Monday, February 10, 2003

Los Angeles Unified School District Breakup Proposed

The Los Angeles Times' Erika Hayasaki and David Pierson relate that LA board president Caprice Young has proposed breaking the second largest school district in the nation into as many as 30 smaller districts. They report that opposition was immediate and vocal. Critics charge that Young is playing politics in trying to get reelected. They also report some support for the idea.

• School District Breakup Proposed
• Critics Blast School District Breakup Plan

The authors quote former board member Mark Slavkin as saying, "Everyone agrees, if you started over again, no one would start with a district this big. But now that we have what we have, the political and legal issues are insurmountable."

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Friday's offering from the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive, Orion on Film, features my favorite constellation. The enhanced photo (584K) by Matthew Spinelli clearly shows the major stars, while the APOD descriptor is excellent, filled with links to the various elements of Orion. With the right group of students, this page could launch a whole lesson!

NASA's Education Emphasis to Continue

With everything that surrounded the Columbia disaster last week, I somehow missed a very good column by USA Today's Karen Thomas and Greg Toppo, Space education gets a sad lesson in reality. Thomas and Toppo write of NASA's continuing commitment to education. One item in the column that escaped other writers is that former Idaho elementary schoolteacher Barbara Morgan, who has been slated for a November shuttle mission as an educator astronaut, "was in a chase plane following Columbia Saturday. After the accident, she immediately went to be with the astronauts' families." (The column link above is to Yahoo, as the USA Today version is already a paid archive item.)

Another Cut in the Bush Education Budget

The Associated Press's Suzanne Gamboa writes of another proposed cut in education funding in the Bush budget proposal. In Military Schooling Subsidy Faces Cut, Gamboa reveals that the Administration's budget proposal would cut the subsidy "for teaching children of military personnel who are not living on bases." Whether this is a good idea or not, the administration showed a continuing lack of class in its timing of the proposal. Gamboa quotes Texas Congressman Chet Edwards as saying, "What the bean counters at OMB missed is you simply don't send servicemen and women off to the Iraqi theater and as soon as they get on the plane tell them, 'By the way, we are cutting education funding for your children, who will be back here at home.'"

Vouchers for D.C.?

The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss reports in President To Push Vouchers For D.C. that confusion seems to reign in discussions between Washington, D.C. officials and representatives of the Department of Education about President Bush's proposal for a voucher program for the city.

Guidelines for School Prayer Issued by DOE

The U.S. Department of Education issued "fresh guidance about how to handle prayer in schools" on Friday. Associated Press writer Ben Feller reports "Schools must allow students to pray outside the classroom and permit teachers to do the same. At the same time, school officials cannot pray with students or try to promote or discourage a particular religious view."

It's not unusual to see an AP posting edited and reposted several times. Feller's posting appeared with a slightly different twist in three different publications:

• Yahoo/AP -- Schools Banning Prayer Risk Fed Funds
• The New York Times/AP -- Education Dept. Warns on Prayer
• The Washington Post/AP -- Guidelines on School Prayer Issued: Resistance Could Jeopardize Federal Funds, Education Dept. Says

Ivins on Bush: Quite A Few Children Left Behind

Over the last couple of years Molly Ivins has become one of my favorite print columnists. She's from Texas, knows George W., doesn't much like him, and tells it like it is. In her recent column, A few words from our president, she quotes the President's comments about No Child Left Behind: "To lift the standards of our public schools, we achieved historic education reform, which must now be carried out in every school, in every classroom, so that every child in America can read, and learn, and succeed in life." Then she takes apart his sham of an education budget:

The president's first education budget after he signed his much-touted No Child Left Behind Act proposed $22.2 billion, a cut of more than $90 million below the previous year and more than $7 billion less than Congress had authorized. They need to change the name of the law to the Quite a Few Children Left Behind Act.

If like me, you find that you appreciate Molly's biting, but accurate commentary about our President, you'll probably like her book, Shrub : The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush.

Tax Time, PCs, and...

I struggled for a number of years with Block's TaxCut, but finally gave up and went to Intuit's Turbo Tax for Macintosh this year. The delays last year by Block in getting out the final state versions for the Mac made it essential I make the move. One of our state universities requires that we file FASFA forms each year by March 1 for our kids in college. The lateness of final federal forms and our state version from Block made things a bit more tense each year, enough so that I was more than willing to pay a bit more for Turbo Tax. I'm not far into the program yet to really say whether I'm going to be happy with Turbo Tax or not.

When installing the state version of Turbo Tax, I did get a nasty surprise. Since my federal Turbo Tax is installed on a different partition than OS X, the installer went into a loop while searching for the file. The end result was that my secondary drive, a Barracuda 32 gig, ended up so corrupted that it wouldn't mount and couldn't be repaired under OS X! This brings to mind a scary scenario for those purchasing new Macs that won't boot to OS 9. I was able to repair the drive with Norton Systemworks 2 (Disk Doctor), but only from a boot from the hard drive under OS 9. Booting from the CD wouldn't recognize the sick drive. While this could be just a strange string of unrelated incidences, it made me appreciate that my five-year-old G3 will still boot to OS 9 from the hard drive.

The Macintosh News Network is providing some good continuing coverage on problems this year with TaxCut. If you haven't purchased a tax program yet and plan to do so, the MNN page might give you some guidance on which products best suits your needs. While Amazon carries both TaxCut and Turbo Tax, one usually can find a better deal at their local Office Depot, Office Max, or Staples. I did, anyway.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to just switch all my financial records over to the PC. The only problem with that is that "the PC" at my house keeps changing. As Annie brings home various abandoned boxes, I keep switching and improving drives and RAM in them, but the process of change never seems to stop. Just a week after I got a Compaq Deskpro 400 MHz set up with an 80 gig drive, modem card, and its CD and CD-RW drives to replace another Compaq (330 MHz), she brought home a 500 MHz Dell! Fortunately, the Dell is a low-profile model that only has room for one CD, so I didn't feel obliged to switch over. Currently, the antique Macs still outnumber the vintage PCs in our upstairs sunroom/computer workshop, but the tide is quickly turning. That may well be because older Macs seem to have considerably more value than older PCs of a similar vintage.

Devotion for February 9-15, 2003

Zach Wood's weekly devotional for this week is The Phenomenon Of Love. Zach also maintains an archive of previous devotionals.

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Wednesday, February 12, 2003

New from SchwabLearning.org

This week's new column on the SchwabLearning.org site is Questions to Ask Private Schools.

Thursday, February 13, 2003

Jay Mathews Presents

The Washington Post's excellent education columnist, Jay Mathews, is a supporter of the No Child Left Behind legislation. While I certainly don't agree with Jay's endorsement of the law, I like Jay's writing, especially his willingness to present unpopular and opposing views on many subjects. This week Jay has enlisted a number of competent educators to present their feelings on NCLB in The Ups and Downs of No Child Left Behind. It's a very good read.

John Martellaro Back on Applelinks

The Warp Core has returned to life on Applelinks with John Martellaro" latest, Why Apple's Market Share Hasn't Budged. He begins this one, "I shall reveal to you that I grew up Catholic." After scratching my head a bit, I read on and found myself saying towards the end, "Yeah, I get it."

Safari Update...and a Surprise

Apple has posted another update to their Safari, OS X only, web browser. This release seems a bit quicker on my machine than its predecessor. Do note, it appears that this version of Safari changes your default web browser to Safari...without asking. Seems like Apple is emulating Microsoft.

A Blast from the Past

The emails starting coming in on Tuesday. Out of the blue, I began receiving brief messages or questions about Adobe Acrobat 4 or Acrobat Reader 4 and/or 5. I initially assumed I'd been the victim of someone forging my email address, but as the trickle of messages turned into a steady stream, I decided to respond to a couple of the emails and just ask the source of this sudden "fame." Brad Paulich and Bill Simpson were both kind enough to quickly respond and point me to WinXPnews which had run a brief mention of readers problems with Acrobat 4 under Windows XP along with a link to a column I'd written three years ago, Adobe Isn't Making Many Friends (originally posted on Low End Mac). Some WinXP users were still trying to use the 4.0 version of Acrobat Reader or the full version Adobe Acrobat without much success. It turns out from the posting that the hard-to-get Acrobat 4.0.5 upgrade does work under XP, but there don't seem to be any links on Adobe's site to the file.

WinXPnews is an attractive and interesting e-zine and newsletter. There's also a companion web site and newsletter, W2Knews.

Saturday, February 15, 2003

MacOS X 10.2.4 Update Posted

Apple Computer has posted the OS X 10.2.4 update for download as both a single (from 10.2.3 to 10.2.4) and combined (from any 10.2.x installation to 10.2.4) updater. See Apple's Recently Posted Updates page for download information (a good page to bookmark).

Devotion for February 16-22, 2003

Zach Wood's weekly devotional for this week is God's Consistency. Zach also maintains an archive of previous devotionals.