What Kind of Science?

Josh Marshall has a link to this Times story, which offers some more info on the Hansen persecution by the science police that is now operating from the White House. It seems that any science that departs from the biblical story is now referred to as "theory:"

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

Connecticut Conundrum

Houston, we have a problem. Challenging NCLB on grounds that it is an unfunded federal mandate was a bad strategy from the get go and now it seems to have backfired on lead dragon slayer Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. The N.A.A.C.P. held a press conference last week announcing its allegiance to Maggie. They are petrified if Connecticut wins this lawsuit, their friends in the Bush administration who practice the “hard bigotry of impossible expectations,” will use the opportunity to further slash funding to protect civil rights and states will follow suit.

What the N.A.A.C.P. doesn’t get is that NCLB was never designed to help minorities or protect civil rights. If someone would be kind enough to send them a study published in the Negro Educational Review (July 2005) by Randy Lattimore of the University of North Carolina, perhaps they would understand the damage being inflicted on African American students because of this failed, draconian policy. Then the N.A.A.C.P. might just wake up and realize they are making a deal with the devil. In the study, Lattimore concludes:

“High-stakes testing continues to remain a prominent feature of public schooling and in the lives of African American children. Time has come for educators to think about the kinds of people we are trying to produce through the educational process. For example, many school districts use the slogan, ‘Every child can learn.’ That sounds like the right thing to say, and it sounds so beautiful and is inspirational reading. But, it is a passive cliché. It suggests that every child can learn if someone decides to teach her or him. The slogan ‘leave no child behind’, is another construct that suggest idealism and utopianism. Both constructs sound good, but are condescending and often not operational.

More attention needs to be given to the kinds of African American children we are trying to educate. We need to ask whether we are interested in educating our African American children to have a creative impact on this society or whether, instead, we intend for them to serve mainly as consumers and a reserve labor force.

The articulated perspectives of children instead of the muted voices of children need to have an important place on the policy and research agenda. Until it is placed on this agenda, African American children will continue to be victimized people with their perceptions and voices factored out of the current regime of high-stakes testing throughout the United States.”

Meanwhile, in a Hartford Courant article, Blumenthal basically admitted it really isn’t just about the money:

Blumenthal told the judge that state officials also believe simplifying the test as suggested by Spellings, would interfere with school curriculum. “There’s always the option of dumbing down our tests to the point where we believe they would be inadequate, and we’re not willing to do that,” Blumenthal said. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, for a nitwit like Spellings who runs around the country talking about measuring every child every year, that might be too difficult a concept to grasp. Her bosses and cronies, however, know exactly what they are doing.

What do the N.A.A.C.P. and the state of Connecticut have in common?

a) the need to change course
b) a formidable enemy that has succeeded by using the oldest trick in the book – divide and conquer
c) a no-win situation
d) all of the above

The correct answer is “d”.

Kennedy, in challenging Bush’s latest smoke and mirrors campaign for education, recently issued the following statement:

“When it comes to President Bush’s education initiatives, it isn’t just a day late and a dollar short – its five years late and 50 billion dollars short. He has shortchanged our competitiveness, shortchanged our opportunity and shortchanged our future. Sadly, there is a huge gap between the President’s words and deeds and it is harming our progress. I would give the President’s education proposals a B- on ideas, but an F on follow through, an F on funding and an F on building a foundation for our future.

Someone needs to let Kennedy know it’s too little too late, and besides, it’s not just about the money — it’s the pedagogy stupid.

Rising Above the Gathering Storm of Corporate Socialism

Back in October when Rising Above the Gathering Storm was made available, I noted then that this scare document would be used to blame a pre-fab crisis on the schools while pushing forward a plan to use tax dollars to fund corporate R&D. Here are a couple of the self-serving recommendations contained in that report that would now seem to have priority over the desire for more math science teachers, or more engineering majors:

• Policy-makers should provide tax incentives for innovation that is based in the United States. The Council of Economic Advisers and the Congressional Budget Office should conduct a comprehensive analysis to examine how the United States compares with other nations as a location for innovation and related activities, with the goal of ensuring that the nation is one of the most attractive places in the world for long-term investment in such efforts.
  
• The Research and Experimentation Tax Credit is currently for companies that increase their R&D spending above a predetermined level. To encourage private investment in innovation, this credit, which is scheduled to expire in December, should be made permanent. And Congress and the administration should increase the allowable credit from 20 percent to 40 percent of qualifying R&D investments.

Almost before the ink was dry on Rising Above . . ., these recommendations were being realized--and the ruse of educational failure, used so effectively with A Nation at Risk, now seem like an unnecessary backdrop for the stage center feeding frenzy that cannot wait for any of the other players. With the whole neo-con house of cards threatened by an unending stream of lies, law-breaking, and corruption scandals, the corporate socialists running America's corporations want theirs now--and that is what they are getting.

With Bush out front making his own horrid variety of anti-thought a subject that has long ceased to be a laughing matter, tax cutting and tax credits for research are on cruise control through Congress, and more are being announced daily.

So while the President peers into microscopes at magnet schools and makes jokes to high schoolers about how stupid he is, keep in mind that the $136 billion that is being shoveled out of the federal treasury over the next ten years is not intended for school children, but for the R&D that corporations are unwilling to fund for themselves. Here is how it breaks down, according to an ABC News piece:

. . . Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez said that of the $5.9 billion the president has requested for the program in next year's budget, only $910 million would support research. Most of the money would go to private industry in the form of tax breaks.

In 2007 alone, industry would get $4.6 billion in tax breaks for research and development. Over 10 years, that would become an $86 billion tax break.

According to the administration, the tax break is necessary to encourage "bolder private sector investment in technology." And it pointed out that an earlier research and development tax break had expired. . . .

As part of the initiative, the president outlined a plan to train an additional 70,000 advanced placement teachers in math and science over the next five years. And over the course of the next eight years, the initiative would encourage 30,000 people trained in math and science to become adjunct high school teachers. In his comments in Minnesota today, the president said he would ask Congress to appropriate the money necessary to train these teachers.

But Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said Wednesday that only $380 million would be earmarked for the education component of this effort. And the plan outlined no funding for the president's ambitious education goals beyond 2007.

What more is there to say?

The Pre-Owned "Representative from Sallie Mae"

Gerald Bracey notes that after Congress stripped vouchers from NCLB during its crafting, Boehner tried on six separate occasions to get them back in. Failing that, he got the next best thing: impossible AYP requirements that assure the failure of most public schools by 2014.

Here is part of a piece on Boehner from TomPaine.com (by Robert Borasage):

. . . For a Republican caucus that can barely summon a majority to pass a ban on former members-turned-lobbyists using the House gym, while grousing about anything approaching real reform, Boehner is the perfect choice.

And for the rest of us, Boehner personifies how the cost of corruption in Washington gets passed on to ordinary Americans. As chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, he is known as the “representative from Sallie Mae.” Sallie Mae is the leading provider of loans to college students and their parents, and Boehner has consolidated his leadership by dispensing big bucks raised from lenders in campaign and party contributions. In fact, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that Sallie Mae is the biggest donor to Boehner's political action committee, called Freedom Project.

In return, he protects their interest. Most recently, he helped develop and push through legislation that may weaken the loan industry’s competition—the Direct Student Loan program, where students bypass Sallie Mae and others and borrow directly from the government. While taking it to their competition, Boehner openly reassured bankers that they would not be harmed greatly by this legislation—as reported in the Chronicle of Education —he informed a group of bankers that they could rest easy in his “trusted hands.”

College tuition is soaring, and grant levels aren’t keeping up. Under Boehner’s leadership, Congress has refused to raise the top level of Pell grants, despite repeated campaign pledges by George W. Bush to do so. As a result, more and more students have to work part time, while taking on ever greater levels of debt to pay for college. Already, hundreds of thousands are having college priced out of reach; thousands more drop out, unable to sustain the burden of classes and work and debt. And those that do make it will find the difficult burden of paying of those loans just got harder.

The new pre-owned leader of the Republicans in Congress is rewarding the bankers that contribute to his campaigns by protecting their profits and threatening their competition. And in this most corrupt Congress, he’s portrayed as the reformer. When the stench gets this thick, it is no wonder that people start talking about cleaning the stables.

Billee Bussard provided this pertinent detail: While Pell Grants have remained unchanged for the past four years, tuition in state schools, take Florida for instance, has increased by 37% or in-state and 64% for out-of-state.

Boehner, the Bane of Public Education

All Bush loyalists are eventually rewarded, and it would seem that Boehner is now getting his for actions as a steadfast lieutenant in the neo-con war on public education, whether aimed at kindergartens or graduate schools. The Bushies know, too, that there is so much more work yet to get done, with the upcoming recommendations from the Commission that Spellings hatched to build support for the corporatizing of the American university system. And, of course, there is the unfinished Whittle nitemare to use NCLB sanctions as the lever to privatize K-12 education and to soak up the half-trillion spent there every year. With jobs flooding overseas and with Harley-Davidson worth more than General Motors, education is the real growth industry--and all the unemployed energy traders from Enron are looking for an angle.

Who else, then, besides Boehner is better postioned to lead this wing of the corporate socialist phalanx? He already has availabe an able network of crooks and whores who know how to squeeze the giving tree and where to squeeze it. And he has just showed how he can deliver on student loan cuts to help assure more tax cutting, while at the same time lining the pockets of his largest contributors. He's perfect.

Here are just a couple of examples from news stories that do not even get into the scandals from the 90s. Boehner is, indeed, worthy of a lead role in the current regime.

First try this from the Post on Boehner's PAC that he calls the "Freedom Project":

In the most recent election cycle, 2003-2004, the Freedom Project received $572,719 from individuals, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission and analyzed by PoliticalMoneyLine. More than half of that, $292,570, came from employees and lobbyists for private student lending companies and for-profit academic institutions.

Individuals affiliated with the private student-loan industry gave the PAC $220,020, including $52,670 from officers of Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae was established in 1972 as a government-sponsored organization that over the past decade has become privatized, and is now a Fortune 500 company specializing in student loans.

Boehner's PAC received $72,550 in donations from employees and lobbyists from for-profit colleges and trade schools.

The largest single source of money from the for-profits, $17,500, was given by corporate officers and senior employees of California-based Corinthian Colleges Inc., a for-profit educational firm which disclosed eight weeks ago that the Florida attorney general is investigating a Florida subsidiary.

Boehner has sponsored legislation strongly supported by private student lenders to restrict the ability of the U.S. Department of Education to make government student loans less expensive by cutting fees. Student loans constitute a multibillion-dollar market in which the nonprofit government and for-profit private lenders compete.

During the current congressional session, Boehner's committee endorsed his legislation to allow the for-profit colleges and trade schools to gain millions of dollars in federal subsidies.

The measure would eliminate 1992 regulations designed to prevent the for-profits from signing up unqualified students and collecting student loans for tuition. Boehner would bar traditional colleges from denying credits earned at for-profits on the grounds that the for-profits are not accredited.

The Boehner proposals to deregulate the for-profit schools was strongly opposed by a coalition including the United States Student Association, American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the American Federation of Teachers. They cited a series of recent controversies and investigations involving the for-profit colleges.

"Boehner has been a supporter of" for-profit colleges and trade schools, and private student lenders "since he first came to Congress," said Don Seymour Jr., his press secretary. Other staff members pointed out that as a conservative Republican, Boehner believes private-sector companies subject to market forces will likely provide better and cheaper services than the government.

Critics of Boehner argue, however, that he has provided government subsidies and rules designed to give private-sector providers unfair advantages over public-sector loan and postsecondary education programs.

"The claims of being pro-free market are at complete odds with the behavior of this [Education and the Workforce] committee," said Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. He said Boehner showed "chutzpah" in citing competitive markets when the education committee in practice promotes a "command and control system for lenders, with guaranteed outcomes."

Then sample this story from Forbes.com, which makes a nice addendum:

As chair of the education committee, he [Boehner] has championed the schools' position that students, who have earned credits in the for-profits, should be able to transfer them more easily to traditional, not-for-profit private and public universities.

He also wants to force students at traditional universities to fund 10% of their education with money from non-government sources, just as those at for-profits are required to. Such changes would put Corinthian Colleges (nasdaq: COCO - news - people ), Apollo (nasdaq: APOL - news - people ), Career Education (nasdaq: CECO - news - people ) and Education Management (nasdaq: EDMC - news - people ) on a more equal footing with not-for-profit universities.

Addicted to Lying

Apparently the problem most recently evidenced in the SOTU is not just restricted to promises about math and science teachers. This from Knight-Ridder:

Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports

WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

Science Teachers as Academic Bounty Hunters

Did you think that when Bush said 70,000 new math and science teachers that he meant 70,000 new math and science teachers? No, no, no--he meant to re-train the ones we already have, you see. This story from the NY Times:

President Bush's proposal, in Tuesday's State of the Union address, to increase the ranks of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate teachers in math and science by 70,000 over four years would nearly triple the number of such teachers and, the administration hopes, make college-level courses available to more low-income students.

But the plan does not envision hiring new teachers. Rather, it proposes to retrain the math and science teachers on hand. According to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, nearly 60 percent of eighth graders in American schools — double the international average — are taught math by teachers who neither majored in math nor studied it to pass a certification exam.

The fact is that increasing the number of IB teachers is based on the Dallas incentive model, dreamed up by Peter O'Donnell, of the O'Donnell Foundation and contributor to the Rising Above . . . scare document that started all this nonsense. It is based on $2,000 in incentive pay for teachers who choose to teach IB courses and an additional $100 for each student that the teacher can sign up and get through the AP exam:

In describing his initiative, the president did not mention financial incentives for students and teachers, though Peter O'Donnell Jr., president of the O'Donnell Foundation, which has played a major role in the Dallas program, said the incentives were crucial to the program's success. "The teacher's really the driver to get increased participation," Mr. O'Donnell said. "They're out there recruiting students for their AP courses. That's one of the things that make the numbers go up each year."

Now does this make you wonder how many minority or poor students are likely to be recruited into this program if teachers are turned into academic bounty hunters whose teaching becomes focused by how many hundred dollar bills are coming her way? Or does this scheme make you wonder how much this will exacerbate the problem of unqualified math and science teachers in areas where the shortages are the worst? Or will this attract more undergraduate students to consider science and math teaching as a career instead of more high-paying career choices?

The Pumping Begins

Right on cue, Ben Feller, early favorite for this year's Armstrong Williams Award for news, turns the ED talking points into a rosy, misleading promo for the AP feed that will immediately go around the world.

Any ed reporters interested in the facts? No so far.

Take the Quiz on the New Science and Math Initiative

To what question is the answer, Add 70,000 more science and math teachers and mandate more degrees in science, engineering, and math?

Is the question--

a) how does one use fear of foreign domination to divert attention away from the systematic exportation of jobs by U. S. corporations?

b) how does America generate an oversupply of scientific and technical job applicants so that wages and benefits can be cut further?

c) how does the Federal government further implicate higher education in the fulfillment of the corporate socialist state and in the undeclared war for American economic domination?

d) all of the above?

Click here and here and here for the answers (in chronological order).

How Do Racists Vote?

New studies reported in Sunday's Washington Post confirm once again what we Southerners have known ever since Lyndon Johnson reversed the traditional Southern Democratic position on race. Between 1964, when Johnson shocked Congress by ending his appeal for passage of the Civil Rights Act with "We Shall Overcome," and 1968, when Nixon's crowd completed the reversal on the Party of Lincoln, segregationists found a new home in the Republican Party. The South has been red ever since, and these new empirical studies confirm the reasons--here's a clip:

Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson culled self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial bias that measures the speed of people's associations between black or white faces and positive or negative words. The researchers examined correlations between explicit and implicit attitudes and voting behavior in all 435 congressional districts.

The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.

"Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president," said Banaji, "but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice."

If "R" is not just for Red State anymore, then do these racial overtones and underpinnings show up in, let's say, educational research? In a new freakanomics-inspired study reported by Harvard economist, Ronald Fryer, and published by the propaganda tank, the Hoover Instititute, Fryer does several things that would make any red-blooded racist perk up:

• While dissing ethographies in favor of quantititative studies, Fryer uses studies from the Manhattan Institute as a counter to the work of Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu on black academic performance and the phenomenon of acting white, or deliberately under-achieving in order to avoid peer sanctions;

• he offers a solution to the problem of acting white that would put black and other minority students in segregated, private schools;

• he blames minority communities for their own plight and never acknowledges income disparities, lack of opportunity, and racism as factors that shape identities and performance.

Ever wonder where the justification for segregated chain-gang teaching might be found? Well, here it is clearly delineated in this summary statement offered by Fryer, and it is sure to make every racist all fuzzy inside that he is doing only what is in the best interest of the black child who, in the end, will be ostracized and "provided an identity," all for his own good:

Minority communities in the United States have yet to generate a large cadre of high achievers, a situation as discouraging as the high incarceration rates among minorities who never finish high school. In fact, the two patterns may be linked. As long as distressed communities provide minorities with their identities, the social costs of breaking free will remain high. To increase the likelihood that more can do so, society must find ways for these high achievers to thrive in settings where adverse social pressures are less intense. The integrated school, by itself, apparently cannot achieve that end.