Here is a news rundown of stories on the Texas State Board of Education, who have been planning for a year now to mess up social studies standards for Texas public schools, this week.
Austin American-Statesman details part of the trouble: Officials at the SBOE have hired a couple of radical religious historical revisionists, David Barton and Peter Marshall, and ignored educators, historians and economists in revising the standards; both are ministers with a history of conflict with historians and educators. Both have called for emphasis on their Christian sects’ beliefs in history classes.
Here it is, the invention that stole sleep from our grasp, made clubbing possible, and launched 50,000 cartoons about ideas:
The light bulb Thomas Edison demonstrated on December 31, 1879, at Menlo Park, New Jersey - Wikimedia image (GFDL)
The light bulb. It’s an incandescent bulb.
It wasn’t the first bulb. Edison a few months earlier devised a bulb that worked with a platinum filament. Platinum was too expensive for mass production, though — and Edison wanted mass production. So, with the cadre of great assistants at his Menlo Park laboratories, he struggled to find a good, inexpensive filament that would provide adequate life for the bulb. By late December 1879 they had settled on carbon filament.
Edison invited investors and the public to see the bulb demonstrated, on December 31, 1879.
Thomas Edison in 1878, the year before he demonstrated a workable electric light bulb. CREDIT: Thomas Edison, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing left, 1880. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction number LC-USZ62-98067
Edison’s successful bulb indicated changes in science, technology, invention, intellectual property and finance well beyond its use of electricity. For example:
Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey, offices and laboratory were financed with earlier successful inventions. It was a hive of inventive activity aimed to make practical inventions from advances in science. Edison was all about selling inventions and rights to manufacture devices. He always had an eye on the profit potential. His improvements on the telegraph would found his laboratory he thought, and he expected to sell the device to Western Union for $5,000 to $7,000. Instead of offering it to them at a price, however, he asked Western Union to bid on it. They bid $10,000, which Edison gratefully accepted, along with the lesson that he might do better letting the marketplace establish the price for his inventions. Other inventive labs followed Edison’s example, such as the famous Bell Labs, but few equalled his success, or had as much fun doing it.
Edison didn’t invent the light bulb — but his improvements on it made it commercial. “In addressing the question ‘Who invented the incandescent lamp?’ historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison’s version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.”
Look around yourself this evening, and you can find a score of ways that Edison’s invention and its descendants affect your life. One of the more musing effects is in cartooning, however. Today a glowing lightbulb is universally accepted as a nonverbal symbol for ideas and inventions. (See Mark Parisi’s series of lightbulb cartoons, “Off the Mark.”)
Even with modern, electricity-saving bulbs, the cartoon shorthand hangs on, as in this Mitra Farmand cartoon.
Brilliant cartoon from Mitra Farmand, Fuffernutter
Or see this wonderful animation, a video advertisement for United Airlines, by Joanna Quinn for Fallon — almost every frame has the symbolic lightbulb in it.
Thomas Edison's electric lamp patent drawing and claim for the incandescent light bulb CREDIT: “New Jersey--The Wizard of Electricity--Thomas A. Edison's System of Electric Illumination,” 1880. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-97960.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Here’s an education and Texas issue I’ve not done justice to: The Texas State Board of Education is working to gut social studies curricula in Texas, with a special vent on history, which they appear to think is not fundamentalist Christian enough, and economics, where they think “capitalism” is, somehow, a dirty word.
Do I exaggerate? Very little, if at all. Really.
There’s a lot to say. I may have another post on it this week. In the meantime, the indefatigable Texas Freedom Network works to organize for the hearing on the issue in January. SBOE hopes it will be a quiet, non-confrontational meeting, and they will do whatever they can to prevent Texans from telling them to have good history standards that make great students. So it’s important that you speak up — especially if you’re a Texan. Here’s what TFN said in an e-mail alert:
Make Your Voice Heard at January Public Hearing
The process of revising social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools is moving into a critical stage. And a public hearing the board has scheduled for January may be the only opportunity for you to speak out against the far right’s efforts to corrupt standards for history, government and other social studies classes.
The final drafts of the proposed standards prepared by writing teams made up of teachers, academics and other community members are reflective of mainstream academic scholarship in the various subject areas. It is clear that members of these writing teams largely resisted intense political pressure from far right, rejecting attempts to remove key civil rights figures and make other politically motivated revisions. (See the Background section at the bottom of this e-mail for a more detailed account of the politicization of this curriculum process.)
The State Board of Education so far has scheduled only one public hearing on the proposed standards. That hearing is likely to occur either on January 13 or January 14 in Austin.
If you are interested in speaking at the hearing, pleaseclick here. TFN will help you register to speak before the board and be an effective voice against efforts to politicize our children’s classrooms.
This may be the only opportunity the board provides for Texans to speak out on the proposed standards. If we are to prevent far-right SBOE members from turning social studies classrooms into tools for promoting political agendas, then it’s critical that the board hears from people like you! Click here to sign up for more information on how to testify in January.
Background on Social Studies Review Process to Date
Earlier this year, TFN exposed and derailed several attempts by the far right to hijack the social studies curriculum revision process. Members of the state board – or their appointees to review panels and writing teams – tried at various times to:
Remove civil rights champions like César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall from the standards, calling them poor examples of citizenship
Turn Joseph McCarthy – who discredited himself and dishonored Congress with his infamous Red-baiting smear campaign in the 1950s – into an American hero
Rewrite history and portray America’s Founders as intending to establish a Christian nation with laws based on a fundamentalist reading of the Bible
Members of the writing teams largely rejected these fringe ideas in the final drafts of the standards they submitted to the board. Chávez and Marshall remain in the curriculum. The American history standards do not whitewash the damaging history of McCarthyism. And under the proposed standards students would still learn that the Founders created a nation in which all people are free to worship – or not – as they choose without coercion or interference by government.
We must ensure that the board adopts curriculum standards that reflect mainstream academic scholarship in social studies. This is vitally important because the results of this decision will be reflected in the next generation of social studies textbooks around the country.
Dr. James Dobson profits from his image as a great Christian leader. His campus of enterprises in Colorado Springs is one of the largest businesses in the city.
But this does not compute: Colorado Springs has several hundred people homeless in the city, with no place to sleep but public parks and other public places. There are more homeless than there are facilities to help them.
Colorado Springs Salvation Army officials have a shelter, but it can’t handle the homeless population.
Robert Moran, an advocate for the homeless, said the city this year has been doing a “great job” showing compassion toward homeless people. Among the examples is the Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team, he said. But the proposed no-camping law would take those efforts in a “completely opposite” direction, Moran said.
“It would be criminalizing homelessness,” he said. “People have the right to survive, and people that are homeless are part of our community as much as anybody else.”
The Salvation Army’s shelter only has 220 beds, he said.
“We have more people than that living in tents in the Springs,” he said.
James Dobson, you with that big campus of buildings: What do you think Jesus would do in this situation?
Focus on the Family's visitor center in Colorado Springs - photo by David Shankbone - Wikimedia image
WND plays politics instead of helping the homeless [How much do you think WND paid for that fancy sign, instead of contributing to the Colorado Springs Salvation Army?] [We already have from the sign make the confession that it wasn’t paid for by the homeless:
KRDO got its first clue when Spencer Swann of Colorado Canyon Signs confessed to constructing the sign, though he denied it was his idea and still refuses to divulge for whom he built it. He did, however, explain that there was more to the sign’s intent than criticizing the sitting president:
“You mention his name, you get some attention – I think that was the whole idea behind it,” Swann told KRDO. “I didn’t dream it up, but I thought it was a good idea. I thought that it would help some of these guys down here.”]
An Obama guest, Lin-Manuel Miranda, pushes the envelope on gangsta rap, and history teaching:
You can’t use that in the classroom, teachers? Why not?
More:
Wikipedia notes of Miranda:
He is working on a hip-hop album based upon the life of Alexander Hamilton, entitled The Hamilton Mixtape.[5] He recently performed “The Hamilton Mixtape” at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009. Accompanied by Alex Lacamoire. [12]
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter likes charter schools, and often enough writes about them and his frustration that public schools and their teachers won’t roll over and play dead while charter schools steal money from them (my characterization, not Alter’s).
Go watch, and learn. Among other things, the discussion is much more civil than we usually see on blogs. It’s a lesson for Christians and creationists especially.
It’s not much of a conflict of interest, but I have dealt with Alter before, in his previous job at The New Republic (back when it was not so much a bastion of neo-conservatism). Alter did a major profile of Sen. Orrin Hatch. Alter strove not to be flattering, and the biggest problem was the Vint Lawrence illustration, showing Hatch draped in the American flag as a cloak. As I recall from those now-dusty decades, the profile wasn’t exactly correlated with the illustration on any issue. Over the years, Alter’s been closer to correct more often than he’s been wrong, in my view — his views on charter schools being in that area where I think he errs.
Public schools have never suffered from a surplus of money. Charter school advocates should not be allowed to steal income from public schools directly. To shore up GM, we don’t allow GM to take a share of profit from Ford for every GM car sold. Nor do we allow Ford to take a share of GM’s income. Competition in education is a foolish pursuit most often, but we don’t need a competitive model that bleeds education on either end, as Alter’s advocacy favors.
In hard economic terms, free market, gloves-off, bare-fisted capitalistic competition has never been shown to work in education. I never could figure out Milton Friedman’s advocacy for such competition since there is no case ever to be made that competition makes better schools, nor that privately-run schools work better for educating an entire nation than public schools. I think all relevant evidence runs the other way.
Pay for performance, but links for free:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Robert F. Kennedy speech at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, March 18, 1968 - Photo by George Silk, Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images
RFK said this in 1968. In a speech I heard today it was quoted and it stirred me.
Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP — if we judge the United States of America by that — that GNP counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Kennedy delivered these words in an address at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, on March 18, 1968.
This isn’t exactly an error, but it creeps me out. Barton goes on at length about incorporating the views of a scholar of economics — but he never names the guy, and Barton seems overly affected and concerned about the guy’s residence and Jewishness.
See the section of Barton’s report talking about free enterprise (page 7). The real experts, the social studies teachers and professors whose work the Board appears to have rejected, suggested bringing the economic discussion into the 21st century and use “capitalism” instead of “free enterprise.” This would make the Texas curriculum correlate with the studies in the area done by social scientists, especially economists, and more accurately and precisely describe the system.
That is one reason given for rejecting their work, that the Board doesn’t want to mention capitalism. They don’t want to call capitalism by the name economists use.
But look at Barton’s suggestion. He veers off on a tangent about ethics in capitalism — I would venture that Barton never took any economics courses he can remember, and he’s never read Adam Smith, judging from the nature of his complaint (ethics is very much a discussion in economics). But it just gets weird. He refers to a paper, without citation, by a “Jewish economist” in the “Pacific Northwest.”
Barton doesn’t name the paper. He doesn’t say where it was published, nor offer any other citation by which it might be tracked down. Most creepily, he keeps referring to the “Jewish economist” as if his faith or ethnic background has any relevance, without ever naming the guy.
That isn’t scholarship. He almost makes a good point, but any valuable point is completely overcome by the bigoted lack of scholarship, the mere convention of naming the author of the paper and offering a citation.
Expert? No, certainly not in manifestation. That’s just creepy.
Here is the section I’m talking about:
Comment D: Free-Enterprise & Capitalism
Throughout the TEKS, the term “free enterprise” has been followed by the parenthetical “(free market, capitalism)”.By including the terms capitalism and free-market as synonyms for free-enterprise, perhaps it is now time to consider the merits of an observation concerning capitalism raised by a Jewish economist in the Pacific Northwest.
In previous generations, capitalism and the free-market system was universally operated on the unstated but unanimously assumed foundation of general societal virtue – there was a general set of assumed values and ethics that remained at the basis of transactions.
For example, to this day we assume that when a waiter brings us a glass of water that he did not spit in it before he delivered it to us. We assume that when we get the oil in our car changed that the mechanic actually changed the oil rather than just put a new sticker on the windshield. We make many Golden Rule type assumptions in the operation of the free-market system of capitalism.
When these general societal principles of ethics and morality are observed, the Free Enterprise System works as it should; but when these principles are ignored, the FreeEnterprise System breaks down and produces Bernie Madoff, Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Dennis Kozlowski, John Rigas, Joe Nacchio, Gregory Reyes, James McDermott, Sam Waskal, Sam Israel, Bernie Ebbers, and many others recently convicted of fraud, theft, corruption, and other white collar crimes that bilked clients of billions of dollars. The traditional Free Market System will not operate properly if the guiding premise is the egocentric Machiavellian principle that the end justifies the means.
We are now at a point in our history where we can no longer assume that the previously universally understood ethical basis of the Free Enterprise System will still be observed, understood, or embraced. Therefore, the Jewish economist in the Pacific Northwest has proffered that rather than using “Capitalism,” we instead begin using the term “Ethical Capitalism,” for it captures the historical import of the system and identifies an underlying principle without which the free-enterprise system will not work.
Therefore, I recommend that when we have the phrase “free enterprise (free market, capitalism)” that we instead consider using “free enterprise (free market, ethical capitalism).” It is an accurate recognition of what is one of the unspoken but indispensable elements of the free enterprise system. This change also reinforces the long-standing premise of political philosophers across the centuries that the continuation of a republic is predicated upon an educated and a virtuous citizenry.
Who is he talking about? What is he talking about?
More information:
Steve Schaffersman, the intrepid force behind Texas Citizens for Science, has a longer exposé of Barton’s odd claims and work to frustrate accurate history in Texas at Schaffersman’s Houston Chronicle hosted blog, EvoSphere. It’s well worth the read, just to see how intricately bizarre and erroneous Barton can be about simple facts of history, and how Barton chooses to misinterpret the Constitution, especially the First Amendment, and how he exaggerates little facts of history into gross distortions of the American story. I regret I failed to note this article here, in the first edition.
Two weeks ago, with North Texas soaked thoroughly to the bone, our telephone service went out. We were scrambling to get James to the airport and off to another year of school in Wisconsin, so there was little we could do when it expired.
Later that Saturday, on a cell phone with a different carrier, I got through to a machine at AT&T that promised someone would come check the problem on the following Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon at just after 4:00 p.m. we got a note on our door that phone service was restored — and it was for about an hour.
Then it went out again. And it’s been out since.
After several days of unsatisfying robot answers, I found another number and got to a human who referred me to another human who said they were completely flattened by phone outages in the Dallas area after the recent spate of Noachic storms (we had something over 11 inches in a week — the rain gauge kept topping out). No, they said, it does not good to call again to complain — they’re working as fast as they can.
To AT&T’s credit, the internet service is fine. We have alternative telephones to use, though many of our family and friends don’t know the numbers.
But, two weeks in America without telephones? That could be a problem for many people, still, couldn’t it?
Or is AT&T becoming increasingly irrelevant in their own business?
Who else is having similar problems?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
For all the hard work they do, North American sheepherders sure seem to me to get short shrift in U.S. markets. When was the last time you could find anything but New Zealand lamb at your supermarket? And I ask this from Texas, the largest sheep producing state in the U.S. (with very few grizzlies).
Is there any way to interpret away his conclusions that the war against green jobs is killing American industry?
Is there any way he could be wrong? Read it; doesn’t it make you want to fix things?
O.K., so you don’t believe global warming is real. I do, but let’s assume it’s not. Here is what is indisputable: The world is on track to add another 2.5 billion people by 2050, and many will be aspiring to live American-like, high-energy lifestyles. In such a world, renewable energy — where the variable cost of your fuel, sun or wind, is zero — will be in huge demand.
China now understands that. It no longer believes it can pollute its way to prosperity because it would choke to death. That is the most important shift in the world in the last 18 months. China has decided that clean-tech is going to be the next great global industry and is now creating a massive domestic market for solar and wind, which will give it a great export platform.
In October, Applied will be opening the world’s largest solar research center — in Xian, China. Gotta go where the customers are. So, if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you’re going to love importing solar panels from China.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. Yet the G.O.P. today resists national health care, immigration reform and wants to just drill, baby, drill.
“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”
Drum up some business:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
If you do not read Robert Park regularly, you should. His weekly missive on September 4 succinctly deals with the two big climate change stories of the week, with vim and vigor:
1. CLIMATE CHANGE: HOTTEST ARCTIC SUMMER IN 2,000 YEARS.
A major study published in today’s Science marks a seminal advance in Sediments from Arctic lakes were used to compile proxy for the last 2000 years. Arctic summer temperature declined for thousands of years due to a shift in Earth’s orbit. Although the orbital shift has been going on for 8000 years and will continue, an increase in greenhouse gases produced by the overpowered the cooling trend. The warming has been more rapid since about 1950. Moreover, thawing permafrost will release methane into the atmosphere, accelerating warming. The latest study comes just months after scientists at NOAA warned that within the next 30 years Arctic sea ice could vanish completely during the summer; that will further accelerate warming due to decline in reflective ice cover.
2. CLIMATE SOLUTIONS: IN THE LONG RUN, THERE IS ONLY ONE.
Even as the study on Arctic warming was making its way into print, a group at the controversial Center proposed a quick geo-engineered solution to. The group is headed by statistician Bjorn Lomborg, a follower of the late Julian Simon, the libertarian economist at the University of Maryland, who believed there are no limits. Lomborg proposes puffing lots of white clouds into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. It would be the perfect job for Lomborg, who has been puffing clouds of obscurantism since he wrote (Cambridge, 2001). Presumably we should just keep puffing out bigger white clouds to compensate for the ever growing population.
White clouds of vapor indeed. Park is a great fog-cutter.
3. SCOPES REDUX: LOBBYISTS MAY BE NOSTALGIC FOR DAYTON.
Newspapers around the country have carried the story of the US Chamber of Commerce, the top US lobbying group, calling for the EPA to hold a Scopes- like hearing on the evidence that climate change is man-made. The EPA dismisses such a stunt as a “waste of time,” but that’s the least of its problems. Having lost the contest over scientific peer review of journal articles, the global warming deniers are accused have cooked up a Hollywood stunt.
Global warming deniers are steamed, and may just stew.
More:
“Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling,” Science 4 September 2009: Vol. 325. no. 5945, pp. 1236 – 1239 DOI: 10.1126/science.1173983 (abstract; full text available with subscription)
Darrell S. Kaufman,1,* David P. Schneider,2 Nicholas P. McKay,3 Caspar M. Ammann,2 Raymond S. Bradley,4 Keith R. Briffa,5 Gifford H. Miller,6 Bette L. Otto-Bliesner,2 Jonathan T. Overpeck,3 Bo M. Vinther,7 Arctic Lakes 2k Project Members
“The temperature history of the first millennium C.E. is sparselydocumented, especially in the Arctic. We present a synthesisof decadally resolved proxy temperature records from polewardof 60°N covering the past 2000 years, which indicates thata pervasive cooling in progress 2000 years ago continued throughthe Middle Ages and into the Little Ice Age. A 2000-year transientclimate simulation with the Community Climate System Model showsthe same temperature sensitivity to changes in insolation asdoes our proxy reconstruction, supporting the inference thatthis long-term trend was caused by the steady orbitally drivenreduction in summer insolation. The cooling trend was reversedduring the 20th century, with four of the five warmest decadesof our 2000-year-long reconstruction occurring between 1950and 2000.”
From Reuters: "A sockeye salmon scurries through shallow water in the Adams River while preparing to spawn near Chase, British Columbia northeast of Vancouver October 11, 2006. REUTERS/Andy Clark"
“It’s quite the shocking drop,” said Stan Proboszcz, fisheries biologist at the Watershed Watch Salmon Society. “No one’s exactly sure what happened to these fish.”
Salmon are born in fresh water before migrating to oceans to feed. They return as adults to the same rivers to spawn.
Several theories have been put forward to try to explain the sockeye’s disappearance:
* Climate change may have reduced food supply for salmon in the ocean.
* The commercial fish farms that the young Fraser River salmon pass en route to the ocean may have infected them with sea lice, a marine parasite.
* The rising temperature of the river may have weakened the fish.
The Canadian government doesn’t know what’s killing the fish, but believes the sockeye are dying off in the ocean, not in fresh water, based on healthy out-migrations, said Jeff Grout, regional resource manager of salmon for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
In this case, even a small change in climate can have huge effects on ecosystems and specific populations of animals. It’s one of those climate change issues that climate change skeptics and denialists prefer not to talk about at all. If, as they allege, concern over climate change is entirely political, driven by bad information and false claims from over-active environmentalists, these problems should not exist at all.
But the problems do exist. A fishery that had been stable for 50 years previously, the entire time it was tracked so carefully, suddenly becomes fishless. Watch those rivers and fisheries.
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
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