I caught this item last week:  Minnesota gets high marks for its laws on charter schools:

According to an annual report card published by the Center for Education Reform, Minnesota has the strongest charter school laws of any state.

Minnesota gets credit for, among other things:

• Giving charters legal and fiscal independence;
• Not imposing a cap on the number of charters;
• Allowing a variety of organizations to approve and oversee charters (in addition, of course, to the state department of education).

Of course, that “lack of a cap” is over the DFL’s dead body; last session, they tried to cap the number of charter schools; the GOP (and six brave DFLers) voted against the cap, barely beating it back.

Despite the fact that the national charter school movement started in Minnesota, charter schools still face opposition from vested interests. In the Winter 2008 edition of Education Next, Ember Reichgott Junge describes how her support of charter schools was one factor in her loss to Keith Ellison in the Fifth District primary.

I’m not quite sure how to read that; Junge was an incredibly weak candidate – and while Ellison represents a party that hates charter schools (they are an affront to the teachers’ union and institutional education), inner city parents sick of the diluted, agenda-driven education they’re getting from the public system are running like mad for the charters; Minneapolis’ district has lost an immense share of its students; one in eight of Saint Paul’s students have left for charter schools.

Hence the cap, that failed last year – and, we can be sure, other attempts to kill off this experiment.

A California appeals court last week ruled that homeschooling parents need “teaching credentials“.

In this case, California ruled that a family’s kids needed to be “supervised” by “credentialed” teachers.  The parents fought – and lost.

A lawyer appointed to represent two of the Long’s young children requested that the court require them to physically attend a public or private school where adults could monitor their well-being. A trial court disagreed, but the children’s lawyer appealed to the 2nd District Court of Appeal, which has jurisdiction over Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

The appellate panel ruled that Sunland officials’ occasional monitoring of the Longs’ home schooling — with the children taking some tests at the school — is insufficient to qualify as being enrolled in a private school. Since Mary Long does not have a teaching credential, the family is violating state laws, the ruling said.

“Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in a Feb. 28 opinion signed by the two other members of the district court. “Parents who fail to [comply with school enrollment laws] may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program.”

The usual suspects tip their hands:

The ruling was applauded by a director for the state’s largest teachers union.

“We’re happy,” said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. “We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting.” 

For starters, lets be clear on something:  “Teaching Credentials” are to “qualified to teach children” as “Tia Tequila” is to “actress”.  Whenever a profession sets up “credendials”, especially credentials administered by the government, the purpose is very rarely to promote a better professional service;  it’s to constrict the supply of those professionals.  Which is exactly what this ruling does; limits the job of “teaching kids”, something nearly every parent in the world does by instinct, and better than most teachers, to people who’ve taken “Theory of the Eraser 352” at Bakersfield State College. 

 I wish my father – an almost-forty-year teacher and several-time instructor in a college education department – could sound off on this one; he’s as solid a critic of “teacher education” as anyone I’ve met…

But what this ruling really means is “the state knows more about raising your children than you do”.

Which should make your skin crawl.

As you think of that, and might perhaps be tempted to say  “well, it’s only California”, remember; the DFL is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Education Minnesota, and EM hates homeschoolers; the Minnesota Legislature tried to “cap” the number of charter schools (the only alternative an awful lot of working parents can afford these days) last year, and the DFL in the legislature fought charter and home schools tooth and nail when the idea first surfaced.

It can happen here – and big parts of the Educational/Industrial Complex want it to.

I knew early on that I didn’t want to be a teacher. 

Don’t get me wrong.  My dad was a high school teacher for four decades, and – as I’ve noted in this space many times – a great one.  And for my whole life, he’s evangelized his trade very eloquently.

Of course, by the time I was in college the profession had changed quite a bit – and I knew pretty much from the beginning it wasn’t the field for me.  I’ve gotten the impression that the teachers’ union has turned it into a blue-collar factory job – like an assembly line, bolting little bits of knowledge onto passing units students – while the education academy has imposed a politically-correct culture on the profession that seems, from my experience as a parent, to stifle thought and teach a one-sided view of pretty much everything with more than one side.

Still, I’ve seen or heard of nothing quite as Sartreian as this piece from last weekend’s edition of “This American Life” – “Act One”, about the New York Public Schools’ “Rubber Rooms”, places where hundreds of teachers, held on probation for one charge or another.  As the blurb notes:

Teachers are told to report there instead of their classrooms. No reason is usually given. When they arrive, they find they’ve been put on some kind of probationary status, and they must report every day until the matter is cleared up. They call it the Rubber Room. Average length of stay? Months, sometimes years.

They get paid full salary as they wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Oh, just  listen. 

Your tax dollars at work.

I remember when I first became aware of the decay of the education system, during Reagan’s first term.  “A Nation At Risk” was the seminal report detailing the problems the system faced.

The thing that worried me at the time was the overwhelming push to drive kids into science and math.  Although I was still pretty much a proponent of the system back then, I figured that the only way to deal with this nation’s “shortage of scientists and engineers” was not to try to convince junior high kids that math was cool – but to teach kids to think, and pave the way for the ones that are inclined toward math and science to get into the field.  But with all due respect to my engineer and scientist friends, math and computer science and engineering majors can be among the most provincial, narrowly-focused people around. Which is fine to an extent; I don’t care if my neurosurgeon has read James Joyce, and I’ll forgive some of our engineers’ ignorance on Locke vs. Rousseau if they at least get the next batch of gusset plates right.

But I worried about the tendency to push science and engineering as a panacea for all that ailed education.

And, whaddya know, I was right!

Big Brother. McCarthyism. The patience of Job.

Don’t count on your typical teenager to nod knowingly the next time you drop a reference to any of these. A study out today finds that about half of 17-year-olds can’t identify the books or historical events associated with them.

Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack important historical and cultural underpinnings of “a complete education.” And, its authors fear, the nation’s current focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities – even if children can read and do math.

Wanna know something scary?  I actually expected these numbers below to be worse than they turned out:

Among 1,200 students surveyed:•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.

•52% could identify the theme of 1984.

•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature, though the survey suggests students do well on topics schools cover. For instance, 88% knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led the USA into World War II, and 97% could identify Martin Luther King Jr. as author of the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Fewer (77%) knew Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped end slavery a century earlier.

I’ve commented on this before, here and on the NARN show.  My kids complained that, while in the public system in Saint Paul, they basically learned about…:

• Slavery
• The Civil Rights movement.

Worthy and essential topics – but hardly the whole sweep of American contribution to the world, much less history.
Now, certain lesser bloggers phumphered and argled when I made that comment on the air.  But I had a point…:

“School has emphasized Martin Luther King, and everybody teaches it, and people are learning it,” says Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank. “What a better thing it would be if people also had the Civil War part and the civil rights part, and the Harriet Tubman part and the Uncle Tom’s Cabin part.”

I guess in a backhanded way, I should be encouraged.  Indeed, I suspect the alternative media has had a lot to do with the wide knowledge of at least the surface aspects of 1984.

I mean, maybe.

The findings probably won’t sit well with educators, who say record numbers of students are taking college-level Advanced Placement history, literature and other courses in high school.

“Not all is woe in American education,” says Trevor Packer of The College Board, which oversees Advanced Placement.

Maybe there’s a change in the wind for the public system?

The study’s release today in Washington also serves as a sort of coming out for its sponsor, Common Core, a new non-partisan group pushing for the liberal arts in public school curricula.

And…maybe…not…

Its leadership includes a North Carolina fifth-grade teacher, an author of history and science textbooks, a teachers union leader and a former top official in the George H.W. Bush administration.

Stay tuned.

I’m all for privacy – as in, “more than you”, whomever you are (and that means you too, Chuck Samuelson). As someone whose free speech Hillary Clinton has in her cross-hairs, I’m obviously a First-Amendment advocate (and the rest of the Bill of Rights as well). And I’m a pretty forthright critic of the public school system.

But I still would like to see these kids tossed out on their ears

Thirteen Eden Prairie High students who were pictured drinking online face penalties. Some students are planning a walkout after first period this morning, and they’re promoting the protest where the controversy began: on Facebook.com.

The walkout – as opposed to a job strike – has always struck me as the most gutless and snotty form of protest, in general. I don’t know who’s teaching these kids about rhetoric, civil disobedience and protest, but if it’s a teacher, the district should get its money back.

Katie Kieffer writes to note that the St. Thomas Register has Latest E an online edition,  Katie (and her sister, current editor Amy) has been fighting the good fight at St. Thomas for the past four years.
They don’t get a heck of a lot of support from St. Thomas – while the school is not the most hidebound liberal campus in town, it’s still hardly conservative-friendly.

And they’re fund-raising, too.  So if you have a couple of bucks to spare for intellectual freedom on campus, they’d love to hear from you.

U of Delaware forces students into a coercive PC indoctrination program:

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism.

Let’s assume for the moment that those university-approved views were that “racism is a dead issue, gays should be accepted but there are issues with gay marriage, that all moral and political systems are not created equal and that America has ample reason to be proud, and we should await actual empirical proof that human activity has anything to do with global warming before we hand the keys of our economic engine over to the boobs at the UN” – do you suppose these people, pollyannaish as they are about conservative kids being indoctrinated, would take it sitting down?

Oh, relax. Those, naturally, aren’t the views at hand.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education talked about the whole sordid episde on the Ben Gleck show. It’d be funny if it weren’t everywhere.

Oh, they abandoned it.  Musta been all that unsubstantiable whining.

After last fall’s incident involving middle school kids passing meth around in class, among other things,  this sordid incident almost seems like a return to a simpler, more innocent time:

Tipped off by some odd behavior during science class and a 15-year-old who had trouble negotiating a school stairway, St. Paul school officials discovered that four girls had shared a water bottle filled with vodka during their second-hour class Monday.

It almost seems like something Beaver Cleaver would do, in context.

…private and charter schools have ever gotten:

People decisively favor letting their public schools provide birth control to students, but they also voice misgivings that divide them along generational, income and racial lines, a poll showed.

Sixty-seven percent support giving contraceptives to students, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. About as many – 62 percent – said they believe providing birth control reduces the number of teenage pregnancies.

85 percent of this particular polling sample also said that giving away Coca Cola in the cafeteria would curb obesity.

I attended the Twin Cities’ debut of Indoctrinate U Friday night at the Oak Street Cinema on the U of M Campus (details here).

Things I liked:

• It was the kind of movie I’d love to see more of, in this Youtube/ITunes/Blogger driven era of grassroots media; you could tell it was shot on video on the cheap.
• Which didn’t distract from the message; there is a systematic anti-right, anti-conservative, anti-Christian bias in american post-secondary education, at schools big (Scott Johnson’s daughter Eliana, known to bloggers of a certain age as “Yale Diva”, testified about life as an underground Republican at Yale) and small (Ahmed al-Quloushi, a former guest on the Northern Alliance, who testified about being pushed into a psychological gulag at his small California college for writing a pro-American essay.

Plenty of other notables were there: Jamie Delton was there (and I’ll hope he writes a review soon). Scott Johnson wrote about it on PowLine this morning:

The theater was also packed with a responsive crowd last night, a large part of which stuck around after the screening to hear from Evan and film producer Thor Halvorssen. I haven’t seen such a big crowd in that theater since “Putney Swope” opened there in 1969. Several University of Minnesota students were in the audience and testified to the accuracy of the film’s depiction of university life. In a recent New York Times column Stanley Fish (wrongly, in my view) pooh-poohed the film’s portrayal of the university, but he also smartly captured Evan’s genius

I’m tempted to say Robin “Rew” Marty of the MinMon went to and wrote about the wrong movie – but no, I actually saw her there. So that doesn’t explain her review.

A better one might be that the standard knee-jerk response on the left is to ascribe all conservative complaints as “whining”.

In response to Maloney’s tales – of conservative newspapers being stolen from their drop sites, of conservative students being spat upon, of conservative students being forced to attend psychological counseling for…being conservatives, Rew wrote an anecdote about one of her professors:

…and concludes:

Are there left-leaning professors who push their students? I’m sure there are, and I am sure that just like the other professors I have encountered, they have what they believe is a good reason for doing so. College is a time for new ideas, new challenges, and new outlooks. I responded by becoming more firm in many of my beliefs, just as Mitch Berg and other responded by finding a new path more suited to their convictions. But that’s education, not indoctrination.

Well, yes. That, indeed, was the point of my piece yesterday – where my advisor, Dr. Blake, helped me question the bases of my own “beliefs” as a late-teen/early twentysomething. Robin tells a similar story, and tells it modestly well (although she fails to indicate why any survey of English literature would be intellectually honest in eschewing Robert Browning’s work for his wife Elizabeth’s – indeed, there is none).

But it has absolutely nothing to do with Maloney’s point in Indoctrinate U. The film isn’t about people feeling uncomfortable about having their beliefs challenged, or about professors “pushing” their students. It’s about:

• A student Several students being accused of harassment and being coerced into getting psychological treatment for (in one example) pasting up fliers to a conservative speaker’s appearance.
• A psychology department head being harassed to within an inch of her job after being “outed” as a conservative – and the attendant lopsidedness of political beliefs on college campuses, especially in the humanities and liberal arts.
• Conservative newspapers being systematically stolen from their drop boxes.
• Conservative activists being attacked, spat upon, and harassed – for exercising their First Amendment rights (which we’ve seen in spades in the Twin Cities over the years)
• Professors using their bully pulpits to vent about politics in courses that have nothing whatever to do with politics.
• Liberal groups using mob tactics to bully non-PC groups – recruiters, especially – off campus.
• Administrations systematically enacting double standards – allowing left-leaning students to behave in ways that are sanctioned when the students lean right…

…and on, and on. The movie is 90 minutes; it’s funny and aggravating and has nothing, really, to do with anything Robin talked about.  Rew giggles, comes up with an off-topic but personal anecdote (which is intended, one supposes to counterbalance all 90 minutes of Maloney’s material) and says conservatives are whining, that it really cuts both ways (absent any actual counter-evidence).
Which, to be fair, is still no worse than the rest of the left does in addressing this issue.

You don’t have to take my word for it, of course. Get your butt on down to the Oak Street Cinema at 7:15 PM any night this week.

Kudos to the Minnesota Association of Scholars for participating in the showing.

I was pretty smug about what I believed when I went to college.

There, I encountered a number of professors who agreed with my smug, self-satisfied beliefs – and one who challenged them, assaulted them, turned them on their heads.

Of course, I went into college a liberal – and Doctor Blake was a self-described “monarchist”. Doctor Blake cajoled me into reading Crime and Punishment, Modern Times by Paul Johnson, The Gulag Archipelago, and PJ O’Rourke’s essays (the ones that later became Republican Party Reptile). I entered college as a kid who had been just too young to vote in 1980 – and in 1984 I voted for Reagan (and in 1996 may have done it again, although I don’t remember).

The challenge to my “beliefs” was a whack up side my intellectual head. It was also one of the things I went to college for in the first place.

Of course, Dr. Blake wasn’t on a mission to create young Republicans – indeed, I barely remember him discussing current events or politics in class. He was not on a mission to indoctrinate kids, and while when called upon he did talk about why he was a Republican and why the Democrats were wrong, it was never as an abuse of his position, at the front of a classroom.

Which is where the line needs to be – and all too often isn’t.
So as I join with King Banaian and Janet Beihoffer in hoping you can attend Indoctrinate U at the Oak Street Cinema starting this evening, I’ll also draw your attention to the latest Katherine Kersten piece. Not every professor, it seems, is as forebearing as Dr. Blake:

t’s become a common complaint that U.S. campuses are home to a stifling liberal orthodoxy where contrary beliefs are persecuted. Doyle says it’s no illusion.

A new film, “Indoctrinate U,” documenting that atmosphere, opens near campus tomorrow.

Bethany Dorobiala, a senior political science major at the U of M, knows just what Doyle is talking about. Dorobiala was one of the few students who agreed to speak on the record about the problem.

In many courses, Dorobiala says, professors load up reading lists with books that reflect their ideological agenda. “If you speak up in class and present an alternative view, you may risk being ridiculed by a professor twice your age with a PhD.,” she said. “Students who agree with the professor’s politics are regularly praised and encouraged.”

Dorobiala has encountered this disregard for intellectual diversity in classes outside of political science. “In geology class, I had a teacher who made side comments bashing President Bush,” she said. A rigid orthodoxy prevails on issues as disparate as the death penalty and global warming, she says, and some professors regularly pontificate on topics outside their discipline.

Read the whole thing. Check out the movie.

Challenge is good. Abuse is bad.

…on my right (where else) side bar, the Minnesota Association of Scholars is sponsoring a blitz of showings of Indoctrinate – U at the Oak Street Cinema, starting this evening:

The Minnesota Association of Scholars is delighted to bring to the Twin Cities Evan Coyne Maloney’s stunning new documentary about politics in America’s college classrooms: Indoctrinate-U.

“A terrific must-see,” National Review
“Alarming and funny,” The New York Post
“A gripping hour and a half,” Instapundit.com

Whether your politics leans Left, Right, or Center, you should be worried about any inclination on the part of colleges and universities to deprive students, especially undergrads, of the even-handed presentation of all viewpoints regarding critical social, political, and economic issues. For it’s vigorous debate about the full range of ideas that will produce what’s best for society.

Come join us for
• The Opening-Night Gala
• Any of Fifteen Public Screenings
• Lecture/Discussions on Education versus Indoctrination

I’m hoping I can swing it – it’s supposed to be great.

On the one hand, Channing Crowder isn’t the crown jewel in America’s geography education crown:

Maybe he was joking, but gregarious Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder confessed today he didn’t know until Tuesday that people spoke English in London.

Crowder, a former Florida Gator and Atlanta native, apparently isn’t sure where the plane is headed when it takes off this afternoon for Sunday’s game against the New York Giants in Wembley Stadium.

“I couldn’t find London on a map if they didn’t have the names of the countries,” Crowder said. “I swear to God. I don’t know what nothing is. I know Italy looks like a boot. I learned that.

Downside:  Not good.  It’s a good thing he has a career in sports.

Upside:  If he gets injured and has to retire, he might have a career as a Democratic Party staffer.

You could see this coming.

After St. Thomas disinvited Desmond Tutu (at the behest of its president, Father “Havana Denny” Dease, who certainly should be a laughinstock), you could count the hours until some lefty claimed that there was a culture of intimidation against liberal speakers on campuses.

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein brings a note of reality to the discussion:

I agree with Smith when he criticizes the University of St. Thomas, an institution I very much respect, for its original decision, several months ago, to disinvite South African Bishop Desmond Tutu from speaking on campus. Well-intended and solicitous to the Jewish community as that move might have been, it nevertheless was unprincipled, dim and hugely counterproductive, and university President Dennis Dease was right, of course, to recently reverse field and reinvite Tutu.

But at the risk of framing this issue excessively in ideological terms, there was at least a subtle implication in Smith’s column that scholars and speakers on the left such as Tutu are generally treated by colleges and universities no worse than their counterparts on the right; that all different kinds academics and activists are abused and censored equally. Yet no way is this true.

For example, was there any left-leaning commencement speaker this past spring who was treated as abysmally as Republican Sen. John McCain was by graduating boars at the New School in New York? Or who on the liberal side of the aisle in recent years has needed police protection to get in and out of lecture halls as frequently as conservative writer David Horowitz?

And as for retrieved invitations, I know of no one other than Linda Chavez — in the supposedly open-minded 1980s — who was told by a college president in New York City, “If you insist on speaking, I can’t guarantee your safety.”But you invited me, or at least members of your faculty did,” she said in amazement, before being escorted from the building by bodyguards for a waiting car — but getting punched anyway.

Multicultural mavens frequently went batty at the thought of Chavez (a former head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission during the Reagan administration) speaking on their campuses, as she just wasn’t their style of minority. The president of the University of Northern Colorado, for instance, disinvited her after students rallied against her scheduled appearance. And then (you’ll love this one), instead of apologizing to Chavez, he apologized to the students for the “grossly insensitive” invitation in the first place.

Read the whole thing.

On October 23 – next Tuesday – the Saint Paul School Board is going to hear yet another attempt by a group of well-connected “youth” “anti-war” “activists” to get the Board to bar military recruiters from Saint Paul campuses.

A little bird sent me their internal email:

NOTE: The “adult” peace and justice movements MUST stand in solidarity with our youth who are challenging the militarization of their schools!!!

That, of course, is hilarious stuff.

At the last meeting I attended, the “anti-war” group included perhaps three high school kids, and well over a dozen adults and/or college kids. 

“Standing in Solidarity?”  They’re standing in substitution!

But I digress: 

 So far, the StPaul School Board has IGNORED YOUTH VOICES on the issue of military recruiters being given free rein.

Actually, they’ve given the YOUTH VOICES attempt after attempt to sway the Board – largely because at least two members of the board, Ann Carrol and Tom Goldstein, seem to more or less favor the idea of barring recruiters from the campuses, career fairs and so on. 

Which, if the author of this email is any indication, might actually benefit the military:

 Too many of our kids are being CHANNELED into the military–especially youth of color & low-income youth in inner cities & rural areas are being TARGETED by recruiters.

Largely because they, traditionally, join the volunteer military in vastly greater numbers than the white, upper-middle-class children of liberal parents – the ones that make up groups like these. 

They are offered NO OTHER CHOICES–NO trade schools or apprenticeships, NO help going to college–just “join the army”.

 Really?

So when you go to a “career day” or a “college fair” at a high school, it’s a chimera – nothing but booth after booth of military recruiters stretching from wall to wall?

High school kids?  Anyone know about this?

Lydia Howell, host/producer of CATALYST:politics & culture on KFAI Radio

Hm.  Big charges. 

Worth looking into.

“Youth Against War and Racism” wants to help guarantee future war and entrench further racism, by nagging – again – the Saint Paul School Board to restrict military recruiters on Saint Paul school campuses:

Youth Against War and Racism (YAWR), the Twin Cities metro area student group, asks for your support in urging the St. Paul and Minneapolis School Boards to restrict military recruiters’ access to high schools.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools allow recruiters access to schools, but YAWR asks that recruiters be restricted to Career Centers where school counselors can supervise the recruiters’ contact with students. They do not want recruiters in school cafeterias, at sporting and other extra-curricular events or elsewhere around schools and students.

The military has had large presences at School Board meetings in the Public Commentary times, and has been allowed to freely advocate for their position with school boards.

Please come support the students who actually attend the schools and live in the community, in advocating for their position. Also: Please phone or e-mail the School Board in your district with your concerns.

A little bird tells me Superintendent Carstarphen would like this whole issue to just go away – that she’s sick to death of board time being taken up by these yowling little patricians-in-training and the college-age-and-older lifestyle leftists who are basically using them as a mouthpiece (to be fair, I’m jamming that last bit into her mouth – but to her credit, she would, I’m told, rather actually deal with education than this particular vanity issue).
Last time this came up, Swiftee and I went to the meeting and spoke.  If you care about the St. Paul Schools, it’d be great to have some more people there next time.

No fair peeking…

Is it A):

The dialectic of Christo’s “Gates” is a reflection of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, absent the schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of “now-more-than-ever.” The semiotics of the saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New New York to their perceptions of the orange joy of being – the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucauldian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst. It’s in this context that “The Gates” covers, even metastasizes, over Central Park like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.

The panels, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie (nursing at the paps of American Idol), emanate as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature – the maternal yin imprisoned in the mechanistic yang of the city and yet floating above the concept of restraint – the “Gates” welcome yet repel; they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas and yet remain silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material), smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The “Gates” are, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontiguous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age.

Or is it B):

“Pedagogy requires a hermeneutic ability to make interpretive sense of the phenomena of the lifeworld in order to see the pedagogic significance of situations and relations of living with children.”

OK. You may peek.

(more…)

If you’ve been reading this blog any length of time, you know that:

1. …my father, and both of my maternal grandparents, were teachers, as is my little sister (occasionally). All of them taught/teach/will teach soon in one public school system or another.
2. I have two kids (and spent the better part of a decade helping raise another kid, my stepson)
3. This past two years has seen my ex-wife and I pull both of our kids out of the public school system, after a decade-and-a-half long growing realization on my part that not only does the whole system, despite the best efforts of a lot of very good people, put education behind ideology, but that the very pedagogical model used in public (and most private and parochial) schools functions primarily to teach children that learning is a wretched chore.

Well, school’s started again. And Elder refers us to a piece by Tony Woodlief in Opinion Journal that I agree with as fiercely as I reject it.

Confused? Me too.

Another school year has sprung itself upon us, which is always an occasion for my wife, a former Detroit public-school teacher, and me to remind ourselves why we home-school. Part of the reason, in addition to my wife’s expertise in this area, can be found in Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions,” published 20 years ago. Mr. Sowell contrasted the “unconstrained vision” of utopians, who want to radically improve humankind, with the “constrained vision” of realists, who begin with the proposition that man is inherently self-interested, and not moldable into whatever form the high-minded types have in store for us once they get their itchy fingers on the levers of power. Mr. Sowell’s book has been influential among conservatives for its compelling explanation of the divide between people who want to reshape us–often via large intrusions on liberty–and those who believe that the purpose of government is to protect institutions (like markets and families) that channel our inherent selfishness into productive behavior. It is also a handy guide for parenting.

Parenting.  Yes, indeed.

Schooling?  Maybe not so much.

While some mothers and fathers stubbornly cling to the utopian beliefs of their childless years, the vision of humans as inherently sinful and selfish resonates with many of us who are parents. Nobody who’s stood between a toddler and the last cookie should still harbor a belief in the inherent virtue of mankind. An afternoon at the playground is apt to make one toss out the idealist Rousseau (“man is a compassionate and sensible being”) in favor of the more realistic Hobbes (“all mankind [is in] a perpetual and restless desire for power”). As a father of four sons, I’ve signed on to Mr. Sowell’s summation of a parent’s duty: “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

Right. 

But that’s the parent’s job. 

Not the schools’. 

The constrained vision indicates that world harmony and universal satisfaction are mirages. People are innately selfish, and they’ll always desire more goodies. …While the unconstrained worldview teaches that traditions and customs are to be distrusted as holdovers from benighted generations, those of us with the constrained view believe it’s good to make our children address their elders properly, refrain from belching at the table and wear clothes that actually cover them. Mr. Sowell noted that some benefits from evolved societal rules can’t be articulated, because they’ve developed through trial and error over centuries. This reveals the sublime wisdom in that time-honored parental rejoinder: “Because I said so.”

It’s not surprising, then, to see Mr. Sowell approvingly cite Edmund Burke’s observation that traditions provide “wisdom without reflection.” This is lived out in our house by the dictum that parents are to be obeyed first, and politely questioned later.

Fair enough, so far.  It’s something toward which many of us strive… 

That seems oppressive to parents with the unconstrained worldview, who want to nurture Junior’s sense of autonomy and broad-minded reasoning. It’s awfully useful, however, when Junior is about to ride his bike into the path of an oncoming car. Obedience may be a dirty word in progressive schools and enlightened parenting circles, but it saves lives.

In the hands of a parent, authority and tradition are good things.

But when you turn the corner into insisting the schools should have that same authority – and that families and students owe the same kind of “obedience” to the school (and I’m not talking about behavior; I’m talking about blind obeisance to the current system of education), we wheel into the weeds.

Perhaps the fundamental purpose of schooling should be to liberate parents from the necessity of supporting our kids well past our retirement years. But regardless, this notion that humans are inherently angelic, and that it is society that corrupts them, is at the heart of much bad parenting, as well as inept schooling. Rather than help our children develop internal constraints that channel their energy and passion into productive enterprises, we end up teaching them that limits and discipline are for chumps.

Indeed.

But someone please show me, empirically, how the “sit your ass in a chair and learn what you’re told, when you’re told to learn it” model of education benefits anyone but that thin little film of children who, for whatever reason, are wired that way?

All this talk of “balancing” talk radio by bringing the government in to “make things fair” brings up an idea.

What this country needs is political balance across the board.  The “red states vs. blue states” split is tearing the nation apart.  When half of the nation’s votes and 90% of the land are populated by self-reliant, hard-working people who create most of the nation’s actual wealth, and the other half (and 10% of the land) are people who get wealthy by jiggering numbers and skimming from the work of the rest of the country, we’re headed for disaster.  Moreover, the nation would benefit if Red and Blue could live together, rather than segregated; the ideological cross-pollination would make a better nation, in the long run. 

So I advocate forcibly relocating people from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and the rest of “Blue America” to live in the interior, and moving people from the “Red States” to replace them.  52% of the “Blue States” will be populated by red staters, and 48% of the “Red States” will be occupied by former blue staters.

Anyone who resists will face the full weight of federal law enforcement.

And the results would be…?

Probably pretty dismal, right?

Bringing in government to re-engineer society is pretty much always a bad idea, whether it’s “Urban Renewal”, clearing the Plains of Indians, banning alcohol (or, as we’ve seen in our inner cities, drugs), the “Fairness Doctrine”…

…or mandatory school busing.  Katherine Kersten writes about the decades of fallout after yet another attempt at (voluntary) integration falls flat:

The Inter- District Downtown School in Minneapolis and the FAIR School in Crystal opened their doors with much fanfare in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Their sponsor is the West Metro Education Program, a consortium of the Minneapolis school district and 10 suburban districts. WMEP created the schools at a cost of more than $26 million to be showcases of racial balance, achieved voluntarily.

Last week, we learned that they are no such thing.

Today, InterDistrict students are 70 percent minority’ and the FAIR School is nearly 70 percent white. Their racial composition is little different from that of the districts in which they are located. The InterDistrict School actually qualifies as “racially isolated” under state desegregation rules.

For those of you too young to remember – and I am, although I do remember parts of the debate, because I was a really weird kid who remembers a lot of news from the late sixties and early seventies – the theory was that forced busing would improve things by sending the poor to wealthier districts, and by giving the kids from the wealthier districts an exposure to life outside the privileged classes. 

Kersten:

 As a result, many Minneapolis students began spending extra hours every week on the bus to get to schools far from home. Brothers and sisters were often assigned to widely separated schools, and parents struggled to attend conferences and get involved in school life.

After two decades of busing, however, black students’ test scores did not improve as expected. (No surprise there: data from the National Assessment for Educational Progress from 1975 to 1988 — when black students across the country made significant academic gains — showed black students in majority black schools doing as well or better than those of blacks in majority white schools.)

But mandatory busing did have one devastating unintended consequence: White, middle-class families began streaming out of the city. When the suit that launched busing was filed in 1971, the Minneapolis district was 14.5 percent minority. In 1985, it was 40 percent. In 1994, it was 62 percent minority and today it’s 72 percent.

The effects?

Minneapolis is still paying the costs of two decades of forced busing. Busing increased the concentration of poverty in the inner city, undermined community institutions that could otherwise have provided vital stability in poor children’s lives and weakened district schools.

Today, it is black students who are leaving Minneapolis district schools. Some are choosing to attend suburban schools through Choice Is Yours program, the outcome of a 2000 legal settlement. Many more are flooding to charter schools. Ironically, students at Minneapolis charter schools are more likely to be poor and minority than those at district schools.

The teacher’s union’s legislature’s response?  Shut down charters, and cram the kids back into the public schools for their own good.  But I digress.

In 2004, black Minnesota students had the fourth-lowest graduation rate in the nation, according to a recent Education Week study. Imagine the progress we could have made on this and other fronts if — instead of devoting endless hours to racial balance study groups and endless millions to busing — we had focused on learning how the best schools are succeeding with the children who face the greatest obstacles.

The lesson we need to take away from this:  when government tries to enact social change anywhere below “broad sweeping concept”-level, it’s always a disaster. 

The Strib Editorial Board acts like a blindfolded man examining a cow, and declaring what he’s prodding at to be two powderhorns, a dusting broom, a walking cane and a fur rug.

Sometimes a cow is just a cow.

And sometimes a financial scam is just a financial scam.  In this case, it’s the state’s “Alternative Learning Centers” – schools for kids who are having trouble in the traditional school system. 

Today, almost 150,000 — nearly 20 percent of state public school students — go to Alternative Learning Centers (ALCs). But a May 13 story by Star Tribune reporter Jim Walsh looked behind those numbers to reveal some troubling issues.Yes, students are going to the schools in droves, but what happens after they get there? A majority of them never take standardized tests or graduate. A quarter to a half of them are absent most days. So is it good enough that only a tiny number of alternative students are being educated — or are the schools too often holding areas that delay the dropout process for a few years?

The Strib feels about the cow, and finds a wet sloppy thing that it figures is a leather washcloth:

Those and other questions raised in Walsh’s story deserve answers. The state and school districts should do a better job of tracking and evaluating ALCs and students. And more should be done to find effective ways to assess and educate the most challenging students. Tens of thousands of youth are involved; if they fail to get a basic education, their earning capacity and quality of life are imperiled. Moreover, the state’s future workforce and economy will be negatively affected.

It notes a smell – and, in noting “something smells like bulls**t”, comes perilously close to the truth:

Now some observers worry that enrollments have swelled because district officials use the schools as “dumping grounds” for the worst students. There is also concern from some quarters that districts keep the students in the system because of the $200 plus million in state funding they attract.

…but then notices the long legs with the hard ends, and figures it’s part leather dining room table:

One of the original and strongest arguments for the learning centers is that they keep students in school who would otherwise drop out.

They came so close to the truth.

School Funding 101:  Schools get an amount of money for every day a student attends.  If the student is absent – or drops out – that money doesn’t go to the district.

The beast doesn’t like being starved.

Schools have ample tools – including the cooperation of well-funded departments of local County Attorney’s offices – to keep “truant” kids (defined as kids whose absence or tardiness jeopardizes that per diem payment).  But thanks to No Child Left Behind, schools have also become obsessed with test scores.  Students who can’t, or won’t, excel on the standardized tests that have become public schools raison d’etre since NCLB need (although they’ll never say it) to get rid of the problem kids…

…but if those kids drop out of school, the districts lose the per diem that they get for each student attending.  

ALC’s solve this Catch 22, giving districts a place to continue mandatory attendance (and collecting of the per-student per diem, naturally) while firewalling all those inconvenient bad test scores in a place where they won’t be held against all the other schools.  Not unlike a grocery store that hides rotting merchandise under and behind the fresh stuff, except that the “rotting merchandise” is the student body.

  The idea is that with more time and individualized attention, students who couldn’t make it in a traditional school can still earn a high school diploma. Then, after achieving that goal, some will be inspired to go on to higher education.

Except that “extra attention” really doesn’t exist – ALC is basically an unstructured hodgepodge, and graduation is entirely subject (at least in Saint Paul) to the individual students’ motivation to get that diploma – a goal that doesn’t mean much to everyone who is sent there). 

At most alternative schools fewer than 25 percent of the students took the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment; among those who did, only 22 percent passed the reading exam and 4 percent passed the math test.

That’s not good enough. State, district and alternative school officials must work together to evaluate ALC programs and find ways to raise their success rates.

Yeah, that’d be nice – but that’s not the point of having ALC.  And the Strib should know that.

I was listening to the audio of Keri Miller’s MPR “Town Hall” meeting, Is High School Obsolete, yesterday.  It’s worth a listen (although I have yet to find the audio online – I’ll let you know). 

But toward the end, there was one bit that I thought needed a response.

One of the panelists, asked what we should do about the problems faced by public high schools, says “we should treat it as a national scandal”.

Oh, good Lord.  No.  Don’t.

The problems in education have been treated as a “national scandal” twice in my adult lifetime.  The first was in the mid-late eighties, when the “teacher shortage” was the big issue.  Recruiting teachers was made a national priority; thousands of college grads went into the field; pay and benefits increased (conservative cant aside, teaching doesn’t pay spectacularly well everywhere in this country, although being in administration can be a nice payday).  Then, between burnout (the teacher’s unions have turned education into a factory job in all too many ways) and a demographic drop bringing layoffs in many school districts, many of them left the field. 

And again, early in the Bush Administration, dropping test scores and zooming expenditures left us with “No Child Left Behind”. Enough said.

Calling something a “national scandal” causes politicians to pose for cameras and propose flurries of legislation to make it look like they’ve done something about the issue.  Is the “something” useful – indeed, is it better than doing nothing at all?  In many cases, no. 

But calling difficulties a “national scandal” is, in any case, not only exactly the wrong approach, but indeed due to the law of unintended consequences will no doubt make things much worse; today, it’d most likely cause politicians on both sides (because Education is the same third rail for the right that gun control is for the left) to pour a lot of extra money  into “saving” the current, in-my-opinion unsaveable system.

Laura McCallum at NPR – recently moved from the Capitol to an Eduation beat – did a series of pieces, “Is High School Obsolete“, that’s trolls some familiar territory.

Every school day, as many as 300,000 Minnesota teenagers stream through the doors of one of more than 450 high schools in the state. These buildings are their gateways to either college or the workforce, and the rest of their lives. Is high school preparing them for the world that awaits?

…If you ask Gov. Tim Pawlenty, his answer would be “No.” He said so in his State of the State address in January. 

“In too many cases, our high school students are bored, checked-out, coasting, not even vaguely aware of their post-high school plans, if they have any, and they are just marking time,” Pawlenty said. 

Pawlenty believes that high schools need to modernize to prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow. He describes high schools as a “one-size-fits-all assembly-line model” trying to educate students in a high-tech world. 

The governor’s remarks are music to my ears.  And Bill Gates is also involved – and says some of the same things I have been pushing: 

Gates goes further than Gov. Pawlenty, wanting to redesign today’s large comprehensive high schools, particularly those in urban areas. 

Gates’ money is building new smaller schools, and dividing big schools into smaller entities within the same building. One wing might focus on technology, another on the arts. Gates believes that high schools with fewer than 600 students are more successful. 

“In those high schools, the goal is that every adult knows every student. So that when you’re walking the halls, they say, ‘Hey, you’re supposed to be over there. Hey, I heard you didn’t turn your homework in, do you need help?'” Gates told the Senate panel. “If you create a smaller social environment, then it really changes the behavior in the high school.” 

This is an idea I’d love to pursue; I actually wish I could have attended the forum on the subject.  McCallum notes something that’s worth further exploration: 

Still, there’s no question that in a school this big, even with all its advantages, some students fall through the cracks.  

Here’s a question I’d like to see more fully explored:  there are students who thrive in the current, one-size-fits-all, factory-model school system.  And the ones that “check out” the worst, are pretty obvious and easy to find; they drop out. 

I’m most concerned for the ones in the middle; the ones who plug it out in the system for 13 years, and don’t drop out, but for whom learning will forever be associated with sitting in long rows in airless rooms, having a pre-assembled curriculum read to them on a schedule that has nothing whatever to do with how they learn.  The ones for whom learning will be turned from a normal human activity, as natural and human as eating and breathing, into a duty, a drudge-like exercise in communal hazing that they’re happy to survive but take not much more away from. 

The piece explores a subject much nearer and dearer to my heart:  

The Gates Foundation is putting money into schools like Avalon School in St. Paul, a charter school with fewer than 150 high school students. Avalon has received two grants from the Gates Foundation totaling $150,000. 

First thing in the morning, Avalon students check in with their advisor. Then they spend their days either working independently on projects, or attending seminars that meet the state’s graduation standards. They have individual workspaces that look like office cubicles. 

Both of my kids have attended Avalon.  For my daughter Bun, it’s been a godsend. 

Even though people who are addicted to the conventional view of what a school is supposed to be often don’t seem to get it: 

And their projects are certainly different. One student is working on a project about Sicilian cooking for his geography graduation standard. Another student did a project on pop art to meet some of the requirements of her U.S. history grad standard. And another did a project on Star Wars for part of his English grad standard.

The topics sound too quirky to be academically rigorous. But that’s why Avalon students get excited about learning, according to Gretchen Sage-Martinson, one of the school’s two program coordinators.  

Sage-Martinson said Avalon students have to meet the same graduation standards that every Minnesota student needs to graduate. That includes four credits of English and language arts, and three credits each of math, science and social studies. The difference is that Avalon students earn those credits through subjects that are intriguing to them. 

This is the part that’s either smoothly intuitive or impossible to explain, depending on your view of what “education” is supposed to be.  If “academic rigor” means ensuring students get a prescribed ration of subjects jammed down their throats on a specified schedule – a ration they’re able to satisfactorily regurgitate on standardized tests – or if it means teaching kids to know how to learn, to take responsibility for learning (as opposed to following the dotted line to the prescribed way stations). 

Sage-Martinson said Avalon doesn’t drill students to do well on standardized tests. Yet with the exception of last year’s math test scores, Avalon students do better than the state average. 

Wonder how that happens? 

 Sage-Martison said Avalon tends to attract intellectual students who’ve struggled to do well in traditional high schools. 

That was certainly the case for senior Ian Weiland. He’s the teenager who did the project on Star Wars. At his old school, Weiland fit the stereotype of the checked-out student. He began high school at a suburban school with about 2,000 students, and he was flunking out. 

“It felt like I was just, like, in a prison,” Weiland said. “I go from one class, you got five minutes to get to each class, and you’d go there and you’d listen to some boring teacher, pretty much reading out of the textbook. And I’d sit there, and I’d just be so unmotivated and I would just not do anything. I’d just sit there, and I’d just fail.” 

While I didn’t have the option of flunking out – Dad was a teacher, after all – I can remember feeling exactly the way Weiland describes. 

The whole series is worth a read.  I’ll probably be going through more of it in coming days. 

A student’s creative writing essay – in which he was instructed not to censor himself! – leads to arrest, charges.

A high school senior was arrested after writing that “it would be funny” to dream about opening fire in a building and having sex with the dead victims, authorities said.

Another passage in the essay advised his teacher at Cary-Grove High School: “don’t be surprised on inspiring the first CG shooting,” according to a criminal complaint filed this week.

Allen Lee, 18, faces two disorderly conduct charges over the creative-writing assignment, which he was given on Monday in English class at the northern Illinois school.

Students were told to “write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing,” according to a copy of the assignment.

I’m not sure what part bothers me the most here; that the student was arrested, that he was charged with “disorderly conduct” for essentially following his directions (albeit tastelessly and flippantly, as we’ll see below) or that if you take the statement below seriously, he was quite clearly looking to poke and prod the system:

According to the complaint, Lee’s essay reads in part, “Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s…t…a…b…puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did.”

Officials described the essay as disturbing and inappropriate.

Lee said he was just following the directions.

“In creative writing, you’re told to exaggerate,” Lee said. “It was supposed to be just junk. … There definitely is violent content, but they’re taking it out of context and making it something it isn’t.”

The system is reacting with the same common sense that I’ve personally come to love about the public (and too many private) school systems:

Lee was moved to an off-campus learning program, and the district was evaluating a punishment, schools spokesman Jeff Puma said.

“It wasn’t just violent or foul language,” Puma said. “It went beyond that.”

The teenager’s father, Albert Lee, has defended his son as a straight-A student who was just following instructions and contends the school overreacted. But he has also said he understands that the situation arose in the week after a Virginia Tech student gunned down 32 people before committing suicide.

Defense attorney Dane Loizzo said Allen Lee has never been disciplined in school and signed Marine enlistment papers last week.

A conviction could bring up to 30 days in jail and a maximum $1,500 fine.

Maybe Lee should treat it as “performance art” parodying the institutionalized paranoia of a system that has lost the ability to discern reality.

The Strib takes a whack at Katherine Kersten, and at all of you who take umbrage at Minneapolis Community Technical College’s investigation into installing foot baths for Moslem students:

Minneapolis Community and Technical College has been bombarded with letters and e-mails — most of them hostile, some of them hateful — since disclosing that it is considering the installation of a foot bath for some Muslim students to use before prayer. This reaction is out of proportion to the modest and cautious inquiry the school has undertaken, and it is certainly out of keeping with Minnesota’s long tradition of social tolerance and temperate thinking.

Actually, it’d be out of keeping with Institutional Minnesota’s traditional self-glorifying view of itself.  Minnesota has plenty of racist skeletons in its closet, from the Duluth lynchings to the Russell Shimooka affair. 

If the downtown Minneapolis school were discriminating in favor of Islam and against other faiths, we would understand the outrage. But it’s not. When Christian students asked for space to study the Bible and conduct prayers, the school obliged them. When a Jewish student asked to reschedule an assignment because of a religious observance, the college agreed.

Small interpersonal affordances are fine – and different. 

The Strib Editorial Board should ask itself “if a Catholic, Protestant or Jewish group asked MCTC for a capital expenditure to modify a building to be more congruent with their religious practices, how far do they think it’d get?

They seem to have learned “logic” from the Minnesota Monitor:

And so the school found itself wading into that murky question of what the Constitution’s “establishment clause” permits and forbids. In our view it has handled that question appropriately. Banning Christmas carols on the official campus coffee cart — which incensed the school’s critics — seems plainly in keeping with a long string of court rulings that forbid the use of public resources to endorse a particular religion. But accommodating the prayer practices of some devout Muslims seems akin to putting kosher items on the cafeteria menu and letting employees display religious objects in their private workspaces — accommodations that MCTC has in fact made in the past.

Surely even the Strib editorial board isn’t this dumb?  Is it?

Kosher food on the cafeteria menu, while a Jewish stricture, is not purely religious; I, a goy, seek out kosher food in many areas.  And the fact that any official body nosed into the privately-funded, privately displayed stuff on a worker’s desk is downright Orwellian.

Now – do you think the foot bath is going to be a community facility? 

But Minnesota will be a stronger state if it tackles these questions in a spirit of generosity and confidence — and who wouldn’t be confident when the state’s schools are full of pious, ambitious young people who are trying to get a college education?

Unless they’re Christians or Jews, apparently.

 Even NPR has noticed – the huge, factory-model school is earning serious detractors.

I did not know, however, that the idea really was too dumb for anyone but an Ivy Leaguer to hatch:

Forty years ago, former Harvard President James Bryant Conant argued that it made no sense to have thousands of small secondary schools. He pushed for the consolidation of those schools into big ones –- like Northwestern High School in Baltimore, where NPR has reported a series of stories this year.

Bryant thought that big, comprehensive high schools were the best way to educate the hordes of baby boomers headed for high school and college. But four decades after Northwestern opened, the school is a dinosaur: It’s one of only three remaining comprehensive schools in Baltimore.

 The story goes on to note that people – institutions, even – are having second thoughts:

 

One argument for the comprehensive high school was economic: Those big educational shopping malls were supposed to cut back on administrative costs. That would allow them to offer Advanced Placement courses, a football team and arts programs, all under one roof.

But big schools created new problems: the violence and intimidation that come when thousands of teenagers are bunched together. Nettie Legters of Johns Hopkins University says smaller schools actually reduce overhead.

“In a large high school, you’re going to have more security guards, more coaches,” she notes. She says smaller schools tend to be safer, so they need fewer staffers devoted to keeping order.

The whole thing is worth a read.

(Via commenter Johnathan, in a previous thread)