Yet Bill Keeps On A-Comin'

I give Bill Gates credit for wanting to do good. I also give him credit for for putting his money where his mouth is, kicking in millions (as much as a billion) to schools. Where I don't give him credit, where he screwed up, is in taking up the banner of some bogus ed school theory and holding his money out like a carrot to schools/districts who would test out this theory on students.

And the idea hasn't worked. I hope no harm was done to these children while they satisfied Gates' ego.

Carnival of Education

You can find this week's Carnival over at The Magic School Bus.

Teachers

I just watched the new NBC show Teachers. It was truly as bad as I'd heard it was. It's not that I didn't like it because it wasn't realistic, or because it portrayed teachers in a bad light, or because the characters are unattractive. No, I didn't like it because it wasn't funny.

Seriously, I laughed only one time. "You have lobster on Fridays?" "Sometimes we throw in scampi." It was so unexpected that I chuckled. But the rest of the show? Yuck.

And it's by the writers of Scrubs? They obviously used up all their talent writing Scrubs, a truly funny show. Teachers? No way. I can't imagine this will last a season.

Study Says Laptops Don't Improve Education

I've written before about computers and their applicability to education. Many consider me a Luddite, but I don't see computers as the Holy Grail of education. A century ago, Thomas Edison thought that movies would revolutionize education. I'll bet he'd still recognize the classrooms of today, only the students (or the teacher, for that matter) wouldn't be as nicely dressed and the boards would have changed from dark green to white.

Put simply, the Holy Grail of education is hard work. There's no "royal road" to geometry, as the old saying goes.

Computers are a tool, nothing more. They are a means, not an end. They are akin to a pencil, a book, a movie projector. Computers have no inherent ability to improve education; how they're used makes all the difference, if there's even a difference.

At a meeting held in my favorite city (cough! cough!) this week, a report given to the American Educational Research Association shows mixed results at best from flooding the education system with computers.

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Give a kid a laptop and it might not make any difference.

That's the message from research presented here Monday, which suggests that spending millions of dollars to bring technology into kids' homes and schools has decidedly mixed results.

Taxpayer-supported school computer and Internet giveaways are political gold, but studies have questioned whether they actually help student achievement. This research, presented at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting, confirms skeptics' doubts.

In one study, researchers from Syracuse and Michigan State universities examined a program that gave laptop computers to middle-school students in Ohio in 2003. Preliminary findings are mixed.

"Overall, we don't know if it is a worthwhile investment," says Syracuse researcher Jing Lei.

Why are we surprised? Are we surprised? I'm not. And as much time as I spend on my computer, you'd think I'd be a big fan. And I am a big fan--just not in education.

Here's my idea of how to effectively use computers to support instruction. Note that it's a great use, but it's also limited in scope and very expensive!

As I just reread that post, I almost laughed that I used the same words and ideas in this post. Well, I'm nothing if not consistent!

LA Times Gets It All Wrong On "Intolerant Speech"

Note the opening paragraphs:

By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
April 10, 2006

ATLANTA — Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.

Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.

With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment.

Uh huh.

The LA Times is certainly slanting the news here. Look what they put at the end of the rather lengthy story:

Malhotra said she had been reprimanded by college deans several times in the last few years for expressing conservative religious and political views. When she protested a campus production of "The Vagina Monologues" with a display condemning feminism, the administration asked her to paint over part of it.

She caused another stir with a letter to the gay activists who organized an event known as Coming Out Week in the fall of 2004. Malhotra sent the letter on behalf of the Georgia Tech College Republicans, which she chairs; she said several members of the executive board helped write it.

The letter referred to the campus gay rights group Pride Alliance as a "sex club … that can't even manage to be tasteful." It went on to say that it was "ludicrous" for Georgia Tech to help fund the Pride Alliance.

The letter berated students who come out publicly as gay, saying they subject others on campus to "a constant barrage of homosexuality."

"If gays want to be tolerated, they should knock off the political propaganda," the letter said.

The student activist who received the letter, Felix Hu, described it as "rude, unfair, presumptuous" — and disturbing enough that Pride Alliance forwarded it to a college administrator. Soon after, Malhotra said, she was called in to a dean's office. Students can be expelled for intolerant speech, but she said she was only reprimanded.

So this woman isn't actually suing her university for the right to harass others, or the right to be intolerant (as the LA Times so judiciously puts it). She's suing for the First Amendment right to speak out against those with whom she disagrees. She's suing for the right to be free from official government (university) harassment--from college deans, no less!--because she doesn't share the official school views. "I'm OK, you're OK" only applies to those whom we think are OK, doesn't it? Don't agree with us, and you're no longer OK. In fact, you might get an official reprimand.

Notice how the lefties don't like Ms. Malhotra's views at all, and gleefully stifle her views, but she's the one who's intolerant. I've seen no evidence that she's harassing individuals or causing them any harm. She's tolerating them but not accepting them. Yes, she'd like them to go away, but they'd like her to go away, too. The difference here is that the forces that want her to go away are using the authority of the college to make it happen. That's a pretty big difference.

Generation Me

The Washington Times has a lengthy article on the narcissism of Americans born after 1970 or so. Apparently, I missed the Baby Boom by a few months and I missed being in Generation Me by 5 years. I need to come up with a nifty nickname for those of us born from 1965-1969. I'm leaning towards Generation Awesome, but that sounds too much like what a Generation Me person would call his generation. Anyway....

Americans born after 1970 -- including the so-called Generation X and Millennial Generation -- have become "an army of little narcissists," says Mrs. Twenge, who explains her views in her new book, "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled and More Miserable Than Ever Before."

Unlike their parents and grandparents, "GenMes" have "never known a world that put duty before self," she says. Instead, they were raised in a culture obsessed with self-esteem and feel-good mantras such as "Believe in yourself, and you can be anything" and "Never give up on your dreams."

The result is a generation of youths who are tolerant, confident, open-minded, ambitious -- and have wildly unreasonable expectations about how they fit into the adult world.

It gets more interesting.

Among Americans who lived through the Great Depression and two world wars, between 1 percent and 2 percent experienced a major depressive episode in their lifetime, says Mrs. Twenge, who bases her book on decades of generational data. Suicide was more common among middle-aged people, not young people.

Today, the lifetime rate for major depression is between 15 percent and 20 percent, an increase too large to be explained by improved case reporting, she says. Suicide is the third-leading cause of death for people ages 15 to 24, while rates have dropped for the middle-aged.

Why should Generation Me feel so much anxiety and pain when it has grown up in relative peace and technological and economic expansion? A big part of the answer is the constant focus on the self, Mrs. Twenge says. "[W]hen we are fiercely independent and self-sufficient, our disappointments loom large because we have nothing else to focus on."

Who's at fault here? Let's lay the fault squarely where it belongs: first on the parents, and second on anyone involved in the self-esteem movement--and that includes the schools. But Twenge's solution doesn't cut it in my book:

She recommends social changes that support two-parent working families, such as paid parental leave, public preschools, tax deductions for child care, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. school hours.

Why does socialism have to be the solution?

Twenge does support getting rid of the self-esteem crap, but unfortunately is countered by those from the National Association for Self-Esteem. Did you get that? We have a freakin' association devoted to that feel-good crap.

Despite its critics, self-esteem training and character education "are both alive and kicking," says Sharon Fountain, president of the National Association for Self-Esteem (NASE).

NASE defines self-esteem as "the experience of being capable of meeting life's challenges and being worthy of happiness," she says.

Personal competence grows out of self-awareness, accurate self-assessment and self-confidence, which is linked to self-esteem, she says. "If we are prepared to deal with the world in context, with responsibility and accountability, then not only does it improve the quality of our lives, it adds to the world."

Healthy self-esteem is not egotism, arrogance, conceit, narcissism or a sense of superiority -- those characteristics are "pseudo-self-esteem," former NASE President Robert Reasoner says in an article.

Good self-esteem programs are grounded in reality and promote self-worth and competence, he says.

Nathaniel Branden, a pioneer in the field of self-esteem psychology, argues that self-esteem is far more than just feeling good about yourself.

"It is confidence in the efficacy of our mind, in our ability to think," he writes. It is also "confidence in our ability to learn, to make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change."

How many times must I say this? Self-esteem is the result of accomplishment, not the cause of it. How can that not be plain? I agree with this next snippet, though:

Ample data now shows that "if anything, Americans tend to overrate and overvalue ourselves," writes Florida State University psychology professor Roy Baumeister. His advice to nonprofits, policy-makers, teachers, parents and therapists: "Forget about self-esteem, and invest in self-control."

Exactly.

Of course we're all painting with fairly broad brushes here, and these sweeping generalizations don't apply to specific individuals--especially generalizations about all the people born in the last 36 years. However, there does seem to be a societal movement afoot, one I'm not particularly fond of.

Environmentalism

Over a year ago I wrote an award winning 5-part series called Environmentalism and the Skeptical Mind. (Full disclosure: I gave myself the awards.) Read this riveting series here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

I also linked to a story discussing an anti-environmentalist article in, of all places, The New York Times.

In May of last year I wrote a piece called I'm Not The Only One Who Thinks The Kyoto Protocols Suck.

Instapundit now reports that Canada is backing out of the Kyoto Protocols, and that a university in England reports that average global temperature didn't increase from 1998 to 2005.

Why is global warming, and man's fault in causing it, getting so much press lately? Newsalert links to an expose' showing that media companies are large financial backers of extreme environmental groups.

During the early part of the last millenium, there was what scientists now call a mini-ice age, at least in Europe. Then it warmed up. Man had no part in making the weather colder, and he had no part in making the weather warmer. We all know what a tropical paradise most of North America was several (million) years ago. My point is that climate change is a natural occurrence, and there's no evidence that man is causing global warming today--if indeed global warming is occurring. That is not to say that we shouldn't be good stewards of the environment, far from it. But we don't need to throw capitalism out the window and start worshiping the tree goddess, either.

Update, 4/17/06 6:40 am: If you read my series above, you're familiar with Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. He penned a column for the Washington Post this weekend.

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

I'm still not convinced on global warming, but I am convinced about the necessity of nuclear energy.

Taxes

Interested in the Census Bureau's estimate of your total tax burden, per capita by state? If so, here's the chart. California ranks 9th. My adopted home of Colorado ranks 47th. Hmmmm.

CTA *Finally* Endorses A Republican--Big Deal

According to the major Sacramento newspaper, the California Teachers Association (of which I am proudly no longer a member) has endorsed Bruce McPherson, the incumbent running for Secretary of State.

There are two key points to be made here.

1. Why is the CTA recommending anyone for the Secretary of State post? What possible tie does that job have to education? CTA spends money (including some of my agency fees) endorsing people for jobs that have little or nothing to do with education--like President, or state Insurance Commissioner--and it drives me nuts.

2. The following statement from CTA President "Boss" Kerr says it all:

CTA President Barbara Kerr said it was the first time she could recall CTA endorsing a Republican for statewide office...

"We looked at the November election, which was about education, and he ran that well," Kerr said. "He was the bipartisan (official) he was supposed to be."

If only CTA could be the bipartisan organization it claims to be. Call me intolerant, but I despise these people with every fiber of my being.

Another Moonbat Teacher

Only this one is running for Congress!

Iraqi Liberation Day

I remember watching Saddam's statue come down. It was a great day to be an American--or an Iraqi.

In honor of that day, and in honor of all those who have served and sacrificed, I link here to a letter from a Gold Star Mother--one of those with "absolute moral authority" to talk about the value of this war in which we are engaged.

Real Dollars, Not "Blog Dollars"

This isn't Blogshares--this is what my blog is supposedly really worth:

My blog is worth $31,614.24.
How much is your blog worth?

Gays In California Education News

I don't toe either party line as far as homosexuality goes. I expect that, after writing this post, the left will call me a homophobe and the right will call me a liberal. They can both drop dead.

I've come around to agree with the philosophy/belief that homosexuality is "what you are", not "what you do". It's kind of like heterosexuality in that regard--you can be celibate and still be homo/heterosexual. It's the people you're attracted to (you cannot consciously control that) that defines your sexuality here, not who you have sex with.

Now the right will counter with, "Pedophiles are attracted to children and that's wrong...." True. It's wrong because a child cannot consent, whether the pedophile is gay or straight. Get a new argument, right wing. A better one.

The left could actually claim the moral high ground in the homosexuality arena, but they don't. Instead, they try to stuff their self-righteous moralizing down everyone's throats--just like they accuse the Religious Right of doing in other topics.

Where this topic is concerned, is everyone an idiot but me? I'm beginning to think so.

A couple of nights ago, a local school district had a board meeting at which they were going to discuss a proposal to give official board approval to the Day of Silence (which I wrote about in this post last year--scroll about halfway through). Of course the gay-haters showed up, but that's par for the course. Unfortunately, though, because they rely on emotion instead of logic to make their point, they come across as fanatical idiots who do more to harm their cause than to help it. But I digress.

Let me be direct: the Day of Silence is a stupid idea. Unless I'm hitting on you, I don't want to know your sexual preferences. And I don't hit on my students. This silly activity is a "pay attention to me!" stunt that takes something personal and throws it in the face of everyone they come in contact with.

At issue was a national Day of Silence on April 26, which aims to call attention to the bullying and harassment that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students often face.

Lots of people face bullying and harassment. It's wrong no matter who the recipient is--even if the recipient is a devout Christian, or even a Republican! The problem here is that we're making an issue of only the homosexual students. This goes back to what I said in my fourth paragraph, above. The school board should not be in the habit of supporting events like this.

Reasonable studies put the homosexual population at anywhere from 1.5%-6% of the general population, far fewer than Kinsey's 10% but still not zero. Let's pick a midling value, say 4%. That would mean that one out of every 25 people is gay. That's a minority, folks. If gays want acceptance from the other 24 of 25, in-your-face cannot be the best way to achieve it.

And that brings us to the second article about gays in California educational news. It seems that openly-lesbian legislator (agenda! agenda!) Sheila Kuehl has written a law that would require that school textbooks tell about the contributions of gays in California's history.

History books record contributions by gays but their sexual orientation is often ignored, a situation gay activists say is inexcusable in California, home to a large gay population in San Francisco, a city that briefly made history in 2004 by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

As I quoted in my post last year on the stupid concept of Ethnomathematics:

Young people need to be shown that they need to accomplish something in their own lives and be proud of that, not to be proud by dubious association with a group hundreds of years and thousands of miles removed from them.

Or with a group with the same sexual orientation.

This is another case of what I said in my fourth paragraph--the left shoving its moralizing down everyone's throats, including the throats of schoolchildren.

I'm all about teaching tolerance--not because I think people should have to like anyone they don't want to, but because society requires that their actions not physically harm other people. That's what tolerance is, tolerating people you'd rather not be around. Tolerance is very different from acceptance, which is what the gay lobby is pushing on the 24 out of 25. Tolerance may eventually lead to acceptance, and that might be a good thing, but acceptance certainly is not something we should enforce on people--especially on those who have religious convictions about what you want them to accept.

And lefties, before you chime in on this, I'd like you to convince your Islamist brothers to accept homosexuality. If you'd try to convince them, or even if you'd denounce them as strongly as you denounce the devout Christians, you might have some credibility on this issue. But the Islamists will threaten to cut your heads off, so you cower and go after the less violent folk. You show no spine, you have no credibility.

Acceptance of homosexuality is an issue that needs to be dealt with in the family, not the school. Some consider it a moral issue, and the family is the appropriate place to deal with moral issues. Schools shouldn't be taking a stance on moral issues that are still controversial. The schools should enforce appropriate codes of conduct, not thought.

That's the difference between toleration and acceptance.

The so-called leaders of the homosexual agenda--HRC and their ilk--assume a kneejerk left-wind stance and are shocked--shocked!--when the right doesn't respond lovingly. That's another part of the problem: homosexuals are almost in lockstep with the Democrats and the far left. The Log Cabin Republicans have marginalized themselves within the Republican Party. Go to a gay bar or coffee house and spout conservative viewpoints and see how far you get. ATTENTION, PUSHERS OF THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA: as long as you make a left-wing political issue out of this, the right's going to push back! If these pushers were serious about gay acceptance as opposed to a gay and left-wing agenda, perhaps they'd consider the viewpoints of these non-leftie, non-right authors at the Independent Gay Forum, from which I've quoted before. I love it when people can think for themselves.

I'm Becoming Stossel's New Biggest Fan

"Welcome to my new page: 'Stossel for Teachers.' Every month we will stream a new video segment, designed to be a jungle gym for the mind."

Sorry For The Light Blogging Lately

I know I've been doing mostly links with little commentary lately. I also know that that's not what most of you come here for.

Haven't been feeling well the last couple days, and it was all I could do just to drive home from work today and collapse on the couch. It's gone downhill from there!

I used to have a friend who would sit with me when I was sick. I miss that. I could use a sitting friend right now!

More On A.N.S.W.E.R. And Immigration

This author posits that International A.N.S.W.E.R. was behind the Hispanic protests of last week. Here's a link to all my posts about A.N.S.W.E.R.

And here's where you can read about what "undercover bloggers" discovered when they attended an A.N.S.W.E.R. meeting in Washington, DC recently.

More Filth From the Rethinking Schools People

I've written about them before, here and here.

Now go read their latest, in their own words. Can you say, anti-American? I knew you could!

John Stossel Accepts Union Offer To Teach For A Week

John Stossel had a not-so-flattering report on ABC's 20/20, and teachers weren't so happy about it; I've previously linked to some of Stossel's writing on the topic. The president of the teachers union in New York City, in a show of bravado, challenged Stossel to teach for a week and see what teaching's really like.

He accepted, but in the end, school administrators put the ixnay on the idea, saying it would set a precedent for allowing reporters in the schools.

Imagine that, actually getting to see what goes on in public schools that your tax dollars support!

Here are some snippets from Stossel's "nyah nyah nyah NYAH nyah!" article:

I accepted. I even said I'd let the union pick the school. I thought I'd learn more about how difficult teaching is. Above all, it was a chance to get our cameras into schools -- something the N.Y. bureaucracy had forbidden -- so we could show you what was really going on.

But it won't happen.

Like most of our dealings with the union, nothing was easy. It took weeks of phone calls to make any sort of progress. I suspect this will not surprise public-school parents...

I guess they didn't want me to look at a normal public school.

But this is the school the UFT picked, and I was up for the challenge. Who knows what I might have learned by teaching?

[snip]

My producers went to a meeting at the school to choose a class for me to teach. The union representative didn't come, so we were told no decisions could be made. Lots of people came to a second meeting at the school: four people from the union, one person from the city Department of Education, and administrators and teachers from Beacon [the chosen school--Darren]. They decided I might teach history classes and "media studies," but they would have to talk to more people...

I prepped for my history classes. We had more meetings...

Then there were more meetings. Finally, four days before what was supposed to be my first day of class, they canceled. Officially, "they" were the public school administrators who said it might be "disruptive" and that it might "set a precedent" that would open their doors to other reporters.

Too bad. Letting cameras into schools would be a good thing. Taxpayers might finally get to see how more than $200,000 per classroom of their money was being spent...

I'd like 20/20's cameras to see me struggle to be a good teacher.

I wonder what else our cameras might see.

And remember, it's Stossel who's supposed to be the bad guy here. Just read the union rags, they'll tell you!

School Board Considers Not Following State Law

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Nearly 500 West Contra Costa high school seniors who have failed the mandatory California Exit Exam could receive diplomas anyway this June if a majority of the school board joins a colleague's call to rebel against the controversial
graduation requirement.

For:

"What can we do for our students who have demonstrated they will have a successful life, yet can't pass the exit exam?" [school board member] Brown asked in proposing the resolution. "There's a work ethic that's needed (for employment) that our students demonstrate that may not show up on an exit exam."

Against:

School board President Charles Ramsey said he will vote against Brown's proposal because of its potential legal and financial ramifications.

"I understand the motivation (for the resolution). It's well intentioned, but that has to be coupled with the reality of the law," he said. "We're a part of this state. We can't secede from California."

He was joined by Trustee Karen Pfeiffer. "We have for a long time passed along students who are not prepared for work," she said. "West Contra Costa has not always been accountable. To continue to pretend that students who can't pass this relatively simple exam are high school graduates and should get a diploma is a disservice to the students and the community."

Uh oh:

State Department of Education officials said Tuesday they contacted Cynthia LeBlanc, the district's interim superintendent, to warn that passing the resolution would violate the law. The Chronicle could not reach LeBlanc for comment.

But Hilary McLean, a spokeswoman for the state education department, said her agency "would look at all possibilities, including enforcement through the courts." She also pointed out other leverage, noting that "the Department of Education is the entity that provides funds for schools."

As my students might say, "Snap."

Comments?

More Bad News About Teachers

At least we don't have education majors here in California.

By the by, check out the literacy scores of those math, science, and engineering folks. Not bad, eh?