'Of Pandas and People'
It's not so hard to imagine those people a few hundred years ago who criticized Copernicus for saying that the earth rotated around the Sun. I'm sure they said there were "gaps" in his theory. Unfortunately, there will always be an "earth is flat" crowd.
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You'll have to forgive my schadenfreude if anything comes to pass from the DeLay investigation:
DeLay Probe Winds Down; Charges May Loom
I must resist the urge to dance and begin singing, "Ding-dong, the witch is dead, the witch is dead!"
And his buddies are close behind (Frist, Abramoff, Safavian, Rove, Bolton):
Frist Faces Heat as SEC Orders Formal Inquiry Into Stock Sale
The School Safavian and Abramoff Built
Will Safavian Knock Down The Right-Wing House of Cards?
Tyco Exec: Abramoff Claimed Ties to Administration
Plamegate: The John Bolton Connection
So how's that Republican Revolution working out for you, Newt?
- Smaller government? ============>Nope, screwed that up.
- Less government spending? ============> Fucked that way up.
- Less intrusion into people's lives? ========> Can you say Patriot Act?
- Better ethics and more accountability? ============> Pleaaase!
6 comments:
I have an idea that would please the Christian Right AND the secularists... Offer two separate courses - Creationism 101 and Evolution 101. Let children and their parents decide which one to enroll in and see who flunks college biology and scores a 9 on the ACT Science portion... Conservatives balked so much at minorities saying standardized tests were "culturally biased" so they'd be hard pressed to raise that issue themselves... Natural selection at work, right?
As for DeLay et all... we can only hope. Though Michael Brown just perjured himself in front of congress and no one cared, so...
Let children and their parents decide which one to enroll in and see who flunks college biology and scores a 9 on the ACT Science portion...
Well the ACT Science portion as it is now, isn't designed to support a creationism-educated backround so it wouldn't be an accurate assesment of what the child learned.
Which is interesting to me considering there are so many homeschooled Christian children. How do they fare on the Science portion of the ACT?
I'm going to look that up.
Parents cited several reasons for homeschooling their
children--because they felt able to provide a better education at home, because of
religious reasons, and because they perceived that their child had a poor learning
environment in a traditional school (Bielick, 2001).
And according to Rudner (1999), achievement test scores of homeschooled students are high. The students' average scores were typicality in the 70th to 80th percentile, with 25% of homeschool students enrolled one or more grades above their age-level peers in public and private schools. Christopher Klicka, Senior Counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association, reports that homeschoolers tend to score above the national average on both the SAT and ACT, the primary tests used by colleges in evaluating college applicants.
Wow.
http://www.ericdigests.org/2005-2/homeschooling.html
Well there's debate about whether the ACT/SAT are accurate measurements of learning anyway...
My job is educational research, so I must point out some covariants in that study:
The first section of the paragraph you cited said the majority of homeschooling are white and better educated than non-homeschoolers... well, those are also two of the largest predictors of standardized test performance. So is it the homeschooling or the fact that these kids are white, middle class, and have educated parents? Probably both.
"[homeschooled students] tend to score above the national average on both the SAT and ACT, the primary tests used by colleges in evaluating college applicants. "
- keep in mind also that students with higher educated parents will be more college-bound. The national averages of these tests usually include a large number of students who never intend to attend college but whose state or school district require the ACT or SAT as part of high school graduation (Illinois now requires ACT and the state averages have gone down because of the numbers of non college-bound students). That does bring down the averages somewhat.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I've met many homeschooled people and they're just as smart as anyone else - probably because they're not subject to the lock-step, prison-style education now provided.
I am typically suspect of standardized test scores anyway.
I am typically suspect of standardized test scores anyway.
So am I. They have already begun evaluating my son's academic performance through testing.
He's a bright boy but he doesn't test well. He scored really low on his reading comprehension and when I talked to his teacher about it, I realized that they were testing him with fiction books. My son hates reading fiction. He likes non-fiction books about animals, marine life, war, guns--whatever. Come to find out, there's an option for the student to be tested with a fiction book OR a non fiction book.
His teacher should have known better: He checkes out refrence books everytime the kids go to the library.
Also,
He has trouble carrying over the right answer to the answer sheet.
He has the right answer but when it comes to coloring in the right bubble--he gets confused.
*sigh*
Good info Laura, thanks.
As for what's wrong with Pennslvania? Nothing that isn't wrong with the rest of the country. You know when I knew for sure this country was in serious trouble. When we went to the drive in to watch ROCKY AND BULWINKLE: THE MOVIE, and half the people there weren't smart enough to get the jokes!
yeah there were a lot of double and triple entendres, but hell, my friends and I got those jokes 40 years ago when we were 12!
We have an entire education system that teaches memorization, but not cognitive thinking. Which is why Creationism seems logical to them!
As for Newt, he's been making it clear that he's pretty disgusted with Bush and the neo-cons, along with the Republican leadership (or more precisely, lack there of). He's even making nice with Hillary!
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