Dave Chandler

The Horror of CSAP Revealed

In a lengthy story today, the Denver Post exposes the horror of the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) regimen. Purporting to show how Denver's Stedman Elementary School third graders are doing better on the CSAP test, what it actually reported was the intensity and high pressure put on eight and nine year old children to 'perform', the pep rally mentality of the CSAP season, the priority put on kids learning test taking skills and, of course, the inevitable result of teaching to the test.

Indeed, the article by Jeremy Meyer, begins by detailing graphic behavior by children that would, in any other situation, be termed mind-control and abusive:

On an early February morning at Stedman Elementary School, the pressure was high.

Two students vomited. A few cried at their desks. Another imagined goblins might get him if he failed.

It was the day the third-graders took their first Colorado Student Assessment Program exams, and the 8- and 9-year-olds were all nerves.

Students rubbed lucky "Zap CSAP" lapel pins. They repeated mantras of test-taking techniques and practiced positive self-talk taught to them by their teacher, Dawn Romero.

These are little kids ... where is the joy of learning being instilled by this 'curriculum'? After reading this can there be any adults left who wonder why some kids end up hating school?

In a couple of paragraphs later in the story, it is reported how even parents are surprised at how difficult the tests are -- yet their children are expected, pressured to 'perform' well.

Before taking the CSAP, the third-graders took timed mock exams with questions teachers developed in the style of the official assessment. The school even threw a CSAP breakfast on the Saturday before the test, inviting parents to take a practice exam alongside their children.

Many parents walked away surprised at the difficulty.

"The questions try to confuse you," said Robin Hill, whose son Royce is among the brightest.

In addition, this description shows how the test is being 'gamed', that is the taking of mock exams so that the students 'know' the questions before the test. Take a look at this:

To prepare for the reading test, they taught the students how to summarize readings, exposed them to material such as poetry and nonfiction and helped hone test-taking skills. Reading lessons often were given with a timer.

"Monitor your time, look for key words, read through your answers," Romero would tell her class.

Now, some of that might sound good, kids need to learn how to summarize what they read ... but the purpose is "to prepare for the reading test", "hone test-taking skills" and the "reading lessons often were given with a timer". CSAP and this kind of educational practice is going to give us a generation of people who hate reading, who don't know the happiness that can be found from reading a difficult book, talking about it in class and discovering its real meaning through thoughtfulness and reflection.

No, it's really all about producing data for the Governor, a U.S. Senator and the school superintendent to point to as a reason to compete for more federal funds.

Also note that the article mentions that in addition to the three weeks of CSAP, the children are given "interim exams that DPS students take three times a year." Testing, testing, testing -- rallies for testing, bribery for testing, cheers for testing, paraphernalia for testing. Despite the 'warm, fuzzy' feeling for the teacher that the article tries to convey, the reality is a kind of techno-bizzaro world of propaganda, drudgery and high pressure that will ultimately turn these poor kids into cynics towards learning after the eight years to come of constant testing.

And the pressure on the kids will only get worse, because it is the goal of the education establishments in Colorado and Washington, D.C. to make teacher pay and jobs dependent upon how well the students test -- not how much their young charges understand content, not how much they appreciate real learning, not how well they can function as educated adults, but on how well they test.

Thanks for the report Denver Post; it was an eye opener for anyone not taken in by the top-down elitism of CSAP and the so-called "accountability" theory.

But it was also a very sad article showing just how much our children are being manipulated for the political ends of educrats and politicians.

Helping Students, One School and One Teacher at a Time | Jeremy P. Meyer/Denver Post

We've Been Conned

In the end, all of Colorado's Dimocrat representatives in the U.S. House voted for it; and both of the state's Repuglicans voted against it. But either way, they were willing players in a confidence game perpetrated on the American people.

It is the biggest con played on taxpayers since the bank bailouts of 2008.

I'm talking, of course, about the passage of the corporate health insurance 'reform' legislation passed last night to be sent to President Obama's desk for his signature.

In a successful confidence game, the mark (that's us) doesn't even realize that he's been 'conned'. The right thinks that we've now got socialized medicine, the left thinks we're on the way to socialized medicine. The 'play' is that the corporate health insurance cartel has got almost everything it could have hoped for ... they made out like con men and we've been 'stung'.

The taxpaying folks in this country are now on the hook for more billions of dollars to be funneled into the coffers of some of the biggest corporations in the world. One way or another we are all now legally mandated to purchase the product of the health insurance companies. Moreover, the insurance companies now have a legal obligation to raise rates (for instance) to cover the cost of "pre-existing conditions'. And, because it was a con, we were supposed to believe that this 'reform' was either a "government take-over" of health care (the Repuglican patter) or that the corporations were fighting this 'reform' tooth and nail (the Dimocrat line). (Dimocrats were also conned with the exhortation that this had to pass or Obama's presidency would effectively be over. In other words, it didn't matter anymore what was in the legislation, this was about political survival and "winning".)

How this con plays-out, we'll see. I certainly won't be surprised if somehow the "fixes" proposed by the House get derailed in the Senate's 'reconciliation' maneuver. But the pro-corporate Senate version of 'reform' was always the favorite of Obama and the Congressional Dimocrat establishment.

Now, how this works out for the Dimocrats and Repuglicans in the 2010 elections remains to be seen. Since so much of this new law doesn't take effect for four years, Dimocrats may fare better than is now expected against the extreme reactionary Repuglicans and their bigoted Teabag allies. Frankly, I don't care much about that kind of calculation anymore. Without single-payer or a robust public option, we've created another "too big to fail", government subsidized, mega-industry with the new insurance scheme.

My prediction is that the redistribution of wealth from working Americans up to the super wealthy corporate elite will only accelerate over the next few years because of this legislation. Insurance companies will still find ways to raise premiums higher and higher (well, because taxpayers are now footing the entire bill) and to cut-off unprofitable 'terminal' patients.

Conned.

We've been conned.

In Health Care Reform, Boons for Hospitals and Drug Makers | New York Times

... some analysts said as the vote neared that the final legislation was shaping up as much kinder to the industry than many initially feared. Hospitals and drug makers, which supported the final legislation, would be clear beneficiaries, analysts say, even if the outlook for insurers was less certain.

Yet the bill would not create the thing that insurers feared most: a government-run public option, a health plan that would compete with the private insurers.

Over all, the legislation would be a positive for much of the industry, said Les Funtleyder, who oversees health care strategy for Miller Tabak & Company, a New York investment firm. ...

... But insurers are expected to benefit from the influx of new customers after years of shrinking enrollments. About 16 million of the newly insured are expected to enroll in private plans. The rest would become eligible for Medicaid, the state-administered program for the poor, but some of those would probably sign up for privately run Medicaid plans available in different states. ...

The Health Care Hindenburg Has Landed | Chris Hedges/TruthDig.com/CommonDreams.org

Rep. Dennis Kucinich's decision to vote "yes" in Sunday's House action on the health care bill, although he had sworn to oppose the legislation unless there was a public option, is a perfect example of why I would never be a politician. I respect Kucinich. As politicians go, he is about as good as they get, but he is still a politician. He has to run for office. He has to raise money. He has to placate the Democratic machine or risk retaliation and defeat. And so he signed on to a bill that will do nothing to ameliorate the suffering of many Americans, will force tens of millions of people to fork over a lot of money for a defective product and, in the end, will add to the ranks of our uninsured.

The claims made by the proponents of the bill are the usual deceptive corporate advertising. The bill will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014. Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and ultimately unsustainable system.

The mendacity of the Democratic leadership in the face of this reality is staggering. Howard Dean, who is a doctor, said recently: "This is a vote about one thing: Are you for the insurance companies or are you for the American people?" Here is a man who once championed the public option and now has sold his soul. What is the point in supporting him or any of the other Democrats? How much more craven can they get?

Take a look at the health care debacle in Massachusetts, a model for what we will get nationwide. One in six people there who have the mandated insurance say they cannot afford care, and tens of thousands of people have been evicted from the state program because of budget cuts. The 45,000 Americans who die each year because they cannot afford coverage will not be saved under the federal legislation. Half of all personal bankruptcies will still be caused by an inability to pay astronomical medical bills. The only good news is that health care stocks and bonuses for the heads of these corporations are shooting upward. Chalk this up as yet another victory for our feudal overlords and a defeat for the serfs.

The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care-$7,129 per capita-although 45.7 million Americans remain without health coverage and millions more are inadequately covered, meaning that if they get seriously ill they are not covered. Fourteen thousand Americans a day are now losing their health coverage. A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 cents of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough, Physicians for a National Health Plan points out, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans. Check out www.healthcare-now.org. It has some of the best analysis.

This bill is not about fiscal responsibility or the common good. The bill is about increasing corporate profit at taxpayer expense. It is the health care industry's version of the Wall Street bailout. It lavishes hundreds of billions in government subsidies on insurance and drug companies. The some 3,000 health care lobbyists in Washington, whose dirty little hands are all over the bill, have once more betrayed the American people for money. The bill is another example of why change will never come from within the Democratic Party. The party is owned and managed by corporations. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America's Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world's biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of 2009. The Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama's director of health care policy, who will not discuss single payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations. And as salaries for most Americans have stagnated or declined during the past decade, health insurance profits have risen by 480 percent.

Obama and the congressional leadership have consciously shut out advocates of single payer from the debate. The press, including papers such as The New York Times, treats single payer as a fringe movement. The television networks rarely mention it. And yet between 45 and 60 percent of doctors favor single payer. Between 40 and 62 percent of the American people, including 80 percent of registered Democrats, want universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans. The ability of the corporations to discredit and silence voices that represent at least half of the population is another sad testament to the power of our corporate state to frame all discussions.

Change will come only by building movements that stand in fierce and uncompromising opposition to the Democrats and the Republicans. If they can herd Kucinich and John Conyers, the sponsors of House Resolution 676, a bill that would create a publicly funded National Health Program by eliminating private health insurers, onto the House floor to vote for this corporate theft, what is the point in pretending there is any room left for us in the party? And why should we waste our time with gutless liberal groups such as Moveon.org, which felt the need to collect more than $1 million to pressure House Democrats who had voted "no" on the original bill to recant? What was this purportedly anti-war group doing anyway serving as an obsequious recruiting arm of the Obama election campaign? The longer we tie ourselves to the Democrats and these bankrupt liberal organizations the more ridiculous and impotent we appear.

"I'm ready to listen to the White House, if the White House is ready to listen to the concerns about putting a public option in this bill," the old Kucinich said on the "Democracy Now!" radio and television program before he flipped. "I mean, they can do that. You know, they're still cutting last-minute deals. Put the public option back in. Make it a robust public option. Give the people a chance to really negotiate rates with the insurance companies ... from the standpoint of having a public option. But don't just tell the people that you're going to call this health care reform, when you're giving insurance companies an even more powerful monopoly status in our economy."

© 2010 TruthDig.com

Schooling 'Uniformity' is the Goal

Today, His Excellency Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is in Denver to campaign for His Excellency U.S. Senator Michael Bennet. Duncan never attended a public school and Bennet makes no reference that he ever sat at a desk in a public school-- two wealthy, elite appointees telling everyone else how to run their school districts.

But I've got more to say on education today, this past Monday, the lead Denver Post editorial praised the effort to institute national standards for our nation's public schools -- the elite of Colorado's government education establishment is part of this scheme.

Superficially this idea sounds good, every student expected to meet the same standards ... whether they live in Alabama or Alaska, Connecticut or Colorado. But in the American tradition, historically, local control has been a fundamental principle of how our schools are governed. There is very good reason for this: when parents and community are fully invested in the educational success for their own children, then schools and teachers and students will respond accordingly.

'No Child Left Behind' (Bush and Obama versions) and the whole standards/accountability/testing/charter theory is the enemy of parental and community participation in the education of our children. Indeed, it is a top down, data driven, "bureaucrats know best" theory that discourages those closest to the students from instilling curiosity, adventure and success in learning.

For instance, we constantly hear from professional educrats, administrators and some teachers that parents are not involved, that it is the parents fault that the kids are doing so poorly in school. But what are parents actually expected to do? Well, I'll tell you from my experience as a two year chair at my child's elementary school: fund raise, support the program and shut-up. Period.

Don't question "in service" training time, don't question 'No TV Day', don't question how the PTA spends money, don't question the amount of homework (too little or too much), don't question the school start time, don't question the number of vacation days, don't question the limited reading lists, etc. ... in other words, if parents behave as submissive, frightened puppies they are deemed to be "involved" in a good way.

Real reform for teaching and for learning in our public schools would actually involve parents helping to direct their child's education in a meaningful way: she wants to read a book not on the 'approved reading list'? Fine, let her read what she wants. He isn't college-tracked? Fine, let's get him into a curriculum that supports his employment goal skills. She and others want more classes teaching how to fix a leaky pipe, how to build a shelf? Good, the school will have more practical living classes. He wants to be a carpet installer? Fine, we'll develop a program for him to spend "class" time with his uncle the carpet installer.

Additionally, real reform would mean smaller school districts and schools that can actually respond to the desires of the voters, taxpayers, business interests and parents who live and work and play in local communities. Then everyone benefits from success in learning and sees the consequences of their decisions.

The Obama/Bush standards/accountability/testing/charter policy ultimately means a nationalized education system with national standards, a national curriculum, with a nationalized bureaucracy and dependent upon nationalized funding -- as individual, tiny little cogs in the national education machine -- students, parents and teachers become mere 'data points'.

The 'national standards' idea that the Denver Post supports may appear to be voluntary, but it is integral to the bad 'No Child Left Behind' idea -- if you care about the future of education in this country, this uniformity being foisted upon all of our children should be opposed by parents who really care about their kids.

Part One

Part Two

On Obama (and Jay Mathews) and Teacher Accountability | Valerie Strauss/Washington Post

Really now, does anybody think teachers should not be held accountable for how they do their jobs? What professionals are not evaluated on how well they do their jobs?

The real issues are not whether, but how, the assessments are carried out, and how the results are used. And the way a lot of school "reformers" want to hold teachers supposedly accountable is wrong.

"Teacher accountability" is one of the central themes of President Obama’s new vision for the post-No Child Left Behind era, and that two-word term, unfortunately, has come to mean something it shouldn’t.

Today in the world of education the phrase has come to mean how well a teacher’s students perform on standardized tests. If the students do well, the teacher is considered excellent. If the students haven’t done well, the teacher is not excellent.

Here are just a few of the problems with this scheme:

If we had a test, standardized or not, that really was a complete measure of a teacher’s performance -- or a student’s, for that matter -- it would be hard to argue against its use.

But let’s be clear: We don’t. Our standardized tests are rudimentary assessments, still. They are nowhere near sophisticated enough -- if indeed any single test can be -- to be used as a real measure of performance.

Even if the test were an excellent assessment tool, some students will still wind up taking it sick, or hungry, or tired, or anxious, or depressed. What is a teacher supposed to do about that?

Another problem with basing teacher accountability on standardized test scores is that students don’t take annual assessments in many subjects. Is it fair to subject math and English/language arts teachers to this sort of accountability and not everybody else?

In her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” education historian Diane Ravitch discusses studies that evaluated whether teacher effectiveness, as measured by student test scores, is stable over time.

The conclusion was that “being an effective teacher is not necessarily a permanent, unchanging quality.” In other words, the New York University professor wrote, the scores “reflected something other than what the teachers did, such as the students’ ability and motivation, or the characteristics of a class or conditions in the school.”

Now my colleague Jay Mathews, in his Class Struggle blog, took me to task for opposing this part of Obama’s new vision for reauthorizing NCLB. Here’s what he wrote:

"For now, I think it is important to note that my colleague Valerie Strauss’s distress about the president’s emphasis on teachers improving student achievement harks back to an earlier era that will never return. It is politically impossible to pass a plan that doesn’t make teachers accountable for student performance. We will never return to the good old days (in the minds of some) when we ignored that factor. I agree with Valerie that there are better measures of schools, but for the moment they are way too expensive (like regular inspections) and way too complicated for voters to understand and trust."

I, of course, did not say that teachers shouldn’t be evaluated. But test scores do not make an evaluation system. There are multiple ways to measure how much progress students have made. They require time and effort.

To say that better measures of achievement are “too expensive ... and way too complicated for voters to understand and trust” is no reason to institute an accountability system that will never work.

Editorial: Striving for the Same High Goals | Denver Post

The proposed set of national K-12 education standards released last week is a big step forward in creating a uniformly high bar for achievement around the country.

To those who fear loss of local control or a single national curriculum or test, you should know that is not part of the proposal.

This set of standards, crafted by a group representing all but two of the states, is a voluntary effort to ensure that states are addressing the same math and English concepts each year. ...

... We like it because it will put everyone on the same page, so to speak, when it comes to determining the broad skills each child should be taught in each grade. ...

... The Obama administration, which is not playing a part in crafting the standards, has many of the same goals that were pursued by several prior administrations, but is going about them differently.

The U.S. Department of Education is offering some $4 billion in incentives to states that adopt the national standards, called the Common Core State Standards. ...

... In Colorado, the state recently adopted new standards that "match or exceed" national expectations, Education Commissioner Dwight Jones said in a written statement issued last week. Dr. Stanley Rabinowitz, an expert who helped create the national standards, also helped shape the Colorado standards, Jones said. ...

Fire Teachers in Colorado?

How about this for a question: Are Colorado Gov. Ritter and Lt. Gov. O'Brien as keen on firing teachers in Colorado as President Obama is for terminating teachers' employment in Rhode Island?

Considering Ritter's and O'Brien's obsequiousness towards the so-called "Race to the Top" (aka 'race for more money' ... education incidental) contest, the answer must be "print-up a whole new batch of pink slips!"

CSAP season is almost over and two weeks of learning opportunity are gone for the sake of giving the educrats and politicians more 'data' to manipulate and crunch and spin. And what we are hearing from our national leaders is all about firing teachers and the need for even more "reform."

So, what follows is a pretty good critique of Pres. Obama's latest "reform" scheme to improve graduation rates in our public schools.

What Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan reveal with this new plan is that they are apparently cold-hearted technocrats working for corporate America to turn our schools into zones of fear and uncertainty.

For the standards and testing crowd, you can never put enough emphasis and importance on the cold, hard data. Inspirational teachers are worthless if the standardized tests don't show their students making sufficient yearly progress: fire'em!

One of the best grade school teachers I ever had made me love school for quite a long time ... that teacher wasn't especially good at sticking to the lesson plan, he told lots of stories about his own childhood, but he conveyed the sense that learning was a worthy adventure and endeavor that would last a lifetime. Obama and Duncan would probably have had him fired because undoubtedly our class wouldn't have done that great on a standardized test that year.

I have little but disdain for what Bush and Obama have and are doing to our young people in the public schools.

Man, we need some new political parties in this country ... that's for sure.

Educating for Democracy: Obama Flogs Teachers to Teach Better | Joel Shatzky/HuffingtonPost.com

One of my favorite expressions was written on a sign in my colleague's office when I first started teaching at SUNY, Cortland in the late 1960's: "The flogging will stop when morale improves." President Obama's new proposals for improving graduation rates in "failing" schools by firing "half the staff" (which half?) as a way of giving incentives to other teachers to "do better or else" reminds me of that witty saying. Only the results aren't going to be very funny.

Faced with losing their jobs, as has been happening in New York City under similar circumstances, teachers in threatened schools will not only "teach to the test" until all semblance of learning is driven out of the classroom: their supervisors will do the kind of "creative accounting" that will miraculously increase graduation rates, including the use of "credit recovery," a way of granting failing students high school diplomas without their passing the required exams.

In fact, in one of the southern states, in order to increase graduation rates, the single math course required for a high school diploma--an elementary algebra course--accepted a 24% grade as "passing." This was often only accomplished when the student had had a number of opportunities to retake the test after being coached.

My major problem with the criteria being used to determine if a school is "passing" or "failing" is that I'm unconvinced that standardized tests are an accurate way to measure student learning. In the relatively short time that I have been writing blogs on education, I've seen increasing evidence of these tests' unreliability. The vast discrepancy between the 97% A's and B's given to New York City schools last Spring in the State tests and the miserable results on the more demanding NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) tests are such examples. The one argument that standardized tests and graduation rates seem to have in their favor is that they provide "data" and that data can be used for all sorts of political purposes.

I've cited in past columns how "intelligence tests" given to World War l soldiers "proved" that Eastern European Jews were less worthy of being accepted for immigration to the United States than Northern Europeans because it was shown that the Jews were "intellectually inferior." It is this kind of "data" that can be used to justify the serious mistakes in educational policy that are being made in our schools today.

I went to a New York City high school in the late 1950's that you would assume had a lot of "great" teachers. Drop outs were almost unheard of, and 98% of those who graduated went on to college. I can't remember a single "prep test" although our teachers advised us--on our own--to look over the old Regents exams in a review book.

The fact was that not only were our teachers, for the most part, "average," although several of them were inspiring; a number of them, particularly the ones I remembered who taught math, were by anyone's standard "failing teachers": disorganized, unclear, impatient: bad. That, of course, didn't prevent most all of the students from passing their Regents exams in math. And by any standard of measurement, my high school, Music and Art--now LaGuardia--was extraordinarily successful. What was the secret of our success?

All--or almost all--of us came from middle-class, well-educated families who had a high regard for the arts, learning for its own sake, and an open-mindedness about what their children should read. Most of us, the sons and daughters of second-generation Americans, were also Jewish or of other newly immigrated backgrounds whose families regarded taking the time and expense to allow their children to excel in the arts as an obligation and a privilege.

It's unfortunate that the public assumes that the best students have the best teachers, and the worst students the worst teachers, because that simply isn't true. There are many "good teachers" in low-performing schools and more than a share of bad ones in outstanding schools. But to increase the number of good teachers in all schools, they have to be given conditions in which they can teach their best and that means when students can be raised in the best learning environment, an environment free of poverty. In the following analysis of Obama's program for improving the schools, I wish first to point out that the President does not mention any of the environmental factors that have a significant impact on whether or not the schools he considers "failures" would have a good chance of success in a "learning friendly" environment.

Of the four solutions he offers to what he sees as "failing schools," the "Turnaround Model" is, to me, the most thoughtless. The dictate is to "fire at least half the teachers and principal" and "implement a new or revised instructional program." If the objective in this exercise in the numbers game is merely to raise standardized test scores, the "instructional program" will be pretty much the same as its failed predecessor.

In the "Restart Model" a charter school or "management organization" will replace the regular public school (read: privatization of public schools). Not all charter schools are bad, certainly. However, one must consider the negative impact they have had on New York City as reported in this and many other similar blogs in setting parents of minority communities against each other and stigmatizing the students and former graduates of "failed schools" that are replaced by charters. Moreover, there is little evidence that charters are performing any better than regular public schools given their "ability" to cherry pick the most ready learners and reduce the number of students with learning disabilities and language limitations from being counted in their "test scores." It is hard not to conclude that charters are not the solution to the problems of public education: in fact, they add to these problems.

"School Closings" as a solution by enrolling "students in higher achieving schools in the district" presupposes that there are other schools in the district within easy access to the students who have just lost their neighborhood school. It also does not recognize that the schools to which these students transfer become overburdened and will themselves become low-achieving. A recent example of this educational catastrophe occurred when after the closing of Far Rockaway High School, the flood of students that overcrowded and overwhelmed the resources of Beach Channel High School has brought it down as well, at least according to Chancellor Klein's bizarre notion of "failure."

Finally, Obama's "Transformational Model" leaves the school intact but requires it to address "teacher effectiveness, instruction, learning and planning and operational flexibility." To what end: so it can get higher numbers on standardized tests?

If President Obama believes that some teachers should be fired, I agree with him: for molesting a student; for not showing up for class; for failing to make an effort to provide a positive environment in the classroom within the limitations imposed by social and economic conditions. But a teacher should not be fired for being unable to raise standardized test scores. Using test scores, especially when they are so arbitrary in what they prove, as a way of measuring a teacher's fitness to continue to teach is, as politely as I can put it: non-productive.

Most, although not by any means all, of our educational issues can be ameliorated by addressing the underlying problems which contribute to the likelihood of a poor education: poverty. With no mention of the many factors caused by poverty that lead to poor learning conditions, Obama's program for improving education in the United States is as likely to succeed as getting better weather by firing the local meteorologist.

Why I Call Them 'Dimocrats'

The 'Dimocrats' deserve to lose their majorities in the Colorado legislature ... and the governorship, too.

Last month, the Dimocrat majority in the legislature and the Dimocrat governor of this state enacted into law a provision that now places an even greater tax burden on our recession-stressed citizens and small businesses.

The state government is attempting to collect a regressive sales tax on internet purchases. While the prison system still grows and corporate welfare continues, while the state puts-up more cash to appease the 'No Child Left Behind' schooling scheme -- the politicians want to 'balance' the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable, least able to pay, by raising the sales tax on a variety of items.

Below is the text of a message sent to us today by Amazon, the internet book seller. It means that this small revenue source for www.DaveChandler.us is gone. It means that your contribution to keep DaveChandler.us functioning is even more important. I'll keep the "Recommended Reading" list in the column to the right, but be aware that DaveChandler.us will no longer receive any remuneration for the advertising or sales for Amazon products because of the Dimocrat-controlled state government of Colorado. And be aware, there are charitable and non-profit organizations in this state that raised funds through Amazon Associates Program that will also be negatively effected by this new law.

This development should serve as a reminder of the fraud of the Dimocrat Party as a 'progressive' political "party of the people." There is nothing progressive about sales taxes and there is nothing for the people in making us pay more to enable the corporatized government that we witness now at all levels, local to national.

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Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to "voluntarily" collect Colorado sales tax -- a course we won't take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado's new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill.

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

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