Killing Through Breakfast

It's amazing. Unbelievable. No long quotes. I don't want my computer to explode. No More Free Breakfasts | National Review Online: "...These are the ways in which the Left has damaged children and families through free school breakfasts..."

Take The Test

A Quiz for Lawmakers

"by emptywheel

Jeff Stein tells us that the rising Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes, doesn't know whether Al Qaeda and Hezbollah are predominantly made up of Shiite or Sunni Muslims. Well, the BCIS has decided to revamp the test required of applicants for citizenship. So I think we, the blogosphere, should put together our own new test--fifty questions a legislator should be able to answer correctly before he or she can vote on laws relating to those subjects. I've made a start below. Once we get a bunch I plan to put this into a document and send it to Pelosi and Reid. Hell--at the very least, maybe they can get their legislators to cram for the quiz so they don't sound quite so embarrassing in interviews. . ." Click to take the test.

The Real Left Behind

The Blog | Gerald Bracey: Things Fall Apart: No Child Left Behind Self-Destructs | The Huffington Post: "For the record, my first anti-No Child Left Behind (NCLB) article was commissioned by Newsday in late 2000 and published January 28, 2001. At the time, NCLB was a no-name plan, the administration not yet having ripped off the slogan of the Children's Defense Fund. But even then I saw not a great civil rights act as some, but yet another Orwellian double-speak program like Clear Skies, Clean Waters, and Healthy Forests--a program to accomplish the opposite of its avowed intent . . .

. . .But as the law enters its fifth year, even its supporters can no longer ignore that the law is imploding. On November 30, Frederick Hess, Education Director for the American Enterprise Institute and Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation convened a conference, "Fixing Failing Schools: Are the Tools in the NCLB Toolkit Working?" I attended.

After the first four presentations, moderator Finn declared that instead of providing sweet cakes and coffee, "I should be handing out mood altering pharmaceuticals, those that deal with depression." No later presentations offered anything to elevate Finn's mood as one scholar after another delivered evidence on this failed provision or that failed provision and the law's failure to accomplish its stated goal: to elevate the achievement of poor children and minorities. . ."