A jump in advanced placement test scores is good news to Oak Park-River Forest High School administrators, though it's dampened by a drop in the number of minority students enrolling in AP classes,
says Oak Leaves.
Dampened? The writer means caused? Unless the gap has been closed, in which case this blog missed a major story.
posted by Jim Bowman @ 8/30/2006 09:56:00 AM
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The teachers union didn't like my "government monopoly" comment [says ABC’s John Stossel], but even the late Albert Shanker, once president of the American Federation of Teachers, admitted that our schools are virtual monopolies of the state -- run pretty much like Cuban and North Korean schools. He said, "It's time to admit that the public education system operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."
A teachers’ union president said that? Phew.
posted by Jim Bowman @ 8/30/2006 08:48:00 AM
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No was at there studio and he wouldn't let me go on because he had sheriff Lee on , so I went to WDSU and did my report there .
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Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Device
posted by Jim Bowman @ 8/27/2006 09:40:00 AM
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. . . a few weeks ago, two women, probably mothers:
#1 with boy, probably son, age 6 or so, at his beck and call, hops up from little table of his choosing (she meets his requirements) many times in course of 15–minute muffin breakfast, depositing stuff in trash container or getting napkins. She has an itch.
#2 with little girl, probably daughter, tells her to pick a table, she picked an adult one, settles self there while woman gets muffins, even saving stool for her with her yellow and red mini-backpack, waits. Woman brings muffins, sits on saved stool, crosses long legs, pulls out paper, reads while little girl eats, looking into space, relaxed. A few bites and she's off to the little kids’ area and book shelf, gets a picture book, returns and looks it over.
posted by Jim Bowman @ 8/26/2006 11:47:00 AM
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"Why are you dressed like that?" asks the Jewish mother of her son when he visits her wearing the uniform of a naval officer. "Because, Mama," he explains, "I just bought a boat, and I'm the captain." To which, smiling fondly, she replies, "Well, by you you're a captain. And by me you're a captain. But by a captain are you a captain?"
That’s Norman Podhoretz in Opinion Journal, asking Is the Bush Doctrine Dead? The president's critics are wrong. That includes the neocons.
He continues.
Which is to say that, like Ronald Reagan before him, George W. Bush may be an ideologue "by" most politicians (who believe in nothing much and are always ready to trade a principle for a political gain), but "by" an ideologue he's no ideologue.
Which is to show you can be funny while serious.
posted by Jim Bowman @ 8/24/2006 12:03:00 PM
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How’s this for Lib-Dem crude? It’s a list of Republicans and other undesirables who support Sen. Joseph Lieberman in his primary race with an anti-war zealot:
posted by Jim Bowman @ 8/03/2006 09:48:00 AM
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Juan Cole lost out as a tenured prof at Yale because of his insufficient scholarly record, says David White, not because right-wingers pressured anyone, as charged. The relevant committee did, however, note other matters:
"What first blindsided them," [former Yale Prof Mary] Habeck explained, "was his political involvement in so many controversial topics. I can say unequivocally that at the beginning, they weren't aware of Juan Cole's blogging life." [Italics added]
Yes. How can you be a trustworthy scholar while so involved? Can’t be done, sez I.
posted by Jim Bowman @ 8/03/2006 09:08:00 AM
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Call it McLuhan’s revenge:
[O]ur new post-literate Democrats have largely come to live in an image driven, magical world, where a picture of a coffin coming back to the United States or a weeping Iraqi in a war-torn village trumps the hard fact that Iraqis have more freedom than ever before in their history.
That’s investment-fund man Eric Singer on how TV’s “images without consequences” — one-night stands without pregnancy, gang-bangers made to look attractive, divorce without harm to children — have taken over the second-oldest profession, politics. McLuhan’s after Marshall M. in his Gutenberg Galaxy, consideration of which leads Singer to see us as “higher apes at a watering hole,” the hold being TV.
That being so and mainstreamers being mostly Democrats, conservatives should be more in the game, countering this “image driven, magical world” inhabited by “post-literate Democrats” with “a positive patriotic story to be told in images that the public understands,” if offered only on the Internet. Government should be in this game:
[T]here is no excuse for having an empty propaganda war chest. . . . the failure to use images effectively to promote the War on Islamo-Fascism undermines support for, and ultimate success in, the War.
Otherwise, it won’t happen, since
most of our leading media outlets suffer from Stockholm syndrome. Unlike World War II, we do not know why we fight, and we do not know our enemy. Because we are in a preventive war, and not a reactive war with millions already dead, the government finds it does not have the same panoply of tools available to FDR, such as internment, widespread censorship and propaganda. Worst of all, the genuine heroism of our troops is buried under a bushel.
Citing the recently released movie “United 93,” which “captured the consequences of letting terrorists get control,” he calls on individual, especially bloggers, “to join the image wars on the side of
posted by Jim Bowman @ 8/03/2006 07:49:00 AM
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Books and essays, ideas from lots of places, some of them wild and woolly. This blog has conservative commentary, with special attention to literature, Oak Park Illinois, and cultural drift in general. Motto: "Two Cents and worth it"
Ex-newsman, ex-Jesuit, ex-preacher. Writer, pewsitter, reader.
