Posted by Michael Haran on Feb 6, 2014
By Michael Haran
Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, Ca.
February 6, 2014
George F. Will’s article (The Common Core is Worth Opposing 1/17/2014) is amazing in its “conservative” mentality. He bashes the Common Core Standards as a continuation of “Fifty years of increasing Washington
inputs into K-12 education that has coincided with disappointing cognitive outputs from schools.” Hello? This is exactly why the Standards were enacted.
Will’s reminds us that the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the 1970 General Education Provisions Act and the 1979 law that created the Department of Education are all federal intrusions into what he calls, “state and local responsibility for curriculum control.” He complains that “what begins with national standards must breed ineluctable pressure to standardized educational content.”
He notes that, “Washington already is encouraging the alignment of the GED, SAT and ACT tests with Common Core. By a feedback loop, these tests will beget more curriculum conformity. All this, he contends, will take a toll on parental empowerment.”
What Will fails to recognize, or admit, is that all his criticisms are why the standards were initiated. He says that “it is more likely there will be a half a dozen innovative governors than one creative federal education bureaucracy.” With this remark Will is right. The Common Core Initiative was established by the National Governors Association, many of which are Republicans, and the Council of Chief State School Officers based on a 2004 report titled, “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts.” It found that both employers and colleges are demanding more of high school graduates and that current high-school exit expectations fall well short of demands.
In his article “Why Our Nation Needs Common Standards,” (Hechinger Report, July 18, 2013) Jonah Edelman said “The Common Core Standards are clear and high standards for what every child in the United States should know by the end of each grade and are a practical and effective solution for a system that now dooms some students to learn far less than their peers who happen to live in other states.
They benefit students in states with weak academic standards. They benefit teachers who want to access and share the best possible lesson plans. They benefit parents who have a right to know that an “A” in school or a “proficient” on the state test actually means their child is on track.
Will insinuates that Common Core roll out is experiencing the same “federal touch” that has given us HealthCare.gov. What he doesn’t say is that all new government programs experience roll-out problems. Social Security did, Medicare Part B did and Common Core will.
The biggest problems are cost and technology. Georgia spends 8-9 dollars per student to administer five-subject tests compared to the Common Core’s new per-student cost estimate of $29.50 for just two tests. Only 28 percent of Oklahoma school districts have the infrastructure necessary for the new exams. Both of these problems will be addressed as the $4.35 billion Race to the Top money is released to states when the Common Core Standards are initiated in the 2014-15 school year.
People like George Will look at progressive education as a bad thing. They don’t like change even though change is inevitable. Technology has made the U.S., like the world, a smaller place. Education conformity makes America’s workforce more efficient which allow people to move to where the jobs are. Will calls Bill Gate’s remark: “It’s ludicrous to think that multiplication in Alabama and multiplication in New York are really different,” flippancy. I call it common sense – I call it Common Core.
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Posted by Michael Haran on Jan 30, 2014
Healdsburg Tribune
1/23/2014
By Michael Haran
In December I went to a Regional Climate Protection Authority presentation at the Healdsburg City Council chambers. The RCPA was created in 2009 to improve coordination on climate change issues and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as was mandated by the ten county government’s partnership with the Climate Protection Campaign in 2005.
I was expecting a sit-down presentation on RCPA’s progress but instead there were only charts ringing the room and index cards for suggestions. When I asked one of the RCPA staff members why there wasn’t a formal presentation she said that they decided to forgo one because of the disruptions they had encountered at the Windsor presentation.
It seems that there is a group of climate deniers in the county who attend these meeting as concerned citizens. They pretend not to know each other and then disrupt and dispute anything the RCPA’s staff has to say. I was told that these people are not polite and their sole purpose is to take over the meeting for their own agenda.
Regardless of the fact that the deniers tend to be rather obnoxious and since none of us have done the science ourselves who’s really right about climate change, the deniers or the believers?
On the deniers side the earth warms and cools about every ten thousand years. Eventually we will once again have glaciers in the middle of North America. In pre-historic times we had forest fires that burned from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains and at one time the earth was covered in volcanos spewing tons of magma gases into the atmosphere. Humans have only been spewing for about a hundred years and affecting the climate for even less than that.
Research published in the journal “Science” on September 8, 2013 stated “Abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth’s climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.”
On the believers’ side, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950’s, many of the climate changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.
During those “hundreds of thousands of years” climate anthropologists have been able to identify six major species die-offs most likely caused by CO2. This is probably what killed off the dinosaurs some 60 million years ago and let’s hope that we’re not the next with the amount of CO2 humans are currently releasing into the atmosphere.
No matter whether climate warming is real or not, oil is a foul, dirty energy source that pollutes our streets, water-ways and air so we should just ban it as soon as we can. Most products that are petroleum based can be made with synthetic alternatives and that $5 billion a year we give to the oil industry, for whatever reason, would go a long way in feeding the children of the working poor.
So once we get rid of oil what should we do with all the oil and coal slurry pipelines crisscrossing the country? I say fill them with water. Now I don’t know the feasibility or the cost of such an undertaking but with the Great Lakes being the world’s largest deposit of fresh water it stirs the imagination. Drought in the Midwest? No problem. Drought in the West? No problem. Water for oil – pump, baby, pump!
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Posted by Michael Haran on Dec 18, 2013
Commentary
Healdsburg Tribune
12/5/2013
After reading Rollie Atkinson’s editorial it got me thinking just how valuable the Tribune is to Healdsburg and I’m sure how the other Sonoma West Publishers’ weekly papers are to their communities.
Rollie did a good job of listing the paper’s features and their benefits. I had never before looked at ads as news but Rollie’s comment, “The butcher’s special at the grocery story is a big weekly headline for us,” caught my eye. The Big John’s Market back page ad is the first thing my wife looks at when the paper arrives at our house. I look at all the ads in the Business Directory to see who is still advertising and who is new to the section and doing what. I like to follow the activities of the business owners that I know.
I enjoy following the Healdsburg High’s sports teams especially the basketball teams. I play basketball on Saturday mornings at the high school gym which is monitored by Wayne Rudy for the Town’s Park and Rec Department. He is a long time junior high and high school basketball coach for both boys and girls and he regularly brings the younger kids to our pick-up games to play against the all-ages that play there. The kids I have gotten to know I follow their high school sports careers in the Tribune. The Saturday mornings are also an on-going mini reunion of sorts as many of the players that have graduated occasionally come back to play.
In an interview with the California Newspaper Publishers Association in 2012 Rollie said, “We have a very low turnover in most of our organization, except for our newsroom. Our wage level is terrible, but we do offer a great learning experience and lots of freedom to explore the craft and trade of writing and journalism. I think we’ve been very lucky to keep finding the level of talent we do.” When asked “What are some of the ways the industry can preserve newspapers in our communities?” he went on to say… cautiously (very cautiously) explore projects or relationships with civic journalists.”
When we moved here about eight years ago, I wrote my first Tribune Letter-to-the-Editor about little Christmas tree that would light up every night in a vineyard. I have since gone on to write commentary that has been published in not only the Tribune but also the Press Democrat and other publications. I have to say that the tribune has helped me, and others, become a commentary writers and “civic journalists.”
Now if you look at what is published every week in the Tribune such as public notices, obituaries, local news, what the town government is up to, event calendars, school-library-museum announcements, local columnists and editorials on local, state and national issues I too am amazed at what a bargain the paper is at 50 cents. I think it is quite easy to justify $1.00 a copy. I feel the real value is closer to $5.00 but unfortunately you wouldn’t sell many papers at that price.
The paper is not just a local resource. When I travel and stay in a new community the first thing I do is buy the local newspaper to get a lay of the land. Even though my stay will be short I can serendipitously immerse myself in local politics, culture and the business community. I’m sure many Healdsburg tourists have found their stay in our town more rewarding by picking up the Trib and reading it with their morning lattes.
This is some of what the Trib means to me. So in this Thanksgiving season we certainly should be thankful for having the Tribune and we have to support the local merchants that support our town newspaper. I’m sure Rollie is not getting rich running his little publishing empire but he is certainly making us the richer for having the Healdsburg Tribune.
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Posted by Michael Haran on Dec 2, 2013
Commentary
A recent letter-to the-editor of a local newspaper took a columnist to task for calling Ted Cruz a moron. The reader said that Senator Cruz has “advanced degrees and honors from prestigious universities” and that such “derogatory sophomoric” terms are a “departure from civility.”
As most people know it doesn’t matter if a person has advanced degrees that person can still be a moron and for that matter they can also be a hypocrite, sociopath, obstructionist and all around idiot. When someone throws their hat into the ring and runs for public off all is fair, the gloves come off and name calling is part of it. Politics can be a nasty business and if a person doesn’t have tough skin they better not play the game.
Ted Cruz is the type of Politian that comes along every generation or so. The last one like him was Joe McCarthy the communist witch hunter (it’s a little scary how much Cruz even looks like him). Cruz is an opportunist. He is riding the libertarian ideology of small government expounded upon by the Tea Party movement. To the casual observer it would look like Cruz is a moron if he has serious plans to run for president. Presidential elections are determined by the independent vote. Independents can go either center left or center right but they don’t like extremes and will never vote and extremist into the White House.
In true con-man fashion Cruz has been raising a ton of money from his base. You know that base, the people who scream “get the government out of my Medicare!’ and continually vote against their own self-interests (those are the real morons). Maybe Cruz’s goal is to raise as much money as possible so he can hang with the Koch brothers, the high priests of Libertarianism, but one thing is for sure he doesn’t give a damn about governing. Even his hometown newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, has disavowed him. The Tea Party of today is not even remotely concerned with the Middle Class, they are all about money going to money and finding whatever ways they can to keep it for themselves.
The Liberians primary belief is that the market will dictate the human condition. They believe that the federal government should be so weak that it can’t interfere with business. If the one-percent controls so much wealth that the U.S. turns into a banana republic so be it. If a person doesn’t have a job it is their fault because they are lazy and just sucking off the system. Let’s cut $40 billion from food stamps, most of which goes to children, but keep the subsidies for big oil.
What’s sad is that the Republican Party has been hijacked by extremist like Cruz and we have no one to balance check the political Status Quo. With our aging population we are going to need serious entitlement reform but it also has to include serious tax code reform of the wealth’s entitlements and we can’t find compromise with elected officials like Cruz who read “Green Eggs and Ham” on the Senate floor and spout ridiculous conspiracy theories about George Soros secretly partnering with the United Nations to come into our cities and eliminate our right to play golf.
Fortunately the majority of Americans are not morons. Con men have to work in the shadows and as the true agendas of these shills for the rich get exposed to the light of day they will once again slink back under their rocks just like what happened to Joe McCarthy. As Michael Ciric said in his blog, “So believe me, that ain’t no Green Eggs and Ham Ted Cruz is serving up. If anything it’s Green Eggs and Political Scam!”
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Posted by Michael Haran on Nov 24, 2013
Published Healdsburg Tribune 11/21/2013
On a day dialed up by the Point Arena Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell, came, saw and listened. I attended Friday’s environmental love fest on behalf of Sonoma County Supervisor Mike McGuire who is running for the 2nd District Senate seat in which the beautiful 1,664 acre Stornetta Public Lands is being considered for a land inclusion into the California Coastal National Monument. McGuire’s time is now limited as he is speaking to the Kiwanis, Rotarians and special interest groups times the seven counties in the district.
But this day belonged to Point Arena, Mendocino County and the California’s north coast. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, who accompanied Jewel, was complimented several times for getting the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a resolution to add the land to the Monument. A bill sponsored by Sens. Barbara Boxer and Diana Feinstein is currently stalled. “There’s a lot of uncertainty in the legislative process,” Huffman said. Having Secretary Jewell visit the area “is basically sending a message that we’re going to make it happen one way or another.”
Secretary Jewell told the crowd of over 200 people that by her presence she was confirming President Obama’s commitment to land preservation for future generations. “I wouldn’t be out here if it wasn’t a high priority,” she said. The twelve mile stretch of land is managed by the Bureau of Land Management and is open to the public.
The get-together was as folksy as you’d expect in a small town. A group of about 50 elementary students sang “This Land is Your Land,” read environmental poems to the Secretary and gave her framed copies. Dressed in native costume a few of the Manchester Band of Pomo Indians children gave a brief ceremonial dance.
After the representatives of Boxer and Feinstein said that both senators supported the effort, a representative of the Manchester Pomo’s gave an impassioned request to have the BLM do more to preserve some of their historic tribal areas. Jim Keena, California’s BLM director who said the BLM has an archeologist who specializes in these issues and he promised to put the two together.
Next came a steady stream of environmentalist like the Sierra Club, Audubon Society and the Mendocino Land Trust to name a few. District Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro, talked about the California Coastal Trail which he help champion. Many local civic leaders, civic organizations and county supervisors all spoke of their support for the Monument addition. Both the Mendocino County Tourism Bureau and the local Chamber of Commerce said that the addition would help promote job growth in Mendocino County’s largest business, tourism.
Everyone got a chuckle when a local activist presented Secretary Jewell with a petition supporting the effort with over 800 signatures from Point Arena residents, noting how exceptional that was considering a population of 450. When Mendocino Supervisor Dan Hamburg expressed concern for the oil “fracking” off the California coast, Secretary Jewell said that being a petroleum engineer she knows a lot about oil “fracking” and that there is a lot of dis-information out there. She flatly denied it was happening and said that we need a balanced approach to oil extraction and protecting the environment.
In her summation the secretary got a laugh by referring to the local petition as being “Democracy in action.” She then asked for a show of hands for how many would prefer the Monument designation by a Presidential Proclamation or an Act of Congress. Overwhelmingly, people wanted a Presidential Proclamation but then several shouted, “Anyway we can!”
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What Will fails to recognize, or admit, is that all his criticisms are why the standards were initiated. He says that “it is more likely there will be a half a dozen innovative governors than one creative federal education bureaucracy.” With this remark Will is right. The Common Core Initiative was established by the National Governors Association, many of which are Republicans, and the Council of Chief State School Officers based on a 2004 report titled, “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts.” It found that both employers and colleges are demanding more of high school graduates and that current high-school exit expectations fall well short of demands.
