Aszilvasy

In the last half-century, baby-naming has become more susceptible to trendiness:

Last year, a total of 20,791 Emmas were born in the United States. The size of that cohort was only surpassed by the 22,158 Sophias added to the US population in 2012. Together, both names came out on top in 47 of the 50 states. …

Considering the top names for girls per state, we see two distinct blocks emerging: Sophialand is anchored on the West Coast, with 7 of its 16 states forming a contiguous territory, from Washington State all the way down to Texas. Its giant next-door neighbour Emmaland occupies a gigantic swathe of land across the west, ranging unimpeded into Pennsylvania. A few mutual enclaves and exclaves complicate the situation in the Midwestern to Northeastern area: there are four Sophia-enclaves (Illinois, Ohio, Rhode Island and a complex of 5 contiguous states: New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia). All the Emma states are contiguous, except for Emmaland’s New England province: Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The US’s two non-contiguous states each declare for either of the main nations: Alaska is Emmaland, Hawaii is Sophialand.

Frank Jacobs notes that the boy version of the map is “much more fragmented: 11 names circulate as states favourites, instead of only 5 on the girls’ side” – as seen below:

More here. Previous Dish on baby names here.

Faculty at San Jose State University have signed a letter opposing the administration’s decision to use online courses developed by faculty at Harvard, MIT, and other eastern universities. The San Jose professors see the adoption of online courses as a deliberate strategy to replace them and downsize their departments. The professors of the humanities are especially incensed.

Their letter was addressed to Harvard professor Michael Sandel, whose course on social justice was offered online to San Jose State.

An excerpt:

• “In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience, we believe that having a scholar teach and engage his or her own students in person is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students.” 
• “We fear that two classes of universities will be created: one, well- funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of videotaped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant.” 

   

• “We believe the purchasing of online … courses is not driven by concerns about pedagogy, but by an effort to restructure the U.S. university system in general, and our own California State University system in particular.” 

   

• “At a news conference (April 10, 2013, at SJSU) … California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged as much: ‘The old education financing model, frankly, is no longer sustainable.’ This is the crux of the problem. … The purchasing of (online courses) from outside vendors is the first step toward restructuring the CSU.” 
• “Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education.” 
• “Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

The strange, fascinating story of a man who believed he was brain-dead offers insight into what it feels like to have Cotard’s syndrome:

Nine years ago, Graham woke up and discovered he was dead. He was in the grip of Cotard’s syndrome. People with this rare condition believe that they, or parts of their body, no longer exist. For Graham, it was his brain that was dead, and he believed that he had killed it. Suffering from severe depression, he had tried to commit suicide by taking an electrical appliance with him into the bath.

Eight months later, he told his doctor his brain had died or was, at best, missing. “It’s really hard to explain,” he says. “I just felt like my brain didn’t exist any more. I kept on telling the doctors that the tablets weren’t going to do me any good because I didn’t have a brain. I’d fried it in the bath.”

Doctors found trying to rationalise with Graham was impossible. Even as he sat there talking, breathing – living – he could not accept that his brain was alive. “I just got annoyed. I didn’t know how I could speak or do anything with no brain, but as far as I was concerned I hadn’t got one.”

To read about what his brain scans revealed, go here.

Philadelphia is once again facing catastrophic budget cuts that threaten to gut public education.

Who is killing Philadelphia’s schools, asks journalist Daniel Denvir. Here is the sordid story.

The state has had control of the Philadelphia schools since 2002. It took control because of a budget deficit. The state School Reform Commission made the deficit worse.

Paul Vallas took over as superintendent and launched the nation’s most sweeping privatization plan. It failed. Vallas left the district with an even bigger deficit.

Now the School Reform Commission wants to have another go at privatization, even though a number of the city’s charters are under criminal investigation. The Mayor supports a pro-voucher group that has become increasingly vocal.

Governor Tom Corbett has slashed the state’s support for public schools. The state is threatening more cuts. Will public education survive in Philadelphia?

Does anyone have the nerve to say “it’s all for the kids”?

Hi Folks! Here’s a bit of advice actual “safety experts” are giving kids — and parents. But first, the backstory. This New York Times guest parenting blogger wrote that her 7th grader came home one day and announced he “didn’t do it.” Didn’t do what? He and his friend were walking home from school (points for that!) when –

Their commute home this February day was interrupted when a short, white-haired woman standing in her doorway called out to the boys and asked them to move a medium-size package from her front step into her house. On the sidewalk, the boys wondered what to do.

At first, they did nothing, knowing that they “shouldn’t.” Then, after the woman said, “I’m 84 years old and I can’t move it myself,” the other boy did the deed: He helped an old lady.

The blogger, torn between gratitude that her son understands the world is full of danger and doubts as to whether this actually constituted good judgment, called — who else? — the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The folks who put the missing kids’ pictures on the milk cartons and neglected to mention that the vast majority were NOT taken by a stranger. Nancy McBride, the safety director there, told the blogger:

 Even though the woman appeared harmless, she said, children need to be taught to follow the rules consistently, because looks can be deceiving.

“Adults should not be asking kids for help,” she said, adding that women have been used to entice children and that one of the top “tricks” used to lure children is to ask them any question at all. “I don’t want the little boy to feel bad who helped her, but he made a judgment call that turned out O.K. this time, but it might not be O.K. next time. You don’t know who’s in the house with her.”

Jeez le-friggin’ Wheez: “It turned out okay”??? As if this was just sheer luck that the woman wasn’t shilling for a psychopath?

If the woman had fallen or had another immediate need, the boys, armed with their cellphones, could have called 911, Ms. McBride said. In the absence of an emergency, she said, they should have shifted the burden to a parent or school official….

So 7th grade boys — in tandem — are being instructed to “shift the burden.” Always ask an official! Do not — repeat — do not attempt to do anything on your own.

The mom ends up worrying some more whether her son did the right thing. Then she invokes the Cleveland kidnappings, and finally concludes that maybe some day in the future her son will be old enough to help.

What I try to explain in my lectures is that I don’t blame the mom for her fears. I blame a whole society and its “experts,” bent on convincing us that our kids are in constant danger, and that the only way to keep them safe is to imagine the worst-case scenarios (like a pimp hiring an 84-year-old accomplice) and proceed as if those are likely to happen TODAY to OUR KIDS. – L

P.S. They’re not.

Come help me with my package, you pretty boys!

Noel Murray: For a show that so loves motifs, it’s surely (or perhaps Maeby) no coincidence that the first episode of the long-delayed fourth season of Arrested Development opens with George Oscar “GOB” Bluth shoving his last “forget-me-now” pill down the throat of his brother Michael. Or that the second episode features another set of brothers—the boys’ father George Sr. and their Uncle Oscar—muttering “forget the past” at each other. This new Arrested Development season has a narrow path to tread, finding a way to serve up all the show’s usual callbacks and self-reference without merely repeating old jokes or coasting on familiarity (which would be contrary to the spirit of the series). Add to that the complication of the cast’s busy schedules, and the “every episode available at once” model ofArrested Development’s new Netflix home, and creator Mitchell Hurwitz had no choice ...

This is a brilliant, stunning analysis by a reader, who explores the goals of corporate reformers–using the template of Schumpeter’s ideas–and contrast them to the ethics of educators. She says that the market reformers and educators are necessarily at odds because their basic values are in conflict.

Read the whole post, not just my excerpts.

I wish I had written this. I am glad I had the opportunity to read it, you should too. You will come away with a deeper understanding of the appeal and the danger of market-based reforms.

Here are some excerpts:

.

“The corporate reform movement is an attempt by a group of wealthy philanthropists to impose market forces where there had previously been none or had protections against them. The policy instruments they support are: data-driven management designed to weed out undesirable employees and reward superstars; school choice models(1) designed to foster competition for student enrollment and their tax dollars to bring down costs and improve customer satisfaction(2); weakening teacher unions to allow for greater labor market flexibility(3).

“This tribe of reformers resolves that market-oriented reforms will offer a better, more varied and customer-pleasing product. Or, it will deliver at least the same quality of product for less money. And, in doing so, these reforms will yield a more equitable education for children in low-income households because parents will not be forced to send their kids to the substandard schools available in their neighborhood…

“The argument that such reforms will be disruptive, lead to job loss, would cause total havoc to the education system as a whole falls on deaf ears. One of the staggering capabilities of markets is their capacity for creative destruction, a term popularized by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Because of the efficiency of markets to adapt to consumer demands, the products, services, and firms of one era will almost certainly fall prey to the changing needs of the markets. One company rises (Microsoft), another falls (IBM). An innovation captures the imaginations of millions one generation only to crumble mere decades later (Polaroid). This is good for us because we reap the benefits of this relentless creative thrust. Things get better, faster, and cheaper, and our lives are made easier and more fun.

“For market-based reformers, the destruction of public education is not a bug; it’s a feature. Like a phoenix out of the ashes, a new, robust, monetized educational system is something to be desired so that — finally — schools can harness the awesome power of private markets.

“In order for markets to work and not descend into some corporatist public-private hybrid, the role of the entrepreneur is essential. They are the risk-takers. They strategically gamble on the novelty of their ideas, on the notion that there is a group of people out there who want what they can provide and that no one else is providing what they’ve got. In the last half-century, these are the Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerbergs of the world, risking the security of a sure-thing job at an established firm for the possibility of striking gold on your own. This risk is what makes innovation possible and is what drives the dynamism of markets.

My question is this: are the roles of educator and entrepreneur mutually compatible? Can one be both risk-taker and caretaker?…..

“The market doesn’t care about equity, period. The market responds to the demands of its consumers….Contrary to the theoretical model put forth by free-market ideologues, markets do not yield more equitable results. The gulf between the “good” and “bad” schools widens because of the inherent segregating properties of market forces…..

“Let’s think about what is lost in this creative destruction.

“First and foremost, kids lose. Since charters are not public schools, they will lose their constitutional rights. Many more kids will lose art, physical education, music, journalism, debate, dance, creative writing, a variety of foreign languages, and any other class that is not tested, not considered “essential.” Students will profound special needs will be further segregated from non-disabled peers because so few schools will want to take on the additional responsibility. Students with language needs will languish trying to find a school that will take them and meet their needs appropriately.

“Parents lose their voice. They are granted a voice as customers, but this is illusory. They are subject to the availability of what the market provides. If they are dissatisfied, they move to another school. This is rough on the kid and on the parents who now have to shop for this other school, possibly in a neighborhood they or their child can’t get to easily. If the school is not satisfied with the student, the student can be booted out in spite of parental protest.

“Teachers lose their voice. As labor participants, we are given a choice of where we want to work, but without organized labor to speak on behalf of workers, the market will dictate wages and hours. The private school, either for-profit or not, will have incentive to remain competitive, trimming the fat wherever possible. The bulk of a school’s operating cost goes to personnel. This means teachers get their salaries cut and their hours extended. And when that happens, it’s our fault because these are the schools we chose to work in. This is what we signed up for….

“I don’t want to suggest that no one would gain from such a system. Parents of certain religious inclinations would now have government funds to send their children to parochial schools, and market reforms would certainly aid those parents who wish to include a spiritual element to their child’s curriculum. However, there’s the whole separation of church and state thing to worry about, not to mention the lunatics who teach creationism as science. With vouchers, parents who already send their kids to private schools now have a subsidy to do so. So it’s regressively redistributive, but hey, rich people get harangued all the time, isn’t it time they got a break? And, let’s not forget the windfall of business opportunities for-profit endeavors would have access to(7)….

“The risks are too great to pursue the destructive ends a market will wreak. The stakes are far too high to pursue anything less than equity for our kids.”

Sharknado is apparently an actual movie, about to be released, about tornados made of sharks.

The official synopsis:

When a freak hurricane swamps Los Angeles, thousands of sharks terrorize the waterlogged populace. And when the high-speed winds form tornadoes in the desert, nature’s deadliest killer rules water, land, and air.

I can't think of any other -nado coinages, aside from a brand name or two, but some must be Out There.

Author George Saunders on upsetting genteel readers in Vermont, Buddhism and his youthful love of Ayn Rand

In January, a New York Times profile announced that your new short-story collection Tenth of December was the best book we'll read all year. How did you feel about that?

Pretty good. Maybe I'm just at the stage of life where I'm like, "OK, sure, definitely." Although it seems like the kind of quote that will follow you around for a while – or at least until the end of this year. I don't know if the book was different or it was just that lucky first media barrage…

Did it feel different while you were writing it?

A little bit. I always think about it as making a bigger doorway – not to dumb it down or turn away from the darkness but just to try to be a little more ecumenical about who could come to the book and enjoy it. When I was younger, a lot of my artistic energy was spent being aghast at how bad things could be. And then as you get older you're like, "Yeah they can be bad but they aren't always, so do we have some responsibility to reflect that?"

It doesn't always feel like you're aiming for mass appeal. Your stories often plunge us into strange environments – sex-filled drug trials, the inside of a teenage girl's head – and leave us to work it out.

Part of the game for me has always been to understand what the situation is as a writer and then to let you in with a high level of respect for your readerly intelligence. This book was funny because, with the New York Times thing, all kinds of people who probably shouldn't have bought the book did. And I'm starting to hear from them now. I got this really funny letter from a sweet woman in Vermont going, "Uhh, I'm returning your book, I don't want it in my house, I'm trying to eradicate these stories from my memory." It was mostly about the language: I don't think she liked the swearwords.

You have a great ear for ugly brand names – Verbaluce™ and Darkenfloxx™ are two good ones from the drug-trial story. Do you keep a notebook for things like that?

No. I'm really a child of my culture. I absorbed that stuff so enthusiastically and unironically as a kid. So I find if they just pop up, they're better. A drug that gives you a hard-on: Vivistif™. But it's interesting. I teach writing here [at Syracuse University in New York], and one of the things that's really hard to talk about, probably the thing that separates one writer from another, is the quality of those split-second decisions that he or she makes for no reason that you could ever name. Take a Shakespeare play and boil it down to its essence and it could be a telenovela. What is it about Shakespeare that made him great? I think it's that he's sitting there and he has a split-second intuition of how to express something that's just better than everyone else.

Do you have much experience of the kind of soul-crushing bureaucratic institutions that regularly crop up in your stories? I understand you once worked at something called the Radian Corporation, which sounds almost too perfect.

Yeah, I worked there for eight years while I was writing my first book, and before then I was working for a pharmaceutical company for about a year, and before that I worked over in Asia for a couple of years for an oil exploration deal, and also in between I worked in a slaughter-house and was a door man in Beverly Hills, but that was all quite a long time ago. I always felt it was good to have a sort of painful temporary immersion in capitalism in some of its worst forms, just so you get the lay of the land, so that, writing stories, you have some passing knowledge of what a corporate job feels like or what manual labour feels like.

I was intrigued to learn that you were once a fan of Ayn Rand. For a writer so alert to how capitalism can grind people down, that's unexpected.

It's kind of a sweet story. I was in high school in Chicago, not really doing any work. Neither of my parents had been to college so to me it wasn't a big thing. Then two teachers started taking an interest in me and giving me books, and one was Atlas Shrugged. I hadn't read a novel since third grade, and if you're a crummy reader sometimes bad art can do magical things. She appeals to a certain kind of adolescent male, I think, and she definitely got me.

So I went to college and read all the rest of the books and she was sort of my patron saint. Then you get an uncomfortable moment where you realise there's this little bag you're holding that's filling up with phenomena that don't really fit the model. And that bag got heavier and heavier. My family ran into some financial problems. And I thought, she would not understand what we're going through. She'd equate it with some kind of moral weakness on our part. And then after college I went to Asia and saw some things there that made the bag really heavy, and at some point I just said, "I don't get her any more, I'll set her down." Only years later I was like, "Oh my God, she's very dangerous." But I like that. I like the idea that someone can change. You could be a rabid right-winger one moment and then…

… you're forced to completely reassess your views. And I imagine you'd learn a lot in the process.

Exactly, because you've embraced the opposite view totally non-ironically so you can understand it. Even now, I look at the conservative movement here in the US, and I get it, I understand where they're coming from. Sometimes it's just a slight turn of the dial between these supposedly irrevocably separate liberals and conservatives.

Philip Roth recently advised a first-time novelist to quit while he was ahead, saying: "Really, it's an awful field. Just torture." Do you find writing a pleasure or a pain?

I guess it depends on how you describe pleasure or pain. If you're in love with somebody, there's always bad days. But in total you would not want to be anywhere else. That's certainly true for me.

You're a practising Buddhist. Does that help your writing?

I think it helps everything. I was writing a long time before I was a Buddhist and they're not that much different, in the way that any authentic spiritual thing is about seeing what it is, what's going on, and being willing to look at it honestly. I tend to not talk about Buddhism that much because I'm kind of a beginner, but it doesn't hurt, let's put it that way.

Do you write short stories because you don't see the point in doing something longer, or because you don't have the disposition to be a novelist?

It's more the latter. I see all kinds of points in writing a long thing because there are novels I love, but so far it hasn't really happened. I did write a couple of novels early on that didn't excite me and wouldn't have excited anybody, except with anger. I couldn't see beauty in them. Whereas with the short form I get it; I understand how to do something pretty cool and get the hell out of there before it gets boring.

What are you working on at the moment?

I'm going to be a little secretive about it because I'm superstitious, but I'm working on some number of pages that are very imperfect at the moment. We'll see what that becomes.

Do you ever yearn to do something completely different – a new style of writing, or another profession entirely?

I think dictator would be good. [laughs] I went through a period after the last book of stories when I felt a little bit at the end of my tether, I didn't know what to do next. So I wrote some screenplays, I wrote a column for the Guardian, I wrote a lot of humour for the New Yorker. I worked on a play that didn't work very well. Now I can see I was kind of restless, almost as if you'd been confined to a little two-room house for a while, very happily, and one day you're like, these two rooms are not enough, and so you go out into the yard and fart around. And then at some point the yard wasn't that fun for me, so about four years ago I made this decision: nothing but fiction. And this new book came out of that period. I love fiction, so for now I'm pretty happy. I found out that I'm a shitty screenwriter, a shitty playwright, an OK humourist. I've been out in the yard, looked around and it's cold, so I've come back in.

George Saunders's short story Home is part of Bloomsbury's Family Snapshots collection, out on 3 June

(This is a review of the entirety of season four of Arrested Development. If you’d rather discuss individual episodes in detail—and we know you would—Erik Adams and Noel Murray’s weekly reviews of two episodes per week will begin on Wednesday. This review is spoiler-free outside of one marked paragraph and the stray observations.)

How much you like the fourth season of Arrested Development will depend on just how quickly you can accept that it’s a show that looks a lot like Arrested Development and shares most important elements in common with that show but is also another series entirely, something more like Mitch Hurwitz and the cast of that earlier show got together to make a bunch of loosely intersecting short films about the characters from the earlier project, each with its own tone and point-of-view. It’s an occasionally hilarious, sometimes boring, always bloated ...

Bridgeport parent leaders responded forcefully to an attack on their schools by Jennifer Alexander, the leader of ConnCAN.

Alexander claimed that charters in Connecticut outperform public schools and that 65,000 students are trapped in failing public schools. She certainly knows the corporate reform script.

The parent leaders wrote:

“As Bridgeport public school parents and elected parent leaders, we find it insulting that a paid charter school proponent is attempting to speak on behalf of a community she has no involvement with. Ms. Alexander does not have a child in the Bridgeport public schools, does not reside in the city of Bridgeport and does not pay Bridgeport taxes.

To Alexander’s claim that charters outperform public schools, the parents wrote:

“In reviewing the data of the six state charter schools that service Bridgeport students, it is abundantly clear that these six schools do not reflect the demographics of our traditional public schools. These six schools collectively underserve children with disabilities, English language learners and students receiving free/reduced-price lunch. By underserving these student populations, in some cases by double digits, they are able to claim that they achieve higher test scores.”

Bridgeport parents understand that ConnCAN represents fabulously wealthy individuals who use the public schools as a plaything. They wrote:

“ConnCan is funded by some very wealthy individuals. Their main purpose is to advocate for charter schools and their expansion. We are Bridgeport public school parents and elected parent leaders who volunteer our time and service. We do not receive a dime in compensation for the advocacy work that we do.

“Until Ms. Alexander can say the same, we recommend she speak for herself and not for those of us that are in the trenches fighting and advocating for our children’s education every day.”

The heartening aspect of this letter is that regular parents are seeing clearly what the game is. They understand that ConnCAN doesn’t care about their children. They recognize that the end game will be a publicly funded dual school system, with one free to exclude or push out kids it doesn’t want.

They are fighting for their children, for their community, for public education, and for democracy.

TIBERIAS, Israel (AP) -- The massive circular structure appears to be an archaeologists dream: a recently discovered antiquity that could reveal secrets of ancient life in the Middle East and is just waiting to be excavated.

It's thousands of years old -- a conical, manmade behemoth weighing hundreds of tons, practically begging to be explored.

The problem is -- it's at the bottom of the biblical Sea of Galilee. For now, at least, Israeli researchers are left stranded on dry land, wondering what finds lurk below.

The monumental structure, made of boulders and stones with a diameter of 70 meters (230 feet), emerged from a routine sonar scan in 2003. Now archaeologists are trying to raise money to allow them access to the submerged stones.

"It's very enigmatic, it's very interesting, but the bottom line is we don't know when it's from, we don't know what it's connected to, we don't know its function," said Dani Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa who is one of several researchers studying the discovery. "We only know it is there, it is huge and it is unusual."

Archaeologists said the only way they can properly assess the structure is through an underwater excavation, a painstakingly slow process that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if an excavation were to take place, archaeologists said they believed it would be the first in the Sea of Galilee, an ancient lake that boasts historical remnants spanning thousands of years and is the setting of many Bible scenes.

In contrast, Israeli researchers have carried out many excavations in the Mediterranean and Red Seas.

Much of the researchers' limited knowledge about this structure comes from the sonar scan a decade ago.

Initial dives shortly after that revealed a few details. In an article in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology published earlier this year, Nadel and fellow researchers disclosed it was asymmetrical, made of basalt boulders and that "fish teem around the structure and between its blocks."

The cone-shaped structure is found at a depth of between three and 12 meters (nine and 40 feet) beneath the surface, about half a kilometer (1,600 feet) from the sea's southwestern shore. Its base is buried under sediment.

The authors conclude the structure is man-made, made of stones that originated nearby, and it weighs about 60,000 tons. The authors write it "is indicative of a complex, well-organized society, with planning skills and economic ability."

The rest is a mystery.

Yitzhak Paz, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority who is involved in the project, said that based on sediment buildup, it is between 2,000 and 12,000 years old, a vast range that tells little about it. Based on other sites and artifacts found in the region, Paz places the site's origin some time during the 3rd millennium B.C., or about 5,000 years ago, although he admits the timeframe is just a guess.

"The period is hard for us to determine. No scientific work was carried out there, no excavations, no surveys. We have no artifacts from the structure," Paz said.

Archaeologists were also cautious about guessing the structure's purpose. They said possibilities include a burial site, a place of worship or even a fish nursery, which were common in the area, but they said they wanted to avoid speculation because they have so little information.

It's not even clear if the structure was built on shore when the sea stood at a low level, or if it was constructed underwater. Paz reckons it was built on land, an indication of the sea's low level at the time.

In order to fill in the blanks, archaeologists hope to inspect the site underwater, despite the expense and the complexities.

Nadel noted that working underwater demands not only a skill such as scuba diving, but also labor-intensive excavations that are particularly difficult in the Sea of Galilee, which already has low visibility and where any digging can unleash a cloud of sediment and bury what's just been uncovered.

Also, divers can remain under water only for a limited amount of time every day and must choose the best season that can provide optimal conditions for excavating.

"Until we do more research, we don't have much more to add," Nadel said. "It's a mystery, and every mystery is interesting."

___

Follow Tia Goldenberg on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tgoldenberg

In an essay in a 1933 issue of the magazine Scrutiny, the critic F. R. Leavis delivered a vicious hatchet job on one poor, unsuspecting poet:

To say that [his] verse is magniloquent … is to say that it is not doing as much as its impressive pomp and volume seem to be asserting; that mere orotundity is a disproportionate part of the whole effect; and that it demands more deference than it merits … His strength is of the kind we indicate when, distinguishing between intelligence and character, we lay the stress on the latter; it is a strength, that is, involving sad disabilities. He has “character,” moral grandeur, moral force; but he is, for the purposes of his undertaking, disastrously single-minded and simple-minded.

Such savagings are common enough among critics, and there’s a rationale to the rough handling. Critics see themselves as the gatekeepers to literary posterity, so when unworthy aspirants approach they need to be forcibly barred from the premises. But there’s something addedly provocative about the pillory quoted above: it was written about John Milton.

One of the first charters to open in Missouri was the Gordon Parks charter school In Kansas City.

Its idealistic founders believed that the purpose of the charter was to take the kids who were far behind their peers and try to help them.

The state of Missouri just canceled the charter. 

Gordon Parks Elementary School will die because its test scores were too low.

This charter tried to do what charters are supposed to do: to take the kids with the greatest needs.

And now it has been punished for doing what the original visionaries of the charter movement wanted, a decade before passage of No Child Left Behind.

Who will want these children? Not another charter school. They have learned their lesson. Take the kids with the best scores; counsel out or exclude the others.

NCLB killed this good charter. And so did the state board of Missouri, which values test scores more than children.

For shame, Missouri.

The people in Moore, Oklahoma need a lot of things right now: Food, water, shelter, their families…

So this fundraiser is just mind-boggling:

Moore, Oklahoma was struck by an EF5 tornado on May 20. Many people have nothing left. Lots of folks are helping with basic needs, but they also need Bibles. I found a place that will sell me Bibles for $1 each, if I buy at least 1,000 Bibles. I want to buy more Bibles than that. Please help me get Bibles to the people of Moore, Oklahoma who have lost everything!

And when they’re done reading those Bibles, they can place them on their bookshe–oh, right.

I’m not asking anyone to boycott this fundraiser or anything. It’s just amazing to me, though, that anyone could seriously consider the Bible one of those necessary items after a disaster. I mean, without a magnifying glass or matches, paper isn’t going to be very helpful.

If you really want to get upset, think of how much food or water could have been bought for the same amount of money.

Updated: 5:23pm ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that four American citizens have been killed in drone strikes since 2009 in Pakistan and Yemen. The disclosure to Congress comes on the eve of a major national security speech by President Barack Obama.

In conducting U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida and its associated forces, the government has targeted and killed one American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and is aware of the killing by U.S. drones of three others, Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy.

Al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, was killed in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen. Holder said three other Americans were killed by drones in counterterrorism operations since 2009 but were not targeted. The three are Samir Khan, who was killed in the same drone strike as al-Awlaki; al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a native of Denver, who also was killed in Yemen two weeks later; and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.

"Since entering office, the president has made clear his commitment to providing Congress and the American people with as much information as possible about our sensitive counterterrorism operations," Holder told Leahy, D-Vt. "To this end, the president has directed me to disclose certain information that until now has been properly classified."

"The administration is determined to continue these extensive outreach efforts to communicate with the American people," Holder wrote.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

The final “vote” on which Chicago Public Schools to shutter may be a done deal, but the implications of the largest single school closure in US history will be felt well beyond the Windy City. Mayor Emanuel, who has long tethered his political fortunes to hedge-funded education reform, now has poll numbers hovering near the bottom of Lake Michigan. Meanwhile, the Chicago media has suddenly awakened and is practicing, once again, the long-lost art of journalism. And Chicago charter school fever is beginning to look an awful lot like old-fashioned Illinois-style “pay to play” corruption. In other words, on this bad news bears day, my outlook is decidedly wine-box-half-full…

The white course
Let’s start with Mayor Emanuel’s poll numbers. Did I say they were in Lake Michigan? I meant living on Lake Shore drive in a million dollar plus unit with great lake views. A recent poll found that the only voters left who unabashedly approve of the mayor’s education reform agenda are wealthy whites who live in the city’s lakefront wards. Six in ten Chicagoans oppose Rahm’s school closure plan, while a full 75% say they don’t like his vision for education in the city. Of voters with children who attend the Chicago Public Schools, just 9% said they side with the mayor in the debate over how to improve the schools. Fifty-four percent said they now side with the Chicago Teachers Union.

Welcome back, journalists. We’ve missed you!
The past few weeks have seen the kind of reporting that’s all too rare in today’s Walton-funded era of achievement gaptivism. Check out, for example, this “fact check” prepared by a local public radio station in which reporters examine the justifications being given for the mass school closings—and debunk virtually all of them. Even the Chicago Tribune, which just weeks ago ran an editorial trumpeting the results of a pro-charter push poll, got in on the action. The Trib dug deep into official documents to dispute many of the claims being made by Mayor Emanuel et al and revealed once again just how dependent hedge-funded “reform” is on a lax and fawning press.

Pay for play
Meanwhile reporters at the Chicago Sun Times have been busy digging up the dirt on the state’s largest charter school operator: UNO Charter Schools. It turns out that Illinois’ new favorite past-time, *crushing* the achievement gap by constructing shiny academies of excellence and innovation, looks an awful lot like the state’s old favorite past-time: cash-fueled corruption.

Race to the top
The disproportionate impact of school closings on minority students has already resulted in multiple law suits. But could it finally prompt a conversation on the great white elephant in the room: the overwhelming whiteousness of the education reform movement vs: the communities that reformers are intent on improving? Based on this intriguing tweet from Teach for America CEO Matt Kramer, I’d say the chances are good.

As white person, I thk role of white ppl in ed reform is a fair Q. But, I believe answer lies in allyship, not abdicating responsibility.

— Matt Kramer (@kramer_matt) May 21, 2013

We are so over
In case you missed it, opposition to the school closings in Chicago even precipitated an education reform break up. I’m talking, of course, about the recent decision by the University of Chicago chapter of Students for Education Reform to divorce their national organization. In this Dear John letter, the Chicago students hint at their discomfort with being the fresh Chicago faces of SFER’s national agenda. As for what that agenda is, I will say only that SFER is likely the only grassroots student group in the country to be funded by the Walton Foundation.

Even Republicans are pissed
And now a gratuitous shout out to my favorite Windy City blog: Chicago Public Fools.This Chicago Public Schools mom is representative of the astonishing diversity of voices that are now questioning the city’s education reform mantra. In this post, Red in a Blue City, she fillets would-be school privatizers like lake trout.

Karen Lewis rocks
Even though I am *technically* married, I have been crushing on Karen Lewis since the first time she used the expression “full-tilt bozo,” the precise definition of which I still don’t know. In case you missed it, she was overwhelmingly re-elected by the members of the Chicago Teachers Union last week and pledged to spend her next term making education equal in all of the city’s neighborhoods. Now there’s a thought…

Send comments and tips to tips@edushyster.com.

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Monica Ratliff won a historic upset in Los Angeles!

She won with 52% of the vote!

She had less than $50,000 in small contributions.

Her opponent Antonio Sanchez had the support of billionaire Eli Broad, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and organized labor groups.

People power beat money power!!!

THE Washington Post reports today that linguists have discovered a handful of "ultraconserved" words, some 15,000 years old. These are said to include "hand", "give", "bark" and "ash". The paper is "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia," by Mark Pagela, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Post buried the real news, though: what the new paper does is claim this as evidence that 7 modern language families, not yet conclusively shown to be related, are part of an Ur-family called proto-Eurasiatic. By their theory, the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Inuit-Yupik, Dravidian, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Kartvelian languages all share a common ancestor. The descendants of these proto-languages are spoken in a vast territory covering most of Eurasia including the Indian subcontinent today.

What the Post doesn't even brush on is how controversial this is likely to be. Historical linguists have not just established the existence of proto-families. They have elaborately reconstructed them.  By...Continue reading

IF FORCED to pick my favourite part of the history of English, I’d be torn. There are so many to choose from. Would I pick the Great Vowel Shift, the mid-millennium change in pronunciation that largely explains English’s inconsistent spelling? Perhaps I’d turn to colonial times, when English vocabulary ballooned. I do like Noah Webster’s attempts to change American English spelling in the name of efficiency, too.

But my favourite must be the Norman invasion of 1066. When the Normans, who spoke a dialect of Old French, ruled over England, they changed the face of English. Over the ensuing two centuries, thousands of Old French words entered English. Because the ruling class spoke Old French, that set of vocabulary became synonymous with the elite. Everyone else used Old English. During this period, England's society was diglossic: one community, two language sets with distinct social spheres. Today, English-speakers pick and choose from the different word sets—Latinate (largely Old French borrowings) and Germanic (mostly Old English-derived words)—depending on the occasion. Although English is no longer in a diglossic relationship with another language, the Norman-era diglossia remains reflected in the way we choose and mix vocabulary. In informal chat, for example, we might go on to...Continue reading

Geoffrey Canada gave a TED talk recently in which he did two reprehensible things:

1. He boasted that his charter school has a 100% graduation rate.

2. He used his talk to knock the public schools.

Gary Rubinstein, the extraordinary detective of miracle-school boasting, checked the New York state website. Canada did not tell the truth.

After reviewing the data, Gary writes: “So the 62 graduates in 2012 had been the 97 6th graders in 2006. This does not represent a 0% dropout rate, as Canada implied to John Legend, but a 36% dropout rate.” The graduation rate is not 100%, as Canada claimed, but 64%.

But there is an even dirtier secret that Gary discovered. Canada has TWICE kicked out an entire class. A few years ago, Paul Tough wrote a book about Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone called “Whatever It Takes.” Tough tells the story of Canada firing the entire entering class–three years after they started sixth grade–because their persistently low test scores embarrassed the bankers and lawyers on his board.

When I debated Geoffrey Canada at Education Nation in 2011, I asked him why he kicked out the class, and he denied it. He said that he had closed the school because its performance was not good enough. That won him a round of applause from the sympathetic audience, but I knew he had not closed the school. Paul Tough’s description of the mass ouster of the entire class was detailed and clear. He fired the eighth graders in May, when it was difficult for them to find high schools that had room for them in New York City’s choice system.

Let me be clear. I admire the work of the Harlem Children’s Zone. The zone offers children and families a broad array of social and medical services. It is a well-funded cradle-to-college-or-career pipeline. HCZ does what all schools should do, if they had the money to do it. I personally like Geoffrey Canada. He is a very likable guy, but he feels compelled to make these outrageous boasts because (I think) it is what the corporate reformers on his board want to believe.

HCZ has the resources to offer amazing facilities and services to those who enroll in its charter schools. Three years go, according to an article in the New York Times, HCZ had $200 million in the bank, and some billionaires on the board, so the school can afford to help children in ways that public schools cannot afford.

“In the tiny high school of the zone’s Promise Academy I, which teaches 66 sophomores and 65 juniors (it grows by one grade per year), the average class size is under 15, generally with two licensed teachers in every room. There are three student advocates to provide guidance and advice, as well as a social worker, a guidance counselor and a college counselor, and one-on-one tutoring after school.” Students also get free health care and dental checkups.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the schools in Harlem offered the same services and small classes? The HCZ high school has classes under 15, with two teachers, but the typical high school class in the NYC public schools is 32-35, with one teacher.

Canada is blessed with the resources that public schools in NYC can only dream about.

Nonetheless, Canada used his time on TED to lambaste the public schools for failing to match his success.

I just wish that Canada would use his celebrity and media access to advocate that all public schools should have the resources he has, instead of castigating them for not being as good as the school he runs, with such munificent provisions.

Geoffrey Canada recently did a TED talk entitled ‘Our failing schools.  Enough is enough.’  Canada is the president and CEO of The Harlem Children’s Zone and star of ‘Waiting For Superman.’

The premise of Harlem Children’s Zone is a good one.  It serves to provide school and complete wrap-around services (health, mental health, nutrition, etc.) to kids from Harlem beginning at birth and supporting them all the way through college.  The program, you might imagine, is very costly — hundreds of millions of dollars — and Canada, himself, pulls in about $400,000 a year.

During the question and answer section of the talk, Canada called on musician and TFA board member John Legend who asked the very relevant question:

John Legend: So what is the high school dropout rate at Harlem Children’s Zone?

Geoffrey Canada: Well, you know, John,100 percent of our kids graduated high school last year in my school.  A hundred percent of them went to college.This year’s seniors will have 100 percent graduating high school.Last I heard we had 93 percent accepted to college.We’d better get that other seven percent.So that’s just how this goes. (Applause)

Now I know that generally when a ‘reformer’ brags about a 100% graduation rate, he means that 100% of the students who made it to senior year also graduated while neglecting to mention what percent of the cohort had not made it to senior year.  This is the statistic that is quite easy to find by looking at the New York State report cards.  Here are seven consecutive years of enrollment statistics I got from there:

So the 62 graduates in 2012 had been the 97 6th graders in 2006.  This does not represent a 0% dropout rate, as Canada implied to John Legend, but a 36% dropout rate.

But looking at these numbers also reveals two large scandals of which I had only been aware of one before looking into this:  First, notice how there are 68 8th graders in 2007 (down from 100 6th graders in 2005) but no 9th graders in 2008.  This is because Canada ‘fired’ the entire group of what would have been their first 9th graders and first graduating class.  This story is not a big secret anymore, though Canada doesn’t seem to have lost much of his credibility for it.  For the second scandal, notice that in the 2007-2008 school year there were 88 6th graders but in 2008-2009 there are no seventh graders.  This is because they also rid themselves of an entire class of 6th graders that year.  The next year they decided to only take new 5th graders which is why we see they had 12th graders and 11th graders in 2011-2012 but no 9th or 10th graders.

Regardless of how poor the performance of those two lost classes were, Harlem Children’s Zone could have easily kept those students and have been able to answer critics of their test scores by saying that those two classes of students were students who had started as 6th graders in the school and that HCZ should only be judged by the performance of the classes of 2016 and beyond since those students will have completed their entire schooling through the program.  I guess that this could have been construed as an ‘excuse’ which would have gone against the ‘no excuses’ ideology.

As far a performance goes, the HCZ Promise Academy high school may have decent state test scores, but when it comes to national tests they only had on the ACT a 20 in Math, a 15 in English, a 15 in Reading, and a 17 in Science.  Aside from Math, this puts them in under the 20th percentile for those tests.

I’ve spoken to two teachers who have worked at Promise Academy, one is a former elementary school teacher there and another is a current middle school teacher.  The middle school teacher said that the school had recently had almost a complete turnover in staff.  When a place is supposedly so great, teachers would want to spend some time there, in my experience.  The elementary teacher described a horrible abusive working condition where uncertified co-teachers often taught test prep and where there was little support from the administration for teachers and nearly zero interaction with Canada, despite his nearly half a million dollar a year salary.

To see Canada get publicly humiliated in a debate with Diane Ravitch from September 2011, watch the live version of Meet The Press from Education Nation here.

Meher Ahmad highlights a growing trend:

Married couples who live apart for reasons other than legal separation [has] nearly doubled since 1990, when roughly 1.7 million American couples did it.

How much of that is for financial reasons, however, isn’t clear. Whereas couples like [Allen] Shainman and [Collette] Stallone live in the same city but in two different apartments, Candice and David Knox live and work in different states. “People think that we’re weird,” said David Knox. “When you’re married, you’re supposed to live together. It just freaks them out.”

But the perks may outweigh the “weirdness.” Considering you wouldn’t get in fights with your significant other about petty things like dishes or walking the dog, living by yourself also means that you can effectively “do you” but file for joint taxes. Professor Aaron Ben-Zeev of the University of Haifa argues that couples who live apart, while lacking daily intimacy and interaction, gain in other aspects of their relationship:

Distance may focus the partners’ attention on the profound aspects of their relationships and hep them disregard the superficial ones. And if the profound aspects are perceived to be positive, then the whole relationship is seen this way. Like other incomplete romantic experiences, commuter marriages are also typically romantically intense.

In 2010, the Los Angeles commissioned a rating system based on test scores and published the individual names of teachers and their ratings. New York City did the same last year. To say this was controversial is putting it mildly.

Many researchers opposed it, as did Wendy Kopp and Bill Gates. If the purpose of the ratings is to help teachers improve, how exactly does it help to publish those ratings? Shouldn’t they be part of a discussion between principals and teachers? Right after the ratings went public in Los Angeles, a fifth grade teacher committed suicide. His name was Rigoberto Ruelas. Collateral damage, you might say.

John Ewing, the head of Math for America, called this thuggish use of data “mathematical intimidation,” and said that mathematicians have an obligation to speak out against it.

Nonetheless, both candidates for mayor in Los Angeles say they approve the practice.

Is there any evidence that the public releases in either L.A. or NYC improved teaching?

Please, someone, get some informed advisors for these candidates.

Following the inaugural Bad Grammar awards, Thomas Jones lists nine grammatical conventions that, depending on context, you may – sorry, might – as well adhere to

The Idler Academy's inaugural Bad Grammar award was bestowed last week on 100 academics who wrote an open letter to Michael Gove in March criticising the education secretary's revised national curriculum. The letter reads at times as if it was written by committee, but does it really display "the worst use of English over the last 12 months by people who should know better"? Hardly. Like many such gongs, up to and including the Nobel prize for literature, the Bad Grammar award looks suspiciously like the continuation of politics by other means. One of the three judges was Toby Young, whose latest book is How to Set Up a Free School; Gove apparently told fellow guests at a Spectator party last year that he'd like Young to stand as a Tory MP. "The 100 educators have inadvertently made an argument for precisely the sort of formal education the letter is opposing," Young said. Steven Pinker (no soft leftie) put it slightly differently in The Language Instinct 20 years ago: "Since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble."

Despite all that, it's still the case that some ways of writing are clearer and more elegant than others, and some of the shibboleths are worth following for the sake of clarity, elegance and consistency (I'm fairly sure I don't think that just because I'm an editor at the London Review of Books). They're conventions not rules, however, and different conventions apply to different kinds of discourse: constructions that are unacceptable in so-called Standard English and wouldn't find their way into the LRB or the Guardian – a reinforcing double negative, say – are more than fine in other registers (eg "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more").

Bearing all that in mind, here are nine conventions (the number as arbitrary as everything else) that are more or less worth adhering to, depending on context, though none of them are hard-and-fast rules (and, yes, I have tried to discreetly break most of them in this preamble).

1. Dangling (or unattached) participle "Going to the shops, a dog ran in front of my bike." The dog must have been worried they were about to run out of bones at the bone shop. Dangling participles are best avoided because they can change the meaning of a sentence. And while it's true that most readers will be able to understand what you're getting at, it's still worth saying what you mean. So: "As I was going to the shops" or "On my way".

2. That/which

"Which is appropriate to non-defining and that to defining clauses," HW Fowler wrote in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). "The dog that ran in front of my bike had floppy ears." "The dog, which had floppy ears, ran in front of my bike." It's often a fine distinction, and was very possibly invented by Fowler, but it can nonetheless be useful. As with dangling participles, it's about saying what you mean.

3. Split infinitive

One of my English teachers once told us that the critic Helen Gardner's last words were: "My dear, try never to split your infinitives." A nurse had asked her: "Would you like me to gently prop you up?" Split infinitives are worth avoiding to keep pedants at bay, but there's nothing actually wrong with them, and a split infinitive is preferable to an inelegant alternative. "To boldly go" is resoundingly iambic, the alternatives – "boldly to go" or "to go boldly" – either flighty or leaden. The rule against splitting infinitives was supposedly invented by Dryden, by analogy with Latin, in which the infinitive is a single word.

4. Who/whom

Whom is on the way out, and won't be much missed. There's nothing wrong with saying: "Who am I speaking to?" The stiffer formulation "To whom am I speaking?" can be useful if you want to be stiff. But no one would ever say: "Whom am I speaking to?"

5. Ending a sentence with a preposition

Like beginning a sentence with a conjunction, this is always completely fine. As Winston Churchill never actually said, it's the kind of pedantry "up with which I will not put".

6. Due to

The idea that "due to" is wrong, but "'owing to" is OK is bogus. They're both wrong if used to mean "because of" and both OK if used to mean "the result of". "Due to unplanned engineering works, the train to Basingstoke has been cancelled" is a mistake. "The train to Basingstoke has been cancelled; this is due to unplanned engineering works" is fine. Still, "due to" is best avoided because it leads to formulations such as "due to the fact that", which is a really clumsy way of saying "because".

7. Greengrocer's apostrophe

"Carrot's" and "apple's" are not so common, but almost everyone occasionally writes "who's", "it's" and "you're" for whose, its and your. That's the problem with following rules – such as the rule that possessives are distinguished from plurals by an apostrophe – sometimes they don't apply.

8. Different from, not to or than There's no very good reason for following this rule, but then there's no reason not to, either.

9. Using the subjunctive in conditional clauses

And finally, another one that's worth paying attention to, because altering the mood alters the sense. The subjunctive is used to describe a state of affairs that isn't the case. "If the dog were hungry, it would run to the bone shop." This means the dog isn't hungry, as we can tell because it isn't running to the bone shop. "If the dog is hungry, it will run to the bone shop." This means the dog may be hungry, we'll have to wait and see.