This guy just won the lottery, and intends to start a Wiccan religious school. Seeing as how my wife* has a special ed practice, and when people start schools, they frequently forget that there are special education needs in their community, I’ve just given her a heads up on this.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
It appears that there is a major scandal at Oral Sex Roberts university.
Richard Roberts, Oral’s son, has taken a leave of absence pending an investigation.
Among the allegations:
Many people, when they see self-righteous professions of faith, assume that at the bottom of everything is corruption. Episodes like this show why.
There are two reasons this change, the reduced availability of credit, and the fact that the Democratic congress is reigning in some of the excessive fees and interest on government guaranteed loans.
This deal has been in jeopardy for a while.
What is happening to Sallie May might very be bad for them, but it is good for college students and the tax payer. I shed no tears.
The headline may seem to be a bit off relative to the story here, a school guard broke a girl’s arm for dropping a piece of cake in the cafeteria in Palmdale California(aka Lockheed-Martin central), but I believe that it is symptomatic of a change in attitude that Tom “The Mustache of Pomposity” Friedman describe succinctly when he said, “What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid.”
It’s done more than that. It has made us subservient to authority figures. What’s more, it has made authority figures willing to go to any length to enforce their will.
Here is the course of events:
Seriously, this sounds like the response of any petty dictator out there. We aren’t finding monks’ bodies in swamps, but this is intellectually similar to the Burmese crackdown.
Not only should this guard have been fired, he should be in jail right now.
When did worship of abusive authority figures become the cost of admission to our society?
Have we fallen so far that all we have left is brutality and force?
Links:
Here, here, here, and here.
Sallie Mae, the former GSE and current student loan powerhouse, had a deal to go private, and it’s now in jeopardy.
There are two reasons, the difficulty in obtaining capital in the past few months, and the fact that Congress has reigned in some of the absurdly high fees in the guaranteed student loan business.
The fact is that the GSLs are handled better and cheaper by the government than by for-profits, and hopefully this market will move increasingly in that directions.
University of California, Irvine, is starting a law school, and they got a bit of a feather in their cap when they got Erwin Chemerinsky as their first dean.
He is a highly respected legal scholar and lawyer, and he was tapped as dean, but the offer was rescinded by the Chancellor, Michael Drake about a week ago.
Since then, this has gotten a lot of publicity and a lot of outrages even from the right wing side of the legal community, and now the decision has been reversed.
According to Chemerinsky, Drake had said he was pulling back the job offer because of pressure from conservatives over his outspoken liberal politics. The chancellor denied it.
In a conference call with reporters, the chancellor and new dean agreed that Chemerinsky would enjoy absolute academic freedom and would continue to write opinion articles on a wide range of issues, not just legal education as Drake suggested last week.
“Chancellor Drake reaffirmed in the strongest possible way the academic freedom that I would have, as all deans and faculty members do,” Chemerinsky said. He later noted that he was aware that his role as dean also would require him to build a broad base of support. Before he was ousted, the dean had sought conservatives for some slots on his board of advisors.
Drake declined to discuss his decision to drop Chemerinsky, and he was vague on the reasons behind his turnaround. “Circumstances change; knowledge comes in,” Drake said.
I’m fairly sure that when we get to the bottom of this, that we will discover that some of the Governator’s conservative appointments to the UC Regents had a hand in this.
The young lady who performed this bit of educational enrichment deserves major props.
Jeremy Hernandez saved the 50 children on the school bus during the Minneapolis bridge collapse.
As a result, Dunwoody College of Technology had offered him a full scholarship toward a degree in applied science. (Sounds like an associates degree.)
What’s more, he’s turned down a photo op with George Bush:
Mr. Hernandez was not available to comment on the offer; Ms. Schwartz said he left town for northern Minnesota late on Friday, overwhelmed by the attention and concerned that his co-workers were being overlooked. He spent the weekend fishing. When President Bush’s staff contacted him to request a photo opportunity, “He was just, like, ‘Nope,’ ” she said.
Props to him if he just doesn’t want to make too much out of this, humility is far too rare these days.
Double props if he decided that he did not want to shake hands with Bush.
Dan Rodrik has a very good post on a fundamental difference in the economist community.
Essentially, it comes down to those who believe that theory as it now exists explains how the economy behaves, and any divergence from the theory as noise, and those who who see the noise as significant to a degree that textbook theory cannot be realistically applied.
Speaking as a non economist, I would see Milton Friedman (he got a Nobel for monetary free market theory) falling in the first category, and Joseph Stiglitz (he got his for his descriptions of how information asymmetry distorts free markets) in the second category.
There is a third category I think that he missed between the “first-best economists” and “second-best economists”, those who will revisit their theory on the basis of real world observations, where I would put Keynes, who I admire far more than Friedman.
The Republican Party and the Religious Right: Giving your Children Aids since 1996.
BTW, thank you Bill Clinton for signing this into law in the first place.
Sallie May (SLM Corp) is the 800 pound gorilla in the student loan market. They are also one of the worst offenders in the current spate of student loan scandals.
Well now, a planned private equity deal involving Sallie Mae is at risk because of legislative changes.
Basically, the law will slash the subsidies to student loan providers, and reduce the interest that they can charge, so SLM is a much less attractive takeover target.
This is a good thing. The private players in the student loan market suck. They shaft the students, and they cost the taxpayers money. The direct federal program saves money for the taxpayer.
Make no doubt about it. This was an attempt by the school administrators to punish both girls for being gay, and not only should they never be allowed to set foot in a school again, those responsible should be put in jail.
Grrrr…..
Girl caught kissing says school misused cameras
11:23 AM PDT on Monday, April 30, 2007By LINDA BRILL / KING 5 News
GIG HARBOR, Wash. — A girl caught kissing her girlfriend on a school security camera says the videotape should have never been shown to her friend’s parents.Seventeen-year-old Jenna Johnson and her mother say Gig Harbor High School invaded Jenna’s privacy.
“I think it was really misinterpreted because it was just a little kiss, and they brought religion into it and it shouldn’t have happened this way,” Jenna said.
Her mother, Deborah Johnson, said she thinks it never would have happened if it was a video of a boy and a girl.
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Bet you haven’t heard about this in the news, but a European paper, the International Herald Tribune, did.
All-white jury likely to hear racial fight case in LouisianaThe Associated Press
Tuesday, June 26, 2007JENA, Louisiana: An all-white jury was seated Tuesday to hear the case against the first of the “Jena Six” — a group of black youths accused of beating a white fellow student amid racial discord at a Louisiana school.
Five women and a man will hear opening arguments Wednesday morning at the courthouse in LaSalle Parish, Louisiana, where the black population is only about 12 percent.
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The approaching trial had led to allegations of racism from parents of the accused, who said the original charges — attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder — were out of proportion to the crime. The charges carry a combined sentence of 80 years.
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The racial tension began in late August in Jena — a central Louisiana town of 2,900 with about 350 black residents — after a black student sat under a tree traditionally used as a gathering spot by white students. The next month, three nooses were hanging in the tree when students arrived on campus.
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The school’s principal recommended the students who hung the nooses be expelled, but they served brief suspensions instead.
On Dec. 4, Justin Barker, who is white, was attacked at school by a small group of black students. He was treated at a hospital.
Unfortunately, it’s not here, it’s in the UK.
UK Gov boots intelligent design back into ‘religious’ margins
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Monday 25th June 2007 12:35 GMTThe government has announced that it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching, and has reiterated that it sees no place for either on the science curriculum.
It has also defined “Intelligent Design”, the idea that life is too complex to have arisen without the guiding hand of a greater intelligence, as a religion, along with “creationism”.
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13 Year olds are not adults, but this is infantilizing them, and possibly creating sociopaths out of them.
People need physical human contact, perhaps even more so children.
Va. School’s No-Contact Rule Is a Touchy Subject
By Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 18, 2007; Page B01Fairfax County middle school student Hal Beaulieu hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office.
Among his crimes: hugging.
All touching — not only fighting or inappropriate touching — is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: “NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!”
School officials say the rule helps keep crowded hallways and lunchrooms safe and orderly, and ensures that all students are comfortable. But Hal, 13, and his parents think the school’s hands-off approach goes too far, and they are lobbying for a change.
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Deborah Hernandez, Kilmer’s principal, said the rule makes sense in a school that was built for 850 students but houses 1,100. She said that students should have their personal space protected and that many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome.
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No, you are just an uptight bitch.
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Hal’s troubles began one day in March when he got up from his assigned cafeteria table and went to a nearby table where his then-girlfriend was sitting. He admits he broke one rule — getting up from his assigned table without permission — and he accepts a reprimand for that. “The table thing, I’m guilty,” he said.
Assigned tables? Jesus H. Christ on a f%$#ing cracker!!!!! What the hell is wrong with these people.
These people won’t be satisfied until they have extracted every gram of humanity from their students.
My Mom and Dad went Antioch College, and met there. My older brother went there too, and I seriously considered going there, but opted instead for Hampshire College. I transferred to UMass when I realized that I wanted to be an engineer.
Where the Arts Were Too Liberal
By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
London
THIS is an obituary for a great American institution whose death was announced this week. After 155 years, Antioch College is closing.
Established in 1852 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, by the kind of free-thinking Christian group found only in the United States, Antioch College was egalitarian in the best tradition of American liberalism. The college’s motto, not in Latin or Greek but plain English, was coined by Horace Mann, its first president: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
For most of its history the institution lived up to that calling. It was one of the first coeducational colleges in the United States, and at a time when slavery was being practiced 70 miles to the south of its campus, it was one of the first colleges not to make a person’s race a factor in admission. It was also the first to appoint a woman as a full professor. All this happened before Lincoln became president.
Later Antioch would incorporate pragmatism, that most native of American philosophies, into its curriculum, balancing a student’s experience of learning inside the ivory tower with regular jobs off campus in the “real” world.
Yet it was in the high tide of liberal activism that the college lost its way. I know this firsthand, because I entered Antioch in the fall of 1968, just when the tide was nearing its peak. So much of the history of 1968 reflects an America in crisis, but if you were young and idealistic it was a time of unparalleled excitement. The 2,000 students at Antioch, living in a picture-pretty American village, provided a laboratory for various social experiments of the time.
With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the college increased African-American enrollment to 25 percent in 1968, from virtually nil in previous years. The new students were recruited from the inner city. At around the same time, Antioch created coeducational residence halls, with no adult supervision. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll became the rule, as you might imagine, and there was enormous peer pressure to be involved in all of them. No member of the faculty or administration, and certainly none of the students, could guess what these sudden changes would mean. They were simply embraced in the spirit of the time.
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My comments will be in line.
Long Reviled, Merit Pay Gains Among Teachers
By SAM DILLON
MINNEAPOLIS — For years, the unionized teaching profession opposed few ideas more vehemently than merit pay, but those objections appear to be eroding as school districts in dozens of states experiment with plans that compensate teachers partly based on classroom performance.
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Minnesota’s $86 million teacher professionalization and merit pay initiative has spread to dozens of the state’s school districts, and it got a lift this month when teachers voted overwhelmingly to expand it in Minneapolis. A major reason it is prospering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview, is that union leaders helped develop and sell it to teachers.
“As a Republican governor, I could say, ‘Thou shalt do this,’ and the unions would say, ‘Thou shalt go jump in the lake,’ ” Mr. Pawlenty said. “But here they partnered with us.”
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“It’s looking like there’s a critical mass,” Professor Odden said. The movement to experiment with teacher pay, he added, “is still not ubiquitous, but it’s developing momentum.”
Some plans still run into strong opposition from teachers and their unions, as in Texas and Florida this year, where skeptical teachers rejected proposals from school districts. An incentive-pay proposal by Chancellor Joel I. Klein of the New York City public schools has stalled, with city officials and the teachers’ union blaming each other.
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Merit pay, or compensating teachers for classroom performance rather than their years on the job and coursework completed, found some support in the 1980s among policy makers and school administrators, who saw it as a way to encourage good teachers to work harder and to weed out the bad ones. But teachers saw it as a gimmick used by principals to reward cronies based on favoritism.
And this is the crux of the matter. Teacher’s unions are so strident and aggressive because principals have no adult supervision.
I have experienced this with my own children, where a principal, either directly, or through coddling one fo their toadies, have cost the district with NO negative consequences.
The Department of Education is encouraging schools and districts to try merit pay. [Last week it awarded 18 new federal grants, building on 16 others distributed last November. That makes a total of $80 million that the Bush administration has given to schools and districts in 19 states that have incentive pay plans.] ……
This action has NOTHING to do with education, and EVERYTHING to do with politics.
Simply put, there is no Bush admin policy apparatus. Everything is political gain, and this is an attempt to weaken teacher’s unions.
The positions of the two national teachers’ unions diverge on merit pay. The National Education Association, the larger of the two, has adopted a resolution that labels merit pay, or any other pay system based on an evaluation of teachers’ performance, as “inappropriate.”
The American Federation of Teachers says it opposes plans that allow administrators alone to decide which teachers get extra money or that pay individual teachers based solely on how students perform on standardized test scores, which they consider unreliable. But it encourages efforts to raise teaching quality and has endorsed arrangements that reward teams of teachers whose students show outstanding achievement growth.
This is beacuse the NEA has delusions of grandeur, and see their labor union as secondary to their status as a “professional organization”.
Let’s be clear about this. There are two goals here. Eliminating the teachers’ unions, because they support dems, and resegregating schools.
Do away with public schools – Los Angeles Times
Jonah GoldbergGovernment is inept at running schools. It should subsidize education for needy students, then get out of the way.
June 12, 2007HERE’S A GOOD question for you: Why have public schools at all?
OK, cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government’s interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can’t leave any child behind.
he problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid “behind” is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run 90% of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets. Why should it run 90% of the schools — particularly when it gets terrible results?
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Here is the problem: You want the most numerate students entering college to select a profession where pay is marginal, layoffs are rife, status is low (how many engineers have a secretary?), the positions are constantly under threat of outsourcing, and your bosses are technically and mathematically illiterate morons.
So you are saying, “Gee you have special and valuable skills, how about taking a low paying job for a career where you will be dumped for younger cheaper labor when you are in your 40s.
Had I thought more about the real world, I would not have gone into engineering school. I would have gone into business school, made my millions, spent my two years in a low security prison playing ping pong with Jack Abramhoff, and have gotten out with three homes, 5 cars, and my kids college education fully funded.
If you want more people to be engineers, pay them more and make their employment more stable.
Engineering Encouragement for Youth(Subscription Required)
Aviation Week & Space Technology
06/11/2007, page 13Edited by Patricia J. Parmalee
Printed headline: Engineering Future Talent
A New Jersey fifth-grader will get a taste of the future this summer as winner of a Lockheed Martin-sponsored essay competition, a part of its national Space Day initiative. Victoria Geyer’s entry earned her a spot at Space Camp at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. See http://www.spaceday.org. And BAE Systems has launched a nationwide competition offering a team of students the chance to be ‘test pilots for a day’ at their Military Air Solutions site in the U.K. where they will fly the Typhoon simulator. See http://www.baesystemseducationprogramme.com
This was bullsh%$ from the beginning. The school did not update its filters, and she was told not to turn off her computer under any circumstances.
There appears to be prosecutorial misconduct too.
Hat tip to Lindsay Beyerstein. She really was the person who got coverage of this.
Of course, the poor woman is still out legal fees, and a child. The stress of the trial led to a miscarriage.
TheDay.com – Substitute Teacher Gets New Trial on Porn Charges
By Karen Florin Published on 6/6/2007A New London Superior court judge this morning overturned the conviction of Julie Amero, who was found guilty of exposing Norwich schoolchildren to pornography on a computer, and has granted Amero a new trial.
Judge Hillary Strackbein said the state had conducted further forensic information that the jury had not heard at the trial. The information, according to defense experts, was that the computer had generated pornographic popups and that Amero, a substitute teacher, was not at fault. Amero had been convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor and faced up to 40 years in prison.
She has has been the subject of national attention as of result of the conviction, and seemed relieved after Attorney William Dow explained the judge’s ruling.
“I have a great team behind me and I feel very comfortable with the rulings,” she said before getting into a car with her husband and leaving.
“It was a porn trap,” said Chip Neville, a retired computer sciences professor who had petitioned the office of the Chief State’s Attorney to review the verdict.
“We’re all exposed to this. We wander into the wrong site innocently.”