Month: June 2006

I spent six weeks in fall 2003 in Zambia as part of a Pew Fellowship. I kept a blog while I was there, but it was taken down by a server crash some time ago.
Anyway, last weekend, I went through the bother of rebuilding it (on a modified version of the new crabwalk.com design). So zambiastories.com is back online and ready for your reading enjoyment.

Here’s my story from today’s paper, on the final closing of the Wilmer-Hutchins Independent School District. Long-time readers know that I’ve written roughly three gazillion stories on Wilmer-Hutchins; because of its many problems, it is shutting down forever at midnight tonight. You might find this story worth your time.

The earthly remains of Wilmer-Hutchins were, in the end, few.

A few broken buildings. Some debts, some indictments. A few thousand kids who learned less than they should have.

Everything that could be put in boxes was Thursday, as the Wilmer-Hutchins Independent School District slipped into the past tense. After decades of mismanagement and crisis, Wilmer-Hutchins will legally cease to exist when the clock strikes midnight tonight. Under orders from the state of Texas, it will be absorbed into the Dallas school district.

“It’s a sad day for the district, but it’s also a new day,” said Donnie Foxx, one of the state-appointed managers who have shepherded the district through its declining days.

The district’s skeleton staff – down to 10 from more than 400 two years ago – went out for a nice lunch at Truluck’s and said their goodbyes Thursday afternoon.

They would have locked the doors one last time. But Dallas staffers were too busy carting off the district’s remaining items of value.

“I think in the long run, kids will have a better chance to get a good education – that’s the important part,” said Ron Rowell, the Texas Education Agency employee who has spent the past few months as acting superintendent.

For decades, his agency was criticized for not doing enough to stop corruption and mismanagement in Wilmer-Hutchins. The district was sick, residents said, and needed immediate attention from TEA.

They got their wish. But most residents hoped the patient could be saved. Instead, state officials chose a mercy killing.

And if you want to stroll down Hutch memory lane, the paper has posted some of the high points of my stories on the district since 2004.

Did you know: Every nation has to have its own tripartite motto, apparently. Ours, of course, is “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The French: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” And what could be more Canadian than “Peace, order, and good government.” (Alternately “paix, ordre et bon gouvernement.”) The Nazis: “Kirche, kinder, küche” (church, kids, kitchen). The Russian revolutionaries: “Peace, land, and bread.” (An echo of “panis et circenses.”)

I take no stance on the Ashkenazi IQ research presented here, but I did find this stretch interesting:

The possibility that Jewish mothers produce smarter children is unlikely in light of abundant evidence that families have no lasting effect on intelligence. Siblings reared together are no more correlated in IQ than siblings who were separated at birth, and adopted siblings are not correlated at all. Growing up in a given home within a culture seems to leave no lasting stamp on intelligence.

Really? “No lasting effect on intelligence”? In other words, drop a given newborn in a crackhouse or in the lap of luxury and it has no lasting effect on IQ? Unless the “within a culture” caveat means that one particular crackhouse has no greater or lesser impact on IQ than any other crackhouse.
In any event, since a given parent can have an enormous impact on a child’s academic performance in school, I suppose this points to the yawning gap between intellectual potential and intellectual performance. In its parents-don’t-matter approach, it reminds me a bit of this Gladwell piece from 1998 on the comparative importance of peers over parents in child development.

A Year Following The Breakup — first linked here back in March — has come to a close. A year’s a year, apparently. Still, if you want to kill a few hours, there are worse ways than to start at the beginning, read in chronological order, and watch Arnie slowly get over his ladyfriend.

Why did no one tell me that Maury Povich had become a Dada artist on the order of Tristan Tzara or Max Ernst? I mean: Pickles?

Go watch this five-second video: What sound is he making?
Then listen to it again, this time with your eyes closed. What sound is he making?
The answers to this very cool optical/aural illusion here.

Attention crossword-puzzle fans: Take a moment out from your intense loathing of sudoku to go see Wordplay, the documentary film about your craft. And keep an eye out for no fewer than three appearances by my college buddy Ken. (He’s in the trailer on the web site, too — the bearded fellow posing for a picture, oh, about 35 percent in.)

Here’s my story from today’s front page. Foot fetishists, note that this story sets my new personal record for toe mentions:

If you own stock in a company that makes No. 2 pencils, now might be a good time to sell.

After a few years of tiptoeing, Texas is preparing to take its first big step into online testing. School districts have the option to administer next spring’s TAKS test by computer.

“Students have become more and more accustomed to a computer environment,” said Susan Barnes, associate commissioner for standards and programs at the Texas Education Agency. “That has become the mode of how they interact.”

Some worry that the shift, designed to eventually save money and time, could have substantial implications for the tests’ fairness. Not every school has access to the same quality or quantity of computers.

It could also be a solution to Texas’ cheating problems – or make them worse, depending on who’s talking.

I also never linked to my column from Monday:

Why do some parents make such stupid decisions?

That was the question that kept popping into my mind last week as I walked around the KIPP TRUTH Academy in South Dallas. (For the moment, please forgive their over-commitment to capital letters.)

Here was a middle school, in a poor part of town, that put academics first. A free charter school with a demonstrated record of taking struggling neighborhood kids and putting them on a path to college. A school whose graduates will get scholarships to Dallas’ most elite private high schools and who will eventually be successful in life.

And it opened school this month with 20 empty seats in its fifth-grade class.