ROME, Jan. 18 - The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as "correct" the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution.
"If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another," Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L'Osservatore Romano.
"But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science," he wrote, calling intelligent design unscientific. "It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious." . . . .
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Vatican: Darwin Scientific, Intelligent Design--Not So Much
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
On George Bush and James Lovelock
WASHINGTON (AP) - Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency - five Republicans and one Democrat - accused the Bush administration Wednesday of neglecting global warming and other environmental problems. . . . Russell Train, who succeeded Ruckelshaus in the Nixon and Ford administrations, said slowing the growth of "greenhouse" gases isn't enough."We need leadership, and I don't think we're getting it," he said at an EPA-sponsored symposium centered around the agency's 35th anniversary. "To sit back and just push it away and say we'll deal with it sometime down the road is dishonest to the people and self-destructive."Full story here.
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From an article January 16 in The Independent by James Lovelock:
Imagine a young policewoman delighted in the fulfilment of her vocation; then imagine her having to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead, murdered in a nearby wood. Or think of a young physician newly appointed who has to tell you that the biopsy revealed invasion by an aggressive metastasising tumour. Doctors and the police know that many accept the simple awful truth with dignity but others try in vain to deny it.
Whatever the response, the bringers of such bad news rarely become hardened to their task and some dread it. We have relieved judges of the awesome responsibility of passing the death sentence, but at least they had some comfort from its frequent moral justification. Physicians and the police have no escape from their duty.
This article is the most difficult I have written and for the same reasons. My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.
The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.
Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.
Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves. . . .
Nationalize or Privatize? Does Ravitch Have a Preference?
1) Ravitch knows nothing or claims to know nothing about NCATE and what teacher preparation programs are doing in terms of subject matter focus:
And, 2) Ravitch would just as soon privatize as nationalize:
Question from Jane Leibbrand, VP Communications, NCATE:
Diane, I must object to your answer to Stephen Grant in saying that having a national standard "might even persuade ed schools to care about teacher quality as it relates to subject matter." Diane, a majority of states now require a degree or the equivalent in subject matter. Candidates must know the subject they plan to teach to be recommended for licensure in accredited schools of education. Knowledge of subject matter is front and center, Standard 1, in NCATE's accreditation system. The problem comes when individuals who never planned to teach enter the system, usually teaching at-risk children in low-income areas. These individuals are not from 'ed schools.' Many teachers are also assigned to teach out-of-field. Ed schools are not responsible for this distribution problem. The entire education system must work to come up with reasonable solutions to this intractable problem. We can work at reallocating resources in the at-risk schools so that more adults are in the classroom with these students--student teachers, interns, career teachers, board certified teachers (as part-time supervisors), so that one unqualified teacher is not left on her or his own in a class of at-risk students.
Diane Ravitch:
Gosh, I have loads of scars from years of contending with ed schools on the issue of subject matter. If NCATE is now putting teachers' subject matter knowledge front and center, I am very happy to hear it.
Question from Maria Estela Carrion:
The constitution limits the powers and duties of the federal government. Setting Education policy has always been a "right" of the state. What changes are needed to provide for this transfer of power to feds? What other arguments against national standards are state governors and officials putting forward?
Diane Ravitch:
As I mentioned before, I am not sure that this authority should be vested in the federal government or in a private entity. If it were in the federal government, it would not require a constitutional amendment, as the Constitution does not mention education. Yet we do have a federal Department of Education and many programs. We would need federal authorization by Congress to create such an activity. Which is why we might be better served by getting the whole activity into the private sector, minimizing political interference and dumbing down by politicians.
I guess if you are a corporate socialist, it really doesn't make much difference whether we have a national standard or a corporate standard.
A New Kind of Right Wing Work Study
"Radical" UCLA professors targeted by alumni group
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Wednesday, January 18, 2006
(01-18) 05:19 PST Los Angeles (AP) --
An alumni group is offering students up to $100 per class to supply tapes and notes exposing University of California, Los Angeles professors who allegedly express extreme left-wing political views.
The year-old Bruin Alumni Association on its Web site says it is concerned about professors who use lecture time to press positions against President Bush, the military and multinational corporations, among other things.
The site includes a list of what the group calls the college's 30 most radical professors.
"We're just trying to get people back on a professional level of things," said the group's president and founder, Andrew Jones, a 2003 UCLA graduate and former chairman of the student Bruin Republicans.
"Having been a student myself up until 2003, and then watching what other students like myself have gone through, I'm very concerned about the level of professional teaching at UCLA."
Some of the group's targets accuse it of conducting a witch-hunt.
"Any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism," said education professor Peter McLaren, whom the associated named as No. 1 on its "The Dirty Thirty: Ranking the Worst of the Worst."
"Any decent American is going to see through this kind of right-wing propaganda. I just find it has no credibility."
The association's decision to name targets and pay students for information led to the resignation of at least one of its 20-plus advisory board members.
"That just seems to me way too intrusive," said Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, an affirmative action opponent and former UCLA professor. "It seems to me a kind of vigilantism that I very much object to."
Other advisory board members, according to the association Web site, include Linda Chavez, a former federal civil rights commissioner in the Reagan administration and head of a Virginia-based anti-affirmative action group; former Republican Rep. Jim Rogan; KABC-AM (790) radio host Al Rantel; and activist Joe Hicks.
UCLA officials said they will warn the association that selling copies of professors' lectures would violate campus rules and raise copyright issues.
The nonprofit association has raised $22,000 from 100 donors, said Jones, 24.
Here is a sample from their racist flogging of Prof. Doug Kellner:
Kellner tells tales of alleged Republican conspiracy and crime with such obvious relish. And why not? Conspiracy theories are like the theory of institutional racism: they aren’t based on empirical evidence, so they can’t actually be disproved. And, like institutional racism, conspiracy theories serve to confirm fervently-held but essentially unprovable suspicions. It’s no surprise, then, that conspiracy theories work with everyone: from an angry ghetto youth convinced that someone else is responsible for his bad grades and inability to attend a good school, to the sophisticated white college professor nursing an unnamed grudge against Texas conservatives. And never mind if there’s no evidence. This is an article of faith. As such, even a lack of evidence is proof of a cover-up.
Connecticut Makes Its Case
| Blumenthal set for 'No Child' fight HARTFORD — Attorney General Richard Blumenthal may not have any other states at his side when he appears in federal court next week to do battle over the No Child Left Behind law — but two-thirds of school districts in Connecticut have his back. In all, 109 of the state's 166 school boards have voted to endorse the lawsuit, Blumenthal said Tuesday. . . . |
Ravitch, the Radical Revisionist?
When the most recent NAEP test results were released, the Washington Post and other papers reported the flat scores as evidence of no evidence on the benefit of the testing madness. This from October 20, 2005:
Reading scores among fourth- and eighth-graders showed little improvement over the past two years, and math gains were slower than in previous years, according to a study released yesterday. The disappointing results came despite a new educational testing law championed by the Bush administration as a way to improve the nation's schools.Now compare those facts, which no one disputed, to this distortion from Ravitch's op-ed on January 5, 2006:
It is unreasonable to expect to see dramatic changes in a short period of time, yet already there is some evidence of solid improvement in 4th grade scores in reading and math, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ long-term-trend data.Then, in the next sentence, comes this head spinner:
On the other hand, not much has changed for students in the 8th and 12th grades, perhaps because they escaped the incentives of the new regime.Even if reality offers nothing to justify such speculation, you have to love the language, "incentives of the new regime." Maybe a title for a rosy Ravitch gloss on the history of the most corrupt federal education policy since forever?
Ravitch's case for a national test is based upon the claim that states cannot be trusted to set and measure their own standards. Why? Here is Ravitch's reasoning:
With each state setting its own standards and measuring performance with its own tests, there are perverse incentives for the states to claim progress where it has not happened and to actually lower existing standards so as to demonstrate “proficiency.”Now where do these perverse incentives come from? Are they not the result of impossible performance goals imposed by a federal mandate (NCLB) designed to demonstrate the universal failure of public schools by 2014? Are the states to blame for trying to keep their schools open in spite of federal efforts to manufacture their failure and turn them over to Whittle and his bottom feeding buddies?
What has Ravitch and the other hangers on of the Bush/Whittle solution really upset is that the states are delaying the designed failure as long as they can, and the growing realization of the NCLB privatization plan will, perhaps, undercut their efforts, which are dependent upon a steady increase in failure rates, a steady erosion of public support, and a steady stream of Stossel-esque media stories all the way to 2014. The race is on now between the public denunciation of NCLB and the public denunciation of public schools.
The strategy of blaming the states is a Rovian diversion of the first order to take attention away from the criminal source of our current travails. Nationalizing testing simply guarantees the manufactured failure and dismantling of the public schools that the neocons set out to accomplish in the first place. It will simply and effectively remove all options of the states and towns to delay the inevitable destruction as planned.
Dr. Ravitch is simply a switch in that great machine.
Update:
Gerald Bracey sent me this clarification on the NAEP data cited by Ravitch:
there are two sets of NAEP data here. Diane is referring
to the trend analyses which the Bushies did, in fact, try to
use as evidence that NCLB was working. Of course, since the
last time the trend data was collected was in 1999, it's a
little hard to specify when growth occurred.
The later data which you have the Post quoting is the regular
NAEP assessment which results in those "Report Card" results.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Holding Colleges Hostage
Colleges May Face Testing to Keep Federal Aid Funding
By: Mason Kerns - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 1/17/06 Section: Metro
College students could experience their own version of No Child Left Behind if recommendations by a newly created federal panel that would make federal money conditional on test scores come to fruition. In its first round of suggestions to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education is expected to ask that such tests as the Collegiate Learning Assessment be used to determine if a public college or university should receive federal money.
A specific plan for allocation of aid based on student-test performance has yet to be developed, but the Bush administration has said the change would make colleges more accountable. The proposal, though, drew criticism from a number of UI administrators Monday, who said testing could diminish educational diversity and create regimented curriculums. Others speculated that students would be discouraged from taking a diverse schedule if the measures were adopted. "We want our students to learn to think critically, to engage in research, to analyze data, and to solve problems," said UI Vice Provost Patricia Cain. "I can't imagine a valid standardized test being given to all college students that could measure accurately what they have learned." The UI is already held accountable by the state Board of Regents, she said.
A release from the RAND Corp. that designed the college-assessment tests said the goal was to measure an "institution's contribution to student learning" by evaluating general education skills - a prospect that both UI students and professors were equally hesitant to support." Things would be too controlled," said UI freshman Charles Ryherd said. " College should be about higher education in what you actually want to do." Lyombe Eko, a UI assistant professor of journalism, said that while he supports admittance tests, he strongly disagrees with exit examinations and tests used to statistically measure schools success." Education, in general, is what remains after a student has forgotten everything he's learned in class," he said. "You are trained to master certain tasks, but what you take away is cultural."
Mark Warner, the director of the UI Student Financial Aid Office, said he felt the education commission was taking an adversarial approach to funding public colleges and needed to have its political agendas "examined." Holding an institution 'hostage' by controlling eligibility for federal student aid may only do harm to students who are most in need of financial support," he said.
The commission, whose 19 panelists are meeting in Nashville, has until Aug. 1 to present recommendations to Spellings, who could push the issue with lawmakers.
E-mail DI reporter Mason Kerns at:mason-kerns@uiowa.edu
Jeb, Jeb, Jeb
Finally, Jeb reverses Jeb
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Why the wait, governor?
With 600 fewer African-American freshmen enrolled in Florida colleges and universities this year because of his One Florida Initiative that banned affirmative action, Gov. Bush last week announced special programs aimed at increasing those numbers. After six years of denial, the governor says he'll push the Legislature for an additional $52 million in need-based financial aid money. His new interest comes better late than never, given the 1.6 percent drop in black student enrollment from last year.
The governor continued to play the symbols by appearing with students from historically black Florida A&M University to announce his executive order to fix his executive order. It speaks well for FAMU that its students demonstrated such grace, since Gov. Bush helped ensure that others could not be present. FAMU students were prominent in the massive 2000 protests in Tallahassee telling him that One Florida would do what it's done to black enrollment. The black freshmen who were enrolling at 17.6 percent statewide at the time of his anti-affirmative action dictate have dropped to 14.1 percent.
He at least could drop the pretense that he was doing it all for their benefit, but the governor typically refuses to blame One Florida, pointing to the increase in overall admissions and Hispanic student enrollment. That argument ignores the state's growth, its burgeoning Hispanic population and the fact that the black population also has continued to rise.
Gov. Bush can credit University of Florida President Bernie Machen for the parachute he grabbed in his attempt to break the One Florida free-fall. The affirmative-action proponent's Florida Opportunity Scholarship program at UF is designating $1 million for need-based scholarships and for students who are the first in their families to attend college. Gov. Bush is adopting both those ideas, perhaps because the name reminds him of his own Opportunity Scholarships school voucher program.
But the governor must deal with a Legislature that prefers to underfinance the university system while blessing recent tuition increases that fall hardest on minorities, who tend to be less affluent. Gov. Bush always has insisted that his anti-affirmative action experiment would need only minor correction. Now, he must correct for the lost opportunities of the students One Florida has left out. . . .
"Credible Threats"
A: Exercise your American rights to protest Pentagon policies.
Edison Is the Symptom, NCLB Is the Disease
It’s not that I object to Edison and Confluence Academy per se. I understand that theyare logical expressions of our contemporary system of education, especially the way that we educate poor minority children. Edison is profiting – literally and metaphorically – from the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law. But Confluence and Edison are symptoms of a much larger social disease, a disease that creates the conditions for these companies to exist and thrive and for these schools to be regarded as models for our future.
The most troubling thing about my visit to Confluence came when I observed what actually happened in the classrooms. I visited six classrooms at various grade levels. I did not observe a single white student. Every child I saw was African-American. The students were dominated and controlled in ways that were reminiscent of a trainer working with frightened, caged animals. The children seemed utterly unchildlike, utterly joyless. In one first grade class, I observed students who had all of their body movements tightly controlled. They responded in automaton-like fashion to instructions from the teacher.
Instead of smiles and engaged looks of curiosity, the faces of these six-year-old children expressed a kind of dull affect. The teachers taught at the students, and the students simply responded in parrot fashion to the teacher. The students' role was clear: obey orders, do not do anything that the teacher does not tell you to do, sit and be quiet. This was often taken to the extreme: in one case, a teacher had a group of first graders lined up for lunch. The boys' line could not go forward because one of the boys was wiggling as he stood in line. He had to become absolutely still before the teacher would let them go to lunch. The teacher, a white woman, stood and leered at the six-year-old black boys for more than 30 seconds. Her face was filled with judgment and contempt for these wiggly little boys. This degree of total control over the students affected the way that teachers taught; in only one of the six classrooms I visited did I see a teacher who seemed like she was having fun; the others were very short with the students, quick to pounce on any undesirable, uncontrollable behavior. The teachers constantly berated the children for the slightest infraction. For example, in the middle of a fourth grade math lesson, the teacher sensed some rumblings in the background and suddenly blurted out, "Hands folded! Everyone sit at attention." I was frightened by this sudden explosive outburst. All the students suddenly snapped into place at their seats, and the lesson continued in the context of “Be quiet and pay attention – or else.”
In defense of the heavy discipline, the board member said, "Sure, the structure of the Edison schools is a bit tough. Yes, we make the kids walk in lines wherever they go. But it works. You don't have to waste 6 minutes at the beginning of class, telling Johnny to sit down and be quiet. And you don't waste 15 minutes in the middle of every class, trying to get students to be quiet and stay on task. Even the very brightest kids can't learn in an environment like that. No one can." But being quiet and paying attention to the teacher should not be taken as unquestioned and unqualified virtues in themselves. There's something very troubling about white teachers telling students of color to sit down, shut up, and do as they are told. In a rigid structure such as that imposed by Edison, there is no room for student or teacher creativity or spontaneity. The only room for freedom of expression is either (a) do what the teacher tells you to do or (b) resist what the teacher tells you to do. Given the kind of power and authority structures that already exist in white-dominated society, it's little wonder that students of color are tempted to act out and lash out. If they don't act in this manner, then both the implicit and explicit power relationships and inequities are reproduced in the classroom: docile brown bodies controlled by powerful white bodies. This is even more troubling given the fact that no white, wealthy, suburban district would ever consent to a school that controlled its students and its teachers in this way. Indeed, these schools pride themselves in their individuality, their creativity, and the professional autonomy of their teachers, who are viewed as experts in assessing what is best for each student.
Teaching and learning at Edison schools are driven by computer-based benchmark assessment systems. Tungsten, a division of Edison, provides a web-based diagnostic test that features a series of multiple-choice questions designed to help children practice for the state standardized test. But the time spent preparing for the benchmark tests, reviewing the results of the benchmark tests, and remediating student performance
based on the results of the test cut into instructional time for subjects outside of reading and math, currently the only subjects tested under No Child Left Behind.
The fact that teaching and learning are inextricably linked to test performance is further complicated by the fact that pay for senior teachers in Edison schools is linked to test score performance: better scores yield better pay. While rewarding teachers for being good teachers might make sense, reducing “good teaching” to a test score not only makes no sense, but it also provides an incentive for teachers to teach at the most superficial level possible.
Many people have been taken on the same exact tour of Confluence Academy that I was taken on and emerged gushing about how great the school is. "Look how well-behaved they are!" or "They're all so quiet!" I’m told are typical reactions. As I was sitting in the classrooms, I was certainly aware of how quiet the students were. And, at times, it struck me that they might actually be learning. But then I turned my attention away from the teachers and looked at the children in the room. This was hard to do, as all the teachers completely, without stopping for a breath, dominated every moment of the classroom. I looked at the kids that weren't shouting out the correct answers to the teachers' almost-incessant calls for the correct answer. They sat there. Quietly. Very quietly. Not disturbing anyone, least of all the teachers. If you had given a benchmark diagnostic at that moment, all the kids who were following along and shouting out the correct answers would be the higher achievers in the classroom. Those that were shouting out on occasion or with some reservations would be “the bubble kids.” And those that were sitting there quietly, so well-behaved, would be the low achievers. If the teachers can get the bubble kids over the passing bar, that's all they need to do. And at Edison, if they can get just enough of their scores up, not only will they get to keep their jobs, but they'll also make more money.
Unlike the Hollywood depiction of classrooms, in which "good" classrooms are quiet and arranged in neat rows of desks, effective classrooms tend to be a bit “noisy.” As a teacher, I seldom led classes that were quiet. Because my classes almost always used group activities and hands-on, project-based work, they were usually pretty noisy. So I never thought of the issue of whether the class was quiet or not. Quite honestly, the issue was irrelevant. What concerned me was whether the students were engaged or not. Engagement, in my experience, comes by being able to allow students a great deal of say in the manner of what they learn and how they learn it. “Having a say” means that students use their voices. For voices to be heard, they cannot be quiet. The literal and metaphorical implications of silenced voices, particularly the silenced voices of historically silenced people, cannot be emphasized enough. Any system that demands that historically oppressed people be silent should be subject to scrutiny and skepticism. But in an educational system that is responsible for educating future citizens, this forced silence and compliance should do more than give us pause. It should make us angry. Unfortunately, the Board members of Confluence Academy have apparently bought into the notion that "noise = chaos," at least for non-white kids. Thus, for non-white kids, there must be rigid "discipline" as seen in the military and prison.
Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, students in these academic settings will be forced out of school and will have nowhere to go but the military or to prison. The one comfort may be that if this fate does befall them, they will have been well prepared.
Peter Campbell
Lead Instructional Designer
Montclair State University