Surly, depressed, normal
Cold Fury has a sensible slant on teen-age misfits (via Hawkgirl). He speaks from experience.

When I was a kid, it was generally understood that a teenager would on occasion feel lonely, depressed, and anti-social. The common response of my parents was basically "it's okay, you'll get over it." No Prozac or Ritalin, no hovering shrinks trying to figure out why I hated my father or some such tripe.

OK, this part is a rant. But I like it.

What it all boils down to is this: I think that overall, we allow -- hell, encourage -- a very disproportionate and inappropriate level of importance to be attached to what teenagers think and feel.

. . . So much of our culture is geared towards making Johnny feel as though he's the "hope for the future," that as soon as he or she graduates high school the world will be depending on his wisdom and vision to correct all the wrongs that all of us muddle-headed or greedy adults have been so unable or unwilling to rectify; that we're all just waiting for little Johnny to walk across that stage, grab that diploma, and get busy showing us what we've been doing wrong all these years. That's a lot of pressure to be putting on kids who basically just want to get drunk, hang out, and cruise chicks. The idea, promulgated by the "Rock the Vote" folks and plenty of others, that the youth of today is just bursting with bold new ideas that We All Should Be Heeding is just a load of over-indulgent crap. After all, take a look at some of the wonderful things that have resulted from excessive pandering to the youth market: Zima. Marilyn Manson. Bill Clinton. Stupid little Japanese pickup trucks slammed to the ground with neon around the bottom of them and dopey-looking Matchbox-car wheels. Greenpeace. Limp Bizkit. Rap music in every commercial you ever hear. Dennis Rodman. Pants that don't fit. Sneakers that look like something Neil Armstong might've worn to walk on the moon. My advice to the youth of today: lighten up. Enjoy what you can and deal with what you can't. Life is short, but it's also quite long too. And nothing is ever as important as your high-school guidance counselor says it is - not even you. -- 4/30

Iraq's Stalin
You can now read Mark Bowden's Atlantic profile of Saddam Hussein, "Tales of the Tyrant, '' online. Bowden concludes that Saddam's cruelty has isolated him from reality. Nobody has the guts to tell him the truth.

In Iraq itself he is universally hated. He blames the crippling of the state on UN sanctions and U.S. hostility, but Iraqis understand that he is the cause of it. "Whenever he would start in blaming the Americans for this and that, for everything, we would look at each other and roll our eyes," says Sabah Khalifa Khodada, the former Iraqi major who was stripped and decontaminated for a meeting with the Great Uncle. The forces that protect him know this too—they do not live full time behind the walls. Their loyalty is governed by fear and self-interest, and will tilt decisively if and when an alternative appears. The key to ending Saddam's tyranny is to present such an alternative. -- 4/30

UN Rights Abusers Commission
"Abuser solidarity" has made the UN Human Rights Commission virtually irrelevant, says Joanna Weschler, Human Rights Watch's U.N. representative.

Weschler said too many countries that may be targets of the commission had banded together to shield themselves from scrutiny and the publicizing of abuses. . . . Several countries accused of violations in the past have seats on the commission, including China, Cuba, Congo, Libya, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and now Zimbabwe.

The U.S. is back on this sterling panel, hoping to refocus its attention on . . . Well, on Zimbabwe to start with. Lots of luck. -- 4/30

A riot victim, 10 years later
Ten years ago, during the Los Angeles riots, four black and Latino men pulled 28-year-old Jeff Vink, who is white, from a cab. He was beaten so badly he's lived in hospitals and convalescent homes ever since, unable to talk, walk, eat solid food or form memories. The Daily Breeze reported on how Vink is doing (via the LA Examiner roundup of riot retrospectives).

After spending six months in a coma and years of therapy, Jeff Vink can barely move his legs and right hand. He can communicate with grunts and moans. And when he's happy, he shakes his left fist in the air.

Vink doesn't know his sister was murdered by her boyfriend six weeks after the riots, or that his mother died two years ago. When he asks about them, his father says they're on vacation in Minnesota. Vink has little short-term memory, so he doesn't realize he's heard that before.

South Central LA has been rebuilt. Vink's brain can't be restored. -- 4/30

Slavery's heirs
Jesse Jackson and other victim-milkers hope to benefit from slavery by pushing "reparations'' for advocacy groups purporting to speak for the descendants of the enslaved. Or the descendants of any non-white group suffering exploitation, discrimination or unpleasant working conditions. Debra Saunders reports for the SF Chronicle on a little-known Californi law, passed in 2000, which could require "that companies doing business in California pay reparations for slavery, if they or parent companies ever benefited from slavery."

At a Chronicle editorial board meeting on Tuesday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said that the bills also could lead to reparations for Chinese Americans, because their "coolie" ancestors helped build America's railroads, as well as for Mexican Americans. . . .

The second bill mandates a UC panel to put a figure on "the economic benefits of slavery" -- an endeavor in which advocates have been creative. Fagan's brief argued that "many American industries" profited from the cheap price of cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco and other slave-produced products -- to the tune of $1.4 trillion in today's dollars. Get it: Every major industry could be liable.

Polls show 81 percent of Americans oppose reparations for slavery, writes Saunders, but 53 percent of African Americans support government reparations. Of course, they probably think that they'll get a check for their great-grandparents' suffering.

Will that number hold when individuals find out that groups such as the Rainbow Coalition get the money -- and they don't? -- 4/29

Look, Ma! I'm writing!
Short sentences. Vaguely poetic. But no information. Pretentious. Blather. Read Welch. On the LA Times. -- 4/29

Bloodless victims
Newbie blogger Howard Owens observes that an AP photo, ostensibly of two Palestinians in Bethlehem who bled to death after being caught in crossfire, is nearly bloodless. No wounds or bandages are visible. The survivor, who seems to be smiling, has not straightened out the bodies of his brother and mother. -- 4/29

Allah's plan for the Jews
A politically connected Saudi cleric, host of the telethon that raised millions of dollars for Palestinian fighters, calls on Muslim Palestinians to enslave Jewish women.

Muslim Brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women? Why don't you wage jihad? Why don't you pillage them?

Because (via Anne Wilson) they won't let you.

Happy Fun Pundit translates the "Saudi Jerry Lewis." Here's an excerpt, but go read the whole thing.

Why don't you enslave their women, apart from the fact that they would kick the crap out you. Why don't you wage jihad? Yes, my friends, why not take up the well-proven jihad thang, which has worked out so well every time it's been tried?-- 4/27

Foxed
Blog highlights are up on FoxNews.com. -- 4/27

Beneath discussion
LePen is driving the Eurosnots nuts, and Mark Steyn says it's their own fault.

M. Le Pen wants to restrict immigration; Chirac and Jospin think this subject is beneath discussion. Le Pen thinks the euro is a "currency of occupation"; Chospin and Jirac think this subject is beneath discussion. Le Pen wants to pull out of the EU; Chipin and Josrac think this subject is beneath discussion. Le Pen wants to get tough on crime; Chispac and Jorin think this, too, is beneath discussion, and that may have been their mistake. European Union and even immigration are lofty, philosophical issues. But crime is personal. The French are undergoing a terrible wave of criminality, in which thousands of cars are routinely torched for fun and more and more immigrant suburbs are no-go areas for the police. Chirac and Jospin's unwillingness even to address this issue only confirmed their image as the arrogant co-regents of a remote, insulated elite.

. . . The problem with the old one-party states of Africa and Latin America was that they criminalized dissent: You could no longer criticize the President, you could only kill him. In the two-party one-party states of Europe, a similar process is under way: If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable politicians -- as they're doing in France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere. Le Pen is not an aberration but the logical consequence. -- 4/27

Carefully taught
"All they are teaching gives peace no chance" in the San Francisco Chronicle describes the curriculum at a Gaza City kindergarten:

Gaza City -- Six days a week, kindergarten teacher Samira Ali El Hassain tells her class of 30 5-year-old boys and girls what makes the world go round.

"Here is how an egg becomes a chicken," she says to a student. "Here is how to draw a circle," she tells another.

Hassain then quizzes the class about a previous, more serious lesson. "Who are the Jews?" she asks.

The children know the answer by heart: "The enemy!" they reply in unison.

"And what should we do to them?" Hassain asks in a voice that is as casual as when she discussed chickens and eggs.

"Kill them!" the children cry out.

The kindergarteners play the "martyr's funeral" game. One child pretend to be the martyr, while the others pretend to bury him. A teacher says children are taught that shahid are heroes. "We tell them that they must grow up and do the same.''

The story concludes with a pregnant woman whose husband was killed trying to blow himself up at a Jewish settlement.

"I will tell the baby that his father died a martyr," Ajrami said, smiling shyly from under her green-and-yellow scarf. "I will teach him to love our country, to know that the Jews occupy our land, that we are right, and the Jews are wrong. I will teach the baby to hate Israel.

"If the occupation continues, I will teach my child to do what his father has done."

This is a woman saying she wants her child to grow up to be dead. -- 4/26

A fence doesn't make good neighbors
Over on Tres Producers, Steve Postrel makes the case that a wall between Israel and a West Bank Palestinian state wouldn't stop attacks on Israel. Sadly, he's persuasive. Jeff Jarvis is anti-wall too.

Terror attacks have unified Israel's doves and hawks behind Ariel Sharon, writes Yorem Hazony In the New York Times.

A Mina Zemach/Shalem Center poll conducted last week showed Israeli Jews solidly united in the view that Yasir Arafat will not fight terror seriously (82 percent); is not interested in real peace with Israel (87 percent); cannot be trusted to keep agreements (90 percent); and cannot be believed when he condemns terror (98 percent). Most believe that Israel should not conduct substantive negotiations with Arafat (74 percent). -- 4/26

Competing for students
Charter schools in Dayton, Ohio are taking students from the low-performing school district. Education Week looks at how the district is responding to competition

A newly unified district administration is embarking on initiatives to raise student achievement in Dayton, which is among the lowest in Ohio, in the hope that the system can rebuild its student base.

"We know if we are going to be competitive, we're going to have to demonstrate our ability to educate children," said Jerrie L. Bascome McGill, a soft-spoken veteran of the Dayton schools who is now in her third year as superintendent. "I wouldn't sit here and tell you charter schools haven't spurred us to push forward and improve, but by the same token, it's just appropriate and proper that we do so." -- 4/26

Working poor
Life after welfare isn't easy, writes Mike Lynch in Reason. Just better than life on welfare. -- 4/26

Venture Cafe
Teresa Essel psyches out entrepreneurs in a new book, "The Venture Cafe: Secrets, Strategies, and Stories from America's High-Tech Entrepreneurs." -- 4/26

All about blogs
Tres Producers continues its Blogography On PressFlex, Henry Copeland says blogging is bigger than journalism. Really? That seems a wee bit premature to me, not to mention crazy. And newspapers do get more reader responses than Matt Welch's 30 e-mails a day. The Mercury News sure does. I used to be the letters editor. -- 4/26

Principals without power
Freeing teachers from cafeteria duty and hall patrol seemed to make sense. But the contract provision ended by giving New York City teachers' unions the right to decide whether teachers could do non-teaching jobs, such as college counseling, explains Joyce Purnick in the New York Times.

In place of monitoring duties, teachers were supposed to spend an additional 45-minute period every day on "professional activities," like running a club or tutoring. But there is little evidence that it worked as planned.

Circular Six turned into one of those sets of Russian nesting dolls: each rule led to another. The focus on the provision about lunch-room duty overshadowed contract language that freed teachers from such nonteaching, but hardly insignificant, jobs as working as a grade adviser, or in the library or even as a homeroom teacher.

Teachers used to volunteer, or be asked to volunteer, for those jobs in exchange for teaching fewer classes. Under Circular Six, principals must submit their plan for nonteaching jobs to the teachers' union chapter in their school each spring; the positions are created only if 75 percent of the union members voting say yes. -- 4/25

Pre-reading in pre-school
Newsweek comes out for teaching early reading skills in pre-school.

As the governor and First Lady of Texas, Bush and his wife, Laura, were impressed by the success of the preliteracy curriculum at the Margaret Cone Head Start Center in Dallas. Until a few years ago, more than a quarter of the children coming into the program at the age of 4 scored in the bottom 1 percent of a national preschool test. Even more troubling, the same group had even lower scores after a year at the Cone Center, despite special funding from Texas Instruments that gave them access to high-quality health care, often cited as a factor in school success.

All that changed when the Cone Center adopted a curriculum developed at Southern Methodist University. Every child now wears a name tag, a visual and personal reminder of their link to the world of print around them. Teachers spend time with kids in small groups talking about word sounds and letter names. Children are encouraged to talk in sentences, use new words and stick to proper English. . . . By the end of third grade, 55 percent of the children who attended both Cone and a local elementary with a strong literacy emphasis were reading at grade level, compared with 5 percent in the control group. --4/25

Skeptical and angry environmentalist
"Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg rebuts the "Misleading Math" attack on his book in Scientific American, which then publishes responses to Lomborg's rebuttal. -- 4/24

Let the children go
Palestinian gunmen holed in up Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity have agreed to free 10 to 15 children held in a church basement, reports Reuters. The hostages include two 10-year-olds.

Will this be spun? Or ignored. -- 4/24

Pickin' chips in Silicon Valley
In 1999, Jesse Jackson launched a crusade to force Silicon Valley companies to diversify their boards and hire more blacks and Hispanics. Rainbow/PUSH bought stock in 51 high-tech companies so it could attend shareholders' meetings. Now he's back, and Sarah Lubman reports in the San Jose Mercury News on what's happened since 1999. Virtually nothing. Rainbow/PUSH's two-staffer office hasn't even updated the web site -- which is filled with phony claims -- much less attended a single shareholder's meeting.

When Jackson came through in 1999, he listed a number of goals in addition to pressuring companies about their board representation. His organization would promote internships for students at local companies, post information on its Web site highlighting high-tech firms' efforts to add minorities to their staffs and boards, and work with churches in low-income communities to educate people about personal finance and investing. Those initiatives are still in progress.

"In progress" means promised for the misty future. Rainbow/PUSH also takes credit for starting "diversity" programs that existed long before he made his Silicon Valley swing.

In an April 15, 1999 column (you have to pay to read the whole thing), I wrote:

'Good Old Boy, Jr.'' runs Silicon Valley companies, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Monday, denying heatedly that high-tech is more open to talent than other industries. ''It's the same as picking cotton. Picking cotton, picking chips. It's not unique,'' Jackson told the Mercury News editorial board. That is: High-tech is no more a meritocracy than a cotton plantation.

The man was totally clueless about the vitality and diversity of Silicon Valley. He thought making money in high tech is like making money in municipal bonds; it's all in who you know who can slip you that contract. And he seemed to think that high-tech companies are homogenous, instead of drawing talent from every corner of the globe. There's never been an industry less likely to equate "good" with "old," or one less likely to confuse skin color with competence.

Well, it was just a shakedown, so why should Jackson bother to learn about how high tech industry really works.

Update: Hector Ruiz, who grew up in a Mexican border town, is the new CEO of Advanced Micro Devices. Ruiz made it with help from a Methodist missionary, who tutored him in English and paid his first-year tuition at the University of Texas. The rest he did on his own. -- 4/24

'Please help'
Palestinian gunmen stole crucifixes and gold from Christian clergy in the Church of the Nativity, say three Armenian monks who escaped.

Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside the Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the soldiers for rescuing them.

They told army officers the gunmen had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books, and had caused damage.

The three elderly monks were assisted by soldiers. One of them held a white cloth banner with the words "Please help."

One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: "They stole everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything... they stole our prayer books and four crosses... they didn't leave anything. Thank you for your help, we will never forget it."

Israeli officials said the monks said the gunmen had also begun beating and attacking clergymen.

Let's see how prominently this story is reported. -- 4/24

Money, money, money
Eugene Volokh looks at education spending over the last 40 years, and discovers that we're spending 3.3 times more per student, adjusted for inflation, in 1999-2000 compared to 1959-60; the student-teacher ratio has declined from 25.8 to 1 to 16 to 1. The ratio of instructional expenses to total expenses is down, but not by much.

. . . we should take with a grain of salt the casual assumption that the problems of American education are caused by underfunding, or can be cured by funding increases.

The American Legislative Exchange Council did a study about 10 years ago (I can't find it on their web site) which concluded that little of the spending increase has helped students in mainstream classrooms. Most has gone for special education and other special programs -- with no evidence that such spending improves achievement. In recent years, a great deal has been spent to lower class sizes. In addition, teachers are better paid than they were 40 years ago, when college-educated women had limited career choices. -- 4/24

No to Starbucks, yes to terror
James Lileks watched clips of the anti-globo/death-to-Israel rally by the Washington Monument.

One speaker called for the violent death of Sharon. Another insisted it was time to GLOBALIZE THE INTIFADA - an interesting remark coming from the anti-Globalization crowd, but if this recent rally proved anything it’s that they despise America itself, not America’s behavior. Whatever point they originally had about globalization - some of which I used to share - has been consumed by their adoration of fascism and political violence. When a speaker promised to bring the intifada to America, and use “whatever means necessary” - enunciating each word so the reference to St. Malcolm the X was welded to the current definition of “means” - then the point is naked and obvious: you have a movement that wants young people to blow themselves up at the Disney store in Times Square. Not that any of the people at the rally would do it, of course. Not that they would necessarily approve of it. But they would certainly understand it.

I disagree with Lileks on one point. He says, quoting the apologists, "You have to understand that no one is innocent anymore."

Not true. While nobody in the West is innocent, nobody in the Muslim world is guilty. Ever. Of anything. -- 4/23

War on non-combatants
Stuart Taylor Jr. wrestles with the issue of targeting civilians. Churchill and Truman " brooded about the terrors they had unleashed to win the war,'' he writes.

"Mr. President," Churchill said at a January 1953 White House dinner, "I hope you have your answer ready for that hour when you and I stand before St. Peter and he says, 'I understand you two are responsible for putting off those atomic bombs. What have you got to say for yourselves?' " Neither man expected to be rewarded with a bevy of virgins.

And both men acted to end a war that -- before Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- had killed 40 million noncombatants.

Jim Holt writes on "Terrorism and the Philosophers'' on Slate. -- 4/23

Edison scores
Edison corporation got hopeful news in Baltimore. Math and reading scores are way up at three elementary schools it runs there. Hundreds of parents showed up to support an Edison-run middle school. -- 4/23

Zeal
Asian students in New York are nearly as poor as black and Hispanic students, and more likely to speak English as a second language. The New York Daily News explores "Why Asian children do so well in school.'' This is the most important reason:

Asian-American parents have a zeal for education and see it as a means of social and economic upward mobility. -- 4/22

Magic
If I were in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," I'd be Arthur, King of the Britons, according to Colleen's quiz. If I were a children's storybook character, I'd be Harry Potter. And if I had any sense, I'd stop taking these quizzes. -- 4/22

Writing on blogging
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post belatedly discovers the Blogosphere.

Another Post story reports on Indymedia's video coverage of the pro-Palestine march. -- 4/22

Arafat's hostages
Some 50 Palestinian children and youths are being held in the cellar of the Church of the Nativity under armed guard, according to a 20-year-old civilian who slipped out through a hole in the church wall.

The youths were permitted to go out only for short periods, one at a time, and were suffering from hunger and thirst, as well as fear and boredom, Taher Manasra said. . .

Five other Palestinian youths also left the church yesterday afternoon with the assistance of the Red Cross mediators, after IDF soldiers spied them standing at the church entrance waving a white flag. They said that priests inside the church had helped them to escape.

The five, who are not on the IDF's wanted list themselves, told their interrogators that many of the wanted men in the church would also like to give themselves up, but are under pressure not to do so both from the leaders of the group and from senior Palestinian Authority officials.

A member of Force 17, Yasser Arafat's presidential guard, "stood watch over the youngsters with a rifle and had ensured that they remained seated in their places all day."

Is it possible that young Palestinians were kept in needless misery by their own leaders? Yep. The escapees are now being called "collaborators'' by Palestinian officials. -- 4/21

Warbloggers on the march
My Sullivan Number is 2, according to Max Power. That means I'm two clicks from the center of the Blogger Conspiracy To Take Over the World.

Richard Bennett thinks PhotoDude was too nice to "whining coders" who don't like the idea of a 9-11 blogbook.

The best thing you can say about the politics of the anti-war, trendoid lefty, open-source, Linux-loving, bumper-sticker-slogan-spouting, font-obsessed masses who write idiot blogs like the ones Photo links is that they're naive: they spend all their time coding web sites and reading about the latest advances in XML and the Google API, so they don't have time to understand politics. That's all fine, but they should not feel that their hopelessly uninformed opinions are as valuable as those of people who work hard at understanding politics. The next time the web techs do a book, do War Bloggers get equal time on fonts?

Bennett's a veteran coder himself. -- 4/20

Anti-globo dodos
Radley Balko infiltrated the anti-globalization march in Washington, D.C.

"Bush Is Hitler," read one sign. "Free Trade=Holocaust" read another. . . .

Protesters burned two American flags. Balko, a libertarian, was surprised at his feeling of disgust and anger.

I've always (and still do) thought movements to ban flag burning were a colossal waste of time and misplaced energy. But believe me, watching one burn, in person, does some crazy things to you. Especially when the flag burns while snotty middle class kids take pictures and giggle and hi-five one another. It was more insulting than I'd ever imagined. I was personally offended.

. . . Mostly, I wanted to pound these smug little shits. These kids weren't even pissed off. They weren't outraged. They were smiling. This was a social event. They were snapping pictures. They were haughty and self-satisfied and completely content with their ignorance. Smarmy bastards. -- 4/20

Gunmen's refuge
Palestinian fighters in Bethlehem planned all along to use the Church of the Nativity, says the Washington Post. The gunmen knew Israeli soldiers would respect a Christian holy site.

Although each side has accused the other of desecrating the church and acting out of desperation, the standoff at the Church of the Nativity did not happen by accident. The decision by the Palestinians to seek refuge there was part of a calculated strategy, planned days in advance, to map out an escape route from their street battles with the advancing Israeli army, according to interviews with more than a dozen Palestinian officials and church leaders in Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

Except for the Armenian Orthodox, the church's priests and monks have been sharing their food and water with the gunmen.

Many clergy members in Bethlehem openly support the Palestinian cause. Several priests and monks inside the church are Arabs; others have spent their careers ministering to Palestinian Christians. Although official church positions vary, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, who is the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the region, is a longtime ally of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. Israel has rejected Palestinian attempts to have the prelate serve as a mediator. -- 4/20

Teachers vs. accountability
Unionized teachers want to control California's testing system. AB 2347, written by the California Teachers Association, would eliminate bonuses for teachers and schools that improve student scores. Unions don't like performance-based pay. The bill also would make it difficult to close or take over a school that fails to improve. So much for accountability. And it would kill the state's new high school graduation exam. Among other provisions, reports the Sacramento Bee:

* Creation of a new state board to administer the tests, thus removing responsibility from the state Department of Education and the state Board of Education. Five members would be appointed by the governor and one apiece by the Assembly speaker and Senate Rules Committee. The bill requires that a majority of board members be teachers. . . .

* Students not to be tested if they aren't proficient in English. Currently, scores of immigrant students are counted if they've been enrolled in the district for a year. Supporters say such testing is necessary, despite the language problem, because year-to-year improvement can be tracked. -- 4/20

Hack Solomon
I went to the Public Intellectual or Not? parody from the Instapundit link, and set about rating various folks on the scale from Cheap Hack to Modern Solomon. Who did I see as one of the choices? Me! Naturally, I gave myself a 10, but my overall rating of 4.5 leaves me stranded midway between hack and sage. Probably accurate, but hit the link and vote high. (You might have to rate dozens of other folks before you get to me.) If CAIR can tweak its poll numbers, so can I. -- 4/19

Nothing but the Fox
Read it twice! Blog highlights are up on FoxNews.com. Tim Blair's got a funny piece up there on "Mosque-See TV.'' Is he writing new copy for Fox? Tim, they're not paying us. Take it easy. You're making me look lazy. -- 4/19

The war on charter schools
Charter schools face enemies from without and within, writes Chester Finn in Education Gadfly. Among his villains:

. . . (a) too many feckless, inept authorizers (aka sponsors) that casually issue charters to groups unprepared to run successful schools, are sloppy about results-based accountability, too eager to revert to regulation as the antidote for charter ills, and clueless about what to require before renewing a school's contract; (b) a small but visible group of greedy charter operators more interested in making a few bucks at state expense than running good schools for needy kids; and (c) ill-conceived state laws that starve charters of needed resources while not freeing them from enough of the red tape that binds conventional schools.

Re-regulation could leave charters little different from conventional public schools, warns Finn.

On a happier note, he links to a review of New York charter schools sponsored by the State University of New York:

Most of the charters are located in high need areas and serve students near the bottom of the academic barrel, many of whom make rapid progress thanks to the rigorous standards, quality teaching, innovative practices and personal attention they receive in these new schools. Officials in school districts that have lost students to charters say they're fighting to win them back by copying charters' appealing features and practices. What accounts for such success? Careful quality control. The SUNY Trustees, who leave the day-to-day management and support of charters to the Institute (along with New York's Board of Regents and local school boards), closely scrutinize charter applicants to make sure they're focused laser-like on the bottom line: student achievement. -- 4/19

City of Bombs
In Egypt's Al-Ahram, a Jenin bomb-maker describes how Palestinian fighters booby-trapped cars, trash cans and 50 houses, tricked Israeli soldiers into an ambush, then pretended they'd agreed to a ceasefire so they could shoot Israeli medics trying to treat the wounded. As Charles Johnson says, the bomb-maker is describing a fierce street battle, not a massacre. -- 4/19

Israel as Algeria
After a century in Algeria, the French abandoned their colony, Bruce Rolston points out. A half-million settlers fled to France. So the French don't see why the Jews shouldn't give up their 54-year-old Western enclave.

If Camus and all the rest of the Algerian settlers were not entitled to a homeland in the Muslim world, why in heavens name would the Jews be? -- 4/19

Strike blog
In a newspaper walk-out, journalists usually put out a strike paper. Radio-Canada's lock out of 1,400 employees has generated a strike blog, reports the Montreal Gazette (via Romenesko). This could become routine, if only because it's so much cheaper than printing a temporary newspaper. -- 4/19

Collect all the victims!
On the front of today's Marketplace section, the Wall Street Journal reports on a sleazy promoter "looking to make a quick buck'' who's trying to buy rights to photos and life stories of 9-11 victims for "Heroes of the World Trade Center" trading cards.

Disgusting. -- 4/18

Semi-private in Philly
Edison Schools Inc., several other private school management companies, Temple University and Penn will take over a total of 42 of Philadelphia's worst public schools. But it's not clear how much autonomy the private school managers will have. Specifically, will they be bound by the union contract? Many critical details haven't been spelled out yet. -- 4/18

Ooh
Ogling Google should be called "oogling,'' writes Henry Copeland, who's got the numbers on who's more sought after than whom.

I found these numbers using Google's Adwords program, which uses historical data to estimate how many times a "keyword" is sought in a day, week and month.

Ogling Google, or, for short, Oogling, could make a great new bar game. With some imaginative programming, Oogling could put marketing research and polling companies out of business. --- 4/18

Victimhood is powerful
Writing in City Journal, John McWhorter says Afro-American Studies professors such as Cornel West celebrate victimhood and demand lower standards for black academics.

Because real racist bigotry is vanishingly rare on campuses, where the race police are out in almost totalitarian force, black academics have become talented at manufacturing racist insult out of encounters innocent of racism. Nervous white administrators usually play along. When Yale president Richard Levin recently joshed at a dinner honoring Gates that he was jealous of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, Hazel Carby, chair of Yale’s Afro-American studies program, resigned, saying that she felt—you guessed it—“disrespected.” One week later, she was back on board, with Yale in the meantime elevating her program to full department status. -- 4/17

Holier-than-thou football
Stanford rejected Nebraska's Ron Brown as head football coach, in part because he's a conservative Christian who condemns homosexuality as sinful. In response to my 4/11 post, "A coach's sin,'' Curt Wilson writes:

When I attended Stanford in the late '70s and early '80s, the Athletic Department had a policy that it refused to schedule games against Brigham Young University because of the Mormon Church's teachings and policies regarding black people.  (This was before the divine revelation to Mormon Church leaders that as of the mid-1980s, black people were now fully equal human beings.)  Was this a case of religous (anti-religious) intolerance and discrimination?

I think Stanford has a right to discriminate against offensive beliefs and practices, whether they're based on religion or something else. That said, the BYU ban sounds hypocritical. At the time, the big issue was that blacks couldn't become leaders in the Mormon church. Well, women can't become Catholic priests. I don't recall Stanford refusing to play Notre Dame. -- 4/17

Welfare reform didn't end poverty
Here's a surprise: Welfare reform didn't end poverty as we know it.

Mothers facing new welfare rules are finding jobs and earning more money. But they haven't improved their parenting skills, they still have trouble paying rent, and they spend less time with their kids, according to a three-state study that examined details of family life.

Mothers with toddlers were interviewed when they entered welfare between 1996 and 1998 and again in 2000. In California and Florida, 53 percent of women were working in 2000, compared to 22 percent in 1998. In Connecticut, 69 percent were working, full or part time, compared to 58 percent in a control group. Average income went up by 35 percent to $13,000 a year, still under the poverty line for a mother with two children.

There was little change in the mothers' propensity to read to their children, set regular meal times, display affection or suffer from depression. Children in home day care watched more TV; those in child care centers watched less and made learning gains.

Many newspaper headlines took a negative slant on the story. The San Francisco Chronicle reported: "Welfare reforms not ending poverty: Study of single moms says paychecks don't provide much lift.'' If you're rich, that extra $275 a month may not seem like much. But it's a lot of money to the poor.

. . . three in four study mothers who were working at the time of the wave 2 interviews, across the three states, said that they felt "better off than a year ago," compared to one-third of those who remained unemployed.

In my time covering welfare reform, I certainly noticed that an entry-level job doesn't solve all the problems a welfare family faces. But it's better than not having a job. The welfare mothers I met hated the welfare system. They all said the work rules were "fair.'' Many said: "This is good because it will help me get a job.'' It got to be a joke among our reporting team: We couldn't find a welfare recipient to complain about welfare-to-work rules.

We followed several welfare families for three years. Last I checked, two ex-welfare mothers were above the poverty line; one had married. Our teen mother was working half-time while a full-time college student; the dad in our two-parent Vietnamese family was working but not earning enough to get off welfare. All had plenty of problems -- children failing in school, a son in Juvenile Hall, a disabled daughter, old debts, high rents, poor health. All were better off than they'd been. -- 4/16

Vouchers help black students
Low-income black students who got privately funded vouchers to attend private schools outscored a control group in both reading and math. Heritage summarizes the results of the Harvard/Mathematica study. -- 4/16

Inny the Inchworm
The president's call to teach pre-reading skills to Head Start kids brings the usual warnings in this Washington Post story. Experts say it's wrong to rush children into learning too soon. Here's an academic Head Start class:

The preschool children at the Rosemount Center's Head Start program in Northwest Washington each have palm-size books -- made of construction paper and secured with yarn -- in which they practice drawing lines and tracing the letters of their name.

The students, ages 3 to 5, also listen to stories and learn the letters of the alphabet each morning with memory devices such as "Inny Inchworm" for the letter I.

These lessons, taught in English and Spanish, are tucked into a day that is a flurry of activity, as students have their faces painted to resemble a cat or butterfly, or as they scoop up dirt and pack it into paper cups for planting corn kernels.

It doesn't sound all that oppressive to me. -- 4/16

Blogdom vs. bogus polls
At 10:48 Monday night, Instapundit linked to the CAIR poll asking if Ariel Sharon should be tried for war crimes. Some 513 people had voted; 94 percent said yes. I checked the site less than five hours later. The voting total was up to 11,789: 94 percent had voted no.

My alter ego, Ken Layne, wrote precisely the same item. Before me. So consider this an update. -- 4/16

Atlantic: Read it all
My subscription to The Atlantic is going to expire sometime in this decade, so I got a call from a woman trying to get me to re-up. I said I was often too busy to read the magazine. She told me they have a great feature just for me called the "table of contents." I could just look at it and decide which articles I wanted to read. I said I'd think about it. The second caller persuaded me by not mentioning the table of contents, even though I fed her a cue.

At any rate, I finally got around to reading my April issue and the new May issue. Highlights were the May cover article on Saddam's Stalinism and Jonathan Rauch's April story on analyzing history and public policy through computer-generated societies. I liked the story on the cruise with the cross-dressing men (and their wives) too. And Hitchens writing about Churchill. I didn't need the table of contents: I liked everything! Most of it's not on their online site. You have to buy the magazine. -- 4/16

Politics of cloning
Virginia Postrel's site is the place to go for cloning commentary. She links to Alex Rubalcava, who thinks Bush's anti-research stance is a political appeal to the anti-abortion right. Virginia writes:

I'd say Democrats should make an issue of it—Bush is selling out sick people to pander to the anti-abortion lobby!—but so far they haven't.

I also suspect that many in the conservative right are eagerly awaiting new therapies for dreadful diseases suffered by themselves and their loved ones. When the choice is between a few cells in a lab and the life of your child, husband, sister, etc., even the hard-core tends to wobble.

Bush is a social conservative, so perhaps he's not pandering. But sincerity doesn't redeem bad policy.

Also see Ronald Bailey, Jacob Sullum and the Engineering Humans debate at Reason. -- 4/15

Do weblogs have an app?
Oliver Willis (via Postrel) says books are the killer revenue app for weblogs. I sure hope so. That's my excuse for blogging. -- 4/15

Class and degrees in England
"Positive discrimination'' -- what we'd call affirmative action -- is now an issue in England (via Peter Briffa). While 80 percent of the children of professionals earn a university degree, only 14 percent of working-class students make it that far. So some want to admit students from inner-city schools with lower grades. -- 4/15

Success breeds discontent
Blacks organized to replace an all-white school board in Mount Vernon, a heavily black district with horrible test scores near New York City. As Education Week reports, the new superintendent masterminded an incredible turnaround in elementary test scores, and is now working on middle school. Now the superintendent, who's black, is under fire from the all-black school board. He's arrogant. Test scores aren't everything. He hasn't saved the older students yet. In short, they're about to dump him and go back to the old cronyism, only now it will be blacks instead of Italian-Americans exploiting the system and making excuses for why students aren't learning. -- 4/15

Saddam's deadly legacy
Iraqis in the Kurdish "safe haven'' would love to see more U.S. intervention, writes Michael Rubin, who taught there in 2000-2001. Rates of infertility, birth defects and rare cancers soared in areas subject to gas attacks in Saddam Hussein's murderous 1987-88 campaign against the Kurds. Saddam won't let Kurds import the medicines they need.

Under terms of a 1996 United Nations agreement, Hussein controls the activities of U.N. agencies operating within Iraq's borders. Baghdad determines, for example, how humanitarian aid is spent, and it is a sad fact that Baghdad often refuses to order medicines that could save lives. . . . Currently Iraq is preventing 280 U.N. officials from entering its borders.

Preventive medical treatment is further complicated by the fact that Baghdad has yet to allow relevant U.N. agencies or nongovernmental organizations to engage in systematic testing to determine exactly what substances civilians were exposed to (forensic evidence indicates that the Iraqi government used not only mustard and nerve agents, but also a wide variety of biological and radiological weapons).

Rubin also deals with the sanctions argument.

If medicines are in short supply, food is not--despite suggestions that the embargo has led to massive shortages. Under terms of the "oil for food" program, every Iraqi man, woman, and child receives 2,472 calories per day. The U.N.'s World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization found in a September 2000 report that the leading cause of adult mortality in Iraq is hypertension and diabetes, neither a disease associated with hunger. The mission found half of all Iraqis to be overweight. Many activists cite a 1999 UNICEF report claiming that 500,000 children died because of sanctions, but fail to mention the report's co-author was the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which provided many of the statistics.

Meanwhile, Saddam is complaining that depleted uranium shells fired in the Gulf War are causing birth defects and cancers. A European delegation is visiting Iraq to look into the effect of sanctions and depleted uranium on Iraqi medical care.

Correction: Matt Welch, who wrote "The Politics of Dead Children'' for Reason, points out that the UNICEF report attributed 500,00 deaths of children to "a large number of factors, including breast-feeding policies, Saddam Hussein's terrible governance, and sanctions." The report was based on interviews with families, not on Iraqi Ministry of Health statistics. -- 4/14

To kill a king
Osama bin Laden ordered the murder of the exiled king of Afghanistan in 1991, says the assassin, a Portuguese Muslim. Mohammed Zahir Shah survived because the knife blade hit a tin of cigarillos in his breast pocket. The would-be killer, who served 10 years in prison in Italy, says Al Qaeda plans included poisoning irrigation systems in Israel. "We were planning to poison the waters of Israel with mercury and destroy their harvests and crops."

The 87-year-old king is due back in Afghanistan, which he fled in 1973, this week. -- 4/14

Good fences
Ehud Barak's peace plan calls for building fences.

The fence would take in seven settlement areas — three of them near Jerusalem — that now make up over 13 percent of the West Bank. Currently, within these settlement blocks live 80 percent of the settlers. Israel will also need a security zone along the Jordan River and some early warning stations, which combined will cover another 12 percent, adding up to 25 percent of the West Bank.

We should not formally annex the settlement blocks and the security zone to Israel, in order not to block the possibility of further negotiations on this issue. I would avoid immediate dismantling of all other settlements so as not to reward terrorism or deepen the political divide within Israel over the settlements. However, Israel should make clear its resolve and determination to end its rule over another people. Israel can do this by making an unequivocal commitment that it would relocate isolated settlements into the settlement blocks or into Israel proper within the time frame created by the proposed plan. The freedom of the Israeli Defense Force to act against terror must be maintained as long as there is no agreement.

In Jerusalem there would have to be two physical fences. The first would delineate the political boundary and be placed around the Greater City, including the settlement blocks adjacent to Jerusalem. The second would be a security-dictated barrier, with controlled gates and passes, inside Jerusalem to separate most of the Palestinian neighborhoods from the Jewish neighborhoods and the Holy Basin, including the Old City. -- 4/14

Lunch with Chris
Christopher Hitchens has a very long lunch with an Observer interviewer. -- 4/14

Slim phones are 'terrible'
From Reason's Brickbats list, here's news from Norway, the funny hat country:

Norway's Socialist Left Party wants a new Samsung mobile phone withdrawn from sale in the country. The phone has a body-mass calculator and counts calories. “This is terrible,” said parliament member Inga Marie Thorkildsen. She and others worry that the phones could hurt the self-esteem of the overweight, especially women. -- 4/13

Stanford's sin
In the case of Ron Brown, T.J. Lynn disagrees with my contention that "Stanford is discriminating against coaches who voice politically incorrect views, not against Bible-believing Christians per se." (See "A coach's sin'' below.) Lynn writes:

But that's not what Glenn said: "'(His religion) was definitely something that had to be considered,' said Alan Glenn, Stanford's assistant athletic director of human resources." Not his political views, his religion. If Glenn had said, we didn't hire him because of his views on gays, that would be a decision based at least in part on political views. That's not Glenn's account. What he did was against the law, and it was wrong besides. I hope this story gets more play.

My response: "His religion'' is in parentheses, which means it's the reporter's paraphrase of what Glenn said. I suspect it's an inaccurate paraphrase. You don't rise in the Stanford bureaucracy by being stupid enough to admit to discriminating on the basis of religion. Discriminating on the basis of views that arise from someone's religion is another matter, I think. -- 4/13

Foxed
My weekend weblog is up on FoxNews.com. -- 4/1

Attempt to kill Powell?
Debka, an Israeli site, reports that the men in the explosives-laden Red Crescent ambulance planned to assassinate Colin Powell.

According to some of DEBKAfile’s sources, the two Palestinians admitted under questioning that they had planned to pull the ambulance up on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv expressway, the route taken later by the Powell motorcade. One of the men was to stay in the vehicle, while the other strapped on the bomb belt and hid in some roadside bushes. When the secretary’s car drove by, the ambulance was rigged to explode. The second bomber was then supposed to leap into the milling crowd of officials and security men and blow himself up. -- 4/12

A coach's sin
Ron Brown, an assistant football coach at Nebraska, had a shot at Stanford's head coaching job when Tyrone Willingham left for Notre Dame. Brown was rejected, in part, because he's vocal about his belief that homosexuality is a sin.

Here's the story from the student newspaper, the Daily Nebraskan, which happens to be my father's old paper:

"(His religion) was definitely something that had to be considered," said Alan Glenn, Stanford's assistant athletic director of human resources. "We're a very diverse community with a diverse alumni. Anything that would stand out that much is something that has to be looked at. ... It was one of many variables that was considered."

Stanford's candor surprised the coach.

"If I'd been discriminated against for being black, they would've never told me that," Brown said. "They had no problem telling me it was because of my Christian beliefs. That's amazing to me."

Brown says he practices hate the sin, love the sinner. He believes homosexuality is biblically incorrect, but that gays should be treated with respect. He also believes he lost one other head coaching job because of his beliefs.

Stanford is discriminating against coaches who voice politically incorrect views, not against Bible-believing Christians per se. I'm sure an atheist coach who talked about his anti-gay beliefs would be blackballed too, while a conservative Christian would be OK if he kept his religious views to himself.

Clearly, Brown is capable of working with football players of various religious beliefs and practices. Nebraska doesn't recruit based on adherence to biblical standards of conduct. But public relations is part of a head football coach's job. Willingham almost lost out on Notre Dame because he's not considered chatty enough for TV. Brown is losing out because he's too chatty.

A Stanford Daily friend, Glenn Garvin, sent me the link. We've been rooting for Stanford football since the Plunkett era. Believe me, it takes faith to be a Stanford fan. We want a coach who can turn literate players into a team capable of beating USC. But we also want a coach with the class of Willingham. (Well, I don't know about Garvin. I do.) Winning isn't everything at Stanford. It can't be. -- 4/12

Terror tools in an ambulance
Israeli soldiers have caught another Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance trying to smuggle explosives belts into Israel. -- 4/12

Date a second-rater
Stanley Kurtz's Women Date Down Day -- proposed as a replacement for the outdated Take Our Daughters to Work Day -- is brilliant.

On Women Date Down Day, feminist groups can sponsor mixers between women at Ivy League law schools and men from junior colleges, or maybe between female medical students and construction workers. It won't be easy, of course. No truly revolutionary social change is. But Women Date Down Day, unlike Take Our Daughters to Work Day, might actually succeed at achieving Anna Quindlen's cherished goal of eliminating gender. Only Women Date Down Day can equalize the numbers of men and women in prestigious and powerful positions. -- 4/12

Equal opportunity to kill
Sen. Barbara Boxer isn't much of a feminist. She wants to deny females an equal right to kill civilians and themselves.

Last month, Boxer publicly denounced the use of female suicide bombers and sponsored a resolution, passed by the Senate, that condemned women's involvement in such attacks.

But men's involvement is not so bad? -- 4/12

A paycheck for the teacher
Money isn't everything, say teachers and administrators in a Public Agenda survey.

. . . by very high margins, most would sacrifice higher pay if it meant they could work in schools with well-behaved students, motivated colleagues and supportive administrators. New teachers have mixed feelings about pay raises for specific types of work: They are in favor of paying more to those who work in difficult schools, but they don't support paying more to teachers in certain subjects, such as math or science. There is some ambivalence among new teachers about tying teachers' pay to their students' performance.

However, most teachers believe low pay keeps others out of the profession; they also oppose accountability measures such as pay for performance.

Teachers average $43,000 a year, reports the National Education Association. Connecticut, where an average teacher earned $52,410 in 1999-2000, tops the list. South Dakota, at $29,072, is the tail-ender. -- 4/12

Union blue about Gray
Gov. Gray Davis didn't want to say "no'' to the California Teachers Association, so he said nothing at all -- till Wednesday. Finally, Davis came out against AB2160, a union-backed bill which would have made textbook and curriculum decisions subject to collective bargaining. CTA President Wayne Johnson wasn't pleased.

"The CTA is going to find out who its friends are," Johnson said. "The CTA has a long memory. Politicians come to you with their hands out for money and support, and then, on tough issues, they go south on you." -- 4/12

Cheers for small schools
Small schools create the "Cheers Effect.'' Everybody knows your name. Do students do better? On Zonitics, Edward Boyd points to two studies that say they do. And to the Rand report that says California's costly class-size reduction program hasn't improved student achievement. -- 4/12

Bleat the dummy
James Lileks throws apples at the brainless, heartless and spineless.

Talking about the “root causes” of 9/11 is like sitting in a Paris cafe in the spring of ‘41 discussing the Versailles Treaty. Nations are always in a state of competition; cultures rub up against one another; religions fracture. Shiites happen. It’s interesting, however, when people insist that the United States bears the blame for the attacks. This absolves the cultures and political structures of nations which have no free press, no elections, no religious freedom, no ethnic diversity, a pathological hatred of the Jews, and no Simpsons reruns at suppertime. -- 4/11

Fuzzy logic
Schools can't raise the achievement of poor students without spending more money and improving families' social conditions, writes Richard Rothstein in the New York Times.

Education Trust claims that some schools are educating low-income and minority students to middle-class standards, so others can do so as well by raising standards and improving instruction. Rothstein says few schools on Ed Trust's "high-flyers'' list have raised test scores for multiple grades and subjects for more than one year.

First, there are elements that the Education Trust properly emphasizes: schools must improve instruction, get parents more involved and hold low-income children and their teachers more accountable. But second, money for urban schools serving poor and minority youth must rise to the level of that spent on suburban middle-class schools, with higher teacher pay and smaller classes; and third, children must be more prepared to learn, with better health care, stable housing and good preschools.

If you count federal and state aid for disadvantaged students, urban schools often have more money per student than suburban schools. (School funding varies from state to state, so that may not be true in New York.)

Poor children already get free health care, though working class kids may not. Providing students with stable housing is impossible without providing stable parents. "Good preschools'' refers to the Abecedarian study, which found a long-term benefit for very poor children placed in high-quality, full-time child care from infancy.

That's not to say we shouldn't spend more on needy kids -- in school and out. But the cry that we can't make a difference without money and better quality ("prepared to learn") kids is the standard excuse for the failure to educate low-income children. They're depraved because they're deprived. -- 4/11

Turning Asian students into slackers
Asian students are turning violent, suicidal and school-phobic, according to a Time Asia story on education. Time thinks Asia needs to slack off on education demands pronto, before all their kids go berserk.

But, American schools have far higher rates of violence, suicide and school failure. According to "The Learning Gap,'' by Harold Stevenson and James Stigler, U.S. students report much higher levels of stress than students in Japan, Taiwan and China.

At least in mathematics, Stevenson also challenges the idea that Asian schools focus on rote learning. Japanese and Chinese teachers do a better job of teaching conceptual understanding than U.S. teachers. The gap between the best and worst students is smaller. See Liping Ma's book on "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics."

The story also claims "experts'' agree that students learn more in small classes. There's no such consensus. -- 4/11

Keep research legal
Virginia Postrel explains why you should sign the petition opposing the criminalization of therapeutic cloning research. -- 4/11

What really isn't happening
HappyFunPundit's expose of blogger riches made me laugh. And I'm not all that cheerful these days. He quotes Blogfather Garland Renault:

"You toe the party line or you don't get the links. Without the links, no hits. No hits, no tips; you're living off your Republican party flak stipend, but then you're driving a Mercedes, not a Rolls. You badmouth me or any of my homeys, all the sudden your web host can't handle Moveable Type, or your domain name expires, or your ISP suddenly wants to hit you with traffic charges. Some of the guys had to learn the hard way, but learn they did, and they're all on-side now."

However, let me point out an error several bloggers have made: The guy who made the "war profiteering" charge is not the warbloggerwatch guy, who made the "crimes against humanity'' charge. Can't tell the idiots without a scorecard. -- 4/10

Mandatory propaganda
Two University of Alabama professors are being hauled before the Faculty Senate, accused of lobbying the Legislature to block mandatory diversity training for faculty, staff and graduate students.

(Anthropologist Charles)Nuckolls said those who dare to question the prevailing orthodoxy on affirmative action, race relations, or "diversity" on campus are treated like those who questioned matters of religious faith at medieval universities.

"You would have been accused of heresy and dismissed, if not worse," he said. Today "you're labeled a bigot, and your arguments are dismissed out of hand."

(Law Professor Wythe) Holt did say he believes ASA members feel threatened because they want to be able to express bigoted ideas without economic or professional cost to themselves, a charge that (David) Beito -- whose field is the civil rights struggle and black history -- dismisses as "laughable."

Holt said ASA members "are worried that it will hurt them in their advancement, that they won't get raises, if they're charged with bigotry or violation of some university policy concerning diversity or multiculturalism, or something like that.

"Why else would they make so much out of it?"

What about freedom of speech? Holt was asked.

"What about it?" the law professor responded. -- 4/9

Mongering
First, Mr. Anonymous threatens to archive warblog posts to hand over to the coming war crimes tribunal, which presumably will punish us for our opinions. He can't give his name for fear of losing his job or being hauled off by FBI agents.

Hey, pal, if you want to fight warblogger triumphalism, don't imply that W, Condi, Rummy, et al., read Instapundit, Sullivan, Little Green Footballs and Transterrestrial Musings before deciding which peace-loving country to invade. Or that we can get you fired, arrested or blackballed from Price Club.

Think about this: If criticizing U.S. policy is so dangerous, why is Michael Moore making millions of dollars, instead of munching granola bars in Gitmo? Why is Barbara Kingsolver walking free?

Then the "dumbest'' blogger, Neale Talbot, accuses warbloggers of profiting from the 9-11 deaths. (Read the comments on VodkaPundit.)

Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds and others have turned commenting on 9/11, and more recently the Arab/Israeli conflict into a cottage industry.

He was set off by news that Andrew Sullivan is breaking even, and hopes to earn as much money writing for his blog as he did writing for New Republic.

Now, I never claimed that all warbloggers were making a profit, but certainly they are trying to do so, with varying degrees of success.

Get a clue. Nobody blogs for the money. What money? I earned more in a day in my newspaper job than I earn from donations in two months of blogging. If Sullivan succeeds, it will be his book club that produces the profits, as John Hiler writes. And Sullivan writes about a variety of subjects from gay Catholics to Shakespeare to exploding toilets. Most "warbloggers" -- I tried to promote "freeblog'' -- aren't all war all the time.

But what if Sullivan did make money for writing online? If that's immoral, so is writing for magazines and newspapers. In fact, according to Talbot's logic, any writer who argues for military action in response to terrorism is immoral and greedy. Talbot approves only if bloggers "discuss the hard issues of 9/11 and the Israeli/Arab conflict.''

I challenge either Reynolds or Sullivan to put to their readers some truly alternative views to their readership. For instance, why not play devil's advocate for a while? Take a position and argue that the US has no moral or political right to get involved in the Middle East.

Why should Reynolds or Sullivan argue a position they don't believe? Why should they try to represent everyone's opinion? Editing takes time. Reynolds has a job. Sullivan has an acting debut.

Reynolds encourages debate by urging people to start their own blogs. Here's a partial list of bloggers who claim Instapundit inspired them to self-publish their views. Of course, they may believe in fighting terrorism.

I believe in open debate.Talbot can post his opinions of what we ought to be doing in response to 9-11. He won't be a war profiteer, even if people who agree with him choose to donate to his blog.

To close on a lighter note, here's blog-reader Kate Coe:

If I can just add my  two cents to the whole blogger issue -- and that's my point. When I read blogs and want to respond, 99% of the time, I get a response to my post. It's not always long, but I  get a real kick of knowing that my input was read by the person who wrote the piece that inspired me (the whole "a cat can look at a king" thing).

Reading Maureen Dowd and ranting at the breakfast table isn't quite the same. The NYTimes Letters to the Editor seems to be full of Assn't. Adjunct Profs. of Something counting their letter as being "published." Blogging and reading blogs is more inclusive, to my mind.

In blogging, it's more like the cat can look at the other cat. It's not the New York Times, but it's a lot of fun. -- 4/9

AP under attack
If more students are taking challenging courses in high school, is that a bad thing? Educators fret about the growing popularity of Advanced Placement courses, in the Los Angeles Times.

Does a 3 or 4 on the AP exam mean the equivalent of a C or B in a college-level course? Harvard and some other elite schools say no. Fair enough. Perhaps the exams should be more rigorous.

But the idea that kids cram in facts to pass the AP doesn't wash.

AP English classes, for example, typically require students to read extensively from works by noted authors and write essays. -- 4/9

Do the math
Are boys better at math than girls? Not really, argues Sally Pipes as Pacific Research Institute's "Contrarian.''

Erin Leahey and Guang Guo, researchers at the University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill, note that previous studies have focused on narrow groups, such as super-smart seventh-graders or college-bound SAT takers. Instead of making broad generalizations from a narrow focus, the pair examined, for the first time, test results of 14,000 students in elementary through high school in North Carolina.

From this broad sample they found that girls scored higher, on average, in math than boys until about age 11, and girls achieved higher reasoning scores at ages 11 to 13. It turns out, however, that things are pretty even overall. By the end of high school, boys held an edge of 1.5 percent over girls, a figure of scant significance that surprised Leahey and Guo, who were expecting big differences. -- 4/9

Kick back, relax, earn a merit badge
"Stress Less'' is a popular new merit badge for Junior Girl Scouts, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Silicon Valley pre-teens are trying out aromatherapy, meditation, foot massage and "I Love Lucy" videos to ease their nerves.

The 90-year-old Girl Scouts of the United States of America -- which once had badges for ``Matron Housekeeper'' and ``Dairy Maid'' -- prides itself on keeping up with the changing times. While revamping its collection of 105 badges to include rock climbing and international diplomacy, the organization also realized that the stress reduction badge already on the list for the older Girl Scouts needed to be offered to the 8- to 11-year-olds in Junior Girl Scouts.

No word yet on whether defining relaxation as a skill is proving stressful.

The Junior Girl Scouts were rewarded with a badge embroidered with a swinging hammock. But the girls had trouble affixing the badges to their clover green uniforms because, well, they don't know how to sew. -- 4/8

English immersion for parents
In Anaheim, non-English-speaking parents are encouraged to attend school with their children.

(Tomasa) Galeana has been attending class with her fourth-grade son since January as part of a pilot program aimed at helping newly arrived immigrants learn English and adjust to American schools and culture.
"A lot of people are probably afraid to go to school so late in their life," Galeana said. "But I want to learn. I want to learn so I can get a job. I want to learn so I can help my son. I want to learn so I can become a citizen."

Proposition 227, which limited bilingual education, included funding for schools to teach English to immigrant parents. Usually, parents go to evening classes -- not to elementary school.

The AP story contains an intriguing statistic: Of 1.5 million California students classified as limited in English proficiency, 1.3 million have lived in the U.S. for three or more years. -- 4/8

The crime of warblogging
An anonymous moderator has enrolled me in War Blogger Watch, a brand-new blog created "to discuss and document the war exhortations of warbloggers such as Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan. When the smoke clears and bodies are counted the evidence of their crimes against humanity will be preserved here."

I thought it was a joke, at first. But apparently not. There are only 12 members, counting me. I can't sign in because it's automatically identified me as my daughter. But I've got the first crime via e-mail: Reynolds' call for fighting the Saudis first. -- 4/8

Osama wails 'bout his travail
Found in an Al Qaeda safe house in Kabul: A poor-little-me poem in classical Arabic, "The Travail of a Child Who Has Left the Land of the Holy Shrines," by "the poet Dr. Abd-ar-Rahman al-Ashmawi" and "Sheik Osama bin Laden."

The New York Times analyzes the poem, which apparently was written last October. So does Gary Farber of Amygdala.

OBL: Father, where is the way out [of all our troubles]?

Farber: Your troubles, bubbele, have only just begun.

The poem reads to me like a complaint to Allah, who's not giving Lil Binny what he wants. -- 4/7

Correcting Carmen
In response to protests that Carmen was showing too much cleavage in a poster, the Auckland Opera agreed to a cover up. Denis Dutton (via Pejman) suggests far more should be done to make Carmen politically correct and smoke-free. The second act opens in a vegetarian restaurant. A bullfighter interrupts the ethnically diverse diners.

Escamillo sings an aria in praise of wine, cigars, thick steaks, and women. This disgusts the young people, although Carmen is strangely attracted to the bullfighter. Don José arrives and, alone at last, he and Carmen vow to live together. They will respect the importance of protected sex and acknowledge each other's unique cultural identity. Don José will do the ironing.

Dutton, a philosophy of art professor in New Zealand, also hopes to update “Rigoletto, the Story of a Person with Disabilities” and “The Ring of the Nibelung: Breaking the Cycle of Abuse.” -- 4/7

This is the Emergency Blog System
Happy Fun Pundit has created the Emergency Blog System. In the event of a Blogger crash, EBS will transmit emergency blog posts:

"Some guy said something that really pissed me off in his column in large newspaper. He relies on discredited study and a lot of discredited ethical notion, not to mention poor economic thinking to make his point. . . .

Jiminy crickets! Blah blah my fiancee blah blah praise for blogger higher up food chain has a cogent analysis; read the whole thing."

HappyFun also mocks John Dvorak's walk: "The overall effect is something like Jabba the Hutt speedwalking."

Mean, childish, fun. -- 4/7

Heroic bourgeois
European and Islamic contempt for America and Israel stems from hatred of our energetic, sometimes heroic, bourgeois character, writes David Brooks in the Weekly Standard. I started out thinking Brooks was foaming at the mouth, but halfway through he becomes persuasive. Read it and decide for yourself. -- 4/6

Class war over testing
The battle over testing is a class war, writes James Traub in a first-rate article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Educated suburban parents think their kids are too good for the state's tests, and would be better off doing science fair projects and reading "Romeo and Juliet.'' For disadvantaged students, test prep is valuable. Finally, they're being taught the skills that more affluent students already know.

New York's eighth-grade E.L.A. exam, which requires students to listen to a lengthy passage and answer questions and write an essay about its central themes and details, to answer questions about written passages and also write two other essays, is well regarded in the testing world; but nobody in the (Mamaroneck) class, including (teacher Dee) O'Brien, considered it an intellectually worthwhile exercise. O'Brien just wanted to get back to ''Romeo and Juliet.'' The kids complained that the recited passages were too boneheaded to inspire the required three-page essay; they were doing their best to fill up the pages with material that wasn't too transparently irrelevant.

Traub goes beyond the usual complaint that schools must "teach to the test'' to explain what that means. In heavily black Mount Vernon, a new superintendent vowed to raise rock-bottom test scores.

The academic value of this exercise depends, of course, on whether the test assesses skills important for a fourth grader to master. There seems to be a very wide consensus that the E.L.A. test does just that. Last year's reading comprehension portion, for example, asked students to read both a story and a poem about a whale and expected them to chart the chronology of the story, to understand the imagery of the poem and to write an essay using information from both. The ''listening'' portion of the test expected students to take notes as they listened to another story and to provide both short answers and a longer essay demonstrating that they understood the narrative.

What does it mean to prepare for such a test? (Reading specialist Alice) Siegel instituted a policy in which every child would take home a book every night and read for at least 30 minutes; the children wrote in every subject, and the teachers drilled into them the difference between an essay that would earn a 4 on the E.L.A. test, indicating ''mastery,'' and one that would merit only a 3, for ''proficiency.'' They learned a graphic system for taking notes. They took lots of sample tests.

Fourth graders in high-poverty Mount Vernon now outscore many middle-class suburban students. In one school, the pass rate in English went from 13 percent to 82 percent. And students like it. At a Saturday test prep class:

One girl, who kept her red ski jacket on all through the class, said that she so enjoyed the exercise of reading texts and learning to pull meaning out of them that she had started to read more on her own. Many of the kids were reading ''Harry Potter'' at home. And when they went over the short-answer questions, a good two-thirds of the kids scored 25 out of 25. I may be wrong, but I would have sworn they were having a good time.

You'd think that if suburban kids are too advanced for the state tests, they wouldn't need test prep. Just read "Romeo and Juliet.'' That happens in Scarsdale, writes Traub, but middle-class Mamaroneck isn't so sure its kids will ace the tests without being taught the skills. Sometimes elite districts spend so much time on trendy, fun projects, they neglect the basics -- or ignore the minority of students who aren't doing well. And there's great pressure on school to post high scores, even if there are no consequences for students and only prestige issues for the schools.

The anti-testing backlash by upper-middle-class parents threatens the progress of disadvantaged children, who desperately need to be taught the skills on these tests. --4/6

Fun with fear
Robert Wright writes:

In the mid 1980's, my district drew up a "proficiency exam" which served as an exit requirement for 8th graders. If an 8th grader failed it, he had to go to a remedial summer school. At the end of summer school, if he failed it again, he repeated the 8th grade.

The test was rather simple. Simple long division. And you had to be able to add fractions with common denominators. Simplification wasn't required. 75% was passing.

The school psychologists were up in arms. "Research shows when you retain a child, it does them more harm than good!"

That might be true, but I saw all the good it did to the students who worked their butts off, paid attention in class, and passed the exam. They learned. Barbaric? Maybe. But fear worked.

I taught in the remedial summer school. They gave me 40 students for four hours. Half needed to learn long division and half needed to overcome a fear of fractions. 38 passed the exam in August. They were motivated. I was focused.

But times changed. Parents of students who didn't pass raised holy hell with the board. Some even sued. The rules were changed so that if a child failed the proficiency exam in June, he was required to attend summer school but if he didn't pass the exam in August, "the best interests of the child" would be taken in to account. (They passed them anyway, but he couldn't attend the graduation ceremony.) And there loud complaints about that too.

Later, it was further watered down. Those who failed in June only got a letter sent home to their parents strongly recommending summer school. In the classroom, during the regular year, students stopped worrying about graduation. Once again, it became a given. I noticed more of them looking out the window.

Accountability has now returned. Standards. But now when the students don't learn, the teachers get beat up. How did that happen? I liked the older system. Instilling fear. It worked and it was kind of fun. -- 4/6

Quick Fox
FoxNews.com has posted my weblog highlights already. You read it here first. -- 4/5

Ahab's quest
Thanks to Virginia Postrel, who's got another great blogging post, I checked out Brink Lindsey's blog, which focuses on international affairs. There's lots of good stuff there, but I especially like the Moby Dick quotes. (I was an English major.)

Most of these passages pertain to what I take to be the overarching theme in Moby Dick: the struggle of human beings to create their own meanings and purpose in a world where any higher meaning or purpose is absent or obscure. The central explication of this theme: Ahab's quest for the white whale, a mad raging against blind, monstrous nature as if it were a personal antagonist.

What does this have to do with the messy, dangerous world we're living in today? Lots. We live in the ongoing tumult of revolution -- the revolution of liberal open society. Islamist terrorists are only the latest, and by no means the greatest, rebels against this radical new order. And what is it that sets liberal society apart? What gives rise to its phenomenal creativity and power, and inspires such fear and hatred among its adversaries? At the bottom of open society's dynamism -- in science, technology, economics, politics, and culture -- is its recognition, pace Melville, of the elusiveness of any fixed and final truth, and of the consequent freedom of men and women to make their own way by their own lights. The counterrevolutionaries -- the Marxists, the Nazis, the Islamists -- find the prospect of such freedom intolerable, preferring instead the bondage of dogma and its illusory certainties. -- 4/5

Tests of character
Standardized tests are flawed writes Ron Wolk in Teacher magazine.

. . . they don't address the qualities that most parents want their children to have—such as the skills and attitudes needed to continue learning on their own and to be good citizens, productive workers, and fulfilled human beings. Parents want their kids to develop virtues and values that we can all agree on, like diligence, honesty, tolerance, fairness, and compassion.

Most parents do want their children to be fulfilled human beings. But they don't want the public schools to be judging their kids on level of fulfillment. On the other hand, they do think it's the school's job to teach reading, writing, math, history and science, and they'd like to know if their kids are learning those subjects.

Some years ago, I was invited to talk to a committee at a school district considering a change in its graduation requirements. A parent asked if I thought they should require that students demonstrate good character, emotional well-being and a propensity for "life-long learning" in order to earn a diploma. After all, these are qualities we want in our young people.

I said: Imagine a straight A student who's a nasty, mixed-up kid. Imagine yourself denying him a diploma on the grounds that he hasn't met your character or emotional health requirements. Do you really want to do that? Imagine a student who's learned nothing in 13 years of education. What makes you think she'll become a life-long learner in the future?

The district put all blather in its mission statement, and stuck with academic graduation requirements. -- 4/5

Dangers of red tape
School construction rules can endanger children, writes Richard Rothstein of the New York Times. For example, Los Angeles ride thousands of miles on school buses to distant schools because sites close to home can't meet stringent earthquake safety rules. They're a lot more likely to be hurt in a bus crash than in a quake. -- 4/5

Bargaining chop
The California Teachers Association power grab is losing its grip on Democrats, writes Daniel Weintraub in the Sacramento Bee. With every newspaper in the state opposing the union-sponsored bill, Democratic legislators are reluctant to endorse it.

The CTA measure would give teachers unions the right to set standards, draft curriculum, choose textbooks and establish just about any other education policy in closed-door collective bargaining sessions with administrators.

One member of a key Assembly committee, Carole Migden of San Francisco, said she might vote for the bill because it leaves school policy to the experts. "I don't think parents should be involved," Migden said.

In Maryland, however, the teachers' union is trying the same thing, with little organized opposition. -- 4/5

Gadfly
Education Gadfly has lots of good items, including Chester Finn on using Head Start to prepare children for school. It also links to a study that finds Texas schools are boosting test scores without pushing out minority students, refuting an election attack called "The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education.'' -- 4/5

A logical border
Novelist Amos Oz, a founder of Israel's Peace Now movement, argues for a withdrawal to Israel's "logical'' border, which would include the fewest possible Palestinians.

Its borders must be drawn, unilaterally if need be, upon the logic of demography and the moral imperative to withdraw from governing a hostile population.

But would an end to occupation terminate the Muslim holy war against Israel? This is hard to predict. If Jihad comes to an end, both sides would be able to sit down and negotiate peace. If it does not, we would have to seal and fortify Israel's logical border, the demographic border, and keep fighting for our lives against fanatical Islam.

Howard Fienberg at Kesher Talk thinks Oz means the 1967 border. But it wouldn't be "logical'' to draw an indefensible border. Or to include people who raise their children to dream of blowing themselves up in Jewish cafes, hotels, buses and markets.

I don't foresee the end of the war against Israel. But it would be a lot harder for suicide bombers if they were living on the other side of a fortified wall. As Bill Quick points out, there's a fence around Gaza and it works pretty well. -- 4/4

First to die
Who wrote this?

If this is a war on terror, Jesus wasn't born in Bethlehem. The first to die was an 80-year-old Palestinian man, whose body never made it to the morgue. Then a woman and her son were critically wounded by Israeli gunfire.

It's hard to know who was the first to die, unless you start with Abel. But in this particular war on terror, the one that brought Israeli troops to Bethlehem, the first to die was a Jewish man, woman, child or baby sitting down to the Passover seder in Netanya. The death toll -- now up to 25 -- includes elderly men, if that's the preference.

Later, the reporter compares the Palestinians to Jesus, and describes Israeli tanks "searching for the 'savages' of 'terror' Ariel Sharon has told us about."

Like, Sharon made this terror thing up?

OK, it's Robert Fisk. He writes a lot about how dangerous it is for him to wander around in the middle of a shooting war. But, so far, he can't even catch a ricochet.

In another story, Fisk loses the facts in the smoke. Or so "it seems.''

If the Church of the Nativity is now a battleground, what is sacred any longer? The details are as indistinct as the smoke that still rises close to Manger Square, but Christian officials speak of at least 100 Palestinian civilians seeking the sanctuary of the church that marks the spot where Jesus is believed to have been born in a stable.

With them, it seems, are at least 10 Palestinian militiamen from the Tanzim movement.

A Canadian priest inside the church, interviewed by the Washington Post, says 200 Palestinian fighters are dodging martyrdom in the sacred church. -- 4/4

It's not a newspaper column
On Pressflex, Henry Copeland gets blogging right. Here's the benefits to blogger part:

Blogs are a great tool for brainstorming and sharing knowledge. Blogs encourage us to write and think more clearly. Blogs force us to interact (intellectually and physically) with the texts we are reading. Blogs invite others to reward our creative effort with feedback and, sometimes, appreciation. Blogs weave new social networks, introducing us to people with common passions. Blogs disseminate "micro-opinions" that are important for a small audience but would never make it onto a newspaper's op-ed or letters page. Blogs build a shared history of experience and opinion among friends and acquaintances.

I know some readers are bored with blogger navel-gazing. But, hey. Just skip the item. -- 4/3

Dirty TV in Ramallah
Why would Israelis broadcast pornography on Ramallah TV stations they've seized? Charles Paul Freund at Reason analyzes the psychology and politics of porn. -- 4/3

Motes on Beam
Closing out the Beam bash, James Lileks reveals the e-mail he sent in response to the Globe columnist's query: Why are you writing "web dreck?" Lileks also notes something that I've been thinking about: The civility of the Blogosphere. We may kick the hell out of idiots, but we're helpful to others in the community. And not to suck up. The big guys, like InstaProf, link to newbies to give them a start, and let readers know what's out there. Lileks writes:

But something struck me at the end - the idea, often expressed by those who feel the need to put webloggers in their place, that everyone links to everyone else in orgy of conspicuous congratulation. True: the blog world swaps a lot of spit. But anyone who’s spent any time with writers knows that this is the exact opposite of writer “communities” as they’re usually defined. Writers are often cliquish, jealous, brimming with spite and gossip, always looking for a fresh spine into which they can sink the shiv, always fearful of the next new thing who’ll make them look old. Intellectual centers often have Famous Author Feuds - in the old days, you expected to pick up the Times and learn that Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer had shot each other to death in a Soho alley.

Disagreements are discussions, not pointless flame sessions.

Virginia Postrel posts her e-mail from Beam, which indicates he reached his conclusion before doing research, and her thoughtful reply, which he ignored. Some blogs are primarily filters, she writes.

Others are a more civilized version of online discussion groups. Because each person has his or her own site, the reader who wants to follow the discussion does not have to read stupid flamers or irrelevant comments. You can read the blogs you know to be interesting and ignore the rest. Or if there's a discussion of a topic you find uninteresting, you can ignore it. . . .

The sense of community created by reading blogs is, however, a key to their vitality and success. That's why reader tips and letters are important and why blogs refer to each other. Blogs create a participatory feeling while preserving some of the filtering advantages of gatekeepers.

It's a dynamism vs. stasis issue, says Virginia. Or as Bob Dylan put it:

Come writers and critics who prophesy with your pen
And keep your eyes wide the chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon for the wheel's still in spin . . .

. . . Don't criticize what you can't understand. . . .
Your old road is rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend a hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

Andrew Sullivan's weblog is drawing 805,000 visits from 210,000 unique readers per month. He's making money at it too. -- 4/3

A California Passover
My daughter went to a second-night seder hosted by a UC-Santa Cruz friend whose parents have gone Jew-Bu (Jewish Buddhist); another guest is rebelling against her parents by rejecting her Hindu name for the original "Rachel.''

Then there's the half-Jewish guest who looked at the matzohs and asked, "What's that?'' No, he wasn't playing the "foolish son.'' He didn't know. Later, he asked, "So how does Easter tie in?'' Told that Easter was a Christian holiday, he said, "Really?'' -- 4/3

No good, no more
When is failure success? When a Chicago charter school that's failing students is closed. Not studied, tinkered with or restaffed. Not given more money and time to fix its problems. Just closed. The charter model -- perform or die -- is working, says a Chicago Tribune editorial, which points out that 12 of 14 charter schools in Chicago are outperforming comparable neighborhood schools, some by large margins.

You don't perform, you don't survive. "We don't have to step into a school to observe results, we look at outcomes," says Richmond. No lawsuits, no protracted haggling with unions, no delays, no compromise.

Regular public schools that fail ask for more time to get their acts together. They usually get it. Nuestra asked for more time--but did not. -- 4/2

What are blogs good for?
Read James Lileks for a hilariously rude e-mail from media columnist Alex Beam, who sneers at bloggers in the Boston Globe. (Poor man took Bjorn Staerk's April Fool's blog seriously.)

Then read Lileks' analysis of old/new media:

The newspaper is a lecture. The web is a conversation.

Like Lileks, I've written a newspaper column and I've blogged. Every post is not, as Beam seems to think, the equivalent of cranking out a column. Blogging is not newspaper writing online. It's less formal, more communal and a lot easier to do. I can respond to an even in minutes rather than days -- now that my computer is fixed. I don't have to write 900 words when 50 words will do the job. And I can link readers to background information and good commentary by others. It's value, not vanity.

Instapundit provides a round-up of Blogovia vs. BeamBoy. So far, my favorite is Stephen Green's take-down, including a comment by Hiawatha Bray, the Globe's tech columnist, who's got his own blog. Proving it is a conversation, Bray writes:

Beam's one of our best columnists. He is, alas, off the beam on this one. But what's up with the silly respondents who think we professional journos are terrified of the bloggers? Most of us don't give two seconds' thought to the phenomenon. Which is a shame, because I'm a blogger and love to read others' blogs. But are blogs likely to undermine traditional journalism? Chortle! . . .

Pay attention and you'll notice that most good blogs are commentary on stuff that appears in old-fashioned newspapers and magazines, complete with links to the original stories. You guys are actually promoting our work. Why would any journalist fear that?

Answer: Smart journos like blogs. Dumb ones fear opening the field to thousands of new writers, some of whom are very, very good. And smart bloggers understand that we're not going to put the Boston Globe out of business. -- 4/2

Educational astrology
Thanks to Bill Evers for this quote from an April 1 Wall Street Journal story on TV shows that bill themselves as educationally valuable for pre-schoolers: "[Howard Gardner's theory of] multiple intelligence is 'like reading your horoscope,' says Marjorie Kaplan, head of kids' programming at the Discovery channel. 'You can read
into it whatever you want and everybody feels comfortable with it.'"

Later, Gardner says he unplugged his TV for 10 years when his children were young. -- 4/2

Poor kids can read
Seaton Elementary's students are poor, but they're not poor readers. How does the D.C. school do it? It follows research calling for structured phonics instruction in the early grades, intensive teacher training and direct teaching, as opposed to student-centered activities, writes Richard Colvin in the LA Times.

It's working for poor kids in Cleveland too, says the Plain Dealer.

The combination of research-based methods and intensive teacher training mirrors the reading initiative in President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001. -- 4/2

Defining math down
Nearly half of California State University students -- who allegedly graduate in the top third of the class -- must take remedial math, reading or both. Trustees want to lower the number of remedial students. At Cal State Northridge, the strategy is to make it easier to pass out of remedial math, writes David Klein, a math professor, in an e-mail exchange. The test now corresponds to 7th grade math skills, as defined by state standards. The provost has ordered remedial math teaching be taken from the math department and shifted to Chicana/o Studies, Pan African Studies and other departments.

Klein argues that mathematics has nothing to do with skin color; males and females of all cultures learn the same math worldwide. If they learn math at all.

Mathematics is a worldwide "monoculture." If you look at the chalk boards and math books at universities in Africa, Europe, Asia, Latin America, or anywhere else in the world, you will find the same mathematical symbols, and the same fundamental forms of mathematical reasoning.

Jim Castro, who teaches remedial math, writes about the consequences of low standards:

Based on personal observation and classroom performance, developmental math faculty have found that many students enter our university with mathematical proficiency below the fifth grade level. When we find students who are struggling, often they struggle because they do not know simple multiplication facts (the "times tables"). The majority do not have proficiency in simple calculations involving fractions and decimals. Thus, we begin by reteaching skills acquired as early as first grade, and for non-technical majors we teach nothing beyond Algebra 1 (generally an eighth grade subject) as described in the Mathematics Content Standards for California Public Schools. -- 4/2

MIT abandons science
Evidence of gender bias at MIT is very thin, writes John Leo. -- 4/1

News in Blogdom
Bjorn Staerk has converted and is now running The People's Blog: Countdown to the Revolution.

I quit writing on the web when I realized that nobody cares about the ignorant hate speech of a right-wing nut.

Meanwhile InstaProf has been bought out by AOL.

Apparently April Fool's Day is celebrated in Norway and Tennesee. -- 4/1

Choosing death
Tom Friedman, in a Staerk-like conversion to hawkishness, argues that suicide bombers threaten civilization. If it works against Israel, it will be used again and again. And it's not the Palestinians only choice, Friedman believes.

The world must understand that the Palestinians have not chosen suicide bombing out of "desperation" stemming from the Israeli occupation. That is a huge lie. Why? To begin with, a lot of other people in the world are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves. More important, President Clinton offered the Palestinians a peace plan that could have ended their "desperate" occupation, and Yasir Arafat walked away. Still more important, the Palestinians have long had a tactical alternative to suicide: nonviolent resistance, à la Gandhi. A nonviolent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state 30 years ago, but they have rejected that strategy, too. -- 4/1