Posted 10:36 AM by Floyd

The State of California's new head of schools has cancelled the next administration of the high school exit exam. The article notes, "The state Board of Education is expected on July 9 to follow O'Connell's lead and delay for at least a year plans to withhold diplomas from students who fail the test."

Assisting in this decision were the usual sort of ethnic pressure groups who think minorities are inherently unable to succeed:

``We're happy that the class of 2004 -- the students who didn't get a quality education -- are not going to have their diplomas taken away,'' said Mike Chavez of Californians for Justice, which has fought the test.

Thanks in part to Chavez, everyone gets a high school diploma. Even if someone fails all eight attempts to score 55% on a test of tenth grade material, that student gets a diploma.

And thanks in part to Chavez, that diploma is a worthless piece of paper.

There are probably 10 or 20 million Californians who approve of exit exams -- but they are in favor of exams in a general, high-minded sense. It doesn't make a huge difference to their lives. There are maybe 100,000 or 200,000 Californians who disapprove of exit exams -- and for them, it's a vital issue of power or money or privilege. And it is that small pressure group that bends the will of California's school administration.

This is how governments behave. Supposedly governments provide public goods that the market cannot. Testing and credentialling high school students to ensure that a diploma has value is a public good. It is not being supplied. Remember this the next time someone babbles high-minded guff about how only the government can take care of some vital function.

Posted 4:00 PM by Floyd

Awhile back Eugene Volokh posted some tips for how small fry like me can increase blog traffic. Several bloggers, including Aaron Haspel, posted their own thoughts on the subject. Today while reading Aaron's blogroll I recognized another tactic:

BLOGROLLING

101-280
2 Blowhards
AC Douglas
Agenda Bender
Agitator
...

There you have it, microbloggers: Time to think of descriptive names that start with "A"!

(I think that 101-280 represents the high-risk strategy, as some might choose to collate blogs with numbers at the end.)

Posted 1:54 PM by Floyd

There are some subjects newspapers just shouldn't write about. An example is in today's San Jose Mercury News: AS EARLY AS MIDDLE SCHOOL, YOUNGSTERS MAY BE HAVING ORAL SEX.

I don't know what the Merc expects to accomplish by publishing this article. I'm not being prudish, just practical. That teens experiment with sex isn't exactly news. There isn't any hard news value in writing about underage sex experiences, because you can't name names and any statistics are wild-assed guesses at best. (This brings to mind a flaw in social science studies that I have never seen addressed: How can researchers assume that the subjects of their surveys tell the truth about their behavior?)

The worst problem with this sort of article is that it's impossible to be honest. If you are realistic and honest you offend both the straight-laced and the feminists, and if you try to make them happy then everyone else just rolls their eyes. The Merc article is an example of this well-meaning, unreadable bullshit; its tone is of approval for only the correct sort of sex acts. For instance:

Many adults think oral sex is one of the most intimate acts two people can experience...

An expensive dinner, a rose, and a blow job. It's what's for Valentine's Day.

``Middle school is the time when you're really tracking your sexual fantasies and laying the groundwork for your sexual life,'' said Dr. Lynn Ponton, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California-San Francisco, and author of ``The Sex Lives of Teenagers: Revealing the Secret World of Adolescent Boys and Girls.''

``If you begin with sex that doesn't involve intimacy, you're not going to develop a healthy attitude about your sexuality.''

Or a healthy attitude about your sexual partners, for that matter. Although some young students said they engage in mutual masturbation, the prevalence of girls performing oral sex on boys is reviving old sexual stereotypes, placing boys in the dominant role and young girls in the role of servers or sexual objects to be used.

Ponton would certainly make an interesting parent. "Hey you kids, are you having oral sex? I'm going to come back in five minutes and I had better see Johnnie on his knees putting out! And no more doggie style sex! If you're going to have sex under my roof, you had better be in a position where you can see each others' faces!"

Posted 10:32 PM by Floyd

If you want to experience some weird associations and serendipity, go to Google Images and do a search. A few minutes ago I searched for "abandoned factory". I didn't get anything that looked particularly abandoned and factory-like, but I did get thumbs for the following:

• Outtakes from the Dungeon Master's Guide: Ring mail and splint mail. Is splint mail Armor Class 3? It's been a long time since I played D&D.
  
• An image from "stewartstewart.com". Is that Martha's younger brother Stewart? I hope she didn't tell him about ImClone.
  
• Mothman the Musical?. Maybe I'll wait until I read the book.
  
• Superballs? I asked for an abandoned factory. Not a factory making superballs. This is getting too weird. Good night.
  

Posted 10:56 PM by Floyd

Here is one thing I dislike about America's big-city newspapers: Ethnic columnists. The San Jose Mercury News has a Latino ethnic columnist named Joe Rodriguez, who normally writes an occasional essay on how this or that town has a lot of Latinos who are gaining political prominence. In today's Mercury News he got off that hobby horse and decided to crusade for ignorance:

Hopes are dashed by state exit exam
By Joe Rodriguez
Mercury News

AFTER three years in high school, Sandra Yanez should be starting her summer of endless possibilities. There are college brochures to sort through, trips to the beach with girlfriends, maybe a few thoughts on a dress for the senior prom.

``I'm thinking of dropping out, instead,'' the 17-year-old junior at Oakland Technical high school said the other day.

Well, that would leave her more time for beaches and dresses.

Posted on Tue, Jun. 10, 2003

Hopes are dashed by state exit exam
By Joe Rodriguez
Mercury News

AFTER three years in high school, Sandra Yanez should be starting her summer of endless possibilities. There are college brochures to sort through, trips to the beach with girlfriends, maybe a few thoughts on a dress for the senior prom.

``I'm thinking of dropping out, instead,'' the 17-year-old junior at Oakland Technical high school said the other day.

She's failed the math portion of California's new high school exit examination four times.

``I feel, what am I going to do? I don't want to spend my last year of high school afraid of this test, afraid of panicking,'' she said, ``I feel embarrassed. Maybe I'm dumb.''

Forty percent of California students taking the exit test are failing, and we know where to find the concentration of failure. In fact, we always knew -- at overwhelmed urban high schools fed by elementary and middle schools in the poorest parts of the state.

Lots of urban, working class Latino students are among them, but Sandra is one of the few who hasn't retreated into silent acquiescence.

``Sandra's very angry,'' said Carmen Iniquez, an organizer with the Californians for Justice Education Fund in Oakland.

Too bad she isn't angry enough to study some math. Here's a sample question from the California exit exam:

Solve for x.

2x - 3 = 7

1) -5 2) -2 3) 2 4) 5

Check out a sample test here.

Anyway, back to our story:

``She's embarrassed, but she's angry enough to speak on the record because she knows the test is wrong.''

x isn't 5. It's 2. It's a conspiracy!

I wonder what would happened if the "Californians for Justice Education Fund" actually tried to teach kids math and English instead of teaching them how to be little Trotskyites?

...

Sandra failed both the verbal and math portions that day. When the school got its act straight the following year and tested students in smaller groups, she passed the verbal section. But she's 30 points shy of passing the math part after her fourth try.

A passing grade on the test is 55%.

The question isn't whether she'll pass. She's improved her math score every time and has at least four more tries. Her grade point average of 2.67, which includes A's in English and a C-plus in intermediate algebra, indicates she'll eventually pass and earn her diploma.

The question is, what happens to her in the meantime and to the thousands of California students who fail on their first attempts and possibly never pass at all?

The question is, what is the point of this pity party? Sandra's abysmal math skills won't cost her a diploma or a shot at college.

``To me, the exit exam is a measure of the intelligence of a student,'' she said. ``It's made us lose our confidence. I've lost my confidence.''

This is not what the state Board of Education and Gov. Gray Davis had in mind when they dreamed up the exit exam. It is not an IQ test. Its purpose, they keep telling us, is to jump-start quality teaching at failing schools, not to punish individual students.

But punishment is what this cruel and unnecessary test delivers best.

``I once wanted to go to a university, but you can't get into college without a diploma,'' she said. ``Even if I do pass the test, I'm still going to feel bad. It won't give me my confidence back. I'll probably have to go to a community college.''

If you can't score 55% on a test which is half gimmes and half simple word problems, do you really belong in a university? Feedback is sometimes painful, but how can one survive without it?

Cue the violins:

There you have it. A promising young lady, the daughter of hard-working Mexican immigrants, who dreams of becoming a social worker, who would normally graduate on time and qualify for admission to a state university -- is already beaten down at age 17.

I remember reading about a guy who was cut from his high school basketball team. (Don't tell Rodriguez that thousands of kids are getting cut from California high school sports teams every year; he'll stage a hunger strike.) His name was Michael Jordan. I don't think anyone would describe him as "beaten down."

Why? Whatever happened to the idea of building character and confidence in high school? What happened to the high school as agent of social progress? When did we turn them into testing mills, where the losers are ground into dust and the winners get to take the SAT?

Oh my god. Whatever happened to overcoming adversity? Whatever happened to realistic self-appraisal? What the hell kind of "social progress" is it where kids don't learn and then everyone pretends they do, to be polite?

Posted 10:00 PM by Floyd

Huzzah! T.J. Rodgers has a guest op-ed in today's Merc. He lays into the idiocy of light rail:

Light rail is a slow, expensive loser
By T.J. Rodgers

MY daily commute to Cypress Semiconductor takes me past two Santa Clara County light rail stops, both within a block of our North San Jose headquarters. Despite the proximity and apparent convenience of the light rail system, I rarely see more than one or two of our 1,500 local employees disembarking from the trains.

The underutilization of light rail is a chronic problem of national proportions. According to the U.S. Census, during the period of 1980-1990, 10 cities (Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta, Miami, San Francisco, San Diego, Portland and Sacramento) invested heavily in light rail.

In nine of the 10 cases, public transportation's share of market decreased after the investment. Only in San Diego did light rail ridership remain constant, at a low 3.2 percent figure. Another survey, by Illinois-based Wendell Cox Transportation Consultancy, found that if the light rail ridership in 11 major cities were dumped onto the streets, they would not increase traffic congestion in those cities by even one-half of 1 percent.

Read the whole thing. (Listen to me, I'm turning into Instapundit.)

Posted 9:55 PM by Floyd

Christopher Johnson -- a.k.a. the Midwest Conservative Journal -- had a choice scoop a while back. I assumed it would swiftly make its way through the blogosphere, but Chris' findings were unaccountably overlooked.

Seems that France is trying to boost its image in America:

In an effort to win back hearts in the United States, France has commissioned a little schtick from one of America's best-known comedians: Woody Allen.

"I don't want to freedom kiss my wife," says Allen says in a new ad spot. "I want to French kiss her."

You remember Woody Allen's wife. She used to be his adopted daughter.

I guess O.J. Simpson wasn't available.

Update: Lileks made sport of the French ad campaign in his syndicated column. His take: "Eewww. You might recall that Allen is 391 years older than his wife, and that his wife was his previous girlfriend's adopted daughter. Why him? Roman Polanski wasn't available?"

Posted 9:48 PM by Floyd

This weekend while piloting the car on a long drive up and down the coast I amused myself by reciting the chemical elements. Today I googled "periodic table" quiz and found The Periodic Table Challenge.

One thing the web is good at is taking people down a peg or two. I thought I was a Big Swinging Dick because I knew the first 40 or so elements (and their relationships) by heart. The Periodic Table challenge is a periodic table that is all blanks; you fill in the blanks with the chemical symbols of the elements. The game then tells you, a la Mastermind, how many total elements you got wrong. It is only in novice mode that you are told which specific elements were mistaken.

Posted 10:46 PM by Floyd

The Mercury News ran one of its usual We Must All Pay More Taxes editorials today. One of the pieties that the Merc is fond of beating us over the head with was mouthed by Marimba CEO Kim Polese:

"[Silicon Valley leaders] need to do even more to encourage our government to invest in education (and) fix our public education system."

and further stated in the headline:

"IT'S REASONABLE TO ASK BUSINESSES TO PAY A LITTLE MORE FOR WHAT THEY SAY THEY WANT: EDUCATED WORKERS"

This has a kind of superficial appeal to it: Silicon Valley businesses hire educated employees, therefore Valley businesses should pony up more funds for education. But this is nonsense. The Valley hires from a vast pool of college graduates, a very small percentage of whom have had four to eleven years of schooling after being educated as children in Silicon Valley. It is ludicrous to expect that a hi-tech business could improve the education of its applicants by paying more taxes to local schools. It would be as if I tried to increase the quality of the beef I eat by planting a rich green lawn in the hope that cattle would graze on it.