Archive for the 'Education' Category

Linda Gray: Arizona state legislator, idiot

The boneheads in the Arizona state legislature seem to think that Arizona’s school children are learning too much. Arizona’s schools are currently ranked 50th in the nation. Out of 50. But Arizona’s lawmakers seem to be shooting for 51st.

To that end, the Arizona legislature cut over $350 million from the 2009 education budget, and plans to slash another $1 billion in 2010.

That didn’t make any sense to a 14-year-old special needs student from Phoenix, so she fired off an email to his State Senator, Linda Gray. What he got back was a rambling, ungrammatical mess of a reply in which Gray taunts the student for his lack of communication skills:

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Looks like the charlatans and snake-oil pitchmen who sell their humbuggery by calling it “alternative medicine” are finally being chased out of British academia:

Last month, Salford University dropped its course in homeopathy for which the vice-chancellor, Professor Michael Harloe, won the praise of big-name scientists in a letter to the Times. Westminster University is strengthening the “science base” of its courses, while the University of Central Lancashire (Uclan) suspended its homeopathy degree last year and is now undertaking a review of other courses.

Professor Edzard Ernst, director of the complementary medicine centre at Exeter University’s Peninsula medical school, which tests complimentary and alternative (CAM) therapies, says most of the subjects are so far removed from science they should not be taught as scientific courses.

“BScs in energy healing or homeopathy are not only out of line with science but profoundly the opposite of science. They could be taught in a scientific fashion but, as far as I can see, they aren’t and that’s disturbing. People are very cagey about disclosing the contents of courses. To teach at academic level, these courses need critical evaluators as teachers rather than promoters of it,” he says.

“Academics could present the claims and then look at the evidence and plausibility of the concepts, and do this with scientific rigour. But the sad truth is that that’s not happening. Students are unsuspecting victims of brainwashing, if you take it to the extreme, which is the exact opposite of an academic training.”

Unfortunately, unscientific theories continue to be taught in the UK and elsewhere. In the US, Sen. Tom Harkin and other well-meaning liberals went so far as to establish the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, funded by taxpayer dollars. Part of the center’s stated mission is to “investigate and validate alternative medical approaches”, but Harkin began to attack the center when its researchers wound up debunking many alternative therapies. That explains why most alternative practitioners don’t conduct clinical trials of their practices, but it doesn’t explain why so many publicly-funded institutions continue to pretend that these practices are scientifically valid.

Alex Barton

This is unbelievably sad:

Melissa Barton said she is considering legal action after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class. After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn’t like about Barton’s 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher said they were going to take a vote, Barton said. By a 14 to 2 margin, the class voted him out of the class.

Barton said her son is in the process of being diagnosed with Aspberger’s, a type of high-functioning autism. Alex began the testing process in February for an official diagnosis under the suggestion of Morningside Principal Marsha Cully. Alex has had disciplinary issues because of his disabilities, Barton said. The school and district has met with Barton and her son to create an individual education plan, she said. His teacher, Wendy Portillo, has attended these meetings.

Barton said after the vote, Alex’s teacher asked him how he felt. “He said, ‘I feel sad.’”

Alex left the classroom and spent the rest of the day in the nurse’s office. Barton said when she came to pick up her son at the school on Wednesday, he was leaving the nurse’s office. “He was shaken up,” she said. Alex hasn’t been back to school since then, and Barton said he won’t be returning. He starts screaming when she brings him with her to drop off his sibling at school.

Thursday night, his mother heard him saying “I’m not special.”

Barton said Alex is reliving the incident. They said he was “disgusting” and “annoying,” Barton said. “He was incredibly upset. The only friend he has ever made in his life was forced to do this.”

(cross posted at Liberal Avenger and This Old Brit)

For one thing, we make it as convenient as possible for teens to buy junk food at school.

Seriously, isn’t there ANY better way to fund our schools? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just pay the extra taxes?

Judge rules school must permit gay pride shirts.

You get suspended from school.

Apparently, though, it’s illegal to compel students to recite the pledge. Perhaps the district superintendent should take a remedial civics class.

Maria Merziotis, after her 3rd place finish at last year’s science fair

17 year-old Maria Merziotis won Canada’s national science fair by inventing a new method of identifying and treating flu infections:

It’s not the long-sought cure for the common cold but a 17-year-old Ottawa high school student won a national science competition today by developing a novel way of identifying and perhaps even fighting flu infections. Maria Merziotis, a Grade 12 student at Hillcrest High School, won a $5,000 first prize and a chance to take her discovery to an international competition in San Diego next month.

The flu virus attacks human cells by binding to a compound called sialic acid, or sialyllactose, on the cell surface. Merziotis synthesized a floating form of the acid, which dupes the virus with an alternative attachment site.

A team of three Toronto Grade 10 students, Jonathan Schneider, Josh Alman and Norman Yau from the University of Toronto School, won the $4,000 second prize for identifying genes that help a plant thrive in salty soil. Vandana Rawal, a 15-year-old from Montreal’s Centennial Regional High School, won third place and $3,000 for discovering a human gene variation that may help in dealing with bipolar disorder.

Health Canada is already looking at Merziotis’s work, which offers a new way of identifying, and perhaps even fighting different influenza strains.

So one Canadian teen invented a new way of fighting the flu, another identified genes for thriving in salty soil, and a team of high school sophomores discovered a possible genetic cause of bipolar disorder.

Meanwhile, more Creation Science Fairs are held every year across the United States.

(cross posted at Liberal Avenger and This Old Brit)

A former Dartmouth English professor is threatening to sue her students because their anti-intellectualism is creating a hostile work environment. This is just the latest example of how political correctness is ruining America’s best universities.

Or so the editors of the Wall Street Journal would have you believe. When this story appeared in the Journal on May 5, I thought it was likely that this was either a hoax or an overblown story, and I did a little googling. It turns out that the entire episode erupted when Priya Venkatesan sent the following bizarre email to her former students:

Dear former class members of Science, Technology and Society:

I tried to send an email through my server but got undelivered messages. I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal discrimination laws.

The feeling that I am getting from the outside world is that Dartmouth is considered a bigoted place, so this may not be news and I may be successful in this lawsuit. I am also writing a book detailing my eperiences as your instructor, which will “name names” so to speak. I have all of your evaluation and these will be reproduced in the book.

Have a nice day.

Looks like Venkatesan was really angry, really drunk, or both. I mean really: “anti-federal discrimination laws”? At any rate, Gawker scooped the Wall Street journal on this non-story by about a week, publishing their account way back on April 29. And Gawker followed up on April 30 with a report that Venkatesan had decided not to file a lawsuit after all.

So here’s the bottom line: a former professor threatened to file a lawsuit against her students for being mean to her, but dropped the idea when she realized she didn’t have a case. The story was picked up by the Dartmouth News and a gossip site called Gawker, which have an obvious interest in news about Dartmouth and ‘news of the weird.” A week later, the Wall Street Journal decided that the episode constitutes a major story about how political correctness undermines academic standards at our best universities.

I spent much of this morning reading this fascinating site that debunks Ben Stein’s new anti-science flick, Expelled. (Via.) From there, I wound up re-watching this amazing NOVA about the fight that erupted when the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania tried to introduce creationism in to science class. It’s damn good TV, well worth an hour of your time. It really exposes what an absolute fraud intelligent design is.

Cross-posted.

EDIT: Sorry, Ben Stein. Crazy typo.

Over in Australia, some students at Brisbane’s all-boys Anglican Church Grammar School vow to boycott their senior prom because of a ban on same-sex couples.

In the United States, this would be a non-issue, because religious schools generally aren’t funded by the government, so they can get away with quite a bit of discrimination. But in Australia, the federal government actually gives more money to private schools than it gives to public schools. Now that the Labour party is in charge of the government, we’ll see if Australia’s religious schools are allowed to continue their practice of discrimination. Private schools in the US are always pressing for federal subsidies in the form of vouchers. But I wonder if they’ve thought through the compromises that could be imposed on them by the government if they get their wish.

Administrators at America’s private schools would do well to remember the Golden Rule: he who provides the gold, makes the rules.

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Private schools in Australia are booming, and for much the same reason that American private schools grew in the 1960s and 1970s: white families don’t want their kids to go to school with nonwhite students. The practice of using private education to create a segregated school system was despicable, but at least in the US it wasn’t subsidized by the federal government.