George Rebane
The Red Chinese and their People’s Liberation Army are hacking American corporations for designs, trade secrets, and business plans – imagine that. Well, our AG Eric Holder did just that recently, and decided it was time to put his foot down and fight crime wherever it was found. He actually indicted five PLA officers for being bad guys and put their names on the FBI’s most wanted list for “economic espionage and trade secret theft”. I understand it’s bad for your blood pressure to hold back impending massive guffaws, so I didn’t even try. And I’m sure that the Chinese leadership in Beijing share similar concerns for their own health.
You’d think that everyone knows that cyberwar is now a constant in international relations, and most certainly between large hegemons and would be hegemons like Russia, China, and the US. Making a hissy fit of it reminds one of the scene in ‘Casablanca’ where the French police inspector (Claude Rains) is ‘shocked, simply shocked’ that there is gambling in Rick’s (Humphrey Bogart) night club as lackey (Peter Lorre Marcel Dalio) comes up to hand the good inspector his night’s winnings. In any case, we should be on the lookout for pictures of NSA hackers going up in Chinese post offices – well maybe not, since they are less given to nonsense in their command and control governance. (more here)
The Union’s 20may14 print edition published Greg Goodknight’s extended piece – ‘It’s time to do the math’ – on Nevada County schools, their rankings, and performance on standardized tests. I couldn’t find the article in their online edition. It is available in their paywalled images of their print edition here. (see Greg’s submittal to The Union in the 22may14 update below). The well-researched piece is worth a read, especially given the upcoming election for school superintendent and the debate about Common Core that has been the subject of several pieces on RR (search ‘Common Core’) for which Mr Goodknight has provided extensive comments.
Agenda21 is on the march across the land, and making recent gains in the Minneapolis-St Paul area in the implementation of its ‘stack and pack’ objectives for how people should be marshalled in urban areas. The twin cities’ social engineers call their master plan ‘Thrive MSP 2040’. It joins equal efforts underway in California (‘Plan Bay Area’) and Florida (‘Seven/50’) to impose state specified strictures that assure “equity” and “sustainability” in urban neighborhoods. A number of studies have shown that stack and pack densification provides no reduction in greenhouse gases, nor any other of the benefits vaunted by collectivists as they seek to herd people into tighter and tighter enclaves while returning the overwhelming part of the continent back to its ‘natural state’. Katherine Kersten of the Center of the American Experiment describes the ongoing process in ‘Turning the Twin Cities Into Sim City’.
[update] We note that darling of the local Left, Jeff Pelline, is giddy with his “scoop” that the Nevada County Tea Party is sorting out a candidate endorsement policy which involves the group’s leadership. The issue is whether someone in the NCTP leadership should be able to endorse a candidate when speaking as a private individual. One of the NCTP’s founding principles has been that it would not endorse candidates for partisan office, yet in the past NCTP’s leaders have endorsed candidates for non-partisan office.
Sue McGuire is a current NCTP leader and has privately endorsed a DA candidate. This caused some heartburn with the senior Mecklers who stated they were withdrawing from the NCTP. Pursuant to a question of policy that I asked, Mark Meckler weighed in with a clear response stating that NCTP leaders should withhold personal endorsements of candidates since those would be construed by opponents of the tea parties as an abrogation of principles. I agreed with Mark, and recommended that 1) personal non-endorsement be included explicitly in NCTP policy so that future leaders would not be confused by precedent as apparently Sue McGuire was when recently communicating her private endorsements, and 2) that everybody take a deep breath, abandon high dudgeon, and get back to working together for tea party principles in this mid-term election year.
And BTW, it’s a mighty poor excuse for a “scoop” when it comes from an email sent to a y’all come distribution list that includes Terry Lamphier, Joey Jordan, and many others of similar ilk who haven’t exactly signed on to the tea party principles of constitutionality, limited government, fiscal prudence, and free enterprise. By now I have lost count of the Left’s celebrations of the NCTP’s incipient demise – such a wellspring of hope eternal continues to provide a source of joy to local progressives.
[22may14 update] I received an email from Greg Goodknight with the submitted form of his above referenced Union article. The newspaper’s 750 word limit to their ‘Other Voices’ submissions kept him from including the following points –
For example, the new principal at NU is a recipe for further academic erosion at the high school… his background is in special education and is former Outward Bound staff, meaning a fealty to the same constructivist drivel as the Grass Valley Charter School. http://www.grassvalleycharter.org/exp_learning.html
Expeditionary Learning is Outward Bound adapted to public school use. It was also the single most significant constructivist vehicle before Common Core reopened the floodgates. Oh, and the Hennessey API/SSI (4/4) outscored GVCS (3/1) despite the Charter parents being more than 60% college grads, nearly 3 times the rate of Hennessey parents. Apples-oranges.
Greg’s submitted Union article follows.
The interviews of Paul Haas and incumbent Holly Hermansen, the two candidates for County Superintendent of Schools and the recent Other Voices written by two of Ms.Hermansen’s employees promoting the new “Common Core” standards has led me to dig into the performance of our local schools as documented by the California Department of Education.
The last STAR exam results were posted last summer; there are 19 schools in Nevada County that were large enough to rate Academic Performance Index (API) and Similar Schools Index rankings. The first is the raw API, how the students performed by the California Content Standards, but the Similar Schools index is more complicated. In order to understand how well schools are actually serving their students, a number of factors, including the demographics of the families served, are used to pick a group of 100 schools that are most similar, and only then are they sorted by the API for a true apples-to-apples comparison. In short, a great school in an impoverished area might have a low API, but a high Similar Schools index because their students are outperforming their peers statewide. Similarly, a school where all the kids speak English and most of their parents have college degrees is expected to do better; with an average API, they might be near the bottom of their Similar Schools list.
Of the 19 more prominent schools in Nevada County, nearly half (nine) are in the bottom two deciles of their 100 Similar Schools, the lowest performing 20%. They are: Scotten School and the Grass Valley Charter of the Grass Valley School District, Seven Hills School and Deer Creek School, Bear River and Nevada Union High Schools and all three of the Charters under the County Office: Nevada City School of the Arts, the Yuba River Charter and the Forest Charter High School.
The County’s Yuba River Charter has the dubious distinction of being at the absolute bottom of their list of 100 Similar Schools, having slid to last place when the one school they were outperforming, another Waldorf charter, was closed and all three County charters are in the bottom decile, the lowest 10% of their Similar Schools. This does not bode well for the attention to academics Ms. Hermanson (whose training is reported to be in Special Education) has made in the last eight years. I also find it troubling that her campaign materials describe her family as including her husband Jon, but not even in The Union coverage is Jon fully identified as Jon Byerrum, the recently retired superintendent of the Grass Valley School District, architect of their “Whole” math and language mess two decades ago. The debacle never really stopped, as the Grass Valley Charter (a poor performing Similar Schools bottom 20%) is an “Expeditionary Learning” school, a discovery or “constructivist” curriculum not unlike the earlier experiments. My son was in the 1st grade when whole math hit Hennessey School in ’95; after struggling to effect change for a year (including much classroom volunteer work by my late wife, Teri Cahill, an adjunct professor of math at Sierra College until 2001), we reluctantly transferred our son to Mount St. Mary’s, which hadn’t adopted the math fad of the day. Good thing; when the first California STAR exam was given, half my son’s GVSD class was in the bottom 25% in both math and language. At the board meeting when these results were discussed, Byerrum declared their math program (Mathland) just needed some holes patched but it never did stop leaking and was ditched a few years later for a more traditional text they had rejected as “just drill and kill” in ’95.
The only local schools documented to be above average are Cottage Hill, Alta Sierra, Magnolia, Clear Creek and Ghidotti (a 10/10 school), and there are three kids stuck in the bottom 20% for every student in the above average schools. Pleasant Ridge and Clear Creek district staff should have a larger leadership role in Nevada County, as should Ghidotti.
Not one County charter ranked above the bottom 10%, no GVSD school ranked above the 40th percentile, and Hermansen’s curriculum experts at the County office are promoting the Common Core with the same empty rhetoric used for whole math and whole language in the 90’s. Mr. Haas isn’t the one who has failed to improve the county schools when given the job to do so over the last 8 years. We need a change.
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