God, reading this story is enough to make you want to throttle people who do this to kids.
Some students burst into tears when a high school biology told them they’d be studying evolution. Another teacher said some students repeatedly screamed “no” when he began talking about it.
Other teachers said students demanded to know whether they pray and questioned why the had to learn about evolution if it was just a theory…..
“I’ve seen churches train students to come to school with specific questions to ask to sabotage my lessons,” said Bonnie Pratt, a biology teacher at Northview High in north Fulton County. “We need parents and the community to understand why and how we teach evolution.”
Enlisting children through emotional blackmail into defending your bullshit. Beautiful example of “family values”. There’s no way to get education to a point where it’s completely depoliticized, but what bothers me so much about the creationists is that they waste so much time and energy defending something that has no real value. Whether god made you or you evolved from a single celled organism doesn’t change your ability to do your job, enjoy a summer day, fall in love, or read literature. And all these kids are casualties. (Via.)
Linda Chavez goes back to the allegation that Barack Obama wanted your five year olds to learn about double-ended dildos and plumbs it for all that it’s worth. You’ll remember the first time this popped up, our intrepid Man-Boy Detective discovered a very sordid underbelly: a bill primarily about changing sex-ed practices for sixth to twelfth graders was talked about in a way as if its purpose was primarily to change sex-ed practices for sixth to twelfth graders. There were, however, provisions that allowed for age-appropriate sex education focused on bad touching and abuse for kindergarteners. You learn this through reading the bill. Linda, on the other hand, read Byron York’s halfassed reading of the bill, and she’s angry:
The McCain ad on Obama and sex ed, despite hysteria from the likes of Joy Behar on “The View,” turns out to be factually correct. Byron York, White House correspondent for National Review, reports that Illinois Senate Bill 99, which Obama supported in 2003, mandated that “(e)ach class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.”
Now, this is in service of the idea that this provision mandated comprehensive sex ed. Let’s take a closer look at the language, shall we?
There is a separate “age-appropriate” clause in the bill, which makes perfect sense - after all, even if you’re teaching, say, “comprehensive” math skills to kids from K-12, you aren’t teaching geometry to first graders or counting to 12th graders (er, hopefully). So, taking that as an overarching guide for what gets taught at what grade level, how do we look at this section?
We’re asked to believe that comprehensive sex ed is being mandated for kindergarteners. In order to believe this, you’d have to read the bill as mandating comprehensive sex education for all grades K-12, which no school does and very few schools anywhere in the country have the resources to do. The much more logical interpretation of the bill is that if comprehensive sex ed is taught in any grade K-12, then the comprehensive sex ed for that grade must include things A through D (or whatever body of things are going to be required).
That’s why it says “any” instead of “all” - the bill is not setting down hard and fast standards for which grades must get any form of sex ed, but saying that when a certain type of sex ed (hence the qualifier “comprehensive”) is taught, it then must include those things.
With McCain hitting Barack Obama on comprehensive sex education, I thought this would be a perfect time to highlight one of the first 4 videos Marc and I are doing for RH Reality Check. This one is on the comprehensive sex education vs. what McCain/Palin prefer—-abstinence-only. This one was fun, because Marc stepped out from behind the camera to play Clint Donovan, our angry conservative.
We didn’t have the time to address sex education for very young kids and how it helps prevent molestation, but the other aspects are covered. I imagine this issue is going to be on everyone’s radars in the near future (and again and again and again), so I hope this can be useful for you in breaking down the various arguments and counter-arguments.
I was happy to see yesterday’s video get embedded at Video Sift, because it’s a more controversial issue than sex education—-contraception in the schools. The comments were great for such a controversial issue—-a lot of people are really supportive of empowering school nurses to write pill prescriptions and hand out free condoms. I remember when this whole issue started heating up in the 90s, and it was like “fuck no” back then. But it’s so obviously a smart idea that common sense is beginning to worm its way into people’s minds.
With the “choice” of Governor Palin as the vice presidential candidate, the GOP must now face up to questions about the teaching of creation myths is public school science classes. The new talking point? “It’s a local issue.” Science is local?
We have video of the mendacity. Starting at 8:08 minutes in.
I’ve been meaning to write on this situation that Lindsay blogged about for awhile, and it’s good, I suppose, I put it off, because there’s been an illuminating amount of follow-up. To summarize: Windsor High School in Wyoming has, like a lot of high schools, a routinely administered “torture them for being teenagers” program of the “scared straight” variety. When I was in high school, the big scary things that we teenagers were assumed to be doing were at least tangentially related to the horrible punishments that were trotted out—-the naughty was drugs and the consequences were long prison sentences. Those were more innocent times, I suppose, since at least drug paranoia was equal-opportunity and, objectively speaking, based in the reasonable belief that kids shouldn’t do drugs. That said, the scared straight programs I bore witness to were ineffectually maudlin and, in the classic tradition, seemed to be rooted in fear and loathing of teenagers for being teenagers, so the sum total effect was that if you didn’t want to do drugs before the program, you sure did afterward.
But I got off relatively easy, because nowadays, the Big Bads are technology and female sexuality, both of which are things I tend to put much more in the positive column, which is why I’m not an officer making money on the side berating teenage girls for having genitals and using computers.
The hard part about reading anything Charles Murray writes is that the obvious subtext of much of it is “let’s shut out the darkies”. The easy part is that he’s otherwise an idiot.
Today’s missive is about the need to do away with the entire undergraduate system and replace it with certification exams for every field imaginable. Seriously.
Outside a handful of majors—engineering and some of the sciences—a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.
If only there were ways of screening individual applicants, like through some sort of “interview” process. And perhaps some sort of, I don’t know, transcript of their academic record, and perhaps letters from instructors recommending their skills and abilities. Naw, that’s ridiculously complicated. Better to introduce a comprehensive set of standardized tests requiring for-profit instructors testing in a number of fields that don’t really have the ability to boil down to a Scantron sheet. That’s the ticket.
The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.
The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough—four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you’re a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.
I had a whole thing worked out about how this is classist and racist and discriminatory and blah blah blah, but instead I’ll just note that virtually every board of accountancy in the country requires a bachelor’s degree in order to sit for the CPA exam.
Last year, the Texas state legislature passed a law allowing for Bible classes to be taught in public schools. The classes are allegedly supposed to be non-denominational and focused on the history and literature of the Bible without any focus on preaching or proselytization.
The Texas state legislature also passed a law declaring that I was a cowboy rocketman on Friday. Thank you and your wonderful delusions, state legislature!
The adopted rule follows broad guidelines used for English and social studies classes. It says courses should follow applicable law and “all federal and state guidelines in maintaining religious neutrality and accommodating the diverse religious views, traditions, and perspectives of students in their school district.”
Courses shall not “endorse, favor, or promote, or disfavor or show hostility toward, any particular religion or nonreligious faith or religious perspective,” the rule says.
“I think that’s pretty specific,” said Jonathan Saenz of the conservative Free Market Foundation. “The constitutional safeguards are there.”
Kind of like how the Fourth Amendment keeps our government from spying on us, or all the laws saying “don’t kill motherfuckers” have reduced the murder rate to nearly zero.
Duke estimates that after hearing a Teen Straight Talk program, up to 90 percent of the students commit to staying abstinent until marriage, based on evaluations that are collected after every program.
“We’re underestimating these kids,” she said. “They want to know the truth that safe sex isn’t really safe and that it just reduces the risk.”
The programs that the organization presents highlight the failure rates of condoms, lifelong effects of getting a sexually transmitted infection, and the possible negative emotional consequences of sexual activity.
When presented outside of the public school systems, the rule of abstinence as a Christian principle is emphasized.
“We respect state property, but in other settings we can’t ignore that this is God’s law,” Duke said. “Which is ultimately why parents who have the greatest influence on their kids should be in charge of teaching them about sex, not the schools.”
I could actually understand abstinence-only education if it were some sort of performance art aimed at making parents understand the need to talk to their children honestly about sex before some nutjob gets them to sign a pledge to the God of the Commons. Unfortunately, that’s in my dream world where all cars are replaced with unicorns and I solve crimes with my Ph.D. supermodel best friend.
One of the most interesting parts of this review by Louis Bayard of Dagmar Herzog’s book Sex in Crisis is an examination of how fundamentalists have resorted to using promises of the best sex you could ever imagine if you just wait until you’re married to do it. Bayard suggests liberals should go on the offensive on this tactic, which made me happy, because it just so happens that this liberal is. On this week’s podcast, I talk about the evangelical promise of ecstatic sex and suggest, yep, that it’s actually about being dutiful and substituting quantity for quality. I didn’t want to push it on the podcast (limited time to make a point), but there is a sense in all the lavish erotic writings of evangelicals that are meant to lure you into the fold that the reality is more that women should learn to view themselves as masturbatory devices for men to keep them from self-abuse. Bayard talks about that briefly.
A Christian wife, if she wants to keep her husband’s mind off porn and his hand off his own penis (onanism is still a big no-no), will have to be a 24/7 tootsie. She is advised to wear sexy lingerie and to keep her legs shaved and her nether region douched at all times. (“Wives,” as Jack Jones once crooned, “should always be lovers, too.”) And she has to give it up whenever her man comes calling. The example of a woman named “Ellen” is approvingly cited. “[My husband’s] purity is extremely important to me, so I try to meet his needs so that he goes out each day with his cup full. During the earlier years, with much energy going into childcare and with my monthly cycle, it was a lot more difficult for me to do that. There weren’t too many ‘ideal times’ when everything was just right. But that’s life, and I did it anyway.”
The book I talk about on the podcast demonstrates this attitude. It’s hard to explain how frightening the dutiful leg-spreading wife sounds; seriously, just listen to it. But I give you a clip from a video I use in the podcast, which I warn you is scary, because it’s Ted Haggard getting young men to talk about how much fucking they’re doing.
I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to be educated by a giant douchebag. Would the seeping vinegary smell permeating everything have had a Pavlovian effect on my education, allowing me to keep a small cache of Massengill in my desk drawer, each whiff bringing back a new fact about the Vietnam War, or multivariable calculus? Would a platter of fish and chips have me spouting facts about post-Renaissance Italian literature to a befuddled date until the pain in my head went away?
Students of Mike S. Adams, please weigh in through the comments section. Adams has decided that an anecdote based on a bad joke about supply and demand will be the thing that defines supporters of Barack Obama (Barack H. Obama, to be exact, because the middle initial he doesn’t go by is somehow relevant) - they keep making up rights that we don’t have with no idea of what rights are or what they entail.
Basically, he watched an O’Reilly Factor where Billy cherrypicked a bunch of unprepared college students with thin arguments and then proceeds to mock them for being awful, stupid people. And Negroes and Muslims.
Why do we need GOP elected fundnuts when we have the likes of Dave Obey (D-WI), who is promoting bogus, dangerous abstinence-only ed programs in schools by upping funding to the garbage?! What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi—why is she enabling Obey, who is House Appropriations Committee. Firedoglake‘s Blue Texan:
Progressives and health care advocates had hoped that when the Democrats took control of the House, one of the first things to get scrapped would be the disastrous abstinence-only education [sic] programs, which blossomed under the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. Their hopes were misplaced. Obey actually increased the funding to the programs, and Nancy Pelosi did nothing to stop him.
The bible-beating moralists of Bushworld have had their heads in the sand, choosing to believe that virginity pledges, Jesus-head chastity rings and scare seminars on the evils of sex will stop teens from knocking boots. Now we have Obey and Pelosi ready to fund it yet again. Abstinence-only education deprives young people of facts they need to know about contraception and sexual health. The ACLU is all over this BS.
“There is no question that all programs offering young people education or guidance about human sexuality should urge them to delay sexual activity. However, federally-funded programs focusing exclusively on abstinence are at odds with good public health policy and raise serious civil liberties concerns. Congress should not support programs that censor medically accurate information, reinforce gender stereotypes, provide inaccurate or misleading information, promote religion, serve a narrow ideological agenda, and jeopardize the well-being of young people. But despite the overwhelming evidence that abstinence-only programs don’t work, Congress remains in the grip of proponents of this failed policy and seems unable or unwilling to disengage itself.
“Young people deserve the truth. At some point, everyone is faced with important decisions about their sexuality. We do young people no favors by censoring information and failing to give them all the tools they need to make well-informed decisions. More than anything, we want them to have all the facts, and we want them to be safe.”
Seriously—why do we bother putting Dems in when they cannot even shut down one of the most outlandish domestic giveaways by the Bush Admin to the religious right? This was a no-brainer to deep six. Perhaps someone should send Obey and Pelosi a copy of the documentary The Education of Shelby Knox. It reveals the ignorance perpetuated by these programs in the Texas schools (it’s set in Lubbock), and how that “education” has resulted in higher STD rates and teen pregnancies. Perhaps Obey is in favor of those infamous virginity rings as well.
(This post is largely an excuse to put up a blurry picture of my dog, Mort.)
Thomas Sowell, who always seems like one of those people who buys shit off of infomercials just so that he can scoff at your need for an actual mop or glue that requires as much as an hour to set, is back today to let us know that there’s a new way to choose a college for your son or daughter - having an AEI fellow generate absolute bullshit into a numerical list!
A new think tank in Washington is trying to shift the emphasis from inputs to outputs. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity is headed by Professor Richard Vedder, who gives the U.S. News rankings a grade of D. Measuring the inputs, he says, is “roughly equivalent to evaluating a chef based on the ingredients he or she uses.”
His approach is to “review the meal”— that is, the outcome of the education itself.
The CCAP study uses several measures of educational output, including the proportion of a college’s graduates who win awards like the Rhodes Scholarships or who end up listed in Who’s Who in America, as well as the ratings that students give the professors who teach them.
Accordingly, we have developed a new CCAP ranking system based one-half on student attitudes towards the faculty who teach them, based on ratings of professors on the popular ratemyprofessors.com Web site, and one-half on the proportion of graduates who achieve a high level of vocational distinction by being included in the 2008 edition of Who’s Who in America.
Linda Chavez 
The hard part about reading 
Last year, the Texas state legislature 
Youngstown, OH schools are 
(This post is largely an excuse to put up a blurry picture of my dog, Mort.)