Ooops

This bit of juxtaposition gold comes from @chernowa:



That's definitely one for the layout hall of blame.

Via @chris_steller

Clever in Overdrive

Via @utterben:


Thus does negative space make fools of us all.

I Woke Up Thinking About Children Left Behind

Years before both parties of Congress passed the No Child Left Behind act for President George W. Bush in 2001, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund used the phrase "Leave No Child Behind" to bring attention to the ways America fails poor children.

It's interesting to note the grammatical difference between the two phrases. Wright Edelman's is addressed to an assumed "you," who is commanded to leave no child behind. Bush's version is in the past tense -- somehow, no child will have been left behind. Both the actors and the mechanism are unclear.

And that's exactly how it has turned out. Underfunded, founded on mistaken or false premises of how schools can succeed, and most egregiously, assuming that children are outputs that can all be made the same, NCLB has provided a goad for anti-union, pro-business-at-any-cost forces to undermine public confidence in the one remaining social institution that had substantial support among most groups in our country.

The remedies prescribed by NCLB for failing schools were all unknowns or wishful thinking, as Diane Ravitch has shown. "Free" tutoring has led to a boom in tutoring businesses, most of which rip off families (and district taxpayers). Reorganizing schools has not led to improved outcomes for the students. Charter schools are no more likely to improve students' learning than the public schools whose funding they have gutted. Kids who got vouchers to attend religious schools don't do any better either.

Once all the cherry-picking of student populations is controlled for in research, the only school models, whether charter or traditional public, that have led to clearly improved outcomes for most (but still not all) low-income students are the ones where the school year and day are extended and students and their parents are supported with a host of social services.

Is anyone surprised by this? Having trained staff working with kids and caring about them from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. five days a week and most of Saturday as well works. Getting rid of summer "vacation" works. Providing free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus social workers, job counseling for parents, and transportation… It's no shock that a child from a family with little infrastructure will do better once there is infrastructure.

It takes more money to make up for things that poor kids don't have.

As publications like Rethinking Schools show, there are plenty of unionized teachers who think our public schools need reforming, but not with NCLB's methods. Testing, which transmogrifies learning into a vacant shell lacking art, music, history, or science, is often absurd, as well as a money magnet for companies like Pearson. And privatizing public schools into for-profit chains takes it one step further.

Leaving no child behind takes a Finland-like commitment to education as a core societal good. It takes addressing child poverty and income inequality as the root cause of the problem. It requires policy that comes from research rather than wishful thinking.

No L, No L

Digging through some boxes a few days ago, I came across this ad. If I remember correctly, I got it from a graduate school professor who handed out photocopies as an example of how readers make closure despite the reality of what's in front of them.


She was impressed that I saw the ad's problem right away. This convinced her that I was an extra-special student and led to academic opportunities down the road that I may or may not have deserved.

Little did she know, but I had seen an ad with the same typo when I was a freshman in college, and had been sensitive to the spelling of that word ever since.

What's the Matter with Kansas (or Any Other State)?

Sometimes the truth just slaps you in the face.



Cartoon by John Johnik

Leaving School

Daughter Number Three-Point-One, shown here as she appeared when she started school 13 years ago, is graduating from high school tonight.


I'll be back tomorrow.

You Have to Watch Out for the Quiet Ones

They were hanging out in the petting zoo, with a label over their heads that said Patagonian Cavy.


Like giant rabbits that don't hop, they're also called Patagonian Mara, a species of South American rodents that are closely related to guinea pigs.

But I think they are actually the mythical jackalope of the Plains, post-plastic-surgery, gone into the witness protection program.

Passing on the Costs

The other day, when writing about choosing a child care provider, I alluded to the fact that decisions like child care or health care are "not simple ones with easy choices between good and bad." They require information that the decider does not have.

Today's Pioneer Press carried a Kaiser Health News story that made my point for me, titled High Health Insurance Deductibles Hit Fortune 500. As costs have continued to rise for our bloated and inefficient system of care, even large employers have begun to move their employees to high-deductible plans.

Supporters say the plans can contain health costs. Patients who have to pay for care up front will take better care of themselves and shop more carefully, the thinking goes, seeking lower-cost providers or asking whether tests are necessary.

That quote might be correct with a few revisions: Seeking lower cost providers who aren't doctors, maybe. Refusing tests that are necessary. How can a person who's sick judge whether a test is necessary? We don't have enough information to know the answer. But we do know if we can afford it or not, so if it's not covered by insurance, it's pretty easy to know which way the question will be answered.

The Kaiser story sited the Wenger family, whose daughter has juvenile arthritis. Under a new high-deductible plan, their "out-of-pocket medical costs... soared from a few hundred dollars a year to $7,000."

The story concludes:

Among high-deductible plans' advantages: For both companies and workers, premiums are substantially lower than for traditional coverage. Employers often use money saved on premiums to fund tax-free health savings accounts and similar arrangements to help workers pay for deductibles.

For severely ill patients or families coping with chronic illness, switching to high-deductible insurance can be the equivalent of a large pay cut.

"I've always hated the term consumer-driven health plan," said Oberlander, the health policy professor. "If we want to describe them accurately, they should be called employer-driven health plans for less comprehensive health insurance."

Monkey on Your Roof

I wonder if this Jetta knows it has has a problem...


...or if it needs an intervention.

Seen in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Books to Keep Me Busy

You may have noticed that I've been reading Michael Pollen's The Botany of Desire for more than a month. That's not a mistake -- I've been impossibly busy and haven't had much time to read before falling asleep each night.

But I just finished it, and like many other readers, I'm very impressed. I'll have some favorite quotes and thoughts soon. In the meantime, other books have been stacking up, waiting for my attention.

I have the habit of reading several fiction titles for each nonfiction one, and I have a feeling it might be more than several before I get back to nonfiction this time.

I went to a used book sale yesterday and came home with these beauties:


Including a copy of Pete Hautman's Godless for Daughter Number Three-Point-One's collection, China Mieville's Kraken (which I keep hearing is essential modern science fiction reading, even though I fear reading him), Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography Infidel, my second Margaret Atwood novel, a nice first edition of Tony Earley's Jim the Boy, cute little illustrated versions of a Russian folk tale collection and Tolkien's Smith of Wootton Major, and David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy, which somehow, I have not yet read.

Mixed in there is a 1962 ex-library book called Valiant Captive. It's part of the "white people taken captive by Indians" genre and may be horrible, but I thought it was worth a $.50 look just out of cultural curiosity, if nothing else.

And then there was this signed first edition of Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannolli to complete my S.V. collection.


Before the book sale, I had wandered into the Red Balloon book shop to buy Kristin Cashore's Bitterblue, a sequel to Graceling, and wound up raiding their YA shelves of:

• Every John Green book (after my recent encounter with The Fault in Our Stars)
• Nothing Special, the latest book by Geoff Herbach (author of Stupid Fast)
• Plus two science fiction YAs recommended by the staff, Victoria Roth's Insurgent and Ilsa Bick's Ashes.

Then Friday I found my way to Uncle Hugo's (the oldest science fiction bookstore in the country!) to pick up 2312, the latest from all-time favorite Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as John Scalzi's Red Shirts.

And finally, there was a quick trip to Micawber's, which netted a paperback printing of Rosemary Sutcliff's The Shining Company (a title of hers I've never heard of before) plus a beautiful picture book called One Times Square, a pictorial history of that famous address over the last hundred years.

It's going to be a YA and science fiction kind of summer, I think.

Child Care Choice Not as Simple as He Thinks

I usually reprint Star Tribune letters when I agree with them, but this one breaks the pattern:

Day Care

Parents are the key in monitoring kids' care

The Star Tribune has published a series of articles trying to sway public confidence in the state's two-tiered day care system ("Lack of child-care records puts kids at risk," May 30). We have become a society that seems to think that personal responsibility should be shifted to the government for everything. Selecting a day care is a choice parents make; they should take it seriously and not just rely on some public website or on inspections by the state or county. Ask for references, talk to other parents, etc. You are your child's best inspector. If you are a parent who drops off your kid without going in and talking to your provider, then you are not doing your job. We don't need unions, more regulation or more websites to make day care better. We need parents to stop shirking their responsibility and put the time and effort into knowing who is watching their children.

DAVID ANDERSON, LONSDALE, MINN.

So many things are wrong with Mr. Anderson's thinking. First, I don't know what he means by saying the Star Tribune is "trying to sway public confidence in the state's two-tiered day care system." My impression was that the Strib was being a newspaper by investigating something in the public interest. The paper reported that more children die in family child care than in centers, both in absolute and per capita numbers. Is Mr. Anderson opposed to reporting facts?

Second, his simple-minded approach to the tough decision parents face would almost be laughable if it weren't politically motivated by his anti-government, anti-union worldview. He is clearly a believer in homo economicus, the rational man theory of human behavior. He thinks parents can get perfect information if they just put their minds to it.

However, like health care, child care decisions are not simple ones with easy choices between good and bad. References from parents who use a provider are great, but they don't tell you whether the provider is over-capacity or puts infants to sleep on their stomachs. Talking to the provider is important, but it's only one piece of information. Having ratings or assessments from an unbiased source is a good thing, and in fact, should play a key role in parents' decision-making.

In essence, Anderson is blaming the parents of every child who has died in a child care setting for their child's death. Because the child died, in his book, obviously the parents weren't careful enough, they were "shirking their responsibility." I suppose they should have insisted on surveillance cameras or something.

A New Name for a Stick

What do you call this little item you would put into a computer's USB port to transfer files from one computer to another?


It's one of those solid state flash memory thingamabobs that has no moving parts, but can hold between 200 megabytes and many gigabytes of data. They started out costing hundreds of dollars about 10 years ago, and now are so cheap it's pretty easy to get one for free.

Some names I've heard used:

• Jump drive
• Thumb drive
• USB stick
• Data stick
• Flash drive
• Memory stick

But yesterday I saw a new name in a client's email:

• Junk stick

Which I can only imagine is an eggcorn combining a mishearing of jump with stick.

Given the kinds of files that wind up remaining on mine, I think I will immediately switch to this new term.