From the NYT:

School Suspensions Lead to Legal Challenge

… poor black students are suspended at three times the rate of whites, a disparity not fully explained by differences in income or behavior.On March 8, the education secretary, Arne Duncan, lamented “schools that seem to suspend and discipline only young African-American boys” as he pledged stronger efforts to ensure racial equality in schooling.

A growing body of research, scholars say, suggests that heavy use of suspensions does less to pacify schools than to push already troubled students toward academic failure and dropping out — and sometimes into what critics have called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

A rising number of districts are already reversing course and trying new approaches, including behavioral counseling and mediation, to reduce conflict and create safer, quieter schools while ejecting only the worst offenders.

“These students were treated like criminals and abandoned by the school system for doing something that students have done forever — fighting in the schoolyard,” said Erwin Byrd, a lawyer with Legal Aid of North Carolina, which brought the suit with lawyers from the Duke University School of Law. The school district says it must retain discretion over punishments.

Some 15 percent of the nation’s black students in grades K-12 are suspended at least briefly each year, compared with 4.8 percent of white students, according to federal data from 2006, the latest available. Expulsions are meted out to one in 200 black students versus one in 1,000 white students.

Zero tolerance and the quick resort to suspensions have been politically popular, but education leaders are having second thoughts. “If our primary obligation is to educate kids, then to punish them by excluding them doesn’t make sense,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said strict punishment should not be the main tool for order.

“Lots of schools don’t provide the panoply of services we think are important — prevention and intervention strategies and alternative placements for disruptive students,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview.

Elsewhere, the NYT will constantly demand that Something Must Be Done so that the best teachers will teach in the worst schools.

No cognitive connection will ever occur.

Not that long ago, dreamy globalists touted Turkey as a fine example of a modern state peopled by moderate Muslims. Those same one-worlders thought that Europe should welcome Turkey into the European Union to share the wonderful diversity for which the Turks are famous. EU membership would allow 77 million Turkish Muslims — 99.8 percent of the population, since Christians and others have been chased out — complete access to the continent.

In recent years however, Turkey has withdrawn from the modernization begun by Kemal Ataturk and moved more into the Islamist camp with the election of a religious party to run the government in 2002.

As a result of the retro political changes in Turkey, Europe has gradually grown unenthusiastic about that country’s joining the EU (although Obama thinks it’s a swell idea).

Somehow, Prime Minister Erdogan doesn’t appear interested in his country joining the EU, judging by recent remarks of a hostile nature.

Erdogan urges German Turks not to integrate, The Local, March 17, 2010

At the meeting last month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turks living in foreign countries to take out citizenship of the new homelands — not to integrate, but rather to become more politically active, according to the website of news magazine Der Spiegel.

Ali Ertan Toprak, deputy chairman of the Alevi community in Germany, told the magazine government representatives had said: “We have to inject European culture with Turkish.”

What if Europeans don’t want to be injected with Turkish culture? Apparently Islam is to be forced upon them, according to Erdogan as he follows the Islam script.

Erdogan told the meeting countries that did not allow dual citizenship violated basic rights and also likened Islamophobia to anti-Semitism.

Participants told Spiegel that Erdogan repeated elements of his widely criticised speech in Cologne in 2008 in which he said: “Assimilation is a crime against humanity.”

Turks might want to stay home if they are so deeply attached to their unique culture. Europeans and other civilized people don’t care much for Turkish immigrants importing honor killings and totalitarian “religion.”

And anyway, immigration without assimilation is invasion.

Nicholas Wade reports in the NYT on the latest on dog DNA:

Borrowing methods developed to study the genetics of human disease, researchers have concluded that dogs were probably first domesticated from wolves somewhere in the Middle East, in contrast to an earlier survey suggesting dogs originated in East Asia.

This finding puts the first known domestication — that of dogs — in the same place as the domestication of plants and other animals, and strengthens the link between the first animal to enter human society and the subsequent invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

A Middle Eastern origin for the dog also fits in better with the archaeological evidence, and has enabled geneticists to reconstruct the entire history of the dog, from the first association between wolves and hunter gatherers some 20,000 years ago to the creation by Victorian dog fanciers of many of today’s breeds.

A research team led by Bridgett M. vonHoldt and Robert K. Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles, has analyzed a large collection of wolf and dog genomes from around the world. Scanning for similar runs of DNA, the researchers found that the Middle East was where wolf and dog genomes were most similar, although there was another area of overlap between East Asian wolves and dogs. Wolves were probably first domesticated in the Middle East, but after dogs had spread to East Asia there was a crossbreeding that injected more wolf genes into the dog genome, the researchers conclude in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The archaeological evidence supports this idea, since some of the earliest dog remains have been found in the Middle East, dating from 12,000 years ago. The only earlier doglike remains occur in Belgium, at a site 31,000 years old, and in western Russia from 15,000 years ago. …

Several thousand years later, in the first settled communities that began to appear in the Middle East 15,000 years ago, people began intervening in the breeding patterns of their camp followers, turning them into the first proto-dogs. One of the features they selected was small size, continuing the downsizing of the wolf body plan. “I think a long history such as that would explain how a large carnivore, which can eat you, eventually became stably incorporated in human society,” Dr. Wayne said. …

Dr. Wayne was surprised to find that all the herding dogs grouped together, as did all the sight hounds and the scent hounds, making a perfect match between dogs’ various functions and the branches on the genetic tree. “I thought there would be many ways to build a herding dog and that they’d come from all over the tree, but there are not,” Dr. Wayne said.

This suggests that the first step, wolf to dog was the hardest, then generic dog to herding dog was also hard, while making subsequent variations on herding dog is easy. I don’t know why dog breeders have given up on creating new functional breeds. For example, it is becoming common in New York City among people looking to rent an apartment to hire a dog to come sniff for bed bugs? Why not create a bed bug sniffing breed that is outstanding at this?

His team has also used the dog SNP chip to scan for genes that show signatures of selection. One such favored dog gene has a human counterpart that has been implicated in Williams syndrome, where it causes exceptional gregariousness.

That’s pretty funny.

Dog domestication and human settlement occurred at the same time, some 15,000 years ago, raising the possibility that dogs may have had a complex impact on the structure of human society. Dogs could have been the sentries that let hunter gatherers settle without fear of surprise attack. They may also have been the first major item of inherited wealth, preceding cattle, and so could have laid the foundations for the gradations of wealth and social hierarchy that differentiated settled groups from the egalitarianism of their hunter-gatherer predecessors. Notions of inheritance and ownership, Dr. Driscoll said, may have been prompted by the first dogs to permeate human society, laying an unexpected track from wolf to wealth.

Domesticating dogs was a big deal, although we don’t know in what precise ways.

Yesterday we did one column  about Dick Armey and another about the upcoming illegal alien march in Washington. In this item, Michelle Malkin combines both themes:

The open-borders lobby will march on Washington this Sunday. Perhaps Armey can serve as an honorary grand marshal, with his good friends John McCain and Lindsey Graham leading the feckless GOP contingent.[In response to amnesty stooge Dick Armey, By Michelle Malkin,March 17, 2010]

You just can’t get around it. Public education always involves the teaching of certain standards. And some authority or group of authorities must decide on the standards. The only question is, what authorities?

In the teaching of social studies, particularly history, there are all sorts of decisions that must be made. What historical personages and movements are emphasized? What is left out? How is it taught?

A case in point is the dispute in Texas over history standards. Texas, by the way, is especially influential because national textbook publishers often follow the leads established by Texas.
You can read about it in this article from the Houston Chronicle:
New Standards in History Class (Gary Scharrer, March 13th, 2010).

The State Board of Education tentatively approved new standards for social studies Friday with members divided along party lines — some blasting them as a fraud and conservative whitewash, others praising them as a tribute to the Founding Fathers that rightly portrays America as an exceptional country. The standards, which will influence history and government textbooks arriving in public schools in fall 2011, were adopted by 10 Republicans against five Democrats after weeks of debate and across a racial and ideological chasm that seemed to grow wider as the proposal was finalized Thursday.

So when it refers to “a racial and ideological chasm” what does the “racial” part mean?
Well, here’s what the article says :

Democrats on the board — all of them black or Hispanic — complained the new standards dilute minority contributions to Texas and U.S. history.

Notice that all Democrats on the board are black or Hispanic. And, as mass immigration continues to make Texas a more diverse state, we can expect more and more of this sort of dispute.
In the meantime, there is to be a public hearing on the document and a final vote in May.

The New York Times is reporting that Suffolk County executive Steve Levy, who is from Long Island, and who we’ve been writing about for years, is thinking of switching to the Republican party, and running for governor–apparently the NYT considers the term “anchor babies” verboten:

There is no question that Mr. Levy will add unpredictability to the race. He is known not only for his Puritan work ethic and stubborn frugality but also for his occasionally incendiary comments, especially on immigration. His detractors say he has stoked the anger of the largely white middle-class residents of Suffolk County, which is grappling with an influx of immigrants who are straining the social service system.

In 2005, Mr. Levy helped orchestrate a highly publicized raid on a house in Brookhaven, where the authorities rounded up dozens of suspected illegal immigrants. He once described foreign women who give birth after moving to the United States as having “anchor babies,” a term often used derisively by anti-immigrant groups. Asked in a recent interview whether he might have chosen his words more carefully, he was unapologetic. “There’s no need to,” he said. “The public is in agreement with me.” [Planned Switch to G.O.P. Stirs New York Governor Race, By Jeremy W. Peters, March 17, 2010]

I’ve been trying to ignore the California gubernatorial election because I’m already sick of billionaire candidate Meg Whitman’s heavy play of her saccharine TV commercials. She has the big money, and so is able to flood the airwaves with her simplistic nostrums, yet polls show her to be the leading Republican candidate, and she is tied with Democrat Jerry Brown. Depressing all around.

She is painfully similar in many ways to the current Governor Schwarzenegger, who thought his movie star charm and sensible ideas could cut through the thicket of entrenched powers of Sacramento, such as the rapacious public employees’ unions and Democratic Party. In the end he was co-opted and has left the state worse off than he found it.

Why do rich businesspeople think that government is like their companies, where employees meekly obey the boss’ every whim? She may be a fine CEO, but it’s not the same job, not even close. SacraDemco won’t treat her any more kindly than it did Arnold, despite his efforts at outreach across the aisle (which have included cigars and schnapps).

Another naive Republican with no political experience will quickly be ground into road kill by the usual suspects of the California capital.

With that sobering introduction, let’s turn to Monday’s political debate of Meg Whitman and her primary opponent Steve Poizner, where an interesting topic came up…

[Poizner, Whitman: GOP candidates' first debate, San Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 2010]

But among the most dramatic differences between the two were their views on the potentially incendiary issue of illegal immigration.

Poizner, continuing a potentially risky strategy in recent days, repeated his calls for a return to the approach to immigration in Proposition 187, passed by voters in 1994, which called for denying undocumented immigrants, including children, the right to state-funded services such as education and health care. A federal court later struck down the measure.

“We have to stop illegal immigration,” he said. “The only way to do it is to turn the magnets off, by ending, once and for all, all the taxpayer-funded benefits for people who are here illegally,” he said. “Meg doesn’t want to go that far; I support Prop. 187; she opposes it.”

Whitman declared herself “100 percent against amnesty, no exceptions,” saying, “We haven’t done what we need to do to secure this border.”

But she said she did not want to make children accountable for “the sins of their fathers” and didn’t support efforts to penalize them. She called instead for “holding employers accountable for hiring undocumented workers,” and proposed “a more efficient system” to verify their identity before they are hired.

She also argued that the state should “eliminate sanctuary cities,” calling San Francisco “the most egregious example” of a policy that the next governor shouldn’t let stand.

Such is the level of political discourse among elite California Republicans, where the guy who is down is forced to tell the truth about illegal immigration’s fearful cost.

The growth over the years of Advanced Placement testing allowing high school students to earn college credit has been one of the better things to happen to American education.

Unfortunately, as with most things involving schooling, the subject of AP is beset with confusion. The most common problem is the recurrent confusion of taking AP classes with passing AP tests. The conventional wisdom assumes that the former more or less equates to the latter, so if we just get enough poor and minority students to take classes called “AP” then our problems our solved. But that’s clearly not true.

Huge numbers of kids take courses in high school each year labeled “AP” and then bomb the national AP test in May. In contrast, other kids pass AP tests without taking AP classes, or even any classes at all in the subject. (My kid, for example, received 9 hours of college credit, more than half a semester, through AP testing for subjects he never even took in high school: World History and Comparative Government. He simply piggybacked off courses he did take, European History and US History and U.S. Government, with some home reading to fill in the gaps, such as memorizing the Chinese dynasties.)

A new book of social science research sounds like it can help clear up some of the confusion. (Of course, that assumes that people want to become less confused, which is a very risky assumption in anything having to do with American schooling.) (more…)

Just a reminder as everybody has fun with the interview given by Rielle Hunter, the mother of former Presidential candidate John Edward’s out-of-wedlock baby: She is also a major character, under the name Alison Poole, in novels by fairly major novelists, Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis: the Alma Mahler of the Tin Age.