If we could just be more safe and relevant and valued and caring

Argument by assertion, wispy generalities masquerading as specific goals, contradictory logic: it’s time for letters to the Times-Union! One Debra Techentien (who is not, as far as I can tell from her letter, a sort of digital Frankenstein) has some thoughts on teacher pay. My initial assessment is that there’s a 60 percent chance she’s a teacher herself. Seems familiar with the linguistic Kool-Aid.

A three-year study reveals that merit pay does not raise student test scores.
This opener is uncharacteristically brief, relevant and accurate. Savor it. The rest of the letter in no way lives up to this modest standard.
My responses:
- Teachers are not going to work to get bonus pay. If it money
(sic)
motivated us, we would be doing something else. Students do not learn and perform their best in a high-stakes testing culture.
Debatable. Perhaps they perform best in a low-stakes culture in which they weep quietly on each other’s shoulders.
- My solution for student performance: Offer students a safe and welcoming learning environment where they will be engaged in meaningful and relevant activities. Students will then be motivated to stay in school and do their best.
“Safe and welcome,” “meaningful and relevant.” Couldn’t be less specific if the specificity lobe of Debbie’s brain had been removed with a frickin’ laser. No doubt those puffy descriptions don't apply to some “learning environments,” (Christ, woman, just say “schools), but is anyone against safe schools? Also, not a solution.
- My solution for teacher performance: Offer teachers a work environment where they are trusted and valued to be the caring and competent professionals that they are.
“Trusted and valued,” “caring and competent.” I’m convinced now that Debbie teaches bad poetry at Fluffy Little Bunnies Middle School, where 110 percent of the teachers are trusted and almost all of them care, except for that mean bastard who teaches algebra.
Pay teachers a decent salary comparable to the private sector.
Confirming my hunch about the poetry thing. A less sloppy thinker and writer would have recalled that like five seconds ago we were told “if it money (again, sic) motivated us, we would be doing something else.” Poor Debbie probably didn’t expect her innocuous letter to the editor to get picked apart by some dick with too much time on his hands. But it’s not a safe and welcoming environment out here in the Interwebs. Also, a teacher’s salary, along with its benefits and summers off, is starting to look pretty damn good during 11 percent unemployment.
Some of the best hearts and minds of the country will then be motivated to stay in the teaching profession and do what they do best: Guiding the hearts and minds of our children.
Clear eyes full hearts can’t lose.
Any questions?
Yes: Can you arrange it so that you never teach anything to my hypothetical children? Thanks.

More money, that's the ticket

What follows is not even close to the most egregious bullshit spouted by the education bureaucrats, but it's a subtly telling indication of how they run things at School Boards across the country, as well as the Department of Education. Duval County, the Times-Union reports, has landed $9.6 million in federal grant money to “attract, support and reward” teachers, specifically in struggling schools.
The counties were selected based on their plans to “develop, reward and support effective teachers and principals in high-needs schools based on evaluations that include multiple measures, including student growth.”
I’m confused: teachers will get rewarded if their students grow? Seems like a sweet deal for a middle-school teacher with a good HGH connection.
Let’s dispense with the obvious point: There’s really no good evidence that throwing money at bad schools will magically turn bad students into even mediocre ones. There was a decade-long case study in Kansas City, but you’ll never hear professional educators mention that. Also, as anyone who has set foot in a Duval County School can affirm, lack of money isn’t the problem in a school district that has tens of thousands of computers, to take one example.
OK, so this funding will go to teacher incentives, not equipment. Still no evidence that will work. But evidence doesn’t seem to be a requirement. Also, among the multiple measures is ‘student growth.’ That’s a quote, not the reporter’s words. It’s also an indication the educrats will leave themselves plenty of leeway when picking winners and losers. In other words, it won’t be based strictly on those irksome standardized tests.
But the details of those plans locally still have to be ironed out, as the districts work with union leaders.
I, for one, am greatly relieved to know the union will have a say in how their incentive pay will be divvied up. They have demonstrated repeatedly that they have the best interests of the students at heart. There’s probably no realistic hope that any decisions along these lines can get made without the unions getting involved. But that doesn’t mean it should be that way. Here’s an idea (not mine, but I like it): anyone who is a member of a public sector union forfeits their right to vote. (That noise you just heard was Nelson Cuba’s head exploding.)
In both districts, teachers and principals won’t see incentive money until the second year of the grant. The first year is about planning.
Perfect. There is a medium-sized trough ($1.2 billion) of federal money for school districts to throw at teachers, and said districts certainly had to fill out lots of forms and get shit notarized in triplicate and toe various federal lines to even qualify for the money -- yet upon landing some of the largesse they have no idea what they’re going to do with it. Requires a year of planning. Right now they’re ‘planning to plan.’

Now where did I put those moderate Republicans?

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus had a puzzling reaction last week to the strange electoral developments in Delaware. The piece is entitled “Why Christine O’Donnell’s victory is scary.” Marcus is, based on the few things I’ve read by her, unimaginitively left/feminist, leading me and the average reader to guess that she will trot out a bunch of tired bullshit about frightening Tea Partiers, the coarsening of public debate, blah blah blah. But fortunately, it’s even wackier than that.
Let’s go to the tape:

Partisan Democrats are delighted about Christine O’Donnell’s Republican primary victory over Rep. Mike Castle in the race for the open Delaware Senate seat.
I’m despondent.
As I expected. I’m about to zip over to Thomas Boswell because I’m really not in the mood for more feminists bashing women they disagree with.
From the Democratic point of view, the defeat of the moderate, well-known Castle turns what had looked to be a lost cause into a likely win. Keeping the seat in Democratic hands could be the margin of control in the Senate. So the folks who focus on electing Democrats and keeping a Democratic majority can't be blamed for breaking out the champagne over O'Donnell's win.
Yes, this is the conventional wisdom. Some (many?) establishment Republicans lamented Castle’s loss because he seemed a good bet to win the general election. He was such a good bet, in fact, given the voters’ anti-Dem mood, that Beau Biden, the son of the logorrheic Vice President who formerly held the seat, had dropped out of the race to avoid an embarrassing loss in a solidly Democrat state.
Not me, for two reasons.
Ruth Marcus, neocon? That won’t go over well at the next bitching circle of The League of Women Voters.
First, I had thought the silver lining of this election year might be to produce a Senate with a more robust cadre of moderate Republicans.
Right. Well, I was picturing -- wait, in mid-September, when the rising tide of anti-Dem voter anger was starting to look like it might even take the Senate from them, you thought this would produce a bumper crop of moderate Republicans? I’m no political expert. I don’t have any fancy degree with capital and lower-case letters in it, just a humble blogger, but it seems obvious to me that in a lot of races across the country the voters are riding the pendulum to the right, after it had yawed wildly to the left to elect Obama.
That caucus has pretty much dwindled to the two senators from Maine, with very occasional company from colleagues such as Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown and departing Ohio Sen. George Voinovich. It's awfully hard for a caucus of two to break with the party.
There is no caucus of ‘moderate Republicans,’ just as there is no caucus of ‘conservative Democrats.’ There is, though, a caucus of ‘True Yankees,’ another of ‘winged unicorns’ and a really sketchy one of ‘stalkers of Fenster Ludge.’ Probably Mike Castle was about to join one of those, and Ruth Marcus was going to write a really bitchin’ article about it.
Peer pressure isn't just a phenomenon of middle school.
It’s a suffocating, distorting presence in the media to conform to the disdain of the Tea Party.
It's alive and well in the U.S. Senate, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has done a good job of keeping party discipline. A larger number of moderates among his herd of cats
I had a boss who made a joke about the difficulty of getting people to work together who described it as trying to herd cats. I had never heard that before, and I laughed out loud. It was around 1996. You, Ruth Marcus, should write a rom-com script.
might make that more difficult and enhance the prospects for bipartisan legislating. There is strength in numbers, and you could imagine a bolstered group of (at least relative) moderates made up of the likes of Castle, Carly Fiorina (Calif.), Mark Kirk (Ill.) or Dino Rossi (Wash.)
OK, I’m starting to (kind of) see her point. Which is, I think, that a GOP takeover of the House would be better (for liberals like Marcus and her fellow travelers in the media (Yes! Yes, goddammit, I called them fellow travelers. Sic the SPLC on me!)) if it included some wavering, not-really-Republican Republicans in the mix.
Now, it's as plausible to envision a bolstered Jim DeMint caucus, following the disturbingly powerful junior senator from South Carolina: Sharron Angle (Nev.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Ken Buck (Colo.) -- plus the two other incumbent-slayers of the primary season, Mike Lee in Utah and in Joe Miller in Alaska. Scary.
Sorry, Ruth, I don’t quite follow your reasoning here. Maybe it’s my lack of credentials, or the metastisizing tumor on my frontal lobe, but if you’re worried about bat-shit crazy conservatives seizing control of the Senate, how is it worse that an unelectable bat-shit crazy GOP nominee will lose in Delaware?
But not as scary as reason number two:
You’re not going to answer my question, which you couldn’t possibly be aware of? Abolish the Electoral College. Now.
the ripple effect of victories such as O'Donnell's on other Republican lawmakers. Republican members of Congress look at races such as those in Utah, Alaska and now Delaware and think: There but for the grace of the Tea Party
Tea Party=Sky God
go I. They will be that much more watchful of protecting their right flank against a primary challenge. They will be that much less likely to take a political risk in the direction of bipartisanship. In this sense, it matters less whether O'Donnell will win the general election -- that doesn't seem likely -- than that she won the primary.
The Delaware result might be good news for both Tea Partyers and Democrats. It is not good news for the cause of good government.
Sorry, Ruth, that’s a total non-sequitur. How does that affect the chances of good or bad government (outside of your narrow preferences?)
Did the Orioles win tonight? (Another non-sequitur, in case you were unclear on the concept.)

Whole lotta nothin' about the St.Johns River

9-19-2010
Ron Littlepage is concerned about the health of the St. Johns River, but he’s cautiously optimistic. Let’s go to the text.

To be honest, the Earth didn't exactly move.
Yes, Ron, it did. It rotates at more than 1,000 miles per hour at the equator, so unless this St. Johns River Summit took place in some sort of super-fraction of a blink of an eye, the Earth moved. What? You didn’t mean that literally? OK, cool. But I’m just getting started on your bland, uninteresting summing up of zzzzzzzz......
Unfortunately, there were no hallelujah moments during last week's St. Johns River Summit.
You mean a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians and scientists got together to talk about the health of the river and there was not a beam of celestial light from on high, accompanied by a chorus of pre-pubescent Al Gores chanting about corporate polluters and excessive nutrient-rich runoff? Damn. Actually, I think that’s good (not to mention predictable), but then I’m one of those wacko hyper-rationalists who think we should do some science-y stuff to figure out what to do for the river.
It was generally agreed that an "Everglades" type commitment is needed to solve the problems affecting the river's health, but one wasn't forthcoming.
The first Everglades-type commitment was for the “Everglades,” (and why the quotes, Ron?) and involved the government (in this case the Army Corps of Engineers, hereafter referred to as The Government Guys You Should Be Wary Of) deciding the Everglades, or whatever the noble aboriginals called it, should hurry up and get its lazy ass to the sea. That didn’t work out well for anyone but the sugar interests.
About $12 billion is being spent to restore a portion of the River of Grass.
That’s the name. Why no quotation marks?
Kirby Green, executive director of the St. Johns River Water Management District, told those attending the summit that only a fraction of that - $1.3 billion - has been spent on the St. Johns, which runs 310 miles through the heart of Florida.
That’s because the huge amount of money spent trying to right the wrongs of The Government Guys You Should Be Wary Of is because Those Guys screwed things up very badly, and now that we’ve realized that original plan was a bad idea, it costs a lot of money to undo it. Also: the St. Johns runs 8,451 miles through Florida.
And funding is the key to restoring the river's health. Securing that funding will take a concerted effort from stakeholders along the entire river.
Excellent point. Doesn’t really matter what we actually do (and we need to do something) we just need to spend shitloads of money to do it. Especially compared to the ludicrous things they did to the Everglades back in 1435.
That could be a positive coming out of the summit,
spending more money, not figuring out what should be done
if the commitment to work together by counties along the river that sometimes have been at odds is carried through.
Look at the back end of that sentence. Is that American English?
There was one concrete proposal that would help with that effort.
Pave the river?
State Sen. John Thrasher said during one panel discussion that he would establish a "St. Johns River caucus" in the Legislature.
(in an angry Scottish accent) “That should do it.”
It will include the 24 state lawmakers whose districts border the river.
That would provide a mechanism to keep issues involving the river - from nutrient overloads to fish kills to algal blooms to bacteria contamination - in the forefront.
That's needed because finding the solutions and funding those that need money will, like it or not, require political support in Tallahassee. That's the nature of the game.
This is rather obvious, Ron, no? Do you have any, um, news to impart?
Thrasher said he had made a commitment to the late Sen. Jim King that he "would follow his great lead in working for the St. Johns River."
Fair enough.
This would be a step toward fulfilling that promise.
Maybe.
The summit was organized by the St. Johns River Alliance, which is made up of representatives from the entire length of the river.
So what?
The 300 or so people attending the event reflected that diversity.
300 people? The hell you say. That’s almost (but not quite) one per mile.
This was the first river summit since 2003. Let's not wait that long for another one.
At the next one, political leaders from all of the counties need to participate.
But didn’t you imply earlier, in that pidgin-English sentence, that there was broad participation from “counties along the river?”
And, if there's to be a serious effort to confront and solve the river's problems, such as nutrient overloads, the discussions need to be more balanced and not weighted in favor of utilities and other polluters.
And all issues need to be addressed, including the politically hot potato Ocklawaha River and the Rodman Reservoir.
“including the politically hot potato Ocklawaha River...” Jesus. Do you have an editor/did you take an English class? Kudos, though, for spelling the name of the river correctly.
The Ocklawaha is the St. Johns River's largest tributary, and the dam that's blocking it can't be ignored.
Discussions about restoring the river's health invariably include what the price tag would be, with some pretty wild claims from the polluters.
It would be helpful to your argument here to specify those claims and refute them. But what the hell, it’s probably close to quitting time.
Neil Armingeon, the St. Johns Riverkeeper, told those attending the summit that "we never talk about the value of the river."
Strictly speaking, not true, but we tend not to quantify the value, tending instead toward vague generalizations about quality of life.
He urged the alliance to come up with that value. "I would say it's priceless," Armingeon said.
He's right.
But you’re not going to say anything about the actual value? You, a working journalist, are going to go along with an advocate’s claim of ‘priceless?’ Cool.

It's what the NFL is all about

9-13-2010
CBS second-string announcer Solomon Wilcots, narrating the Jaguars-Broncos season opener (9-12-10) as the refs send the players off the field at the start of the fourth quarter because of lightning:
“The NFL is all about the safety of its players.”
Wait...what? The same league that is only now implementing new guidelines on how to deal with concussed players? The league that had to know, well before the public did, that the game was mentally crippling and sometimes killing players? Examples: Oh, I don’t know, just off the top of my head, John Mackey (permanently addled) and Mike Webster (dead). Also, the league’s commissioner and owners are getting ready to force a two-game expansion of the schedule on the players, or at the very least use it as a bargaining chip in upcoming negotiations.
I assume, given the power of the league, that it has veto rights over who the networks employ as announcers and can have them bounced, like the Masters did a few years ago to some not-bland-enough announcer who was insufficiently Jim Nantz-like in his Masters ball-washing. But really, Solomon, I doubt the league requires you to spout obvious bullshit. So stop. Please.