Across the Great Divide

Kersten in a Larger Context of Meaning and Beauty.

MEMORANDUM

To: All District Personnel

From: Ruskin Middle School Director of Curriculum

Subject: Sex Education Visual Aids

By now, you have heard about the unfortunate mishap at Ruskin Middle School in which two students were exposed to graphic information about sexual development and reproductive processes. A boy, who apparently has also not yet learned the function of eyelids, threw his shirt over his head to avoid seeing the educational materials. A girl went home in tears, much like other girls who come home in tears fearing they will bleed to death after experiencing their first period.

As a result, Ruskin has received unwanted publicity, and lost two students to home schooling for the coming academic year.

I am sorry to declare our experiment with post-1880s sex education a failure. We will revert to the wise principles of visual representation of sexuality as exemplified in the life of our school's name sake. (For those unfamiliar with the seminal role John Ruskin played in advancing young people toward loving and mature sexual relations, please see the attachment.)

Effective immediately, the following changes are to be implemented in visual aids used in the district's sex education curriculum. The proscribed visual images are listed below. Acceptable substitutes follow in parentheses.

• Naked males and females in various stages of development (clothed prepubescent males and females in various stages of development) NOT chimpanzees or other primates in any state of dress!
• A bra (gingham sun dress; basketball jersey over a sports bra; Brenda Starr comic strips (Dale Messick version only). Note: Realistic images featuring deep cleavage, even with a prominent crucifix, are not acceptable.
• A tampon (an out-of-focus shot of a personal hygiene products shelf; an out-of-focus shot of a rest room vending machine; a calendar with the date circled) Note: The Tampax web page How to use a tampon is now blocked from all district computers.
• An infra-red demonstration of an erection (Until further notice, there are no approved substitutes.)  Need I remind you of the Kielbasa Incident? And if you have information as to how the DVD of Boogie Nights got into the library's sleeve of "Conjugating Spanish Verbs," please notify the assistant principal.
• A live birth (bird's eggs hatching; still images from the State Fair's Miracle of Birth Center) Absolutely NO SHOW AND TELL home videos.
• Vaginas and those whatchamacallits (a halved peach; the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keefe)
• Condoms (At this time, the only accepted alternative is a Playtex Living Glove filled with water, while reciting condom failure rate statistics provided by the  Minnesota Family Council.) Our pilot program with Clyde the Condom Clown was not a success. Some parents failed to appreciate the balloons on bananas as a metaphor, and some boys went home in tears when the banana broke.

It has also been brought to our attention that the program materials have stripped sex of its larger context of meaning and beauty. Effectively immediately, you are instructed to:

• Remind students that, while reproduction is a biological process, sex has a larger context of meaning and beauty, provided you are a monogamous human being and not any other form of mammalian life.
• Play the cassette tape "Handel's Greatest Hits" during all Health Education classes
• Refrain from answering questions about the immaculate conception, the sexuality of Jesus or the relationship between Viagara, Bob Dole and Britny Spears, if any. Refer students who have questions not explicitly addressed in the curriculum to their parents and/or their minister/priest/rabbi/imam

While ignorance has not been proven 100-percent effective in preventing pregnancies among 11- and 12-year-olds, I know you share my goal of preventing teen pregnancies at least until 9th grade. Thanks for your cooperation.

Attachment

John Ruskin was a renowned British Art critic who pioneered the use of visual aids in sex education during the mid-1800s. His parents, of Scottish descent, were first cousins who were so concerned that he have a appropriate orientation toward the meaning and beauty of sex that they arranged his 1848 marriage with Euphemia Chalmers Gray and accompanied the couple on their honeymoon.

Six years later, the marriage was annulled on grounds of "incurable impotency," although Euphemia Ruskin had by then fallen in love with the painter John Everett Millais, whom she then married. There is scholarly disagreement over the precise reasons for Ruskin's marital non-consummation. As leading proponent of the idea that painting must convey "truth," Ruskin may have mistakenly believed that the idealized female forms painted by the masters were biologically accurate. He was therefore horrified on his wedding night to discover that Euphemia's nether regions sported hair instead of the widely painted, but ill-defined, bald mons venus. Some theories hold other natural feminine processes may have been involved.

Naturally, a little less parental supervision and more accurate information might have  avoided this unfortunate outcome. For the rest of his life, Ruskin tried to make up for this gap in his schooling.

Four years after the end of his marriage, Ruskin met and became enamored with Rose la Touche, an intensely religious 10-year-old who may have reminded him of his devout mother. He proposed when she was 17 and for years afterward, until he was finally rejected in 1872 and the young woman died.  

Ruskin also repeatedly asked children's book illustrator Kate Greenaway to draw her "girlies" without clothing:

Will you – (it’s all for your own good – !) make her stand up and then draw her for me without a cap – and, without her shoes, – (because of the heels) and without her mittens, and without her – frock and frills? And let me see exactly how tall she is – and – how – round. It will be so good of and for you – And to and for me.

That quest to share accurate but not-too-explicit information about the developing bodies of children continues to animate Ruskin Middle School. Go, Aesthetes!!

A College of One.

As reader Serns commented on a previous post, the original GI Bill was a grateful nation's reward for its citizen soldiers, not a recruitment come-on. From a CBS News report:

The law, officially called the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, promised returning veterans that the government would pay the full cost of tuition and books at any public or private college or job-training program. It also provided unemployment insurance and loans to buy homes and start businesses.

By contrast, the current Montgomery GI Bill, passed in 1984, asks active duty members to accept a pay reduction of $100 per month through twelve months of military service. When they return to school, they receive $1,100 monthly for a maximum of three years of education benefits. It's an amount that doesn't come close to covering the cost of a modern college education, but it does help some veterans — if they can get through the red tape.

Two generations later, there have also been dramatic changes in the cost and delivery of higher education. Today, many active duty military personnel are being encouraged to pursue their education online through such programs as the Army's eArmyU, which provides access to scores of college programs via a single portal that also includes services and information specific to the military. It had 75,000 soldiers enrolled by the end of 2006 and has continued to grow since.

Online degree programs are offered by traditional colleges as well as for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix, Capella University and American Military University. These programs focus on adult learners who are non-traditional —and to some extent, less-prepared to succeed for a variety of reasons.

Although I haven't found numbers on the proportion of veterans and active duty military, data from eLearners.com  showed that the top ranked cities per capita for prospective online learners were:

1. Hinesville-Fort Stewart, GA
2. Fort Polk South, LA
3. Jacksonville, NC
4. Fayetteville, NC
5. Fort Leonard Wood, MO
6. St. Marys, GA
7. Oak Harbor, WA
8. Ketchikan, AK
9. Warner Robins, GA
10. Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood, TX

Among these ten cities, six serve as the home base or post for members of the United States military. "Online learning is a perfect fit for servicemen and women," said Gansler. "Thousands of members of the military are turning to online education because it offers the flexibility needed to fit their schedule."

Well, yes, but according CBS News,

veterans are much less likely to graduate from college than students who have never served in the military. The department's most recent data show just 3 percent of veterans who entered a four-year college program in 1995 graduated by 2001, compared with a 30 percent overall graduation rate.

Another reason for that gap is the military experience itself. The Pentagon sells an educational dream to recruits. In addition to promising tens of thousands of dollars for a service member's college education, recruiters promise future soldiers that they'll be able to "attend college anywhere they are based and even in the combat zone through Internet classes offered from the college they are enrolled in."

But most Iraq War veterans say that’s a promise that exists only on paper.

I'm not knocking the military here, because it is one of the world's organizations most committed to training and education. Online programs, though not for everyone, certainly best fit military realities. But they also help sell a dream of access to an education that our country really isn't supporting as it once did.

St. Thomas Law: Serving a Growth Industry.

When the University of St. Thomas started its law school a few years ago, it set out to distinguish itself by integrating faith and the law. But is this the way to build your reputation as a law school?

St. Thomas has denied a law student academic credit for an internship with Planned Parenthood. In so doing, it joins ranks with other Catholic law schools and Pat Robertson's prestigious Regent University. Not to mention institutions of sharia law.

The young woman enrolled at St. Thomas with a different view of the school's mission.

"I thought Catholic doctrine would be reflected in the faculty and the curriculum, and it would be a safe place to talk about those issues, but not enforce them."

The church opposes birth control and abortion, so it holds a dim view of offering volunteer service at the agency. Presumably, it still opposes murder, rape, robbery and bearing false witness, all matters that involve the legal profession. If the church is truly worried about students having their faith somehow compromised or contaminated by exposure to the legal activities  of Planned Parenthood, perhaps it should come up with ways to insulate them from being around actual criminals, too.

Or it could do what these other law schools seem designed for — funneling more tunnel-vision Christians into the service of subverting government and working around existing laws. After all, that's where the job growth has been lately.

Angels or Taxes?

A year ago St. Agnes School was facing tough times. Read Spotty for a summary of how the St. Paul private Catholic school got in poor financial condition.

You'll find none of it in Joe Kimball's feel-good story, largely about how the school is back on solid footing after raising $3 million, $2.6 million of which came from two donors.

Think of it. One school needs more money to survive and finds a couple angels. Maybe that's how we should fund education. There are roughly 2,700 K-12 schools in the state.

How many angels?

Superintendent Survey Brings Out the Geniuses.

This week, Minnesota 2020 released results from a survey of more than half the state's school superintendents. More than 99 percent of the respondents said the state's education funding system is broken. Almost 90 percent said the quality of education in the state will continue to decline if the system isn't fixed.

In addition to the survey report, Minnesota 2020 laid out the impact of mandated special education services in public schools — and state and federal under-reimbursement for those costs. 

Many commenters on the Pioneer Press report of the findings weren't impressed.

Minnesota needs to stop throwing money at the education mess and come up with a new plan. We have in real terms increased spending on K-12 by 28% (adjusted for inflation) the past 10 years while our student enrolment numbers have declined. MN spends 2.6 billion on special education and ESL each year. These children are not our future inventors and leaders[,] who are being short changed by Minnesota schools.

Parents of Gifted and Talented youths better be wealthy because most districts have the parents pay hundreds of dollars out of their own pockets to have their children tested and then these parents pay thousands more out of their pockets to place these students in accelerated classes at the UofM and elsewhere, yet we spend billions on children who are mentally challenged and inspire to one day clean up after us at McDonalds.

Minnesota needs to break free of Federal mandates that force us to spend 2.6 billion on special education and ESL (Supposedly reimbursed by the Federal Government but has never been so) and use this money to invest in the gifted and talented and “average” student body. We need to stop wasting 19% of our yearly State Education budget on future Wal-Mart greeters and spend it on our future engineers, scientists, and leaders!
— Mankato Mike

Wow, Mankato Mike. Not many people have the guts to say that. But well said. You hit on the real reason that there is never enough money for schools. There isnt enough for 'normal' school things, teachers, books etc. because too much is required to be spent on the bottom of the accademic barel. Trying with all the might possible to do some really noble things. The only problem is that it is happening at the expense of the rest of the barrel.

Not that the bottom of the barrel should be drained out from the barrel, but we need to stop trying to make it into top shelf stuff.
— Brandon

Eventually, commenter NNR saved me the trouble of responding with an excellent post.

The goal of education is not to make geniuses of all people, but to give each student the education that will help them become the best adults they can be. Schools are supposed to be turning out people who become independent, contributing members of society. It goes far beyond scientists and leaders...

When we introduce a hierarchy of "rights" based on who we think will be the most valuable members of society, where does it stop? Do we stop with education or do we determine which other rights should be withheld. Who gets health insurance? Who lives in which community? How about who lives and who dies? Would you make the cut, Mike?

Special education includes not just those with significant cognitive delays, but those with mental health issues, physical disabilities, dyslexia and related cognitive issues and learners for whom English is a new language. Have you ever heard of F. W. Woolworth, Albert Einstein, George Patton, and Nelson Rockefeller? Under your criteria, they would not have been given an education.

As for expense to parents of gifted kids, every student in Minnesota has the right to enter college when they are a junior in high school. This accelerated program provides the opportunity for a student to attend two years of college at no expense to parents. The state pays the full cost of tuition and books, and local districts lose $6,000 per student in aid. The parents pay nothing.

It is a crime that the federal government has not lived up to its end of the bargain and is only covering 17% of the 40% they promised when they enacted special education laws. Your beef should not be with those who receive special education, but those who wrote the laws and then reneged on their promise.

Could this outpouring from the Special-Ed-is-ruining-the-schools forces signal a return of last year's "Freedom to Poop" campaign with which certain GOP wits smeared DFL legislation? Are they going to merge with their natural allies, the anti-immigrant, anti-union and pro-school voucher folks?

Or will they be too busy in their jobs as CEOs and rocket scientists to propose actual solutions for the funding problem?

UPDATE: David Brauer has a post about PiPress commenters.

Boys and Girls Apart.

A school district in Georgia is making all its public schools switch to single-sex classrooms in an effort to improve student performance.

Big changes are needed to drive a big improvement in student achievement, say school leaders. Although radical, segregating classrooms is a relatively simple change to implement. Whether it has been shown effective is another matter.

Research shows that when boys and girls are separated, each group performs better in school and is more likely to go to college, said Julie Ancis, a professor in the school of education at Georgia State University.

But she said single-sex schools tend to be private institutions with updated technology and ample resources, not poor school systems like Greene County's.

Meanwhile, Greene County, with 70 percent black students,  has one charter school that's still coed. And, you guessed it, in the prosperous, mostly white part of town.

Sometimes You Make a Difference.

I've taken a break from reading stuff about taxes, economic development and who's tried on tribal costumes, but even my fun reading draws me back to politics.

'Zines may seem to be the polar opposite of white papers on education and transportation policy, but they can also offer a potent reminder of why any of this politics stuff matters.

A few days ago, I read Call for Reservations, an account of working as a housekeeper at a Super 8 Motel in Stillwater, Minnesota, that was used in part by the county for transitional housing. Elizabeth Belz is an artist who has lived Nickled and Dimed for real, and she exposes aspects of motel life you'd probably rather not know.

Now, I'm halfway through On Subbing, an expanded collection of Dave Roche's 'zines documenting four years as a Substitute Special Needs Educational Assistant.

Roche was a punk rocker who, as one reviewer put it, spent a brief time in the "thrift store clerk industry" before signing on as a classroom aide in the Portland, Oregon, schools. He worked as a sub, which meant he had brief assignments in a wide variety of schools.

What makes his stories so compelling is that he worked with the kids who are on the absolute fringes of the system — the behavior problem kids, kids with retardation or severe physical disabilities, homeless kids, very few of whom would fit the definition of students.

It's a harrowing and heartbreaking picture, as Roche describes the barriers some of his charges face. Two boys are abandoned by their mother in a homeless shelter. When some of his medically fragile kids go home, it's to a hospital. Changing a diaper or keeping a boy calm might be all he gets accomplished in a day.

Mostly, he retains his empathy and his humor. After one frustrating day he reminds himself, "I'm getting paid to play with Duplos." Though not paid very much.

He's inspired by a one-on-one assignment with an "awesome and super cheerful" boy who's paralyzed from the neck down, and considers the school's offer to take the open position to be his regular aide. But it's only for half days, and though he tries to work it out, the school can't give him hours for the rest of the day. He leaves feeling guilty, but heeding the holes in his shoes and his empty stomach. He can't live on the part-time work.

 

Unlike the kind of poignant Hallmark snapshots political candidates haul out for Message: We Care, 'zines like Belz's and Roche's preserve raw emotions and offer gritty realities.

It's easy enough for progressives to stand for some sort of idealized social services without appreciating how damned difficult the work is and how little apparent effect some of it might have. For conservatives who see social services as a waste of money, I'd ask them to read Roche and then ask for their solutions. It's difficult to see how vouchers and privatizing education would lead to any better outcomes for these kids.

A commenter on the publisher's site put it pretty well.

There are no To Sir With Love/Dangerous Minds moments when he realizes that he can truly make a difference in the lives of these needy children. Sometimes Dave makes a difference. Sometimes he gets kicked in the balls.

With each new class, it could go either way. Which is not to say that the book isn’t inspiring. I fully admit to tearing up when I read Dave’s account of asking all his friends to shoplift supplies for a severely underfunded school. When his lightfingered crowd comes through and provides the school with necessities like markers, paper, and Spanish/English dictionaries, Dave leaves the goods in the staff room with a note saying only, “Here are some gifts from the punks.”

I found both these books in the Studio Shop at Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Big Brain comics, right down the street, is a superb source for more of this subversive but also affirming work.

Pawlenty's Speech: Part Obama, Part Clinton, Mostly Norquist.

The latest anti-Obama meme floating around is that his speeches have no policy specifics, as if the place for wonkery is before 18,000 people in a sports arena. Yeah, that's a good way for a candidate to galvanize young voters.

I'm thinking instead, a better opportunity to talk specifics might be a governor's State of the State address.

Last week, we saw how well that works.

Gov. Pawlenty devoted at least a third of the speech to uplifting praise and platitudes, uninterrupted by any policy content whatsoever. The middle of the sandwich contained some greens — consisting of biofuels bouquets and parkland purchase interspersed with let's help our farmers and cut taxes on businesses — but very little meat. There was scant mention of transportation funding, the big item on the year's agenda.

We heard a vague call for health care reform that predictably suggested we increase use of electronic medical records, prevent chronic conditions and pay for outcomes.

When the governor got more specific, he sounded almost like Bill Clinton, floating nice-sounding ideas that will go absolutely nowhere. For education, the most detailed part of his speech, Pawlenty talked about expanding the talent pool of teachers, but he also called for a cap on property taxes and ignored how underfunding school districts is a factor in making teaching an unappealing career for new teachers.

He also avoided any mention of higher ed or cost-effective investment in education, concluding his speech with this blockbuster policy idea:

I encourage anyone here to purchase or download one of today's state of the art video games with enhanced graphics and sound. Imagine that power being applied to fourth grade math or tenth grade social studies.

Let's get started by developing a world-class, digitally-stored, always-available, anywhere, anytime, jaw-dropping, eye-popping teaching toolbox accessible to all our teachers and students.

At heart, he's a cutter, not a creator, though he tries to have it both ways.

Battling tax policy advisory groups is probably too inside baseball even for my dedicated readers, but if you're so inclined, read Lori Sturdevant's column. The legislature already has a bipartisan study group that includes appointees by Gov. Pawlenty, whose speech declared his intent to create a more business-friendly "21st Century Tax Reform Commission."

Unlike the State Budget Trends Study group that is already under way, this commission will specifically focus on improving our job climate by reforming Minnesota's tax laws. Job providers, entrepreneurs, private sector employees, investors, and others who actually have direct experience in creating private sector jobs will be members of this commission.

No word on whether he intends to appoint members who have experience collecting public subsidies and using tax breaks to create jobs, although after the Legislative Auditor's report on the JOBZ program, he may have trouble finding volunteers.

Color me skeptical, but if the tax reform commission is composed entirely of taxed business interests, let's dispense with the bureaucracy. Grover Norquist could write that report right now.

Colorado Flavors of Minnesota-like Issues.

My two states are both hosting national conventions, expressing concern about the environment, fretting over higher education and trying to figure out how to fund transportation improvements. Feels like home, either place, but with some differences...

Too bad [...] that Denver didn't land the GOP convention instead, said Carol Leigh, a San Francisco prostitute "over 50" who has traveled to previous Democratic conventions in Los Angeles and Atlanta.

"It would be a lot better for the sex workers if it was the Republican convention," she said.

"We get a lot more business. I don't know if they're just frustrated because of the family values agenda," she said.

[...]

Even though they attract a lot of people, political conventions aren't the most profitable for the men and women in the world's oldest profession, Leigh said.

"Computer conventions can be lucrative," she said. "There's a lot of nerds that don't get out much."

– Rocky Mountain News

*****

Loveland, Colorado, officials are giving a crematorium that wants to move into town the choice between installing a $500,000 smokestack scrubber or pulling the mercury fillings from corpses to avoid spreading heavy metal pollution.

*****

The University of Colorado — which has already shown an uncanny ability to choose heads of academic departments, excuse  football coaches and recruit players — is now hiring a new president.

Former president Hank Brown, who came in after the football scandals, was a former meatpacking company executive who later served in the House and Senate.

The sole finalist for the job is Bruce Benson, an oil and gas executive and former chairman of Colorado's Republican Party. Benson has only a bachelor's degree, but also has his name on the university's Benson Earth Sciences Building, where his portrait was defaced over the weekend. Usually prickly faculty don't seem all that worried about Benson's academic credentials, while, of course, some Democrats see it differently.

*****
Colorado transportation spending is also running behind. About $500 million a year in new revenue is the minimum needed to maintain the state’s highway system — more is needed to handle anticipated growth. But voters have to approve any new tax increases, so some other schemes are being proposed.

At one point in time, parking spots in downtown Denver were free because there was an abundance of parking space with little demand for it. Today, drivers expect to pay a fee to park their cars where demand is high, such as downtown during the day, and to pay even more when that parking spot is at peak demand, such as at a Rockies baseball game.

During very specific times, highway space along I-70 is as scarce a resource as a downtown parking space. Given this problem, it is time for us to ask people to slightly change their driving habits, much in the same way they do for parking, in order to allocate scarce highway resources.

When people put a value on highway space, they will change their habits in ways that will benefit our state’s economy and reduce carbon emissions. A 5 percent change in driving habits can reduce congestion by 50 percent. The fee necessary to change behavior could be minimal enough to actually save drivers the extra gas money they currently pay to sit in hours of traffic during high-demand times.

Killing Business.

With the murder of Grandma's Marathon champion Wesly Ngetich last week, many Minnesotans found a personal connection to the strife in Kenya following the re-election of President Mawi Kubaki. The conflict is not just over ethnic differences or a stolen election.

It's also about dashed hopes for many of Kenya's have-nots that a win by opposition leader Raila Odinga would have meant fulfillment of a campaign promise to distribute wealth more equitably.

Deep economic divisions and arrogant exercise of power have helped shake apart one of Africa's most stable democracies, one that had knit together many different tribal groups.

Now riots have made it worse. The Washington Post reports how one Kenyan town is suffering because business has been driven out, needed food and supplies aren't coming in, and jobs may not be coming back.

Businessmen may be risk-takers, but they generally aren't looking to invest in opportunities to get burned out and killed. Businesses are both engines and anchors, and when they go, a community is set adrift.

As someone who writes about taxes and state policy, I often bump up against the charge that wanting to reduce economic disparities is really about hating the wealthy and redistributing their assets. There's no ignoring the fact that raising taxes on high earners redistributes income, but so does selling overpriced groceries, cashing paychecks for a fee and charging 99 percent interest on consumer loans.

And so does war.

The challenge for a society is finding the best, most equitable and productive ways to redistribute income so most people can make it on their own. Killing business is clearly not the way to do it. But neither is leaving unregulated the systems that prey on low income people under the guise of serving them. Nor is gradually abandoning the education systems that might give them the means to break free.

Investing in education is important, but an educated person who can't find work is only marginally less dangerous than an ignorant one. Multiply them by many thousands and things begin to unravel. Color or ethnic allegiances only reveal the unwinding, not the causes.

Last week I read a hopeful story about a small renaissance on a troubled corner in North Minneapolis where a brutal murder occurred three years ago. A lot of these stories have been written in the forty years since the North Side business community was transformed by riots in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination.

Only a few turned out to be true.

It's 8,100 miles from Kisumu, Kenya, to North Minneapolis — but they're not so far apart.