Please stand by...

for a 10-12 day blog absence. I'll be in Mexico City and Tlanchinol. Pictures upon my return.

Farewell for now, cruel blagoblag.

Recent Pics/Vid

Lightning storm from back in May. Rained out softball game that night.


Somebody's car. Oh, the shenanigans that occur during wedding receptions.


An apartment hallway. Oh, the shenanigans that occur during honeymoons.


Sunset on Capitol Beach Lake.


My babbling niece. Such a darlin'.

Ambiguity

One story about violence on Juneteenth.

And another.

I'm baffled by the last couple lines of this second story: the poorly worded quote, and the poor contextual placement of it.

Some people think the violence takes away from the real meaning of Juneteenth.

"I think it should be continued," said Earnestine Rogers. "It shouldn't be stopped because of some youngsters."

It's the second year in a row that violence has broken out at the celebration.

Given the preceding sentence (and I suppose the following sentence as well), what seems to be the most grammatically appropriate antecedent for the pronoun "it" in Earnestine's quote? It seems to me as if "violence" fits best. Try re-reading what she had to say as if "violence" were that antecedent--has a really scary connotation doesn't it? Who is this woman and what's wrong with her?

Behold the importance of context, copy-editing, and choosing unambiguous quotations.

More on Education

Column up today on NRO by Jonah Goldberg that's worth a read.

The Washington Post story he mentions.

And here's the Weekly Standard article he references.

For more fun, here's a pdf from EIAonline ranking states based on the ratio of teachers to administrators (click to enlarge):

And here's one that gives a side-by-side ranking giving per pupil spending and teacher salaries.

Compare/Contrast

I like math. I like graphs. Here's a graph with some interesting numbers.



There's more info, and more intriguing info, at North Shore Journal. Czech it out.

Speaking of Czechs, I came across a brief little bio on Vaclav Havel (if you don't know the name, read the bio!) this morning. What stood out was a quote about 4/5 of the way down the page, under 2003.

During his farewell address from Prague Castle he urges Czech politicians to always follow their conscience. "It was not to be continually loved by all that we - I in the past and you more recently - were chosen," he says.

"We were elected in the hope that we would do what, according to our knowledge and our convictions, is in the long-term interests of human society as a whole, what is in the interest of the freedom, security, and dignity of all of us, what is in the interest of our life in peace and prosperity."

Note the parts about being chosen, not to be loved; long-term interests; society as a whole; freedom, security, and dignity; etc. Heck that one quote is simply chock full of understanding, wisdom, and creamy political right-ness (not necessarily correctness). My hat is off to Havel.

Education

I know I've said some things before on the topic of education. Here's a little bit more, thinking in terms of economics.

A recent US Census press release notes that per pupil spending on education is nigh upon $9,000. (That's a national average, I assume Nebraska's would be less, but give it a couple years, it'll get there.) Lest you mistakenly assume that that figure is a sum for all years K-12, it's not. That's per year. So let's say a 5 year old starts kindergarten this year. After 13 years of (let's just assume constant) $9,000 a year education that high school diploma costs a grand total of $117,000 for ONE student. Now we do need to bear in mind that the girth of this (thankfully) isn't just shelled out by the kid's parents--that would be quite a burden for "educating" even one kid, let alone two or three at the same time. But it is paid by every single taxpayer in the state. Your money, my money, (almost) everybody's money.

Anyway, I wanted to think about this economically, in terms of dollars and sense. Yeah, that's right: sense. It seems to me that if we're going to drop over a hundred grand per student in order to get them high school diplomas, it would be good to get something useful out of that investment. I don't want to say that on the whole it's a bad investment. If we can be optimistic about the future, it's not hard to imagine that some kid in high school right now, some kid for whom we're spending thousands of dollars, will be the person who discovers a cure for cancer. In that case, I say money well spent. On the other hand, if we can be realistic, there's going to be the kid (who am I kidding, "the kid"--there's thousands of them) who, whether he drops out or graduates, will end up in prison or on welfare or use your imagination. In that case, I'm looking for a refund.

I guess it's kind of like a mutual fund--having a diversified portfolio. There might be a few bad options, a couple money-losers, in the bunch, but the idea is that there will be some bigger money-makers (getting you bigger returns on the investment) that will outweigh the negative and get you something positive in return. You know, end up in the black.

I would be interested to see a further break down of this. Anybody who is looking to do research in the field of education, here are some questions for you. How can we determine if our investments will be leaving us with a positive outcome? By what means do we calculate the return on our spendings? How many bad investments are we willing to put up with? How can we identify bad investments? Can we get a refund for an investment that fails to materialize? If a student fails a class, should he and/or his parents be responsible to compensate for the money poorly spent?

Let's see, $9000 per year, figure 7 classes both semesters for a total of 14--call it 15 for even division--that's $600 per class. A kid fails, dad writes a check. *sigh* Only in my happiest dreams. Of course that would also be assuming some degree of competence on the part of the teachers (can't go on...must...keep...tongue...in cheek) which we can't always assume.

Do you see where this is going? There are so many problems here it's less funny than Bill Maher, though to be fair he actually tries. Making students take standardized tests doesn't fix it. Having the government get off on withholding funds for under-performing schools doesn't fix it. Woo! It's all been done. And it hasn't helped. We need something drastic that will probably not sit well with a lot of people, whatever that solution may be.