Category Archives: View

View 780 Monday, July 01, 2013

It has been a bad weekend and I’m a bit under the weather today but

THE BUNNY INSPECTORS ARE BACK

Some of your readers doubted the existence of the much-storied Federal Bunny Inspectors. Well, here is another sighting, much to the chagrin of small businesses:

www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/29/hare-brained-usda-reportedly-orders-childrens-magician-to-produce-disaster-plan-for-his-rabbit/

–Fred

Agriculture Department tells magician to write disaster plan for his rabbit

By Jessica Chasmar – The Washington Times – Monday, July 1, 2013

Magician Marty Hahne didn’t think things could get any more harebrained after the U.S Department of Agriculture harassed him for using an unlicensed rabbit in his magic shows two years ago.

Now, the agency is demanding he draw up a disaster plan for his furry friend.

The Ozark, Mo.-based magician contacted blogger Bob McCarty via email to explain his plight.

"You won’t believe what the USDA has come up with now," Mr. Hahne wrote late Friday afternoon. "If this wasn’t so stupid, it would be funny!"

"My USDA rabbit license requirement has taken another ridiculous twist," he continued. "I just received an 8 page letter from the USDA, telling me that by July 29 I need to have in place a written disaster plan, detailing all the steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such as a tornado, fire, flood, etc. They not only want to know how I will protect my rabbit during a disaster, but also what I will do after the disaster, to make sure my rabbit gets cared for properly. I am not kidding–before the end of July I need to have this written rabbit disaster plan in place, or I am breaking the law."

Mr. Hahne also detailed the guidelines the USDA reportedly gave him:

• The new regulation became effective Jan. 30, 2012.

• The written plan must be completed by July 29, 2013.

• Mr. Hahne and his wife, Brenda, must be trained to implement the plan as written.

• The written plan must be available for review by USDA inspectors by Sept. 28, 2013.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/1/agriculture-department-tells-magician-write-disast/

Hello Jerry,

Hope this note finds you in good health. You’ve likely already received this information from numerous other sources, but I immediately thought of you when I saw it.

This morning, (Sunday 6/30) Fox News ran a story about the Federal Bunny Inspectors Service. Seems an 8 page letter has gone out to magicians around the country, informing them of the need to prepare (and presumably submit to theFeds for approval) a "Disaster Plan" for the care of their rabbits in the event of flood, fire, or other unfortunate events. Perhaps someone at the FBI (Federal Bunny Inspectors) reads Chaos Manor and feels a need to justify the Service’s existence.

The Iron Law, in Spades!

Dave Porter

Jerry,

Do you know where your rabbit is?

One of your favorite examples of most absurd programs has just taken a quantum leap into pathological absurdity.

http://bobmccarty.com/2013/06/28/usda-tells-magician-to-write-disaster-plan-for-his-rabbit/

Jim

I have a dozen other notes on this. Many apparently thought I had made up the bunny inspectors and were astonished to find that it is all true.

At least the rabbits will be safe from disaster.

One proposed disaster plan: a tag around the rabbit’s neck. “IN CASE OF DISASTER <KILL> <COOK> <EAT>”

Others have actual plans to lay in rabbit food. 

: Marco Polo If You Can

My friends in the Northern Areas, of Pakistan have a hard enough time being sandwiched in between Afghanistan, India, and China, but in recent years those regional Powers have more or less kept the peace

Last week things took a turn for the worse when the Taliban spilled over into their normally idyllic neighborhood:

http://takimag.com/article/playing_polo_in_heaven_russell_seitz#axzz2Xjqs7oBa <http://takimag.com/article/playing_polo_in_heaven_russell_seitz#axzz2Xjqs7oBa>

Readers are invited to drop in on them this summer- they sure could use some business, and they certainly can provide more adventure than the average adventure travel agency.

—

Russell Seitz

And be of good cheer…

They are FINALLY deporting illegal aliens for abusing the US hospital system…

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/polish-immigrant-deported-n-hospital-crippling-stroke-article-1.1382505

I thought this story might be of interest to you; you were recently writing about the illegal alien/undocumented worker thing as I recall…

And good reading:  http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/an_optimists_ta.html

View 779 Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Roberta’s computer has decided to funk out and Eric is over to replace it with a new one. We’ll have a performance report on it when it’s done. There are some innovations.

Obama’s War on the American People

That’s a harsh title, but after a careful read of his new Environmental Policy, to be implemented by Administrative Fiat without consent of Congress, relying on the Environmental Protection Act of 1990 which does not mention carbon as a pollutant but now the EPA has declared carbon to be a pollutant – it appears that Obama is out to damage the American economy just as it is struggling to recover.

None of this was in his 2012 campaign. Indeed, he went to coal country and accused Mit Romney of being anti-coal.

The major factors in the US economy are the complexities of regulations and the price of energy. Cheap energy and freedom will produce an economic boom including the recovery of manufacturing. Obama’s new program will multiply the regulations, raise the price of energy, and subsidize uneconomical energy sources like windmills. Next he cracks down on fracking since that produces natural gas which also “pollutes” with CO2. And of course adds to the safety regulations and the administrative processes for actually stating up nuclear power plants.

The price of energy rises.

The economic recovery staggers.

Salve Sclave.

A Federal trial judge in California decided that the California Proposition 8 forbidding same sex marriage was contrary to the Federal Constitution. When Governor Brown and the California state government refused to appeal that decision, the backers of Proposition 8 did. They lost in the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, and appealed that to the US Supreme Court.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the sponsors of Proposition 8 do not have standing to sue in challenging the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Proposition 8 Amendment to the California Constitution is federally unconstitutional. Thus gay marriage is to be restored to California without an actual US Supreme Court ruling on the federal constitution and its rights to marriage.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/06/26/supreme-court-makes-its-doma-prop-8-rulings/

This is less confusing than it seems at first sight. The Court has in some sense deferred to the political authorities of the State of California, who have chosen not to join the suit to enforce Proposition 8. It is a dance, of course: the Supreme Court long ago (1912) decided that incorporation of the Initiative and Referendum into a state constitution did not violate the federal guarantee of “a republican form of government” to the states. What this present ruling implies is that if the people of a state recall their governor and he refuses to leave office, the citizens cannot go to the US Supreme Court to get him thrown out. They don’t have standing. Only the political authorities of the state have standing. But of course they don’t mean that. What the USSC is trying to do is avoid deciding on whether there is a constitutional right to gay marriage.

Meanwhile the USSC ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act is an infringement on the state’s rights; which means that if the State of California had joined in the suit to overturn Proposition 8 then under the same logic that overturned DOMA would have required that Proposition 8 be upheld and gay marriage would be banned in California.

There is dancing in the streets in West Hollywood.

Imagine now if a California governor decides that he doesn’t like Proposition 13 which protects property owners from confiscatory tax rates, and has the legislature raise property taxes by a factor of ten. Property owners sue in Federal Court, but the State pleads that Proposition 13 is unconstitutional on the grounds that it favors property owners and discriminates against the homeless. It is not impossible to imagine that a federal judge, and 2 judges of the 9^th Circuit Court of appeals would agree to that. The state rejoices. Who can appeal to the USSC? Who has standing to sue?

Meanwhile the US fertility rate is below replacement rate, and marriage is no longer the expected way for a couple to beget and raise children. We live in interesting times.

A later reflection: if the proponents of Prop 8 had not the standing to sue on the matter then they had not the standing to take the case to the Circuit Court of Appeals, which means this this has not been decided by a federal court of appeals: I am not enough of a lawyer to know what that means, but since the Governor is sworn to uphold the State Constitution and this has not been decided by an appeals court, can the order county clerks to disobey? It’s pretty well moot now of course.

A Ray of Hope?

There has been a lot of attention on the CO2 rising over 400 ppm recently. Some are advocating political action to halt the rise. That’s not likely to happen because uprooting the world’s energy economy would do more damage (kill more people faster) than the climate changes expected due to the high CO2 levels.

However, something might have changed in the last couple of months.

Solar power satellites are the only energy source known that scales to humanity’s needs and well beyond. To get them adopted on a huge scale, all that’s needed is for the cost of energy from them to undercut fossil fuels, first coal for electric power and then synthetic oil. The first happens at 5 cents declining to 2 cents per kWh. Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels would cost a dollar a gallon if the cost of power went down to 1 cent per kWh.

It’s not hard to get the cost for 5kg/kW power sats down in this range if the cost of lifting parts to GEO can be reduced to $100/kg. Solar power on earth ties up in the range of 500 kg/kW(avg). If you can build them in space, they are not subject to wind and gravity, allowing a hundred to one materials reduction. However, $100/kg is a hundred to one reduction over the current cost of around $10,000 per kg paid to put communication satellites in orbit.

A two-orders-of-magnitude reduction seems to be possible, but not using chemical energy (other than the first step where a Skylon type vehicle burns hydrogen with air for about 1/4 of the velocity to orbit). Beyond that it takes a 3 GW laser located in GEO to accelerate the last 6 km/s to orbit using a simple sheet of tubes to heat hydrogen to 2700 K. That gives an exhaust velocity of 7500 m/s.

A second stage also uses laser-heated hydrogen to transport 20 tons three times per hour to GEO. The second stages are scrapped at GEO for material, making the entire dry weight payload.

The problem is powering the first laser in GEO. Last year I worked out how to do it in a paper that was recently approved after peer review. It took an elaborate multi-step bootstrap process that built a 25,000 tons power satellite in GEO to power the first propulsion laser. The cost came in just short of $140 B. Early April this year it became obsolete because Steve Nixon (otherwise known for advocating Mega-Chimney) made a suggestion that cut the cost model by $80 B. At $60 B (and 500% ROI in ten years), it may be within the capacity of western finance. If not the Chinese asked the Indians to join them in building power satellites last Nov. (Google China India power satellite to find it.)

Steve’s idea was inspired; power the propulsion laser for a few months from a huge (10 km) transmitter on the ground. Reciprocity (look it up) says that the path loss will be the same if you swap the transmitter and receiver antennas. The target in space would be a 1 km rectenna, with a mass under 1000 tons.

Further, the laser, tracking optics and heat sink can all be built and tested in LEO, much cheaper to access, then the propulsion laser can be sent to GEO using electric thrusters powered from the same rectenna that powers the laser. Takes 21 hours of thrust to get it there; powered ten percent of the time, it could make the trip in 10 days.

Then use it for 3 months or less to bring up a first power satellite to replace the power from the ground.

The 3 GW laser is scaled to bring up 500,000 tons per year, enough for

100 GW of power satellites. While that’s not enough to get humanity off coal, it is a good start and (if the financial models are correct) it makes a 500% ROI by the end of ten years, selling power satellites for 5 cents per kWh declining over ten years to 2 cents per kWh.

Re-investing 10% of transport capacity to bring up more lasers doubles production every year and that _will_ get humanity off fossil fuels.

(The energy payback time is under two months.)

Keith Henson

It is a far ray of hope. It would be a large step, and getting the energy and power to put up the first solar power satellites would require a lot of sacrifices in entitlements. The American people no longer seem to be inclined to deprive themselves of immediate gratification to invest in the future. I would like to be optimistic. I was when I wrote about these things in A Step Farther Out. It could still happen.

Of course the Keystone pipeline is a shovel ready jobs project that would substantially lower the cost of energy in the United States – which is likely to mean that it will be refused by this president.

RAND study on Algebra 1 blended instruction

Dear Jerry,

Article today in Education Week on RAND study of hybrid instruction (blend of online plus in-class) of Algebra 1 “Study: Hybrid Algebra Program ‘Nearly Doubled’ Math Learning”

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2013/06/government_study_finds_gains_f.html <http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2013/06/government_study_finds_gains_f.html>

I have not read the RAND study yet. Valerie teaches Algebra 1 and Algebra 2, so I will forward her comments and mine later this month.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR984.html

Jim Ransom

The amount of on line instruction in all subjects grows weekly. What is needed is a way to certify that a person has learned the material without requiring payments to The Blob.

View 779 Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Sixty-Three Years Ago Today

http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=36390

"On 25 June 1950 – at dawn – forces of the Korean People’s Army attacked South Korea. There had been skirmishes along the 38th parallel previously. However, this time the North Korean forces pushed south in an attempt to conquer South Korea and forcibly unify the peninsula under communist rule.

Hostilities were to last 3 years, 1 month, and 3 days. The war would claim between 500,000 and 950,000 total KIA (both sides); in excess of 1,200,000 individuals would be WIA.

The war technically has never ended. The agreement to stop fighting in July 1953 was an armistice, not a permanent settlement. A peace treaty formally ending the war has never been signed."

I worry very much that we’ve utterly failed to learn the lessons of this war, and have already spent far too much time wondering if I’ll know, if I trained, soldiers who will be in the next Task Force Smith.

The Supreme Court said yesterday that in order to achieve racial diversity in a public university, race can be considered in affirmative action. This wasn’t new, but now it’s only as a last resort.

The implications of this seem to have been overlooked. They admit the possibility that some races are so inferior that the only way to get – ANY – member of that race into the University of Texas is through racial preference. While I am sure that no one on the Supreme Court believes this, it sure looks like a logical inference.

Theodore R. Johnson: A Missed Opportunity on Racial Preferences

By THEODORE R. JOHNSON

‘You probably got it because you’re black."

I heard those words two years ago when I had the honor of being selected as a White House Fellow. It wasn’t the first time that at a moment of proud accomplishment I had heard skeptical comments. It happened when I was promoted a year ahead of my military peers. Earning a graduate degree from Harvard University prompted a dismissive remark about admission quotas. Most troubling of all was that, each time, I wondered: "What if it’s true?"

This is the ugly side of racial preferences that gets little attention. No matter what one may think of the policy, the truth is that with it comes an undercurrent of implied inferiority. Even in instances when a black or Hispanic is the best qualified and well-matched for a particular career or academic opportunity, the perception of unfair favoritism follows the person, hovering in the ether. The same suspicion often follows women who succeed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578519324168805746.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

I had a similar situation in the 60’s when I was the pre-law advisor to the undergraduates at Pepperdine. I had fairly good relations with the admissions people at UCLA. One of my black students wanted to go there. He was the kind of student that every professor encounters: a B+ student who works so hard that he consistently gets A grades. The “B+” label is the professor’s internal evaluation, of course, and my not be correct. This chap had the misfortune to be classmates with Bill Allen, the kind of student whose blue book essays you read last so you won’t be disappointed in your other A students.

In any event when it came time for recommendations I sent him over to UCLA with a recommendation that he be admitted to their law school. He came back with an odd look: he had been admitted, but in a “minorities program” as affirmative action. I told him he should go back and tell them he didn’t need any damned minorities program. He wasn’t going to be top of his class, but he would be in the top half because he was thorough, and he had every right to a normal appointment, not some affirmative action program. I don’t think he did that, but I wish he had.

I sometimes think we need a constitutional amendment demanding equal protection of the laws to every person regardless of race, with the addendum that “This time we really mean it.”

I have mixed emotions about the Snowden affair, but only just.

A long time ago, during the Goldwater election of 1964, candidate Goldwater in a new interview proposed bombing the Ho Chi Minh “trail”, a system of roads and supply depots running through Laos that supported North Viet Nam regulars in their invasion of South Viet Nam. President Johnson responded that this was one of the most trigger happy suggestions he had ever heard, and that the very suggestion showed why Goldwater was unfit to be President of the United States. I heard that on the radio as I was looking a strike photos of USAF interdiction of the “trail” in Laos. We were evaluating the effectiveness of some new aerial bombardment systems using large caliber guns and a new computer aiming system.

I suppose I felt a momentary impulse to “blow the whistle” (the term wasn’t used in 1964 or as least I don’t recall that it was) but that would certainly have been a violation of the secrecay laws and the end of any career I might have in operations research. I was a bit non-plussed: just who were we keeping the secret from? Surely the North Vietnamese forces being killed knew we were bombing them, and they certainly told their Russian advisors. Or bomber and gunship crews certainly knew. The only people who didn’t know were the American people and some of the Congress.

On the other hand, it wasn’t likely to affect the national election. I also had on my desk an article signed by 26 certified psychiatrists proving that Goldwater was unfit to be president, and the TV ads were running a countdown to the certain nuclear doom the US faced if Goldwater were elected. And I had signed my agreements when I received clearances and when I signed out classified documents. I wasn’t tempted for long, and I did nothing , nor did any of the other pro-Goldwater people at Norton Air Force base.

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who spilled U.S. surveillance secrets to the world, is a "free man" biding his time in a Moscow airport, Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters Tuesday in Finland.

Putin said that Snowden, who flew to Moscow from Hong Kong on Sunday, remains in the "transit area" of Sheremetyevo International Airport — the zone between arrival gates and Russia’s passport control checkpoints. And while he said Russia won’t hand Snowden over to the United States, he seemed eager to have the focus of international intrigue off his hands.

"The sooner he selects his final destination point, the better both for us and for himself," Putin said of Snowden, who is wanted by U.S. officials on espionage charges for disclosing classified details of U.S. surveillance programs.

Putin’s confirmation ends, for now at least, the international pastime of "Where’s Snowden?" and speculation that the former CIA worker and National Security Agency contractor had perhaps duped the world into thinking he was in Moscow to throw pursuers off his trail as he seeks a safe haven from U.S. prosecution.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/25/politics/nsa-leak/index.html

Mr. Snowden exposed the extent of US surveillance over US citizens. He threatens to expose more. The US and Russia are in a complex dance, and it is clear that the US is not prepared to go to the wall over this. Snowden will eventually leave the Russian airport for some place of refuges.It is unlikely to be Russia. If it turns out to be Cuba, it serves him right: survival in Cuba after all this blows over is not likely to be very pleasant but it will be tolerable, and Snowden will be more free than most Cubans. Perhaps he will repay Cuba’s generosity with some exposure of Cuba’s repressions.

I heard somewhere that he wanted refuge in Iceland.

It is well for the American people to know what most of us have suspected for a decade: nothing you say or do on the Web is secret. If you have visited a porn site, someone has a record of that, and if there is any reason for the authorities to turn their attention to you, someone will find it. If you have made an unwise comment on a political site, or sent an unfortunate email in a fit of pique, it exists out there and spins about on a server somewhere. Which, of course, means that anything can be fabricated, too. It’s as easy to manufacture a condemnatory email as to discover one – easier if that email never existed. I don’t think we have any fool proof way of certifying the provenance of electronic activities. But that’s a subject for another essay.

Much of the subject matter for a proper education is available free on line. For $300 you can acquire most of the course material and reading books you will ever need for bright kids from Art Robinson http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/?gclid=CM23wrCLgLgCFQE6Qgod32EAyQ although I’d recommend that you start young children with my wife’s reading program because Robinson’s curriculum includes good literature as well as adventure stories using a large vocabulary, and children without a background in systematic phonics may have needless problems. See Ms. Pournelle’s reading program, The Literacy Connection.

And for higher education – although the Robinson program goes pretty high – nearly everything is available on line. The Kahn Academy, Richard Feynman’s Freshman Physics lectures (which even the brightest kids will need to listen to more than once, but that’s the beauty of on line lectures) and dozens of other courses from beginner to advanced, they’re all out there and more are being added all the time.

The problem then becomes one of certification and credentialing, and you may be sure that The Blob – the education establishment – will fight desperately to keep their monopoly on granting ‘credentials’ and ‘degrees’ even though we all know that in some institutions those credentials certify nothing about the education of those who hold them: only that they showed up for the ‘workshops’ and had an above dismal attendance record.

I’ll return to the education theme later. It’s lunch time.

View 779 Sunday, June 23, 2013

Super Moon tonight.

In 1983 Nobel laureate Glen T. Seaborg chaired a national commission on education which reported that “If a foreign nation had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.”

This triggered several rounds of debate, with the result that the central government “reformed” American education with policies that insisted that all the states employ ‘credentialed’ teachers. In effect it gave a monopoly on teacher employment to the teacher education industry across the United States. Even private schools are now required to insist on credentials even from their best teachers; I have a friend who is a Catholic school principal, and they are now insisting that all teachers get credentials, even though some of the best teachers in the school have long records of highly effective service.

Last week a new study came out. It reported on the institutions which hold a monopoly on teacher credentials. Obtaining these credentials is often very expensive, resulting in years of indebtedness for teachers, so it is reasonable to examine just what this industry does. The commission to study teacher education programs reported last week.

‘An Industry of Mediocrity’: Study Criticizes Teacher-Education Programs

By Dan Berrett

Colleges of education are "an industry of mediocrity" that churns out unprepared teachers to work in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools, according to a highly anticipated report.

The report, "Teacher Prep Review," describes the findings of a controversial effort to rate the quality of programs at 1,130 institutions nationwide that prepare about 99 percent of the nation’s traditionally trained teachers. Released on Tuesday, the report is the product of a partnership between the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report.

http://chronicle.com/article/An-Industry-of-Mediocrity-/139887/

In other words we require anyone who wants to be a school teacher to spend a lot of money obtaining ‘credentials’ from schools that don’t do well at teaching how to teach. They tend to be operated by professors of education who do not themselves have classroom experience but have impressive credentials and degrees: indeed, getting all those credentials and degrees makes it difficult to spend much time actually teaching.

In theory apprentice teachers must take part in supervised teaching classes, where they will learn proper techniques.

The study’s authors also relied on what they describe as expert consensus, strong research, the practices of states or nations that have high-performing teacher-training programs, and "occasionally just common sense."

For example, student-teaching programs are often described as an important part of traditional training programs, and one that distinguishes those programs from alternative training programs. But the council found that just 7 percent of the programs it studied took what it described as basic measures to help teachers-in-training to succeed, such as ensuring that high-quality teachers were their mentors.

"Instead," said Ms. Walsh of the attitude toward recruiting mentors, "they’ll take anyone as long as they’ve been there for three years."

There’s a great deal more. Now note that while in the past private school programs could hire anyone they thought effective, now the pressure is on to hire only those with credentials; which means that the industry of mediocrity is taking over everywhere. This means that the public school system which for decades has been operating in a way indistinguishable from an act of war against the United States is now expanding to eradicate any competition with its methods.

Philosophical Difference

Another reason for the poor ratings nationwide, said Ms. Walsh, is a fundamental difference in philosophy between the council and many of the programs it surveyed. Teacher-training programs have come to see their students as their clients, Ms. Walsh said. The council believes the programs serve the schools in which their graduates will eventually teach.

As a result, she said, colleges of education focus on the feelings of their students, and encourage them to shed biases or prejudices about the pupils they will eventually teach. The future teachers are also taught to develop a personal approach to teaching, one that does not pay sufficient attention, said Ms. Walsh, to what the available research might suggest.

While a course on teaching methods once taught students tools they would use in the classroom, she said, most such courses now focus on helping a future teacher develop a professional identity.

Another reason for the findings, said Ms. Walsh, is that colleges of education admit too many applicants who perform poorly as undergraduates. About 25 percent of the programs admit students in only the top half of their class. High-performing countries limit entry to the top third, the study found.

"It exhibits such little respect for the profession," Ms. Walsh said, "that we think anyone should be allowed to train."

There’s a lot more. None of it is good news. We have delivered the future into the hands of the professors of education, and when we seek to “improve” the schools we do so by “improving” the teachers – which always means insisting that the teachers accumulate more and more “credentials” from the monopoly which sent them out in lifelong debt but without adequate training. And our remedy to this is to insist that the teachers accumulate even more debt acquiring an ever increasing array of credentials from the people who failed to train them in the first place – and to insist that the private schools accept this madness and impose it on their teachers and students as well.

Report criticizes teacher-training programs

By Philip Elliott

The Associated Press

Published: 12:38 p.m., June 18

WASHINGTON — The nation’s teacher-training programs do not adequately prepare would-be educators for the classroom, even as they produce almost triple the number of graduates needed, according to a survey of more than 1,000 programs released today.

The National Council on Teacher Quality review is a scathing assessment of colleges’ education programs and their admission standards, training and value. The report, which drew immediate criticism, was designed to be provocative and urges leaders at teacher-training programs to rethink what skills would-be educators need to be taught to thrive in the classrooms of today and tomorrow.

“Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms” with an ever-increasing diversity of ethnic and socioeconomic students, the report’s authors wrote.

“A vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars,” the report said.

The report was likely to drive debate about which students are prepared to be teachers in the coming decades and how they are prepared. Once a teacher settles into a classroom, it’s tough to remove him or her involuntarily and opportunities for wholesale retraining are difficult — if nearly impossible — to find.

The answer, the council and its allies argue, is to make it more difficult for students to get into teacher preparation programs in the first place. And once there, they should be taught the most effective methods to help students.

http://www.registerguard.com/rg/news/30040676-76/programs-teacher-teachers-council-students.html.csp

Of course there is dissent from the professors of education:

Controversial Report Criticizes UCSB Teacher Education Program

But Many Say Its Findings Are Incomplete and Inaccurate

California’s teacher education programs — including UCSB’s — are woefully inadequate, according to a report released by the controversial National Council on Teacher Quality. Tine Sloan, director of UCSB’s Teacher Education Program, compiled a list of methodological issues with the study, stating that she concurred, “the widely held view of this report is that it is based on partial and inaccurate data that fails to capture valid and reliable indicators of teacher performance.”

http://www.independent.com/news/2013/jun/21/controversial-report-criticizes-ucsb-teacher-educa/

You may expect to see a great many more reports from education departments defending their monopoly on granting education credentials only to those who make proper obeisance to them – and go into debt to pay them. Being an effective teacher is not a credential: credentials are bits of paper issued by professors of education, many of whom have no actual classroom experience, but are steeped in education theory.

Training for common core standards comes amid national report criticizing teacher-training

By LUCAS L. JOHNSON II  Associated Press June 18, 2013 – 4:30 pm EDT

NASHVILLE, Tennessee — As Tennessee education officials begin training teachers on how to implement a new set of common core benchmarks for math and reading, they acknowledge more work is needed following the release of a national education report Tuesday that heavily criticizes teacher-training programs.

More than 30,000 teachers from across the state have signed up to be trained over the next six weeks, according to Education Department spokeswoman Kelli Gauthier. Sessions began Tuesday in 17 districts statewide.

The common core standards, which 45 states and the District of Columbia are adopting, are described as a set of higher expectations in math and English that include more critical thinking and problem solving to help better prepare students for global competition.

The report by the National Council on Teacher Quality said the nation’s teacher-training programs do not adequately prepare would-be educators for the classroom.

In particular, "fewer than one in nine elementary programs and just over one-third of high school programs are preparing candidates in content at the level necessary to teach the new common core state standards," the report said.

Gauthier said the report is not surprising and acknowledged there’s "more work to do in terms of preparing teachers to be in front of the classroom."

Of course nothing in the report should be surprising to those who have gone through the credentialing process. As my long time teacher friend said at breakfast this morning, she learned very little from her education courses she took long ago. She has been a very effective teacher, then administrator, in the public schools and now having retired from the public school system  is an effective principal in a Catholic school; but aside from learning the laws and regulations, there was little in her teacher training long ago or more resent administrative training that was of much use.

And indeed this is true all across the country. There are effective teachers in this nation, but generally they are so despite, not because of, the education department courses they have taken. The teacher training system in this nation is broken; and the response of the education establishment is to insist that they be given even more control over a system they invented, installed, maintained, and used to put themselves into a monopoly situation, and to insist that the cure for our problems is to give them even more control.

There is a simple remedy to all this. Just as the California Smog Control laws insist that the test stations that determine whether or not your car passes the smog test cannot be the ones that “fix” the cars, there should be an independent way to determine who is “credentialed” to teach. Why should a retired USAF Technical Sergeant who has taught mathematics to USAF recruits headed for the weather prediction organizations be required, on retirement, to get a teaching credential before he can teach high school math? Yet it is the law. Why should a professor of history be required to get a teaching credential before she is allowed to teach history to high school students? Yet is it so.

Understand I am not insisting that all USAF math instructors are good teachers – although all the ones I have encountered have been because their supervisors would have moved them into other work if they didn’t do the job – or that history professors are necessarily good high school teachers. What I am saying that their teaching credentials are irrelevant to the jobs, and the principals should have the option of choosing them rather than a new Ed School grad who has never taught and doesn’t know the subject matter, but who has a credential.

But that is all for another discussion. The point I want to make here is that the system is broken, and that it has been broken for a long long time, and it is time and past time to stop forcing our teachers to pay tribute to the credential machine which delivers less and less at higher and higher costs.

For those who want to think deeper about the problems of education, I can think of no better place to start than by reading Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America, a book published in the 1940’s and very relevant today.