Why Ms. Kavanagh's Brother is bad.

Here is a link to a new story about our topic. Analyze the rhetorical strategies used and compare them to the Wright article. how are they different? which one is more persuasive?
Have a great weekend.

Love,

Ms. Kavanagh

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16099971

Mr. Rich and a Kavanagh apology

Seniors!

My apologies (thanks Sawyer!) the blog did not post earlier. Please read and be prepared to discuss this article tomorrow.
I will provide copies for you if you can't print out tonight! My bad. As you read think about rhetorical strategies and content. What do you think?

-Kavy

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/opinion/18rich.html?ref=opinion

Undercover Classist?

Read the following article. Please respond with the answer to this question:
What does the creation of a show like this one say about our country and the class system?
Remember for full credit, you must PRINT OUT THE ARTICLE AND BRING IT TO CLASS!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/weekinreview/11stanleywir.html?ref=weekinreview

Wait . . . .WHY IS THERE A FOURTH POST?

(This post is for extra credit, which will only be given if you complete the others.)

What is the best part of your Spring Break? What's up with you?

Have a great time!

Love,
Ms. K

And the issue of the day. . . Education!

Please read this op-ed. Then read the letters. In the comments section, write your own letter to the editor.

Thanks!


March 19, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
One Classroom, From Sea to Shining Sea
By SUSAN JACOBY

AMERICAN public education, a perennial whipping boy for both the political right and left, is once again making news in ways that show how difficult it will be to cure what ails the nation’s schools.

Only last week, President Obama declared that every high school graduate must be fully prepared for college or a job (who knew?) and called for significant changes in the No Child Left Behind law. In Kansas City, Mo., officials voted to close nearly half the public schools there to save money. And the Texas Board of Education approved a new social studies curriculum playing down the separation of church and state and even eliminating Thomas Jefferson — the author of that malignant phrase, “wall of separation” — from a list of revolutionary writers.

Each of these seemingly unrelated developments is part of a crazy quilt created by one of America’s most cherished and unexamined traditions: local and state control of public education. Schooling had been naturally decentralized in the Colonial era — with Puritan New England having a huge head start on the other colonies by the late 1600s — and, in deference to the de facto system of community control already in place, the Constitution made no mention of education. No one in either party today has the courage to say it, but what made sense for a sparsely settled continent at the dawn of the Republic is ill suited to the needs of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy.

Our lack of a national curriculum, national teacher training standards and federal financial support to attract smart young people to the teaching profession all contribute mightily to the mediocre-to-poor performance of American students, year in and year out, on international education assessments. So does a financing system that relies heavily on local property taxes and fails to guarantee students in, say, Kansas City the same level of schooling as students in more affluent communities.

President Obama’s proposed revisions to his predecessor’s No Child Left Behind law appear, on the surface, to offer an example not of local control but of more federal intervention. Yet many experts agree that the main reason President George W. Bush’s original law has failed to raise student achievement significantly is that states have dumbed down their exams. Diana Senechal, a former New York City teacher, demonstrated this in an inventive fashion when she showed that anyone could pass New York’s middle-school promotion examinations by simply ignoring the questions and answering, “A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D” in order.

The new proposals being offered by the Obama administration will not significantly change a setup that combines the worst of both worlds: broad federally mandated goals and state manipulation of testing and curriculum. Nationwide testing is useless unless it is based on a curriculum consensus reached by genuine experts in the subjects being taught — yes, the dreaded “elites.” That is how public education is administered in nearly all industrialized nations throughout Europe and Asia, whose students regularly outperform Americans in reading comprehension, science and math.

By contrast, the Texas board’s social studies revision forms a blueprint for bad educational decision-making. Chosen in partisan elections, the board members — most lacking any expertise in the academic subjects upon which they are passing judgment — had already watered down the teaching of evolution in science classes when they turned their attention to American and world history. Thus was Jefferson cut from a list of those whose writings inspired 18th- and 19th-century revolutions, and replaced by Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. This is certainly the first time I’ve ever heard the “Summa Theologica” described as a spur to any revolution.

No Frenchman could conceive of a situation in which school officials in Marseille decide they don’t like France’s secular government and are going to use textbooks that ignore the Napoleonic code (and perhaps attribute the principles of French law to Aquinas). But publishers will have to comply with Texas requirements in order to sell history books to that state’s huge school system. Indeed, they will likely start producing one edition for conservative states and another for the saner precincts of American schooling.

That is exactly why local control of schools is often an enemy of high-quality public education. The real question is whether anything, in the current polarized political climate, can be done about educational disparities that are inseparable from our fragmented system of public schooling. I can imagine at least three baby steps that would pave the way for success.

First, even though a national curriculum cannot be imposed, serious public intellectuals of varying political views need to step up and develop voluntary guides, in every academic subject, for use by educators who do not disdain expert opinion. The historians Diane Ravitch and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who disagreed politically on many issues, advocated for just such a set of national history standards in the late 1990s. These guidelines met with approval from just about everyone but the extreme fringes of the left and right.

Second, the federal government must invest more in training and identifying excellent teaching candidates. France, faced with a teacher shortage in the early 1990s, revamped its training system so that aspiring teachers would receive a partial salary in the last year of their studies. Prestigious institutes for teacher training were also set up to replace less rigorous programs, with admission based on competitive national examinations. Which makes more sense — investing resources upfront in attracting the brightest young people to teaching, or penalizing teachers who fail further down the road, as No Child Left Behind attempts to do?

Finally, the idea that educational innovation is best encouraged by promoting competition between schools and pouring public money into quasi-private charter schools should be re-examined by both the left and the right. One of the worst provisions in the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” program strongly encourages states to remove restrictions on the number of privately managed charter schools. Here again, we have the worst of both worlds: a federal carrot that can lead only to a further balkanizing of a public education system already hampered by a legacy of extreme decentralization.

Daniel Webster, eulogizing Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who both died on July 4, 1826, spoke of “an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry ... and a diffusion of knowledge throughout the community” as two of the fundamental requirements of American democracy. He predicted, “If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be because we have upholden them.” These great principles cannot be upheld if the quality of our public schooling continues to depend more on where a student lives than on a national commitment to excellence.

Susan Jacoby is the author of “The Age of American Unreason.”

Oh you kids and your. . . (!)

Read the following NYT Editorial which discusses the punishment for "sexting". Then respond with your opinion how we should deal with the situation through multiple perspectives:

a) as a school
b)family
c) nation

How does View Park handle these issues? Should we?


March 25, 2010
Editorial
Prosecutors Gone Wild

Schools across the country are understandably concerned about students “sexting” — sending sexually suggestive photos and text messages by cellphone. But a Pennsylvania school district went too far when it referred several female students for criminal prosecution after their images showed up on other students’ phones and they refused to participate in an antisexting education program. A federal appeals court was right to rule last week that parents had the right to block the district attorney from prosecuting the girls.

In the fall of 2008, officials in the Tunkhannock Area School District discovered nude and seminude pictures of female students on cellphones belonging to other students. After they found out that male students had been exchanging these images, the officials turned the phones over to the district attorney to investigate.

The district attorney wrote to parents of at least 16 students, who either owned the confiscated phones or appeared in the photos, threatening to prosecute the students on child pornography charges. If the students enrolled in an education program covering sexual harassment, sexual violence and related issues, he said, they would not be charged.

The parents of three girls refused to enroll their daughters. The parents of one girl, who was photographed speaking on a phone in a white bra, said she was simply being a “goof ball.” Another girl was seen in a towel, looking like she had gotten out of the shower.

These parents sought a temporary restraining order to block the district attorney from bringing criminal charges against their daughters, which the court granted. The cases against two students were dropped and the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, has since upheld the lower court. It said the third student and her parents are likely to succeed with their constitutional claims.

The prosecutor’s threat to bring charges, the appeals court ruled, would be retaliation for the exercise of protected constitutional rights — the parents’ 14th Amendment right to parental autonomy, and the child’s First Amendment right against compelled speech. Students in the program are required to write about how their actions were wrong.

The court said the prosecutor was trying to retaliate, rather than simply enforce the law, because there was so little basis for believing the three students had engaged in illegal activity — that they ever possessed the images or were involved in transmitting them.

Schools have a strong interest in maintaining an appropriate learning environment, indeed a duty to do so. But as students use more — and more elaborate — forms of technology, school officials will need to do a better job of upholding decorum without creating felony prosecutions out of misbehavior that should be handled by parents.

More Ideas about Poverty. . .

Pead the following op-ed by Nicholas Kristof. Please do the following:

1)Identify the claim
2)Agree or disagree by proving relevant examples to support your claim

Thanks!

March 25, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Escaping From Poverty
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Before I ask for a drumroll and reveal “the secrets” of fighting poverty, a bit of background:

For a quarter-century after World War II, the United States made great progress against poverty. Then in the 1970s, we fumbled. Over the last 35 years, our economy has almost tripled in size, but, according to the United States Census Bureau, the number of Americans living below the poverty line has been stuck at roughly 1 in 8.

One reason is that wages for blue-collar and other ordinary workers peaked in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A second is the breakdown in the family and the explosion in single-parent households. A third is the quintupling of incarceration rates beginning in 1970, making it harder for impoverished young men to play a role in families or get decent jobs.

When those factors converge — a young woman with a 10th-grade education trying to raise a couple of kids as a single parent — poverty proves almost inescapable. Often the cycle is transmitted from generation to generation.

Still, there’s a reason for hope: We’re getting a much better handle on what policies can overcome poverty. We’re now seeing more experiments, modeled after randomized drug trials, that measure carefully whether an approach works and how cost-effective it is. Partly this reflects the rise of economists (at the expense of political scientists and do-gooders) and the rigor they pack in their briefcases.

“To make a difference, we have to do things that actually work,” said Gordon Berlin, the president of MDRC, a research organization that pioneered the use of randomized trials to evaluate poverty-fighting strategies. “In the last 15 to 20 years, we’ve begun to build a compelling body of evidence that policy makers and program operators can act on.”

Here’s a peek at some of the interventions that seem to make a difference (and there are many more):

• High-quality early childhood programs, before kids get behind. Much-studied examples include the Perry Preschool program in Michigan in the 1960s and the Abecedarian Project in North Carolina in the 1970s. Both worked with impoverished children who had much better outcomes than control groups. For example, those who had been through the Perry program were — as adults, decades later — only half as likely to go on welfare and much less likely to be arrested.

• Intensive efforts in the ninth grade (which is well known as education’s Bermuda triangle, swallowing up poor students). A program called Talent Development in Philadelphia gave ninth graders a double dose of math and English and reduced absenteeism and significantly improved performance for at least the next couple of years. Tentative results suggest it is also improving high school graduation rates.

• Career academies. These keep students engaged in high school by teaching around career themes and partnering with local employers to give kids work experience. Eight years of follow-up research suggests that graduates are more likely to hold jobs and earn more money.

• Jobs programs. One of the most successful is the “jobs-plus” demonstration, which trains people living in public housing to get jobs and gives them extra incentives to keep them. Participants thrive — and the gains continue even years later, after the program ends.

The two most important interventions seem to be education and jobs. Schooling programs pay off from early childhood all the way through community college. And jobs programs lift entire families: even though one might worry about children getting less supervision with parents working, studies suggest that children then do better at school.

All this underscores a long-term cost of this recession: there are cuts in both education and jobs, harming the two most effective stairways out of poverty. That’s tragic, and I hope we consider schooling and jobs every bit as important as our multibillion-dollar surge in Afghanistan.

In effect, what’s needed to overcome poverty in part seems to be a change of culture, to break self-destructive behaviors — resignation to unemployment, self-doubt, alcohol and drug abuse, disintegrating families, lack of engagement in children’s education — that create self-replicating cycles of poverty. The Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy, a charter school where third graders from a disadvantaged neighborhood outperform their peers around New York City and New York State, offers a shining example of what is possible.

This wave of research suggests that there’s no magic bullet, that helping people is hard, and that even when pilot programs succeed they can be difficult to scale up. But evidence also suggests that we increasingly have the tools to chip away at poverty. We know what to do if we just can summon the political will.

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