Prometheus 6

About 6,000 scores from when the website started in 2003 to the present are in question, GMAC spokeswoman Judy Phair said Wednesday. It's unclear how many test-takers are involved because they can take the test several times a year.

The council plans to match data with test-takers and cancel the scores of anyone who it determines knowingly used Scoretop to cheat on the test. It will also notify the schools that received scores, and perhaps prevent cheaters from retaking the test. Phair said she couldn't offer a timetable on the process.

Business school exam publisher tracking down Web cheaters
July 3, 2008

RICHMOND, VA. — Prospective and current graduate business students who used a website to cheat on entrance examinations over the last five years could have their scores thrown out.

If CareFirst is not fulfilling its charitable public-health mission -- a charge by the District that CareFirst firmly rejects -- then why is the mayor seeking and accepting CareFirst money for a purpose that has nothing to do with public health?

Tainted Money For D.C. Schools
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, June 28, 2008; A15

What to think about the nonprofit D.C. Public Education Fund created by Mayor Adrian Fenty? It is supposed to have a good purpose: raising funds in the private sector to help the public schools with their operating budgets.

Fenty is said to be following the lead of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who tapped well-heeled New Yorkers for money for schools after he was elected.

But is Fenty going about it the right way?

Should he, for example, solicit money for his private D.C. Public Education Fund from an organization that the District government is suing?

The Nation's Most Elite Public Schools
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 23, 2008; 6:13 AM

I am ranking them by one of the most common, and to me most annoying, measures of high school worth--average total reading and math SAT scores. Those test results are most closely tied to the income of the families that raise these fine students. There is something of that relationship at these schools too. But once you get this many bright students together, SAT becomes largely irrelevant, since they have all gone far beyond the 10th-grade reading comprehension and math puzzles that make up those exams. Notice, for instance, the surprises. Some very well-known elite schools have much lower average SATs than some others. Some selective high schools with terrific reputations, like Lowell in San Francisco, do not have high enough SAT averages to make the Public Elites list and so remain on the main list. It shows how little significance SAT numbers have.

Time Magazine has published a story about a cohort of teenaged girls who made a pregnancy pact. The New York Times basically rewrote the article today (they gave credit to Time), though it adds an interview with a school board member. You can read either, but read one of them.

School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.

“Banks are not philanthropic agencies,” said Pat Watkins, director of financial aid at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. The institution was recently informed by Wells Fargo that the bank would not extend loans to its students anymore, Dr. Watkins said. If lenders cannot make the profit they require on loans, she said, “a lot of the banks will just say, we’re out of the business completely, you pushed us out.”

Bill Promotes Universal College Loans
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

Responding to reports that some lenders have stopped offering federal loans at community and other colleges, two Democratic senators introduced legislation Tuesday to prohibit lenders from picking and choosing among institutions.

Under the proposal, lenders that participate in the federal loan program would have to extend credit to any eligible student, regardless of such things as income or the number of years of education, as long as the college is part of the program.

The government already guarantees the loans at nearly full value.

PBS' The Newshour has been running a series on the reconstruction of the two most imperiled school districts in the country: Washington, D.C. and New Orleans. This segment is about teaching first graders to read in New Orleans.

I think it's quite the revealing report. They visited three schools: one that was undamagedby Hurricane Katrina and two that were housed in temporary buildings...one of which was swamped by 4-5 times the number of returning families than it was budgeted for. The results they found was pretty much what you'd expect.

Still, I got kind of a kick out of watching these 5-6 year old reading with comprehension in the first two schools. And you have to ask, what's going to happen to the kids that attend school #3, where the classes are crowded and most of the teachers are new and/or uncertified. Will they come to grief...and will they be condemned in the name of personal responsibility?

Conservatives Can't Vouch for Vouchers, But They Will Mislead
By Isaiah J. Poole
June 17th, 2008 - 10:45am ET

The propaganda machine supporting school vouchers, headquartered in the office of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, is determined not to let the facts get in the way of conservative ideological spin.

The press release for a report released Monday on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program—a masterfully euphemistic name for a program that uses public funds to pay for private school education—is headlined: "Report Reaffirms Academic Gains for D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Participants."

The report actually says this:

This vouchers for private schools crap is more to subsidize the private schools than to educate the kids.

1,900 Scholarships
Del. Norton moves to take a valued educational option from the poor.
Thursday, June 12, 2008; A22

DEL. ELEANOR Holmes Norton's campaign against school vouchers in the District has hit a new low. While proclaiming a desire to protect children, she is seeking to eliminate a program that benefits them and that is valued by their parents. Her actions make it all the more urgent for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty to convince Congress that the educational interests of children are more important than party ideology. Failure to do so would imperil not just the 1,900 children in the scholarship program but the essence of school reform in the District.

“She and Bush have a special relationship, a camaraderie,” Mr. Spellings said of his wife, adding, “She trusts him, and she loves him.”

Damn...Margaret, Harriet, Condi...I'm starting to think Bush had pheromone air freshener for when funny looking women come into his office.

Margaret Spellings is still trying to hold it down for No Child Left Behind, which I still feel is best summarized thus:

I wouldn't think NCLB needs much comment beyond satire, except we're going to have to undo the damage Margaret Spellings, Rod Paige and Bush have done.

The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents....

“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Dr. Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”...

The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”

That question, too, is problematic, the report said, because it diverts attention from systemic failings of K-to-12 schools, shifting responsibility for educational success to individual students. In addition, it said, lumping together all Asian groups masks the poverty and academic difficulties of some subgroups.

The report said the model-minority perception pitted Asian-Americans against African-Americans. With the drop in black and Latino enrollment at selective public universities that are not allowed to consider race in admissions, Asian-Americans have been turned into buffers, the report said, “middlemen in the cost-benefit analysis of wins and losses.” 

Report Takes Aim at ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students
By TAMAR LEWIN

The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.

I quote from Economics Explained : Everything You Need to Know About How the Economy Works and Where It's Going, page 161:

No society has ever become literate solely based upon private education. Yet nothing pays off economically for a society more than having an educated work force.

The need for education on a social level is an economic enabler. It's the most important a factor in increasing productivity. It's one of the major factors in the consistant increase in the USofA's GDP. It is infrastructure.

Attack on Charters
An attempt in the D.C. Council to undercut a relative success in the city's educational system
Monday, June 9, 2008; A16

DISTRICT OFFICIALS may well have come up with a way to stem the exodus of children from the troubled public schools: Just make it harder for popular charter schools to set up shop. A mean-spirited proposal to impose new restrictions on charter schools threatens to undo one of the few good-news stories in Washington education.

Property Taxes ’08

New York’s homeowners can’t be blamed for wanting relief from today’s heart-stopping property-tax bills. But a new call to cap property taxes for schools is an election-year gimmick that will do far more damage than good. Gov. David Paterson, who endorsed the idea on Tuesday, should take a deep breath and then call for a broader look at ways to make taxes fairer and the state’s contributions to schools more equitable.

The proposal would allow local property taxes for schools — usually about 60 percent of the bill — to increase at no more than 4 percent each year outside of the cities. To go over that cap, at least 55 percent of local voters would have to approve it. But as communities in California and Massachusetts have learned the hard way, a tax cap is a dangerously blunt instrument.

Echoing school officials in Miami-Dade and Broward, FEA spokesman Mark Pudlow said most schools spend more than 65 percent of their operations money in the classroom anyway. But the number depends on the meaning of ''classroom instruction'' and whether it includes media specialists and school psychologists.

Pudlow said allowing for more public money to be spent on private schools will make things even worse.

''This doesn't make the pie any bigger. It just rearranges the pie,'' he said. ``The 65 percent solution is a Trojan horse. And what's inside is vouchers.''

And if that don't work there's still the "starve the beast" strategy.

Only 50 percent of voters like the tax commission's proposal to eliminate the state-directed portion of school property taxes, replacing the revenue with budget cuts and increases in sales taxes and other taxes. About 64 percent of voters said they were familiar with the tax-swap plan.

Word change ups chances for school vouchers
BY MARC CAPUTO

A majority of Florida voters don't want to spend public money on private and religious schools -- but they'll probably vote by large margins to do it in November, anyway, according to a new poll.

The reason: A tactical decision by the state Taxation and Budget Reform Commission to combine private-school vouchers with a proposal to ensure that 65 percent of every education dollar is spent in the classroom.

Known as the ''65 percent solution,'' the measure is so popular that 63 percent of voters would approve the constitutional amendment if the election were held today, according to the new poll from Quinnipiac University.

But if vouchers stood alone on the ballot, only 38 percent of voters would favor it, with 56 percent opposed, the poll found.

Even when they think they found evidence of gender differences in education the difference was literally too trivial for serious consideration.

No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says
Academic Success Linked to Income
By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 20, 2008; A01

A new study to be released today on gender equity in education concludes that a "boys crisis" in U.S. schools is a myth and that both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade.

The report by the nonprofit American Association of University Women, which promotes education and equity for women, reviewed nearly 40 years of data on achievement from fourth grade to college and for the first time analyzed gender differences within economic and ethnic categories.

The most important conclusion of "Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education" is that academic success is more closely associated with family income than with gender, its authors said.

And incidentally:

GDP growth is hardly the only indication of a move away from U.S. economic dominance. The rise of sovereign wealth funds -- in countries such as China, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates -- is another. These government-controlled pools of wealth, mostly the result of oil and gas exports, now total some $3 trillion. They are growing at a projected rate of $1 trillion a year and are an increasingly important source of liquidity for U.S. firms.

This, not handing it over to people who already have so much money they could never spend it all, is what we should have done with our budget surpluses. AFTER paying back all our national debt. But noooo...

The Age of Nonpolarity
What Will Follow U.S. Dominance
By Richard N. Haass
From Foreign Affairs , May/June 2008

Summary: The United States' unipolar moment is over. International relations in the twenty-first century will be defined by nonpolarity. Power will be diffuse rather than concentrated, and the decline as that of nonstate actors increases. But this is not all bad news for the United States; Washington can still manage the transition and make the world a safer place.

RICHARD N. HAASS is President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The principal characteristic of twenty-first-century international relations is turning out to be nonpolarity: a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power. This represents a tectonic shift from the past.

The twentieth century started out distinctly multipolar. But after almost 50 years, two world wars, and many smaller conflicts, a bipolar system emerged. Then, with the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, bipolarity gave way to unipolarity -- an international system dominated by one power, in this case the United States. But today power is diffuse, and the onset of nonpolarity raises a number of important questions. How does nonpolarity differ from other forms of international order? How and why did it materialize? What are its likely consequences? And how should the United States respond?

This is what happens when you take schools away instead of fixing them.

Failings of One Brooklyn High School May Threaten a Neighbor’s Success
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Set just a few subway stops apart in blue-collar Brooklyn, drawing from a similar pool of new immigrants and American-born blacks, two high schools spent the past decade careering toward opposite destinies. The question now is whether the failure of one will destroy the success of the other.

Since the late 1990s, Lafayette High School in the Bath Beach neighborhood graduated fewer than half its students, posted dismal scores on standardized tests and, in the view of federal civil rights officials, “deliberately ignored” a series of bias attacks against Chinese-American students, including a valedictorian.

And some districts have found other benefits to a closed-lunch policy: In Denver, attendance in afternoon classes improved after many 9th and 10th graders were barred from going out to lunch last school year. In Bridgman, Mich., a town of about 2,500 on Lake Michigan, cafeteria sales have been up more than 10 percent in the two years since the high school closed its campus.

“Our food service program operates in the black now, whereas it never did before,” said Kevin Ivers, Bridgman’s superintendent, noting that the high school had added a second lunch period to reduce lines, and overhauled the menu to introduce quesadillas, yogurt, salads and fruit. “That enables us to put more money into the classrooms.”

Fatal Accidents Erode Perk of Off-Campus Lunches
By WINNIE HU

SMITHTOWN, N.Y. — The students used to overflow the wooden booths and green tables at Don Jono’s Pizzeria, racing through pepperoni slices and large sodas before driving the quarter-mile back to Smithtown High School West in time for their next class.

But now the pizzas pile up behind the counter. Pete Crescimanno, a compact man with a neat black mustache who co-owns the place, estimates that he has lost more than $500 a week in sales since the school district ended its longstanding policy of allowing seniors to go off-campus for lunch. One recent morning, Mr. Crescimanno and an assistant pounded and tossed dough in a nearly empty storefront, with only the radio to break the silence.

“It’s not the same, and you miss that because you used to prepare for the kids and now you don’t see them,” he said. “Of course, you miss the business, but you also miss the fact that they’re not here anymore.”

“The process is flawed because it starts with the assumption that a property tax cap is something that we need,” said Richard C. Iannuzzi, the union’s president, above. “When you start with the conclusion that it has to be a cap, you limit the ability to look at things.

“That destroyed the public school system in California, and we’re not going to let that happen in New York.” 

A Hunger for a Property Tax Cap, but the Teachers’ Union Isn’t Feeling It
By DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY — The next battleground for the teachers’ union is almost certain to be property taxes.

Last week, a special property tax commission set up by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and supported by his successor, Gov. David A. Paterson, wrapped up its sixth and final hearing. The commission is due to issue a report by May 22 that will include imposing a ceiling on annual property tax increases by school districts as its signature proposal, though the form of any limit remains to be determined.

“There seems to be a real appetite to do something,” the Nassau County executive and the commission’s chairman, Thomas R. Suozzi, said of the idea of a tax cap. Mr. Suozzi added that he had courted the leaders of the Legislature — Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno — and was encouraged.

But here’s the hitch.

"Parents in well-to-do communities can raise significant sums of money to augment their local schools' budgets, while schools in low-income neighborhoods fall further behind," said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. "This is part of the reason that we have an achievement gap in California. We have an economic and moral imperative to close this gap."

California public schools seek private money just to cover the basics
Foundations are nothing new, but they're multiplying as huge budgets cuts loom. And beyond enrichment, their goals now are saving teacher positions and keeping class sizes down.
By Seema Mehta
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 20, 2008

South Orange County families are being urged to donate $400 per student to save the jobs of 266 teachers in the Capistrano Unified School District.

Parents at Long Beach's Longfellow Elementary are among countless statewide who are launching fundraising foundations.

A Million Here, A Million There
What's a Seven-Figure House? Not What Many Expect.
By Dina ElBoghdady and Mary Ellen Slayter
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 19, 2008; F01

Stephanie and Ed Aron figured they would spend about $850,000 to buy a home. But before they knew it, they were signing a $1.2 million contract for a newly built house in Bethesda.

"When I was growing up, a $1 million house meant you had a pool and a driver," said Ed Aron, 37, who is from rural Colorado. "But we're just a middle-class family."

For many home buyers, reaching the $1 million threshold can be an intensely emotional experience, even though that's not an unusual amount to spend in parts of the Washington area. Here, that kind of money can buy a wide range of homes, from a three-bedroom condominium in Cleveland Park to a waterfront estate in Calvert County.

Also, I for get who asked a while back but here's some discussion (on P6, of course) on the physical basis of stereotype threat. Scientific American makes this stuff more accessible than research papers do.

How Stereotyping Yourself Contributes to Your Success (or Failure)
People's performance on intellectual and athletic tasks is shaped by awareness of stereotypes about the groups to which they belong. New research explains why— and how we can break free from the expectations of others
By S. Alexander Haslam, Jessica Salvatore, Thomas Kessler and Stephen D. Reicher

You tried so hard. But you failed. You did not pass the test, you performed poorly in the interview or you missed your project goal at the office. Why? Is it that you were not capable? Or could something more subtle—and worrisome—also be at work?

As it turns out, research shows that such performance failures cannot always be attributed simply to inherent lack of ability or incompetence. Although some have jumped to the highly controversial conclusion that differences in attainment reflect natural differences between groups, the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes, or preconceptions, that others hold about the groups to which we belong. For instance, a woman who knows that women as a group are believed to do worse than men in math will, indeed, tend to perform less well on math tests as a result.

The same is true for any member of a group who is aware that his or her group is considered to be inferior to others in a given domain of performance—whether it is one that appears to tap intellectual and academic ability or one that is designed to establish athletic and sporting prowess. Just as women’s performance on spatial and mathematical tasks is created by, and appears to “prove,” the stereotype of their spatial and mathematical inferiority, so, too, the sporting performance of a team of long-failing underdogs will tend to live up (or, in fact, down) to its low expectations.

The social psychological research that has uncovered these effects is an important development of theoretical work initiated in the 1970s that focused on issues of social identity—looking at how people see themselves as members of a particular group and what the implications of this are. More important, however, social identity research examines not only how we both take on (internalize) and live out (externalize) identities that are shared with our peers—other members of our in-group—but also how these things can change. This research helps us to understand the debilitating consequences of sexism, racism, homophobia and the like, as well as to identify ways of addressing the problems they cause so that human talent and potential are not neglected or squandered.

Part of the story here involves ­recognizing not only that stereotypes can promote failure but that they can also lift a person’s or group’s performance and be tools that promote social progress. Understanding these ­dynamics—and the processes that ­underpin them—enables us to think more productively about the conditions that allow ability to be expressed rather than repressed and that foster success rather than failure.

Sorry, I don't feel clever. 

Exit of College Lenders Sets Off Scramble To Fill Breach
By David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 10, 2008; A01

Nearly 50 student lenders, including some of the industry's biggest names, have stopped issuing federally guaranteed loans in recent weeks because of paralysis in the credit markets, confronting students with higher borrowing costs just as they are starting to apply for financial assistance for the coming school year.

These companies represented 12 percent of the market before they left, and analysts say this is just the beginning of an exodus. That is because virtually all student lenders have been shut out of their traditional funding sources on the debt markets. Dozens of other lenders that offer private loans, which have no federal backing, have also dropped out.

Last night I picked up on two opinion pieces in the Washington Post. The Real Cost Of Public Schools, actually an unsigned editorial, and Graduation Madness by Ted Mitchell and Jonathan Schorr.

The Real Cost Of Public Schools has this absurdity.

We're often told that public schools are underfunded. In the District, the spending figure cited most commonly is $8,322 per child, but total spending is close to $25,000 per child -- on par with tuition at Sidwell Friends, the private school Chelsea Clinton attended in the 1990s.

“We recently made all abortion terms stop words,” Debra L. Dickson, a Popline manager, wrote. “As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”...

Under the rule, Popline ignored the word “abortion,” just as it ignores terms like “a” and “the.” Ms. Sorrough and a colleague, Gloria Won, reported their experience on an electronic mailing list, and librarians protested the restrictions.

“We sent this out on a listserv, and it just exploded,” Ms. Sorrough said. “Eliminating this term essentially blocks access to reports in the database and ultimately to information about abortion. Unwanted pregnancy is not a synonym for abortion.” 

Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Johns Hopkins University said Friday that it had programmed its computers to ignore the word “abortion” in searches of a large, publicly financed database of information on reproductive health after federal officials raised questions about two articles in the database. The dean of the Public Health School lifted the restrictions after learning of them.

A spokesman for the school, Timothy M. Parsons, said the restrictions were enforced starting in February.

Johns Hopkins manages the population database known as Popline with money from the Agency for International Development.