The Discreet Charm of Rush Limbaugh

Limbaugh: Kennedy Will Be Dead By The Time Health Care Bill Passes

He also said that the health care bill should be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care Bill

I don't think it was very nice of Limbaugh to say that. 

But for a body to call Rush Limbaugh a sh*t is to demean an important biological function. 

 
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Conservative credo (with flesh off the bone)

Life is unfair.  Let's keep it that way.
 
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I got the Blue Dog Blues...

Glenn Greenwald has some of the story here http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2009/03/03/davis/.   

I'm less focused on how Blue Dog  Democrats supported Bush's Iraq War in the past--it was a dishonest, craven, stupid and failed political gamble--than I am how about these 40 or so Dems of now are posturing about the deficits in Obama's budget.  As James Wolcott would say, but more literately, they got the vapors about the deficits when many of them--maybe most--are princes and princesses of "pork" in their own right.  As was pointed out in the campaign, less than 2% of the overall budget can be described as earmarks.   As Digby points out, some of the earmarks are easy targets because the projects have funny sounding names:  Mormon cricket conrol studies, tattoo removal, etc.  Well, a plague of Mormon crickets is no joke to farmers in Utah and other places west...and tattoo removal is an important part of a program designed to help former gang members become re-integrated into society.  No doubt there are some unworthy
earmarks--but these are gnats compared to when you get  rampaging elephants in the shop:  no bid contracts and unneeded cold war weapons systems. 

The blogs Open Left and Moveon.org and some other outfits are joining together to form the project Accountability Now to enourage primary challenges to those Blue Dogs who don't seem to understand that unless we hang together we shall hang separately, in a manner of political speaking. 

Saint Lloyd Doggett is my Congressman, but, hell,  if I lived in a Blue Dog District, was younger and not quite so weird, I'd consider running myself...
 
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Ha!

Public Schools Outperform Private Schools in Math Instruction

ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2009) — In another "Freakonomics"-style study that turns conventional wisdom about public- versus private-school education on its head, a team of University of Illinois education professors has found that public-school students outperform their private-school classmates on standardized math tests, thanks to two key factors: certified math teachers, and a modern, reform-oriented math curriculum.

Sarah Lubienski, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the U. of I. College of Education, says teacher certification and reform-oriented teaching practices correlated positively with higher achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam for public-school students.
"According to our results, schools that hired more certified teachers and had a curriculum that de-emphasized learning by rote tended to do better on standardized math tests," Lubienski said. "And public schools had more of both."
To account for the difference in test scores, Lubienski and her co-authors, education professor Christopher Lubienski (her husband) and doctoral student Corinna Crane, looked at five critical factors: school size, class size, parental involvement, teacher certification and instructional practices.
In previous research, the Lubienskis discovered that after holding demographic factors constant, public school students performed just as well if not better than private schools students on standardized math tests.
"There are so many reasons why you would think that the results should be reversed – that private schools would outscore public schools in standardized math test scores," she said. "This study looks at the underlying reasons why that's not necessarily the case."
Of the five factors, school size and parental involvement "didn't seem to matter all that much," Lubienski said, citing a weak correlation between the two factors as "mixed or marginally significant predictors" of student achievement.
They also discovered that smaller class sizes, which are more prevalent in private schools than in public schools, significantly correlate with achievement.
"Smaller class size correlated with higher achievement and occurred more frequently in private schools," Lubienski said. "But that doesn't help explain why private schools were being outscored by public schools."
Lubienski said one reason private schools show poorly in this study could be their lack of accountability to a public body.
"There's been this assumption that private schools are more effective because they're autonomous and don't have all the bureaucracy that public schools have," Lubienski said. "But one thing this study suggests is that autonomy isn't necessarily a good thing for schools."
Another reason could be private schools' anachronistic approach to math.
"Private schools are increasingly ignoring curricular trends in education, and it shows," Lubienski said. "They're not using up-to-date methods, and they're not hiring teachers who employ up-to-date lesson plans in the classroom. When you do that, you aren't really taking advantage of the expertise in math education that's out there."
Lubienski thinks one of the reasons that private schools don't adopt a more reform-minded math curriculum is because some parents are more attracted to a "back-to-basics" approach to math instruction. The end result, however, is students who are "prepared for the tests of 40 years ago, and not the tests of today," she said.
Tests like NAEP, Lubienski said, have realigned themselves with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards for math instruction, which have moved away from the brute-force memorization of numbers to an emphasis on "geometry, measurement and algebra – things that private school teachers reported they spent less time teaching," Lubienski said.
"The results do seem to suggest that private schools are doing their own thing, and that they're less likely to have paid attention to curricular trends and the fact that math instruction and math tests have changed," she said.
Lubienski cautioned that the relationships found between the two factors and public-school performance might not be directly causal.
"The correlations might be a result, for example, of having the type of administrator who makes teacher credentials and academics the priority over other things, such as religious education," she said. "That's often not the case for private religious schools, where parents are obviously committed to things beside academic achievement."
The schools with the smallest percentage of certified teachers – conservative Christian schools, where less than half of teachers were certified – were, not coincidentally, the schools with the lowest aggregate math test scores.
"Those schools certainly have the prerogative to set different priorities when hiring, but it just doesn't help them on NAEP," Lubienski said.
Lubienski also noted that public schools tend to set aside money for teacher development and periodic curriculum improvements.
"Private schools don't invest as much in the professional development of their teachers and don't do enough to keep their curriculum current," she said. "That appears to be less of a priority for them, and they don't have money designated for that kind of thing in the way public schools do."
Lubienski hopes that politicians who favor more privatization would realize that the invisible hand of the market doesn't necessarily apply to education.
"You can give schools greater autonomy, but that doesn't mean they're going to use that autonomy to implement an innovative curriculum or improve the academics of the students," she said.
Instead, some private schools try to attract parents by offering a basic skills curriculum, or non-academic requirements, such as students wearing uniforms.
Privatization also assumes that parents can make judgments about what schools are the best for their children.
"With schools, it's tough to see how much kids are actually learning," Lubienski said. "Market theory in education rests on the assumption that parents can see what they're buying, and that they're able to make an informed decision about their child's education. Although parents might be able to compare schools' SAT scores, they aren't able to determine whether those gains are actually larger in higher scoring schools unless they know where students start when they enter school. People don't always pick the most effective schools."
The results were published in a paper titled "Achievement Differences and School Type: The Role of School Climate, Teacher Certification, and Instruction" in the November 2008 issue of the American Journal of Education. The published findings were based on fourth- and eighth-grade test results from the 2003 NAEP test, including data from both student achievement and comprehensive background information drawn from a nationally representative sample of more than 270,000 students from more than 10,000 schools.

 

 
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I cheated--I looked it up...

Teresa, the person to whom I am married, made the insane suggestion that if I was uncertain about what Obama meant in his budget speech about the "savings plan", then I should, you know, actually look it up.  As she is distressingly right most of the time, I did.  
 
It's here http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/seniors_and_social_security/ under the rubric "Strenthening Retirement Savings"
 
Essentially, it requires that employers offer IRAs to all employees--who can opt out if they want to. 
 
Families that make less than a certain amount will have 50% of the first $1000 in savings matched by the Feds. 
 
I have to think about it. 
 
Right now, it seems unthinkable that anyone would propose that such a system replace social security, but if good times return again...I wonder if there are safeguards could/would be built in, like the FDIC for bank deposits.  My first thought is that the idea needs tinkering to make it to where it would be, in effect, a defined benefits plan. 
 
R.
 
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Armed insanity & religious freedom...

If you want to scare yourself some, check out the website "Gun Guys" http://www.gunguys.com/?p=3353

The Montana and New Hampshire legislatures have passed bills (probably unconstitutional) that would exempt the states from the Federal regulations regarding gun purchases, possession and registration.  Cheap political tricks, but no less deadly if they wind up empowering Mveigh-style wannabes in the interim before they are litigated and overturned.  Well, maybe the governors won't sign them into law. 

When the Supreme Court against most precedent ruled that the Second Amendment did in fact apply to individuals, there was a poison pill in the ruling from the point of view of the gun lobby:  the Court affirmed the right of government to regulate gun ownership.  Maybe the gun lobby hopes to set up test cases down the road that will result in further weakening of gun regulation.  I dunno. 

I do know they're friggin' nuts.  I don't have anything against gun ownership per se although I don't and won't have a gun in my house.  I don't have any ongoing use for one and multiplying opportunies for the "infinite perversity of inanimate objects" is tempting  fate & doesn't seem like a good idea. 

I sometimes wonder why the "gun guys" don't mount a freedom of religion defense.  Their attitude toward guns partakes of religious fervor--like saints' relics, idols & fetishes.  I bet guns and rifles have a kind of glowing nimbus in the minds of these people.

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Today Obama slapped them in the face with a chain mail gauntlet...

Obama ended his electronic fireside chat with "...they are (the Evil Ones--my parenthesis) gearing up for a fight.  And so am I." 

Oh, my.  Could it be that honesty is the best policy?  And the bleeding heart,  Goody-two Shoes leftish persuasion is going to kick over the, um, you know, all across America? 

I call to mind the lines from Ginsberg's great Smoky the Bear Sutra that go (more or less) he's gonna

Drown their butts
Crush their butts, etc., etc.

I agree with what many regard as the hysterical left blogosphere that we should never assume that Obama is always going to do the right thing, and that it is wrong to assume he is playing some kind of 11th dimensional chess whenever he takes a position we don't like or have doubts about & that everything will be okay in the end...

Still, I wonder if he hasn't been playing 11th dimensional chess all along...

He has been insistent about this transparency and openess thing that it is so easy to be cynical about, but I wonder if by insisting on it and then naming the specific lobbies that are likely to oppose his agenda if he isn't playing a new kind of hardball that his opponents will have a tough time hitting against...

He's got 13 million folks on his e-mail list who are arguably at least center-leftish, astute and quite conscious politically--that's 13 million pairs of eyes who are watching him--and also watching out for him. 

I dunno.  Just a theory. 

R.

 
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