Month: November 2012

U.S. Supreme Court considers appeals of DOMA and Caifornia’s Prop. 8

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to wade into historic and controversial territory. The Court is considering 10 petitions for review today regarding same-sex marriage, including the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. The orders granting or denying certiorari are likely to be announced on Monday.

Tim Goldstein at SCOTUSblog has posted this wonderfully written commentary. History:

At their Conference today, the Justices will consider petitions
raising federal constitutional issues related to same-sex marriage. 
These are the most significant cases these nine Justices have ever
considered, and probably that they will ever decide.

I have never before seen cases that I believed would be discussed two hundred years from now.  Bush v. Gore
and Obamacare were relative pipsqueaks.  The government’s assertion of
the power to prohibit a loving couple to marry, or to refuse to
recognize such a marriage, is profound.  So is the opposite claim that
five Justices can read the federal Constitution to strip the people of
the power to enact the laws governing such a foundational social
institution.

The cases present a profound test of the Justices’ judgment.  The
plaintiffs’ claims are rooted in the fact that these laws rest on an
irrational and invidious hatred, enshrined in law.  On the other hand,
that describes some moral judgments.  The Constitution does not forbid
every inequality, and the people must correct some injustices (even some
grave ones) themselves, legislatively.

(Update) The ‘less-than-do-nothing’ Tea-Publican 112th Congress: Worst. Congress. Ever.

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie: In this ongoing series, The 'less-than-do-nothing' Tea-Publican 112th Congress: Worst. Congress. Ever., here is the latest from Steve Benen. Making the 'Do-Nothing Congress' look great by comparison: In his second term, President Harry Truman condemned the snail's pace at which lawmakers actually got some work done, labeling it a "Do-Nothing" Congress. After … Read more

Carpe Diem: The dog ate my test scores

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by David Safier

Students are notorious for having an excuse for missing assignments ("The dog ate my homework") and low test scores ("I left my book on the bus"). And when they're accused of cheating, there's always a logical explanation that leaves the student blameless. But shouldn't we expect more from the founder of Carpe Diem, the "blended learning" charter school in Yuma that's praised to the sky by conservative "education reform" advocates and is starting to franchise into other states?

Carpe Diem students spend a great deal of the school day in the computer lab using online curriculum instead of spending all their time in the classroom — hence the term "blended learning." The student-to-teacher ratio is about 50-to-1, twice the usual ratio. In Yuma, four teachers serve the school's 200+ students. The "proof" of the success of the blended learning model is the students' AIMS scores, which shot up from 2007 to 2009.

The problem is, the school's scores have slipped significantly since their 2009 high. Here's the graph of Carpe Diem's AIMS scores for 2010, 2011 and 2012 from the AZ Dept of Ed website:

Screen Shot 2012-11-30 at 10.25.53 AM

Why the drop? It's probable the earlier scores were inflated by teacher or administrative-level cheating. From the Republic's Anne Ryman in 2011:

In spring 2010, the company that administers the AIMS test, Pearson Education, flagged Carpe Diem's sophomore AIMS reading test for having a higher-than-average number of erasure marks. Flagging means the state gets an alert. Pearson's report said a group of 27 Carpe Diem students who took the AIMS reading test had a total number of wrong-to-right erasure marks seven times as high as the state average.

 

High school drug raids and private prisons

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by David Safier

Hat tip to Vince Rabago for pointing out this AlterNet article about a drug raid at Vista Grande High School in Casa Grande. The article focuses on the use of CCA, Corrections Corporation of American — a private, for-profit prison corporation — in the raid. But let me start by looking at the raid itself.

The school's principal, Tim Hamilton, requested the raid. The school was put on "lock down." No one could go in or out. Students were lined up against the walls of their classrooms while drug sniffing dogs checked for drugs on the students or in their bags.

This is a prison-style procedure where every student is treated like a suspect, a potential criminal. It wasn't in response to a bomb threat or a student who was suspected of having a weapon. The purpose of the raid was simply to find illegal drugs.

Was the raid because of an epidemic of drug use and sales at the school?
Not according to the principal, who said, "We
wanted to send a message to kids that we don't want that stuff on our
campus." And not according to the results. Three students were arrested in the raid: one for .1 grams of
marijuana, one for .5 grams of marijuana, and one, a 17-year-old female, who had  10 ounces of marijuana which was packaged for sale. That's it.
Three people, one of whom was apparently dealing a drug whose illegal
status is being questioned by legislators and law enforcement leaders
across the country.

As someone who spent over 30 years teaching high school, I see this as incredibly destructive to the atmosphere of a school. Schools, by definition, have to create codes of discipline while they promote education, but when the disciplinary measures become this heavy-handed, the balance is tipped toward fear and repression. How long does it take for a teacher to recreate a positive learning atmosphere in class? How long does it take for students to get the raid out of their heads and focus on their studies?

Obama 2.0 makes his opening bid

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I have frequently been a critic of President Obama's negotiation tactics over the past four years. For a Harvard trained lawyer, I was most unimpressed. Obama was far too concerned about that "post partisan" conciliator image he tried to foster during the 2008 campaign. His opening negotiating bids always tried to meet the Tea-Publicans half-way in the mistaken belief that this would encourage them to be reasonable and conciliatory and to negotiate in good faith. Instead, it only emboldened them to demand even more, conciliation was a sign of weakness to them.

Obama either did not understand or did not want to accept that Tea-Publicans are an insurrection who want to destroy the government and who have taken this country hostage. Tea-Publicans believe in win at all costs, even if it means killing the hostage, as they almost did last year with a default on the U.S. debt (they settled for wounding the hostage with a downgrade in our credit rating). "Good faith" simply does not exist.