I encountered a discussion of this topic in CityLab:
Chicago
libraries will no longer collect late fees starting this month,
becoming the largest public library system in the U.S. to do away with
overdue fines. The city is also erasing all currently outstanding fees,
which is good news to the more than 343,000 cardholders whose borrowing privileges have been revoked for accruing at least $10 in unpaid fines.
Chicago is one of a growing number of cities trying to make access to libraries more equitable. Its own data revealed
that one in three cardholders in the public library’s south district,
where many of the communities are of color and living in poverty, cannot
check out books. That’s compared to one in six people in the wealthier
north district. It’s likely that many who have unpaid fines fail to pay them because they don’t have the disposable income to do so...
“Overdue fines are not distinguishing between people who are responsible
and who are not,” says Rogers. “They're distinguishing between people
who can and cannot use money to overcome a common oversight.”..
He adds that research going as far back as the 1970s shows fears that
eliminating fines will deteriorate people’s sense of civic
responsibility to return books on time are unfounded....
For many libraries, fines make up just a small share of their operating budget. The Chicago Sun Times reports
the Chicago Public Library system collects $875,000 annually in fines,
which is not an insignificant amount. But the city says late fines
constitute less than 1 percent of the library’s total budget.
The Madison, Wisconsin library system has been fine-free for quite a while now [photo]. Over the years TYWKIWDBI has accrued an uncommon number of librarians and library staff as readers; I'd be pleased to hear your comments and experiences on the subject.
One by one that morning, his students came to his
office at the charter school in the Iron Range community of Warba and
handed him the same thing: a form, signed by a parent, opting them out
of taking the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments, or MCAs.
“I had a line of kids out the door, just [handing in] the forms,” he said.
By the time he reached the end of
the line, Hamernick had excused nearly all the school’s students from
testing: Out of about 50 students eligible to take the exams, only 10
sat for the math test and four for reading. The rest were put on a bus
and sent to the town’s community center, where teachers scrambled to put
together an impromptu day of classes...
Around the state, the rate of students choosing to bypass the state’s
largest standardized exams has been steadily rising for more than a
decade. Though the overall number of students opting out statewide
remains low — just under 2% declined to take the math test last year,
and about 1.5% opted out of reading — there are a growing number of
schools where more than half the students don’t take the MCAs...
And perhaps of greater concern: When opt outs reach a certain level, the
usefulness of the test score data becomes a serious question.
Minneapolis has already reached that threshold, at least in some
schools. A 2017 report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor found
that the rate of opt-outs among Minneapolis high school students had
already “reached the point where it is no longer appropriate to endorse
the test results as a valid measure of districtwide student learning.”
This video presents a very interesting proposition: that Donald Trump has difficulty reading. He has admitted - publicly and unabashedly - that he "doesn't" read (books, reports, briefings) and prefers to get his information from television. Examples are presented of him appearing to have problems reading when presented with documents during court testimony and public signings.
I think it's unfortunate that the video title questions whether Trump "knows how" to read. The problem, presuming it exists, would be a reading disability rather than a lack of knowledge of how to read. It would also explain his famously low-reading-level speech as being easier to memorize or to read off a teleprompter.
Dyslexia does not preclude advancement or competence in professions. Wikipedia's List of people diagnosed with dyslexia is long and impressive, including Alexander Graham Bell, Richard Branson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Edison, David Rockefeller and many others.
If he is dyslexic, he really ought to come out and say so, and tell his staff that that is why he has avoided the morning briefings, and make arrangements for information to be presented to him in other ways. A public announcement would probably garner a measure of sympathy and perhaps some improved tolerance for his shenanigans.
Addendum: Support for this hypothesis comes from the numerous public gaffes that have occurred when he attempted to read a written speech off a teleprompter.
Reposted from February 2017 to add the latest incident:
The above photograph was taken while Trump was reading prepared remarks about Ilhan Omar and other freshman congresswomen. In recent weeks he has emphasized that he is a "really good speller" and that misspellings in his Twitter comments are the result of "fat fingers" on the keys. But as I've annotated with the red oval in the photo, the document he was reading from has "Alcaida" and "some peopel" in handwritten form. This mistake cannot be attributed to an accidental "typo."
There are at least three acceptable spellings for Al-Qaeda, but Alcaida is not one of them. We'll grant that many, perhaps most, Americans would also misspell the group's name, but it should be well known to the President of the United States. I suspect he does not read his daily security briefings.
For many years I gave spelling tests to third-year medical students, and counted the results toward their grades (never published the data - perhaps I should publish the results in TYWKIWDBI...) My firm belief is that the reason otherwise intelligent and well-educated students spell crucial words incorrectly is because much of this information is acquired aurally (by hearing the words) rather than by seeing and reading them. The result is a lot of phonetically-decipherable but incorrectly-spelled words (hemmorhage, hemmorage, hemorhage, hemorrage, hemmorrhage or gauaic, gauiac, guaic, guiac, guiaic).
I'm sure the same applies to Mr. Trump - that he has heard "Al-Qaeda" spoken thousands of times, that he pronounces it correctly, but that he has not seen it in print enough times to register the proper spelling in his memory.
Most Americans don't need an introduction to LeBron James, but I suspect many readers of this blog do not follow sports carefully, and I know that in the past month there have been readers here from over a hundred countries*, so a few words of explanation are in order.
LeBron James is arguably the best basketball player ever to play the sport. He went directly to the pros from high school without playing in college. Those interested can browse his biography for the sports statistics - I want to focus on some other aspects of his life.
His exceptional athletic skills have not surprisingly resulted in huge salaries and lucrative endorsement contracts (he was signed by Nike - when he left high school - for $90 million). In 2016 he was the third-highest earning athlete in the world (after Ronaldo and Messi).
That fame and fortune is not blogworthy, in my view; there are lots of extremely wealthy professional athletes. I'm writing this post because of what he has done with some of that money. NBC Nightly News featured the story this week:
For those speed-reading the post and without time for a minute-long video, here are the key points about the school as described in Time:
The most unique feature of the school may be the most ordinary: it’s a
traditional public school. Celebrities often back charter schools... Or they open
unorthodox private schools... James made a point of giving Akron a new public
school. “It’s not a charter school, it’s not a private school, it’s a
real-life school in my hometown.”
That said, the school is far from traditional. Its lengthy school day
runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., along with an extended school year that runs
from July through May. During a seven-week summer session, the school will provide STEM-based camps.
Students will spend time each day on social-emotional learning, and
participate in a “supportive circle” after lunch aimed at helping them
refocus on work, Cleveland.com reports.
Nutrition is also central to the school’s mission. Every day students
will receive free breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks. They will have
access to a fitness trainer. James says that, as a kid, he used his
bicycle to explore different neighborhoods of Akron — so he gave one to
every incoming student...
Since the school considers education to be not just for the pupil but
for the whole family, it will offer GED classes and job placement
assistance for parents and guardians...
The school selected area students from among those who trail their peers by a year or two in academic performance... The school is launching with third- and fourth-graders, but plans to add
grades each year until it houses first through eighth grade in 2022.
Students get one other notable benefit: If they successfully complete
the school program and graduate from high school, James will cover their
full tuition at the local public college, University of Akron.
This is a comprehensive approach to education that is way different from the typical charitable gift
that just funds a building with someone's name on it. James grew up in
poverty in Akron, born to a 16-year-old mother and an absent father. He
understands that a modern school building and curriculum will not lead to success unless the students also have adequate nutrition and an
improved home environment. Also note the rigorous schedule: the school day is eight hours long and the academic year is 10 months long. And note they chose students not based on prior success, but on prior failure - those trailing their peers in performance.
The next point to make. LeBron James is the man to whom Laura Ingraham famously said "Shut up and dribble," when he had the effrontery to criticize Trump in an ESPN video.
The above is a screencap; the 2-minute commentary is embedded at this NPR site. She gives viewers a "dumb jock" alert before showing a clip of James "talking politics again," which she describes as "barely intelligible not to mention ungrammatical." "Unfortunately a lot of kids and some adults take these ignorant comments seriously.... This is what happens when you leave high school early to join the NBA... Lebron and Kevin, you're great players, but nobody voted for you; millions elected Trump to be their coach. So keep the political commentary to yourself, or as someone once said, 'shut up and dribble.'"
James responded to her: "We will definitely not shut up and dribble. ... I mean too much to
society, too much to the youth, too much to so many kids who feel like
they don't have a way out...
That was background. Here's what came next...
Two days ago, after LeBron's school was publicized, Donald Trump mocked LeBron's intelligence and education:
(The "Mike" he is referring to is basketball player Michael Jordan). Trump was responding to a public statement by LeBron James that Trump is "dividing America":
“We’re in a position right now in America where this whole race thing
is taking over. One, because I believe our president is trying to
divide us. He’s dividing us, and what I’ve noticed over the last
few months is that he’s kind of used sport to kind of divide us. That’s
something that I can’t relate to, because I know that sport was the
first time I ever was around someone white. I got an opportunity to see
them and learn about them, and they got an opportunity to learn about
me, and we became very good friends. I was like this is all because of
sports. And sports has never been something that divided people. It’s
always been something that brings someone together.”
Blogger's note: I've spent a couple hours today researching and composing this post, so this will be all my blogging for a day or two. I would prefer that any comments about this post focus on LeBron James and/or on public education etc. I plan to delete any comments about Trump/Ingraham etc because at the moment I just don't have time to wade through a shitstorm of political bickering. I'm due to write another q3monthly "Trump clump" in another couple weeks; save those comments for then.
Addendum: A tip of the hat to reader Bulletholes for locating an article from Cleveland that provides some details regarding the expenditures by LeBron James vs. those of the school district in developing and maintaining this school and its curriculum.
*click map in right sidebar and scroll down Top photo via Sports Illustrated.
Reposted from 2018 to add excerpts from a April 2019 update from the New York Times:
The academic results are early, and at
240, the sample size of students is small, but the inaugural classes of
third and fourth graders at I Promise posted extraordinary results in
their first set of district assessments. Ninety percent met or exceeded
individual growth goals in reading and math, outpacing their peers
across the district.
“These kids are
doing an unbelievable job, better than we all expected,” Mr. James said
in a telephone interview hours before a game in Los Angeles for the
Lakers. “When we first started, people knew I was opening a school for
kids. Now people are going to really understand the lack of education
they had before they came to our school. People are going to finally
understand what goes on behind our doors.”
Unlike other schools connected to celebrities,
I Promise is not a charter school run by a private operator but a
public school operated by the district. Its population is 60 percent
black, 15 percent English-language learners and 29 percent special
education students. Three-quarters of its families meet the low-income
threshold to receive help from the Ohio Department of Job and Family
Services.
The school’s $2 million
budget is funded by the district, roughly the same amount per pupil that
it spends in other schools. But Mr. James’s foundation has provided
about $600,000 in financial support for additional teaching staff to
help reduce class sizes, and an additional hour of after-school
programming and tutors.
The school
is unusual in the resources and attention it devotes to parents, which
educators consider a key to its success. Mr. James’s foundation covers
the cost of all expenses in the school’s family resource center, which
provides parents with G.E.D. preparation, work advice, health and legal
services, and even a quarterly barbershop...
A food pantry inside the school. At any time, parents can grab a shopping bin and take what they need. CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
The students’ scores reflect their performance on the Measures of
Academic Progress assessment, a nationally recognized test administered
by NWEA, an evaluation association. In reading, where both classes had
scored in the lowest, or first, percentile, third graders moved to the
ninth percentile, and fourth graders to the 16th. In math, third graders
jumped from the lowest percentile to the 18th, while fourth graders
moved from the second percentile to the 30th...
The students have a long way to go to even join the middle of the pack.
And time will tell whether the gains are sustainable and how they stack
up against rigorous state standardized tests at the end of the year.
... this was an opportunity for DeVos to demonstrate that she and her Department of Education would like to cut $7 billion—that is, roughly 10 percent of the department’s total budget—in spending on education.
DeVos also proposed spending an additional $60 million on charter
schools, but mostly this was about identifying which areas DeVos and the
Trump administration thought were receiving too much money—programs
designed to improve conditions at deteriorating or dangerous public
schools, for instance, or grants that aimed to shrink class sizes and
fund professional development for teachers. The proposal also involved
eliminating the entire $17.6 million that the federal government
contributes to the Special Olympics.
“Even with Republicans in the majority in the U.S. House the last two
years, most of DeVos’s strongest proposals for cuts or spending were
turned back.” With a Democratic House, they stand no chance. Again:
majestic dance of failure; ritual and performance; outcomes that satisfy
no one, forever and ever... the administration’s budget proposal was, while an obscenity on its
merits, also perhaps best understood as a gesture, or as a rare example
of the extravagantly cursed internet phrase “virtue signaling” in
action. Betsy DeVos and the other ghouls in Trump’s Carnival Of Souls
will not succeed in eliminating federal funding for the Special
Olympics. It’s just important for them to get on the record about wanting to do it.
It's worth clarifying that federal funding represents a small percentage of the Special Olympics budget:
In 2017 Special Olympics had a total income of $148.7M, of which $15.5M came from Federal grants. They spent a total $130M, leaving them with a
net positive gain of $18.7M. The elimination of the $15.5M will not
prevent them from doing anything they currently do.
To foster a love of reading, elementary educators
tell their students to read a book at night, or have someone read to
them. One principal in Texas has made it personal: She snuggles into a
pair of pajamas and reads to her students herself.
“I
don’t know if they are read to or not at home,” said Belinda George,
42, a first-year principal at Homer Drive Elementary in Beaumont, in
Southeast Texas.
George, often in a cozy onesie,
opens Facebook Live on her phone each Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. As she reads
a children’s book in her living room, anyone who goes to the school’s Facebook page can watch live. She calls it “Tucked-in Tuesdays,” and it’s become somewhat of a sensation at her school...
George said 94 percent of her students come from economically
disadvantaged homes, and last year’s literacy tests showed that an
average of just 55 percent of her third-, fourth- and fifth-graders were
reading on or above grade level.
I spent the better part of this morning helping the Friends of the Fitchburg Library prepare for one of their triannual book sales. Many thousands of books, CDs, DVDs and other items had to be transferred from the storage bankers boxes to plastic tabletop trays. Fortunately the books had already been sorted into categories, so it was just a matter of unboxing and rearranging them.
These sales bring in thousands of dollars to the library for use in outreach programs, children's programs, and staff development. When the doors open tomorrow, the first ones through will be local book dealers who will zoom around with their portable barcode readers to find bargains. The volunteers price books cheaply and the sheer volume precludes individual pricing. They do try to assess old books more carefully; one year someone donated a copy of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, with the author's name misprinted as "H.S. Wells" - a mark of a rare first edition [example at right]. It had some damaged pages, but still brought in $500 in a private sale.
One noticeable trend in recent years has been an increasing flood of DVDs donated to the library - probably reflecting the public's shifting preference toward streaming rather than buying physical copies.
I encourage all readers to patronize your local library, which likely has extensive resources (local history, geneaology, etc) and programs (child literacy, adult continuing education) that you may be unaware of. If you have some spare time and a love of books, your library probably has a volunteer group that would welcome you with open arms. These are nice people, and working with them can provide a nice variation from whatever hassles you face in daily life.
"Gabriel Nobre, 19, with his mom and sister right after he found out he’d passed Brazil’s famously difficult university entrance exam. The young man had cut a deal with a prep course to clean the building in exchange for free classes to help him prepare for the exam."
Some context offered by ThatDIYcouple at the MadeMeSmile subreddit:
As a little bit of background: Brazil’s public universities are free,
but you have to pass an entrance exam called the Vestibular that is very
difficult. What was meant to be a measure to make the country more of a
meritocracy hasn’t exactly worked in practice. Instead what happened is
a bunch of private companies sprung up to tutor people to pass the
exam. So young people often need to pay for the prep courses and also
study full time for about a year in order to pass the exam. Naturally,
it is mostly affluent Brazilian youths with family support who can
afford to do this. So it ends up being less meritocratic- rich kids get
the prep and training they need, and then get the university for free.
When stories like this kid come out, it really captivates the public’s
imagination, because he’s “made it”, the way the system was intended to
work, against all odds. As a bonus, he came in 4th in his desired field,
medicine, and will be studying at (arguably) Brazil’s most prestigious
university.
Best video of the week, especially if you have any interest in childhood education.
A forest kindergarten is a type of preschool education
for children between the ages of three and six that is held almost
exclusively outdoors. Whatever the weather, children are encouraged to
play, explore and learn in a forest or natural environment. The adult
supervision is meant to assist rather than lead. It is also known as Waldkindergarten (in German), outdoor nursery, nature kindergarten, or nature preschool.
The daycare staff and children spend their time outdoors, typically in a
forest. A distinctive feature of forest kindergartens is the emphasis
on play with toys that are fashioned out of objects that can be found in
nature, rather than commercial toys. Despite these differences, forest
kindergartens are meant to fulfill the same basic purpose as other
nurseries, namely, to care for, stimulate, and educate young children.
As an English major, I found this story in The Atlantic a bit unnerving:
...in 2015, when Governor Scott Walker released his administration’s budget
proposal, which included a change to the university’s mission. The
Wisconsin Idea would be tweaked. The “search for truth” would be cut in favor of a charge to “meet the state’s workforce needs.”
To those outside Wisconsin, the proposed change might have seemed small.
After all, what’s so bad about an educational system that propels
people into a high-tech economy?...
And one of the state’s institutions, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, is the epicenter of that change. In
mid-November, the university announced its plans to stop offering six
liberal-arts majors, including geography, geology, French, German, two-
and three-dimensional art, and history. The plan stunned observers, many of whom argued that at a time when
Nazism is resurgent, society needs for people to know history, even if
the economy might not. But the university said it just was not possible:
After decades of budget cuts, the most extreme of which came under
Walker, Stevens Point no longer had the resources to sustain these six
majors...
The proposal planned to add majors in chemical engineering,
computer-information systems, conservation-law enforcement, finance,
fire science, graphic design, management, and marketing. By focusing
more on fields that led directly to careers, the school could better
provide what businesses wanted—and students, in theory, would have an
easier time finding jobs and career success...
By the time the final proposal was released in mid-November 2018, it was
less expansive, though still forceful. Six programs would be cut,
including the history major...
One thing is sure, however: Financial realities such as those facing
Stevens Point are not far off for many regional institutions. “The
reality is that we just can’t be everything to everyone, regardless of
the public-good value of some of the coursework,” Summers said. “Those
constraints are very real.” There are few encouraging signs—if any—that
states will once again pump dollars into state colleges to get them back
to 2008 levels...
... our role here in central Wisconsin is to anticipate what jobs are
going to be needed and to develop programs accordingly." The problem, he
fears, is that that alone will never be enough.
The national
conversation around higher education is shifting, raising doubts about
whether the liberal arts—as we have come to know them—are built to
survive a tech-hungry economy.
Consider for a moment the content of textbooks used by many tax-funded charter schools:
... students who learn from these texts are taught that God wanted
Protestantism to flourish in North America and that Catholicism is not a
true faith; that it was better Africans to be enslaved and come to
"know Christ" than to be free but not Christian; that evolution is
untrue; that humans and dinosaurs lived together (and that Noah brought
baby dinosaurs on the ark); that the Loch Ness monster is real; that
"abortion, gay rights and the Endangered Species Act" are part of a
"radical social agenda"; that nonwhites are inferior (60% of the
tax-funded scholarship students at charter schools come from racialized
minorities and are thus taught that they are racially inferior to their
white schoolmates).
More at BoingBoing, with a link to the source article.
From testimony given in March by David Helsel, the superintendent of
the Blue Mountain School District, in Pennsylvania, at a meeting of the
Pennsylvania House of Representatives education committee:
Our district has been training staff and students in an armed-intruder
defense plan. Every classroom has been equipped with a five-gallon
bucket full of river stone. If an armed intruder attempts to gain
entrance, they will face a classroom full of students armed with rocks.
And they will be stoned...
Obviously the teachers have pepper spray. The rocks are just for
students. We used to have them huddle underneath desks. We’ve learned
from Virginia Tech: the gentleman that did it went to a shooting range a
week before and put the targets on the ground because he knew students
were going to be under the desks...
From the October issue of Harper's. There's a bit more at the link, and it has a better title ("Schoolhouse Rocks").
