Taking a detour....

I spent this weekend's computer time reading about something that has nothing to do with schooling, but I'm going to blog about it here anyway. I was reading about autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), mercury poisoning, and the process of removing heavy metals from the body by chelation.

Some parents of autistic children and a few MDs and DOs believe that autistic spectrum disorders with late onset, in which a child appears normal until they begin regressing as toddlers, are the result of mercury poisoning. The body can excrete mercury, but several factors have to be in place: you need enough glutathione, you need healthy gut flora (intestinal bacteria, which convert mercury to inorganic forms so it can be excreted), you need metallothionien (whatever that is). Some kids aren't bothered by mom's mercury dental fillings, the tuna she ate while pregnant, the thimerosal in their vaccines-- they can get rid of most of that mercury. Other kids cannot, and the symptoms of chronic mercury poisoning are the symptoms of autism (caution, pdf file).

I expect people to look at me like I have a third eyeball if I bring up the dental fillings issue, but it's pretty clear-cut. Try here for details, including this stunning sentence:

California recognized this risk in November 2000 when it became the first state to require dentists to inform their patients that amalgam fillings may cause birth defects.

Ignoring the mainstream medical opinion that autism has nothing to do with mercury, hundreds (maybe thousands) of autistic children have undertaken heavy metal chelation therapy. In chelation, a medication is given which binds to the mercury in the body, hauls it out of tissues, and allows it to be excreted. It's a bit complicated, since you want to slowly begin removing mercury while supporting the excretion system through glutathione precursors (like N-acetyl cysteine), probiotics and related substances, and hefty doses of antioxidants. (You don't want to free up the mercury from the kidneys only to have it float around in the blood and wind up stored in the brain.) Chelators (the big one is DMSA, also alpha lipoic acid) remove lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals, but unfortunately, they also remove zinc and copper, so patients require supplementation. Many more treatment details here and here.

Does it work? One MD who treated 85 autistic patients had these results following chelation, though the therapy had not yet been completed for most of these patients:

Improvement (%)
Age	Number	Marked	Moderate	Slight	None
1-5	40	35	39	15	11
6-12	25	4	28	52	16
13-17	16	0	6	68	26
18+	4	0	0	25	75

This doctor found that mercury excretion happened much more quickly in the youngest patients than in the older ones, which might explain part of the difference in effectiveness. Additionally, younger kids have more ability to "catch up" developmentally.

The New York Times ran an article about mercury in vaccines and autism, which (wouldn't you know it?) was dismissive of the proposed link. A parent replied:

I was very upset because I have doctors who have backed me up on it, yet this (New York Times) piece made me sound like a lunatic, and that I'm hurting my child and just desperate for hope.

It never mentioned, once, the amazing improvement that my daughter has shown on chelation and the metals that were coming out, so much so that the Mayo Clinic was concerned about it.

They never once talked about the fact these kids are actually recovering when you take the mercury out of them. That's where I didn't think it was fair at all. OK, you can report the other side, there are lots of people who disagree with us, but the fact is there are thousands of children who are undergoing this treatment that are getting better....

And the other thing is they flat-out said chelation is dangerous. Our county chelates children with lead poisoning. I have had the county out to my house numerous times. They said if they found a kid with high lead, they put them in the hospital and they chelate them. How is this that dangerous if our county is doing that to children? ...

[Our doctor] has repeatedly said he doesn't understand the improvements my daughter is making -- "These kids don't improve." When we're in there, he is sometimes speechless about the improvements in her and can't explain it from what he's doing. His patients don't improve like that....

He told us when we first came down there that he's seen mercury poisoning and this isn't it, but he's repeatedly asked us if we live on a toxic dump, because we bring him our tests and we say, "Look what's coming out of her."

We've been chelating her since she was 15 months old and she is now 4. She just started talking in February. She does imaginative play. She does pretend play. She has empathy. She plays with toys appropriately. She likes to play word games -- if you sing, "Twinkle, twinkle little shoe," she'll laugh. Things that autistic kids just don't do -- and at this stage she's doing more and more typical things.

Here is an entire page full of stories of children who have partially or entirely recovered from a previous autism diagnosis using dietary changes, supplements and chelation to normalize the digestive tract and remove heavy metals. Read a few, they are amazing, and they are angering. The medical community is denying many autistic children these treatment options out of a stubborn refusal to admit they have been poisoning children with mercury fillings and unnecessary thimerosal.

It is daunting to feel that when it comes to raising a child, parents have to look into everything themselves, that there is no institution that can be trusted, and that when taking a non-mainstream view one can expect to face dismissive condescension. Of course, that is all outweighed by doing what's best for your child and seeing them thrive.

Getting to school

It's a boring subject, perhaps, but rising diesel prices may be the straw that broke the budget's back in many school districts. Last week, gas prices increased by 18 cents nationwide, the biggest one-week increase in 15 years. One knowledgeable insider in the energy industry, Matthew Simmons, recently said:

Simmons: [O]il demand globally could easily go to 86-88 million bpd during the winter [of 2005-2006], and that could easily exceed supply by 2-5 million bpd.

[Interviewer]: If that was to happen we would almost be looking at $75-80 oil, I suspect.

Simmons: No, no, no. Oil prices could easily go up 5-10 times.

This guy is on the National Petroleum Council and the Council on Foreign Relations, and he says oil could go above $300/barrel this winter. At any rate, the price of diesel is surely going to increase, and the fuel situation is a looming crisis.

Consider the situation in Virginia:

Fairfax County has budgeted to spend 33 percent more on fuel for its 1,570 buses this school year, but that might not be enough. Its price on diesel has risen 11.5 percent since May....

The Prince George's County public school system, which operates one of the region's most extensive busing operations, spends several million dollars a year on fuel and has had to increase its fuel budget significantly in recent months....

Montgomery County public schools budgeted $4.4 million to fuel a fleet of 1,200 buses that transports 96,000 students per day, but officials worry it may not be enough....

Or in North Carolina:

North Carolina school districts are struggling with high gas prices, which will make it more difficult to keep school buses rolling when classes start in the coming weeks....

Chatham County Schools... fueled up a portion of its bus fleet Wednesday for $1.87 a gallon under a state contract for diesel fuel. But the state budgeted $1.05 per gallon for fuel purchases, and officials have told school districts statewide that local budgets will have to make up the difference.

Or in San Diego:

The Poway Unified School District, which is looking at a $120,000 increase in fuel costs, is being forced to increase the annual round trip bus pass for students to $333 a year, a 10-percent increase....

The San Diego Unified School District does not charge students to ride buses and the district is paying 80 cents more per gallon compared to this time last year....

Or in Texas:

Faced with climbing gasoline prices, some Texas school districts are finding inventive ways to save fuel costs including two districts that have eliminated hundreds of bus stops....

Schools don't pay as much for gasoline and diesel as motorists because they're exempt from state and federal taxes. But districts are still feeling the crunch.

"This is the most drastic I've ever seen it," said Nolan Anderson, executive director of transportation at the North East district.

Fuel costs in the North East School District will increase by 56 percent this year, Anderson estimated. Other districts reported increases ranging from 8 percent to 36 percent. Those estimates could increase because fuel costs are expected to increase, officials said.

In many states (probably most), schools do not have to provide busing for students living within 2 miles of the school, and often there is no legal obligation to provide busing at all to students in 7th grade or higher. (Think about a kindergartner walking 1.9 miles to school in built-up, traffic-heavy areas.) I think this story is a preview of what is to come in many districts:

About a dozen angry mothers stood on a dirt corner in Orlando's Azalea Park neighborhood early Wednesday to demand something they were being denied -- a seat on the school bus for their children....

[T]he children would have to walk past construction crews, dump trucks and speeding cars, then cross seven lanes of traffic on Semoran Boulevard to get to school....

Mothers said losing the bus rides would make it difficult to get the children to school.... [F]ew have cars....

Expecting a showdown with the moms, two district bus officials came to the stop Wednesday morning....

Administrators stood at the bus steps, telling the crowd only those who lived more than two miles from school could ride.

School officials beckoned for a few children to board -- the ones who lived more than two miles from school. The rest stood on the sidewalk of Bamboo Drive and stared.

After the children boarded, the crowd began to move. Three or four mothers and a half-dozen children walked in front of the stopped vehicle.

That's when transportation administrator Steve Huckeba changed his mind. He said all the children could ride -- but it would be the last time. Parents had been told the same thing the day before....

Every fall, some who don't qualify for bus service try to get it, said Orange transportation director Rye Merriam.

"We get those threats all the time," he said. " 'We're going to lie down in front of the bus. We're not going to let the bus pass.' We usually have to call law enforcement."

Nice. If you don't send your kids to school, we'll call law enforcement; if you try to insist on safe transportation to school via bus, we'll call law enforcement; and the alternative, if you're poor and few in your neighborhood own cars, is for your 6-year-old to walk or ride a bike 2 miles through Orlando's clogged urban sprawl. (If you've never been to the area, it is not pedestrian-friendly.)

I think we're going to see major difficulties in simply getting children to school, thanks in large part to centralization and consolidation. It's easier to control a few large schools than a bevy of small neighborhood schools, easier to impose "accountability" and kaizen management. But the smaller schools are certainly more educationally effective, due to the benefits of mixed-age classrooms, peer tutoring, smaller class sizes, and less anonymity. Here's hoping that when the fuel crisis hits-- and this isn't a temporary problem, it's Peak Oil-- it will mean a return to smaller schools and more independence.

Designed to fail

These days Corporate America has a large problem on their hands. In 2000, according to census data, more than 4 in 5 Americans had at least a high school diploma. Over half had gone to college for at least some time. And yet we have a trend called "the democratization of unemployment," in which white collar workers are headed toward the same unemployment levels as blue collar workers. For instance, in 2003:

With an overall unemployment rate of 6.2 percent, the rate for workers categorized as white collar stands at a little over 3 percent. This may not seem like much, but when it is taken into account that in 2000 the unemployment rate for white-collar workers was only 1.5 percent, it can be seen that in the space of three years the number of professionals and technical workers out of work has doubled. Also, an analysis of Labor Department data by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that of those termed as long-term unemployed (more than six months), over 18 percent came from white-collar jobs. This is a much higher ratio of joblessness than their actual composition of the total work force.

The emphasis is mine; I wanted to highlight the fact that those with white collar jobs are more likely than others to be unemployed for over 6 months. More likely.

Back when I was an undergrad I took a course on social movements and revolutions, and we saw again and again that what prompts a revolution (social or governmental) is an educated middle class that has been thrust into poverty. Professionals who go without a job for a year are a danger to whoever is in power. They might get organized and demand to know why the total income of the highest earning 1% of Americans is the same as the total income of the 100 million lowest earning Americans (link). This is especially true in a nation where people have long believed in their right to equal opportunity, where people expect to be rewarded for hard work, especially hard work in school.

I came across an excellent article, You'll Never Be Good Enough: Schooling and Social Control, which describes the corporate solution to the over-education problem:

In the past two decades, corporations have adopted new management techniques designed to undermine worker solidarity and integrate workers more thoroughly into the company machine. Known variously as "continuous improvement" or "management by stress," or "kaizen," the Japanese term for it, the technique consists essentially of dividing the workforce into competing "teams" and "stressing" the production system by imposing higher and higher production quotas. As workers work faster and faster to meet the quotas, the company achieves several key goals: production is increased; jobs are eliminated; "weak links" in the system break down and are replaced.

Most important, "continuous improvement" creates great anxiety in workers about their ability to meet the ever-increasing goals, and encourages workers to replace solidarity among themselves with loyalty to the Company Team. It forces workers into constant speed-up. Workers are kept running so fast to meet company goals that they don’t have time to think or talk about their own goals or work together to pursue them.

Corporate-led education reforms use similar strategies. They use "School-Based Management" to isolate teachers in each school from their colleagues around the system. Teachers are then encouraged to join with management as a "team" to compete for students and survival with other schools.

The reforms use testing to keep raising the standards which students and teachers must meet, far beyond what their parents were expected to achieve and beyond anything that would be of value. The purpose is the same as "continuous improvement" in a factory: raise the anxiety level and keep students and teachers running so fast to meet the goals set by the system that they have no time to think about their own goals for education or for their lives.

These reforms will have terrible effects. Many students who would otherwise graduate from high school will drop out. (In Texas and Florida, where "high-stakes" testing is in place, high school drop-out rates which had been dropping have already begun to rise.) Young people who fail to meet the new standards will be condemned to marginal jobs and told to blame themselves.

Continuous improvement is unattainable on its face, just as No Child Left Behind's "Adequate Yearly Progress" is unattainable. Apparently schools are supposed to improve until every student scores 100% on all standardized tests-- and after that, how will we define "progress"? By making the tests harder?

But in fact, many of these tests are already too hard. According to a New Democracy flyer:

MCAS is designed to fail. MCAS uses intentionally confusing and difficult questions, many of them on material not covered in class, to produce a massive failure rate. More than 40% of 10th graders failed the MCAS in 1999; 53% failed in Boston. (In Virginia, 98% of school districts failed similar tests.) Drop-out rates in Florida and Texas, which began these tests several years ago, have increased dramatically.

MCAS imposes a climate of fear on students, parents, and teachers. Students must take these unfair tests in the 4th, 8th, and 10th grade. Many children are becoming discouraged early on, convinced that they will never be able to pass them. For many others, the joy of learning is being replaced by a fearful obedience to authority. Teachers are forced to teach to a terrible test, and to watch in horror at the results.

In California, 2/3 of the class of 2006 appear likely to fail the test required for them to receive a diploma.

Another test used in Boston schools, called the Stanford 9, is also absurdly difficult for tenth-graders:

The 10th grade math test evaluates students on their ability to answer problems like these:

1. "Identify the equation for the line of regression for a scattergram."

2. "Determine a correlation, given a set of data."

3. "Given one side of a right triangle, an angle measure, and the graph of a trigonometric function, find the length of another side." (Trigonometry isn't even offered until the 11th grade!)

4. "Estimate the area under a curve; Solve problems using infinite sequences."

Of the 140,000 randomly selected American students who were given the "Stanford 9" to evaluate the test itself, 61 percent of the 10th graders failed it.

The public accepts such high failure rates as evidence of uneducated students because for two decades they have heard the constant drumbeat of propaganda about failing schools and declining student aptitude. A former director of the national PTA, David Stratman, gave a very informative speech which argued that student abilities had not declined prior to this sudden wave of mandatory testing, that this supposed decline was a destructive myth used to insist on corporate-backed, corporation-friendly school reforms. If over half the students fail a test, it's because the test is bullshit. Only a massive PR campaign could make parents accept such failure rates as realistic or indicative, and allow so many of their children to be labeled as somehow deficient.

I'll end with a few sample test questions from the 10th grade MCAS, and you can judge for yourself whether this is reasonable 10th grade material. Personally, I am strongly reminded of college "weeder" classes, only this time it's a "weeder" test, designed to thin the ranks of what used to be known as the middle class.

Honor can have different meanings for different people. Literature is full of characters that can be considered honorable. From a work of literature you have read in or out of school, select a character that is honorable. In a well-developed composition, identify the character, describe what makes the character honorable, and explain why the character’s honor is important to the work of literature.

[after an excerpt from the first ball in Pride and Prejudice]:

The narrator notes that Mr. Darcy seems better looking to other guests once they learn he has “ten thousand a year.” What is the narrator poking fun at?

A. Darcy’s appearance
B. Darcy’s friends
C. the guests’ shallowness
D. the guests’ manners

[Incidentally, I disagree somewhat with answer C. Austen was not unsympathetic toward economic considerations in marriage. The guests' manners are what Austen is really criticizing, but here answer D would be marked wrong.]


Which of the following shows an application of the distributive property?

A. (6xy + 4xy) + 2xz = 6xy + (4xz + 2xz)
B. 2xy + 3xz + 5xy = 2xy + 5xy + 3xz
C. 4xy – 12xz = 4x(y – 3z)
D. -5xy + 5xy + 3xz = 3xz

A movie projector positioned 28 feet from a wall creates an image that is 7 feet wide on the wall. If a screen is placed 5 feet in front of the projector, what will be the width of the image on the screen?

A. less than 1 foot
B. between 1 and 2 feet
C. between 3 and 4 feet
D. greater than 4 feet

Fighting standardized testing in Massachusetts

[Thanks to MamaBear for alerting me to the MCAS and giving me a topic for this post!]

It turns out that Massachusetts also requires that students pass both a math and a language arts standardized test in order to be eligible for a high school diploma. The test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System or MCAS, must be passed in the 10th grade in order to later graduate. Parts of the MCAS are also taken in several other grades.

There has been a groundswell of opposition to the MCAS. Some examples of protest:

In a testing season marked by dramatic walk-outs, rallies, vigils, and teach-ins, more than 300 students boycotted the high-stakes Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test in April and May. Hundreds of students and parents attended an after-school rally on the Boston Common near the State House on May 15 to express their opposition to the paper-and-pencil, 18-hour test....

A contingent of students marched to the State House to present the Governor's office with petitions bearing almost 7,000 signatures....

Some two dozen students at Springfield High School of Science and Technology walked out of the test; many were suspended. A far larger walk-out, possibly by hundreds of students, apparently had been planned but was thwarted when administrators got wind of it....

Teachers also began to resist. Jim Bougas of Harwich was suspended for refusing to administer the MCAS, while teachers in some other districts were not penalized for their similar actions.

Since the spring of 1999, parents’ groups have sprung up in many Greater Boston communities, including Cambridge, Boston, Arlington, Brookline, Newton, Wayland, and in cities and towns throughout Western Massachusetts where forums have consistently drawn 150-200 people....

Many students remained firm in their decision to boycott in the face of threats and reprisals from state and local authorities. The business-funded, pro-MCAS group MassInsight issued a memo to local school districts recommending that students’ grades be docked if they refused to take the test. This tactic was used by the headmaster of Brookline High School; he told more than 20 students who boycotted the long composition test that their zeroes would be factored into English grades. Parent and student protests forced him to back down and concede that students could “buy back” their zeroes with a 5-page research paper on civil disobedience.

Twenty-five students in Arlington also bravely persisted with their boycott even when the School Committee imposed three-day suspensions.... In Holyoke, 15 students were suspended for refusing to take the test.

More than 150 students at the high school and elementary schools in Cambridge boycotted the test without reprisals.... In Amherst, 20% of the school’s sophomores boycotted, and town school committee voted to ask the state to cease using MCAS as a graduation requirement. Many students appear to be boycotting quietly, either by being absent (as were 10% of Boston students in 1999) or by not answering the questions.

In November of 2000 an anti-MCAS conference was held by New Democracy, a group that is drawing attention to the corporate interests behind the MCAS:

New Democracy has been trying to expand the debate, showing that high stakes testing is part of a 30-year-long corporate attack on working people, to lower their expectations and to strengthen corporate control of society....

In its story on our conference, the Boston Globe reported: "The Massachusetts Business Roundtable created the pro-MCAS non-profit group MassInsight. Cathy Minehan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, is co-chair of MassInsight. FleetBoston, Bell Atlantic, IBM, Intel, and the Boston Private Industry Council are also members."

[...]

Dave Stratman, former Washington Director of the National PTA and editor of New Democracy, showed that education reform is part of a corporate strategy to force students to accept their place in a more unequal, less democratic society and to strengthen corporate control of society.

As another article describes the argument:

According to groups like Boston's New Democracy, the primary corporate goal is not to make money off private education but to lower expectations about what education can provide. In this view, corporations are out to dim the hopes of students whose teachers might otherwise teach them they can get somewhere in life if they work hard and graduate.

The corporate problem is that educated people expect to get somewhere good. And despite all those high-tech job openings, there's even more of a need for low-tech service workers. Cooks. Domestics. Cashiers. Assemblers. Delivery drivers. This is the real new economy, but it's not what today's students envision for their middle-class futures.

There's nothing more dissatisfied, even revolutionary, than an educated work force that can only find low-paid jobs requiring low-level skills. People tend to accept poverty when they think there's no alternative, but not when they've followed the rules and still can't get ahead.

The corporate solution is simple: raise "standards" to arbitrary levels, assign impossible tasks and impossible tests, increase competition and stress, and make our kids think they're too stupid for anything better.

It might seem extreme to some to suggest that standardized testing is a way to oppress the masses. Of course, if your opinion of the Bush administration is anything like mine, you may readily buy the idea that NCLB is an insidious weapon of class warfare, meant to deny the poorest schools funding and discourage students who are already disadvantaged. I believe that when Bush laments about our failing schools and our failing students, he does it in order to repeat one message: you are failing, you are being failed. No wonder, then, that your work choices are fast food or Baghdad. It's the school's fault.

In any case, this excerpt from John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education is quite relevant today:

Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about "the perfect organization of the hive." He said standardized testing was a way to make lower classes recognize their own inferiority. Like wearing a dunce cap, it would discourage them from breeding and having ambition. Goddard was head of the Psychology Department at Princeton, so imagine the effect he had on the minds of the doctoral candidates he coached, and there were hundreds.

Personally, the clincher to the argument that the MCAS is harmful is that it is discriminatory against already traditionally disadvantaged groups such as ethnic minorities and those in poorer districts. From the FairTest website:

As of September 2002, 12,000 seniors, nearly one in five in the state’s public schools, had not passed both tests. Students of color are over-represented in this pool, with half of Latino seniors and 44% of African Americans in the “failing/needs improvement” category compared with 13% of White and 17% of Asian students. Yet statewide for the class of 2000, 69% of African American and 62% of Latino students were accepted to college. This means that roughly 12-15% of African American and Latino students who would have traditionally been accepted to college may not be eligible to attend solely because of their MCAS scores.

So 12-15% of African American and Latino students who would otherwise have gone to college could be prevented from going, based on a test pushed by FleetBoston, Bell Atlantic, IBM, Intel, and other big corporations.

Nothing like keeping the people down.

I wish the opponents of the MCAS all the best, and hope they continue to boycott the test in larger and larger numbers.

Years of school and nothing to show for it

A century or so ago, children went to school for as long as they could, learned as much as possible, and the knowledge itself was both the goal and the reward. These days, many classrooms feature a poster showing how average income increases with educational level. If learning takes place within that byzantine system of rewards and punishments that John Gatto has described, money is the system's last, ultimate reward. A high school diploma (or equivalent) is the passport that must be shown to be hired for many jobs, or to be accepted for most further schooling. (I've written before that homeschooling circumvents this system to some extent.) It's not that I personally feel that a diploma is terribly important-- in fact, I've said the opposite-- but when society is geared so that your diploma is your passport, it's a pretty important document to have. If you aren't a homeschooler, if you've devoted 13 years to public schooling, that diploma is your final goal, your certificate of success.

With this in mind, it's very disheartening to look at California's K-12 public school system. Consider, first of all, the drop-out rate. These rates can be difficult to estimate because individual students are not tracked, but the situation isn't good in California:

[I]f one compared the number of students in California who enrolled in the ninth grade with the number of students graduating from high school four years later (the graduation rate), one would find that approximately one third of those ninth graders never graduated....

According to [Sacramento] Bee reporter Deb Kollars, "In 1993 there were 406,551 ninth-graders in California public schools. Four years later, in the spring of 1997, there were only 269,071 public school graduates — a loss of 137,480 girls and boys [for a graduation rate of 66 percent, and an attrition rate of 34 percent].

Any estimate will be inexact, but it's reasonable to say that in the 90's the K-12 system was losing roughly 1 in 3 students, and only giving diplomas to 2 in 3. But that was before the "CAHSEE" program-- which stands for CAlifornia High School Exit Exam. As you might guess, it's a standardized test that students must pass in order to be given a diploma-- starting in the 2005-2006 school year. If you haven't heard of the CAHSEE disaster, it's because no student has yet been denied a diploma. (Just wait until next summer!)

The exit exam has been given to tenth and eleventh graders. As part of the CAHSEE program, students take the text twice prior to their senior year, so that students at risk of not graduating can be identified and presumably be given additional help. (Where the money for additional help is supposed to come from is anyone's guess, in a state with massive budgetary problems.)

Telling students they're not likely to graduate because they've failed the diploma test in their trial run is a sure way to boost your drop-out rate. Of course, no one will be sure, in future years, what proportion of the dropouts are attributable to early failure on the CAHSEE. This is very convenient for the CAHSEE proponents. It's not their fault if students get discouraged and give up, they'll argue. Those (lazy, irresponsible) students are rejecting the promised extra help which would insure they would pass the exam as seniors. The early testing is meant to help students, not discourage them, they'll claim.

I would argue that if schools haven't been able to teach a student to read at grade level by the 11th grade, then one more year isn't likely to help. Some students will feel the same way and will give up and drop out, including some students who may in fact have passed the CAHSEE when it counted. (There is a lot of variability in testing, and if the test is poorly designed that's true even for repeated tests of the same person.) Luckily for the folks over at Educational Testing Services (contracted to design and score the CAHSEE), very few people will hold the test pushers responsible. If school hasn't been successful for you, it's always your fault (or your parents').

Putting the issue of early failure aside, consider the test results among juniors in 2005, that is, for the class of 2006. These results are the trial run for the first class who will be denied diplomas if they can't pass both the math and "English language arts" (ELA) parts of the CAHSEE next year. Here's how this class is doing, heading into their last year:

• 34% passed the math test
  
• 35% passed the ELA test

Students have to pass both to graduate. At best, that means a third are on track to receive diplomas. Is the State of California really prepared to decree that 2 in 3 students educated for 13 years in their public school system have not obtained minimally acceptable skills? How do they expect to place blame on students and parents if most students have not managed to obtain a minimally acceptable education? I guess they'll fall back on that other explanation: not enough funding.

If we add up the one third of all students who drop out, plus the students who will now drop out because of discouraging CAHSEE results in 10th or 11th grade, plus the students who complete all 13 years of schooling but are denied a diploma because they fail the CAHSEE, we're talking well over half of all students.

What an enormous waste. The property taxes, the school board elections, the hours wasted on buses, the cries for more funding, the nights spent on homework, the textbooks, the testing, the worksheets, the violence and angst and negative socialization, all those years of stressful parent-teacher conferences and worrisome progress reports....

What does all that add up to? Would we never learn to read without schooling? Would we never learn basic arithmetic or how to balance the checkbook? Or is the diploma that certifies you for higher wages or college the real point of it all? If so, then for more than half of all students in California, all this schooling comes to nothing.

Gone fishin'

We'll be up north Friday through Monday, but starting Tuesday I'm going to try and blog more regularly.

(Heard that one before, have you?)

Interactive fiction games

Many years ago (we're talking decades), my family purchased a TI-99/4A computer which plugged into the TV. My brother and I used to play a text-only adventure game in which you typed in two-word commands such as "go west" or "get torch," and you progressed toward some goal. I have very little recollection of the game itself... I think there was a boat in it somewhere... but I remember sitting there and wracking our brains for possible two-word commands that might work. In those early days the vocabulary recognized by such programs was pretty limited.

Later we played Adventure, which is now quite famous. It features the notorious line: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." My brother and I mapped out the rules for that maze on paper, though our lamp went out and we got eaten by the grue any number of times before we got it all straight. We played this one on our Leading Edge computer, which, though it featured a monitor and two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, had no hard disc. Actually I think Adventure predates home computers altogether and was played on mainframes back in the 70's.

Nowadays text games are called "Interactive Fiction," and feature a more sophisticated command system, some tough puzzles, wit and humor, evocative descriptions, and often suspense. They give yearly awards for these games, review them, and offer 1- to 5-star ratings. To play one, you download a small program to run the game, and then download the game itself (for free).

I'm posting about this because they're fun and yet, dare I say it, educational. They make you use your imagination, they improve spelling and typing (if you make mistakes your commands won't be recognized), they encourage map-making, they introduce odd objects and slang (stuff like "dumb waiter" and "quid"), and they require hard thought. Call it strategy, logic, or whatever you want... they make you get creative and solve a stream of puzzles and mysteries. In one game I haven't solved yet, called Curses!, I keep getting sucked into T. S. Eliot's "Unreal City" from The Wasteland, and I can't get out. This has resulted in repeated perusals of The Wasteland, though so far to no avail. While I love graphics games like Myst and Riven, for sheer creativity you can't beat low-tech, unfunded text games.

My brother got so interested in text games that in his last year of high school, which he did at home, he wrote his own text adventure. (There are at least a couple of competing programming languages specifically designed for producing text adventures.)

If you think you or your kids might be interested in playing one of these, you can peruse a list of the 5-star games here, which is a good place to start. (You have to download a program called WinFrotz if you use Windows; then download the .z5 game file itself; then double-click the winfrotz.exe program and select the game.)

Meet my kids

Having disabled pop-up blockers, fiddled with my browser, and learned how to circumvent our firewall, I can finally bring you this photo of my kids! Whew! Only took me a week....




And a couple more:





This is Anya (now 5 years old) in her swimsuit, goggles, and dress shoes. Swimming is probably Anya's favorite thing to do, second only to catching bugs. She also loves playing "pet shop," usually setting up an elaborate scene in some convenient location, such as the top of the stairs.









This is Tristan. He's 13 months, weighs 30 pounds, and is very nearly as strong as I am! His favorite things are toddling around after the cat, escaping with no diaper on, and eating pickles. If you think it's odd that he likes pickles, you should see him eat brined Greek olives. (Somehow I got one kid who eats nothing and one who eats everything.)





What can I say, I got tired of typing "A." and "T.".


A while back I posted a list of humorous things Anya had said. I've collected a few more, and they seem like a good way to finish this post, so here they are!

"Tristan can't draw like I can draw because I have mental advantages."


"Can I have a bagel, Mom? I'm ravenous, and that's even worse than famished."


[after I said we were out of milk]: "Too bad we don't have any coconuts or we could just cut one open and get the milk ourselves."


"You know Mom, you said it's healthy to eat a variety of foods and I haven't had any chocolate yet today."


Me: "...you're thinking ahead!"
Anya: "Yes... that's where my brain is."


[me, responding to Tristan crying]: "What happened?"
Anya, sounding perfectly innocent and matter-of-fact: "Well, he knocked his head against that little plastic hammer."


Anya: "I'd like to wear your ring sometime."
Me: "Well, that's my wedding ring. I don't ever take it off."
Anya: "You mean because if you took it off then you wouldn't be mating anymore?"


Me: "I'm just letting you know, bedtime is coming soon."
Anya: "Well, it's not coming as soon as you think."

The "life is school, school is life" society

I was driving back from the grocery store today and half listening to a local NPR news report, and I heard this woman say "Well, we know that success in school means success in life."

I suppose I could just take this to mean that a better education tends to, at least on the average, lead to a better-paying and more satisfying job, which increases the odds of happiness and accomplishment. But she didn't say success in school leads to success in life, or prepares one for success in life, or any other word indicating a causal relationship. She simply equated the two.

The concept of the developmental "window" during which a skill must be learned, or else it can never be learned, has been used to equate school success with later success. But I think this concept is overrated, or at least misunderstood. While it may be true of language, only unrecognized profound deafness or a genetic cognitive disability typically prevents someone from learning to speak fluently. As for the basics of K-12 education, reading and math, these things have been frequently taught to adults; there is no "window" which can be terribly and irrevocably missed. What we all really mean, when we talk about "falling behind," is getting put on the "you'll never amount to anything" track, and kept out of the "college prep" (they might as well call it "upper middle class prep") classes. So let's be honest: we don't mean that success in school generally leads to better jobs and a fuller, happier life because there is some developmental and cognitive reason for that. It's not that some kids, tragically, missed the critical window in which they might have developed talents in math or literacy. It's just a plain old, straight up tracking system. We have, quite simply, set it up this way.

This woman meant what she said. Success in school is success in life; success in life is success in school. It reminded me very much of this comment from Valerie Fitzenreiter, who wrote The Unprocessed Child:

We’ve all heard the societal cry to put children first, but this cry is usually followed by a call to give them a better education. In the past twenty years I have observed the relentless linking of children to school. Everything that a child does is in some way affiliated to school; everything that is said to a child revolves around the topic of school. It is as if the concept of school is the only way others can relate to a child. Even when the child is on summer vacation, all conversations with him are about the return to the inevitable school year: “When does school start?” “Do you miss school?” “Are you looking forward to school starting?” “Do you like school?” When the child has an interest that he pursues after school, it is called an extracurricular activity. We refer to children between the ages of five and eighteen as “school-aged children.” I believe that a child is more than his experiences revolving around school, more than his last teacher, his last report card and his behavior while in the boring confinement of a schoolroom.

The wonderful thing about homeschooling is not just that you refuse to label your child with narrow and misleading test scores, that you insist upon seeing them as full human beings, that you concentrate on character and ethics alongside reading and math. It's that, until college at least, you opt out of the whole tracking system. (That schools ostensibly exist, and are believed by many to exist, for purposes of egalitarianism and the promotion of social mobility is merely salt in the wound.)

Taking charge of your kids' education means taking charge of how you define success in life, and how you'll go about attaining it.

Math as a game

Lately we've been playing a lot of Uno, and I've been keeping a running commentary as to how many cards we all have. You have 6 cards and get a Draw Two? 6 + 2 = 8. I've already dealt 5 cards to each of us? Then we each need 2 more, 5 + 2 = 7. When we spell things with the letter blocks, such as Draco Malfoy, I point out that 5 + 6 = 11. I'm not too overtly educational about it (honestly!), it's just that A. wants to know how long everyone's name is.

Another game I loved as a kid was Yahtzee, which is sure to teach you your multiplication tables from 1 x 1 to 4 x 6. There is plenty of addition involved in adding up your full house or your straights, as well, and of course in adding up your total score.

And then there are the commercial games, like 1-2-3 Oy, which I haven't yet played but plan to buy at some point. A. loves a software game we have which teaches basic arithmetic, as well.

I think it's likely that A. will just absorb math while playing, at least until we get to complicated multiplication and long division. People who are skeptical of unschooling often have particular concerns about how math will be learned, but imagine how different it is for a child who knows math mostly through games, instead of mostly through repetitive homework sheets. I actually thought it was fun to try to reduce algebraic equations, back in 8th and 9th grade, though I could never have admitted that to my classmates. I hope that for A. math will also seem like a set of puzzles that are fun to solve.