The Immigration Answer? It’s in Mexico’s Classrooms - New York Times

The Immigration Answer? It's in Mexico's Classrooms - New York Times:
The U.S. is not responsible for the poor education of people in other countries. That's nonsense. The immigration problem is driven by the low wages in Mexico compared to what an uneducated person can earn in the U.S. as an illegal.

This author uses a false premise and a failed argument to support higher legal immigration goals for Mexicans and Central Americans. The immigrants that we want (other than political refugees) are those that are legal, within reasonable quotas, with the highest education level possible.

Tyler Cowen, please understand we do not want illegal immigrants, period. Secure the borders and require employers to verify that immigrants they hire are legal. This may sound simplistic and in practice it is very difficult to manage, but that should be the principle underlying U.S. immigration policy.

"Poorly functioning Mexican and Latino educational systems are a central problem behind current immigration dilemmas, and the United States is partly
responsible. If the United States took in a higher ratio of legal immigrants,
and required more education, the entire North American region would be better
off."

Protecting Reporters’ Phone Records - New York Times

Protecting Reporters’ Phone Records - New York Times

Well, Mr. & Mrs. editors, you're wrong (again) to think that your reporters rights trump mine when it comes to national security issues. You and I can argue for freedom of the press except when that freedom reduces my right to be free and safe from terrorists who want to destroy this country.

Reporters have no right to shield informants who play fast and loose with my security. The Supreme Court made the correct decision.

Hezbollah Said to Help Shiite Army in Iraq - New York Times

Hezbollah Said to Help Shiite Army in Iraq - New York Times

It is in Iran's (Shiite) interest to foment discord and break the Sunni hegemony in the region. That is why Iran is a BIG problem gorilla in the Muslim world. Allowing Iran to have nukes is totally unacceptable, yet the world does not seem to adequately recognize the threat.

My bet is Israel will step up at the appropriate time to prevent it if the world sits on its thumbs too long.

More-Savvy Web Retailers Expect More Holiday Profits - New York Times

More-Savvy Web Retailers Expect More Holiday Profits - New York Times:

$100 billion is not small potatoes. Bob Tedeschi earlier in this piece reports forecasts of 20% year-over-year growth in online holiday shopping revenue. That's a substantial increase.

"Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with JupiterResearch, a technology consulting firm, said online sales this year would reach the $100 billion threshold for the first time. Online sales, she added, would probably constitute 6 percent of total holiday merchandise sales."

What It Takes to Make a Student - New York Times

What It Takes to Make a Student - New York Times:

But all these questions point to culture differences as I pointed out in my previous post, assuming no genetic root causes.

"There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap."

Further in the piece is this observation from some research:

"Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a childÂ?s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up."

And then this:

"Brooks-Gunn, a professor at Teachers College, has overseen hundreds of interviews of parents and collected thousands of hours of videotape of parents and children, and she and her research team have graded each one on a variety of scales. Their conclusion: Children from more well-off homes tend to experience parental attitudes that are more sensitive, more encouraging, less intrusive and less detached , all of which, they found, serves to increase I.Q. and school-readiness. They analyzed the data to see if there was something else going on in middle-class homes that could account for the advantage but found that while wealth does matter, child-rearing style matters more."


This is a culture issue!

Here's one of the piece's concluding thoughts:

"The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement. It is not yet entirely clear what that system might look like. It might include not only KIPP-like structures and practices but also high-quality early-childhood education, as well as incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools . But what is clear is that it is within reach."

After reading it, it is culture, deeply ingrained, generational culture born out of ignorance that's at the root of the problem. Parenting is key as the piece points out. Yet if we look at the parenting deficiencies of blacks (70% of black kids born out of wedlock) .With that poor start at parenting, kids have little chance to suceed without massive intervention. It's no surprise that this culture of failure perpetuates itself. Intensive remediation as employed by the successful charter schools described by the author will be necessary to break the cultural cycle that prevents youngsters from developing as white, middle class and Asian kids do.

Here are some data that show disparities by race and ethnicity of educational attainment in the U.S.

What It Takes to Make a Student - New York Times

What It Takes to Make a Student - New York Times:

I am blogging this long NY Times Sunday Magazine piece as I'm reading it. This is the first very important observation by the author:

"In the first few years of this decade, two parallel debates about the achievement gap have emerged. The first is about causes; the second is about cures. The first has been taking place in academia, among economists and anthropologists and sociologists who are trying to figure out exactly where the gap comes from, why it exists and why it persists. The second is happening among and around a loose coalition of schools, all of them quite new, all established with the goal of wiping out the achievement gap altogether.

The two debates seem barely to overlap — the principals don’t pay much attention to the research papers being published in scholarly journals, and the academics have yet to study closely what is going on in these schools. Examined together, though, they provide a complete and nuanced picture, sometimes disheartening, sometimes hopeful, of what the president and his education officials are up against as they strive to keep the promise they have made. The academics have demonstrated just how deeply pervasive and ingrained are the intellectual and academic disadvantages that poor and minority students must overcome to compete with their white and middle-class peers. The divisions between black and white and rich and poor begin almost at birth, and they are reinforced every day of a child’s life. And yet the schools provide evidence that the president is, in his most basic understanding of the problem, entirely right: the achievement gap can be overcome, in a convincing way, for large numbers of poor and minority students, not in generations but in years. What he and others seem not to have apprehended quite yet is the magnitude of the effort that will be required for that change to take place."

Without reading the full piece, my bias is that we have a cultural, not a socio-economic conundrum that prevents certain minorities from achieving in academics. Being in the minority is not the issue because we know that Asians achieve even above Caucasians in this country because their culture values education. Black and Hispanic cultures, for whatever reason, have generally not valued education as a life goal.

London Riddle: A Russian Spy, a Lethal Dose - New York Times

London Riddle: A Russian Spy, a Lethal Dose - New York Times

Hey, this is a James Bondian tale. Could this possibly be a murder? Given the cause of death by a high dose of radioactivity from an exotic isotope, the intrigue is fascinating. The affair certainly has attention of the highest British government officials.

This Russian is certainly the enemy of someone!

Pre - Thanksgiving Dinner

Today, I decided to cook a Thanksgiving dinner in advance of our Thanksgiving Day meal with Mark, Caroline, Estlin and Gawain.

I just finished cleaning up after spending most of the day cooking. The menu consisted of a 13 pound fresh turkey from the Stone Farm in Orwell (next town to Shoreham), VT. I ordered it several days ago from Dick Mazza's market here in Colchester. The menu was very traditional:

Turkey
Gravy
Mashed Potato
Rutabaga (Turnip)
Butternut Squash
Stuffing
Orange-Cranberry Relish

I had never cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner before and I must say this one was extraordinary!

For the gravy and stock for the stuffing, I boiled down 3 pounds of turkey wings last week simmering for three hours with onion, parsley, celery and assorted spices. After draining the stock, and removing the bones, the meat and any remaining juices along with some more onion and celery and spices became the base of a turkey soup with baby pastina macaroni.

The stuffing was a mixture of sweet pork Italian sausage and ground turkey fried out with equal parts chopped onion and celery with fresh parsley and sage as seasonings. This was all mixed with a cup of chopped dried apricot and baked for 1.5 hours at the the end of roasting the turkey.

I placed a mixture of chopped onion, celery, fresh rosemary, fresh sage and an apple loosely in the turkey cavity and cooked the bird for 45 minutes at 450 degrees, then covered the breast (which cooks faster) with aluminum foil while cooking for about 4 hours at 330 degrees, removing the foil for the last 30 minutes. This fresh turkey was out of this world, succulent, sweet, tender and....well it's my favorite meal!

Carol is ill with a fever so she had only a small supper, but do we have leftovers!!!

I prepared another dish of stuffing which we'll have at Mark's and I'm also bringing Mama Stamberg's cranberry relish.

News Corp. cancels O.J. Simpson book and special - MarketWatch

News Corp. cancels O.J. Simpson book and special - MarketWatch

A wise decision by Murdoch to cancel the book and the TV special. What pisses me off is before they cancelled this travesty, they attempted to buy off the Goldmans, et al. Murdoch should have stomped on the fiasco much earlier.

The Smile of Reason - New York Times

The Smile of Reason - New York Times:

David Brooks laments the passing of Milton Friedman and observes...

"...the distinction between intellectual movements and political parties broke
down. Friedman was never interested in partisan politics but was deeply
engaged in policy. Today, team loyalty has taken over the wonk’s world, so
there are invisible boundaries that mark politically useful, and therefore
socially acceptable, thought.

His death is sad, too, because classical economics is under its greatest threat in a generation. Growing evidence suggests average workers are not seeing the benefits of their productivity gains — that the market is broken and requires heavy government correction. Friedman’s heirs have been avoiding this debate. They’re losing it badly and have offered no concrete
remedies to address this problem, if it is one.

I saw Friedman a few times over the past decade, and he would always bring up school vouchers, his unrealized idea. He still brimmed with his faith — which must have been there
when he was a young boy — in average people, making their own decisions, running
their own lives, and doing it pretty well. "

I don't know Friedman's views on globalization, but I expect he was a free market, open trade advocate. It seems to me that free markt capitalism is the best system, but that an inevitable consequence is the massive readjustment of the jobs that Americans do. This is why Bill Gates is calling for an overhaul of the K-12 public education system which does not produce the teaching and learning needed for this century and the jobs needed.