I'm tired of the agenda-pushing preaching, sorry.
They even get you started with a sermon:
"Creationists on Texas textbook panel stir controversy" by Motoko Rich | New York Times, September 29, 2013
AUSTIN, Texas — One is a nutritionist who believes “creation science” based on biblical principles should be taught in the classroom.
Another is a chemical engineer who is listed as a “Darwin Skeptic” on the website of the Creation Science Hall of Fame.
A third is a trained biologist who also happens to be a fellow of the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based center of the intelligent-design movement, and a vice president at an evangelical ministry in Plano, Texas.
As Texas gears up to select biology textbooks for use by high school students over the next decade, the panel responsible for reviewing submissions from publishers has stirred controversy because a number of its members do not accept evolution and climate change as scientific truth.
Well, one out of two ain't bad.
Related:
"Parts of South Dakota were dealing with power outages and digging out from chest-high snow drifts on Saturday. In the Rapid City area, where 21 inches of snow fell, authorities were recruiting snowmobilers to help rescue about 80 motorists stuck in their vehicles. Up to 3½ feet of snow hit the Black Hills (AP)."
Yeah, good way to bury that story under three-day coverage of a nothing storm right now, Globe. I wouldn't worry to much; kid's can smell fart-mist in the classroom, thus damaging the credibility of you all.
In the state whose governor, Rick Perry, boasted as a candidate for president that his schools taught both creationism and evolution, the State Board of Education, which includes members who hold creationist views, helped nominate several members of the textbook review panel.
I do not know what to believe, and quite honestly, it has nothing to do with the earthly affairs being driven by greedy, power-hungry psychopaths down here on earth.
Others were named by parents and educators. Prospective candidates could also nominate themselves.
The state’s education commissioner, Michael L. Williams, a Perry appointee and a conservative Republican, made the final appointments to the 28-member panel. Six of them are known to reject evolution.
Some Texans worry that ideologically driven review panel members and state school board members are slowly eroding science education in the state.
“Utterly unqualified partisan politicians will look at what utterly unqualified citizens have said about a textbook and decide whether it meets the requirements of a textbook,” lamented Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, which monitors the activities of far-right organizations. The group filed a request for documents that yielded the identities of the textbook review panelists as well as reports containing their reviews.
Publishers including well-known companies like Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill submitted 14 biology textbooks for consideration this year. Reports from the review panels have been sent to publishers, who can now make changes.
Didn't Houghton go bankrupt?
Williams will review the changes and recommend books to the state board. Through a spokeswoman, Williams repeatedly declined requests for an interview. The state board will vote on a final approved list of textbooks in November.
The reports contained comments from Karen Beathard, a senior lecturer in the department of nutrition and food science at Texas A&M University, who wrote in a review of a textbook submitted by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt stating that “students should have the opportunity to use their critical thinking skills to weigh the evidence between evolution and ‘creation science.’ ”
Yeah, well, not just on that. Ask the physics guy how could those towers collapse like that due to jet fuel?
In reviews of other textbooks, panel members disputed the scientific evidence, questioning, for example, whether the fossil record actually demonstrates a process of mutation and natural selection over billions of years. “The fossil record can be interpreted in other ways than evolutionary with equal justification,” one reviewer wrote.
I don't want to be digging in the dirt today.
Among the antievolution panelists are Ide Trotter, a chemical engineer, and Raymond G. Bohlin, a biologist and fellow of the Discovery Institute.
By questioning the science — often getting down to very technical details — the evolution challengers in Texas are following a strategy increasingly deployed by others around the country.
There is little open talk of creationism. Instead they borrow buzzwords common in education, “critical thinking,” saying there is simply not enough evidence to prove evolution.
If textbooks do not present alternative viewpoints or explain what they describe as “the controversy,” they say, students will be deprived of a core concept of education — learning how to make up their own minds.
Historically, given the state’s size, Texas’ textbook selections have had an outsize impact on what ended up in classrooms throughout the country. That influence is waning somewhat because publishers can customize digital editions and many states are moving to adopt new science standards with evolution firmly at their center.
Even in Texas, districts can make their own decisions, but many will choose books from the state’s approved list. “It’s a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” said David Anderson, a former official in the Texas Education Agency, as the department of education is known, and now a consultant who works with textbook publishers.
Four years ago, a conservative bloc on the state school board pushed through amendments to science standards that call for students to “analyze and evaluate” some of the basic principles of evolution. Science educators and advocates worry that this language can be used as a back door for teaching creationism.
“It is like lipstick on a Trojan horse,” said Miller of the Texas Freedom Network.
Or anything government or its mouthpiece media is selling these days.
The publishers are considering changes.
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Speaking of selling, that is your next class. Gotta sell another agenda:
"Youths living in Mexico get US education across border" by Lyndsey Layton | Washington Post, September 29, 2013
AT THE US BORDER, Columbus, N.M. — The mothers, holding the small hands of their children, can go only as far as the glass door, where Mexico ends and the United States begins. They lean down and send off their little ones with a kiss and a silent prayer.
The children file into the US port of entry, chatting in Spanish as they pull US birth certificates covered in protective plastic from Barbie and SpongeBob backpacks. Armed US border officers wave them onto American soil and the yellow buses waiting to take them to school in Luna County, N.M.
This is the daily ritual of the American schoolchildren of Palomas, Mexico, a phenomenon that dates back six decades and has helped blur the international border here.
The tide of students washing over the border has drawn muted complaints from some local residents over the cost to US taxpayers. But most accept the arrangement as a simple fact of life on the border, which feels like an artificial divide between communities laced together by bloodlines, marriage, and commerce.
For all the contentious national debate about immigration and stalled efforts in Congress to find consensus, the communities here live cooperatively. Still, coexistence is more nuanced than the discourse in Washington allows.
Nearly 3 out of 4 students at Columbus Elementary, the school closest to the border, live in Palomas and were born to Mexican parents. The Palomas children are American because of a long-standing state and federal policy that allows Mexican women to deliver their babies at the nearest hospital, which happens to be 30 miles north of the border in Deming, N.M., the seat of Luna County.
‘‘All this hysteria about migrants and immigrants, throwing the undocumented out, and all these bills being passed — well, we live in this area and have a very different take on humanity,’’ said Paul Dulin, director of the New Mexico Office of Border Health in Las Cruces.
For generations, the people of dusty Palomas have been toiling in the New Mexican fields, filling trucks with sweet onions and chilis bound for markets throughout the United States and elsewhere. At one point, the two communities shared a fire department. More than 60 percent of Luna County’s 25,000 residents are Hispanic, and many were once schoolchildren from Palomas.
In the 1950s, the Palomas children didn’t even have to be Americans to attend the Deming Public Schools.
The principal of the elementary school simply admitted the children of one persistent Mexican father, and the tradition began. Twenty years later, the county began requiring US citizenship, but students don’t need to live in Luna County, said Harvielee Moore, the school superintendent.
‘‘We’re here to teach children,’’ Moore said. ‘‘They’re American citizens, and we want them to be literate. If they’re literate, they get jobs. And they pay taxes.’’
Children cross the border to attend school elsewhere, most notably in El Paso, across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez. But Luna County is rural and far smaller, and the daily influx of children has a greater impact on the schools.
‘‘This is absolutely unique — I’ve never seen anything like it,’’ said US Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who visited Columbus Elementary School recently and joined the children in the afternoon on their three-mile bus ride to the border.
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Well, I was told it was pretty much dead, but then the agenda was revived the last few days.
Also: Immigration rally draws hundreds to Copley Square and Common
Calif. allows illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses
Mexicans seek asylum from violence
Immigration activists plan reminder for overhaul
At bottom it is another agenda-pushing group!
What's that, I didn't understand you?
"Heritage language programs on the rise" by Laura Wides-Munoz | Associated Press, September 29, 2013
MIAMI — Dorothy Villarreal grew up dreaming in Spanish, first in Mexico and later in South Texas, where her family moved when she was six. She excelled in school — in English. But at home life was in Spanish, from the long afternoon chats with her grandparents to the Spanish-language version of Barbie magazines she eagerly awaited each month. She figured she was fluent in both languages.
Then the Harvard University junior spent last summer studying in Mexico and realized just how big the gaps in her Spanish were.
“We were talking about the presidential election, and there was so much I wanted to explain,” Villarreal said. “We’d end up playing a guessing game where I’d speak in English, and my friends, they’d speak back in Spanish to guess what I was saying.”
Villarreal’s experience is increasingly common in America, where 1 in 5 children grows up in a home where English isn’t the sole language. To help them fill in the gaps, universities are adapting their foreign language curriculum, in part to better prepare graduates for a globalized world where it pays to be professionally fluent in more than one language.
Children in multilingual homes grow up a step ahead of other would-be language learners. They can easily engage in small talk or follow the latest soap opera in their families’ native language. Yet when it comes to meatier topics, or reading and writing, they are stuck.
The linguistic gaps become apparent in high school, where these students can snooze through basic language classes but often drown in more advanced ones — if their heritage language is even offered.
After all, how many American high schools offer Arabic or Korean?
With 37 million Spanish-speakers in America, most heritage classes are in Spanish, and courses have bloomed across campuses in California, Florida, and several Southwestern states. They have also begun to take hold in schools like Harvard University, which added a course this year.
Villarreal, who hopes to work in Latin America for an international business or for the US government, “and not make a fool of myself,” was among the first to sign up. She jumped at the chance to beef up her formal Spanish without the pressure of an advanced class with non-Latino classmates who might have thick accents but rarely misplace an accent mark.
That pressure, and the embarrassment of not being able to read or write a language they are supposed to know, can hold students back in regular classes, said Maria Luisa Parra Velasco, a Harvard professor who created the Spanish course. So too can the stigma of speaking ‘‘bad Spanish,’’ or a more colloquial version of a language they learned at home, she said.
Beyond language, the heritage class offers Villarreal a rare academic space to examine topics she’s less comfortable talking about with her mostly white and upper-middle class peers.
She contrasted the heritage class with the course she runs to immediately after: an advanced, general Spanish class on cultural practices of the US-Mexico border. In that class, Villareal said she is uncharacteristically quiet.
“We’re talking in this abstract way about what the border is, and I’m thinking I went to school five minutes from the border. For me the border is what shuts down my school when the [Department of Homeland Security] helicopters come to find the people trying to cross,” she said.
Heritage language programs have existed in the United States in some form for more than a century as a way to retain both language and culture — even as English-only movements waxed and waned. German schools were common in the late 1800s.
Youth in California have long attended weekend Chinese and Japanese programs. Bilingual Spanish classes have been around for decades.
Spanish classes aren’t the only heritage courses on the rise. Harvard already has heritage programs in Russian, Chinese, and Korean, which the US government considers strategically critical languages for diplomacy and counterintelligence.
That's the motivation for good ejewkhazion right there.
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Maybe you could be a hacker, kids! Government is looking for them!
Maybe I shouldn't say kids:
"College students shed traditional image" by Jenna Johnson | Washington Post, September 22, 2013
WASHINGTON — When President Obama talks about the cost of higher education, his mentions of ‘‘college students’’ might often evoke images of teenagers who spent senior year of high school searching for the four-year institution that best matched their personalities, then enrolled and moved into the dorms while Mom or Dad paid the bills.
That idea of a college student spending four luxurious, carefree years studying is passe.
Of the more than 20 million students enrolled at thousands of two- and four-year colleges and universities across the nation, only about one-third fit that traditional description.
About 40 percent of all college students are older than 25, according to US Education Department data. More than a third attend classes part-time. Nearly 20 percent work full-time. About 60 percent enroll at four-year public and private schools, while the rest mostly attend community colleges or enroll at for-profit colleges. Very few attend the well-known universities topping the US News and World Report rankings.
As the number of traditional high school graduates shrinks, colleges increasingly have had to recruit from places other than high schools to keep their student numbers constant and ensure a steady stream of funding.
Kids, do I need type it?
Many schools have stepped up overseas recruiting and reached out to the ever-growing number of Hispanic students and wooed transfer students who collect credits from a number of colleges. They also are going after ‘‘nontraditional’’ students, a pool that continues to widen.
To be considered nontraditional, students must have at least one of these characteristics: delayed attending college, attends school part-time, works at least 35 hours a week, is financially independent, supports a family, is a single parent, or did not earn a formal high school degree.
‘‘Nontrads’’ often face many more challenges than traditional students, but when problems arise, it can be difficult or impossible to find help on campuses geared toward a younger crowd. Nontrads are at high risk for dropping out or taking far longer to graduate.
A handful of nontrads in the Washington metro region — including a Navy veteran, a 19-year-old living on her own, and a single mom with four children — said they need a different kind of support and commitment from their schools. And not just the financial kind....
A few years ago, GWU decided to become a top destination for veterans. It did not work well at first, so GWU bulked up its veterans affairs office....
It's a war-focused media from policy to terminology, kids. That is your final lesson of the day.
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Related:
Sunday Globe Special: Securing All Schools
Sunday Globe Specials: Ma$ter's Degree
Also see: Sunday Globe Not So Special Anymore
There will be no more Sunday Globe Specials for the obvious reasons.
UPDATE: Magazine | The Education Issue
