Category Archives: Education

No Soup for You — Unless You Sweep the Floor

Congressman Jack Kingston of Georgia is hoping to become Senator Jack Kingston next year.  So you gotta bring out the crazy if you’re gonna win the primary, right?

Kingston wants to abolish the federal lunch program for students from low-income families.  But if he can’t do that, he said today they should have to sweep the floor to get their lunch.

Baby Jesus and Frosty the Snowman

We can all sleep better at night now, people, especially if you live in Texas.  Gov. Rick Perry has solved a terrible problem.

It’s now okay to say “Merry Christmas” in Texas public schools.  Also, you can display symbols of Christmas if you have symbols of more than one religion or just one religion (guess which one!) and a secular symbol.

So look for Frosty the Snowman joining the Three Wise Men in the manger.  Perhaps Frosty will be holding a menorah.

My Yellow Brick Road

I would be heartbroken if yesterday’s bombing had happened in Boise or Birmingham.  But to have it happen in Boston is like breaking my heart and then stomping on it.

I grew up believing that I was incredibly lucky to be born an American and especially to be born a Bostonian.

If you were a bookish child in the 50’s and 60’s, especially a girl, Boston was a welcoming place to be.  Give us your near-sighted, your uncoordinated, your always-picked-last-for-sports…

I grew up not just in Boston, but in Dorchester, where Martin Richard was from.  It didn’t matter that I was poor because I knew that when I grew up, I would never again live in an apartment like my parents’.

When I passed through the doors of the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, where I spent many Saturdays between 7th and 12th grades, I wasn’t just  on my way to whatever research I was doing that day, I was on my way to my future life.   Boylston Street was my yellow brick road.

At the library, I did the research and analysis and writing that didn’t just get me into Wellesley and then Yale when it went co-ed, but also made it easy to excel once I got there.  I was a student at Girls’ Latin School, but I became a scholar at that library,  learning to use and value original sources, learning to think critically and draw my own conclusions.

To see death and blood and severed limbs right outside my library, this home to all the wisdom men and women have achieved, this sanctuary where the poorest of the city can enjoy the same resources as the richest, is unbearable to me.  My brain and body ache.

Jindal Popular With His Party, But Not His People

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has backed away from his budget plan to eliminate the state’s income and corporate taxes while raising the sales tax and heavily cutting health care and education.  Jindal’s approval rating has dropped to 38%, while support for his plan was at 27%.

Jindal is also one of the GOP governors refusing to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, even though the federal government initially pays for the entire expansion and subsequently pays for almost all of it.  Businesses support the expansion — why wouldn’t they want a healthier work force?

Jindal’s failed budget in some ways makes him a canary in the coal mine for GOP policies.  He’s very much in line with his party and groups like the Club for Growth, but not so much with his red state’s voters, who saw his budget as giving to the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class.

If Jindal really hopes to run in 2016, he needs to thread the needle of re-gaining his popularity at home while hewing to GOP orthodoxy.

The GOP seems to think its hope come from its governors, but when you try to enact its principles in the states, people don’t like the results.  It’s much easier for a congressman like Paul Ryan or senator like Rand Paul to spout this inequality-extending stuff in theory than to live with its unfair consequences in practice.

 

The Epidemic of ADHD Diagnoses

How can this be?

Almost one in five of American high school boys is being diagnosed with ADHD.  In the South, it’s almost one in four.

Children on Medicaid are diagnosed at rates about one-third higher than those who are not.

Taking ADHD medication can result in drug addiction and even psychosis.

Diagnoses have gone up more than 50% in the last decade.

Something is disturbingly, dangerously wrong here.  And I think it’s with our parents, schools, and doctors, not with our children.

For more see “More Diagnoses of Hyperactivity Causing Concern,” Alan Schwarz and Sarah Cohen, NYT

Fathers and Sons

From “Study of Men’s Falling Income Cites Single Parents,” Binyamin Appelbaum, NYT:

“The decline of two-parent households may be a significant reason for the divergent fortunes of male workers, whose earnings generally declined in recent decades, and female workers, whose earnings generally increased, a prominent labor economist argues in a new survey of existing research.

“David H. Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the difference between men and women, at least in part, may have roots in childhood. Only 63 percent of children lived in a household with two parents in 2010, down from 82 percent in 1970. The single parents raising the rest of those children are predominantly female. And there is growing evidence that sons raised by single mothers ‘appear to fare particularly poorly,’ Professor Autor wrote in an analysis for Third Way, a center-left policy research organization.

“In this telling, the economic struggles of male workers are both a cause and an effect of the breakdown of traditional households. Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so some women are choosing to raise children by themselves, in turn often producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners.

“’A vicious cycle may ensue,’ wrote Professor Autor and his co-author, Melanie Wasserman, a graduate student, ‘with the poor economic prospects of less educated males creating differentially large disadvantages for their sons, thus potentially reinforcing the development of the gender gap in the next generation.’

“The fall of men in the workplace is widely regarded by economists as one of the nation’s most important and puzzling trends. While men, on average, still earn more than women, the gap between them has narrowed considerably, particularly among more recent entrants to the labor force.

“For all Americans, it has become much harder to make a living without a college degree, for intertwined reasons including foreign competition, advancements in technology and the decline of unions. Over the same period, the earnings of college graduates have increased. Women have responded exactly as economists would have predicted, by going to college in record numbers. Men, mysteriously, have not.

“Among people who were 35 years old in 2010, for example, women were 17 percent more likely to have attended college, and 23 percent more likely to hold an undergraduate degree.”

Having raised a son in a two-parent household, this theory makes sense to me on a gut level.  I was the one who made sure my son had the latest video game he wanted, my husband was the one who made sure he did his homework.

Now Prez Racking Up Pinocchios

I previously posted that Education Secretary Arne Duncan got Four Pinocchios (the maximum) from Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact checker, for making false claims about teachers losing their jobs because of the sequester.

Now the President himself is getting the dubious award for saying this:

“Starting tomorrow everybody here, all the folks who are cleaning the floors at the Capitol.  Now that Congress has left, somebody’s going to be vacuuming and cleaning those floors and throwing out the garbage. They’re going to have less pay. The janitors, the security guards, they just got a pay cut, and they’ve got to figure out how to manage that. That’s real.”

The superintendent of the Capitol told Kessler that’s simply not true.

If the Administration continues to exaggerate the effects of the sequester, they are going to lose their political advantage over the GOP with voters.  People don’t like being lied to.

Also, the Dems can’t vote against (and Obama can’t threaten to veto) giving the President more flexibility to allocate the spending cuts, and then complain about how arbitrary and mindless the cuts are.

The President and the Dems need public pressure to get the GOP to relent on revenue.  But you don’t get that by making things up, you just lose credibility.

WaPo Calls BS on Phony Sequester Hype

The fact checker at the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, has given Four Pinocchios to Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s claim that as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs and some are already getting pink slips because of the sequester.

If the Administration isn’t more careful — and honest — they are going to lose their political advantage here over the GOP and the sequester really could blow up in the President’s face.

If people are getting fed up with the Government That Cried Wolf, they’re not going to take to President Chicken Little.