Posted 3:34 PM by Floyd

The No Child Left Behind Act is bad law. The law's intentions are admirable, but impossible to accomplish. No government agency can operate in the interests of its consumers, because it is insulated from the fundamental rules of the marketplace. No government-run enterprise has ever shut down, or laid off its employees, because its customers are unhappy with it.

I first became aware of No Child Left Behind's problems last summer, when I visited my sister in Michigan. A local paper noted that hundreds of Michigan schools had failed to meet NCLB's criteria for passing standardized tests, while the state of Arkansas did not have a single failing school. NCLB mandates that tests must be taken and the results reported, but the content and administration of the tests are left to the state. Thus there is a perverse incentive to make tests trivial, to get good scores. Obviously Arkansas has succumbed to the temptation of looking good, and Michigan has not.

Yesterday the Mercury News published an editorial critical of No Child Left Behind. As is typical, the Merc got it wrong even while they were getting it right:

Feds `flunk' a good school
GEORGE MAYNE ELEMENTARY AND MANY OTHERS FACE UNREALISTIC REQUIREMENTS
Mercury News Editorial

The George Mayne Elementary School is a case study in what's wrong with No Child Left Behind, the federal education law that Congress passed two years ago.

By most measures, the largely low-income and Hispanic school in Alviso has made impressive strides. Its Academic Performance Index, the chief state measure of achievement, has risen every year, from the bottom rank to near the state average. In the latest STAR results, the percentage of students proficient in math and English rose substantially in almost every grade -- more than doubling in two instances.

Principal Denise Stephens has put together a team of committed teachers; most have advanced degrees.

Other schools would be bragging about these achievements. But this week, Superintendent Paul Perotti sent out a letter with demoralizing news.

It's been awhile since "Juan Gato" or Lileks used the phrase "Baby Jesus." Somewhere, Baby Jesus is crying. There. That feels a lot better.

At this point you are probably holding your breath as you wonder what horrible punishment is about to be visited upon the good people of George Mayne Elementary. Will Principal Stephens be fired? Will the school be closed?

It will tell parents that they have the right to pull their children out of Mayne and send them to another school in the Santa Clara Unified School District.

That's it? You mean the parents could send their children to the school of their choice? Amazing -- it's like they're human beings with fundamental rights, or something!

Anyway, if George Mayne Elementary is doing a good job, the parents won't want to send their kids elsewhere, so why the big fuss?

...

No Child Left Behind requires that 95 percent of students in every major ethnic, racial and socioeconomic group in a school, plus English learners and disabled students, take and pass state standardized tests. If one category comes up short, the entire school flunks.

Mayne fell one or two Latino students shy of 95 percent participation in the STAR tests. So the ax fell. It must use precious Title I dollars to bus students to other schools, at their parents' request.

Cry me a river. "You mean I have to provide metrics to show my performance? I don't get to collect a paycheck for breathing?"

Rigid measures turn the law into a game of gotcha. A school that raises scores of a dozen subgroups will get dinged if one subgroup's score dips. Among those labeled in need of improvement for not testing 95 percent of students were Palo Alto High, Lynbrook High and Saratoga High -- three of the region's highest achieving schools.

Cry me another river. "What do you mean my pay is being lowered because of my poor performance? This is a game of gotcha!"

There are plenty of unalterably bad schools that should be sanctioned; parents in those schools should have the right to go someplace better. George Mayne Elementary is not one of them. No Child Left Behind should be rewritten to recognize the difference.

Let me repeat what the Merc's editorial writers said:

• There are plenty of unalterably bad schools that should be sanctioned
  
• parents in those schools should have the right to go someplace better
  
• George Mayne Elementary is not one of them
  

George Mayne Elementary's customers do not have the right to go someplace better. Words fail me. I half expected to see the Merc advocate that people in the school district be prohibited from moving.

I guess when you're a monopoly newspaper, treating customers like serfs comes naturally to you.

Posted 6:53 PM by Floyd

McWilliams Explains Time Travel

Awhile back I received the "time traveller spam," which beseeched me to send temporal adjustment equipment to a specified longitude and latitude. Wired Magazine has an article -- written by reporter Brian McWilliams -- on the poor disturbed soul who has sent 100 million of these messages in the last few years.

(Link found on Radley Balko's The Agitator.)

Posted 3:11 PM by Floyd

A commenter at Roger Simon's blog points us to Arnold's newest movie.

(Warning: immature content; contains cropped photos of heads with crude up-and-down jaw action.)

Posted 6:42 PM by Floyd

It's easy to criticize people who believe that the UN can do no wrong. But if you dig deeper, you can find people who see the UN as possessing not just superior morals, but also superior capabilities. From today's Mercury News letters page:

Thomas Friedman's claims that our war in Iraq is ``the Big One'' (Aug. 26, Opinion) seem like a sad parody of the arguments advanced 30 years ago. Replace the militants with the Viet Cong and his harping about the spread of democracy with ``domino theory,'' and you have a pretty good approximation of a '60s era speech explaining why we had to continue to fight in Vietnam.

You can bet that the sons of Friedman's colleagues and neighbors aren't the soldiers who are fighting and dying in Iraq. Once again, the less privileged in our society are being sent on an ill-defined mission, in a corner of the world where we are not welcome. Once again there are calls for more troops, an urging of patience at home, and vague assurances that all is going well in the face of plain evidence that it is not.

Parody is amusing in the theater, but this is real life with our troops suffering real deaths. Now is the time to turn Iraq over to the United Nations, with the world community participating to restore Iraq to the Iraqi people. (emphasis mine - FM)

It's amazing to me that Rose can spend two paragraphs complaining about how the US is not welcome, its mission is ill-defined, and its soldiers are being killed -- and then turn around and tell us that the solution is for the UN to try to do the same thing! Why would the UN be any more welcome than America? Why would it be immune from Baathist and Islamist attackers?

And how obtuse do you have to be to write this stuff just days after the UN mission in Baghdad was bombed?

Posted 12:57 PM by Floyd

Via Instapundit I found this interview of Bob Kohn, author of the newly released book "Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts The News And Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted". Kohn is a self-described New York Times fan who became disgusted with its biased coverage:

During the Clinton Administration, when good things happened they gave Clinton credit by name and when bad things happened it was blamed on "U.S. officials" or "federal officials" or "military officials." Since George Bush took office, when good things happened, like the Bush administration capturing the CEO of al-Qaeda in the Persian Gulf, the word "Bush" doesn't appear in the article at all. Yet on the same front page, when it was bad news such as the Turkish government announcing that it was not going to allow troops to be stationed in Turkey for an eventual assault on Iraq, it was a blow to the "Bush Administration." When Richard Nixon had seven of his cabinet officers and staffers indicted, the Times never said that it "rocked" the Nixon administration, or, "in response to widespread criticism" President Nixon did so and so.

Jesse Oxfeld conducted the interview. His next-to-last question raised my eyebrows:

You're not a journalist, tell me about what qualifies you to make these judgments.

This would have made a good lead-off question because it would have allowed Kohn to expand on his thesis and explain his analytical methods. But when Oxfeld asked this question, Kohn had already enumerated specific instances of bias. How could it matter whether Kohn is a journalist or not?