She, along with most of the rest of her class at Franklin Middle School, went on a class trip to a camp at North Bay on Monday, a camp located at the very north of the Chesapeake bay, and she came home today.
It was a science field trip, she studied the econolgy, turtles, stuff like that.
It seems to have calmed her down a bit…for a while at least.
I began my drinking college career before the universal 21-year-old drinking age, it was 20 in Massachusetts, and it did not interfere with my drinking at all, so I approve of the efforts by over 100 college presidents to lower the drinking age to 18 (the Amethyst Initiative).
They believe that the current regime leads to unsafe habits and binge drinking, and I agree.
My observation, and I was at college through the transition, is that the change in the law did not make for safer drinking, or a reduction in drinking and driving.
To be honest, the only reason that I’m covering this is that in the 1970s, I went to Grenada with my family a number of times.
I don’t recall ever being in St. George’s medical school, though I believe I drove by it once.
These folks were the med students that Reagan used as an excuse to invade.
In any case, that’s why I read the article about the exclusive contract between the school and the New York City Health and Hospital Corp. to provide clerkships to medical students.
The deal may not be dishonest, but it certainly has a funny smell.
There is a study by David Deming and Susan Dynarski that seems to indicate that delaying entry into first grade actually reduces academic achievement.
This is interesting,since the, “Boy Crisis” crowd, is aggressively holding boys back a year to deal with the delay in language development of young boys vs. young girls.
My, admitted anecdotal, information would suggest not to red-shirt.
My son, Charlie, is an Asperger’s child, and as such, he is socially delayed, and has issues with social issues with rules and conflict resolution, though he is performs at least one grade level above his age academically.
According to the red-shirting folks, his entry into first grade should have been delayed, which would have been a disastrous.
While he can be a handful when upset or frustrated, when he is bored, he’s like Plutonium.
Considering the fact that it has been at previous Red Flags, and it has zero role in the so called “War on Terror”, and they could shake one loose for the Farnborough airshow but this year, when the Indian AF will be sending Su-30MKIs to the exercise, David Axe reports that they are too busy to participate.
They are doing their hair, or some such.
I’m certain that they guys who actually fly the F-22 want to see how their likely adversary, advanced derivatives of the Su-27 will perform against them, what sort of tactics would be used, and similar issues, but the guys who fly desks, and are still interested in additional purchases of the white elephant, so they don’t want any losses in exercises, to get in the way of that.
Well, here we have another article full of hand wringing about how the US is not graduating enough people with technical degrees.
The problem is very simple. We have policies like the H1B and L1 visas that depress the wages of people in technical in fields.
People inclined to go into technical fields tend to have a greater facility with math than the rest of the population.
Mathematically inclined people look at pay as a part of their career and educational choices, and they determine that there is more money, in going into law, or business administration, or medicine, or video editing, so so choose those professions.
In order for you to increase the supply of graduates with technical skills, you must increase the benefits that accrue as a result of getting those skills.
The efforts this far, which consist mostly of crap like sending astronauts around to encourage kids to take science, don’t work because they are, at their core, a lie.
Our society does not value technical expertise. It it did, it would pay more for it.
Yep, Texas is heading for a new monkey trial.
Chris Comer, former science director of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) was fired because he forwarded an announcement about an evolution event, and she has now sued for illegal termination on the basis that:
The think is that this is fairly settled law, see Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, so I imagine that Comer will win this.
It’s why I left Texas in 2001. I did not want my children to grow up in the backward political and social environment there.
Speaking as someone who did fairly well on my SAT, I find the increasing number of schools who have dropped the SAT (and ACT) to be a welcome development.
Filling in little bubbles with a number 2 pencil has very little to do with the quality of one’s mind, and the Kaplan prep courses mean that rich kids whose parents can drop a grand are basically gaming the test, and the system, to their own advantage.
Frequently, this question is phrased as, “Is college necessary?”, but to any observer, it is clear that the answer to that question is, “Yes”.
Increasingly, degrees, or more advanced degrees, are required for positions that in earlier times did not require this.
“Professor X”, who serves as an adjunct professor at a community college and a private liberal arts school, asks this question, and he concludes that the current educational requirements of our job market are unecessary.
An argument that the goal of universal College Education is not in the best interest of society.
The thesis is that much of education is a racket, with the modern American workplace as a co-conspirator. I agree.
Yep, school districts are employing private investigators to find foreclosed children so that they can thrown them out of school.
I would note that it’s frequently illegal, “The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, an updated version of a 1987 law, says school districts can’t deny enrollment to children who are homeless because of foreclosure or other economic hardship.”
As the good Rev. Wright says, “God bless America.”
H/T Calculated Risk
Well, not me, but my daughter and wife.
They will be seeing the normal Philly sites, IIRC.
Natalie has a field trip to Philadelphia today, and since that meant that they had to be to school early, I was at work late, because I had to wait for Charlie’s bus to pick him up and take him to Chatsworth.
One of the benefits of his new school is that his bus trip is much shorter, so he gets almost an extra hour of sleep in the morning. If he were still going to Forbush, the bus would have picked him up at about 7:45, not 8:35.
I can’t believe that I’m agreeing with a regular contributor to the National Review’s “The Corner”, Jim Manzi, but I do.
The guy is a moron though, in the last ‘graph he claims that because Harvard employees (professors) give to Dems, the institution should not be tax exempt.
He is spot on when he calls Harvard a tax exempt “Hedge Fund”.
But he runs the numbers:
Receipts = $2 billion of operating revenue + $7.3 billion of investment income + $0.6 billion of gifts to the endowment = ~$10 billion.
Operating costs = ~$3 billion.
Profit = $10 billion – $3 billion = ~$7 billion.
This explains why Harvard’s net assets increased about $7 billion in 2007, from about $35 billion to about $42 billion.
This actually segues nicely into my previous post on executive compensation. Just how much is too much anyway?
If Harvard never generated another penny in investment, tuition, or gifts, they would be able to continue to operate for 12 years.
Too much is too much, and by making income (and donations) tax deductible, we are subsidizing “too much”.
I clearly understand how Harvard is the most egregious case of endowment abuse, but once we have determined that there is a problem and that it needs to be fixed, we are, as the joke goes, just haggling over price.
Specifically, the measure calls for a 2.5% tax on any endowment in excess of $1 billion.
Massachusetts has 9 colleges and universities that meet this criterion, with Harvard’s endowment of $35+ billion leading the list, and it would be expected to raise $1.4 billion for Massachusetts.
There are a number of reasons that I think that this is a good idea, the first is that Greg Mankiw, former head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors hates the idea with a passion, and if a Bushie opposes an idea, you are unlikely to be wrong supporting it.
The second, and more logical reason, is that these endowments are so excessive as to run counter to the goals of these institutions as educational non-profits.
Brad Delong, a Harvard Alumni, runs the numbers, and notes that over the past 50 years, Harvard’s graduation rate has gone from 1200 to 1600/year (which means that there is $5.5 million of endowment for each student there), while the UC starting from 5000/year created many more educational openings, both through expansions at UC Berkeley and UCLA, and by improving other parts of the UC system noting that, “Today we have UC Davis, UC Merced, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Sunnydale*, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC San Diego which together with UCB and UCLA graduate 40,000 undergraduates a year.”
Matthew Yglesias, also a Harvard Alumni, says “Long story short if you, like me, are a graduate of a fancy college and the development people come around asking you for money don’t do it save your money for institutions that (a) have less money and (b) do more to help people in need.“
It raises an interesting point, specifically that endowments and foundations become a sort of charitable money pit, where the accumulation of more resources become a major, if not the major driving force behind institutional activities.
*Never knew Delong was a Buffy fan.
Eric Alterman has a column up, Think Again: The Costs of Enforced Sexual Ignorance, in which he rightly excoriates the people who propose abstinence only education.
However, he misses the bigger point:
These programs are chosen as if specifically designed not to work. One long-term evaluation of 10 state abstinence-only programs concluded, “Abstinence-only programs show little evidence of sustained (long-term) impact on attitudes and intentions. Worse, they show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse. Importantly, only in one state did any program demonstrate short-term success in delaying the initiation of sex; none of these programs demonstrates evidence of long-term success in delaying sexual initiation among youth exposed to the programs or any evidence of success in reducing other sexual risk-taking behaviors among participants.”
(emphasis mine)
He seems to think that these programs are wrong headed, and failures as a result.
They are not. They are failures by design.
The driving force for the people behind these programs is that they believe that sex is evil.
The scripture , “It is better to marry than to burn”, states that marriage is preferable to lechery, but inferior to celibacy, and people behind this are not interested in protecting children, they are interested in punishing them.
In fact, not only to they oppose premarital sex and abortion, they oppose birth control for married couples too. Their goal is not to overturn just Roe, but also Baird. They want women barefoot and pregnant.
There is an interesting court case in Turkey.
The background is as follows, in 1980, following a military coup, the Turkish Junta created mandatory religion classes in the schools as a way increasing government control of religious activities.
Additionally, the government either created or gave new powers to (not clear from the article) the directorate of religious affairs in Ankara, a government agency which which appoints imams, pays their wages, and reviews the sermons they give.
You see the Orwellian bit here. The government is micro-managing religion in order to maintain the secular character of the Turkish state.
It turns out that there is a problem though, Turkey is not completely Sunni Moslem, court cases have been filed, including this one by a member of the Alevi religious minority:
A court victory by Alevi mother Hatice Kose has prompted public questions over the government’s commitment to minority religious rights.
In 2004 Kose sparked a long legal battle when she tried to exempt her son from mandatory religious classes in elementary school: these include lessons on praying in a mosque as well fasting during the holy month of Ramadan and the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca.
“We have our own beliefs and our own culture which is not what is being taught in schools,” said Kose, who says she was ridiculed as a pupil in her religion class as a child because she didn’t know how to pray.
“I can’t accept them trying to impose a foreign religion on us.”
In February Kose won her case in the Turkish Court of Appeals, which would have forced the ministry of education to change the content of the curriculum in religious education classes earlier this month.
But the government has appealed the decision in the Kose case, as it has other cases, saying it does not have the power to alter mandatory religion classes.
“Because religion classes are protected in the constitution there is nothing that can be done right now, it is beyond our authority,” said Mustafa Oymak, a spokesman for the ministry.
There are any number of reasons to support the plaintiffs, both in terms of civil rights, and the basic fact that a wall between the state and religion is a good thing.
What is notable in this case is that the plaintiffs also appear to be admirable in their own right, which is often not the case in civil rights litigation, “Alevism stresses tolerance and respect for all and equality between the sexes.:
Yep, just what we need, commanders in Iraq assigning mercenaries to train Iraqi troops.
This has disaster written all over it.
Very good, but it’s about an hour long, so have the time to be really depressed.
In listening to the changes, I can only conclude that this is a direct result of avarice, stupidity, and malice by the leaders in the US in the political and business spheres.
The unspoken meme of the Reagan revolution was that if you were not rich, it was because you are evil, and thus the not rich must be punished.
It looks like Congress, knuckling under to knuckle heads, will continue to fund the fraud that is abstinence only education.
The reputable studies all show no effect on teen sex or pregnancy, and there are indications that it may increase the incidence of STDs, but the anti-sex right won’t let facts get in their way on their jihad against common sense.
The problem is that there is no political upside to being honest with our children.
Yes, Georgetown has decided not to renew Douglas Feith’s contract
Speaking of Iraq, the Georgetown Hoya newspaper last week quoted a student saying she was ‘displeased that university officials have not asked’ former Pentagon undersecretary Douglas Feith’to return to teach next year.’
Asked about Feith’s status, Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown’s foreign service school, told us that when Feith was hired — something that caused an uproar among the faculty — it was understood he ‘was on a two-year appointment.’ Any decision not to renew should not be seen as ‘a judgment on his performance,’ Gallucci said, noting that Feith’s students’ ‘course evaluations were really good.’
Good move.
A better one would have been never to hire the son of a bitch.
So, Reps. Neil Abercrombie, D-HI, Lynn Westmoreland, R-GA have decided that a Congressional investigation of the college football bowl system is warranted.
They are missing the bigger point, which is that the US taxpayer is funding NCAA Division I sports are not a non profit activity, they are a for profit activity in which a cartel of institutions have conspired to prevent their employees, so-called “student atheletes”, from being paid, and for which alumni donations are tax deductible.