Basically, NCLB school evaluation in Califnornia is based on the percent of 10th graders who pass the HS Exit Exam.  It doesn’t matter if the student passes [...]]]> It’s hard to describe how awesome it is to see that my former high school district is manipulating No Child Left Behind in such innovative ways.  I’m almost proud.

Basically, NCLB school evaluation in Califnornia is based on the percent of 10th graders who pass the HS Exit Exam.  It doesn’t matter if the student passes the test in a later grade; the 10th grade rate is the key statistic.  The Kern High School District has therefore taken an ‘assume a can-opener’ approach to this challenge and eliminated sophomores.  Or at least the low-performing ones.

Here’s how it works:

The Man: We have decided that you have ‘failed’ your freshman year by not earning enough units to be advanced.

You: Fuck me.

The Man: Hey! Language, please.

You: Sorry. That sucks.

The Man: Yes, well, so do your grades. Now you will redo your freshman year and make up the classes you failed so you can rejoin your class.

You: Hmph. What if I fail again? Do I stay a freshman?

The Man: No.

You: Oh. Do I become a sophomore?

The Man: No.

You: Ok…well what?

The Man: You’ll be a junior.

You: Even if I fail? Again?

The Man: Of course. We don’t want to hold you back, we just want to give you more time to succeed.

You: Wait, wait, wait. So you’re saying you’re going to keep me locked in hear for 5 years now?!

The Man: Don’t be ridiculous. If you can’t graduate in 4 years, then there’s nothing we can do to help you.

You: So how is that ‘more time to succeed?’

The Man: Well, it’s more time to prepare for the exit exam, which you won’t take until you’re a sophomore, or in your case, a junior.

You: I’m never going to take that fucking test.

The Man: We know sport.  And it’s ok.

You: What?

The Man: Well, I shouldn’t tell you this, but let’s be honest. You’re not going to pass the exit exam.  I mean, you might, eventually, but certainly not next year. Not as a sophomore. And we can’t have that. If our sophomore pass rate dives, it’s means lost funds, lost promotions, worse education for all you kids. And that wouldn’t be fair, would it? It’d be better for all of us if you just skipped next years test. I trust you’re agreeable?

You: Maybe. IF I take your test, what if I fail junior year?

The Man: Nothing! It would be unfortunate for you, but rest assured it won’t affect me, and I won’t be on your case. No one will look at that statistic!

You: You guys are gangster. I feel suddenly full of school pride.

The Man: Um, thank you. See you at freshman orientation.

Compare this to economic policy, where conservatives do [...]]]> I’m constantly impressed with how many debates can be reduced to this fundamental conflict.  Mike talks about this conflict within the abortion debate, and it’s pretty clearly active in arguments over death penalty, rehabilitation vs. punishment, drug treatment vs. criminalization, immigration — all the crime & punishment issues.

Compare this to economic policy, where conservatives do field data-based arguments (or at least they could, in some ideal world where the right was about more than appealing to the most base human instincts).  Few arguments occur without some appeals to emotion, but in, say, minimum wage debates, both sides reference legitimate economic research backing their preferred policy.

Possibly, the emotional tact is effective with crime issues because we’re predisposed/conditioned to act non-rationally when ‘fairness’ is at stake. Regardless, this fundamental conflict suggests that the process-change needed to enact many of the progressive fantasy policies is…smarter voters.  Original, I know, but what I actually mean is: voters better trained in critical thinking, the ostensible goal of much of our education system.

Of course, this means that woman grade school teachers from Brown are the vanguard of any long-term progressive agenda, and Jonah Goldberg is not a complete idiot.

No wait.  That can’t be right.  Ignore this entire post.

This xkcd got me thinking:  High school physics, where most kids are told about the fictitious status of centrifugal forces, generally sticks to Newtonian physics.  This makes sense because pre-modern, F=ma primitivism are the most useful sort of physics to those [...]]]> Not to be confused with Centipetal Forces, the militia units of the the Centipede army.

This xkcd got me thinking:  High school physics, where most kids are told about the fictitious status of centrifugal forces, generally sticks to Newtonian physics.  This makes sense because pre-modern, F=ma primitivism are the most useful sort of physics to those of us not charting spaceship courses or building nuclear bombs.

But, as xkcd points out, there is a real reactive centrifugal force when there is a centripetal acceleration acting on a mass.  Moreover, this is the way Newton constructed his law.  It’s only when you turn to modern physics and use a rotating reference frame that centrifugal forces become fictitious.

So why would teachers abandon their own standard reference frame and seek out a counterintuitive teaching moment?  Particularly since a centrifugal force certainly feels real, so said teachers are going to be arguing against students’ lived experience of physics; it’s pretty self-defeating to take one of the few moments where an inaccessible subject becomes tangible, and tell people their senses are giving them crap data.  Especially when people’s senses are actually correct from a certain point of view.

And yes, I’m bitter about having my elementary physics understanding shut down at some past point in my education.  It soured me on modern physics forever and drove me to a field where the one and only goal is static equilibrium.  Now I’m in perpetual pursuit of clean, perfect nothing; that ideal state where all forces cancel and the structure stays still, undeflected, undeformed, unbesmirched.  Driven to nihlism by renegade physics teachers.

Thus a simple request for the future of our children: more an better physics, please.

Behold! [...]]]> All the lights in Los Angeles my neighborhood my apartment have been off for almost thirty minutes and I have to say, the place looks a lot bigger by laptop light.  The general darkness is soothing, and then, bursting forth with glowing shininess: a rectangle of backlit information, giving me a glimpse out of my…cave:

Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

Such was the world before we found the true light of the sun internet.

That is certain.

Uh…thanks Plato.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form [...]]]> The best sentence ever:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Oh for a Judith Butler blog! It would be the ultimate clash of registers. Or she would reveal that in an informal setting, she mostly likes to post LOL Cats pics.

Also: here’s an interesting article on bad writing in academia, though the author decided to go on an anti-left tangent at the end:

The problem, finally, is not that academic writing is “ugly” and “stylistically awful.” It’s rather that bad academic writing conceals the political reality of the contemporary university. No longer defined by the common attachment to ordinary rational principles, they have become institutions of one-party rule. To canvass for this party is to promote your career; to dissent from it is to put your career at risk. Young scholars must conform in their writing—and pay a protection fee to the party bosses in the form of quoting them. And “to succumb to verbiage” is really to succumb to “the terror under which many graduate students and junior faculty live.”

Hyperbole much?

How Gay is UCLA? – Learn why UCLA was named one of the top 20 schools for LGBT students and how you as an LGBT or ally person fit in. We have something for everyone!

This is one of the orientation sessions for the new school year, by which I imply the answer: [...]]]> Hard to say, but:

How Gay is UCLA? – Learn why UCLA was named one of the top 20 schools for LGBT students and how you as an LGBT or ally person fit in. We have something for everyone!

This is one of the orientation sessions for the new school year, by which I imply the answer: pretty gay.  In a very good way.

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its public health assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa.

And I’ve been thinking about this off and on for the last few weeks. (Yes, this is where I brandish my true-nerd membership card and reveal my previous life as a [...]]]> So this year’s High School Policy Debate topic is:

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its public health assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa.

And I’ve been thinking about this off and on for the last few weeks. (Yes, this is where I brandish my true-nerd membership card and reveal my previous life as a (mediocre to moderately successful) debater. Note, though, that I continue to follow the ‘bater scene because my father is a coach, not because I can’t let go of my youth. So there.)

Now, it bothers me that most kid’s (or adult’s for that matter) exposure to Africa is limited to the “Save-A-Child!” commercials and news reports of famine, pandemic, or genocide. And that my geographer wife was once asked “So…is Africa a country…or a continent?” And that a fellow engineer couldn’t imagine what work they could find over there.

[internal roar] It’s a continent of nearly one billion people. They are rich and poor, healthy and sick, urban and rural, and yes, they do have buildings big enough to require an engineer. You Morons.

I wish depictions of Africa in the media and in school curriculum reflected the whole place. It might even help us with racial stereotypes in this country.

But, putting that criticism aside, I feel this topic is problematic, because, unless there’s a trade-off, of course public health assistance should increase. How is that arguable? I realize I’ve become a bad debater as I’ve become more set in my beliefs, but you have to have drunk A Lot of the Ayn Rand koolaid to convincingly argue against helping people. Sure, you can argue that the money should be better spent elsewhere, but it’s hard to treat money as zero-sum in a debate round where it requires no political capital to say “We’ll get the money from ending Ag subsidies and auctioning off Yellowstone.”

Anyway, some links that caught my eye regarding African public health:

• Crooked Timber has a good summary of recent studies on using DDT to fight Malaria.
• Matt Zeitlin argues for aid that saves lives rather than builds big impressive things.
• How the Gag Rule also decresed condom availability, spreading HIV. (Thanks Bush!)
• Africans forced to eat GM foods.
• The trash of the west is dumped in Africa.
• Fresh off its success it Latin America, the drug war is opening a franchise in Africa

Forget increasing health assistance. If the US and it’s buddies just stopped shitting on Africa, and made the aid we do provide more meaningful, the situation would improve a lot.

…kids with annual incomes of 104,000 or 164,000 a year — including, I suppose, him [...]]]> I think we’re getting close to answering the world’s questions about education, the universe, and everything, so I’ll throw some more random thoughts up at this juggernaut of an education post over at Ways to End the World. An excerpt:

…kids with annual incomes of 104,000 or 164,000 a year — including, I suppose, him if he is among them — simply don’t need much help

Well I did have this plan in high school to start a search engine business called El’goog that would have brought in some serious cash…but alas the idea was stolen… I agree completely that if would-be college students themselves have massive income, aid is redundant. However, problems arise when parent’s money is equated to kid’s money, and this gets at how class is experienced in this country. (Family Kindness Disclosure: Below, I am not primarily talking about my own situation.)

Being a ‘privileged’ kid implies several conditions. You have many material things. You go to a good/safe/white school. You have the financial and emotional space to pursue your own projects. Now, these are all great, but you also have little autonomy. Your many gifts are not really yours, but rather a privilege provided by your parents, and subject to their feelings. Now the paternalism one experiences can be benevolent or not, stifling or not, but it is there.

This is not to equate the oppression of the elevated and subaltern sectors of society — clearly, given the choice, everyone would choose the soft tyranny of privilege — but to point out that there are plenty of shitty power dynamics to go around, no matter how high up the food chain you are. Our society is more complicated than a rich/poor binary can convey.

I have a friend who studied structural engineering with me because her parents wouldn’t pay for culinary school. She could have disobeyed them, but then would have had to make it work without their help or financial aid. She would always bring cookies to the labs. Another friend only was able to leave home for school because a scholarship allowed her to buck her parent’s wishes. Merit scholarships can mean freedom to do what you actually want, can mean escape from a bad family environment. They are one of the few outs for people who would otherwise not be helped by either their parents or state aid. Yes, loans are an option here, but then the need for repayment drives one’s post-college employment. It’s not a great solution.

Looking at the stats in Dr. Heller’s study on merit aid, the situation doesn’t seem all that bad:

My study found that while 97 percent of all federal grant dollars and 75 percent of all state grant dollars awarded to these students went to those whose parents’ income was below the national median, only 47 percent of all institutional grants were targeted to this same population of students. Over half of the grants awarded by institutions, or $5.5 billion, was awarded to students without any consideration of their or their parents’ financial need.

Even if all the schools’ merit-based aid went to students who’s parents are above the national median income, schools are still splitting their aid right down the middle. Half to those below the median, half to those above. This isn’t my preferred division, but it’s not like schools are only giving merit aid. It’s true that upper-income folk already received the best of our pre-college education system, but making sure poor folk have plenty of money for college in no ways addresses this earlier disparity.

Of course, a lot of the merit aid conflict would go away if we began to look at students as independent entities from their parents, and awarded them aid based on their own finances. I gained independent status after getting married, and my school began to give me grants, even as my parent’s assistance remained the same. It was no longer a struggle to make everything work. I now tell everyone they should get married before they start college, though no one actually carries through. Of course, if every student was considered a financial independent, and the government actually funded the required levels of aid, this would be equivalent to free college for all.

I see this is an unqualified good, though, since I look at education as being inherently valuable, irrespective of scarcity. Besides, it’s unseemly for employment advantage to derive from one’s ease of access to college, better that you have to distinguish yourself there or in other pursuits.

So…onwards to free education.