May 2002

Guess what?
Palm Beach County high school students can pass district-wide history finals by answering 23 of 100 multiple-choice questions correctly (via Best of the Web). Apparently, there are only four choices. A principal says students who guess blindly would average 25 correct answers. Students who get more than 50 right will get an A.

The final exams for American and world history classes replace teacher-written exams and count for 20 percent of the semester grade. School district officials wrote the exams to cover state-mandated units on women's history, African-American history, Africa, the Holocaust, etc. It's not clear the exams cover dead-white-male history too. -- 5/31

Life
Danny Pearl is a father. Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter, gave birth to a boy in Paris. His name is Adam. -- 5/31

Mindful memorization
Commit these words to heart: Not all memorization is rote memorization. Knowing things and thinking about things are not mutually exclusive, writes Claudia Winkler in the Weekly Standard.

This conflation of mindless, blab-school, learning-by-rote with the necessary, if sometimes painful, committing of information to memory has a sordid effect: to dress up ignorance as superior thoughtfulness. Implicitly, it disparages the intake of knowledge--once the very essence of classroom learning--as an activity fit only for drones.

"Critical thinking" is breathing. Knowledge is oxygen. -- 5/31

Prospicient speller
The new National Spelling Bee champ isn't home schooled! But Pratyush Buddiga, the first public school student to win since 1999, represents the other over-represented category, Indo-Americans. The 13-year-old won on "prospicience." The finals were broadcast live in ESPN.

In the final day of competition, contestants successfully worked their way through "kakemono," "caulicolous," "stultiloquence," "culgee," "hermeneutics," "soavemente" and "toreutics," among others.

Others were felled by "verticil," "badigeon," "batture," "throstle," "roriferous," "tiralee," "objicient" and "icteric," not one of which I could spell and none of which I could define.

Eric Olsen gets emotional about spelling bees despite his inability to spell Cincinnati, or however it goes. Instapundit came in 28th in the National Spelling Bee as an instakid. -- 5/31

Uncle John's Explainers
In response to my quest for meaning in Uncle John's Band, Kirk Parker writes:

They Were On Drugs.

He says Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn'' makes no sense either. No! Surely not!

Meanwhile, Robert Wright says:

Jerry Garcia, bless his pickled heart, was no Bob Dylan -- or even Bob Hunter. Garcia wrote Uncle John's Band and like Twain's "wingless wild things," it's devoid of meaning.

However, this annotation of the lyrics claims Hunter wrote the song.

Jim Breed, on the other hand, claims not worrying anymore is a logical response to "danger at your door.''

Worry clouds one's mind as to how to deal with the danger. If we are capable of banishing the terror associated with worrying and accept that we are, indeed, in a pickle, then we are prepared to deal with the danger.

I disagree. If worrying leads to action, it prevents a feeling of terror. Worrying is useful.

When I was in Literary Club in high school we'd analyze song lyrics like poetry, but I think we did the Beatles -- "Eleanor Rigby" compared to "Richard Cory," for example -- rather than Jerry Garcia. I also remember our next-door neighbor coming over and demanding that my sister and I explain "The Mighty Quinn" to him. "It doesn't make any sense!'' he said with considerable indignation. We told him it wasn't supposed to make sense. "Why not!'' he said.

Because They Were on Drugs. -- 5/31

Vocational vacuum
Jim Breed, an engineer, also weighs in on the question of making all students take college-prep courses.

It seems to me that the guys in the blue collar neighborhood in which I grew up mostly liked working with their hands and the ones who took the shop classes did better in life than the ones who weren't college bound but took the college material anyway. I think vo-tech education in this country is a joke. I work with laborers and assemblers that would have been better served by high schools that trained them for the work they are doing than the ones they went to, the ones that pretended to prepare them for college that they weren't going to anyway.

I think the key phrase is "pretended to prepare." Many students think they're preparing for college and discover, late in the game, that they're not qualified for anything. They can't read well enough to understand a college textbook or an auto repair manual. -- 5/31

Amusing the students
And Robert Wright describes the grueling end-of-the-year schedule in his middle school. The school year is 180 days, he says.

Today I spent one of those 180 days on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with my students. It wasn't my idea. My teaching team planned it and I had to go along or call in sick. No literature today.

And there probably won't be much literature tomorrow. Most of my students will be at Raging Waters with their choir class.

Another team took their students to see the new Star Wars film.

Instrumental music students went to Disneyland a couple weeks ago.

Great America is next week. -- 5/31
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Trash
Lisa Snell got better trash service when she could choose between seven pick-up companies. Now she's stuck with the amnesia-ridden bozos who got the county contract. At least she can buy her way out of the local public school, which is meeting its improvement targets but remains well below average.

Unlike the poor-performing trash collector, El Cerrito Elementary's contract will most likely never run out.

This is why education privatization is better than the status quo. It introduces some accountability into the system. An education service provider, like Edison, has a contract with actual requirements for performance. And when they fail to meet those performance measures everyone hears about it and some districts or schools cancel their contract.

However, in a real market, Edison wouldn't have a contract with the school district; customers -- parents -- would determine which schools stay in business.

When school districts, school boards, or state governments choose an education service provider, it is no different than the city choosing your trash hauler or your cable service. If you have a complaint, you are at the mercy of the government agency that selected the provider. -- 5/31

Blame the test
Los Angeles Unified doesn't give low-income students trained teachers or equal resources, so the students can't pass state-mandated tests. So says the LA school board, which voted "to study alternative assessments for gauging student academic achievement." San Francisco's school board passed a similar measure. The LA Times reports:

In Los Angeles, the sharply worded measure criticized the Stanford 9 and high school exit exam for discriminating against students with limited English skills.

What do they think? That employers will celebrate the alternative excellence of kids who leave high school without being able to read or write in English? That colleges will not discriminate on the basis of ability to do academic work in English?

The measure also said that district schools in poor and minority neighborhoods have fewer resources--including a shortage of materials, college prep classes and certificated teachers. Relying on such tests, the proposals said, unfairly penalizes students in these schools.

"There are huge inequities that exist in this district for poor children and immigrant children," board member Genethia Hayes, one of the measure's sponsors, said during the meeting.

And who's responsible for creating those inequities, Genethia? Would it be . . . the school board that runs the district?

An Education Trust West report backs enrolling all high school students in college prep classes unless they request otherwise. Minority students who've taken a college-prep sequence like California's A-G requirements do much, much better in college than those who've avoided rigorous classes.

However, San Jose Unified is quoted as a success story. More students are graduating with the A-G courses required by the state university system. But the report doesn't mention that a third of seniors weren't on track to graduate at the start of their final year. Half of Hispanics hadn't earned enough credits. Students are cramming in extra courses -- tough for kids who haven't been able to handle the normal workload -- hoping to graduate in June.

In National Review, Casey Lartigue tells school choice critics: I'm rubber and you're glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. -- 5/30

We're not the scared country; we're the scary country
P.J. O'Rourke's Orange County Register column tracks Jonah Goldberg's thoughts on who should be scared of whom. Only O'Rourke's role model is Godzilla, while Goldberg cites Superman and the Hulk. -- 5/30

The crow's tale
Reading Lileks' economic analysis of "Ten Apples Up on Top'' has inspired me to ask for help from the blogosphere. At Tuesday's rehearsal, while the altos were learning their part in "Uncle John's Band,'' I was examining the lyrics with my fellow soprano, Debby. We got pretty far with the death motif and I was pretty sure this "Uncle John" is a Christ figure, but we had a lot of questions. Why, for example, are the first days the hardest days? And why should one stop worrying if there's danger at the door? Wouldn't worry be appropriate? Please advise. -- 5/30

What about Edison?
Chester Finn helped develop Edison's school design, but left the company several years ago. He says many sensible things about Edison's strengths and weaknesses, and its importance to the school choice movement, and concludes that Chris Whittle is smart enough to save the company.

Never forget that the teacher unions HATE Edison and the other EMO's and are doing their best to subvert and bankrupt all such ventures.(There are rare and limited exceptions, such as Dade County, Florida.) They are also looking to safeguard their members' jobs. The upshot is that the unions lay down conditions before a school district (such as Philadelphia or New York) can engage Edison at all, and these conditions may prove fatal both to a school's instructional effectiveness and to the profitability of its parent firm. Retaining highly-paid but poorly performing teachers is usually the big challenge.

I think it will be almost impossible for Edison to succeed in Philadelphia, given the hostility and hysteria of the anti-Edison forces. If the company has to employ union teachers, it will be absolutely impossible to run effective schools. I wouldn't bet the farm on Edison's survival either. These days investors like a for-profit company to run a profit. -- 5/29

How many foxes on chicken coop board?
Under a proposed bill, AB2363, California's school board would be run by people strongly invested in the status quo, with five of 11 members directly employed in public schools. The board would include three public school teachers, one principal at a low-performing school, one non-teaching public school employee, two public school parents, one school board member and one public school student. Only two of 11 members would represent the general public, and one of those would need expertise in teaching students who aren't fluent in English. Who would qualify but a teacher or former teacher? The bill by Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh, D-Los Angeles, has passed the Assembly and will be assigned to the Senate Education Committee. The good news is that the governor isn't likely to sign it.

Update: Ze'ev Wurman quotes a former state board of education member saying, "I particularly loved the idea of an administrator from a failing school . . . Who would want a successful person to make policy?"

The governor is not a toaster, the Riverside Press-Enterprise tells the California Teachers Association. The union gave $1.3 million to elect Gray Davis, and he hasn't done what they wanted. They put in the bread and never got the toast. But there's no "agency for political donors to go to with consumer complaints when they don't get their money's worth." -- 5/29

We're all in this together
James Lileks watched New York City's 9-11 documentary and noticed the people who watched with horror as the twin towers burned, and desperately sought news of missing relatives.

I was also struck, again, by the variety of people standing on the street below, or holding out pictures of missing loved ones. A Hispanic woman and son; an Asian couple; a Black gay man - aren’t these supposed to be the people marginalized and oppressed and devalued by society and the media? What are they doing on a documentary made by a giant media conglomerate? Could it be they all worked in the same place and got along, and that every single interaction wasn’t shaped and defined by Race and Gender and Shoe Size and all other forms of polarizing identity?

It says something about America that you can’t blow up an average skyscraper without killing people of every race and creed on the planet. -- 5/28

Biology of blogging
John Hiler describes the ecosystem of weblogs. -- 5/28

So that's how it happens
Palestinian gunmen sent to Italy in the Church of the Nativity deal are threatening to explode, Al Bawaba reports. They can't take the humiliation of being watched by the Italian police.

The three Palestinians granted exile in Italy after the Israeli army siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity risk cracking under the strain of being so closely monitored, one of them told La Reppublica on Monday.

"When we arrived in Italy I asked the head of the Italian security service responsible for us not to track us too closely. I told him, “at least give us some personal space and autonomy or we could just explode”, Khaled Abu Nejmeh told the daily. -- 5/27

Found: A teen-age virgin
Newsweek finds teen-age girls who are happy, successful, respectful of adults and not worried about being popular. Then the reporter interviews a blonde "Wendi" who's popular and shallow. The girls who go to Bible class turn out to be virgins. Barbie look-alikes classify oral sex as "third base." Which proves what? You can go on a high school campus with 2,200 students and find just about any kind of kid you want. -- 5/27

Memory
I watched the 9-11 memorial show on HBO last night. What hit me hardest was the helicopter pilot who saw a man waving a towel from a window but couldn't land his helicopter, the white dust covering the people fleeing from the towers' collapse, the volunteer rescue workers marching down the street in their ratty T-shirts, the mayor's aide talking about her firefighter husband, the people lining the streets to cheer the men on the bulldozers and fire trucks.

HBO's "In Memoriam" site lists the names of the victims. When I clicked on the "click here to view the site," it happened to start with "I" names and then go to "J." So I saw that four of the dead were named "Jacobs."

After Sept. 11, I started to fly my flag every day. But I worried about coming home late and having it out there after dark or in the rain. The Girl Scouts trained me too well in flag etiquette. So I taped a cardboard flag in the front window. (I got it at a Stanford football game.) It's been there ever since. New York City is officially ending its mourning period on May 30. And I've noticed my window flag has faded in the sun. I think I'll take it down today or on the 30th. Or should I wait for Osama's DNA to be identified from the bones in his last cave? -- 5/27

Last words
The New York Times' "Fighting to live while the towers died," relies on phone conversations, taped messages and e-mails from workers trapped in the World Trade Center.

. . . the words from the upper floors offer not only a broad and chilling view of the devastated zones, but the only window onto acts of bravery, decency and grace at a brutal time.

More than 50 people fell or jumped from the north tower, the Times estimates. -- 5/26

Teen sex
The Blogosphere has discovered teen sex via a US New article, "Risky Business." Glenn Reynolds says it's normal for teen-agers to want sex and uses "ephebophilia" in a response to his hate mail. Moira Breen says girls don't seem to be enjoying it; they go along to have and keep a boyfriend. I think she's got a point, especially for younger teens. Katie Granju of Loco Parentis notes that the real issue is "Irresponsible Idiot Sex." And there a lot more links on Instapundit.

I pretty much agree with everybody, especially about irresponsible idiot sex.

I talked to a number of teen-age focus groups about 10 years ago for a series on teen-agers' attitudes toward sex. I asked boys this question: How would the average boy respond if his girlfriend told him she was pregnant?

A group of white and Asian-American boys at an affluent high school answered in unison: "Abortion! Abortion!"

A Hispanic, black and white group at a Boys' Club in a low-income neighborhood also answered in unison. They said: "Leave her! Leave her!"

Then I sat in on a sex education presentation at the county's school/jail for girls. Some of the inmates were mothers already. The presenter asked: What does a boy say when he wants you to have sex with him. Instantly, they replied: "I love you.''

Kids aren't stupid. They just act like they're stupid.

I think the key to sex ed, drug ed, etc. is to teach two-year-olds this key lesson: Actions have consequences. By the age of three or four, they can move on to the second step: Think about the consequences before you act. Once they've got that down, the rest is trivial. -- 5/26

Europe vs. U.S.
Europeans and Americans no longer agree about the utility and morality of power, writes Robert Kagan.

Europeans believe they are moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. Europe itself has entered a post-historical paradise, the realization of Immanuel Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international rules are unreliable and where security and the promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.

. . . The German lion has lain down with the French lamb. The new Europe has succeeded not by balancing power but by transcending power. And now Europeans have become evangelists for their "postmodern" gospel of international relations. The application of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe's new mission civilisatrice. If Germany can be tamed through gentle rapprochement, why not Iraq?

I can answer that one: Because Hitler's dead and Saddam Hussein is alive.

Kagan notes that Europe can reject force because the U.S. hasn't.

Most Europeans don't acknowledge the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Instead, they have come to view the United States simply as a rogue colossus, in many respects a bigger threat to the pacific ideals Europeans now cherish than Iraq or Iran. Americans, in turn, have come to view Europe as annoying, irrelevant, naive and ungrateful as it takes a free ride on American power.

It's not much of an alliance anymore. -- 5/26

On duty in The Stan
Here's a British reporter's impressionistic view of U.S. soldiers at Afghanistan's Bagram air base. Among other things: Every Meal Ready to Eat includes a small bottle of Tabasco sauce. At each morning briefing, a major recites the number of days since Sept. 11 and reads a brief obit of a victim from the New York Times web page. Due to my no-obscenity policy, I can't quote directly, but look for the three English phrases taught to an Afghan soldier named Crazy. -- 5/26

Charter challenge
Education Week's three-part series, "Changed by Charters," discusses the impact of charter schools on the public education system and profiles the first for-profit education management company to actually make a profit. It's not Edison, which is desperately trying to raise money to stay afloat. -- 5/26

Say cheese
Go ahead and have that slice of pizza, says JunkScience.com debunker Stephen Milloy. Don't let the nattering nabobs of nannyism put you off your feed.

Yes, pizza contains fat and salt; these key components make pizza and many other foods taste good. But salt and fat aren't necessarily the dietary bogeymen portrayed by fun-food haters.

Good news for a Memorial Day weekend. -- 5/25

Identity potluck
What's your ethnic identity? Instead of checking German, Irish or Italian on Census forms, more Americans are writing "American," reports the Washinton Post. -- 5/25

Foxblog
My weekly Fox weblog -- a bee extravaganza -- is available for reading. It has some new material on why I think home-schoolers are winning scholastic contests. -- 5/24

Drop-out prep
Every kid's supposed to go to college these days. But most won't earn a degree, Dan Walters writes in the Sacramento Bee.

Fewer than 10 percent of those entering high school will have obtained four-year college degrees a decade later. Indeed, about a third of those freshman class members won't even graduate from high school, some of them because of unrealistic expectations about college.

Some legislators want to boost funding for vocational ed. But they're swimming against the tide. Sen. Richard Alarcon, D-Los Angeles, has introduced a bill requiring all students to take college-prep classes approved by the state university system, known as the A-G requirements, unless parents sign a waiver.

The laudable goal is to force all high schools to offer the A-G sequence. But the courses are bound to be dumbed down if they're filled with unprepared, unmotivated students. My book is about a college-prep high school that targets underachieving Hispanic students; most students enter with a D or F average. Preparing these students for a true college-prep curriculum is a huge challenge. If students and parents aren't motivated to get serious about schooling, it's impossible. -- 5/24

Congressional choice
Heritage zings Congress members who send their kids to private school while voting against vouchers for low-income students in low-performing public schools (via the Volokhs).

Of course, the legislators are paying for private school with their own money. But liberals don't accept the distinction between public and private funding when they hit conservatives for wanting welfare mothers to work or study for 40 hours a week while praising married moms who forego a paying job to stay home with their kids. Personally, I think the question of who pays is very relevant. Your choices are your business --until I'm asked to pick up the bill. -- 5/24

Kill thy neighbor
Buried in a Monitor story on Israel's recruitment of collaborators is an amazing statement by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza (PHRMG):

During the first intifada, which began in 1987, about 1,000 Palestinians died in fighting with Israeli soldiers and settlers. Research by PHRMG suggests a similar number were killed by their own people under suspicion of collaboration but just 45 percent of those killed were rightfully accused.

Many suspected collaborators are simply gunned down in the street by vigilante groups. The PA turns a blind eye. The label is sometimes used as an excuse for extra-judicial killing designed to settle old scores. -- 5/24

What the numbers mean
Education Next features a discussion on value-added analysis with articles by Dale Ballou, Anita Summers, Jay Greene and Don McAdams. -- 5/24

They don't name 'em Bertha or Adolph anymore
"Madison" is the second most popular name -- for girls. "Jane" is down to 365. Virginia Postrel's column on how names wax and wane in popularity is a lot of fun. And I found the Name-o-Meter addictive. It says that "Joanne" is very '50s, but "Joanna" is fashionable. -- 5/24

In the woods
The D.C. police claimed they searched Rock Creek Park for Chandra Levy's body. But they didn't search a wooded area only a mile from the building she'd called up on her computer. It was too far off the path. So, they thought the killer would leave the body in a convenient location? -- 5/24

Victims of compassion
A reader speculates that Mexican-American students are held back by low expectations. In his high school, students who spoke English as a second language were segregated in special classes that focused on celebrating culture, not meeting academic goals.

Many of the same students were in the ESL classes from the beginning of junior high all the way through high school. Although most of them could actually speak English just fine, there seemed to be few expectations on them to do so. The primarily white teachers, instead of focusing on teaching them English and helping them move into regular classes, seemed much more concerned with planning "cultural" events.

. . . There didn't seem to be any accountability to get work done . . . I remember thinking that they weren't treated much differently than the special education kids . . . It often seemed to be the white teachers who would feed the idea that the students were victims, while many of the Mexican-American parents wanted their children to work hard and learn English.

What kind of backwards world is it when those who treat adolescents like helpless children are seen as compassionate, and those who actually want the same students to learn the tools to succeed here are seen as racist? -- 5/24

Where in the world is Calvin McCarter
A 10-year-old home-schooled boy from Michigan won the National Geographic Bee Wednesday by identifying China as the location of the Lop Nur nuclear test site. Four of the top 10 competitors were home schooled. (See "Bee mail'' below.) National Geographic reports:

A survey of this year’s contestants showed widespread admiration for President Bush and the job he’s doing, and a desire to be president themselves one day.

Here are some sample geography questions. -- 5/23

Uneducated = poor
Stop the presses! Or the electrons, or whatever. Mexican-American households earn 40 percent less than non-Hispanic whites because they're less educated, says a Public Policy Institute of California report. What's interesting is that more education leads to more earnings for second-generation Mexican-Americans, but not for the third generation, which has even more access to schooling.

Immigration experts and community groups say Mexican-American children often must attend schools that lack up-to-date textbooks, credentialed teachers and access to computers, hampering the group from improving its lot as quickly as previous waves of immigrants.

Did the second generation get better schools than the third? I don't think so. Something else is going on here that has more to do with culture than number of computers in school. -- 5/23

Autonomous automatons
Market-based education reform --charter schools, vouchers and other choice proposals -- are leading to progress, writes Peter Berkowitz in the Weekly Standard. So why are alleged progressives so hostile? It's not just the debt to the teachers' unions, he argues.

Homogenizing liberalism wants all individuals to be autonomous free agents who have transcended narrow communal and religious attachments and who are bound together by their shared capacity for reason and choice. The achievement of this kind of autonomy, contends the homogenizing liberal, is not merely a good but perhaps the highest good: both a benefit and duty of citizenship in a liberal state. In order to ensure that each individual lives up to the demands of citizenship so understood, it is necessary, homogenizing liberals conclude, to rely upon the state, which alone has the resources and reach to rescue children from negligent or sectarian parents and instill, through public education, autonomy.

But some parents have different educational goals for their children.

When we hear expressed the fear that private schools (particularly private religious schools) fail to promote autonomy as the highest good, we must ask how the liberal state's interest extends to mandating the highest goods that students and their parents must hold dear. Those who care for themselves and their friends and their family, who obey the law, and prefer stamp-collecting or fly-fishing or attending church services to spending their evenings and free weekends engaged "as critical interpreters of our shared political traditions" also deserve our respect. -- 5/23

Elementary thongs

Ten-year-old girls are ready for thong underwear with cherries, says Abercrombie & Fitch, which is selling the sexy undies as part of a clothing line aimed at girls 7 to 14 years old.

The thongs are adorned with the images of cherries and candy hearts and also include the words "kiss me" and "wink, wink." They are appropriate for girls as young as 10 years old, according to a company spokesman.

The shock factor helps Abercrombie sell clothes. It just gets more and more challenging to find a taboo to violate. -- 5/23

Victim
Hollis Considine says the Stanford Daily quote I cited below was unfair to Rene Girard.

Girard suggests that Osama bin Laden provides an object of blame which unifies the country, without comment as to whether that blame is justified or not. His technical definition, in his books, of "sacrificial victim" is that object upon which an entire community's blame and opposition concentrate, thereby stilling internal strife.

Considine sees Girard as undermining the terrorist's exploitation of victim status to justify horrible acts.

I replied that "sacrifice," "victim" and "scapegoat" imply innocence in normal English usage, while the word for an object of hate or blame that unifies a community is "enemy."

Considine replies that philosophy uses "technically defined shadows of normal words."

It is particularly irritating to see (Girard) misrepresented as a typical example of the moral imbecility of the academy when his philosophy is currently taught for the explicit purpose of understanding the motivations of OBL in order to achieve moral clarity by examining and understanding why OBL's justifications aren't.

I have some trouble following this. It seems to me that when academics engage in public discussion they should employ the normal, low-tech meaning of words, lest nobody but their own students will know what they're saying. -- 5/23

Bee mail
Mark Shawhan:

Having a good vocabulary, knowing your Greek and Latin roots, etc, is certainly important; but by the time you get to the final rounds of the National Bee, for example, there are words from so many different languages and so many possible spellings (even if you know your roots), that you have to rely on your memory, even if you have a great vocabulary, etc.

Judging by the link he provides, to the rounds in the '97 bee, Indo-American students are as over-represented in the National Spelling Bee as home schoolers.

To do well in spelling bees requires a good vocabulary, an ability to handle pressure, and a fair of amount of practice and drill. None of those have much to do with whether one is being educated at home or in a public school; they have far more to do with the level of involvement of parents in their child's life.

Ken Summers is a spelling bee and Math Counts parent.

I want my own kids to do well but not be national champions. I want them to study hard for roots and derivations, but memorization of obscure words is time better spent elsewhere. This is even more important in math competition. As a MathCounts coach, I pressed students to concentrate on principles and how to apply them to a variety of problems. National competition, though, requires memorizing shortcuts due to the time aspect. I am not willing to have students concentrate on shortcuts except for a few that are very common and useful. As they work a variety of problems, they generally recognize shortcuts on their own; more importantly, they learn to draw deeper connections between different type of problems. This may not make them national champions now but it serves them far better in the future. -- 5/23

Uses of depression
Chris Huttman writes that the high rate of depression in college students may relate to the utility of the diagnosis.

I've heard of more than one kid who gets terrible grades, claims depression, gets a letter from a shrink, and voila, the university forgets about the bad semester. Not just notes a withdrawal -- completely wipes the (bad) slate clean.

If depression is a Get Out of Screw-ups Free card, why not be blue? -- 5/23

Sooo fun
One Democratic staffer asked others if the rhetoric of a Bush-bashing Social Security op-ed was factual. The reply was sent by mistake to a Republican staffer. The National Republican Congressional Committee will release it tomorrow.

. . . "not entirely factually accurate . . . Talk about scaring seniors -- this may be a little over the top. But it is sooo fun to bash Republicans.:)

Just keep that e-mail list updated. -- 5/22

Harvard's jihad
One of the speakers at Harvard's commencement will call for graduates to engage in an "American Jihad,'' reports Matt Yglesias. Zayed Yasin is a former president of the Harvard Islamic Society. No doubt he'll offer an Islam-is-peace definition of "jihad." Not the kill-the-infidel version depicted in the video of Danny Pearl's murder. -- 5/22

Osama killed for our sins
From a Stanford Daily article on a science and religion "dialogue," comes this mush-minded moral equivalence.

“We live in a sacrificial world,” (French Professor René) Girard said. “The function of sacrifice is to protect society from violence.”

Translated into modern times, Girard suggested that Osama bin Laden may be the sacrificial victim of society’s need for scapegoats.

Later in the story:

“Our amazing ability to generalize and represent each other is the root of all evil,” said Terrence Deacon, biological anthropology professor at Boston University. Along with this comes the potential for great destruction through the perversion of moral reasoning,” he said

For example, it's a perversion of moral reasoning to equate a mass murderer with a "sacrificial victim." -- 5/22

Voucherizing special ed
Let parents decide how to educate a disabled child, argues Cato's David Salisbury. He proposes giving parents of a "special needs" child a voucher "limited to what the public school normally pays for a child with a similar disability." Parents could choose the local public school, another public school or a private school.

Children with disabilities have individualized, specialized needs. So, allowing parents to shop around for the best option makes sense. Choice for parents is the best way to serve the diverse needs of children with disabilities.

The cumbersome processes associated with IDEA impose enormous costs on school districts, requiring them to spend funds on IEP meetings, record keeping, administrative reviews, and settlement costs for parents that sue. According to the American Institutes for Research, school districts spend about $4 billion a year on central office special education administration.

Red tape costs wouldn't vanish: There'd be a lot of meetings to decide who qualifies for special ed and how much the voucher should be worth. But it would be simpler and cheaper than the current mess. -- 5/22

Union compromises
California's teachers' union has backed down on a bill to make curriculum and textbook selection part of collective bargaining. The compromise bill requires school boards to heed the textbook recommendations of advisory committees made up of teachers and board members. --5/22

High confidence
I'm getting tired of linking to Jeff Sackmann's Confidence Man. It's good every day. He's prolific too.

College kids report high rates of depression? Could be that it's more socially acceptable to admit to depression these days, says Sackmann.

He links to Mark Goldblatt, who explains why the SAT's validity is underestimated: It's highly predictive of college grades at the margins, but the test is used to screen out students at the margins. That is: Students with SATs under 750-900 SATs don't apply to the same colleges as students in the 1350-1600 range.

It's this very screening process, however, that undermines the SAT's ability to predict grades and graduation rates since it ensures a relative homogeneity among students at any given college. Once the pool of students is narrowed to those who scored between, say, 1100 and 1300, then variables such as home environment, discipline, and maturity — which the SAT cannot measure — tend to override the statistically minor deviation between, say, a 1130 student and a 1170 student.

On the NAACP's demand to close the racial learning gap, Sackmann agrees with USA Today that learning starts at home. Or doesn't, if an uneducated, immature, overwhelmed single mother doesn't read and sing with her child. "More than half the racial learning gap shows up in kindergarten assessments,'' writes USA Today. Sackmann writes:

I'd bet that this "half the racial learning gap" is even bigger than it sounds. By age five, not much learning has been done. Additionally, kids who are good at school are more likely to be motivated to keep getting better; similarly, kids who start to think that they aren't cut out for school will get worse. My instinct, then, is that the learning gap expands not because schools discriminate against (or fail to serve, or whatever) anyone, but because learning gaps expand.

At last, a chance to disagree! A lot of learning is done by age five. By conversing with adults, children learn to use language. By playing, they learn to understand the laws of nature: Drop the spoon and it will fall. By watching TV endlessly, they learn passivity. -- 5/22

Do bee, do bee, do
In response to the item on home schoolers doing well in national spelling and geography bees, Mark Shawhan pointed out that bee excellence isn't a factor of good schooling. Now a Columbia student, Shawhan competed in the National Spelling Bee as a middle schooler, as did his brother.

Based on that experience, what largely matters in qualifying for a spelling bee (and doing well once you get there) is drill, rather than learning. In the National Spelling Bee, for example, only the first couple of rounds use words that a middle-schooler could be legitimately expected to know on their own (and I'm speaking as someone with what I'd like to think of as a strong vocabulary); after that, knowing the spelling of words is primarily a matter of having studied them. . . I would think that the more flexible scheduling of home-schooling (not to mention the ability to alter the homework load, if all parties think it desirable) would make it easier to find the time for drill, practice, etc.

Shawhan also remembers home-schoolers as being less social and more likely to stick with their parents during Bee Week.

He's certainly right that home-schoolers have an advantage in flexibility, and I can't quarrel with the contention that such bees favor memorization. However, I've noticed in doing crossword puzzles that memory is not enough. I use my knowledge of word structure in the English language, including its borrowings from Greek and Latin, to analyze my options and predict the correct spelling of unfamiliar words. Surely, a champion speller must do this.

Of course, my only spelling bee experience came in Mr. Parker's fourth grade class at Ravinia School. After I'd won, Mr. Parker tried to spell me down. It took quite a while. He thought he had me with "ricochet" but I knew it because of the "Rick O'Shay" comic strip. He finally got me with "feign." -- 5/22

Supremely unconstitutional
University of Michigan Law School uses a racial quota to admit minorities, writes Stuart Taylor Jr. in Atlantic Online. He predicts the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the Sixth Circuit's 5-4 "diversity" ruling; a broad decision would throw out racial preferences at unversities all over the country.

Michigan estimates three out of four of its black, Hispanic and American Indian law students wouldn't have been admitted under a color-blind policy. Taylor quotes Danny Boggs, one of the dissenting judges:

Under-represented minorities [blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians] with a high C to low B undergraduate average are admitted at the same rate as [white and Asian] applicants with an A average with roughly the same LSAT scores.... The figures indicate that race is worth over one full grade point of college average or at least an 11-point and 20-percentile boost on the LSAT.

. . . 10 under-represented minority students, each a child of two-parent lawyer families, are considered to be diverse, while children whose parents are Chinese merchants, Japanese farmers, white steel workers, or any combinations of the above are all considered to be part of a homogeneous (and 'over-represented') mass.

Taylor used to support racial preferences in university admissions to prevent "resegregation," but he's changed his mind:

The academic elites who run the top universities have shown that when given a green light to discriminate a little bit, they discriminate a lot.

According to this, it took court-stacking in the Sixth Circuit to get a majority for racial preferences. -- 5/22

They're coming for your doughnuts
Col. Sanders is under attack. The Frito Bandito is on the run. The Battle of the Bulge -- the culture war of the new century -- has begun, reports the New York Times.

The battlefield is the American diet, particularly that of the nation's teenagers.

The two biggest states, Texas and California, are moving toward phasing out junk food in schools, as are many school districts in other states. Lawyers who pioneered suits against tobacco companies have set their sights on what they call Big Food as the next target. Class-action lawsuits have been filed in New York and Florida contending that processed foods with little nutritional value have misled consumers. The lawyers filing these suits hope to do to Mega Gulps and Twinkies what they did to Joe Camel and tobacco.

This week Congress took up legislation, the Obesity Prevention and Treatment Act, that would start a campaign to improve the eating habits in the nation, where more than 60 percent of adults are overweight.

Fat Fighters and "Big is Beautiful" defenders share the same mindset, writes Jacob Sullum in Reason: Put Big Government in charge of obesity. As far as they're concerned, we're all children, unable to decide whether we prefer sloth, chocolate and pudge to aerobics, lettuce and lean.

Neither seems to consider the possibility that people are simply making ambivalent choices in a world of tradeoffs, where food tastes good but too much makes you fat, where exercise is a bother but helps you stay lean, and where it's good to be thin, other things being equal. They rarely are.

If your food and exercise decisions are the business of the legislature and the courts, what isn't?

And whether it's tobacco, guns, HMOs or Twinkies, the goal is to use the judicial system to "exact tribute from corporate pariahs,'' argues Cato's Robert Levy.

Overlaywered.com says odds are gambling is next. At a conference on gambling addiction, Scott Harshbarger, who heads Common Cause, predicted lawsuits, saying, "There is a dramatic public health cost, there is a dramatic social cost" to gambling.-- 5/21

So much for merit pay
Cincinnati teachers voted overwhelmingly to reject a merit pay plan, reports the Enquirer, despite their union's claim it suppports pay-for-performance.

Under the “comprehensive” evaluation, which occurs every five years, teachers are assessed on 17 standards. The evaluations include prearranged and “surprise” observations by peer evaluators and administrators. Teachers must also prepare a portfolio of student work, records of parent conferences and phone calls, and personal written reflections on their teaching.

The union was heavily involved in negotiating the plan under a previous president, Rick Beck, reports the Educational Intelligence Agency. Yet 96 percent of members voted "no." -- 5/21

Home to bee
While home-schooled kids make up 1.7 percent of U.S. students, they comprise 21.8 percent of national geography bee competitors, 10.9 percent of national spelling bee competitors. -- 5/21

History isn't required to repeat itself
The reflex panic of American Jews isn't justified, writes Leon Wieseltier in an excellent New Republic essay. Hitler is dead. The U.S. is a free, pluralistic country where anti-Semitism has no legitimacy. Israel has an army, a navy and a nuclear arsenal. And Arafat is no Amalek.

"As I've said before," Nat Hentoff told New York magazine, "if a loudspeaker goes off and a voice says, 'All Jews gather in Times Square,' it could never surprise me."
 
Call me a simple soul, but it could surprise me. The Jews that I see gathered in Times Square are howling at Nazis in Mel Brooks's kick lines. Hentoff's fantasy is grotesque: There is nothing, nothing, in the politics, the society, or the culture of the United States that can support such a ghastly premonition. His insecurity is purely recreational. But the conflation of the Palestinians with the Nazis is only slightly less grotesque.

Read the whole thing. --5/20

Perma-links
Someone -- Tres Producers? -- was abusing Sullivan for not having perma-links, and I thought: Gee, I should have perma-links. So, techies, what would you suggest? I'd like to add a comment function too, if possible. I use Dreamweaver, if that helps. My brother doesn't think I can use Moveable Type on account of the server. Whatever that means. --5/20

Summer school blues
What should failing students do in the summer? "Grapple with thought-provoking questions," says Alfie Kohn. Learn the basics, says Jeff Sackmann of Confidence Man. And, if you don't want to spend your summer sweating fractions, do your work during the regular school year. Students who've learned the basics can move on to those thought-provoking questions. They'll do fine on standardized tests too.

Kohn professes sympathy for poor, minority kids, who are the mostly likely to be flunking their classes and required to attend summer school. I feel sorry for students who are passed on from year to year without the skills and knowledge they'll need to qualify for college, vocational classes, a decent job or even a lousy job

Sackmann's right about "collective learning" (group projects) too. They only work when all group members are equally motivated, and not always then.

In sixth grade, my daughter did a pyramid project with a boy who was an excellent artist. He did all the drawing, practicing a skill he'd already mastered. She did the research, planning, math and writing. -- 5/20

Darth Vader's managerial and military shortcomings
PejmanPundit's Star Wars rant, though long, is very funny. I love seeing a rational mind run amok.

At the Battle of Yavin, the Death Star rotates the planet in order to get to the Yavin moon with the Rebel base, and destroy it with a laser blast. Query: Why not just blow up the planet? It gives you a clear shot at the moon. Why wait to orbit the planet to get to the moon? For that matter, once you blow up the planet, you don't even have to fire at the moon--the sudden lack of the planet's gravitational pull on the moon, as well as the resulting meteor shower, will be more than enough to ruin the Rebels' day. Just don't enter into planetary orbit, blast Yavin proper, and the moon is fooked. Is this so hard? -- 5/20

Single-sex schools
Neophyte edu-blogger Jeff Sackmann sacks Ellen Goodman's single-sex sophistry.

In a more perfect world, there would be no need for this discussion of single-sex public schools: charter schools and the like could offer single-sex schooling as one alternative. When Paige offers this plan for more "flexibility," that is surely the direction he points.

There's no proof single-sex schools boost achievement or self-esteem, reports the Washington Post.

Though studies on the subject exist, the results are mixed. Some, for example, show that girls do better in academics, athletics and social situations in all-girl programs and that their self-esteem improves. But a 10-year study in Australia found that self-esteem in girls and boys who had been in single-sex classes initially declined when they started going to coed classes, but then rose to new heights.

"The research on the issue is quite inconsistent, and one cannot draw scientific conclusions with any confidence," said Judith Kleinfeld, professor of psychology at the University of Alaska.

Common sense says single-sex schooling will benefit some children but not others, which gets back to Sackmann's point about parental choice. -- 5/19

Enviro-saps
A trio of foolish environment writers are exposed by Anthony Woodlief, who is dead right in his analysis. Journalists must learn science, statistics and economics to report intelligently on environmental issues.

Smug Susan had a similar tell, as we say in poker, which was most clearly on display as she answered a question from someone with the audacity to ask how she knows the difference between real science and junk science. Susan furrowed her disapproving brow and replied: "Well, I can trust the coal mining industry who says they aren't hurting animals, or I can trust this guy in the woods who has studied animals his whole life."

Good reporters don't trust anyone. -- 5/18

Home schoolers rule
Home-schooled students regularly win national spelling and geography bees. Now a team of home-schoolers known as Family Christian Academy has won the National High School Mock Trial championship. Friday's Wall St. Journal editorial celebrates the victory, noting that it's outmoded to call home schoolers drones.

. . . an issue of the alumni magazine of the Ivy League's Brown
University quotes a dean describing home-schoolers as the "epitome" of Brown students. "They are self-directed, they take risks, and they don't back off."

My daughter competed on her high school's mock trial team for three years. In her senior year, they won the county and placed fifth in the state. So I can vouch for the rigors of Mock Trial, which requires students to understand the law, argue persuasively and think on their feet. No drones need apply. -- 5/18

Flagging patriotism
Students at England's Warwick University can't fly England's flag of St. George (red cross on white background) during the World Cup, lest they offend foreign students who've chosen to study in England. -- 5/18

Foxblog
This week's blog highlights are on FoxNews.com. -- 5/18

End of teaching history
I hated "social studies" in school. It was all about the three principal products of hither and yon: Saskatchewan was wheat, oil and . . . cattle? It was hard to care. I loved to read history though, especially American and British history.

In "Anti-Social Studies" in the Weekly Standard, Kay Hymowitz argues that American students don't know much about history because their social studies teachers don't believe in teaching history. The National Council for Social Studies (NCSS), a teachers' group, promotes curriculum standards that are obscure, impenetrable, vast and trivial, Hymowitz writes. There's much on personal identity and cultural sensitivity, little on government, nothing on history.

Such references as there are to government--"Describe how public policies are used to address issues of public concern," for example--exist in some hazy realm of ur-citizenship that could apply to the Democratic Republic of Korea as easily as to our own. While it's true that high school students are expected to be able to "explain the origins and continuing influence of key ideals of the democratic republican form of government, such as human dignity, liberty, justice, equality, and the rule of law," this task is 78th in a series of 87, given no more salience than such pressing civic goals as knowing how to "construct reasoned judgments about specific cultural responses to persistent human issues" or how to "analyze the role of perceptions, attitudes, values, and beliefs in the development of personal identity."

Elsewhere, NCSS teachers equate patriotism with racism, Hymowitz says. They don't try to teach a common American identity. Either you're a "niche American" -- African-American, Hispanic, etc. -- or you're a member of the global community.

Now, this familiar multiculturalism has begun to give way to something known as "global studies," a sprawling discipline that encompasses world history, current events, world religions, geography, ecology, and world economics.

With all that, it's no wonder kids don't have time to learn about the Boston Tea Party or the New Deal.

However, I'm not holding out high hopes for the Bush administration's plan to boost civics education, which the Washington Post promises won't include vulgar flag waving or shouts of "U.S.A." These days civics education means coerced community service, which disrespects the "spirit of liberty," as Mark Steyn puts it. Democracy demands more than learning how to bag canned food or pick up trash at the beach.

For content-rich world and American history, Chester Finn of Education Gadfly recommends the Core Knowledge books. I like story-teller Joy Hakim's "History of US." She thinks reading history should be fun. -- 5/17

Fear factor
In some countries, dissidents risk losing liberty or life if they speak out. In others, they risk criticism. As Matt Welch suggests, there is a difference. Peter Briffa and Pejman and Damian Penny take down a Guardian writer who thinks New York City is turning into Brezhnev's Moscow. -- 5/17

Freddy Kruger's dysfunctional family
Explosive growth in divorce rates built an audience for teen slasher movies, theorizes Pat Gill, a professor of media studies at the University of Illinois.

In all of the films, starting with the trendsetter "Halloween" in 1978, the focus is on kids who have to save themselves and others "because the parents aren’t there," Gill said. Even when they are, "they are stupid, they are selfish, they don’t listen, they don’t seem to care about their kids. Or if they do care, they are unable to help their kids face the nightmares of the everyday world."

The kids who become victims are similarly selfish and flawed, Gill noted. The kids who survive are those who care about others and play the parental role. These were themes that not only reflected on the absent parent, but on perceived excesses of the "Me Decade" of the '70s, she said. -- 5/17

Eye of the beholder
Maxwell Smart was a more devious spy than those Israeli "art students" caught selling overpriced art, writes Flit. He's got a link to a Drug Enforcement agent's report, which seems to prove conclusively that the Israelis were working in violation of their tourist visas and misrepresenting made-in-China schlock as their own art.

I feel implicated myself. Thirty years ago, my brother Peter sold wind chimes door to door, pretending to be earning money for college, in a similar but all-American scam; he might have hit some drug agents' homes. And someone with his name appears in the report. My cousin lives in the same town in Israel as one of the art sellers; her daughter served in Israeli intelligence. I once had an Israeli tour guide who was a demolitions expert and served in Lebanon, like one of the art sellers. Could this be a coincidence? -- 5/16

Blanking out the news
The New York Times hasn't seen fit to print a review of William McGowan's "Coloring the News," observes Nat Hentoff.

Unlike Bernard Goldberg's bestselling Bias, McGowan's Coloring the News has received generally favorable reviews, even in such papers as The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which are sharply criticized in his book. But the influential New York Times Book Review has so far ignored McGowan's indictment of much of the press—an analysis that, as Peter Schrag, no right-winger, says in the Columbia Journalism Review, "has focused attention on important and troubling issues."

The Times has a history of banning its critics from its pages, says Hentoff, who was shunned for dissing a book co-written by then editor Abe Rosenthal.

In a puff piece on Nina Totenberg (via Romenesko), I learned that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiated at the reporter's wedding in 2000. Totenberg, who covers the court, said it's not a conflict of interest because she's known Ginsburg for a long time.

"I'm not a monk and I don't live in a cocoon. I live in Washington. I needed a judge to officiate at our wedding, so I asked Ruth Ginsburg."

Insider? Moi? -- 5/16

The men who are hunting Al Qaeda
For a Marine colonel's description of the fighting in Afghanistan and other blog highlights, go to American Digest. The anonymous Marine says that commandos from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada are joining Americans on raids. He also tells the story of the Navy SEAL who was knocked out of his crippled helicopter during Anaconda.

Meanwhile, Roberts crawled from where he fell about 200 feet or yards (not certain which) to hide, activated his emergency beacon. --60 + heavily armed Al Qaeda in the area.  When the rescue helo came back, a machinegun opened up on it as it came in.  Realizing the gravity of the situation, Roberts totally disregarded his safety and attacked it with a handgun and his grenades.  He was killed in a close quarter firefight, incredibly outnumbered and outgunned. -- 5/15

Attack of the killer Vegans
Unremitting Verse features an animal-loving assassin's ode.

Through gently rolling countryside
     I often take my strolls;
I love to watch the tender mares
     Attending to their foals,
I love the woodland creatures wild,
     The squirrels, rabbits, voles—
And if you do not love them too,
     I’ll drill you full of holes.

That's just the first verse. -- 5/15

Highly effective pay
"A gold star for merit pay" in the Chronicle of Higher Education (registration required) reports on plans in Chattanooga to use Tennessee's "value-added" assessment of teachers to link pay to effectiveness. The best idea: Teachers who win high ratings would qualify for a bonus for teaching high-risk students at a low-performing school.

Teachers ranked "highly effective" by the state (according to their students' test-score gains, averaged over a three-year period) will receive $5,000 salary bonuses if they move into one of Chattanooga's high-priority schools. Highly effective teachers already in those schools will receive $5,000 bonuses simply to stay put. -- 5/15

More mud on Gray
Davis got a $260,000 check from the pipefitters' union after a pro-union ruling that will prevent plastic pipes from replacing copper in homes.

Davis promised prison guards he'd close privately run prisons. That includes the state's only minimum security prison for women.

Update: Tom Perry of Isntapundit blogs on the virtues of plastic pipe. Instapundit has become an instaplumbing site too. It's the hot new blogging topic. -- 5/15

Princess Pim
"What Pim and Diana had in common,'' writes Ian Buruma in the Guardian, was the habit of poking "a stuffy, complacent, out-of-touch establishment in the eye."

The governing elite of the 18th-century Dutch republic was a patriciate, known as regenten. These worthies, who emerged from the Amsterdam merchant class, were, on the whole, liberal-minded and decent men. They governed in a civilised, paternalistic manner. They knew best what was good for the people, and they did not expect their judgment to be questioned. Their natural heirs are the social democrats who defined the vaunted Dutch consensus, which Fortuyn tried to bust wide open.

Regenten technocrats "now govern in most democracies, from Britain to Japan," writes Buruma.

Update: Richard Leed thinks Buruma is full of it.

Buruma's parallel is ridiculous, saying that the 'natural heirs' of Dutch patriciate in the ancient and lamented Dutch Republic are the modern social democrats who tried to repress Fortuyn. First of all, it is simply bad history to make a connection of a modern movement with one that has long since disappeared, as the Dutch Republic has. Secondly, and most absurdly, the victim of the previous political murder in 1672 was John deWitt, the leader of the patriciate against the theocratic Calvinists and the aristocratic Orangists. If there is any 'natural heir' to the patrician toleration of people like Arminius and Rembrandt, it is Fortuyn himself, not the unsociable and undemocratic social democrats. -- 5/15

Blue-collar universities
Not all universities are hotbeds of political correctness, writes Rebecca German, a science professor at University of Cincinnati," a large, urban, largely commuter school." In her department, professors are hired based on objective criteria -- number of published articles, courses taught -- and an assessment of the quality of their research and the courses they're qualified to teach.

My experience suggests that group-think, left-bias etc is relatively rare among science profs and students. The students I teach, often the first generation of their working class families to go to college, are far more concerned with jobs, the future, and what they are learning.

I was just typing up notes from a discussion at the charter school I'm writing about. The students -- mostly Hispanic, mostly working class -- refuse to excuse stealing to feed one's family. A boy says there's lots of help for people in need. A girl remarks, "Welfare is a kind of stealing." Another boy says, "Get a job!' All three hope to be the first in their family to go college. -- 5/15

The Nazi at the end of the chatroom
I like Mike Malone's "Tyranny of the Twit." -- 5/15

Jews out of San Francisco State?
San Francisco State's president says the university will crack down on rioters who surrounded Hillel students and yelled "Get out or we will kill you" and "Hitler did not finish the job" after a pro-Israel rally. The Hillel members were wearing T-shirts with "peace" written in English, Hebrew and Arabic. Let's see if SF State follows through.

This SF Chronicle story reports an upsurge of attacks on Jews and Arabs in the Bay Area. Actually, Jews and Jewish buildings are the victims of all the recent attacks, except for a church arson.

A recent fire at the Beth Jacob Synagogue in Oakland and the destruction last month of the predominantly Palestinian Antiochian Orthodox Church of the Redeemer in Los Altos Hills -- both arson, authorities believe -- have fueled suspicion and resentment between Jews and Arabs. No arrests have been made.

Local rabbis immediately condemned the arson and promised to help rebuild the church, which had hosted a series of discussions between Jews and Arabs. -- 5/14

Course requirement: Agree with the prof
At the University of South Carolina, Women's Studies 797 is required to earn a graduate degree in women's studies. Classroom participation counts for 20 percent of the grade. FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) reports on the professor's “Guidelines for Classroom Discussion,” which require that students:

“acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist.” Students must assume “that people -- both the people we study and the members of the class -- always do the best they can.” The Guidelines also stipulate that “we are all systematically taught misinformation about our own group and about members of other groups,” that “this is true for members of privileged and oppressed groups,” and that students must “agree to combat actively the myths and stereotypes about our own groups and other groups.”

In short, students mustn't challenge the professor's ideas. -- 5/14

Computers confuse classroom
Students who used computers in social studies class scored substantially lower on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) history exam, compared to students who didn't use a computer in class. So says the Education Intelligence Agency.

In the 4th grade, students who used computers at school for social studies every day scored a whopping 47 points lower that students who "never or hardly ever" used computers at school for social studies. The margin for both 8th and 12th graders was 24 points. The trend was virtually unbroken for all three grade levels: the more frequently you used a computer at school for social studies, the lower you scored. Conversely, students who used the Internet for research projects scored much higher than those who did not. The lesson here seems to be that computers should be used as an enhanced library tool, but that their use in classroom instruction for history is counterproductive. -- 5/14

No cap and gown for job-bound graduates
San Fernando Valley high schools won't let graduating seniors participate in graduation ceremonies unless they "commit" to college, trade school or military training. Someone needs to be committed, but it's not the students. -- 5/14

Corrupt but moderate
Debbie LaFetra is a connoisseur of San Jose Mercury News editorials. She writes:

For all the scandals that are piling on Gov. Davis, the thing that bothers me most is that the Mercury News could win a Pulitzer for uncovering the most corrupt government since Tammany Hall and the editorial board still wouldn't endorse Simon in November.  Instead, the endorsement for Davis will read something like, "With great reservations, we reluctantly endorse Gov. Davis for a second term.  Simon has x, y and z positive traits, but he is just too extreme to govern the diverse population of California.  We hope Davis will do better and urge you to give him another chance."  Same for all the major dailies in the state (except the Orange County Register). 

She could be right. If I were advising Simon, I'd tell him to work on his image as a moderate, sensible, ho-hum, non-drooling conservative. Say nice things about minorities. Say you'll leave abortion law alone. Study McCain tapes. -- 5/14

Giving the chop to Indian names
Admiration, not derision, motivates the choice of names for a school's team, writes Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle. In a Sports Illustrated poll, 81 percent of Native Americans surveyed didn't want to see teams stop using Indian names.

Yet Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg's anti-mascot bill bans the use of Redskins, Indians, Braves, Chiefs, Apaches and Comanches, and gives a state panel the right to ban other names deemed offensive to a minority. "Aztecs" aren't specifically banned: San Diego State doesn't want to change its team name, which many Mexican-Americans see as honoring Aztecs. The school did replace "Monty Montezuma" with the more dignified "Ambassador Montezuma."

Stanford stopped being the Indians when I was an undergrad. When a student poll failed to choose a substitute -- "Robber Barons" was my favorite -- the university adopted its color, Cardinal. Like the That Other School Crimson. My Native American roommate hated Prince Lightfoot, who did a phony Indian dance before the football games, but had no trouble with the team name.

In Minnesota, an animal rights group wants the Austin High Packers -- named for workers at the nearby Hormel meat-packing plant -- to become the vegetarian Pickers. -- 5/13

Character assassination
The Dutch media is feeling guilty about demonizing Pim Fortuyn, writes the Times of London.

Many papers noted that the scenes of mass mourning, hysteria and anger at the media were reminiscent of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

“Pim Fortuyn was made an outcast by politically correct Netherlands,” Professor Dr B. Smalhout, a columnist in de Telegraaf, the biggest selling Dutch daily, said.

“He was depicted as a fake professor, a second Hitler . . . a neo-Nazi, a narcissistic homosexual and a political outcast. Practically all the media took part, it was the fashionable thing to do, to have a go at Professor Pim.”

Pim as Princess Diana? -- 5/13

Another chance for martyrdom
Saddam Hussein has offered Yasir Arafat "safe haven" in Baghdad, if the Palestinian leader is exiled by Israel. Such a deal. -- 5/12

Scandal avalanche
Day after day, Gov. Gray Davis is being hit with scandal stories about cronyism, no-bid contracts, a $25,000 donation from Oracle, a payoff to the prison guards' union and asking the teachers' union for a $1 million contribution while discussing union-backed bills in the governor's office. This has got to hurt.

Update: Davis invited Berkeley students to meet with him -- in exchange for a $100 campaign donation. In th same Chronicle story, Democratic insiders, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, complain of being shaken down by the governor.

"I'm not naive. . . . We've contributed quite a bit of money and sat next to him at dinner," said one prominent California chief executive officer who said he has given more than $25,000 to the governor. "I know people give money to get access."

But the CEO said his own disillusionment began when, hoping to press Davis on a policy issue, he was told by Davis' staff that the governor's ear was also getting bent by out-of-state business interests -- who gave bigger checks.

"It was so direct. It's, 'These guys are giving me the money, and I've got to listen,' " the CEO said. "This is entirely about, 'If you give me money, I will do this for you'."-- 5/12

Groupthink U
Michael Hyman went to college in the late '60s. Intolerance for conservative ideas is nothing new, he writes. Hyman thinks fear of being shot in a rice paddy motivated anti-war protests, but old anti-warriors prefer to think of themselves as courageous idealists.

Remember the slogan "Girls say yes to guys who say no!" These guys are now sitting as department chairs.

Mara Williams writes on the uniformity of academic thought:

In my department, most of the professors like to fish. They always look for people who "fit" the department and it seems that people who fish "fit" particularly well. They also like people who drink beer. Unfortunately, that leaves those of us who don't drink or fish out of the running for jobs here. Departments are chummy like that. All companies discriminate to a certain extent against employees who don't fit their vision of what a good "lug nut polisher" (or whatever) looks like. This is especially true in academia where you spend the rest of your life working beside the people in your department.

Eve Kayden was at the Haverford speech that inspired Christina Hoff Sommers to write on the lack of intellectual diversity on campus.

The worst part is that most students didn't see her views as reasonable, or even as being a threat. They saw her as a joke - a right-wing lunatic who should be either ignored or made fun of. In truth, I think they couldn't even understand what she was saying.

Go to Angry Clam for the latest on explicitly biased Berkeley course offerings. -- 5/12

Dworkin and anti-Dworkin
My review of Andrea Dworkin's "Heartbreak" and Wendy McElroy's "Liberty for Women'' is up on the San Jose Merc site. -- 5/12

Alive
Mona Charen's oldest son was hit by a car. It looks like he'll live; it's not clear yet how seriously his brain was injured.

Twenty-one years ago, I was sitting in a neonatal intensive care unit at Stanford, watching the monitors, wondering if my daughter would live or die. The odds were very bad. But two young doctors, Keith Kimble and Bill Benitz, refused to give up on her. And Allison refused to give up.

I just got back from touring Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford with my mother. Dr. Benitz, now head of neonatology, was our guide. He'd sent me an e-mail three years ago in response to a column I wrote about Allison's high school graduation. He remembered Allison because she was the sickest baby he'd ever treated who survived. "She's a tough kid,'' he said today.

Allison is studying at Oxford, so she couldn't make it. (It turns out she went to Palo Alto High with one of the OxBlog guys, who I'm now planning for her to marry.) I told Dr. Benitz that Allison never went through the stage of thinking the world wasn't good enough for her. No alienation. No depression. No black turtlenecks. She's happy to be alive.

I wish for Mona's son the gift Allison received in the first days of her life: a fighting chance.

Today's my mother's 75th birthday. Last May, she and my father were both hospitalized. (They wheeled him in to her hospital room for a birthday dinner on matching trays.) This year, they're back in action. Tough parents too. -- 5/10

Fox reads
You can read ReadJacobs highlights on FoxNews.com. At the moment, the headline on the Views page says "matt'' instead of "mat." I'm trying to get it fixed. -- 5/10

Not so special
On Education Gadfly, Jay Greene critiques a special education myth: Schools aren't burdened with more disabled students. They're classifying more normal but low-achieving students as learning disabled, using very fuzzy criteria. Schools get more money for learning disabled students, yet don't spend much to "treat" them. The diagnosis also exempts students from accountability testing, reduces expectations about their performance and covers up education malpractice, Greene writes. He suggests a solution.

Making all special education students eligible for vouchers not only expands the options available to them and their families, it also provides a disincentive to public schools to over-diagnose students, since public schools will not want to lose these students to private schools.-- 5/10

Exemplary but not effective?
Students don't learn more when taught by board-certified teachers, according to a Tennessee study. Critics charge the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) measures how well teachers conform to progressive education theories, not to how much progress their students actually make. In most states, teachers get substantial bonuses or raises for earning NBPTS certification.

Tennessee measures teacher effectiveness through "value-added" analysis of the gains in student test scores. For students taught by 16 NBPTS-certified teachers, only 14 percent of scores were rated exemplary, while 10 percent were deficient. None of the teachers earned a bonus by Tennessee standards, which require producing 115 percent of a year's growth in three core subjects for three consecutive years. -- 5/10

Quindlen, uncut
Anna Quindlen's reference to her children's "textbooks'' having fewer "uncut pages'' probably refers to "consumable" workbooks with pages that can be torn out, writes Mary Anne Kania. She's another 10 of 11 scorer on the intelligence test, so I suspect she's right.

Virginia Postrel says air feels softer in humid weather. So Quindlen may feel a softening on the East Coast. Here in California, the air gets dryer in summer.

Carroll Bloyd lives in Minnesota, where ferocious cold dulls the sense of smell.

The arrival of spring brings both floral scents and the ability to smell them again. And these springs scents do seem soft after the harshness of winter. -- 5/10

Knowledge-based kvetching
Sonoma State tried to please critics by replacing the militaristic "Cossacks" with Jack London-inspired "Seawolves" but found new critics who complained the name honors Nazi U-boat commanders. Timothy Sheridon finds the bright side. Kvetching requires knowledge.

Specifically:
* There was a world war in the early 1940s.
* Germany was one of the nations involved
* Germany was one of the bad guys.
* The bad guys running Germany were called Nazis
* The German Navy had U-boats 
* U-boats have captains (commanders)
* The U-boats patrolled the North Atlantic in a operating structure known as a wolf pack.

Holy (deleted), I didn't realize they even taught these details any more. Since the academy discovered that the text of the classic history writings was oppressive, one doubts the need to disclose mere technical details of the actual machinery. I suspect extra credit for watching the History Channel is probably in order.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, two out of 10 students in grades four and eight, and one out of ten students in grade 12 reached the proficient level on the 2001 history exam. The average student scored at the basic level in grades 4 and 8, and scored below basic at grade 12. -- 5/10

Two Minute Hate
Steve Sailor of UPI rounds up European elites' reaction to the murder of Pim Fortuyn: He had it coming.

Fortuyn was popular among immigrants, according to a Dutch survey cited by the Christian Science Monitor.

Strangely enough for a politician running on an anti-immigration platform, a recent poll in the leading Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, focused on his popularity among immigrants. According to the survey, many immigrants approved Fortuyn's breaking of longstanding taboos in Dutch politics and his role as catalyst in opening discussion about underlying tensions between native Dutch residents and the immigrant population.

The article states that his popularity among those groups was for "putting the finger on the sour wounds, stimulating debate, and giving immigrants their own responsibility back as real citizens." Nearly 2 million people in this densely populated country of close to 16 million are ethnic minorities – almost 800,000 of Muslim origin, mainly from Morocco and Turkey.

The key phrase is "their own responsibility as real citizens."

My brother Peter lived in Amsterdam, six to 10 years ago. Many of his friends were immigrants from around the world -- Indonesia, Surinam, Pakistan, Morocco, India, etc. -- who he'd met in Dutch class. Few had steady jobs, perhaps because few were there legally. But the ones he knew had left their homelands to escape the dead hand of the past, not to establish their culture in a colder country. -- 5/9

Chocolate falsely maligned
The enviro-whiners have gone too far! Now they want a warning label on chocolate. -- 5/9

United hypocrites
James Lileks interprets the U.N. debate on the latest resolution condemning Israel. It turns out Sudan, which enslaves its Christians, is upset about the siege at the Church of the Nativity. -- 5/9

To kill a dodobird
Damian Penny reports that black teachers in Nova Scotia want three books removed from school libraries: "To Kill a Mockingbird," "In the Heat of the Night" and "Underground to Canada'' (about two black girls escaping slavery). The books are offensive, the teachers say, because they include characters who use the "n word.'' -- 5/9

Finally, an important online test
Like Andrew Hofer, I got 10 out of 11 on this intelligence test. -- 5/9

Union reformers
Peter Schrag writes on the backlash to school reforms from the teachers' union and from get-tough rules running headlong into reality.

In Chicago, the teachers' union will run two failing schools; the board of education will take over two different schools slated to be closed for persistent failure. The union plan is expensive: Teachers will earn more for teaching a longer school day and classes will be limited to 20 students. The union may have to raise money from foundations, as well as prioritizing its discretionary spending. -- 5/9

Huh?
"Doing Nothing" in the summer made Anna Quindlen a writer, she asserts in Newsweek. So American kids should hang around being bored instead of going to soccer camp or computer camp. Typically, she seems unaware of low-income and working-class kids who spend their afternoons and summers watching TV. But it was the first scene-setting paragraph that left me puzzled.

Summer is coming soon. I can feel it in the softening of the air, but I can see it, too, in the textbooks on my children’s desks. The number of uncut pages at the back grows smaller and smaller.

Uncut pages? In Victorian novels, people have to cut the pages of a book as they read. But that went out early in the 20th century, and it's now the 21st. What is she talking about? Is this some weird East Coast private school thing?

I also wonder about that "softening of the air," which seems like a pretentious way of saying that it's getting warmer. And if boredom makes the writer, why didn't ennui teach young Anna that "the wheels inside that fuel creativity" is a mixed metaphor? -- 5/8

Brainless boycott
Nat Hentoff lambastes five black law professors at the University of North Carolina who boycotted a discussion with Clarence Thomas, who came for a day-long visit in March. Marilyn Yarbrough argued that Thomas, as the Supreme Court's only black justice,

has ``lent cover'' to his conservative colleagues by joining their ``anti-progressive'' decisions. ``Since we are all black,'' said Yarbrough, ``we did not want to lend cover to him. We have welcomed justices we disagree with, such as Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor.'' However, joining Thomas, she explained, would have been seen as an endorsement, or at least a tacit approval, of his views.

In their righteous self-approval, these law professors clearly had no idea they were failing their students. Here they were, in fundamental disagreement with Justice Thomas on a number of crucial constitutional issues and in front of their students, they could have challenged him directly. Talk about being role models -- to all their students -- as professors with the intellectual equipment to confront such a powerful figure in the law!

It's OK for white justices to disagree with black academics, but blacks must toe the line. And, since all blacks think alike, the black profs can't be in the same room lest they be seen as thinking like Thomas. -- 5/8

From the teacher's desk
Mark DiBois, a veteran Georgia teacher, defends tenure after at least three years of teaching, and says his state has a workable process for removing bad teachers.

The truth is that administrators have to get off their collective rumps and do their job effectively and in case you haven't checked lately most of them don't like doing that.

Glenn Sacks, a former high school teacher, blames the "Teacher's Code of Silence" -- and lazy administrators -- for keeping incompetent teachers on the job.

Robert Wright weighs in on the supply issue. He and his wife, both teachers, each spend about $1,000 a year buying classroom supplies.

The last time I ordered Kleenex, 10 years ago, I had to order through the district warehouse. They refuse to reimburse you for anything the warehouse carries. And they wouldn't let me order just one box. It had to be a case. Where am I going to store a case of Kleenex?

Wright ordered a class set of Paul Zindell's "The Pigman." The principal said he thought the book was better for 8th graders than 7th graders.

All I have to do is to get the English department to classify all of the novels we have or intend to purchase by grade level and have the department decide that "The Pigman" is most appropriate for 7th grade. We're talking about a list of 80 novels. The English department can barely agree on what day it is. So, that's why I'll be buying 30 copies of "The Pigman" out of my own pocket. I think they go for $6.95 a piece.

Anything over $25 needs prior approval. -- 5/8

Time matters
School spending doesn't correlate well with school performance, according to a Pennsylvania analysis by Standard & Poor's (via SardonicViews). Seven of the state's 501 districts posted above-average scores for low-income students for three years running. How? Maximize instructional time, minimize disruptions, make no excuses. -- 5/8

Traffic
Michael Levy and Ross Nordeen e-mailed me to say that if I use Instapundit's correct e-mail address, Alexa will show that InstaProf is the 68,172nd most visited site on the Net. My 780,766 still has Ben Sheriff's Layman's Logic beat, but not his rugby site. The key is to lure Alexa Toolbar users, who seem to be a rugby-loving lot.

Via Nordeen, I found a test of my Blogger Archetype. He is a Rebecca Blood. I am archetypically Sullivanesque. But I don't know how to post the graphic, so you'll have to take my word for it. -- 5/8

Bomber's logic
Luke Helder, the alleged Rural Delivery Bomber, has been arrested in Nevada. In a non-exploding letter to the Badger Herald, a University of Wisconsin newspaper, he tried to explain his philosophy: Death doesn't exist. Government control is bad. So is punctuation.

"I will die/change in the end for this, but that's ok, hahaha paradise awaits!" the letter read. "I'm dismissing a few individuals from reality, to change all of you for the better, surely you can understand my logic."

"Dismissing from reality" seems to suggest more than just blowing the hands off farmers and mailmen. But Helder's dad and an old school buddy do their best to put pipe bombs in a positive context.

Cameron Helder, Luke's father, said his son is attempting to make his political beliefs heard. "I think he's just trying to make a statement about the way the government is run," he said.

Molly Webb, a UW-Madison junior who went to high school with Helder, said he might have a drug problem, but she believed this was not the source of his anger. "I think he just wanted to get his message out there," she said. "He's not the kind of guy who would hurt anyone."

Because death doesn't exist.

I don't think Helder will have a freedom of expression defense, but insanity looks like a good bet. Apparently, he was dismissed from reality some time ago, only nobody noticed. -- 5/7

Bad clone pun here
Tell your senator you oppose criminalizing therapeutic cloning research. -- 5/7

The $100,000 hello
Gov. Gray Davis is notorious for mixing campaign fund-raising with state business, writes Daniel Weintraub in the Sacramento Bee. -- 5/7

Letters to the blogger
Jim Miller responds to the "Rah, rah, rah for the Cooperative Ferns'' post:

The Portland Oregonian bans Indian names in its sports pages. This meant that a team from a reservations school could not be referred to by its name, which was "Braves." Poor people just didn't realize it was offensive, but the Oregonian set them straight. BTW, one name which does bother me, "Redskin," is used by a number of teams from Indian schools. I suppose the PC people would claim that is false consciousness.

Joachim Klehe writes on his drug of choice:

I buy my chocolate (for medicinal purposes only, of course) from El Ray Chocolate, the U.S. distributor for high cocoa content chocolate from Venezuela. Excellent selection, even better service, and highly recommended! -- 5/7

Sound of one lobe flapping
Christina Hoff Sommers calls for action to nurture intellectual diversity on university campuses.

In a recent talk at Haverford College, I questioned the standard women's studies teaching that the United States is a patriarchal society that oppresses women.

For many in the audience, this was their first encounter with a dissident scholar. One student was horrified when I said that the free market had advanced the cause of women by affording them unprecedented economic opportunities. "How can anyone say that capitalism has helped women?" she asked.

The woman who'd invited Sommers was accused by to students of providing "a forum for hate speech."

Few conservatives make it past the gantlet of faculty hiring in political-science, history, or English departments. In 1998, when a reporter from Denver's Rocky Mountain News surveyed the humanities and social sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, he found that of 190 professors with party affiliations, 184 were Democrats. There wasn't a single Republican in the English, psychology, journalism, or philosophy departments. A 1999 survey of history departments found 22 Democrats and 2 Republicans at Stanford. At Cornell and Dartmouth there were 29 and 10 Democrats, respectively, and no Republicans.

David Horowitz writes that universities fund left-wing speakers -- and find last-minute excuses to cancel his talks.

At Vanderbilt, the university annually provides roughly $130,000 for left-wing agitations, including the visits of left-wing speakers. This is balanced by $0 for conservative groups and speakers. Ironically, the faculties of these schools are strong proponents of campaign finance reform in the political world they don’t control. -- 5/7

The history of me
The prize-winning essay in Prentice Hall's "What History Means to Me'' contest is flabby, trite and dull, Jeff Jacoby writes in the Boston Globe. Students are trained to write about their feelings, not to research and analyze events outside their own experience.

It discusses not history but Lee herself (''How have Sputnik and other satellites influenced my character and personality by what I see and hear every day?'') . . . The 2000 grand prize-winner, Julija Zubac, wrote about how ''as a little girl in faraway Europe, I easily recognized a historic place when I saw one. There was something so incredibly fascinating about walking along old streets or crossing a bridge that had been crossed for hundreds of years.'' Andrew Goodman-Bacon concluded last year's winning essay with ''My personal values and many of my wonderful opportunities are because of history - to me, history means me.''

It's not that high school students can't write about history. The Concord Review publishes students' research papers. But facts are out in education. Narcissism is in. -- 5/7

No exit
On Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson and readers debate the "transfer" of the Palestinian population from the West Bank to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Rep. Dick Armey endorsed this the other day on "Hard Ball." I think the idea is insane. There are 2 million Palestinians on the West Bank, another million in Gaza. They don't want to go and nobody wants to take them. Peaceful transfer is impossible. It would take a real massacre on a massive scale to move them.

Yes, I know Kuwait kicked out 300,000 Palestinians during the Gulf War. But none of them thought Kuwait was their homeland. And if a Palestinian state isn't economically viable, well, that's their problem. -- 5/7

Dubious trafficking
Reading Privateer's Savage Warblog, I came across Alexa.com's traffic ranking gizmo: readJacobs.com is the 780,766th most heavily visited site on the Net. But Alexa claims I outrank Instapundit, which is ridiculous. Plus it says six sites are linked to readJacobs, which is much too low. And clicking on the links thing gives 722 other sites. So I'm a bit dubious about Alexa's accuracy, but give it a try, blogfellows. If you like the numbers, believe them. And write glowing reviews of your blog favorites.

I may be kicked out of the Cabal of Amalgamated Warblog Profiteers: Donations through Amazon have sunk to virtually nothing. It's my own fault for not mentioning the tip jar in a long time. Well, it's over there on the left, readers.

Who was The First Blogger? The Roman satirist Juvenal, writes Dr. Weevil. -- 5/7

Rah, rah, rah for the Cooperative Ferns
California's PC enforcers want to ban the Braves, ax the Redskins and -- while they're at it -- consign to the rubbish heap of history the Fighting Irish, Fighting Scots, Vikings, Spartans, Romans, Normans, Saxons and Gauchos.

A proposed bill would allow two state boards to ban team names that might be offensive to a race, ethnicity, nationality or tribal group. That could doom the Torrance High Tartars, Huntington Park Normans, Alhambra Moors, Beverly Hills Normans and Loara Saxons, reports the Los Angeles Times. The mascot of my daughter's alma mater -- Palo Alto Vikings -- could be in trouble. It would take only one complaint to refer the name to the state.

The bill's sponsor, Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, wants to ban all names based on human groups. "My own personal view is that there are too many animals, symbols and colors that won't offend anybody," she said. "I would always err on the side of caution." Goldberg forgets the animal rightsers are going to complain about demeaning animals by using Lions, Tigers, Bears, etc. as mascots. Gangs have laid claim to the colors red and blue. Someone's always going to be offended.

Coachella Valley High School picked the Arabs because the area is rich with date trees imported from the Middle East. The Hollywood High School Sheiks were named in homage to the 1921 Rudolph Valentino movie. And Rim of the World High School in Lake Arrowhead chose the "Fighting Scots" because the school, on the edge of Highway 18, feels as if it's perched in the Scottish Highlands.

Names chosen because of the warrior-like images they conjure up -- the Moors, after all, invaded Spain in the 8th century -- are criticized for the warrior-like images they conjure up.

Sonoma State University dumped the name Cossacks earlier this year, after complaints it was too militaristic. Now there are complaints about the new name, Seawolves. Meant to honor a Jack London character, to some it conjures up Nazi U-boat commanders.

Bill Leonard writes:

How about companion bills to outlaw stupidity in legislators and their staffs, and to automatically remove from public office any elected official or government bureaucrat who shows by word or deed that he or she really does not have enough to do? -- 5/6

Chocolate dreams
"I'm still waiting for the study proving that chocolate is good for you," I wrote. I wait no longer! Faithful readers Michael Levy, Ken Summers and Lorne Becker have sent me links to the research of my dreams. Chocolate is good for the heart, reduces blood clots, boosts antioxidants, prevents arterial plaque -- and fights tooth decay! It's like the scene in "Sleepers,'' when Woody Allen wakes up and discovers that hot fudge sundaes and steaks are the health foods of the future.

My grandfather was in the candy business. You know those malted milk balls, Whoppers, that come in a milk carton? His product. According to my mother, he "invented the modern malted milk ball." (He figured out how to aerate the malt.) Hershey's bought the company about five years ago, but I still look for Whoppers at movie theaters. -- 5/5

Truth filter
Charles Johnson uses his Ersatz Intelligence Algorithm to translate an interview with a Hamas leader. -- 5/5

Strong words
Who should supply "peacekeeping" troops to stand between the Palestinians and Israelis? Fred Pruitt suggests Belgium or Luxembourg. Or else mobilizing the U.S. State Department's 335th Heavy Strongly Worded Statement Brigade. -- 5/4

Fade of Gray
Just when he's up for re-election, Gov. Gray Davis is being hit with scandal stories involving shredding, a "no-bid contract for unneeded software and a claim by the teachers' union that he's opposing their bills because they refused to give Davis a $1 million campaign contribution. I think the union charge is false: Davis cares about his education reforms and doesn't want to see them destroyed. But his years of manic fund-raising are coming home to roost. California's next governor could be Clark Kent. I mean, Bill Simon. He'll benefit from the too-rich-to-steal image. -- 5/4

Unfair equity rules
Gender equity in college sports is unfair, argues Jessica Gavora in the Chronicle of Higher Education (link may require registration). The government's Office of Civil Rights interprets Title IX to require that the number of male and female athletes must be proportional to the number of male and female students -- not to the number of students wanting to play sports. To keep a money-making, alumni-pleasing football team, colleges must eliminate men's teams in other sports.

Bucknell University has announced it will drop wrestling and men's crew as varsity sports, eliminating 44 men's positions. Seton Hall and the University of St. Thomas have dropped their wrestling teams. Iowa State University has eliminated baseball and men's swimming. The University of Nebraska at Lincoln has also axed men's swimming and diving, leaving only three of the institutions in the Big 12 conference still participating in the sport. And those are just a few of the institutions that have cut men's sports to comply with the proportionality test of Title IX.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison had 429 male athletes in 2000, 425 female athletes. Federal civil rights officials demanded UW add 25 women because 53.1 percent of students are women.

Many colleges and universities attract more women than men. Yet female students -- especially older women returning to finish a degree -- are less motivated to play competitive sports than males. So male athletes lose the chance to complete while women's teams have trouble filling their rosters.

Thanks to Iowa's status as an early caucus state and its passion for wrestling, George W. Bush may tell the Office of Civil Rights to lighten up on quotas. -- 5/4

One box of pens per year
Over on the Patio, Martin Devon is wrestling with school funding: Do you spend more to improve second-rate schools? Or is it just throwing good money after bad? He posts e-mail from an Ohio history teacher who has to buy her own supplies once her annual box of pens, chalk and paper clips runs out.

Denying supplies is a hidden tax on dedicated teachers, who will spend what it takes to get the tools they need. The less dedicated do without. But Devon's right to wonder about priorities. With more than $8,000 per student -- lavish by California standards -- the district should be able to fix the copier.

The most convincing answer I've seen in the "does money matter" debate is that more money will make a pretty good school better but will not improve a bad school. So, what does improve a bad school? Usually, nothing. Sometimes a dynamic principal with power to make changes can turn a school around. Unfortunately, such leaders are rare. They get squashed by the system, not promoted. -- 5/4

Drink deep, earn more
Boozers make the big bucks, according to a new University of Calgary study that found moderate and heavy drinkers earn more than sippers or abstainers. Another study concluded that mildly depressed women live longer than the eternally perky. So the way to be wealthy and healthy is to be soused and sad. I'm still waiting for the study proving that chocolate is good for you. -- 5/4

Quick Reads Fox
If you want the thrill of reading Quick Reads on FoxNews.com, this is your chance. -- 5/4

Instant tenure for teachers
Here's a really bad idea: Make it even harder to weed out ineffective teachers. California teachers' unions are pushing a bill, SB 1968, that would give tenure to new teachers after two years -- and it's really more like 18 months -- unless the district can show cause to dismiss the novice. A two-person panel, one from the school board and one from the union, would hear appeals. In other words, new teachers who aren't very good but aren't outrageously bad will get tenure because it will be too complicated to get rid of them. And they'll be there forever with no incentive to improve.

On the flip side: Why is it so hard to keep good teachers on the job? Read Jay Mathews in the Washington Post on a falsely accused teacher's ordeal. -- 5/3

Talking Bubba
Peggy Noonan once predicted Bill Clinton would have a TV talk show called "Here's Bill" after he left the presidency. Now she explains why it won't happen: it's too much work and Hillary won't let him.

She doesn't want her husband in a job that would put him back on the media radar screen on a daily basis. She knows that if he had a TV show he'd wind up in the kind of trouble presidential spouses aren't supposed to get into. And she intends for him one day to be a president's spouse.

If I were a TV exec, I'd be dubious about hiring Clinton. He loves to talk but he doesn't like to shut up. And I'm not sure that he's got that much personal popularity left with the American people. He's no Oprah. Howard Kurtz says the Clinton lovers and haters would watch, giving "Here's Bill" a 100 percent share. But for how many days? -- 5/3

Moira blogs
Moira Breen's Inappropriate Response is back. -- 5/3

Investing in schools
Giving money to schools is harder than it looks, writes Chester Finn, introducing a series of articles on education philanthropy. -- 5/3

Sore losers
Eric Olsen says the Arabs don't hate Jews. They hate everybody who makes them look like pathetic losers. (He uses less polite language.) That's why we're the Great Satan and Israel is only the Little Satan. And Europeans don't want to kill Jews, just sneer at them. I think he's right. -- 5/2

Passing
Zenflea is Jewish but can pass for Nordic -- if she doesn't wear a star of David necklace. Asparagirl looks Jewish, but might not if she lightened or straightened her hair.

I read John Hersey's "The Wall'' about the Warsaw Ghetto when I was a teen-ager. Afterwards, I looked in the mirror and wondered if I could pass. Maybe, I thought. But then I wondered about the rest of my family. I didn't think my parents or my sister could pass. So I decided to share their fate, no matter what. Then I remembered I was living in a Chicago suburb. Nobody was coming to get us.

My daughter looks Scottish or Irish, with maybe a trace of Dutch. Not Jewish, certainly. But she does have a star of David necklace, which she wears occasionally. I thought of asking her not to wear it when she flew to England. Instead I told her to clobber anyone who caused trouble on the flight.

She's now studying in Oxford, home of Oxblog, a new addition to BlogWorld written by expatriate Americans. -- 5/2

The Sept. 11 excuse
In possibly the stupidest exploitation of the Sept. 11 attack, New York politicians and unions are trying to block the opening of new charter schools. John Fund writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Democratic legislators and state teacher unions are pushing the argument that the attack's aftershocks on the state budget should block the opening of any new charter schools--independent public schools that operate with more flexibility and freedom--for two years. "Charter schools drain precious resources from public schools," says Assemblyman Paul Tonko, an upstate Democrat. "This extraction of funds could result in multimillion-dollar shortfalls for local school systems." His bill would stop the opening of a dozen charter schools in the state that have already been approved for operation. To date, only 32 charter schools have been allowed to open, in part because of bureaucratic resistance.

New York charters get 70 percent of normal school funding. -- 5/1

Popping the populist bubble
While taking out Demo-hunk John Edwards, Mickey Kaus explains why populist rhetoric falls flat. Most Americans don't think "powerful forces" are in their way. Where there are such forces at work, "often they are powerful forces and special interests within the Democratic party." For example, Edwards says "forces inside Washington work against people'' in the ghetto. Kaus writes:

It's not easy to blame the modern problems of ghetto residents on the decisions of elite Washington insiders -- unless they were the Washington insiders who gave us the old welfare (AFDC) system despite what were the repeatedly-expressed objections of the voters. (Even the race discrimination that created the ghettos wasn't, and isn't, a Washington force.) But if there are political "forces" holding back ghetto kids today, they surely include the teachers' unions, which prevent reform of existing inner-city public school systems and fight attempts to replace them with something that might be better.

And voters get that. -- 5/1

Learning English
News flash: Immigrant students taught in English learn English a lot faster than students taught mostly in their native language. Results are in from California's new statewide English Language Development Test.

Twenty-five percent of English learners in specialized immersion programs statewide scored high enough to be considered fluent. Nine percent of students in bilingual programs, receiving some instruction in their native language, scored at the same level.

Students waived into bilingual classes tend to speak less English and come from poorer families than those in English immersion, say bilingual ed defenders. That accounts for some of the difference in results.

The test also shows that districts are slow to reclassify students as fluent: While 24 percent of "English Learners" tested as proficient in English, only 9 percent were moved out of the program. -- 5/1

California gets wimpy on failing schools
Three years ago, 430 low-performing schools in California were given more state money to fund improvement. The schools were supposed to show progress or face a state takeover. Now the state is wimping out, reports the Sacramento Bee.

The state quietly has lowered its performance demands and expanded its penalty options for the 122 campuses that declined in student achievement last year and are subject to seizure if they repeat that dismal showing this year.

Put simply, a school could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in state money, see its test scores fall each of the past two years and still not be taken over by the state or see a single teacher or administrator transferred.

Lowering the improvement criteria should drop the number of sanctioned schools to three dozen this year. That's still more than the state education department is prepared to handle. Most failing schools will face a "soft sanction." A team of education consultants will write an improvement plan and advise on implementation. Soft, yes. But where's the sanction? Where's the accountability?

Bush's "No Child Left Behind'' law demands that high-poverty schools show improvement or lose Title I federal aid. The feds will have to hang tough on accountability. Otherwise, nothing will change. -- 5/1

Inner-city churches become schools
With the help of vouchers, tax credits or privately funded scholarships, inner-city churches are preparing to educate poor children, according to Tamara Henry of USA Today.

Inner-city Christian churches across the nation are quietly opening their own schools and making other preparations for an expected flood of neighborhood children who may soon have government dollars to pay for their special brand of private education.

The churches are taking charge in some neighborhoods because congregations and ministers are convinced that public schools neglect local children and because they believe students are more likely to succeed academically if they receive religious training.

Henry cites a security guard who sells his blood four times a month to pay the difference between full tuition and his son's privately funded scholarship to Christian Academy of San Antonio. -- 5/1

Junking science
When scientists try to debate pseudoscientists, they tend to get slimed by little green men from UFOs, writes Lawrence Krauss in the New York Times.

Although it is probably true that there is far more that we do not know about nature than that we do know, we do know something! We know that balls, when dropped, fall down. We do know that the earth is round and not flat. We do know how electromagnetism works, and we do know that the earth is billions of years old, not thousands. . . .

Science is not a democratic process. It does not proceed by majority rule and it does not accept notions that have already been disproven by experiment.

Scientific literacy remains low, according to a National Science Foundation report; 70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process. The NSF survey found that 60 percent believe in psychic powers, and 30 percent think UFOs are space visitors. Half think early humans co-existed with dinosaurs.

Oh, and we're importing increasing numbers of foreign-born scientists and engineers. -- 5/1

Our thing
HappyFun Steve Neal has posted a photo of the Blogger gang who gathered at his house last weekend. Everyone is smiling pleasantly, except for me. I appear to be screaming for more beer. And there was plenty.

Neal also blogs on the Saudi ad campaign, which quotes President Bush saying the Saudis have been "nothing less than cooperative.'' A voiceover declares:

"Read the editorials, tune in to the Sunday morning news shows or listen to talk radio if you want opinions. Listen to America's leaders if you want the facts."

The ad was written by Americans who don't seem to understand American psychology. We don't sit around waiting for "leaders" to tell us "the facts." Especially not politicians. Well, maybe it's a rope-a-dope strategy, as in rope the dopey Saudis into spending millions of dollars for a useless ad campaign.

"The People of Saudi Arabia -- Allies Against Terrorism" is the tagline. HappyFunPundit suggests more credible alternatives, such as:

"Saudi Arabia -- Now with 40% less treachery!"
"The House of Saud -- We suck, but we have a lot of money."
"Saudi Arabia -- Come for the oil, stay for the beheadings." -- 5/1