My Blog

Category: Education

  • CPS Pays Parents for Good Behavior

    Blatantly stolen from Second City Cop:

    Is the lure of a $25 gift card enough to persuade a parent who’s not involved in their child’s education to get involved?

    Seventy Chicago Public Schools that have struggled to engage parents are about to find out.

    At Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s request, Walgreen Co. has agreed to provide $25 gift cards to parents who pick up their students’ report cards and participate in parent-teacher conferences during report card pickup days.

    “This is a way, in my view, of incentivizing responsible parenting,” Emanuel told a news conference at Field Elementary School, 7019 N. Ashland.

    Is he serious? “incentivizing responsible parenting?” In what parallel universe is this unmitigated ass living in? If you “incentivize” (which isn’t even a real word) bad behavior, what do you get? More bad behavior.

    Every study in existence proves this. Example A is the entire welfare system – you pay someone not to work, you get a shitload of people not working. You give someone a check for pushing out babies, pretty soon the birthrate skyrockets and you have 15, 14 even 13-year-olds having babies. You know what reduced the teen birthrate back in the 1990’s? Stopping the checks.

    Emanuel said he got the gift card idea during one of his morning workouts.

    “That’s what happens when I start swimming. I start coming up with ideas,” the mayor said.

    The mayor then approached Walgreen CEO Greg Wasson, who jumped at the opportunity to “give back” to the city where the company has operated for 112 years and now has 150 stores.

    This explains part of where he keeps getting these fucked up ideas – chlorine poisoning.

    via Second City Cop.

    So that’s kinda entertaining.  But I fail to see how giving away gift cards to parents who come pick-up report cards and sit for parent-teacher conferences is exactly creating an incentive for bad behavior.  Seems like good behavior to me.

    The bigger problem with this is like Chris Rock (and Barack Obama) have pointed out that we keep setting the bar so low.

    Another comparison, though, is illustrated by an old Chris Rock joke: “People say Colin Powell speaks so well. What’d they expect him to say? ‘Ahmma drop me a bomb’?” There’s something incredibly condescending to think of saying that a man who has risen to the ranks of 4-star general or United States Senator is “articulate,” but it’s always meant as a compliment. In reality, though, it’s a backhanded one.

    Obama is more than “articulate,” of course; he’s a truly gifted orator. And he was editor of the Harvard Law Review and otherwise has some mighty impressive credentials. It does seem, though, that the bar is set much lower for Obama than most men who would be president.

    via Outside the Beltway.

    Isn’t there a soft bigotry in saying that these parents need this incentive to do things that other parents do [without the incentive]?

    I actually believe — from what I’m seen with my own eyes living on the West Side for 9 years — that the vast majority of parents want to help their kids get a good education.  They want to be a positive influence in their children’s lives.  They just simply do not know how because they were never taught by their parents.

    What we need to do is help train parents to be better parents.  Not throw $25 in gift cards at them and expect them to suddenly become Ma and Pa Cleaver.

  • Rise of Titan the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

    After falling behind Asia and Europe in the great race, where success is measured in FLOPS floating-point operations per second, the US has struck back at the new high-tech Olympians with Titan: quite possibly the fastest supercomputer in the world.  …

    All of that might now change, as a new supercomputing giant hailing from the Smokey Mountains was unveiled by the US Department of Energy’s DOE on Monday.  More than 10 times faster and five times more energy efficient than its predecessor Jaguar, Titan is the brainchild of the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory ORNL, nestled in the Tennessee highlands.  Titan’s theoretical peak is 20 petaflops – 20 quadrillion calculations per second – with 299,008 CPUs central processing units and 18,688 graphics processing units GPUs spinning at breakneck speeds to make to make scientific breakthroughs in record times.

    Titan’s blistering computation speed will be the equivalent of “the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second,” ORNL says.

    via RT.

    Hell Yeah!!

    You all realize this is the Super Bowl of computers right?

  • Teen Loses Stomach After Drinking Liquid Nitrogen

    Gaby Scanlon, from Heysham, Lancashire, was celebrating her 18th birthday with friends at Oscar’s wine bar and bistro in Lancaster earlier this month when she drank two shots of the liqueur Jagermeister, which was laced with liquid nitrogen.  …

    It was made popular by celebrity chefs, including Heston Blumenthal, and is completely harmless as a gas.  But if the nitrogen has not burned away fully, as a liquid it has the power to freeze objects in a matter of seconds.  Touching the liquid can give you severe cryogenic, or cold, burns.

    Duh?

    Miss Scanlon said she felt fine after her first drink but suffered “excruciating pain” the moment she drank the second, offered to her by the bar man because it was her birthday.

    via Business Insider.

    From the UK.  But I’m still chalking this up to bad education.  Someone missed a very important lesson when she stayed home that day.  Had she seen the rose shatter maybe she would remember how dangerous this stuff really is.

  • Pension’s Rate of Return Plummets to 0.76%

    This sounds like a problem:

    The pension fund for most public school teachers in Illinois generated just 0.76 percent in fiscal 2012, a big drop from the 23.6 percent rate of return in the previous fiscal year, the Teachers’ Retirement System reported on Thursday.  …

    It is the long-term results that matter and the system’s 20-year investment return at the end of June was 7.73 percent.”  …

    Last month, the pension fund for teachers in all Illinois school districts with the exception of the Chicago Public Schools, lowered its long-term assumed investment rate of return to 8 percent from 8.5 percent.The move will depress TRS’ funded ratio to 42.5 percent and increase Illinois’ fiscal 2014 payment to the fund to $3.36 billion instead of $3.07 billion under the previous return rate.

    via Crain’s Chicago Business.

    Indeed a problem.  Consider …

    A drop in the assumed rate of return from 8.5% to 8.0% meant that the state (that’s you and me, a/k/a the taxpayers) owed an extra $300,000,000.  Hummm….

    TRS’s board members, appointed by The Machine, like to quote the 20-year ROR because it’s a respectable 7.73%.  That’s true.  But as I wrote about this before, the 10-year ROR is a pathetic 5.7%.

    The fact remains that TRS is in some real trouble.  Everyone knows it.  And the longer we keep our head in the sand the more painful it’s going to be to fix.

  • 30,000 Unfilled Jobs in Illinois

    Say “skills gap” to any manufacturer, and invariably they’ll respond with the number 600,000. That’s the gaping hole of unfilled jobs at U.S. manufacturers — for Illinois, estimates point to 30,000 unfilled jobs. The talent shortfall carries serious consequences. In a Manufacturing Institute 2011 skills gap report surveying more than 1,100 U.S. manufacturers, 74 percent of respondents said a lack of skilled production workers was harming productivity or hindering their ability to expand operations.

    That skills gap will widen. The Society of Manufacturing Engineers, based in Dearborn, Mich., predicts the number of unfilled manufacturing jobs will reach 3 million by 2015.

    via Crain’s Chicago Business.

    Holy Cow!!

    To be fair, the rest of the article talks about how wages for machinist have not kept pace with inflation; that may be true.  But isn’t taking a job at $13 or $14 an hour better than sitting home watching Judge Judy and playing xbox all day?

    These jobs are fun too.  In a former life I used to work with a lot of machinist and injection molding operators and tool & die guys, and other people who I think had cool jobs.  You get to build things.  You get to play with equipment that costs more than your house.  At the end of the day you can go home and tell your family that you did something with your day.  You didn’t just move paper from one side of the desk to the other (like I do now.)

    What we have here is evidence of the complete failing of our educational system.  Children not only don’t have the most rudimentary math skills necessary to become a machinist or CNC operator but they don’t have the intellectual curiosity and patience to solve complicated puzzles.  That’s what these jobs really are… puzzle solvers.  Figure our how to make something better than it’s being made today, faster, cheaper.

    We have to turn this around.  Show kids that learning is fun and that building (and breaking) stuff can lead to a rewarding job that might not get you a house in Lake Forest but will certainly allow you to put food on the table, gas in the car, and take a decent vacation every year.

    We will not survive as a nation if people will stay home rather than work for a living.

  • What Kid’s Need in Schools (that they’re not getting)

    Every person in any career should spend 90 minutes in a classroom at least one time in a school year, sharing their stories and setting an example for the students,” he said. “It’s part of giving back. These kids generally don’t see enough examples of why education is important or who they could be or what they could do.
    — Brad Keywell, Groupon co-founder

    via Sun-Times.

    This is a brilliant idea.

    Kudos to Mr. Keywell for putting this together.

  • Florida’s Bigoted New Education (Union) Standards

    Asian students should be the smartest, and teachers will expect the least from blacks.  That’s the case in Florida, at least, where the Board of Education has agreed to pass a revised plan that outlines new academic goals for students based on race.  …

    Under the approved strategic revision, 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of whites, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of blacks will be expected to read at or above their applicable reading grade levels in future tests. For math scores, they expect 92 percent of Asians, 80 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of blacks to excel, suggesting that some races warrant a lower bar than others.

    Patrick Franklin, president and CEO of the Urban League of Palm Beach County, opposes the revision, telling the Sun Sentinel, “All children should be held to high standards and for them to say that for African-Americans the goal is below other students is unacceptable.”

    via RT.

    What kind of nonsense is this?  Thank you Patrick Franklin for standing up and demanding equal educational expectations for African-American children.

    Did Florida just accept the premise of The Bell Curve?  Is that where we are today?

    Can you imagine someone said, well it’s ok to pay black people less than white people or Asian people?  Or that black people only need to work 6 or 7 hours a day instead of 8?

    We need to work on treating all peoples equally.  Isn’t the goal to try to ignore race — not call it out?  This goofiness is only going to set back race relations 20-30 years.

    It’s such a stupid idea that one has to wonder why it was put forth and passed…

    And while educators are hoping to have higher test scores coming in across the board, race and ethnicity play a deciding factor in what’s expected from Sunshine State students in the years to come.

    “Educators” for those that don’t know means “Union Teachers.”  These are the people who are fighting to limit any performance based evaluations.

    Florida’s Republican governor think this is a dumb idea:

    Schools’ expectations should be color blind.  As a nation, we have rejected police use of racial profiling on the streets, by what rational do we now accept it from educators in the classroom.

    Indeed Governor. Indeed.

    The take-away here is that Democrat Teachers’ Unions are racist.

  • Secrets Of the College Admissions Office

    1) It sucks to be a middle class white applicant.

    2) East Asians can be disadvantaged too.

    3) Athletes bring down the quality of the class. So do legacies, but not nearly as much.

    4) Early admission is less competitive, despite what the College claims.

    5) Most college essays are too boring.

    via Business Insider.

    Tell me something we don’t already know, right?

  • Problems in Pennsylvania Schools

    Well over 100 educators will eventually face state disciplinary charges for cheating that could lead to the revocation of their professional certificates, Tomalis said. But that could take years, and the results of state disciplinary board hearings in Harrisburg would be disclosed only if educators were disciplined.

    In Philadelphia, 53 district-run schools and three charter schools are still under investigation for allegations of cheating in past years.

    via Philly.com.

    Charter Schools do NOT perform any better than Government Schools.

    Failing test scores.  Cheating teachers.  And general poor performance all around.

    Pathetic.

  • CPS Debt Downgraded

    A leading bond-rating agency has downgraded the Chicago Board of Education’s debt in the wake of the settlement of the Chicago Teacher’s Union’s recent strike.

    Moody’s Investor Service had already downgraded the Chicago Public Schools’ bond rating outlook to “negative” from stable in July, and cited Thursday the rating agency’s “view that the district will be hard-pressed to make the budget adjustments necessary to close an estimated $1 billion budget gap for fiscal 2014.”

    The schools’ downgrade to an A2 rating “reflects a weakened financial profile” born of depletion of reserves, a coming jump in pension payments after three years in which state law was changed to reduce the payments temporarily, slow payment of state money–and the recent strike, Moody’s said in a release.”If progress is not made toward improving the financial condition and liquidity of district operating funds, or if challenges arise in making the required pension contributions, the district’s general obligation credit quality will be impaired,” according to the release.

    Strikes by other unions, more delays in state funding or “unmanageable” increases in pension costs could result in further ratings downgrades, Moody’s warned.

    A spokesperson for Chicago Public Schools wasn’t immediately available to comment on the downgrade.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    CPS is falling apart.  The biggest losers here are the poor families generally on the South and West sides that have no other options for their children.  It’s the false choice of failing CPS school A or failing CPS school B.

    Rahm caved.  He owns this.  Epic fail.