A new documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (who made An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud) is promising to ask some tough questions about America’s schools.  According to the film’s website, Guggenheim “follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth…Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying drop-out factories and academic sinkholes, methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems.”

A friend of mine who attended an advance screening of the film tells me that it’s excellent.  Here’s a trailer:

There’s no guarantee that the movie will play in Nortwest Arkansas when it opens this fall, but taking the pledge below surely couldn’t hurt.

Fayetteville voters overwhelmingly approved the proposed change for HMR tax revenues, by a margin of 81% to 19%.  Mayor Jordan was quoted in today’s paper saying that “This will help us in our general fund.”  In the coming months, we’ll keep tabs on general fund spending and spending on park development.  As we have said before, changing the park development portion of the HMR tax was a tradeoff.  It meant that park development funds could be diverted to park maintenance, and as a result general fund revenues could be spent on other things.  Since Fayetteville’s politicians never spelled out what those tradeoffs specifically entailed, it will be interesting when we find out.

The ballot language was horribly misleading.  Taken at face value, it apppeared that one was either voting for park “development, construction and maintenance” or against park “development, construction and maintenance.”  In truth, the only choice being decided yesterday concerned ”maintenance.”  Intentionally misleading?  Almost certainly.  But, I expect it would have passed anyway.

I actually don’t have a lot of knowledge about Fogleman’s career as a judge, so I can’t attest to how good or bad it has been.  But, according to the Dem-Gaz, the length of his career is more important than its quality.

Yesterday the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette endorsed John Fogleman for the State Supreme Court.  The reason?  Well, according to the editorial writers, he’s been around a long time.  In what amounts to one of the worst written editorials to come out of the DemGaz in recent memory, 814 words are used to fill a column space that essentially amounts to one single point:  Fogelman is good because he has been around a long time.  Here’s an excerpt:

For example, it would help if a candidate had long judicial experience. Say, 15 years as a circuit judge in Arkansas. Or, before that, if he had been a prosecuting attorney for 11 years. And a city attorney for 13 years. And been engaged in private practice representing a variety of clients and meeting their needs for 13 years. And if, over the course of his long public and private career he’d worked with law enforcement officers like sheriffs, prosecutors, police chiefs and other judges, a number of whom had come to regard him highly enough to endorse him for the state’s highest court.

We’ve just described in capsule form the legal and worldly experience of one John Fogleman, who’s running for Position 3 on the state’s Supreme Court in Tuesday’s elections. He’s opposed by a candidate who’s been an appellate judge for only a year and, before that, was a Court of Appeals clerk for eight years. In terms of real-world experience in the law, courtroom experience (28 years of it in Judge Fogleman’s case), and contributions in general to the law, there’s really no comparison-except a lopsided one in favor of Judge Fogleman.

And it goes on and on.  Not once does the column mention any case that Fogleman has been a part of, nor are any of his legal philosophies discussed.  The column is just one long exercise of repetition about an essentially  irrelevant point.

The Dem-Gaz ends their article with this:

Nothing beats actual experience in the lower courts, where the law meets the citizen, for preparing an appellate judge. After all, would you want to hire a school principal who’d never taught a class, or, in a field we’re more familiar with, an editor who’d never written a word of copy?

Of course, there certainly are times when a principal who has never taught a class could be preferable to one who taught classes poorly.  And if this editorial was the product of experience…well, you get the point.  It doesn’t matter how long Fogleman has been around if his service hasn’t been particularly exceptional.

The most amazing thing, however, is that the endorsement said nothing about Fogleman’s role as the prosecuting attorney in the West Memphis Three case.  How does one write an 814 page endorsement and not mention that Fogleman played a crucial (and highly questionable) role in the most famous case in Arkansas’ recent history?  Just a few months ago CBS ran a nationally televised hour-long program that detailed how poorly the case was handled, yet somehow nothing about the West Memphis Three case is mentioned in the Dem-Gaz’s endorsement?  A good treatment of Fogleman’s conduct during the case can be found in this Arkansas Times article by Mara Leveritt.

Fogleman isn’t the only person of West Memphis Three fame running for office this year.  Judge David Burnett is running for the Arkansas Senate.  I’ve expressed my feeling about Burnett in a previous post here.   Needless to say, the prospects of either of these guys winning elections bothers me.

As Mara Leveritt points out in her blog, the best way to keep these guys out of office is to show up on election day and vote for their opponents.  Fogleman’s opponent, Judge Courtney Henry, seems reasonable enough.  I don’t know much about Barry Harrison, who is running against Burnett, but I find it hard to believe he could be any worse.

UPDATE: John Brummett says he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Fogleman because of his role in the West Memphis Three case.  He makes some arguments about why a person might consider letting Fogleman off the hook.  However, while the arguments are good, they’re not good enough.

(edited for clarity)

A couple of weeks ago Brian mentioned an Ed Next article we wrote with our colleagues Gary Ritter and Nate Jensen. The article, titled A Closer Look at Charter Schools and Segregation, challenges the methodology used in a study of charter schools and racial segregation  released in February by the Civil Rights Project (CRP) at UCLA. Our article is scheduled to appear in print this summer, but the debate is already in full swing. Today the Ed Next blog is running a response to our original article from the CRP authors, followed by a reply from us. You can find their response here, and our reply here.

In their response it is evident that the CRP staff either misunderstand or choose to willfully ignore the substantive methodological concerns we raised in our article. Instead they simply chose to reiterate their rightness, failing to engage in meaningful debate.

Even though they failed to address the methodological flaws present in their report, it is a greater disappointment that they failed to acknowledge the larger and more damning points we raised in the concluding paragraphs of our article.

In the closing portion of our reply, we bring the discussion back to what we believe are the most compelling arguments for why the CRP report is fatally flawed.

1)    First, neither the traditional public schools nor charter schools are doing a particularly good job at drawing racially diverse student bodies. Those genuinely concerned with the racial segregation in schools should focus their attention on traditional public schools, where the vast majority (97%) of U.S. students are enrolled.

2)    Families that send their children to charter schools are making a choice that best fits what they seek in an educational experience. To compare this choice to the forced segregation that occurred a half century ago is a trivialization of the true oppression that occurred. And to refer to these schools as “apartheid schools,” which implies that families are legally and physically required to attend segregated schools, is nothing more than alarmist rhetoric.  Such charges would be more appropriate if they were leveled at traditional public schools where students in residential boundaries are forced to attend segregated schools.

The Civil Rights Project has a history of seeking justice and we commend that.  But the organization is simply on the wrong side of this issue. First of all, the empirical data do not support the CRP claims.  Moreover, although the group’s leaders have called for regulations to encourage more integrated charters, vocal critics of charters will certainly use the conclusions drawn from the CRP differently.  And, if critics of charters were successful in limiting the growth of charter schools, the educational options available to poor and minority students would be further restricted.  We and the CRP authors would certainly agree that this outcome would not enhance the civil rights of our nation’s disadvantaged students.

(Guest Post by Jay P. Greene via jaypgreene.com)

The City of Fayetteville, like many local governments, is facing a budget squeeze as revenues have declined without a commensurate reduction in expenditures.  In those instances, responsible public officials should explain to voters that either certain services will need to be cut or taxes raised.

We don’t have that kind of public official in Fayetteville.  Instead, our local officials seem to fancy themselves as slick politicians in the minor leagues, honing their skills at the art of public manipulation so that someday they may get called up to the big leagues of deception and lording over other people.

To offset the shortfall in the city budget, Mayor Lionel Jordan and his backers have proposed grabbing money from the hotel, motel, and restaurant (HMR) tax that is currently dedicated for park development so that they can use it to cover park maintenance and then redirect the general operating funds currently devoted to park maintenance to other parts of the city budget.

Jordan and friends are saying they want voters to approve changes in the HMR tax so that the revenue can be used for things other than the development of parks, giving the city more “flexibility.”  This is just doublespeak.  The flexibility they want is the flexibility to reduce park development spending so that they can keep other city operations unchanged.

Personally, I prefer the development of more parks and the cutting of other city services.  Our parks and public bike trails are some of the best things about Fayetteville.  But I could be persuaded that we needed to defer additional park development to avoid cuts in other services if they presented the trade-offs directly and honestly.  Make the case that additional park development is less important than other city services that would be continued.

But no.  Our local public officials refuse to treat us like grown-ups and have to use deception rather than presenting us with difficult choices straightforwardly.  This is the same kind of doublespeak nonsense we saw with the business license proposal. That wasn’t really about “helping promote local business.”  That was about facilitating the taxation and regulation of businesses while helping the Chamber of Commerce effectively compel membership.

And don’t buy the fall-back argument on the HMR tax change that says we are in danger of developing so many parks that the cost of maintaining all of them would be prohibitive.  If this were true, advocates for changing the HMR tax would need to present facts about rising park maintenance costs.  They haven’t.  Park maintenance costs have not been growing at a significantly faster rate than the city budget.  In addition, park maintenance only costs $1.9 million out of a total city budget that exceeds $120 million.  The HMR tax dedicated to park development generates about $2.3 million per year.

And also don’t buy the argument that we are just correcting a “mistake” from when the HMR tax was initially adopted.  It may well be that city officials meant to include maintenance and development as potential uses of the tax, but that’s not what was on the ballot and what voters ultimately approved.  We can’t know whether voters would have approved the measure if it had permitted the funds to be used for park maintenance as well as development.  And voters are under no compulsion now to allow the money to be redirected for other purposes.  If city officials want to convince voters to approve the measure, they need to make the case that those new bike trails we are developing are less important than other uses for the same money.

Update: The NWArk Times is endorsing the tax change (subscription required).  They say a lot, but don’t offer up many good points.   I think the question is simple: If you really want more parks and trails in Fayetteville, and you think there are other places where the city could cut funding before they cut park development funding, then you should vote against this change.–BK

Some of you may have heard that there was a small earthquake in Northwest Arkansas last week.  What you may not know is the reason.  Well, it turns out that earthquakes actually have nothing to do with shifting tectonic plates.  According to an Iranian government official and cleric, earthquakes are women’s fault, specifically women who do not dress modestly (think burqa).

Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying “Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes.”

If you’re keeping up with current science, then you already know that Pat Robertson discovered that gays and lesbians were responsible for hurricane Katrina, and that the earthquake in Haiti was a result of their pact with the devil.  Of course, a major difference is that here in the US we are free to make fun of Pat Robertson-types.  In Iran, these types of lunatics run the government.

Here in the U.S., many women tested Sedighi’s theory by conducting a massive “Boobquake.” News reports claimed that the Boobquake failed to trigger an earthquake.  I guess they failed to notice the small one that hit NWA.

Then again, the local quake could have been our own fault.