In recent years, California's education establishment has taken some small steps back from the brink of educational disaster, though not before its untested educational theories pushed a large number of unfortunate children over the edge. After years in which the official state framework for language arts touted "whole language," which purported to teach children how to read without explaining to them the secret of how it was done, the state landed at the bottom of the national heap in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. No coincidence, that. The math framework similarly elevated process over results. The curriculums based on that framework have only recently been implemented in many districts, and as soon as they do test scores start to fall. "We're already last in reading scores, and now we're trying to hit rock bottom in math," said Assembly Republican Steve Baldwin, with pardonable sarcasm. "That's our next goal." The state Board of Education has heard the message. Recently, they tossed two of the most egregious "whole language" reading series off the list of approved texts. Late last year, they rejected a number of nominees to the committee selected to revise the math framework and replaced them with people who really think it needs to be revised. The result, naturally, has been consternation on the part of the true believers. And they're trying to regain control of events by targeting members of the board as they come up for confirmation or reappointment. One, Janet Nicholas, will appear before the Senate Rules Committee March 3. She was appointed last year by Gov. Pete Wilson, and must be confirmed before April 1 in order to remain on the board. She needs three votes on the committee for her nomination to go before the full Senate, and then a two-thirds vote. Nicholas is a former Sonoma County supervisor, and subsequently served on the state's parole board. What impelled her into working for better education, she said, was discovering how many of the people who came before the board had reading difficulties. As a member of the Board of Education, she says, she focuses on making sure that the policies the board adopts are based on properly conducted research. Too often, anecdotal evidence is accepted as research. Delaine Eastin, the state superintendent of schools, is publicly staying neutral on Nicholas' appointment. But she was fuming in November, when she wrote a letter to the board president complaining about Nicholas' role in the selection of the Math Framework Committee. Two other education board members, Kathryn Dronenburg and Jerry Hume, were up for reappointment in January, and teachers and bureaucrats are orchestrating a letter-writing campaign opposing them to state senators, especially Rules Committee Chairman Bill Lockyer, D-Hayward. In a sample letter drafted for circulation to members of the California Association of Teachers of English, one teacher wrote, (Dronenburg and Hume) "want to change the make up of the Instructional Resources Panel for Mathematics to reflect their agenda . . . an agenda which would deny higher order math skills to most kids and keep math in its historically ineffective mode of mind-numbing, repetitive, and meaningless tables of problems." I have no doubt at all that the person who wrote this sincerely believes it. But all the research evidence suggests the opposite is true; a solid grounding in fundamental skills is essential for children to learn anything at all of "higher order math skills." She goes on, "They were also active in the removal of two publishers from the recommended list for language arts adoption and the attempt to add two totally unbalanced programs, again reflecting their fear of programs which support self reliance and emphasis on thinking and personal response." Where's the evidence to support this attack on the motives of the people who disagree with her? There is none. But beyond that, she's simply wrong about the issue. Most research indicates that teaching children to read with a strong dose of phonics is the most successful method for the most children. For instance, research presented earlier this month at the Seattle conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science reported a Houston study comparing whole-language teaching with phonics-based instruction. At the end of the year, only 6 percent of the children in the phonics-based group had serious reading deficiencies. In the whole-language group, it was 33 percent at the lowest level. Good teachers won't use phonics to the exclusion of reading to their classes, or doing other classroom activities that instill a love of literature. A balanced program is the best possible foundation for strong, independent readers, and self-reliant thinkers as well. That's what Janet Nicholas thinks, and Kathryn Dronenburg and Jerry Hume as well. If you agree, you might want to let Sen. Lockyer know. He's at 2032 State Capitol, Sacramento, CA 95814, 1-916-445-6671; district office fax is 582-0822. Subj: Pendulum swing Date: 97-02-23 14:57:33 EST From: SPedJO To: Valleytms Linda Seebach: In referenced to your 2/23/97 editorial on State Board of Ed: Please remember that during "..last in reading scores.." and "...rock bottom in math.." times, California also holds near-records of 'highest class size' and 'lowest per pupil spending'. It is never as simple as "whole language". None of my fellow teachers left out phonics teaching during the 'whole language' era. They are glad to have more emphasis on phonics materials, but are HORRIFIED that the good supplemental reading material is now practically forbidden at the state level. Joanne Campbell Lafayette, CA Subj: The Politics of Phonics Date: 97-03-22 19:21:27 EST From: brucec76@ix.netcom.com To: Valleytms@aol.com Ms. Seebach, Mike McKeown of Mathematically Correct just directed me to your recent column about phonics and Nicholas, Hume, Dronenburg, Eastin et al. Thank you for your vigil and commentary. If we ever get California education back on track, it will in no small part be because of you and your colleague across the bay, Debra Saunders. I commented to Mike that I don't know where the male journalists are on this. Occasionally Dan Walters or someone else will write a piercing column, but in my opinion the best work is being done by the distaff side. I don't have any answers, but I'm glad you ladies are lighting things up on public ed. Thanks for a great job! Bruce Crawford Orange County, CA Subj: Linda Seebach's editorial Date: 97-03-23 00:23:40 EST From: vcmth00m@email.csun.edu (david klein) To: Valleytms@aol.com Linda; What a great editorial. Keep up the good work! David Klein Prof. of Mathematics CSUN ------------ Stepping Back From California's Educational Abyss Twenty years ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about the consequences of living a lifetime with the lies of Soviet communism. "For decades, while we were silent, our thoughts . . . lost touch with each other, never learned to know each other, ceased to check and correct each other. "The stereotypes of required thought," Solzhenitsyn said, "made mental cripples of us and left very few minds undamaged." Though he had little hope at the time that the tyranny he knew would vanish, he predicted that if it ever did, its victims would have great difficulty relearning the uses of freedom. Even when they could say whatever they wanted, their ability to think anything other than what they had been taught and required to say would have atrophied. Solzhenitsyn's dismal prophecy is quoted by Timur Kuran in his book "Private Truths, Public Lies," which examines the social consequences of lying about one's beliefs, which he calls "preference falsification." Kuran is professor of economics and King Faisal professor of Islamic thought and culture at the University of Southern California. There are lots of reasons why people misrepresent what they really feel, of course, and some of them seem harmless enough. "Thanks for the marvelous evening!" has obvious advantages over "What a bunch of bores" — especially if the host or hostess is someone important to one's career. Kuran, however, is painting on a broader canvas. The first panel shows an individual, putting forth opinions that he does not hold in response to real or imagined social pressures. It may be to gain some reward for holding the right opinion, or to avoid punishment for holding the wrong one. Such punishments can be severe, as the Soviet experience reminds us, and people who comply with social pressures to save their lives or their fortunes are not necessarily sacrificing their sacred honor. Not everyone is cut out to be a Solzhenitsyn. In the second panel Kuran draws the crowd. Individuals still mask their views, but the masks they choose are determined by all the faces they see around them. Some of the faces may be honest, but many are not. The opinions some present falsely contribute to the social pressure that convinces others that pretense is the better part of valor for them as well. Such a situation is essentially unstable, although it may not appear so. Public agreement may hide increasing private dissatisfaction, until some event trivial in itself impels a few people to speak their minds. Their courage (if they survive) emboldens others and with little or no warning everybody jumps on a bandwagon that is suddenly heading in the opposite direction. "Deceptive stability and explosive change are thus two sides of a single coin," Kuran writes. The model explains why the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed with such astonishing rapidity. Kuran's third vision is that dark future Solzhenitsyn portrays. So many people have been pretending for so long that they have forgotten even how to think about the opinions they once held in private. The evidence they would need to support their beliefs vanishes from public debate. "An unthinkable belief," Kuran writes, "is a thought that one cannot admit having, . . . without raising doubts about one's civility, morality, loyalty, practicality or sanity. "An unthought belief is an idea that is not even entertained." Kuran offers a poignant example. In the 1970s, when sociologist James Coleman was doing research on inequalities of educational opportunity, he discovered two things: that children's success was strongly affected by their teachers' verbal ability as revealed on standardized tests, and that black teachers, many of them trained in segregated schools, did badly on such tests. But the potential implications of the idea that black children might do just as well or better with white teachers were simply unthinkable, and Coleman and his colleagues did not pursue it. Looking back on the episode, Coleman admitted it could be true that "we aided in the sacrifice of educational opportunity for many children, most of whom were black, to protect the careers of black teachers." But that was by no means the most unfortunate consequence. When Coleman's research was published, it concluded that black children did better in integrated schools, without making clear that the likely explanation was differences in teachers' qualifications. Skill-specific retraining, for all teachers, could have solved that problem. But judges relying on Coleman's results didn't know that. Instead, courts across America ordered massive busing as a remedy for racial imbalance in the schools, with tragic consequences. Besides politics in Eastern Europe, and America's tortured debate about race, Kuran offers a third case study, of the caste system in India. Kuran says that once he began to think about preference falsification, he saw it everywhere. But he also began to value more highly "the independent streak in the human character, to the spirit that gives one the courage to say 'no' when the pressures of the moment demand a 'yes.'" He's more appreciative now, he says, of the nonconformist, the pioneer, the innovator, the dissident — even the misfit. He hopes readers will come to share his appreciation, and that's one preference I don't have to falsify. Subj: Re: LINDA SEEBACH: The consequences of lying about one's beliefs Date: 97-02-15 01:45:36 EST From: sailfish@unforgettable.com (Patrick 'Sailfish' Thompson) To: Valleytms@aol.com Linda, another excellent article. I recently purchased a book, The Soul's Code, James Hillman, that speaks to the last few sentences of your article. While I've not yet been able to finish it (very weighty) it offers another look at what may the better way to view rebels and misfits. I firmly believe that Public Lies, Private Truths (aka, Political Correctness) often gets in the way of providing true resolutions to some of our most difficult problems. I do feel, however, that the winds of change are about us. People are beginning to question their lemming tendencies and demanding to hold public officials more accountable to their dogma. They are expecting to see positive results after much monetary and personal investments. Call me an optimist or naive but it cannot continue this way much longer or the predictions of the Bell Curve will be realized and, sadly, not for any of the reasons outlined in the well-known research but for faulty teaching methods... http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/voices/021597/voices10_850.html -- Best Regards, Pat "Surfin' the Net...grappling with the 3rd Wave" ====================== Subj: consequences Date: 97-02-16 09:07:51 EST From: cthomas@csrlink.net (Charles Thomas) Reply-to: cthomas@csrlink.net To: Valleytms@aol.com He's more appreciative now, he says, of the nonconformist, the pioneer, the innovator, the dissident even the misfit. Did you ask him about Clarence Thomas? -- Chas * _______ * ____.-.____ * * * * . \______]) \_________/ * * . * . * . * . . _||______//_"-" * cthomas@mail.csrlink.net `--._______]{ * * * I will probably never have my hair done in an African hairbraiding style, but just the same I'm cheering for JoAnne Cornwell of San Diego. She wants to open a hair salon offering her trademarked style "sisterlocks," and to teach others how to do it. The California State Board of Barbering and Cosmetology says it's illegal for her to style hair unless she gets a cosmetology license. Cosmetology in California, as in most other states, is a highly regulated occupation. To get a license, applicants have to complete 1,600 hours of classroom and practical study. The prescribed curriculum requires 60 hours of instruction in manicures and pedicures, 30 hours in eyebrow arching and removal, and so on, including -- to add insult to injury -- 20 hours spent on the cosmetology board's rules and regulations. Hairbraiding and other African hairstyles are not part of the curriculum. So on Jan. 28, Cornwell, together with the American Hairbraiders and Natural Hair Care Association, filed suit in federal court in San Diego, with legal assistance from the Institute for Justice, based in Washington. D.C. The suit asks for an end to enforcement of "arbitrary, excessive, and anachronistic occupational licensing laws and regulations" that keep them from earning a living in the manner they choose. For Cornwell, the issue is cultural autonomy as well as economic liberty. An African-American woman whose mother and grandmother owned hair salons, she is also the chair of the Africana Studies Department at San Diego State University and teaches in the French department there. "We have the ability to set new standards based on our unique and stunning attributes, and it is high time we began seriously asking ourselves what symbols we are wearing on our heads," Cornwell writes. She deliberately designed her "sisterlocks" program to offer entrepreneurial opportunities for women who couldn't afford the $5,000 to $7,000 it costs to get a cosmetology license. Besides doing her own clients' hair, she trains others in her styles. But she could be cited for a misdemeanor, like a San Diego business called the Braiderie, which was charged with "aiding and abetting unlicensed activity" and fined $100. There's a historical irony in the history of cosmetology regulation. Fifty years ago, women hairdressers were agitating for the right to work on women's hair independent of rules imposed by male barbers. They won that fight, and the rules now being challenged are the result. Perhaps that makes it a good time to ask why licensing is needed at all. The California board is close to sailing off into the sunset in any case. Last year the state's Department of Consumer Affairs did a "sunset review" and concluded that the board performed few necessary functions although it had a $9.2 million budget and 105 employees. The board will cease to exist in July unless the Legislature acts to revive it -- and when that happens, the DCA will take over its powers. So no one should be surprised that the DCA recommended merely trimming the tangle of regulations instead of shearing them off entirely. When I wrote about Charles Murray's new libertarian book recently, I didn't have room to mention one of his more intriguing ideas: let businesses choose whether they want to be regulated or unregulated, identify themselves clearly if they are not, and then let customers decide whether the benefits of regulation are worth their costs. Would people fly an unregulated airline? Probably not. Would they patronize an unregulated hair stylist? Why shouldn't they? There are health and safety issues, obviously, but they are not grave. California's current board spends $4 million a year on enforcement, and oversees some 400,000 people with licenses, but deals with fewer than 10 cases a year alleging physical harm. Adult women can be trusted to decide for themselves who will style their hair. In fact, because the risks are so small, this would be an excellent trial arena for Murray's insidious thought experiment. Proving that ordinary people are capable of conducting their economic lives with much less government interference than they currently suffer is one of the goals of this lawsuit, according to the Institute of Justice, the non-profit group that is providing Cornwell and the other plaintiffs with legal representation. "This effort has enormous resonance in light of welfare reform's emphasis on transitioning people from welfare to work," said Clint Bolick, the institute's director of litigation. "Government regulations that exceed legitimate public health and safety objectives are cutting off the bottom of the economic ladder." Bolick's group has notched some successes. In Washington, D.C., it won a federal court decision overturning a ban on streetcorner shoeshine stands. And the district deregulated hairbraiding after the Institute sued on behalf of an enterprise called Cornrows & Co. Taalib-din Uqdah, one of the proprietors of Cornrows, started the hairbraiders' association to help others struggling with the same restrictive legislation. The institute also won a case challenging Houston's law banning jitneys, and forced Colorado to allow new entrants to Denver's taxicab market. "The Institute's efforts will not cease until the right of every American to earn an honest living is secure," Bolick says. 2/9 Jim Conran, director of consumer affairs in the first Wilson administation, column is right on target Subj: RE: hairbraiding column Date: 97-02-10 16:06:52 EST From: jkramer@instituteforjustice.org (John Kramer) To: Valleytms@aol.com ('Valleytms@aol.com') WOW!!!!! I'm sorry: WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you so much for the wonderful piece. I'll ship it over to JoAnne & Company. Best regards, Kramer Subj: cosmetology column Date: 97-02-11 14:41:02 EST From: 76435.137@compuserve.com (RJ Reader's Opinions) To: Valleytms@aol.com (Linda Seebach) Hi Linda Seebach: I believe we communicated via e-mail briefly a few months ago when you had a letter from one of our readers referring to a piece you had done. I have a question on your latest, the one about cosmetology. I happen to be highly suspicious of credentialism, and was interested by your column and plan to use it because of its connection with that subject. But I noted that the column, as transmitted, says a cosmetologist needs 1,600 hours of instruction, and you gave only 110 hours of examples. Can that be correct? It's been a while since I took college courses, but it seems to me the books were consistent: either they referred to total hours in courses and used yearly hour totals in the requirements (Law school did it that way because the New York laws required so many hundreds of hours of instruction to be eligible to take the bar exam) or they dealt in weekly hours — as in a 3-hour math course yielding 3 credits. Assuming a 30 hour course in "eyebrow arching and removal" is ten weeks of a 3-hour course, it would take a long time to accumulate 1,600 hours. I thought cosmetology was a sort of vocational study, and they typically run 8-week courses, albeit intensive. It seems to me that I wouldhave had to spend two or three more years in lawschool to tally up 1,600 hours of study, and if that's really the case, someone isn't taking legal education seriously enough!! Thanks for clarifying this for me. Allan Church Editorial Page Editor Meriden CT telephone call from a reader in Littleton, Col., who saw the column in the Rocky Mountain News; she's looking for help on behalf of a small company her son works for that has been targeted by the EEOC. Subj: Your Column Date: 97-02-11 18:00:45 EST From: pciotti@earthlink.net (Paul Ciotti) Reply-to: pciotti@earthlink.net To: Valleytms@aol.com Hi Linda: I just noticed your recent column on hair braiding and see that you're up in Pleasanton now. Good for you. I wrote for the Daily News a little while longer than you did. But not much. They wanted shorter and shorter columns and more and more local news. Not my cup of tea. How are things in Pleasanton? Best (He said it was on the Nando Page) Charles Murray was once called "the most dangerous conservative in America." I don't think he's dangerous, though I can easily see why ideological opponents who resent his extraordinary effectiveness would feel that way. But nobody should think Murray is a conservative. He's a radical, and the root he nurtures in his new book, "What It Means to be A Libertarian" is the sturdy constitutional one planted by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. "Human happiness requires freedom," he says in the introduction, "and freedom requires limited government . . . shorn of almost all of the apparatus we have come to take for granted during the last sixty years." The traditional word for this philosophy is "liberal," sometimes called "classical liberal" to distinguish it from the L-word policies that creep like kudzu into every crevice of our personal and private lives. Rather than risk that confusion, Murray elects to call himself a (lower-case) libertarian. The proper functions of a libertarian government are three: to restrain people from injuring each other through force or fraud; to enforce contracts; and fosters public goods (things that can't be provided to anyone unless everyone has them). Our current government has arrogated to itself many more functions than that, and as a result it does few of them well. The first problem with most government interventions, Murray says, is that they are ineffectual. And he illustrates the point with a graph -- not just any graph, but Everygraph. It has no labels and no scales; it could be anything. The graph trends quite sharply down from left to right, then takes a little kink and flattens out. His challenge: Without knowing what this is a graph of, mark the point where the government stepped in. The answer: Nothing marks the point. This particular graph, he lets on later, happens to show highway fatality rates, and the invisible mark is the imposition of a federal speed limit. But the pattern is typical for most trendline graphs. When the trendlines show social indicators before and after government intervention, "deterioration has been the rule and improvement is the exception. "Among trendlines involving safety and health, the most common result is . . . nothing. Whatever was happening before the government got involved continues to happen." We have sold our birthright of freedom for a mess of red tape and gained nothing in exchange. The second problem with government intervention is that it displaces whatever solutions civil society had found or would find. Social Security virtually wiped out the private social-insurance functions that existed when it was created. "Another example lies in the web of parental pressures and social stigma that kept illegitimacy rare, combined with the private charitable and adoption services that coped with the residual problem," he writes. "Intricate, informal, but effective, this civil system could not withstand the proliferation of welfare benefits for single mothers." This echoes an analysis from his influential earlier book, "Losing Ground," where Murray asked readers to think about the incentives facing Harold and Phyllis, typical young people who face the problem of deciding what to do when Phyllis finds out she's pregnant. Once, they would have married as a matter of course; why don't they now? Once enough people started thinking that way, and not about entitlements and benefits, the end of welfare as a way of life became politically feasible. I caught up with Murray's book tour Tuesday in San Francisco, at a luncheon sponsored by the Independent Institute of Oakland. He elaborated on the central insight of his new book: that we don't need to have universal solutions to our problems; we need solutions that satisfy the people close to them. We don't know how to achieve "a drug-free America" using cops, courts and prisons, he said, but that's the wrong question anyway. What people really care about is that their kids attend schools that are safe and drug-free, and that's easy as long as schools have the authority to implement policies as strict as parents want. Government policy, has made it much harder for people to live in neighborhoods that reflect and support their values, especially if they don't have a great deal of money. They no longer can use good character as an asset. Government has plopped housing projects in the middle of neighborhoods, made eviction of bad tenants difficult, and restricted the rights of landlords to choose their tenants. All with the best of intentions, but with pernicious results. The decline of civil society in the past 30 years, Murray observed, has nothing to do with money -- it's that the essential stuff of life has moved to a bureaucracy downtown. Most people gain their deepest satisfactions in life from the ties of family and community; we are spouses and parents, friends and neighbors. Those ties are strengthened by reciprocal obligations, freely offered and accepted; they fray and snap when all we have to do with each other is to pay our taxes and collect our benefits. Subj: Attn: Linda Seebach Date: 97-02-05 11:51:53 EST From: jeremiah@usa.net (Jere Joiner) Reply-to: jeremiah@usa.net To: Valleytms@aol.com Re: Charles Murray article-- I am a writer for a weekly paper in Colorado, and have sold a few articles to the Denver Post. I wanted to congratulate you on your Charles Muray article. It should be required reading for editors who never met a government program they didn't like. --Jere Joiner Subj: Charles Murray Editorial Date: 97-02-08 14:17:20 EST From: billwald@juno.com (Bill Wald) To: Valleytms@aol.com CC: ipnews@mindspring.com, letters@heraldnet.com Above your editorial the Everett "Herald" printed a letter complaining about local land development. Mr. Guy-Tavares wrote,"Is there no freedom from the development of urban ghettos?" He defines his freedom in terms of governmental control of someone else's land. I hope he reads your editorial. Harry Browne wrote an interesting editorial in the Jan. issue of the "Libertarian Party News," in which he discusses the difficulty of selling freedom to Americans. How do you sell freedom to people that believe the government should control other people's property for their benefit? Americans don't want freedom, they want "My fair share and a little bit of yours." Bill Wald 2005 McDougall Ave. Everett, WA. 98201 Subj: RE: A radically rational Libertarian Date: 97-02-11 22:26:28 EST From: srschulte@juno.com (stephen r schulte) To: valleytms@aol.com --------- Begin forwarded message ---------- From: srschulte To: Seebach/ Valley Times,CA Subject: srschulte: RE: A radically rational Libertarian Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 22:00:28 PST Message-ID: <19970211.220827.8071.0.srschulte@juno.com> --------- Begin forwarded message ---------- From: srschulte To: Seebach at Valley Times,CA Cc: Steve Dasbach, Sep School & State, Sharon Harris, bumper at FFF,lp news, NLP Subject: RE: A radically rational Libertarian Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 21:39:24 PST Message-ID: <19970211.214718.8055.3.srschulte@juno.com> Dear Ms. Seebach: I am writing to commend you on your excellent column regarding Charles Murray's most recent book, What It Means to be a Libertarian, that appeared in today's The Cincinnati Enquirer (2/11/97). It seems that only libertarians understand that the welfare/warfare state is destructive not only to a free and just society, but also to a civil society. It has been said that taxation is the price we pay for a civilized society. But isn't the opposite true? Taxes are the price we pay for being uncivilized. With taxation we utilized barbaric force and coercion against our fellow citizen rather than civilized persuasion and voluntary exchange. We have witnessed in this century the utter destruction of societies and cultures by those who believe in 100% taxation (communism). Again, thanks for your excellent column. Steve Schulte Libertarians for Greater Cincinnati voice: 513-923-4299 email: srschulte@juno.com Robert McBurney, Colorado Springs, sent a clip from the Gazette Telegraph, "Another fine article." Subj: To Linda Seebach. Date: 97-02-23 16:18:49 EST From: Rbegley1 To: Valleytms I want to thank you for your coverage of topics with what I feel is a strong Liberterian bent.I have been philosophically commited to these ideals for over 20 years and it seems as though these long planted seeds are bearing fruit: to see main stream media even using the "L" word makes all these years of " talking the talk and walking the walk" seem all worthwhile.I have been meaning to drop you a note previously but what prompted me was you article mentioning you were at the Charles Murray luncheon of the Independent Institute- I was there with my son.As you know ,the meeting was very well attended( Liberterian events seem to have an attendance limit of no more than 6} so this was quite refreshing and now I find out you were and I missed the opportunity to meet you . The Toms-Jefferson and Paine- are two of my heroes:my their ideas be reborn in this country before it is too late( I'm not sure that it is not too late already). Please keep exposing your readership to the editorials that I have been seeing. Best regard, Reg Begley Discovery Bay Linda Gross, 2566 Ferguson Rd., Cincinnati OH 45238, saw in Enquirer