May 6, 2008
Living through the Watergate scandals and the Constitutional crises they produced — and spending part of that time in Washington, D.C., working for the Senate — I got a wonderful view of how constitutional government works, why it is important that good people step up to make it work, and a glimpse of what happens when good people lay back and let the hooligans run amock.
Over the last three months it occurs to me that we may be living in a similar time, when great but latent threats to our Constitution and the rule of law may be halted or rolled back by one John Dean-like character who will stand up before a group of elected officials, swear to tell the truth, and then, in fact, tell the whole truth.
Teachers, are you taking advantages of these lessons in civics that come into our newspapers every day?
We live in interesting times, exciting times — we live in educational times.
You should be clipping news stories on these events, and you should be using them in your classrooms today, and saving them for the fall elections, for the January inauguration, for the new Congress . . . and for your future classes.
What other opportunities for great civics lessons come to our doorsteps every day?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
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Accuracy, Checks and Balances, Government, Heroes, Journalism, Justice, Law, Leadership, Lessons of history, Scandals, U.S. Constitution, U.S. House of Representatives, Watergate scandal | Tagged: Checks and Balances, civics, Constitution, Current Events, Government, Newspapers, Politics, Teaching, U.S. Congress | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
May 3, 2008
Utah rejected education vouchers last November, so the release from the Census bureau at the first of April probably got overlooked as not exactly important — I saw no major story on it in any medium.
Maybe it was the April 1 release date.
Whatever the reason for the lack of recognition, the figures are out from the Census Bureau, and Utah’s at the bottom end of spending per student lists, in the U.S. I wrote earlier that Utah gets a whale of a bargain, since teachers work miracles with the money they have. But miracles can only go so far. Utah’s educational performance has been sliding for 20 years. Investment will be required to stop the slide.
Utah’s per pupil spending is closer to a third that of New York’s.
Of course, spending levels do not guarantee results. New York and New Jersey lead the pack, but the District of Columbia comes in third place. Very few people I know would swap an education in Idaho, Utah or Arizona, the bottom three in per pupil spending, for an education in D.C.
Public Schools Spent $9,138 Per Student in 2006
School districts in the United States spent an average of $9,138 per student in fiscal year 2006, an increase of $437 from 2005, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today.
Public Education Finances: 2006 offers a comprehensive look at the revenues and expenditures of public school districts at the national and state levels. The report includes detailed tables that allow for the calculation of per pupil expenditures. Highlights from these tables include spending on instruction, support services, construction, salaries and benefits of the more than 15,000 school districts. Public school districts include elementary and secondary school systems.
All the census statistics are on-line, for free. Policy makers can mine these data for insights — will they? You may download the data in spreadsheet or comma-delimited data form.
The rest of the press release is pure policy talking points:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
21 Comments | Classroom size, Economics, Education, Education reform, Education spending, Education success, Government, Politics, Public education, Teacher Pay, Teaching, War on Education | Tagged: Education, Education spending, Government, Politics, School Finance | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
April 17, 2008
The comments at Boing-Boing are a lot smarter than the action by Oregon. Oregon mailed cease and desist letters to on-line providers of the texts of Oregon laws.
No, not to the big, hugely for-profit publisher West; only to smaller, on-line providers.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Dr. Bumsted.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Freedom of Information, Jurisprudence, Law, Plagiarism | Tagged: copyright, Government, Media, The Law | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
February 6, 2008
King Canute* couldn’t hold back the tides.
Surely the Utah legislature doesn’t think they can hold back the rumblings of the Rocky Mountains, either — but the proposed legislation raises delectable questions about the role of government in preventing disasters, especially using zoning laws as the method of prevention.
Good discussion material for government, civics, geology and “integrated physics and chemistry (IPC).”
* Canute was a Viking. Is anyone from Pleasant Grove, Utah, wondering about the symbolism here, with the high school mascot being the Viking, and the town being located at the foot of the mountains, almost astride the Wasatch Fault?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Leave a Comment » | geology, Government, Law, Science | Tagged: civics, Cnut the Great, earthquakes, geology, Government, King Canute, landslides, Law, Science, zoning | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
February 6, 2008
“Paul Revere” at Effects Measure muses on the effect of one vote in the grand scheme of things, and comes up wondering whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to require voters to vote — as indeed is done in Australia (voters pay a fine for failing to vote).
It’s a good discussion of the impact one citizen’s vote really makes, a discussion leavened by the science background of Revere. The article would make a wonderful warm-up exercise for classes in civics, government, economics and U.S. history.
Voting is a privilege, but it’s also a duty of good citizenship. Should we require people to vote, by law, with criminal penalties for those who fail to make a choice at the polls?
What do you think?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
3 Comments | Bell Ringers, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Economics, Government, Voting Rights Act, Warm-up exercises | Tagged: Citizenship, Elections, Government, Politics, voting | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
January 2, 2008
Some of us were still digesting the heart- and conscience-rending story of the Navy Judge Advocate General (JAG) who resigned rather than continue to work in an organization that unethically endorsed torture, when we also became aware of the Bush administration’s plan to politicize the justice operations of the U.S. military. (See Geneva Conventions, here.)
Jurist, a news organ from the University of Pittsburgh Law School, with the short version here (with a recounting of other political troubles in JAG); the Boston Globe has the longer version here.
It’s the sort of move one expects from Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharaf; it’s the sort of move one would expect President Hugo Chavez to try in Venezuela, before the college students and military shout him down. It’s a banana republic-style action. It’s a move beneath a U.S. politician. Or, it should be.
If Orrin Hatch and Arlen Specter were alive today, you can bet this proposal would be dead.
For high school history and government teachers, these are exciting times. Abuses of the Constitution and potential crises cross the headlines every day. Each of these stories tells students the importance of knowing government and where the levers of power are.
Jan Carlzon at SAS Airline used to say people armed with knowledge cannot help but act. We must be missing the boat — where is the action?
Tip of the old scrub brush to Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
2 Comments | Government, Justice, Law, Politics, Presidents, U.S. Constitution | Tagged: Government, Justice, Politics, U.S. Constitution | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
January 1, 2008
Lisa Schencker writes about Utah’s problems in The Salt Lake Tribune, but you can find exactly the same story in every state in the union, plus Guam and Puerto Rico:
The two Utah men don’t know each other, but they have at least one thing in common.
Ben Johnson is a first-year math teacher at Alta High School. He loves his job, but it’s exhausting and pays well below what he could make elsewhere with his bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
Marc Elgort is a University of Utah graduate student who researches cell metabolism at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. He tried teaching but found it stressful, all-consuming and riddled with bureaucratic frustrations.
Both men’s stories reveal different shades of the same problem: retaining and attracting teachers in Utah, especially in math and science. Utah schools were 173 teachers short – including nearly 20 science and math teachers – on the first day of school in 2007, according to a recent report by David Sperry, a University of Utah professor of educational leadership and policy and Scholar-in-Residence with the Utah System of Higher Education. State education leaders worry Utah’s students and economy could fall behind other states and nations if something isn’t done soon.
Utah voters rejected an ill-thought-out voucher plan in November, but the Utah legislature had no plan B — so Utah’s classrooms are still crowded, there’s not enough money to provide merit increases to teachers who need them, teaching is a grind instead of a calling, and that means it will take a lot more money to get the teachers the students deserve — money the legislature hasn’t appropriated and probably won’t when they get back to the issue early next month, for the legislature’s 30-day budget session.
At some point we will have to stop working for education reform, and start working at education rescue, if these conditions are not changed.
Don’t smirk if you’re not from Utah. I can find a school in your state, probably in your town, with the same problems:
Johnson, like 8 percent of new teachers hired to work in Utah schools this year, came from out of state. Several Utah school districts recruit from elsewhere because Utah colleges and universities trained about 1,200 fewer teachers than schools needed this school year, according to Sperry’s report.
Johnson made most of his contacts at a job fair in Michigan.
“Every person that found out I was a math teacher pulled me aside,” Johnson said. “You could see how desperate they were.”
He said he interviewed with several school districts and received an offer from each one. He ultimately chose Jordan.
That’s where the easy part ended.
On a recent school day about three months into his career, Johnson invited juniors to the board to work with polynomials.
“Let’s take a look at a couple of things first. What do you see that we can cancel right away?” Johnson asked of one problem.
Several groups of students chatted and laughed among themselves.
“Guys, listen up,” Johnson said. It was one of many times he had to remind students to pay attention.
“It’s really tough,” Johnson said earlier. “I have to be really firm. They’re talking all the time.”
Holding on to the dream: Johnson said classroom management has so far been his biggest challenge – his largest class has 37 students. Utah has some of the largest class sizes in the nation.
“There’s no way I can keep an eye on every single student,” Johnson said.
Utah appropriated a cool half-billion dollars to encouraging teachers in shortage areas, like math, in schools that desperately need them. What does that look like on the ground?
Johnson also puts a tremendous amount of time into teaching. As a new teacher, he is building curricula for several of his courses with help from the district.
“Just building that curriculum takes hours and hours outside of the classroom,” Johnson said. “So does correcting papers.”
Johnson said he has about 180 students. If he gives one assignment or test per class a week, and it takes him five minutes to correct each one, that’s another 15 hours of work.
Johnson makes just over $30,000 a year and estimates he works about 65 hours a week. That boils down to about $13 an hour for the weeks school is in session.
“My wife and I get by, and that’s all I can expect,” Johnson said.
Schencker’s story lists ten bills in the Utah legislative hopper designed to hammer at the problems.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
5 Comments | Education, Education quality, Education reform, Science, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Tagged: Education, Government, Politics, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
December 21, 2007
Z Magazine is a little slow on the draw with this article, “Downwinders catch the drift,” so we note it here for the archives. The Energy Department scotched the worried-about test. So this is history.
But it’s scary history, and it needs to be remembered. The scariest part is that it comes around again, after even the most ardent pro-military, keep-the-finger-on -the-missiles-launch-button types acknowledged the injuries and deaths of thousands of U.S. citizens, innocent civilians mostly.
Every once in a while I see a small note about the problems with the radiation injury compensation program, intended to fill in where the courts and the Federal Tort Claims Act failed so spectacularly. This story is just a reminder of the deadly nature of big government unchecked.
Did we need to be reminded?
(And Ron Preston: Where are you?)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Leave a Comment » | Atomic Bomb, Government, Nuclear weapons, Public health | Tagged: Government, nuclear fallout, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
December 19, 2007
Texas’s creationism controversy continues, today with new articles in The San Antonio Express and The New York Times.
Melissa Ludwig’s article in the San Antonio paper gets right to the problem, that the Institute for Creation Research proposes to train educators to do what the law says they cannot do:
Science teachers are not allowed to teach creationism alongside evolution in Texas public schools, the courts have ruled. But that’s exactly what the Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research wants them to do. The institute is seeking state approval to grant online master’s degrees in science education to prepare teachers to “understand the universe within the integrating framework of Biblical creationism,” according to the school’s mission statement.
Last week, an advisory council made up of university educators voted to recommend the program for approval by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in January, sparking an outcry among science advocates who have fended off repeated attempts by religious groups to insert creationism into Texas science classrooms.
“It’s just the latest trick,” said James Bower, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas at San Antonio who has publicly debated creationists. “They have no interest in teaching science. They are hostile to science and fundamentally have a religious objective.”
The 43-page site visit report by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) is available for download in .pdf form at the San Antonio Express site (and thanks to the Express for making this available!). This report provides details that regulators should check carefully, such as the library for ICR is in California and unavailable to students. Up-to-date science articles are unavailable to these graduate students, it appears from the report. In science, journal articles provide the most recent research, and often the most interesting work. Graduate students would be expected to rely heavily on such sources for much of their work.
In the Times, the focus is on just getting the facts out. Perhaps understandably, some officials did not want to talk to the Times:
The state’s commissioner of higher education, Raymund A. Paredes, said late Monday that he was aware of the institute’s opposition to evolution but was withholding judgment until the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board meets Jan. 24 to rule on the recommendation, made last Friday, by the board’s certification advisory council.
Henry Morris III, the chief executive of the Institute for Creation Research, said Tuesday that the proposed curriculum, taught in California, used faculty and textbooks “from all the top schools” along with, he said, the “value added” of challenges to standard teachings of evolution.
“Where the difference is, we provide both sides of the story,” Mr. Morris said. On its Web site, the institute declares, “All things in the universe were created and made by God in the six literal days of the creation week” and says it “equips believers with evidences of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.”
Notable is the absence of consultation with the science community in Texas. Texas officials avoid meeting with scientists, as if they know what the scientists will tell them about programs to offer creationism.
The report to the THECB includes a section on legal compliance. ICR has required building occupancy permits and no obvious OSHA citations, the report says.
The legality of teaching creationism gets no mention. It’s not legal, of course. Generally, a program to train people must not train them to violate a state’s laws, or federal laws. If no one asks that question, the answer that it’s not legal won’t get made.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
2 Comments | Creationism, Education, First Amendment, Government, Politics, Religion | Tagged: Creationism, Education, Government, Politics, Religion | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 7, 2007
Have you Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana economics teachers registered for Evening at the Fed?
Evening at the Fed
Dinner and Discussion for High School Teachers
Dallas, November 29, 2007
Houston, December 4, 2007
San Antonio, December 11, 2007
El Paso, December 13, 2007
Financial Markets: Innovations and Challenges
The 2007 Evening at the Fed series will feature Jeffery Gunther, assistant vice president and senior economist in the Dallas Fed’s Financial Industry Studies Department. Gunther will speak on factors leading up to the recent financial market turmoil, in particular the role of nontraditional financial instruments. He will address such questions as:
- Are financial innovations, such as hedge funds, forever changing the financial landscape?
- What happened in the U.S. sub prime real estate market?
- What does the consumer need to understand about nontraditional financial instruments?
- What impact do these new financial instruments have on the US economy?
Join us at a location convenient for you. The fee to attend is $15, which includes dinner and materials. Space is limited and the registration fee must be received by the cut-off date.
This would probably be a good session for government and U.S. history teachers, too.
Registration details after the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
2 Comments | Economics, Education, Federal Reserve Bank, Free market economics, Government, History, Personal finance | Tagged: Dallas Fed, Economics, Education, Government, Teachers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
September 17, 2007
Editor’s note: Dr. Vincent Resh of the University of California at Berkeley addressed the distinguished, long-lived Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on August 22, 2007. Below is a column by Resh which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle a few days before the speech, covering much of the same material.
Resh tells the story of a public health victory in Africa against a disease called river blindness. People victimized are made blind by a parasitic worm which lives in the victim’s eyes. I relate it here because Resh tells how the victory is achieved without resorting to the use of destructive DDT, which had been proposed. Note carefully what Resh says about DDT. This is one more chunk of evidence against the broadcast use of DDT, a story in support of the ban on DDT imposed in the U.S. since 1972. Rachel Carson was right.
_____________________
- Vincent H. Resh has been a professor of entomology at UC Berkeley since 1975. He was the senior environmental adviser for the onchocerciasis control program.
River blindness ‘curse’ lifted
Vincent H. Resh
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Insect-transmitted diseases typically come to our attention through local news reports of the threat of West Nile virus or of dengue fever in our neighborhoods. The works of the Gates Foundation have made us more aware of malaria, the mosquito-transmitted disease that kills well more than a million people each year. But there are scores of insect-transmitted diseases that affect humans, and the insects responsible for many of them live in water.
Click on thumbnail image for a chart showing the life cycle of river blindness — from the Carter Center, by Alberto Cuadra
DDT and its descendents were initially effective in controlling the water-dwelling vectors of human diseases. However, the effects of these insecticides on environmental health also had significant, indirect effects on human health. The fish in rivers, which are the main protein source for humans in most developing countries, were drastically reduced by these poisons.
Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Leave a Comment » | DDT, Geography - Physical, Government, Public health, Rachel Carson | Tagged: Blackfly, DDT, geography, Government, ivermectin, Onchocerciasis, Rachel Carson, River Blindness, Vincent H. Resh | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 21, 2007
Much of recent history does not show up in internet searches. Some of the holes are being filled, as copyrights expire and older sources get digitized — but that means that a lot of what happened in the late 1970s, in the 1980s and 1990s escapes notice of history searches.
Whatever happened to the Sagebrush Rebellion?
My view is biased — I got stuck on the front lines, knowing a bit about the environment and working for Sen. Orrin Hatch from 1978 through 1985. While working with people who think it’s good policy to aim a D-9 Caterpillar through a wilderness area has its drawbacks, there were a lot of great people and great places working that issue.
Orrin Hatch’s website doesn’t even mention the stuff any more, though it features a nice photo of Delicate Arch, which some of his supporters threatened to bulldoze or dynamite to make a point. Paul Laxalt is dead long gone from office, and (in 2011) nearing 90. Jake Garn is out of the Senate, and never really was all that interested in it. I had extensive files on the ins and outs, but I unwisely loaned them to the guy who took over the issue for Hatch after Jim Black left the staff, and they disappeared.
The issues have never died. It’s in the news again — see this article in the Los Angeles Times in April. But the old history? Where can it be found?
If you have sources, especially internet sources, please send them my way.
Poor copy of a photo from U.S. News and World Report, Dec. 1, 1980
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
9 Comments | Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Capturing history, Conservation, Environmental protection, Government, History, Law, Public Lands, Sagebrush Rebellion | Tagged: BLM, Capturing history, Government, Law, Sagebrush Rebellion, Sen. Jake Garn, Sen. Orrin Hatch, Sen. Paul Laxalt, Wilderness | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Click on thumbnail image for a chart showing the life cycle of river blindness 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 