Friday, December 30, 2005

New York City's Big Donors Find New Cause: Public Schools

Kudos to Bloomberg and Klein (and all of the donors) for their support of NYC public schools!

"There is a club of people in New York that support just about everything - the museums, the libraries," said Merryl H. Tisch, a member of the state's Board of Regents whose husband, James S. Tisch, is chief executive of Loews Corporation and whose family cuts a wide swath in philanthropic circles. "Now, because Michael has such a good name and is so reputable, they are able to transfer that club into the school system."

In the context of the system's regular budget of about $15 billion a year, $311 million might seem insignificant. But the tax dollars come with so many strings that the administration has viewed private money as crucial for research and development and an array of experimental programs.

"You are able to do it without saying this is money that is going to come out of the classroom," Mr. Klein said in an interview.

So far, the mayor's and the chancellor's collections include more than $117 million to start new small schools; nearly $70 million to open an academy for principal training; $41 million for the nonprofit center supporting charter schools; $11.5 million to renovate libraries; $8.3 million to refurbish playgrounds; and $5.7 million to reshape troubled high schools.

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New York City's Big Donors Find New Cause: Public Schools

Published: December 30, 2005

A flair for high-society smooching has not always been an essential skill in running New York City's public schools. But there was Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, at Michael Jordan's Steakhouse, grinning awkwardly as he blew a kiss across the room to Elizabeth Rohatyn, the philanthropist and wife of the former ambassador to France.

The moment occurred at a November luncheon debate about education whose guests included fashionistas, artists, wealthy businessmen or, in many cases, their wealthy wives, and it captured how, in remaking the school system, Mr. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have forged a close bond with the private sector, raising $311 million and turning public education into a darling cause of the corporate-philanthropic-society set.

"When I went out 10 years ago to dinners, I rarely ever spoke about what I was doing in education," said Mrs. Rohatyn, who in 1994 founded Teaching Matters, a nonprofit organization that advocates better use of technology in schools. "I find that's very different now. People want to engage in it. They want to talk about it. They are enthused."

They are also known. The host for the luncheon was Sir Harold Evans, the former president of Random House, and the event was sponsored by the magazine The Week, where Sir Harold is editor at large. Guests included the fashion designer Mary McFadden; the performance artist Karen Finley; the photographer Dominique Nabokov; the mayor's companion, Diana Taylor; and a Republican candidate for governor, William F. Weld.

While much of the private money for the schools has come from major foundations eager to support what is widely regarded as the most exciting urban school overhaul in the country, many of the givers run in local society circles.

"There is a club of people in New York that support just about everything - the museums, the libraries," said Merryl H. Tisch, a member of the state's Board of Regents whose husband, James S. Tisch, is chief executive of Loews Corporation and whose family cuts a wide swath in philanthropic circles. "Now, because Michael has such a good name and is so reputable, they are able to transfer that club into the school system."...

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Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Low-income students aim high at nontraditional school

A great article about KIPP Gaston College Prep and its new high school, Pride High, which are kicking butt in rural North Carolina...
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Asheville Citizen-Times
December 27, 2005 6:00 am

GASTON — No one at Gaston College Prep talks about the day they’ll close the racial achievement gap. They did that the year the rural school opened in 2001.

Now they talk about the day when every kid will go to college from a student body that is predominantly African-American and mostly low-income. If they didn’t believe it, they wouldn’t be breaking ground for a new high school.

Located just off Interstate 95 south of the Virginia line, the school sits in a part of the state where poverty rates are high and expectations are often low. But the school’s test scores are among the best in the state. Most of the 300 students at the middle school and fledgling high school are above grade level. Some have already posted SAT scores that meet college entrance requirements.

There is no secret to how they do it. They work hard. Students attend class each day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. — and every other Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tutoring takes place at the end of each day. Summer includes a three-week session to prepare for the coming year.

Discipline is tight. Excuses aren’t accepted. High expectations include everyone. If children don’t understand a lesson, they try again — and again.

“You can get in trouble pretty quickly for poor behavior,” said ninth-grader Marco Squire. “But if you’re in trouble academically, they’ll work with you all day long.”

From the middle school’s name to the seemingly endless reminders about college, the mission of Gaston College Prep redefines the way students and teachers go about their daily tasks.

Few children who attend Gaston College Prep and Pride High come from well-educated families. Most parents have completed high school, but many have not. Two-parent families with college degrees can be counted on one hand.

That makes the school particularly proud of its test scores, but other forms of accountability ensure that teachers and students keep sight of their college goals. Every teacher, for example, is given a cell phone, and students and parents are given the numbers. Students who don’t understand their homework are expected to call teachers at home.

Teachers quickly learn that a well-taught lesson cuts down on late-night calls. Students soon learn they don’t want to be the ones who always call the teacher.

It’s all part of the school’s effort to push forward as a group. When two ninth-graders got into a scuffle on the first day of school, the new band director was surprised when classes were stopped throughout the entire ninth grade.

“All of the ninth-graders gathered in the band room to talk about what had happened and what should be done next,” Kenneth Woodley said. “It’s called ‘Stop the World’ because that’s what happens. You take care of the family’s problems right away and you do it as a group.”

Woodley, who taught 13 years in traditional classrooms, called it “school as it should be.” But it’s not what parents are used to.

Gaston College Prep and Pride High are products of something called KIPP, shorthand for the Knowledge is Power Program. KIPP, which runs more than 40 schools nationwide, started in 1995 with two schools in inner-city Houston and New York’s South Bronx. The schools are free and have no entrance requirements.

In Western North Carolina, KIPP has an academy in Asheville, which opened in 2003.

In just its first year in Asheville, students’ end-of-grade tests in math and reading showed dramatic improvement among the 46 fifth-graders in the program, as compared with their performance the previous year, Robert Logan, superintendent of Asheville City Schools, told the Citizen-Times in June of that year.

While just 44 percent of the students performed at or above grade level in reading as fourth-graders, more than 80 percent scored at levels considered proficient at the conclusion of their year in KIPP. In math, the percentage increased from 78 percent in the fourth grade to more than 91 percent at the academy.

KIPP gained national attention in 1999 when it was profiled on the CBS program “60 Minutes.” In 2000, the two schools in Houston and the Bronx were showcased at the Republican National Convention. The next stop was rural America.

KIPP’s founders settled on Gaston, a town of fewer than 1,000 people, about 300 miles east of Asheville. But it wasn’t just the town that attracted them. It was Tammi Sutton and Caleb Dolan.

Sutton and Dolan were already working in Gaston as part of Teach for America, a program that recruits high-achieving college graduates from disciplines outside of teaching.

Teach for America expects its recruits to spend at least two years in inner-city or rural classrooms, but Dolan and Sutton were overachievers — they seemed never to leave their classrooms.

It was exactly the kind of commitment KIPP’s founders were looking for. Gaston College Prep was formed with one group of fifth-graders. Since then, a new grade has been added each year.

Classroom success came quickly, and it wasn’t long before teachers realized the kids would probably backslide if they returned to local high schools. So Sutton and Dolan started talking about scholarships to send them off to boarding schools. That idea eventually gave way to something more practical.

They decided to build their own high school. Until it’s ready, ninth-graders are housed in a separate set of classroom trailers.

This all makes perfect sense to Sutton and Dolan, who weren’t trained in a traditional college of education and don’t spend much time worrying about the way schools are supposed to operate.

“You just use your common sense and stay away from things that don’t directly benefit the kids,” Sutton said.

And it helps immensely that Gaston College Prep and Pride High are both charter schools. That frees them from many of the policies and rules that govern traditional schools — and it dovetails with the autonomy required by KIPP. Those differences paved the way for longer days, longer years, a principal with full authority and teachers who might — or might not — be certified.

It does not mean they run a fancy school. The 27-acre campus is mostly a collection of classroom trailers. About three-fourths of its $2.3 million budget comes from state and county tax dollars as dictated by charter school laws. Fund-raisers and grants cover much of the remaining costs.

But the school leaders are convinced that the quality of teachers — not buildings — dictates success. That’s partly why teachers are paid up to 30 percent more than they could make in surrounding schools. The rules are simple. If something works, keep it. If it doesn’t, toss it out.

For Danielle Brown, that means an unceasing, high-energy, in-your-face approach that defies students to ignore her. When a boy gets caught up in a vocabulary lesson about the word “ravenous,” he tells Brown he is ravenously hungry every 30 minutes. She acts incredulous. After all, she tells him, a class period is 90 minutes.

“But I be hungry!” he insists.

His use of the phrase “I be” triggers a chorus of oohs from classmates who know what’s coming next. Brown gets out a fly swatter, walks over to the boy and playfully swats the “be’s” out of him.

“I be! You be! We be! No, no, no!” Brown says, flipping the swatter around.

While everyone in the room is having great fun, two things are clear. The boy is more likely to use formal English when it’s demanded and he’s not likely to forget what “ravenous” means.

Dolan smiles a bit sheepishly when he hears this story.

“Whatever works,” he said.

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Tuesday, December 27, 2005

In Middle Class, Signs of Anxiety on School Efforts

There are a lot of really tough issues here.  As usual, Eva is exactly right and -- I hope you're sitting down -- I think Randi Weingarten is as well (though only because, for once, she has the good sense to agree with Eva).

Eva:

That sort of disillusionment, if it translates into an exodus, would be difficult for the city. "It's the middle class that makes the New York City school system better than Philadelphia or Chicago," said Eva S. Moskowitz, a District 2 parent who is chairwoman of the City Council's Education Committee and will be executive director of a new charter school in Harlem. "If we become a school system of the exclusively poor, we are going to be in big trouble."

There are moral reasons to address the educational inequity that exists for the poorest students, but there are also moral and pragmatic reasons to focus on those who are better off financially, Ms. Moskowitz said. The Bloomberg administration, she said, has not confronted the "problem of the top quartile with the zeal that it should."

Randi:

Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers' union, faulted the administration for using a "Robin Hood" approach. "You have to simultaneously work to help your struggling students in particular schools and keep your middle class - you have to do both these things at the same time," she said.

"When you do one at the expense of the other, you get the rebellion and revolt you see in District 3," she said, referring to the Upper West Side, where some parents have complained that their children were suddenly being shut out of admission to top public school programs.

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In Middle Class, Signs of Anxiety on School Efforts
Published: December 27, 2005

The Bloomberg administration's efforts to invest immense attention and resources on low-income students in low-performing schools are causing growing anxiety among parents from middle-class strongholds who worry that the emphasis is coming at their children's expense.

Some of the very changes that Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made his hallmark - uniform programs in reading and math for most schools; drilling that helped produce citywide gains last spring on standardized tests; changes in rules for admission to programs for the gifted and talented, designed to make them more equitable - have caused unease among that important constituency.

In interviews and at public meetings, dozens of parents from the middle class and upper middle class have complained of an increasing focus on standardized test preparation and remedial work, of a decreasing focus on science education and the arts, of large class sizes and of the absence of a powerful mechanism for parental influence...

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Monday, December 26, 2005

Learning How to Hope

An accurate assessment of the old New Orleans schools -- and a nice mention of KIPP in the latest Newsweek:
Most encouraging, the hurricane blew away the New Orleans school district, a cesspool of corruption and neglect that made local schools among the worst in the country. With the entrenched bureaucrats and teachers-union hacks scattered to the winds, the state legislature took the opportunity to strip them of all their power.

This offers what Tony Recasner, the principal of the New Orleans Charter Middle School, calls a "magic moment" for major change. Almost all the schools that will begin reopening in 2006 (mostly in the fall) will be charter schools, where everyone works on one-year contracts (full accountability) and the principal can actually run the school. "This gives us an opportunity to fix each school as it comes back on line," says Recasner, who already has an impressive track record of academic achievement in his school. "We get to create something from our own imagination and ask: what is this going to be?"

The answer, ideally, would be a series of KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools. The nearly 50 KIPP schools around the country have an astonishing record of academic success with low-income students, not with shortcuts but with a disciplined "be nice, work hard" program. While KIPP has only one New Orleans school planned and not nearly enough leaders in its pipeline yet, Recasner and the other avatars of local school reform are eager to adapt the model. The challenge is to get the right leadership in. And because the system will go from 60,000 students to about 20,000 next fall, New Orleans will have the perfect size for a true national experiment with school reform.

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Learning How to Hope

Amid the heartache—feelings that can lead to tears in an instant—a few rays of winter sun are slipping through.

Dec. 26, 2005 - Jan 2, 2006 issue - New Orleans in December is cool and dry, and the 20 percent that wasn't flooded seems normal enough. But the pictures don't even begin to convey the scope of what 17 days of standing water will do to the delicate ecosystem of a metropolis. More than 50 million cubic yards of debris have already been picked up, including 100,000 useless refrigerators—that's 34 normal years of garbage in just three months.

Every day brings more mounds of tangled possessions and sundry junk, the stuffing of a city. I rode with a nonprofit group called Share Our Strength past the thousands of abandoned cars and handwritten WE TEAR DOWN HOUSES signs at intersections that still have no working stoplights; past the still-mysterious levee breaks and reopened Wal-Marts; past mile after eerie mile of homes and stores that for a moment look habitable enough, until you see the thick layers of dust and mold and grimy water lines four or six or eight feet up, a sure indication that the place is a total loss.

So the gutting of New Orleans has begun, but not the renovation....

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A New Civil Rights Movement

More kudos to Bob Herbert for using his bully pulpit to communicate powerful and important messages!

One of the cruelest aspects of slavery was the way it wrenched apart black families, separating husbands from wives and children from their parents.

It is ironic, to say the least, that now, nearly a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, much of the most devastating damage to black families, and especially black children, is self-inflicted.

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that some of the most serious problems facing blacks in the United States - from poverty to incarceration rates to death at an early age - are linked in varying degrees to behavioral issues and the corrosion of black family life, especially the absence of fathers.

Another devastating aspect of slavery was the numbing ignorance that often resulted from the prohibition against the education of slaves. It was against the law in most instances for slaves to even learn to read. Now, with education widely (though imperfectly) available, we have entire legions of black youngsters turning their backs on school, choosing instead to wallow in a self-imposed ignorance that in the long run is as destructive as a bullet to the brain.

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A New Civil Rights Movement
Published: December 26, 2005

One of the cruelest aspects of slavery was the way it wrenched apart black families, separating husbands from wives and children from their parents.

It is ironic, to say the least, that now, nearly a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, much of the most devastating damage to black families, and especially black children, is self-inflicted.

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that some of the most serious problems facing blacks in the United States - from poverty to incarceration rates to death at an early age - are linked in varying degrees to behavioral issues and the corrosion of black family life, especially the absence of fathers.

Another devastating aspect of slavery was the numbing ignorance that often resulted from the prohibition against the education of slaves. It was against the law in most instances for slaves to even learn to read. Now, with education widely (though imperfectly) available, we have entire legions of black youngsters turning their backs on school, choosing instead to wallow in a self-imposed ignorance that in the long run is as destructive as a bullet to the brain.

I remember interviewing a 17-year-old dropout in Brooklyn who had already fathered two children by two different girls. He wasn't working and he wasn't helping to support either child. I asked if he had considered going back to school. He looked at me, puzzled. "For what?" he said.

Most black people are not poor. Most are not criminals. Most are leading productive lives. The black middle class is larger and more successful than ever. But there are millions who are still out in the cold, caught in a cycle of poverty, ignorance, illness and violence that is taking a horrendous toll.

Nearly a third of black men in their 20's have criminal records, and 8 percent of all black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are behind bars.

H.I.V. and AIDS have literally become the black plague. Although blacks are just 13 percent of the overall population, they account for more than half of all new H.I.V. infections. Black women account for an astonishing 72 percent of all new cases among women.

This is frightening...

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Pride and Prejudice

How lame that I'd never heard of the great woman!

As a young lawyer, Derrick Bell, who now teaches law at New York University and is a leading authority on constitutional law, worked with Motley on desegregation cases in the South. When Motley argued, courtrooms became "places of rich racial drama," Bell wrote in an e-mail message. "Whites on one side, exhibiting silent hostility, and blacks on the other side, barely able to restrain their pride. Here was a black woman, obviously better prepared than her white opponents, speaking firmly and with full knowledge of her case. The judge. . .usually ruled against her, but no matter! For these black people, many of whom had spent their lives in involuntary deference to whites, these hearings were priceless scenes." The stories would spread rapidly outside the courtroom, "embellished at the barbershops and beauty parlors for weeks to come."

Motley displayed a rare mix of aristocracy and compassion. The catcalling and threats and jostling angry mobs seemed barely to catch her attention. "Connie took it all in stride," Bell wrote. "On one occasion, we ran into the opposing attorney in many of these cases at the airport. Connie extended her hand in greeting, and the attorney refused to take it. 'Oh,' she said, 'you still don't shake black people's hands. Very well, then,' and off she glided to her flight."

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Constance Baker Motley | b. 1921

Pride and Prejudice

Published: December 25, 2005

February 1941, Constance Baker, age 19, a bright and ambitious young woman from New Haven, left home for college. She was slender and stylish, wearing a wool overcoat with a fur collar and black leather gloves. Her dark wavy hair fell from under a slanted wide-brimmed hat. She'd found a hometown mentor - a white philanthropist named Clarence Blakeslee -who had heard her speak up at a community meeting and subsequently offered to pay her tuition. Despite the fact that female lawyers were rare creatures, and black women lawyers almost unheard-of, Constance Baker had set her sights on law school...

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Friday, December 23, 2005

POOR KIDS GET LESS SCHOOL $$-AID

While money alone will not do much to help turn around the failing schools that poor, minority children typically attend, this is still a disgrace.  Kukos to the Education Trust for exposing and documenting the discrepancies.  The full report is at: http://www2.edtrust.org/NR/rdonlyres/31D276EF-72E1-458A-8C71-E3D262A4C91E/0/FundingGap2005.pdf

Poor and minority schoolchildren are shortchanged on education aid in New York more than in any other state in the country, according to a new report to be released today.

School districts with the highest poverty rates in the state receive an average of $2,280 less than those with the lowest poverty rates - by far the largest gap in the nation.

PS--Following up on the NYT story I sent around recently about child porn and the internet, here's a link to an equally horrifying Dateline expose on pedophiles: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9927253.  They caught a ton of these evil men ON CAMERA, including a rabbi, a schoolteacher, etc...
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POOR KIDS GET LESS SCHOOL $$-AID

By DAVID ANDREATTA Education Reporter, NY Post, 12/22/05

Poor and minority schoolchildren are shortchanged on education aid in New York more than in any other state in the country, according to a new report to be released today.

School districts with the highest poverty rates in the state receive an average of $2,280 less than those with the lowest poverty rates - by far the largest gap in the nation.

The disparity translates to as much $3.42 million a year between a typical well-off high school of 1,500 students and an impoverished counterpart.  That's about $57,000 in a classroom of 25 kids.

Across the country, an average of $907 less is spent per student in poor districts than in affluent ones.

"Even before you account for the additional costs of educating kids in poverty, New York stands out for being more unfair than any other state in the country," said Ross Weiner, policy director for the Education Trust, which issued the report.

When it comes to spending on minority students, districts in the state with the lowest concentration of minorities receive $1,965 more per pupil than those with a sizable minority population - more than three times the national average of $614.

The Education Trust, a national advocacy organization, found aid inequities related to poverty in 27 of the 49 states examined, and underfunding in districts serving high numbers of minorities in 30 states.

Figures were derived from data for the 2002-03 school year.

The findings come as the state struggles to comply with a court order to pump an additional $5.6 billion into city schools annually.

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Thursday, December 22, 2005

Congress OKs $1.6B in hurricane school aid

Regardless of one's feelings on vouchers, I think this will be an important experiment.  It will be fascinating to see what happens when one takes students from one of the worst public school systems in the country and, overnight, voucherizes it.
Clint Bolick, president of the Alliance for School Choice, said the bill was a bipartisan victory for families and children. For students forced out of their home schools, the aid means that "at least for a year, their educational prospect are bright," Bolick said.
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Congress OKs $1.6B in hurricane school aid

By Ben Feller, AP Education Writer  |  December 22, 2005

 

WASHINGTON --Congress on Thursday approved $1.6 billion in hurricane relief for schools and colleges, including private-school aid that critics assailed as a national voucher experiment.

 

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings promised speedy delivery of the money wherever it is needed and pledged to work with state school chiefs to make that happen.

 

"The education community's response to Katrina has been overwhelming," she said. "Schools across the country have opened their doors and hearts to these children. They need and deserve this support."

 

"This agreement will allow much needed relief to finally reach the students, families and schools impacted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita," Rep. John Boehner, chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said before the vote. The hurricanes hit in August and September.

 

The school aid money became controversial when the issue of vouchers came into play.

 

Under the one-year deal approved by Congress, schools that enroll displaced students can be reimbursed up to $6,000 per student, or $7,500 for each student with disabilities.

 

The money will flow through public school districts, which will be responsible for passing along money to private schools, including religious schools, with eligible students.

 

Supporters said their plan is not a voucher program because public money will go to private schools as reimbursement for helping students, not to parents as a private-school coupon.

 

Critics see it as a voucher program that will sap money from public schools and perhaps set a precedent for a national expansion.

 

"Inserting a voucher scheme into the defense bill under the guise of national security represents an end-run around the legislative process," said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union.

 

Congress has made direct attempts to encourage voucher experiments for years. It has approved only one, private-school scholarships for poor children in the District of Columbia.

 

Clint Bolick, president of the Alliance for School Choice, said the bill was a bipartisan victory for families and children. For students forced out of their home schools, the aid means that "at least for a year, their educational prospect are bright," Bolick said.

 

An earlier version of the bill included a ban on federal money being used for "religious instruction, proselytization or worship." The final version includes no such restriction.

 

Higher education representatives had asked for $500 million. Colleges and universities in the Gulf Coast have scaled back faculty, staff and courses as they try to recover.

 

Of the $200 million approved for college aid, $190 million will be split evenly between the governing higher education boards in Mississippi and Louisiana for them to distribute. Private colleges and universities are expected to be eligible to apply for that money.

 

The remaining $10 million in college help will be available to Spellings to give to universities that have enrolled evacuated students.

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Intelligent Design Derailed

It is truly appalling that at a time when our public K-12 system is failing so badly that, for example, 60% of African-American 4th graders (ALL African-American children, not just low-income ones) can't read a simple children's book (like the one my 1st grader read to me tonight), we're wasting time and energy on utter horseshit like intelligent design.  This NYT editorial further shreads this ridiculous, transparent attempt to bring religion into the science classroom.  Isn't it bad enough that the Chinese and Indians are already kicking our butt in math and science without trying to teach kids that evolution is an unproven theory?!
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December 22, 2005
Editorial

Intelligent Design Derailed

By now, the Christian conservatives who once dominated the school board in Dover, Pa., ought to rue their recklessness in forcing biology classes to hear about "intelligent design" as an alternative to the theory of evolution. Not only were they voted off the school board by an exasperated public last November, but this week a federal district judge declared their handiwork unconstitutional and told the school district to abandon a policy of such "breathtaking inanity."

A new and wiser school board is planning to do just that by removing intelligent design from the science curriculum and perhaps placing it in an elective course on comparative religion. That would be a more appropriate venue to learn about what the judge deemed "a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism and not a scientific theory."

The intelligent design movement holds that life forms are too complex to have been formed by natural processes and must have been fashioned by a higher intelligence, which is never officially identified but which most adherents believe to be God. By injecting intelligent design into the science curriculum, the judge ruled, the board was unconstitutionally endorsing a religious viewpoint that advances "a particular version of Christianity."...

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Blowing the Whistle on Gangsta Culture

Three cheers for Bob Herbert for saying some politically incorrect truths:

I keep wondering when leaders of eminence will step forward and declare, unambiguously, that enough is enough, as they did in the heyday of the civil rights movement, when the enemy was white racism.

It is time to blow the whistle on the nitwits who have so successfully promoted a values system that embraces murder, drug-dealing, gang membership, misogyny, child abandonment and a sense of self so diseased that it teaches children to view the men in their orbit as niggaz and the women as hoes.

However this madness developed, it's time to bring it to an end.

I noticed that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Snoop Dogg and other "leaders" and celebrities turned out in South Central Los Angeles on Tuesday for the funeral of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the convicted killer and co-founder of the Crips street gang who was executed in California last week.

I remember talking over the years to parents in Los Angeles and elsewhere who were petrified that their children would be killed in cold blood - summarily executed, without any possibility of a defense or an appeal - by the Crips or some other gang because they just happened to be wearing the wrong color cap or jacket or whatever.

The enthusiastic turnout at Tookie Williams's funeral tells you much of what you need to know about the current state of black leadership in the U.S.

And:

This problem is not limited to the black community. E. J. Duncan and his friends came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. But it is primarily a black problem, and it is impossible to overstate its dimensions.

I understand that jobs are hard to come by for many people, and that many schools are substandard, and that racial discrimination is still widespread. But those are not good reasons for committing cultural suicide.

I'll paraphrase Sam Cooke: A change has got to come.

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December 22, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist

Blowing the Whistle on Gangsta Culture

BOSTON

Edwin "E. J." Duncan was a young man from a decent family who spent a great deal of time with his friends in an amateur recording studio his parents had set up for him in the basement of their home in the Dorchester neighborhood.

It was in that studio that Duncan, along with three of his closest friends, was murdered last week, shot to death by a killer or killers who have yet to be found. Whoever carried out the executions, it seems clear enough to me that young Duncan and his friends were among the latest victims of the profoundly self-destructive cultural influences that have spread like a cancer through much of the black community and beyond.

I keep wondering when leaders of eminence will step forward and declare, unambiguously, that enough is enough, as they did in the heyday of the civil rights movement, when the enemy was white racism...

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Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Academy Set to Keep Training Program for School Principals; Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World

1) A follow-up to yesterday's article.  This seems like a reasonable compromise:

The New York City Leadership Academy, a nearly $70 million principal training program that was one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's signature education efforts, will continue to exist as a private nonprofit group, its board announced yesterday.

 

The Department of Education, however, will pick up its single largest cost: the salaries and benefits of its principal trainees.

2) This is really scary -- I always knew this sordid world existed, but never realized its vast scope and sophistication.  I'm against the death penalty, but would be willing to waive my opposition for quite a few of the cretins in this article.
 
Kudos to this reporter, who both saved many lives and also will put many people in jail for a LONG time...
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New York Times

December 21, 2005

Academy Set to Keep Training Program for School Principals

By ELISSA GOOTMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/nyregion/21academy.html?pagewanted=print

 

The New York City Leadership Academy, a nearly $70 million principal training program that was one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's signature education efforts, will continue to exist as a private nonprofit group, its board announced yesterday.

 

The Department of Education, however, will pick up its single largest cost: the salaries and benefits of its principal trainees.

 

While the extent of public financing was not clear, the shift would signal the next stage for the program, which was started as a three-year, privately financed experiment for training new principals...

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Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World
Published: December 19, 2005

The 13-year-old boy sat in his California home, eyes fixed on a computer screen. He had never run with the popular crowd and long ago had turned to the Internet for the friends he craved. But on this day, Justin Berry's fascination with cyberspace would change his life.

Weeks before, Justin had hooked up a Web camera to his computer, hoping to use it to meet other teenagers online. Instead, he heard only from men who chatted with him by instant message as they watched his image on the Internet. To Justin, they seemed just like friends, ready with compliments and always offering gifts.

Now, on an afternoon in 2000, one member of his audience sent a proposal: he would pay Justin $50 to sit bare-chested in front of his Webcam for three minutes. The man explained that Justin could receive the money instantly and helped him open an account on PayPal.com, an online payment system.

"I figured, I took off my shirt at the pool for nothing," he said recently. "So, I was kind of like, what's the difference?"

Justin removed his T-shirt. The men watching him oozed compliments.

So began the secret life of a teenager who was lured into selling images of his body on the Internet over the course of five years. From the seduction that began that day, this soccer-playing honor roll student was drawn into performing in front of the Webcam - undressing, showering, masturbating and even having sex - for an audience of more than 1,500 people who paid him, over the years, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Justin's dark coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances. Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by inexpensive Webcams. And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents are nearby, beyond their children's closed bedroom doors.

The business has created youthful Internet pornography stars - with nicknames like Riotboyy, Miss Honey and Gigglez - whose images are traded online long after their sites have vanished. In this world, adolescents announce schedules of their next masturbation for customers who pay fees for the performance or monthly subscription charges. Eager customers can even buy "private shows," in which teenagers sexually perform while following real-time instructions.

A six-month investigation by The New York Times into this corner of the Internet found that such sites had emerged largely without attracting the attention of law enforcement or youth protection organizations. While experts with these groups said they had witnessed a recent deluge of illicit, self-generated Webcam images, they had not known of the evolution of sites where minors sold images of themselves for money...

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Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous

An interesting study...
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December 19, 2005

Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous

Working-age Americans who make $50,000 to $100,000 a year are two to six times more generous in the share of their investment assets that they give to charity than those Americans who make more than $10 million, a pioneering study of federal tax data shows.

The least generous of all working-age Americans in 2003, the latest year for which Internal Revenue Service data is available, were among the young and prosperous - the 285 taxpayers age 35 and under who made more than $10 million - and the 18,600 taxpayers making $500,000 to $1 million. The top group had on average $101 million of investment assets while the other group had on average $2.4 million of investment assets.

On average these two groups made charitable gifts equal to 0.4 percent of their assets, while people the same age who made $50,000 to $100,000 gave gifts equal to more than 2.5 percent of their investment assets, six times that of their far wealthier peers....

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Judge Bars 'Intelligent Design' From Pa. Classes; City Officials Put Academy for Principals Under Review

1) A victory for common sense!  So sad that this appears to be so rare these days...
 
2) An article in today's NYT about the Leadership Academy, which is sort of like Teach for America for principals from what I understand.  I think the fact that 77% of graduates are currently principals is actually a decent number; the real question is the cost, though I suppose that ALL principals should go through such a program...

Mr. Klein said in an interview that he was committed to keeping the program going, though at a slightly scaled-back level. He said that even though some candidates did not make it, the program infused the system with well-trained leaders and brought in more black men as principals. Many academy graduates, he said, were placed in tough schools, replacing poor principals that he described as "place-holders."

"I think it's made enormous sense," Mr. Klein said, "and, quite frankly, it's an enormous lever of reform."

But others are raising serious questions about whether the program, with a cost of $160,000 to $180,000 per principal, is worth the money, particularly if the city itself has to assume some of the cost. "Unfortunately, the number of recruits now assigned as principals is not impressive," Betsy Gotbaum, the public advocate, said in a statement yesterday.

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December 20, 2005

Judge Bars 'Intelligent Design' From Pa. Classes

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- "Intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said.

The school board policy, adopted in October 2004, was believed to have been the first of its kind in the nation.

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy," Jones wrote.

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City Officials Put Academy for Principals Under Review
Published: December 20, 2005

Junior High School 8 in Queens and Middle School 22 in the Bronx were sorely in need of a steady hand when they were assigned leaders fresh out the New York City Leadership Academy, the elite, $70 million principal-training program that was at the core of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's efforts to remake the school system.

Now, more than a year after Shimon Waronker became principal, M.S. 22 has fewer fights in the hallways; test scores have risen; and most students come to school wearing their new uniform of khakis and white shirts. But at J.H.S. 8, the principal, Adrienne Lloyd, was transferred to a different school last February after tensions with teachers grew so serious that the teachers' union gave her a symbolic "shame award."

The contrasting stories show that two and a half years after the academy was created as the most expensive and ambitious principal-training program in the country, its record is decidedly mixed. Of the 180 candidates who entered the academy, only 113 are now working as principals.

Thirty-three candidates dropped out or were counseled to leave before the training was over. Others graduated, only to be placed in administrative roles other than principal.

With the academy's private financing set to run out at the end of the school year, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and the other members of its board of directors are expected to begin shaping the program's future - from its financing to its scope - at a meeting today.

Mr. Klein said in an interview that he was committed to keeping the program going, though at a slightly scaled-back level. He said that even though some candidates did not make it, the program infused the system with well-trained leaders and brought in more black men as principals. Many academy graduates, he said, were placed in tough schools, replacing poor principals that he described as "place-holders."

"I think it's made enormous sense," Mr. Klein said, "and, quite frankly, it's an enormous lever of reform."

But others are raising serious questions about whether the program, with a cost of $160,000 to $180,000 per principal, is worth the money, particularly if the city itself has to assume some of the cost. "Unfortunately, the number of recruits now assigned as principals is not impressive," Betsy Gotbaum, the public advocate, said in a statement yesterday....

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Monday, December 19, 2005

An ed student's blog

I got a kick out of this ed student's blog (http://schoolnerdblog.blogspot.com), in which she rants about the idiocy of the "education" she's receiving, the pathetic level of knowledge of her 11th graders, and the even more pathetic teaching skills and attitude of many of the teachers she interns with.
 
My favorite quotes:
 
a) Comparing Gates fighting malaria vs. what needs to be done with our education system:
A Tanzanian health entomologist told the reporter, "I am sitting here watching my hair go gray and waiting for those nets. Every year a million more kids die. A decade ago, they were saying 'Let people die; there is nothing we can do.' Then Gates came along and he said this is not acceptable. That was more important than his money."

There are so many parallels here with education. Just as they know nets and insecticide work for malaria (they helped to eradicate it among officials in the British Raj in India), we know that discipline, hard work, and attention to academic rigor work for urban education. What's missing is merely the will to do it, someone to come and say "this is not acceptable." Everyone would rather wait for a magic bullet that's easy and cheap. Or perhaps they just don't care. The Tanzanian scientist said, "We already know how much eight hundred thousand African children are worth to the rich world. We have known it for a long time."

I hope that's not true, for African children or American children. But it's sad that a cold fish like Gates is the guy who has to save the rest of us from the collective guilt of a natural holocaust in Africa. We should take his initiative for ourselves here in America, regarding education. We should say something like, "The underclass in this country, who are disproportionately minorities, have hardly a chance to improve their circumstances. And the only way for that to change is to give everyone a good education. So that is what we are going to have to do." In other words, "This shit is not getting done. Therefore, we will have to do it."
b) On the pathetic knowledge of the students and lack of proper teaching by the teachers:
Unfortunately, the entire class today was "student-centered." Please read "none of the kids had any idea what was going on." We were reading various documents about colonists continual insistence upon taking Native American land after the American Revolution. The problem is that most of the kids still do not really know what the American Revolution was or who was even fighting in it, because they were never actually told what it was, explicity. That would have been wrong...I guess they were supposed to "construct" the two sides of the conflict from various bits and pieces of information thrown their way.

If you don't believe me that 11th graders don't know anything about the American Revolution, here are some student guesses I received today as to who fought who: 1) The colonists were fighting the Indians. 2) The British were fighting the English. 3) The whites were fighting the British. 4) The whites were fighting the English. And we can't forget 5) The Indians were fighting the Native Americans.
c) On the chaos that reigns in the classroom -- and the teacher who thinks it's OK:
As if this were not depressing enough, the kids' behavior in second period is getting out of control. They throw balls of paper. They swear at each other across the room. They hit one another. They rap. They yell. They do anything but the work. When the teacher talks, there are eight other conversations going on at the same volume level. My teacher refuses to do anything about this. Refuses. In fact, she thinks that "the class is going really well!" Whereas I would put it more like, "the class is an unmitigated disaster!" Today, another teacher who works with us suggested that we do something to stop them from throwing paper at each other, since it is completely ridiculous. When we see them do it, all we can do is tell them not to. They laugh it off. But she has tied our hands because she never set any limits or any consequences for acting like a total idiot. She said that their paper throwing didn't bother her. She doesn't want to be "authoritarian" with them. She doesn't want to say "oh no, you can't do that." Because somehow, that is wrong. The other teacher said, well, it's your call. But another thing is that oftentimes you're talking, and they're all talking over you. You respect them so much, and you should demand it back from them. She responded, "in my five years of experience, this type of thing gets better as time goes on and they come to know and respect me more." On the contrary. At the beginning of the year, their behavior ranged up and down the scale from "ok" down to "the worst behavior ever." Now it starts at "the worst behavior ever" and goes downhill from there.
 
d) On why she writes the blog:
Writing about the crazy things I see helps me step back into the world I've always known, where knowledge is good, achievement smiled upon, and intellect encouraged. Please do not believe that I am glad to witness any of the things I do. I wish to God I didn't see any of it. Many days I feel nauseous and near tears with the futility and the tragedy of the thing. It makes me crazy, just crazy. The only thing I can do, besides steeling myself against it all, is to write here. So that's why I do it.
e) More on the near-illiteracy of her 11th-grade students:
Today's post is simple. It is a series of paragraphs written by 11th grade students in my school. I do believe that posting these paragraphs is mildly unethical. However, I think the fact that these kids are allowed to get to 11th grade and write like this is positively immoral, and I think people should know about it. These excerpts are written responses to questions about a novel on the American Revolution. Just for extra safety, I took out the name of the book when it is directly stated and replaced it with brackets like this: [Title]

  • "I like how they showed how the black people got there freedom and what white men did to the blacks I did not know black men had to go to the army to get freedom"
  • "1 thing i liked about the book "[Title]" was that she kept on fighting for freedom and never gave up no matter what happen. She stood strong even when she witness her fathers die. I really didn't have any dislike's about the book. I would really recommand this book to other 11th graders."

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Charter schools see boom in signups

This is a key benefit of charter schools that is often overlooked because it's hard to measure: that they spur improvement in the regular schools!  Hard to see someone from the Detroit Public Schools saying (and doing) something like this in the absence of charters:

"We are trying to change how we do business," Oguntoyinbo said. "We are working twice, maybe three times harder than ever to prove public schools are the best options."

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Charter schools see boom in signups

Urban districts like Detroit feel pain from charters' 13% gain in enrollment in Michigan.

Doug Guthrie / The Detroit News

December 19, 2005

Fall enrollment in charter schools statewide reached a four-year high this year, with most of the gains coming from the state's urban districts, such as Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids.

Charter enrollment statewide rose to 91,000 students, a 13 percent increase, according to figures released last week by the Michigan Association of Public School Academies.

In Detroit, where authorities predict the public school system may have lost up to 10,000 students since last school year, charter school enrollment surged 22.5 percent.

Charter school enrollment will likely surpass 100,000 next year, as parents increasingly perceive them as better serving the needs of their children, said Dan Quisenberry, president of the Association of Public School Academies.

Barbara Williams pulled her daughter, Euneka, out of the first grade in a Detroit school and placed her in a charter school four years ago after she grew frustrated with school administrators.

"The Detroit Public Schools were too large for me. They didn't know how to communicate with me or my daughter," Williams said. "They said they were trying to change and I saw them falling behind."

Parents see charter schools as safer, more personal and more connected with individual needs -- something the public schools should be copying, said Margaret Trimmer Hartley, spokeswoman for the state's largest teacher union, the Michigan Education Association.

Lekan Oguntoyinbo, spokesman for Detroit Public Schools, said academic standards are higher in Detroit's schools than in many charter schools. Teachers are better qualified and better paid, and students have greater academic, extracurricular and athletic opportunities, he said.

The district takes some of the blame for the perception that charter schools are better, Oguntoyinbo said.

"For many years, we did not do a good enough job of telling our story," Oguntoyinbo said. "A lot of parents don't know how much progress we have made."

Some charters in Detroit have gained more students despite poor academic performance. Joy Preparatory Academy performed worse than Detroit schools on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests. Yet the charter school doubled its enrollment this fall to 293 students.

Williams, whose 10-year-old daughter is fifth-grader at Joy Preparatory, said the charter school's academic standing hasn't hurt her daughter.

"All schools have issues, whether it's Detroit Public Schools, Catholic or Lutheran," Williams said. "What I like about this school is I think they really care about the kids. It's a smaller school. I have a rapport with every administrator in the building. I like that."

Kelly Updike, of the Leona Group, which manages several charter schools in Metro Detroit including Joy Preparatory, said a safe environment and family-friendly small schools with personalized instruction are what most parents say they are looking for.

"In our urban schools, the majority of children who come to us are a couple of grade levels below where they should be," Updike said. "It takes time to change that and some tests scores can't measure the many aspects required to serve the whole child."

Detroit is addressing the safety issue through more surveillance cameras in schools and programs aimed at student behavior, Oguntoyinbo said.

He said charter schools can be selective in admissions, while the public schools must take all students, including those with special needs and behavioral problems.

"We are trying to change how we do business," Oguntoyinbo said. "We are working twice, maybe three times harder than ever to prove public schools are the best options."

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Fifth-graders get high-tech gifts

A great story from KIPP in Tulsa!
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Fifth-graders get high-tech gifts: They receive their own home computers in a donation from QuickTrip.

By Andrea Eger, The Tulsa World

12/17/05

 

Only a few minutes had passed since Christian Jackson Meeks and her 89 fifth-grade classmates at KIPP Tulsa College Preparatory had learned that they would all be receiving a free home computer.

Then it occurred to her what she might be able to do with that computer, besides the hours of homework she has to do every night.

"I'm gonna be able to e-mail my dad from home now," she said, explaining that her father, Alex Meeks, had recently left for his second tour in Iraq with the U.S. Army.

Christian said she has had to use her grandmother's computer for Internet access and to do assignments and reports for school because her family's home computer isn't working.

The convenience and luxury of a home computer for every KIPP student was made possible through a donation of unused computers by the QuikTrip Corp. and refurbishment and software installation by the Sunrise Rotary Club of Tulsa.

School officials surprised the students and their parents after KIPP Tulsa's Winter Extravaganza program on Friday afternoon.

After a music teacher led students through a host of songs and a few student achievement awards were handed out, Principal Millard House announced that there would be a drawing for a special prize.

Teachers distributed golden tickets with a number concealed inside to every student, and House unveiled the prize from behind the stage curtain: a home computer.

"I'm going to tell you a number and whoever has that number should hold their ticket up and wave it around like this," House said, demonstrating by waving his hand above his head as students giggled in anticipation.

He gave them a hint that the number was the year they would all be going to college.

They knew it by heart.

"2013!" the kids yelled, ripping open their tickets to find they all had the winning number.

Next, pandemonium.

All 90 students seemed to leap a foot and a half off the gym floor in unison, some crying, all screaming.

The few hundred parents and family members in the back quickly joined in the cheering and whooping -- and crying.

"I guess you know who had the number," House joked from the podium.

KIPP teachers cried as they watched their students celebrate.

Chris Truesdale, vice president of information systems for QuikTrip, told the students, "Enjoy these computers, learn from them and put them to good use."

Michael Briggs, director of community services for Sunrise Rotary, said he had read about KIPP Tulsa in the newspaper and contacted the new school because he wanted to do something to help.

He found out the school had received some free computers but officials couldn't do anything with them because they needed to be refurbished.

So Briggs asked his fellow Rotarians to help do the work and to donate money to purchase the software program Microsoft Office XP for Students for all of the computers.

"I've been looking forward to this for a long time," Briggs told the students about the surprise presentation.

He also encouraged them in their pursuit of a college education.

"You're never going to get anywhere if you don't have a specific goal in mind. So listen to your parents and teachers," Briggs said.

Christian Jackson Meeks said she had heard what Briggs and Truesdale had to say to her, and she wanted to say something back.

"I want to say thank you, thank you -- and I hope they do it again next year."

Andrea Eger 581-8470
andrea.eger@tulsaworld.com

 

KIPP students Shante Johnson (left) and Miriam Fields leap into the air after they and their classmates learned they were all getting home computers.
KELLY KERR / Tulsa World

All About KIPP Tulsa

KIPP Tulsa opened in August for fifth-graders only. It is part of a network of schools in the San Francisco-based Knowledge Is Power Program and is operated through a contract with Tulsa Public Schools. It is set to add one grade each year until it serves students in grades 5-8.

 

 

 

 

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Sunday, December 18, 2005

Ghosts of a Shuttered College Follow Weld Back Into Politics

What is it about for-profit schools that inevitably seems to lead to massive fraud?!  Bill Weld never had a chance against Spitzer, but that's now doubly true...

Mr. Urquilla, along with several other former Decker officials, have come forward to describe practices during Mr. Weld's 10-month tenure as chief executive that they say they considered improper and possibly illegal. The school closed in October.

A former admissions director has described the routine falsification of federal loan applications. The former head of Decker's online program says he saw systematic recruitment of students for Internet-based courses who had no access to a computer. A former instructor in Atlanta says administrators routinely shared test answers with students.

And a former instructor in Louisville says that in 2004 - when Mr. Weld was an active board member in Decker's parent company but not yet its chief executive - officials asked him to set up a sham classroom to fool accreditation inspectors.

In two lengthy interviews, Mr. Weld said repeatedly that he never saw evidence of wrongdoing and had not heard the complaints about document falsification or the way the college was handling loan applications. And no one who has stepped forward has said Mr. Weld was told directly of wrongdoing.

The story of Decker College is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls facing commercial colleges as they seek to build profits by recruiting struggling students eligible for financial aid while honoring their obligations as educators and stewards of federal loans.

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Ghosts of a Shuttered College Follow Weld Back Into Politics

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Carlos Urquilla said he felt lucky when he was hired a year ago to be a dean at Decker College here. A former Army lieutenant straight out of law school, Mr. Urquilla liked the way the school sold itself as a place to help poor students learn a trade.

But in his first weeks at the for-profit school, Mr. Urquilla says he found employees falsifying student attendance records, instructors helping students to cheat, and recruiters arranging federal loans for students who could not read.

Mr. Urquilla said he was fired after he complained to superiors. Months later, William F. Weld, then Decker's chief executive officer, who is now seeking the Republican nomination for governor of New York, signed a severance agreement with Mr. Urquilla. Its terms required him to keep quiet about the school, which offered courses in carpentry, electrical work and other trades, but he considers the agreement breached.

Mr. Urquilla, along with several other former Decker officials, have come forward to describe practices during Mr. Weld's 10-month tenure as chief executive that they say they considered improper and possibly illegal. The school closed in October...

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Saturday, December 17, 2005

Remote and Poked, Anthropology's Dream Tribe

This is a VERY interesting article, which will be published in tomorrow's NY Times.  It's fascinating to encounter people who time forgot -- who live today virtually identically to the way their ancestors lived hundreds of years ago.  I had such an experience last December when I was visiting my family in Kenya and my parents and I flew up to far northern Kenya to visit a school that serves Samburu children (it can't be far from where the Ariaal tribe is -- see article).  I posted pictures of our visit and a description of the school and the Thorn Tree Project, which aims to grow the school and educate more Samburu children, at www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Thorntreeproject.
 
I persuaded a few generous friends (mostly Ciccio Azzollini, whom I wrote about in this article (www.fool.com/news/commentary/2004/commentary040618wt.htm) and Bill Ackman -- thank you, gentlemen!) to donate money for four new dormitories and a computer lab, which will have a dozen laptops (thank you, Pfizer!) and a satellite dish that will provide a high-speed internet connection.  I think it's going to be really interesting to see what happens when the most isolated people in the world are exposed to the world wide web...
 
Ciccio, a friend from Pfizer and I (along with some family) are going back next month to celebrate the opening of the first two dorms and the computer lab.  We're going to spend the night, there's going to be a huge celebration, they'll slaughter a cow, the Samburu warriors will dance, etc.  It should be quite a trip!  I'll post pictures...
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Remote and Poked, Anthropology's Dream Tribe
By MARC LACEY
Published: December 18, 2005

LEWOGOSO LUKUMAI, Kenya - The rugged souls living in this remote desert enclave have been poked, pinched and plucked, all in the name of science. It is not always easy, they say, to be the subject of a human experiment.

"I thought I was being bewitched," Koitaton Garawale, a weathered cattleman, said of the time a researcher plucked a few hairs from atop his head. "I was afraid. I'd never seen such a thing before."

Another member of the tiny and reclusive Ariaal tribe, Leketon Lenarendile, scanned a handful of pictures laid before him by a researcher whose unstated goal was to gauge whether his body image had been influenced by outside media. "The girls like the ones like this," he said, repeating the exercise later and pointing to a rather slender man much like himself. "I don't know why they were asking me that," he said.

Anthropologists and other researchers have long searched the globe for people isolated from the modern world. The Ariaal, a nomadic community of about 10,000 people in northern Kenya, have been seized on by researchers since the 1970's, after one - an anthropologist, Elliot Fratkin - stumbled upon them and began publishing his accounts of their lives in academic journals.

Other researchers have done studies on everything from their cultural practices to their testosterone levels. National Geographic focused on the Ariaal in 1999, in an article on vanishing cultures...

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CER survey results on choice and charters; Charter Schools Make Big Gains in ISTEP Results

1) Some national survey results from the Center for Education Reform (which is not affiliated with Democrats for Eduction Reform):
  • By nearly a 3:1 margin, Americans agree that SCHOOL CHOICE IS BETTER than residence-based school assignment! This support for choice is most intense among 18-34 year olds.
     
  • Did you know that 20 percent of Americans recently surveyed could not correctly identify a charter school as a public school? However, once given some basic information, 78 percent supported the concept of charter schools because they are based on accountability, standards and innovation. Plus, they are achieving at excellent rates.
     
  • Charters enjoy tri-partisan support; Republicans (87%), Democrats (74%), especially Democratic women (77%), and Independents (70%) would all green light community efforts to create these "new public schools."
     
  • And the winner is... Although it lost in the Gubernator's special ballot initiative this past November, a clear majority of Americans (59 percent) support performance pay for teachers. The strongest levels of support came from adult minority Californians.
  • 2) Kudos to the KIPP in Indianapolis!

    KIPP Principal Omotayo Ola-Niyi says her fifth grade class performed at a second grade level when the school opened in 2004. She says one year later the students are nearly caught up. Their ISTEP scores improved by 11 percent this year.

    “Our students grew over two grade levels in every subject area,” she said.

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    Charter Schools Make Big Gains in ISTEP Results

    Dec 16, 2005, 06:12 PM EST

    http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=4255955&nav=0Ra7

     

    ISTEP scores were released earlier this week, and Indiana's students showed only marginal improvement from last year. But local charter schools made gains that outshone the traditional schools on the statewide exam.

     

    The fifth graders at the KIPP school in Haughville are aiming for college. KIPP stands for Knowledge is Power Program. The middle school the children attend is one of nine charter schools sponsored by Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson. Charter schools are public schools, but they have much more freedom than traditional schools.

     

    KIPP Principal Omotayo Ola-Niyi says her fifth grade class performed at a second grade level when the school opened in 2004. She says one year later the students are nearly caught up. Their ISTEP scores improved by 11 percent this year.

     

    “Our students grew over two grade levels in every subject area,” she said….

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