Gone Camping

Yes, the boy and I are off for our annual camping trip. I doubt if there will be many posts between August 1 and August 10. Don't worry though, I will be back (and maybe The Frustrated Lawyer will chime in).

Have a great couple weeks!

NCLB Smackdown! Ouch!

I don't know how I got there, but I ended up at cleveland.com reading some reactions to a pseudo-letter published in the Clevelnad Plain Dealer. It is an apology from a principal to his constituents (yeah, the parents, students and teachers) for having to shortchange everyone in favor of testing. I guess it's a little over-the-top, but it makes the point rather well.

Anyway, at the site I ended up at, cleveland.com, the general feeling among the commenters was that the principal is a wimp, shamed the district, and should just shut the fuck up. Commenters go on and on about how schools and teachers are paid for with tax dollars, so the public should get more for their money, blah, blah, blah. This is the "Government School" crowd who can't wait to privatize education. I guess they don't realize privatizing it won't help, but whatever.

Now to the point of this post. One commenter decided to put into words something I have tried to say many times. I have seen versions of this in the past, but this comment is solid.

To all who have commented:

It seems evident from the majority who have responded that accountability of taxpayers' dollars is of paramount importance. I too don't want my taxes wasted, so let's improvise a bit. Education deals with the human condition as opposed to industries based on the production or servicing of inanimate objects. Perhaps we could curtail tax waste by uplifting the "No Child Left Behind" education law as a model for tax dollar accountability in other societal based endeavors receiving federal money of any sort. (Please remember, NCLB call for 100% student proficiency by 2014)

Given a 10 year deadline, police will eliminate 100 percent of all crime in local communities. Officers and administrators will face termination if significant progress isn't made over three-year intervals during the decade.

Given a 10 year deadline, established organizations whose purpose is to counter drug abuse will eliminate substance abuse with 100 percent efficiency within their jurisdiciton. Agents of such organizations (counselors, DEA personnel, law enforcement officials) will be terminated if significant reduction in drug abuse is registered over three year intervals during the decade.

Given a 10 year deadline, all medical practitioners and hospitals who accept Medicare payments will achieve a 100 percent recovery rate of their patients or be denied all future Medicare patients. (Practitioners deemed ineffective by the 100 percent criterion in publicly funded hospitals will be terminated.)

Given a 10 year deadline, all universities receiving federal funding (or accepting students with outstanding federal education loans) will achieve a 100 percent graduation rate. If the graduation rate does not make significant improvement over three-year intervals, identified professors from ineffective departments will be terminated.

In each of the preceding examples progress rates will be published on a regular basis in local newspapers keeping the public abreast on whose doing the best job with the public's (federal) money.

I am sure we can agree that "data-driven" proficiency/efficiency plans are the way to go to get maximum mileage from our tax dollars. They provide simple answers for very complex issues.

Yeah! If we are going to hold teachers accountable, after all, they are paid with public money, we should hold all the public employees accountable! So let's pay that rude DMV representative more money if she can plow through more vehicle registrations than her coworkers! Who cares about fairness when we can have accountability!!!!

Let's not forget Jay P Greene! He has a line by line takedown of the letter by the principal. He is just so horrible!

Jay P. Greene: Moron

I was visiting this lover of NCLB's site. He has a book. It got slammed on the Amazon comments (full disclosure, it was half and half, but the good half are his sycophants). I copied and pasted one of the comments, from none other than Philip Kovacs, and within minutes, JayP removed it and disabled comments on that page! He is a world-class putz, apparently.

You should head over to JayP's site and try to read his stuff (others find it laughable too). He is a professor, but I think he is getting paid by some rich folks to do their bidding. I could be wrong, but I'm not.

Shakesville: Most Hypocritical Site Ever? Updated!

(This is a re post of the other one. The comments are gone, though it was only 2 of us. I will try to recover them. Shouldn't blog with the kids.)comment recovered

Over at Shakesville they are ripping a movie promo about father's rights. Now, admittedly, the trailer is awful. The acting is bad, there's too much gratuitous sex and violence, and the whole thing just looks bad.

The problem, though, is not with the trailer. It is the non-nonchalance with which The Sister herself trivializes the very real problem facing parents who enter family court; especially stand-up fathers. Here is McEwan:

A word of warning to anyone considering the old "my cousin's best friend's brother's wife is a crazy bitch who won't let him see his kid and he's honestly a good guy I swear and his kid is dying to see him but she's totally a crazy bitch and did I mention she's a crazy bitch?" routine: Great. Good for him and shame on her, if it's true [emphasis mine].

Remember the shit Hillary got when she said Obama was not a Muslim, as far as she knew?
Well, here we have McEwan doing the same thing to good fathers. According to her post, McEwan seems to think the notion of a good father is nearly impossible; so nearly impossible that anyone claiming to know a good father (who is also the victim of a bat-shit crazy female partner) should be derided, blown-off, and doubted.

I have had the pleasure of commenting on the blog over there, and let me tell you, that is one intolerant community. I check them out weekly, and usually find something interesting. This one today though, struck a cord. Probably because I am one of those men who had to fight for every second I got with my son, who now lives mostly with me (not because his mom is a crazy bitch, but because the judge realized that my son deserved BOTH parents, and due to our schedules, that's how it worked out--which should be the default setting for conciliation/family courts, but it's not).

The courts are not family friendly. They deal with the worst of society, and that is how they are set up to run. The courts make assumptions about the population it serves, and, apparently, it serves a population of crappy fathers. The only problem is, we are not all crappy fathers. In fact, some of us good fathers, whose children have good mothers, are frequently sold short in court by requiring we pay for all attorney's fees (because we are men?), pay for a long-cause hearing, pay for psychological evaluations (to rule out "?") and be happy with visitation. VISITATION? You want me to VISIT my child?

Look shakers, you have your niche where you point out every misogynist, sexist, ...ist thing you can find. Great. How about you do a little digging into this father's rights thing and see, if just maybe, we are not all trying to get custody of our children so we can beat them. Douchebags!

(Maybe The Frustrated Lawyer will chime in?)

UPDATE: Here is what I think is a comment representative of Shakesville. It is from the thread about the above mentioned item:

Molly, NYC
" . . . she's totally a crazy bitch and did I mention she's a crazy bitch?" routine: Great. Good for him and shame on her, if it's true.

Rule of thumb: In any he-said-she-said argument, unless she's clearly in the aluminum-foil-hat brigade, if he starts impugning her sanity, he's lying through his teeth.

Then came a levelheaded comment that was met with derision:

closette
Bad acting, bad script from what I can tell, and I've no idea who the intended audience is meant to be (unless they're imprisoned in some kind of right-wing Christian compound and not allowed outside).

But it doesn't mean that there is no systemic bias against fathers in Family Court, unless you really believe that MOST fathers are undeserving of more than a few days a month with their children. Yes, that is the norm (otherwise why caution against too many anecdotes?). Also you'll find a selection effect in groups - more women screwed over among feminists, and more men screwed over among MRAs. No surprise there.

Conversely, the few cases where a real (i.e. not just alleged) 'bad dad" gets custody seem to be anomalies due to the system's incompetence, nepotism and cronyism. All the same, they are signs that the whole system needs to be reformed way from perpetuating itself by its "winner takes all" approach.

By the way, I suspect that its balding male judges, not "feminists", who are hardest on fathers, combining a toxic mix of political correctness and good old-fashioned chivalry to "help the [helpless, childlike] woman". It will be interesting to see how they handle lesbian custody battles in the future.

But Starfoxy couldn't agree with such sense-making gibberish:

Starfoxy

But it doesn't mean that there is no systemic bias against fathers in Family Court, unless you really believe that MOST fathers are undeserving of more than a few days a month with their children.

This assumes that custody is awarded based on what the parents 'deserve' which isn't and should not be the case. Custody should be awarded in ways that best meet the needs of the kids, and in a divorce kids do best with continuity. That means that if mom was doing 90% of the caregiving then she should get [emphasis mine] 90% of the custody because that is what the kid is used to. This is true even if dad is a great guy and totally deserves to spend time with his kids. If fathers want to spend time with their kids after a divorce then they should start the habit before a divorce.

Notice how Starfoxy phrases that; its as if there is some sort of competition, and therefore some handicapping should come into play, regardless of anything outside the time-I-spent-as-opposed-to-the-time-you-spent giving care. That is the only measure. Giving care. Dare I say how do we define that? I wonder how long it will take to bring up breast feeding? Lawn mowing? Money earning? Dish washing? Driving to school? Shall I go on? I think Starfoxy's rubric is a bit nebulous.

Kids deserve their parents. Up until a few years ago in California the law was such that a custodial parent could move to Timbuktu. They changed that and now the custodial parent has to do what the court says is in the best interest of the child. I think it changed in 2004, not sure though. But at least the court recognized that kids deserve their parents, and one parent could not do whatever he/she wants just because there is a custody arrangement. These arrangements are made for myriad reasons, having nothing to do with abuse, or neglect, or not giving the right/equitable amount of care in someone else's eyes. The court now assumes both parents, as opposed to assuming only the mother, will participate in the raising and care giving of their child. Over at Shakesville, they are of the mind that fathers suck, and probably wish the court had not set a new precedent a few years back. Well, my son just asked for dessert, and I don't have any. What do I do?

Here's hoping we get over our stereotypes!

"We Must Guard Against the Acquisition of Unwarranted Influence...

...whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

That first part of Ike's farewell we have not remembered. Unwarranted Influence. Understatement of the year century! Read this.

Reich: A Little Perspective

Does it seem like all you do is work, work, work? Well, You do!

The Myth of Summer Vacation

I'm about to take a few weeks off. If you are, too, we're in the minority. A Conference Board poll last April found fewer than 40 percent of Americans planning a summer vacation.

Of course, for most Americans, there's not much summer vacation to begin with. The average American employee gets a total of 14 days off each year. If you want to take a few of them around Thanksgiving, between Christmas and New Years, and maybe when the kids are home on spring break, summer vacation is already practically gone.

Those 14 days, by the way, are the fewest vacation days in any advanced economy. The average French worker gets 37 days off annually; In Britain, it's 26.

And even when we take those 14 days, we don't always get paid for them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us 1 out of 4 workers gets no paid vacation days at all. Every other advanced nation -- and even lots of developing nations -- mandate them.

On top of all this comes the current economic squeeze. That figure of 40 percent of Americans planning a summer vacation is the lowest in 30 years.

Not incidentally, consumer confidence in the economy is the lowest it's been in 28 years. In other words, there's a correlation between the small number of Americans taking a vacation this summer and this very bad economy.

It's not that we're too busy to vacation. Just the opposite: There's not enough work go around. Which means we don't dare leave work, lest we lose us a customer who might just happen to want us when we're gone. Or we could even lose the job, because employees on vacation might seem expendable to an employer looking for a way to cut costs.

Despite all this, you need a summer vacation. I do, too. I'll return in August.

Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I'll piss on 'em

Eighteen months of detention. This video of the daughter of the incarcerated is important to watch. This young woman, well, I hope she gets to stay in America!


from MJ

Robocalls

I just received a robocall from Hollywood Video. They were trying to get me to sign up for something. Of course, when I hung up on them, and then picked back up, they were still there. It takes a few seconds for the line to disconnect. The only way to get off the list is to call them back. If you don't have caller ID, that could be a problem. So, I call them back, at their 888-285-5905 number, and after pressing myriad buttons, and following directions, I think I have successfully removed myself from their list.

There is a button you can push to hear their privacy policy. The funny thing about the recording regarding the privacy policy is that it sounds, well, smarmy. Like they know they are assholes, but they have the law on their side (which they mention) so they are allowed to annoy you at dinnertime, legally, even though their message makes it sound as if they understand the immorality, invasiveness, and assholeishness of their position. Reminds me of someone....

Punishment for Torture

Ever wonder how the punishment prescribed by Congress for torture compares with the punishment it prescribes for other offenses?

Under federal law, the punishment for committing or attempting to commit torture is a fine or imprisonment for up to 20 years, or both.

-For distributing at least 5 kilograms of cocaine (or 1 kilogram of heroin or 1000 kilograms of marijuana), federal law requires a sentence of at least 10 years and no more than life imprisonment. If the person has a prior felony drug conviction, the minimum sentence is 20 years, with a maximum of life imprisonment.

-File-sharing child pornography calls for a sentence of between 5 and 20 years.

-If you're an illegal alien who was deported after an aggravated-felony conviction and who reenters the United States: a fine or imprisonment for up to 20 years.

-A person who possesses a machine gun during and in relation to a crime of violence or drug-trafficking crime gets hit with a 30-year mandatory sentence that must run consecutive to any sentence for the underlying crime.

Is there something screwy about the punishment priorities here? Or maybe torture's not such a big deal.

Robert Reich: Make Obama Hire You!

As usual, Bob says it like it is. Now, I don't know Bob very well, but I do know he is one of the nicest guys in the world. He cares about people, has many friends--who are just normal people--and is probably one of the smartest guys ever to have a stint in government. If you do not read his blog, you should. Here is his latest on our suffering economy:

The Heart of the Economic Mess

The Federal Reserve Board's "beige book" for June and July offers a clear explanation for why the economy has slowed to a crawl. It shows American consumers cutting way back on their purchases of everything from food to cars to appliances to name-brand products. As they do so, employers inevitably are cutting back on the hours they need people to work for them, thereby contributing to a downward spiral.

The normal remedies for economic downturns are necessary. But even an adequate stimulus package will offer only temporary relief this time, because this isn’t a normal downturn. The problem lies deeper. Most Americans can no longer maintain their standard of living. The only lasting remedy is to improve their standard of living by widening the circle of prosperity.

The heart of the matter isn't the collapse in housing prices or even the frenetic rise in oil and food prices. These are contributing to the mess but they are not creating it directly. The basic reality is this: For most Americans, earnings have not kept up with the cost of living. This is not a new phenomenon but it has finally caught up with the pocketbooks of average people. If you look at the earnings of non-government workers, especially the hourly workers who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, you'll find they are barely higher than they were in the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Per-person productivity has grown considerably since then, but most Americans have not reaped the benefits of those productivity gains. They've gone largely to the top.

Inequality on this scale is bad for many reasons but it is also bad for the economy. The wealthy devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they’re rich. They already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, the very wealthy are more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

This underlying earnings problem has been masked for years as middle- and lower-income Americans found means to live beyond their paychecks. But they have now run out of such coping mechanisms. As I've noted elsewhere, the first coping mechanism was to send more women into paid work. Most women streamed into the work force in the 1970s less because new professional opportunities opened up to them than because they had to prop up family incomes. The percentage of American working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970 — to more than 70 percent. But there’s a limit to how many mothers can maintain paying jobs.

So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages. They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.

But there’s also a limit to how many hours Americans can put into work, so Americans turned to a third coping mechanism. They began to borrow. With housing prices rising briskly through the 1990s and even faster from 2002 to 2006, they turned their homes into piggy banks by refinancing home mortgages and taking out home-equity loans. But this third strategy also had a built-in limit. And now, with the bursting of the housing bubble, the piggy banks are closing. Americans are reaching the end of their ability to borrow and lenders have reached the end of their capacity to lend. Credit-card debt, meanwhile, has reached dangerous proportions. Banks are now pulling back.

As a result, typical Americans have run out of coping mechanisms to keep up their standard of living. That means there's not enough purhasing power in the economy to buy all the goods and services it's producing. We’re finally reaping the whirlwind of widening inequality and ever more concentrated wealth.

The only way to keep the economy going over the long run is to increase the real earnings of middle and lower-middle class Americans. The answer is not to protect jobs through trade protection. That would only drive up the prices of everything purchased from abroad. Most routine jobs are being automated anyway. Nor is the answer to give tax breaks to the very wealthy and to giant corporations in the hope they will trickle down to everyone else. We've tried that and it hasn't worked. Nothing has trickled down.

Rather, the long-term answer is for us to invest in the productivity of our working people -- enabling families to afford health insurance and have access to good schools and higher education, while also rebuilding our infrastructure and investing in the clean energy technologies of the future. We must also adopt progressive taxes at the federal, state, and local levels. In other words, we must rebuild the American economy from the bottom up. It cannot be rebuilt from the top down.

Barack Okennereagama

Here is Obama's speech from Berlin. Pretty impressive!

Stephen Colbert Pussed Out On Spellings (updated)

Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education, and NCLB proponent went on The Colbert Report last night. Stephen, to his credit, asked about sanctions, but his follow-up was a bit lacking.

[this section updated to reflect the fact that prior to update it was a jumbled mess]Spellings said they shouldn't be called sanctions since what they do is help schools be accountable by giving them help! Schools are accountable to whom?-accountable to parents. Parents apparently are not accountable for the education of their children; teachers are. So, it would follow that: patients are not accountable; doctors are. Criminals are not accountable; lawyers are. Congress is not accountable; THE PEOPLE ARE!!!!!!!!

Accountability is something every citizen has. No-one is allowed to blame someone else if one has not taken action one's self to try to ameliorate the offending situation. If your kid ain't learnin', you try help the little fella. Maybe you need to do some learnin' in order to help, so, get on that. Don't expect someone else--a doctor, teacher, politician, lawyer--to fix your shit. Fix your own shit, then you can start to ask for assistance in fixing the shit that you cannot fix on your own. But please, don't expect anyone to fix your shit while you drink a beer.

Read my thoughts on a certain sanction: http://www.thefrustratedteacher.blogspot.com/2008/05/curriculum-of-sanction-lucy-calkins.html

Your Federal Tax Dollars Hard at Work

This sad, sad -- and true -- story will make you glad that Homeland Security is looking out for us all....NOT.

Once upon a time there was a hard-working Mexican citizen, living illegally in the United States with his wife and two school-age kids. Let's call him Luis. He'd never been in trouble with the law; he worked hard as a carpenter and eventually was able to set up his own carpentry shop. He hired some other Mexican citizens, also here illegally and without work authorization, to help out in the shop. Luis' wife also worked in his shop. By all accounts, Luis did good work and treated his workers well. He even paid federal and state taxes for himself and his workers, though because the social-security numbers were false, nobody would be able to claim a penny from the government in benefits.

One day someone called the ICE (Immigration Control and Enforcement, the new INS) tip line and told them that Luis was employing illegal aliens. ICE promptly launched a six-month investigation into Luis and his carpentry shop, sending undercover agents to the shop to talk to Luis and surreptitiously taking pictures of his employees. ICE even recruited one of Luis' workers to act as an informant, complete with body wire.

Ultimately, the federal government charged Luis with, among other things, the felony offense of "harboring" illegal aliens by employing them in his carpentry shop. One of the eight aliens he is charged with harboring is HIS WIFE, the mother of his (now three -- they have a newborn daughter) children. After all, Luis not only employed her but also sheltered her in his house and occasionally drove her to work.

After it filed charges against Luis, the government deported most of his employees. Now, however, in preparation for Luis' trial, they have brought the employees back to the United States (at taxpayer expense) on special one-year visas AND given them authorization to work here. Apparently it's okay for illegal aliens to work here as long as they're useful to the federal government.

Luis, meanwhile, is on house arrest and cannot work to support his family or even leave his home for enough time to make arrangements to rent out his carpentry tools, which are sitting, unused, in storage. He wonders whether he can get permission from the government to take his elementary-school-age daughter to the library for a few hours each week, as recommended by her summer-school teacher. Luis' arrest and the six months he spent in jail have been hard on his daughter, and her schoolwork has suffered.

I can't tell you how many person-hours the government has spent investigating and persecuting -- I mean, prosecuting -- this poor man and his family. How much money it has wasted, and how much venom it has spat, in trying to make this guy out to be Homeland Security priority number one. Shit.

Educational Research: Mostly Crap

Here is a little nugget from a 2007 journal article (or pdf) regarding the re-authorization of NCLB. In it they question the SBR (scientifically based research) requirement that all materials must meet to conform to NCLB. I have said many times that educational research is some of the poorest, least robust, most maligned research. Here is a good reason why:

A basic research goal for educational research is to determine causation. The advantage of using SBR is that having a control group allows a better explanation of the variance in the data. Even with a control group, however, educational research must account for the intentionality of both students and teachers. This is not trivial [emphasis mine]. Intentionality refers to the ability of students and/or teachers to behave in a way that is not norm-regulated (Howe, 2005, p. 311). To determine the effectiveness of an intervention, researchers must assume that control and test group teachers deliver the same content in exactly the same way to the same mix of children. Research design options can minimize errors for these assumptions, but not without considerable efforts and collaboration (National Research Council, 2005, p. 30). Student populations vary widely in their ethnicity, socio-economic status, and family backgrounds. These factors can be controlled for. The student motivation, the intentionality of students and teachers and the variety of administrative philosophies make it impossible to control for all variability [emphasis mine]. Many of these constructs cannot be measured or scaled as a data point; however, each can strongly influence educational achievement. The variance inherent within each of the constructs does not lend itself well to SBR, even with randomization and a control group.

We can't even measure this shit! We know the problems are societal. We have big things to fix before anything is going to improve. All this nonsense is a reaction, and it is a knee-jerk reaction, providing a lot of people with a whole lot space for their self-serving, career-advancing, kid-under-the-bus-throwing, teacher blaming, policy excusing nonsense they decided to name NCLB. TAKE A STAND!!!!!!

So Long, Suppression

Another remnant of the Fourth Amendment is on its way out...

So, the NYTimes yesterday not only predicted but pretty much called for an end to the exclusionary rule, which generally prohibits the government from using at trial evidence that the police obtained by violating the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. The article says that the United States is the only country that "routinely and automatically" suppresses unconstitutionally obtained evidence and claims that police misconduct may be better punished by, say, "internal discipline and civil suits."

Yeah, I have some problems with this.

Let's talk about the alleged "routine and automatic" suppression of evidence. I practice before a relatively liberal court. I've worked on maybe 50 or 60 motions to suppress evidence in my nearly 12 years of practice. I can count on one hand the ones that resulted in ANY evidence being suppressed and on three fingers the ones that resulted in the prosecution being dismissed. (In one of those cases, the defendant was then given a seven-year sentence in a parole-revocation hearing, at which the exclusionary rule does not apply.) Now maybe I'm a bad lawyer, but I don't know anyone who wins these things routinely and automatically. Cops lie, and judges believe them and will look for absolutely any excuse--and the decade-long erosion of Fourth Amendment rights provides many--to not suppress evidence.

Let's talk about the other proposed remedies for police misconduct. Internal discipline? What a joke. Getting the bad guys by any means is cause for police celebration, not punishment. And the Supreme Court justices who are gunning to get rid of the exclusionary rule and suggest civil suits as an alternative remedy seem to have forgotten that 14 years ago the Court decided that you can't sue the police for an illegal search unless you first can prove that you are innocent of committing the crime for which you were prosecuted based on illegally obtained evidence. In other words, if the police bust down your door in the middle of the night and tear apart your house--in clear, blatant and intentional violation of the Fourth Amendment--and eventually find drugs, you can't sue them for the unconstitutional search unless you first can prove that you're innocent of any drug charge. Good luck with that.

One final point about comparing the criminal justice system in the US with the system in other countries. The article begins with the story of a case from Canada: Guy is stopped, illegally, with 77 pounds of cocaine in the truck, and the Canadian courts declined to suppress the evidence. The guy gets five years in prison. In the U.S., someone caught with that much cocaine, with no prior criminal record, would be looking at 12 1/2 to 15 1/2 years in prison under the federal sentencing guidelines. Kind of a big difference in penalty there. You can't just look at one piece of the system in isolation.