar Hill where you find her and get advice is Petal Pushers, on Old Straus Road. (No promotional consideration, by the way.)
I congratulate you on the foundation thus laid for a general System of Education, and hope it presages a superstructure, worthy of the patriotic forecast which has commenced the Work. The best service that can be rendered to a Country, next to that of giving it liberty, is in diffusing the mental improvement equally essential to the preservation, and the enjoyment of the blessing.
James Madison letter to Littleton Dennis Teackle, March 29, 1826; from the Madison Papers at the University of Virginia
No feature in the aspect of our Country is more gratifying, than the increase and variety of Institutions for educating the several ages and classes of the rising generation, and the meritorious patriotism which improving on their most improved forms extends the benefit of them to the sex heretofore, sharing too little of it. Considered as at once the fruits of our free System of Government, and the true means of sustaining and recommending it, such establishments are entitled to the best praise that can be offered.
James Madison letter to Gulian C. Verplanck, February 14, 1828; from the Madison Papers at the University of Virginia
Both quotes are contained in James Madison’s “Advice to My Country,” edited by David B. Mattern, University Press of Virginia, 1997
No, the company didn’t go out of business. It was taken private by its management, after being a public company for three years. From the Baltimore Sun morning e-mail:
Educate becomes a private company
Educate Inc. has completed its transition into a private company, ending its three-year run on public markets.
Best known for its Sylvan tutoring centers, the Baltimore company, which was purchased in a management-led buyout, traded for the last time on the Nasdaq yesterday.
The investor group that purchased the company is led by chief executive officer R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric, other executives and affiliates of Sterling Capital Partners and Citigroup Private Equity. They paid $8 a share for the company in the deal valued at $535 million.
The company announced this week that more than 75 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which came as the firm has struggled with poor product sales.
Internal reorganization was swift. The company’s website carried this note this morning:
On June 13, 2007, through a merger transaction, Edge Acquisition, LLC became the owner of Educate, Inc. In a related series of simultaneous transactions, the companies which were part of Educate, Inc. have been split into the following independent companies:
Educate Services, which includes Sylvan Learning, Catapult Learning, and Schulerhilfe;
Educate Online, Inc., which includes Catapult Online and eSylvan;
Progressus, Inc.; and
Educate Corporate Centers Holdings, Inc., which is a franchisee of various Sylvan Learning and owner of Sylvan Learning Centers.
The companies are now operating independently to better serve students, families and schools across the country. To learn more about the merger and related transactions, click here.
Making a profit delivering education is rare. Milton Friedman notwithstanding, free market rules do not apply to educational enterprises in the same way they do to other services. This is one more example, or set of examples, that should give pause to any rational person considering making public schools “compete” for money to improve education for any child, especially any group of children. Sylvan Learning Centers are considered to be the top of the heap in their niche; Hooked-on-Phonics is a cliché success story. And they “struggle with poor product sales.”
I hope the company finds the education answers, the magic bullets, and can retail them at affordable prices.
The answer, by the way, probably is not 42.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
If you’re in the Washington, D.C., area, get on over to the University of Maryland tonight for the junior performance and documentary finals, or tomorrow morning for the senior performance and documentary finals of the National History Day competitions.
When the elder Fillmore’s Bathtub son attended intermediate school, he complained of the discipline. So did a lot of other good kids. We got a call from a parent asking if we’d join in a meeting with the new principal, and hoping to learn things were really hunky dory and offer assurances to our son, we went.
Royal typewriter, 1919.
Source: Emory Adams, The New Knowledge Library (Chicago: The S. A. Mullikin Company, 1919)
This image is licensed for educational use by FCIT. All images retrieved June 5, 2007, from http://etc.usf.edu/, specific images’ sites listed separately.
There you go: Legal clip art, properly attributed (though not necessarily properly footnoted — that’s another topic). How can you get more licensed clip art? See below the fold.
I don’t know the details of how or why this class is set up the way it is, but day after day they do things that other people use as textbook examples of what a good classroom ought to be doing, sometimes. And they do it day, after day, after day.
Side note: Looking at the photos, ask yourself, “Does our town offer these types of recreational facilities for use?” Washington has traditionally led the nation in setting aside land for public recreational use — this class has taken full advantage of being in a town that had the foresight to put up public art and public beaches, and otherpublicparks and places. There is a lesson here for city planners, and for mayors and city councils who wonder how they might support their schools, run by other governmental entities.
School’s out in much of the nation, and won’t last much longer in the rest (except for full-year schools). It’s a good time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what to change for next year. I was especially intrigued to learn that Mr. Teacher of Learn Me Good teaches in Dallas — close by, somewhere. One wonders how an alternative certification sneaked through the human resources shredder of the Dallas ISD to get a job, and one hopes it may show a trend; and then one wonders why DISD doesn’t pay more attention to the obvious success of the guy and go back to that alternative certification well. (HR departments in Texas school districts have reputations that they really don’t like alternative certification, even when the teachers work out well; one more indication that we don’t know what the heck we’re doing in education. My experience suggests the reputation is well-earned.) [See comment on alternative certification by Mr. Teacher, below.]
There is much, much more in the carnival. The Carnival of Education is an outstanding example of what blog carnivals can be — useful packages of information, summaries of the field they cover. Spread the word.
Those we honor on Memorial Day fought, and died, to preserve Ken Ham’s right to believe any fool thing he wants to believe. That’s part of the ironic beauty of our Constitution and those who fight to defend it.
Having a right to believe any fool thing, and promoting fool ideas with $27 million given by people who expected one to tell the truth, are probably separate, different things.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Politicians ought to listen to what the teachers think is needed to improve education. For starters, they want smaller class sizes and an environment that gives them the opportunity to do the most important thing: challenge and motivate students to learn. One wrote that after 30 years of teaching he has “…discouraged … nieces and nephews from taking up the career. What a shame when there is so much possible with all these young minds.” Another wrote that her school had a student teacher quit halfway through, frustrated because the students wouldn’t work; phoning parents resulted in getting an earful, and the principal made little effort to back her up.
The following year, the school had an opening so they phoned her “…to see if she wouldn’t try again at our school.” The reply: “Thank you, if I ever came back it would be there, but never. I have a job now with great opportunities to grow and a great working environment.”
But, John — would better working conditions really help pass the standardized tests?
Some principals and administrators of which I am aware haven’t found the sign yet, but would put it up if they had it:
The daily floggings of staff will continue until morale improves!
They wouldn’t mean it as the joke it was originally intended; or even if they did, the staff would know differently.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It’s not clear who will win in the bloody vouchers war going on in Utah — it’s only clear that, once again, public education, students and teachers, lose.
Utah’s legislature, a bastion of Republican conservatism in the last decade or so, passed a voucher bill in its just-ended regular session. Conservative legislature, conservative governor — a law authorizing vouchers is what should be expected these days, no? What the advocates of vouchers failed to take into account has made this quite a drama.
Utah’s voters don’t like vouchers much, but love their public schools a lot.
So, the Utah state board of education opposed the measure. A hint of graft in existing alternatives to public schools angered many citizens. Opponents pointed to, among other things, the possibility that vouchers would vacuum funding from public schools — Utah is already dead last in per-pupil spending in the U.S.
Another of my favorite blogs, I Thought A Think, hosts the 120th Carnival of Education this week. Graciously, ITAT included Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub — part of the sideshow or part of the midway, I’m not sure. But I’m grateful. The link is to my post on the Internet Archive features on tobacco, and the Flintstones promoting Winston cigarettes.
Interesting that the Carnival of Education cites the post on tobacco in the Internet Archive, and not the post on education reform in the same archive.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 