Education: January 2005 Archives
Eduwonk describes how the teachers' union in San Diego is doing its utmost to prevent reform and harm children for its own profit.
Superintendent Alan Bersin is poised to reorganize several of the city's chronically underperforming schools. At two of the three schools a majority of teachers have voted to make the schools charter schools to help facilitate this and at all three 60-80 percent of parents voted to do the same. Remember, these are not schools that didn't do well "on a single test" but schools that have not done right by students for years.Yet the school board member who represents these schools has apparently decided to oppose this and in the process force a vote on buying out the remainder of Bersin's contract because he won't play ball. Possible reasons for her move? (A) It's a great way for her to make a lifelong friend of the Bersin-loathing teachers' union there. Or (B) concerns that if several schools in her district become semi-autonomous it will hurt her political clout and power on the board. There is no (C) because it's generally agreed that changes are in the interest of the kids....600 parents showed up at a recent school board meeting to push for these changes.
Note that it's not even the teachers; in two of the three schools the teachers affirmed the proposed changed. It's the unions that are attempting to thwart the will of the parents, teachers, and administrators. It's unfortunate, but teachers' unions (and most unions, these days) are societal parasites that don't benefit anyone but their rulers -- not even their members.
Paul Sperry has a great article in Reason Online about resume and diploma fraud, particularly among our public servants.
Laura L. Callahan was very proud of her Ph.D. When she received it a few years ago, she promptly rewrote her official biography to highlight the academic accomplishment, referring to it not once or twice but nine times in a single-page summary of her career. And she never let her employees at the Labor Department, where she served as deputy chief information officer, forget it, even demanding that they call her "Doctor." ..."When she was running around telling people to call her 'Dr. Callahan,' I asked where she got her degree," says Richard Wainwright a computer specialist who worked for Callahan at Labor for two years. "When I found out, I laughed."
It turns out Callahan got her precious sheepskin from Hamilton University. Not Hamilton College, the highly competitive school in Clinton, New York, but Hamilton University, the unaccredited fee-for-degree "distance learning" center in Evanston, Wyoming, right on the Utah border. Such diploma mills frequently use names similar to those of accredited schools.
Unbeknown to Callahan, Wainwright had once lived near the small town of Evanston (population: 10,903) and knew it well. As a student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he received his bachelor's degree years ago, he had made beer runs to Evanston, less than 60 miles away. He knew there were no universities there, or at least none worth attending. "Evanston doesn't have much but a few motels and liquor stores," he tells me. "I looked up Hamilton University on the Web and saw it was an old Motel 6, and I knew it was bogus."
A few minutes with Google would probably save our government billions of dollars and increase productivity at the same time. This type of fraud isn't new, and it's one of the reasons why I have very little respect for most public sector workers. No evil private corporation would fall for this kind of nonsense -- not without going out of business, anyway.
I hate urinals; I never use them. I'll always use a stall (standing up) unless it's some sort of emergency, and in that case I'll just cut out the middle man and piss right on a tree or rock or wall or something. Urinals are gross and primitive; uncivilized. That said, there's quite a bit of etiquette involved in using a urinal, particularly if there are other men already in the midst of doing their business. Here's a handy urinal tutorial to teach you the basics; it may be of particular interest to women, who probably don't have a great deal of experience pissing into a trough.
