StickWithANose

One of the most frustrating aspects of our current push for high academic standards and achievement [masquerading as a push for educational equality] is the expansion of ’schooling’ to the early years of childhood and with it the increasing fetishization of assessment. It is now commonplace for policy-makers and politicians to establish their educational street-creds by advocating for increased funding for pre-school and ’school-readiness’ programs designed to ensure that 5 year-olds are ready for the barrage of instruction and assessment that awaits them in Kindergarten, and pre-school and day-care providers are jumping on the testing bandwagon with glee. A colleague of mine recently expressed her frustration to me about her fight with a day-care provider intent on assessing her toddlers academic progress, and her fight is emblematic of where this focus on early-childhood education is leading us.

For parents, their well-justified concerns about their children’s education leads many middle-class parents possessing the necessary cultural capital to think strategically about when to enroll their children in Kindergarten. NYTimes…

AFTER all those attentive early childhood rituals — the flashcards, the Kumon, the Dora the Explorer, the mornings spent in cutting-edge playgrounds — who wouldn’t want to give their children a head start when it’s finally time to set off for school?

Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from “The Tipping Point” about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”

Hers is a popular school of thought, and it is not new. “Redshirting” of kindergartners — the term comes from the practice of postponing the participation of college athletes in competitive games — became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, and shows no signs of waning.

In 2008, the most recent year for which census data is available, 17 percent of children were 6 or older when they entered the kindergarten classroom. Sand tables have been replaced by worksheets to a degree that’s surprising even by the standards of a decade ago. Blame it on No Child Left Behind and the race to get children test-ready by third grade: Kindergarten has steadily become, as many educators put it, “the new first grade.”

First off, as the classically trained economists like to say, incentives matter. Parents with the where-with-all and the means to delay the enrollment of their children in Kindergarten will do so if that means they get a leg up on both academic development and maturation, and their ability to do so only confirms the sad reality that American education is a two-tiered system. However, that is not the point which I would like to focus on today. Instead, I would like to make what might appear to be a radical proposal to some.

While the mantra for the past hundred years of education policy has consistently called for more schooling, I would like to make an argument for less schooling. In Nordic countries, such as Finland, formal schooling begins at the age of 7 for a total of 9 years of mandatory education, although the majority of students continue on for two more years as preparation for technical school or the academy. My proposal is to follow this model, and I will justify this proposal following two lines of argument… one pedagogical the other financial.

First off, it is well-established that human cognitive and emotional development is not uniform nor does it follow a neat schedule that can be tracked by the calendar year. The assumption of policy-makers and specialists is that today’s new crop of Kindergarten students should walk in the door with, at the very least, the rudimentary skills of reading in hand, but this assumption is one built on a factory-model of schooling that bears no resemblance to the course of actual human development. I would argue that the primary mission of pre-school and day-care from day one to the age of 6 should be summed up with one word: play. Provide pre-schoolers with cognitively rich environments in which to explore, play, and imagine in collaboration with nurturing adults and mixed-age groupings of other children. Academic instruction as we adults envision it should be totally absent; formal instruction should begin at age 7. This would provide quite a few benefits… I’ll mention two here.

First, it would help to ensure that the students walking in the door the first day of school would have had two more years to mature and develop the necessary skills for reading and mathematics through play. For sure, some students would walk in the door already reading and writing but for those who mature more slowly those extra years would provide them with the time they need to develop the necessary skills required for literacy. Second, the idea that 5 and 6 year-olds are ready to spend the majority of their time sitting still behind a table or desk is simply mad. While 7 year-olds aren’t known for their low energy, those added years of maturation does provide them with a greater ability to attend to more formal instructional tasks, and their cognitive development provides them with more opportunities to make connections with the material they’re learning and to construct more advanced cognitive frameworks for future learning.

Turning to school finances, the savings involved with eliminating two years of formal schooling would be significant. Those resources could be re-directed toward practices that are proven to work, such as lower class sizes in elementary schooling. In the age of austerity, it is clear that resources for research-based education reform will not be forthcoming, so I would argue that instead of trying to expand schooling with limited resources [that results in the expansion of inadequate educational practices] let’s focus on getting more bang for our buck. I advocate that we use resources currently being dedicated to Kindergarten and the first grade to the expansion of small, neighborhood elementary schools with low student-teacher ratios and cohesive class structures that work with the same teacher throughout the elementary years. In short, I would argue that we should re-focus our resources not on more schooling but on better schooling.

Obviously, the blog format is not the best medium for fleshing out all of the particulars involved with a policy proposal such as this, and there are certain issues, such as child care, that are not addressed here. However, my intent here is to begin the process of re-thinking the way we educate our children and to work out my thoughts by writing about them… I’ll be coming back to this idea again…

This is what public looting looks like… EdWeek

Questions have been raised about some of the companies chasing the $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants to target the bottom 5 percent of America’s schools, and now Congress is jumping in the act.

As The New York Times pointed out in a recent story, some of the companies certified by states as school turnaround partners have no experience actually improving the fortunes of low-performing schools—or any school, for that matter.

Experimental Philosophy! In truth, the idea that philosophers are bound to their arm-chairs is a product of the 20th century and is an aberration in the history of philosophic thought… NYTimes

I think that what we are seeing now, with the surge of interest in experimental philosophy, is best understood as a return to a more traditional understanding of what philosophy is all about.

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame has been charged and cleared of rape chargers in less than 24 hours… AP

Swedish prosecutors withdrew an arrest warrant for the founder of WikiLeaks on Saturday, saying less than a day after the document was issued that it was based on an unfounded accusation of rape.

The accusation had been labeled a dirty trick by Julian Assange and his group, who are preparing to release a fresh batch of classified U.S. documents from the Afghan war.

On the bright side, Gerald Celente says we’re living in the midst of the Greatest Depression… Yahoo Tech-Ticker

The crux of the problem, Celente argues, is that the middle class has been wiped out. America used to be a land of opportunity for all, where hard-working people could build their own small businesses in their own communities and live prosperous and fulfilling lives. But now a collusion of state and corporate interests that Celente describes as “fascism” have conspired to help only the biggest companies and the richest Americans. This has put a shocking amount of the country’s wealth in the hands of a privileged few and left the rest of the country to subsist on chicken-feed wages and low job satisfaction as Wal-Mart “associates” — or worse.

You’ve got to be kidding me…

Today’s “Answer Sheet” features an article by Justin Snider of Teachers College that demonstrates the circularity of educational debate. The issue Snider addresses is the concept of academic rigor, but all that he seems to accomplish is to demonstrate the ways in which education policy has been going in circles for the past three decades. Pointing to such familiars as flat scores on national assessments, the drop out epidemic, and W’s now infamous “soft bigotry of low expectations”, Snider gives away his almost total lack of criticality with this statement…

I invite everyone to read, or reread, the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s report, “A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform.” Here’s an excerpt: “More and more young people emerge from high school ready neither for college nor for work. This predicament becomes more acute as the knowledge base continues its rapid expansion, the number of traditional jobs shrinks, and new jobs demand greater sophistication and preparation.”

How well these two sentences capture our predicament in 2010!

That they were originally written in 1983 should scare us.

And that is exactly what it was intended to do in 1983 but the real question is: To what end? As we have seen, the “end” in question has been three decades of standardization, assessment fetish, and privatization that has accomplished very little except more hand-wringing over academic failure and lack of rigor that is used to justify more of the same without ever stepping outside of the cognitive box we’ve created for ourselves. In the words of Master Yoda, it is time for us to “unlearn what we have learned.” Without a call to completely re-think current policy trajectories, it is hard to see this article as little more than navel gazing.

Despite my propensity for publishing posts that take, let us say, a bleak view of education policy, economic issues, and politics, I really don’t consider myself to be all that cynical. [Although my friends might beg to differ...] I find joy in the small stuff like enjoying the roar of cicadas in the early evening and embracing minor inconveniences as opportunities to attend to the things we often ignore. [A boating fiasco that ended in an amazing midnight stroll through beautiful countryside comes to mind...] That said, today’s post is truly bleak. I offer you two perspectives from two very different bloggers on the possibilities for the emergence of an American version of fascism. That doesn’t mean that I see this as being inevitable as much as I see the conditions for its emergence falling into place.

While my primary focus on this blog is to highlight education policy and issues related to schooling, I believe it is important to keep the context in which these issues play out in mind. The public looting I identify in the charter school movement is part and parcel with the looting carried out by Wall Street firms and military contractors. The move to tap public treasuries for private profiteering is expanding across the political economy of the U.S., and I see no reason to expect a pull-back any time soon. Likewise, the on-going growth of a corporately-funded knowledge industry tasked with constructing common sense understandings of the socio-political world is the early 21st century version of the political propaganda and yellow journalism that enabled many of the atrocities of the previous century. In short, I would argue that understanding the dynamics of any one issue in contemporary American society demands that you situate it within the totality of relations in which it operates. Unfortunately, the picture that emerges from that perspective is a dire one.

With that in mind, I would encourage you read Ed’s post on how the emergence of Teabaggery in American politics is indicative of a necessary pre-condition for the rise of authoritarian politics.

[I]f we can step outside of the comfort zone of our cushy life of contesting politics in the confines of a liberal democracy, an objective view of this country is pretty scary. I struggle to think of modern democratic state in which the conditions for the success of fascism would be better. I mean, we have it all: simmering racial hatred, extreme xenophobia, sharp class distinctions, a ravaged economy, and the grandiose belief in our own exceptionalism. That thought is simultaneously paranoid and plausible. Watch a Teabagger rally and tell me those people would not fall in line behind the right charismatic fascist leader if given the opportunity. And I don’t mean Tom Tancredo. I mean a real, honest-to-god, working from Hitler’s playbook fascist. Because as the Ground Zero mosque story underscored in yesterday’s post, most Americans don’t believe in rights except for themselves. Sure, we talk about rights a lot, along with freedom, liberty, the Constitution, and all kinds of other high-minded concepts. But when the chips are down, we are willing to deny (other) people rights at the drop of a hat. The cry of the American right quickly changes from “Constitution! First Amendment rights! Freedom of religion!” to “Yeah, but I hate Muslims more than I love any of that stuff.” [...]

Hannah Arendt may have written some of the most important political analysis of the 20th Century when she characterized the post-War analysis of Nazi Germany as “the banality of evil.” The people seated on witness stands were not horned monsters or satanic comic book villains (even if they committed acts that we’d expect from Satan himself). They were your parents, your neighbors, and your dentist. Arendt concluded that just about any person was capable of committing Nazi-style atrocities under the right circumstances. How much urging do you think a crowd of Teabaggers would need to burn down a mosque or start rounding up brown people? It’s like Bill Hicks said about alcoholics – anyone can become one. All it takes is the right bar, the right friends, and the wrong woman.

Jesse offers an equally bleak view from an economic perspective.

The argument that ‘tax cuts for the wealthiest few stimulates growth’ aka the trickle down theory needs to be buried alongside the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’ and the other principle beliefs of voodoo economics that have brought the US from the world’s greatest nation to third world status in a generation.

It was the irresponsible tax cuts enacted by Bush II while increasing military spending on two wars, one highly discretionary, along with the increasing financialization of the economy through deregulation, fraud, ‘one way globalization,’ and crony capitalism that have undermined the foundation of the American economy…

Can ‘the many’ continue to borrow to maintain a constant standard of living? Can a democracy be maintained in conditions that start to resemble a third world country? How long before a ’strong man’ rises to take control of the political situation on behalf of the national society of workers? And how long after that would it be before the industrialists and oligarchs lose control of this strong man, as they always seem to do?

Can the US afford to maintain 800 overseas military bases while the domestic tax base continues to erode through a parasitical transferal of wealth from the many to the few based on leverage, speculation, monopoly, asset bubbles and fraud?

Like I said, this is a bleak view of contemporary America, but I would not be so quick to dismiss these perspectives. Viewed in its totality, the nation has a lot of problems, and the majority of “answers” being proffered are built on the ideological framework that got us into this mess in the first place.

Noted “progressive” think tank hack Matt Yglesias got his panties all in a bunch the other day after Jeffbinc at Open Left made the observation that crowding minority students into segregated schools built around a teacher-centric militaristic pedagogy that middle and upper class families would never accept for their children just might be, well, racist. However, is it really shocking that someone might label a 21st century version of ’separate but equal’ as being racist?

Yesterday, Jeff offered a polite rebuttal to Matt that is well worth your time. While I wouldn’t characterize Jeff’s critique of KIPP as being authoritative or demonstrative of his mastery of the research literature, it does a decent job of pointing to many of the issues related to these test-prep factories built on positive psychology. Here’s a couple of points that I’d like to highlight…

I would hope that you agree that the best instructional methods should be available to all children, regardless of their socioeconomic and cultural background. I would hope that you understand that a “one size fits all” approach to teaching simply doesn’t work for every child. That instruction needs to be differentiated because we all learn in the different ways. And that children from poverty deserve the same access to instructional approaches that you and I want for our children. Since children of poverty are not inherently different from our kids, are they? [...]

Finally, I would hope that you understand the true dynamics of racism. I learned a long time ago from a public school teacher in Iowa that whenever you hear about what’s best for “those kids” and how “they” should be treated differently from your children that what you’re hearing in actuality is the language of racism. I grew up in Texas on the tattered edge of suburban Dallas during a time when there was something called “desegregation” going on. I went to a small, all-white elementary school perched high on a caliche knob where the September winds shocked our morning flag raising into immediate furl. After we recited the Pledge of Allegiance we were informed about the “new students” that were going to be bussed from the other side of town to “our school” and how they were “different” from us. Our political leaders back then told us that it would be better if those black and brown kids kept to their own schools because those schools were what “those kids needed.” Back then, in the South, those politicians were all Democrats.

Today, as Linda Darling Hammond points out, “the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988,” and a “growing share of African-American and Hispanic students” now find themselves in “highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities.” And once again, as I saw on the blackland praries of my childhood, we have Democratic leaders telling us to support a charter school movement, which tends to foster highly segregated schools, as numerous studies have shown.

It doesn’t take a genius to discover that, despite the rhetoric of reformers, the driving impetus behind current trajectories in education reform is a simplistic narrative of neo-liberal market ideology. At the core of the reforms being pushed by Team Obama is an un-critical belief in the power of market competition and external accountability systems as being the principle tools of education reform that in reality operate as little more than a simple carrot and stick methodology that ignores the profound complexity of human psychology, American society, and public education. As I’ve noted here and here, the science behind what motivates individuals [students, teachers and administrators alike] is far more complex and involve intrinsic motivations that policies such as merit pay and accountability simply cannot supplant.

In a post at EdWeek’s Inside School Research, guest blogger Debra Viadero points us toward more evidence of the failure of this simplistic narrative in a study that attempts to flesh out the importance of student motivation and academic success.

“Learning, Performance and Improvement,” in the latest issue of the London-based Institute of Education journal Research Matters finds students learn and behave differently if they—and their teachers—focus on improving their knowledge and competence rather than proving it. Yet simply talking about learning won’t overcome a classroom atmosphere focused on meeting test benchmarks.

In a review of more than 100 studies from the U.S. and across the globe, Chris Watkins, Institute reader in education at the University of London, ties the current discussion over how to teach modern critical thinking and problem-solving skills back to the decades-old discussion of students’ motivation in the classroom.

The research suggests two parallel motivations drive student achievement: “learning orientation,” the drive to improve your knowledge and competency; and “performance orientation,” the drive to prove that competency to others. Watkins found the highest-achieving students had a healthy dose of both types of motivation, but students who focused too heavily on performance ironically performed less well academically, thought less critically, and had a harder time overcoming failure.

Two guesses which orientation develops under a U.S.-style assessment accountability system, and the first doesn’t count.

As I and many others have repeatedly pointed out, the obsession of American education reformers with assessment and accountability is not simply mis-guided in the sense that it does not raise student achievement but that, more importantly, it undermines students ability to develop the critical and constructive thinking skills they will need to be successful in what reformers refer to as the 21st century knowledge economy. The education reformers populating the D.C. vortex inhabit a world of almost pure contradiction, and yet they continue to win the day. The reason for the dominance of this cabal of edu-philanthropists and think tank trolls…? There is a lot of money to be made in public education. It really is that simple. Follow the money and all will become clear.

One of the truly depressing characteristics of contemporary news media is its inability to call ‘bullshit’. In order to maintain the false appearance of neutrality, reporters and talking heads alike will allow all manner of patently false statements to be propagated without so much as offering a challenge to the ideologue being “interviewed” [with the consistently crazy-talk of Faux News being the exception] and each issue that is discussed in news media is treated as a ‘he said, she said’ affair in which no attempt is made to actually dig into the validity of the statements made by each ’side’ of the debate. So, on the occasion that a village reporter actually does her/his job by speaking truth to power, it is truly news-worthy. Let us all take note that on Sunday, August 15th in the year 2010 of the Common Era Dana Milbank of the Washington Post actually did his job. [h/t Schools Matter]

In federal education policy, the president and his education secretary have been the neighborhood toughs — bullying teachers, civil rights groups, even Obama’s revered community organizers.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, in now-famous remarks, said that those who claim Obama is like George W. Bush should be “drug tested.” In general, I have sympathy for Gibbs’s frustration –liberals have an annoying tendency to eat their own — and I often think Obama should be more forceful. But in education, the Bush-Obama comparison is spot on. If anything, Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law — an obsession with testing — and amplified it.

Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed — despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he’s offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives…

Privately, Obama’s one-time friends are far more caustic. They talk of an “elitist” and “arrogant” administration embracing an education policy produced by the Center for American Progress with too little regard for what happens in practice.

Obama’s response to his supporters: Buzz off. On July 29, he gave a speech to the Urban League and said his critics are “comfortable with the status quo” and have “a general resistance to change.

But it’s not just ossified interest groups that oppose the testing. When winners of the state Teachers of the Year came to town this spring, Valerie Strauss, author of The Post’s Answer Sheet blog, asked several of them for their thoughts on education policy. All complained about using test scores to rate teachers.

There’s nothing wrong with testing, but when you use tests to determine pay and job security, you inevitably induce teachers to turn children into test-taking automatons, not the creative thinkers that have been the most valuable product of American schools. Test obsession won’t help the bad schools, and it will wreck the good ones.

Now that Tennessee has taken its bribe money the children of the urban poor are being set up for yet another un-controlled experiment in quasi-privatization and the intellectual bounty that is “drill and kill” test-prep academies. In my own little slice of the Southern Appalachians, the first institution to get the ax is a school [Austin-East High School] that has gone through an endless stream of quick-fix miracle programs, staff turn-over, and re-structuring while the building itself and the surrounding community continued to crumble. Here’s how the game is going to played here in Tennessee…

The bill [Tennessee First to the Top Act of 2010. (SB 7005 )] passed by the state legislature and signed by Bredesen, authorizes the commissioner [of education] to contract with any person, governmental entity, or nonprofit entity (managing entity) to manage the day to day operations of any or all schools or LEAs in the district including providing direct services to students. A managing entity may apply to the commissioner for a waiver of any state board of education rule that inhibits or hinders the ability of the school or LEA to achieve the required adequate yearly progress benchmarks.

Tennessee has partnered with Louisiana in applying for and receiving a $30 million grant to “expand the charter model implemented in New Orleans to the lowest performing schools in New Orleans and Tennessee, particularly in Memphis and Nashville. The consortium aims to turn around the bottom five percent of failing schools by establishing successful charters that have a track record of boosting academic achievement in challenging school environments.”

Note the waiver section that I’ve highlighted above. I wonder what kind of rules the Gates Foundation public intellectuals in the state house have in mind…

I’m beginning a new research project on KIPP schools while I get some much needed R&R on the beach. I had anticipated having to travel to Nashville, New Orleans, or D.C. to conduct observations, but it might turn out that I can do some of the observations here in my home town. Oh joy!

Regular posting will resume next week…

One moment that will forever stick in my mind is the night that “Shock & Awe” was unleashed upon Iraq. Our fearless leader stood before the camera in the White House and announced that we were, in effect, going to war to ensure peace. It was a moment of both clarity and cognitive dissonance that surely made Baudrillard chuckle, cry, or both. For me, it was the moment in which I was forced to face the sad reality that my world was not simply up-side down but hollow.

The problematic of Western modernity is one of simulation. The concepts we employ to understand the complex totality of our social world are not perversions of reality nor do they even convey the pretense of representing objective reality. The sad truth is that the concepts we use bear little to no resemblance to any reality what so ever. We inhabit a world of socio-political fantasy in which the play of power moves within the minutiae of the everyday simulation of a reality. As Baudrillard  noted:

It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality [ideology], but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

One of the most troublesome concepts in modern political speech is ‘progressive’ or ‘progressivism’. Historically, progressive was always a tricky idea that represented all manner of political perspectives from the political right to left. In today’s lingo, progressive has become a general substitute for what was once called ‘liberal’ or, by American standards, the political left. Yet, this modern incarnation of a left politics is notable for being little more than the simulation of a left politics. The politicians and organizations that represent the institutional mandate of ‘progressivism’ pursue policies that are both corporatist and elitist in nature. Beneath the patina of a left politics we find the same exercise of power that animates the entire political spectrum.

So, where am I going with this? These observations are my round-about way of pointing you toward a clear example of the simulation of a left politics within the institutional framework of a ‘progressive’ institution. Pointing toward Kevin Carey’s post at Quick and the Ed about the promise of online education as a way of expanding university training, in which Carey observes that “The challenge is to create an educational experience that’s of high enough quality to be associated with the globally recognized academic tradition of the University of California. It can be different, as long as it’s good.”, Matt Yglesias offers the following observation:

I would go stronger. It’s not just okay if it’s different, it’s okay if it’s actually worse. Historically, a lot of important improvements involve downgrades in technology. Ready to wear shirts are not as good as tailored or handmade ones. Nonetheless, developing the technology of mass produced ready to wear shirts was a huge advance in improving the world’s stock of apparel. Frozen vegetables aren’t as good as fresh ones, but again the advantages in convenience still make them an important advance. One very important reason we’ve seen such disappointing productivity in the health and education sectors over the past few decades is precisely that we’ve tended to lack these kind of quality-degrading innovations. But if you could find a means of educating students that’s 80% as good as what Berkeley currently does at 10% of the per capita cost, then you’d be opening up vast new frontiers of potential learning.

There is so much to tear into here that I honestly don’t know where to begin. So, I will offer the following. It is amazing to me that Ivy League graduates carrying the mantle of a left politics that offers the hope of providing a high-quality education to all regardless of her/his position in the social hierarchy would openly advocate for offering educative opportunities to the lower classes that they themselves would never accept for their own children. The “quality degrading innovation” in question here is one of institutional context. The reason elite schools are so desirable is that students are given the opportunity to meaningfully engage with highly-regarded experts in academic fields and to associate with other high caliber students in the pursuit of knowledge creation.  While online technology certainly offers promise for advancing education opportunities, the idea that we should pursue “quality-degrading innovations” in order to expand educational opportunity is to, in effect, advocate for a 21st century version of separate but equal… well almost equal.

Today’s cheery theme is brought to us by Glenn Greewald… Salon

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

Yves Smith points us toward the ugliness that is Friday’s job report… Naked Capitalism

While the preparation of economic data is always a fraught business, one hopes that errors are more or less symmetrical, particularly in data series that (as is the case for some important metrics in the US, like GDP), are released on an initial basis (almost without exception the only one Mr. Market notices) and tidied up subsequently. It’s troubling when a statistical release shows a marked bias over time in corrections. It suggests at best a need for a change in methodology (something statisticians are reluctant to implement, since it means the series will not be strictly comparable over time) or at worst, political meddling (pressure to interpret legitimate ambiguities in the early findings so as to produce a prettier picture).

The Employment to Population Ratio is dismal… The Vantage Point

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics released new data today that shows the US employment to population ratio is continuing to plummet. As of July 2010, the employment to population ratio stood at 58.9%, down from 59.5% last month.

Income Inequality is equally dismal… Modeled Behavior

Its impressive that the income for the Top 1% races off while the income for the middle and lower class is squished towards the bottom.

Wyoming threatens to sell chuck of Grand Tetons to raise money for education… Guardian

Governor Dave Freudenthal is threatening to sell off a chunk of one of America’s most beautiful national parks unless the Obama administration comes up with more money to pay for education in the financially beleaguered state.

He says he will auction land valued at $125m (£80m) in the Grand Teton national park, one of the country’s most stunning wildernesses. Part of the park was donated by John Rockefeller Jr.

Other parts belong to the state government including two parcels of land of about 550 hectares (1,360 acres) designated as school trust lands to be “managed for maximum profit” to generate funds for education in Wyoming.

Man, do I need a vacation before classes start up or what? I’ll let George Carlin close this out with some parting wisdom about the state of the world…