August 15, 2006
Teachers in Texas got notice in the past week of the financial literacy standards the State Board of Education approved over the summer. There is a push on nationally to add these standards in every state. The Department of the Treasury has been working to push such standards and create materials for teachers to use in classrooms.
Most Texas school districts were working on such a curriculum, I think — every one I checked was, if that’s any indication.
Odd side note: The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) provided meetings with the Department of the Treasury and guidance for state school boards doing what Texas did — but the Texas SBOE dropped out of that organization over an anti-bullying campaign also promulgated by NASBE. The problem was that NASBE’s program said homosexual kids should not be bullied, and the Texas board members disagreed. Yes, I know, there is no rational way to defend that decision, but there you go. Read the rest of this entry »
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Business Ethics, Economics, Education, State school boards, TEKS | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
August 14, 2006
I’ll make this quick (back to the grindstone, you know).
In my immediately previous post I make a minor case that advocacy of intelligent design is the less preferable alternative to understanding evolution, for moral reasons. Advocacy of intelligent design has so farproven incapable of making a case in a straightforward and honest fashion. All cases for intelligent design rest in large part, or completely, in distortions of science and history. What originall caught my eye and my ire was the mischaracterization of the recent decision in the Pennsylvania intelligent design case. Read the rest of this entry »
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8 Comments | Accuracy, Creationism, Current History, Curricula, Education, Evolution, First Amendment, Intelligent Design, Law, Public education, Religious Freedom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 14, 2006
I’m straying only a bit off topic, and only by certain legalistic interpretations. History folks, bear with me.
My complaint about what is called “intelligent design” in biology is the same complaint I have against people who wish to crown Millard Fillmore as a great light for bringing plumbing to the White House over the complaints of health officials — that is, my complaint against those who push H. L. Mencken’s hoax over the facts.
Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost listed at great lengths his list of reasons that arguing for science actually promotes intelligent design instead (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). This blog’s response was in two parts, one and two. Other people offered other rebuttals, including notably, P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula, a very good blog that features the hard science of biology and especially evolution.
Joe provided a first affirmative rebuttal here. This post is my reply, on the single point of whether it’s fair to say creationists, IDists, or others who twist the facts and research, are “dishonest.”
The text is below the fold; I left it in remarks at Evangelical Outpost. I have one other observation I’ll make quickly in the next post.
Enjoy, and chime in with your own remarks (I’m headed back to the grindstone). Read the rest of this entry »
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23 Comments | Creationism, Current History, Curricula, Education, Evolution, First Amendment, Intelligent Design, Public education, Religious Freedom, Science | Tagged: Creationism, Current History, Curricula, Darwin, Education, Evolution, First Amendment, Intelligent Design, Joe Carter, Religious Freedom, Science, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 13, 2006
I stumbled across Bibi’s Box, a blog that appears to be devoted to finding videos available on the internet. Bibi wrote about John Sutherland, a producer for Walt Disney who struck out on his own in 1944. He became famous, or infamous, for doing cartoons for hire that capitalist enterprises wanted to make available for schools.
Some of us Baby Boomers will recognize almost every one of these films. Film distribution was always problematic back then, before Federal Express or UPS and overnight air delivery to almost anywhere in the world, and back when 16-mm film projectors were often old, cranky monsters that defied the most tech-savvy teachers to make a film dance on a screen. Consequently, to increase the circulation, many of these films also ended up in the afternoon cartoon fests that local television stations ran for “kiddies.”
The images are rich. There are time-bound charicatures of middle-class Americans, and full use of other American iconography. In a 1948 film, “Make Mine Freedom,” Sutherland’s film shows a Member of Congress dressed as a southern politician (though without an accent), the labor representative in denim overalls, the capitalist factory boss with a cigar and morning coat with striped pants, and the farmer in stereotypical straw hat. In a later scene, some of the characters parade in a “Spirit of ’76” fashion, with drum, fife and flag, across the Lincoln Memorial.
Some of the images are corny, but they are rich mines for classroom use, where the images form powerful mnemonic devices for kids who don’t know the history of that era. I have used chunks of “Schoolhouse Rock” for individual study on specific areas — last year I required high school history students to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution, and the “Schoolhouse Rock” version helped enormously. Sutherland’s films could be as useful, in certain topics.
In any case, Bibi has links to more than a dozen of Sutherland’s cartoon films.
If you find a good use for one, please let me know.
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2 Comments | Cold War, Curricula, Economics, Education, History, History video sources, Lesson plans | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 12, 2006
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we pay for the knowledge we use to make life better, and how we have no good way to compensate many who do the most important work. I had lunch today with some of my former co-workers at Verizon Wireless. The gaps in pay between the best teachers and market-equivalent jobs in private industry are enormous — 100% or more in many cases.
Even small incentives to keep people in academia can produce huge results.
Over at a new, interesting blog, “Aspirations of a Joint Doc,” blogger Carpus notes that he’s got approval from NIH for a grant to pay off part of his student loans, if he can find funding and devote 80% of his time to research. It’s supposed to be an incentive to keep this guy working in rheumatology — he saves lives, or reduces pain, or makes life worth living.
And I’d wager that his loan excusal isn’t half of what some companies throw away on projects that waste resources, but pleased a boss somewhere, at some time.
In academia, people are held accountable. In private industry, stockholders rarely hear about it.
So, what’s this big drive to “make teachers accountable?” Hello? Are we even on the same planet?
But I digress. Go give Carpus some traffic at Aspirations of a Joint Doc.
(Did I mention that he reminds me a lot of David Kessler when Kessler was finishing his pediatric residency, and working the Senate Labor Committee? Can’t tell you exactly why, and it’s a gut reaction in any case with no data. Joint doc guys always fascinate me.)
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Posted by Ed Darrell
August 11, 2006
I suffered through a couple of uninspiring commencement addresses in my day, and a few good ones (Sen. Daniel K. Inouye’s speech at my law commencement even impressed my father, who generally regarded speeches by politicians as pure fluff).
David Lawrence, former publisher of the Miami Herald, delivered an outrageous commencement address at Florida State University.
Even the good ones generally fall back into platitudinous depths, reminding graduates of the great potential they have to do good . . .
“Be outraged that our great country can figure out how to invest $5 billion dollars every month to try to bring democracy to Iraq, and yet we live in a nation where more than 12 million children live in the full definition of poverty.”
This commencement address popped up in some search or other. If Howard Beale is platitudinous, this is full of platitudes. Sadly, most Americans haven’t a clue who Howard Beale was, or why they should care. Read the rest of this entry »
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1 Comment | Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Education, Education spending, No Child Left Behind Act | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 11, 2006
RECAP: It’s only nine months since Judge John Jones’ extremely well-reasoned and carefully-written decision in Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District, which declared unconstitutional the efforts by the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, to sneak creationism into their schools’ biology curriculum. But the revisionists are out in force. On August 8, Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost posted “10 ways Darwinists help intelligent design,” in extreme length.
Other people were bothered by the post, too. I see that Matt over at Pooflingers fisked the thing, too. I haven’t read his post yet — his is no doubt more incisive than what I’ve written below. But can there be too much taking to task those who would sacrifice our children’s education on a cross of hooey?
You can go read the entire thing at Evangelical Outpost if you want. I’ll post the list of ten, with corrections. History revisionism is an ugly thing, especially when the court decision is still fresh, available and an easy and educational read, and especially on things scientific, where one’s errors may be easier to spot. In keeping with the ethical standards ofthisblog, to expose hoaxes about bathtubs wherever they may appear, here goes;
Part 2: Joe Carter posted his list of ten things scientists do wrong; Part 1 covered the first five, here are numbers 6 through 10:
#6 By invoking design in non-design explanations. Anyone who wonders why so many people find intelligent design explanations plausible need only to listen to scientific community discuss the evolutionary process. Scientists have a complete inability to talk about and explain processes like natural selection without using the terms, analogies, and metaphors of design and teleology.
Take, for instance, the recent finding that leads researchers to believe they have found a second code in DNA in addition to the genetic code. On The New York Times science page we find an explanation by Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute in Israel:
“A curious feature of the code is that it is redundant, meaning that a given amino acid can be defined by any of several different triplets. Biologists have long speculated that the redundancy may have been designed so as to coexist with some other kind of code, and this, Dr. Segal said, could be the nucleosome code.” [emphasis added]
No! No! No! Scientists note the appearance of design, but scientists go the extra mile; they go on to look for natural explanations for such appearances. Most often they have found a perfectly natural explanation that involves fitness for survival, sexual selection, or chemical and physical necessity, and they have found no intervention outside the critters’ struggle for survival. Read the rest of this entry »
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6 Comments | Accuracy, Creationism, Current History, Education, Evolution, History Revisionism, Public education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 9, 2006
CNN carries the Associated Press report on the new study: Sexy music triggers teen sex.
According to AP:
Teens who said they listened to lots of music with degrading sexual messages were almost twice as likely to start having intercourse or other sexual activities within the following two years as were teens who listened to little or no sexually degrading music.
If only it were so easy! Shelly Batts at Retrospectacle points out the science error (which is actually noted in the AP story). (The original study is in Pediatrics; an abstract of the article is here, free of charge. I have not found a free source for the ful text.) Consider how we could use this research, were it accurate.
- The story related in the musical 1776! about how a conjugal visit from Martha Jefferson got Thomas off the dime to complete the Declaration of Independence would hold the rapt attention of kids who normally can’t tell the difference between the Declaration and the U.S.S. Independence.
- Woodrow Wilson’s romance after the death of his first wife would be a critical lead-in to a lesson about Wilson’s 14 Points, the Treaty of Versailles, the end of World War I and the setup for World War II.
- No student, knowing of the love Archduke Ferdinand had for Sophie, would ever forget the act that triggered World War I.
- Students would hide copies of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin with the good passages highlighted, to pass around. They’d want to go to London in their youth to work in a publishing house, and to Paris in their old age, to play chess with the ladies. Heck, they might even take up playing Franklin’s glass harmonica, and learn Mozart’s pieces written for the instrument, to see if it really drove ladies into fits of uncontrollable passion.
- Warm Springs, Georgia, might become a key Spring Break destination, to see if the warm waters would do for teenagers what it seemed to do for the libido of Franklin Roosevelt.
- Harry Truman would be devalued in the rankings of “better presidents.”
- Boys Nation of the American Legion would be overwhelmed with applicants trying to follow in the footsteps of Bill Clinton.
Oh, I’m sure we can find more. Richard Feynman’s stories of seduction would make the history of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project crackle to life, and boys would try to impress the girls with their understanding of the binding curve of energy. Read the rest of this entry »
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3 Comments | 1776, Education, History, Pedagogy | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 8, 2006
An editorial in Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser commends progress in Alabama schools toward achieving standards under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Alabama public schools made huge strides toward meeting national No Child Left Behind accountability standards, with 1,194 of the state’s 1,364 schools making “Adequate Yearly Progress” toward a goal of having every child in the state and in the nation performing at proficiency levels in reading and math by 2014.
That’s 87.5%.
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1 Comment | Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Education, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 8, 2006
No sooner did I note the Nevada State School Board’s request for more money, mostly to increase teacher pay, than today’s editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal started shooting at the proposal, saying it has no chance to pass.
The editorial board wrote:
That the board would make such an outlandish demand is not surprising. Leading into each legislative session over the past decade, the board has prepared budgets that far exceed the state’s ability to pay. Of the board’s 10 members, six have ties to education, either through teaching positions or retirements from schools and colleges. From their perspective, schools can never have enough money, no matter how much they pull from your pockets.
The earlier story noted that the slide to the current average classroom size took several years. From the appearances of the earlier story, the state has not kept pace with funding needs in education. If the state board’s recommendations are not met one year, and they recommend full funding the next year, the recommendations will begin to look “outlandish.” As the needs continue to be unmet with funding, the need for funding grows — and usually such growth is not linear, but is instead exponential. Ten years of budget failure does not indicate that the current budget proposal is too large by any means. It would be the logical result of a state sliding in education capability. Read the rest of this entry »
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3 Comments | Classroom size, Education, Education spending, Harry Wong, Public education, State school boards, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 8, 2006
Nevada’s State School Board Saturday voted to ask the legislature for an additional $1.1 billion, mostly for increases in teacher pay, but also to add 2,000 teachers. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported the story in Sunday’s paper:
The Nevada State Board of Education voted Saturday to recommend that the 2007 Legislature increase spending on public education by $1.1 billion over current levels.
The proposal, if approved by lawmakers, would boost Nevada’s education funding by 50 percent and consume more than the $1 billion in additional general fund tax revenue that Gov. Kenny Guinn has said will be available for all state agencies in the upcoming budget.
Guinn estimates that state government will receive $6.9 billion in tax revenue for the 2007-08 and 2008-09 budgets, compared with $5.9 billion in the current two-year budget.
The board, which approved its education spending recommendation in a 9-1 vote, wants to increase teacher salaries 3 percent each year over the next two years. It also voted to reduce the current ratio of 21.4 students per teacher to 19.65. That ratio last was achieved by Nevada public schools in 2001-02.
Reducing the ratio would require public schools to hire about 2,000 additional teachers.
In the current two-year budget, the state spends about $2.2 billion on public education, or $4,600 for each of the 404,000 students. The proposals backed by the state board would increase state spending to $3.3 billion and raise the per-student allocation to $6,244.
(story reported by Ed Vogel of the Review-Journal’s Capital Bureau in Reno)
In Nevada, all but about 10% of local school funding comes from the state government. Nevada is the state among the continental 48 with the highest percentage of land controlled by federal agencies, way over 50%. Most of that land is unpopulated, but the state has experienced explosive growth around Las Vegas and Reno. New schools pop up with amazing frequency around Las Vegas. Budget issues in Nevada education may vary from other states.
The vote on the proposal was 9 in favor, one opposed. The one opponent to the budget recommendation explained her vote in a way that may pop eyes in other states:
Barbara Myers, the only board member to vote against the budget request, said she opposed the plan only because she wanted to reduce the student-teacher ratio even more.
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Leave a Comment » | Education, Public education, State school boards, Teacher Pay | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 7, 2006
Utah’s State Board of Education voted late last week to toughern the graduation requirements, with 18 state-mandated topics — requiring another year of science, another year of math, and another year of “language arts.” Here’s the story from the August 5 Deseret News.
Michigan recently strengthened graduation requirements, too, as noted in this story from the Macomb Daily.
Missouri joined a number of states (Texas and Utah) that require financial literacy, reported in this story from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
[Please send me a note if your state is considering or has recently adopted new graduation standards, to edarrell AT sbcglobal DOT net.]
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Leave a Comment » | Curricula, Education, Public education, Science, State school boards | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 7, 2006
Mark Olson is a veteran blogger on issues of concern to conservatives and to Christians, at Pseudo-Polymath. He’s responded to my earlier post on vouchers. Marks calls it ‘a bit of a quibble.’
His first complaint goes to history: I wrote that once we had a broad consensus on the value of education. Mark wrote:
In colonial (and I presume probably pre-Civil War Virginia) the Chesapeake bay/plantation folkway had a … hegemonic attitude toward education. In fact, while the plantation “masters” were 100% literate, the servants and other classes in the society (white) were some 70% illiterate. It was something of a point of pride that public education was not generally available. Literacy and education as well, was not emphasised in the backcountry as well (which continues (I think) today in Appalachia for example). So of the four folkways which made up our early nation, only two held that education was of value.
That official policy prevented education as a mark of oppression and/or racism only makes the point. Infamously, some states and localities at various times had laws against teaching slaves to read, or to educate slaves formally in other ways. Denying education is a traditional form of oppression. This does not change the consensus that education is valuable, but instead is a dramatic demonstration that the policy makers regarded education as valuable and as a political tool for change. At the same time that these governments forbade educating slaves, they established schools for other people. Read the rest of this entry »
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5 Comments | America's founding, Education, Freedom - Political, History, Public education, School vouchers, TAKS, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 6, 2006
Huntsville Times (Alabama) on extensive summer workshops teachers take in order to keep current and keep teaching credentials: Who says teaches take summer off?
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) notes that some educators seem to fear teaching history for fear of saying something politically incorrect; Australia’s public school history courses are virtually non-existent, with the topic covered in other subjects: Schools ‘afraid of teaching history.’
An Associated Press story on a project that I think would work wonders in my high school classes: Pitt professor aims to help teach other subjects through music. A sample:
What do Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, James Brown, Dolly Parton, Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan have in common? They, among others, just may save music in American schools and put a powerful tool in the hands of teachers of all subjects.
A University of Pittsburgh music professor is disseminating a new approach to teaching history, English, social studies and other humanities by including music to be studied like any primary text. The results have been stunning for those teachers who have implemented his program in their curriculums.
More from Down Under: The Australian notes that several parts of Australian history face pressure from revisionists — and goes on to detail a challenge to the common notion that the Great Depression there featured a lot of evictions of renters into the rain — it was, instead, a tough time where Australians helped each other get by: The Myth of the Great Depression.
A press release from Pearson Scott Foresman details a new California history curriculum the company is selling, which is almost completely digital, and focused intensely on California standards.
A high school history teacher in Tibet got a 10-year prison sentence for writing a text on Tibetan history, government and geography that appears to have come too close to telling the facts, for Chinese authorities. He’s asked the United Nations to intervene.
One of America’s great local newspapers, the Louisville Courier-Journal, carried a report on the death of Henry E. Cheaney, a University of Kentucky professor who collected massive amounts of data on the state’s African American people, for in-depth history.
The Grand Rapids Press (Michigan) criticized proposed history standards from the Michigan State Board of Education. According to the newspaper:
A straight telling of the American story is what Michigan students need. State education bureaucrats should have been able to provide it.
Instead, they produced a truncated and ideologically tilted version that fully deserved the subsequent uproar and the decision of state Superintendent Michael Flanagan to send it back for remedial work.
Enjoy!
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Leave a Comment » | America's founding, Education, Geography - Physical, History, Public education, Textbooks | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 5, 2006
Libertarian-bent lawyer Tim Sandefur posts this note at Panda’s Thumb:
Neal McCulskey of the Cato Institute and Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect have a debate going over whether school choice programs would help resolve the evolution/creationism controversy. Here’s McCulskey’s first post, Yglesias’ reply, and McCulskey’s rebuttal.
Vouchers. Parental choice is an issue across the curriculum, but it is especially poignant in sex education, biology, and history. In those three areas there are national movements to direct curricula, some of the movements in each area based on a great deal of misinformation and disinformation.
Read the rest of this entry »
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14 Comments | Creationism, Curricula, Education, Geography - Political, Intelligent Design, Public education, Religious Freedom, School vouchers, State school boards | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 