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What They've Thought
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What They Thought October 22, 2006 Alan
Caruba Click here for columnist bios |
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It’s not very often you will find me agreeing with an avowed environmentalist, but facts are facts and, when it comes to population growth, they are ignored at our peril if America is to avoid sliding rapidly into a Third World status. “The American people, especially our leaders, must bring themselves to face the reality that our population cannot be allowed to continue to grow without disastrous consequences,” said Donald Mann, president of Negative Population Growth, Inc. in response to the news that on October 17, 2006 our population passed the three hundred million mark. Of that number, the estimate of illegal immigrants ranges from twelve to twenty million. In his bestselling book, “State of Emergency,” Patrick J. Buchanan noted that “Rarely have immigrants constituted 10 percent of our number,” adding that “We have almost as many foreigners here today as came in the first 350 years of our history…(and) most of those coming are breaking in.” The U.S. Census bureau calculates that an immigrant sets foot in America, legally and illegally, every 31 seconds. Americans, in addition to the out-of-control immigration crisis, have an even larger crisis looming and it too will impact every aspect of our lives. With more people being born every day than are dying, we are less than thirty years away from a population of 400 million! We do need a new, replacement, younger work force and the current Social Security and other benefits programs depends on this. It’s predicted to go broke in a decade or so anyway. A dramatically growing population is going to require more roads, bridges, power plants, airports, housing, jails, schools, hospitals, and other elements of our national infrastructure just to keep pace with our current needs. By any measurement you apply—crime, healthcare, education, transportation—life in America is going to grow worse without the facilities and the energy to maintain our current lifestyles. The quickest, easiest answer is to stop all immigration, legal and illegal, into the nation and do not tell me this cannot be done. It has already been done. Between 1924 and 1965, America declared a moratorium, a forty-year pause that allowed the “melting pot” to facilitate assimilation into our culture. There is another factor this massive growth of our population portends. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “worldwide marketed energy consumption is projected to grow by 71%.” Of the various sources of energy, “petroleum consumption is still expected to grow strongly, reaching 118 million barrels per day in 2030.” America will be closing in on a hundred million more people at that point. America will not only be more crowded and in need of far more electrical energy generation than exists today, but it is going to need to exploit the oil reserves we have or import even more oil to fuel our transportation needs, heat homes, and provide the vast petrochemical needs of our industries. Three hundred million Americans want to turn on the electricity where they live and work. Our electrical grid system needs massive upgrading and expansion. We offer few incentives to utility companies to do this. We must rid ourselves of the impediments to expanding our nuclear energy industry. We must begin to more effectively exploit our existing oil reserves in “mature” fields and to explore for more offshore and in places like Alaska’s ANWR. In December 2005, Merchant Consulting in Houston released a study about “enhanced oil recovery projects.” David Merchant noted that two-thirds of the world’s proved oil reserves lie in the Middle East and that the world consumes around 80 million barrels of crude oil a day. Not only will the worldwide oil demand increase, it will do so as the top 14 super giant fields are in decline. Yes, oil is finite. Yes, we’re going to have to import more to support the needs of 300 million Americans. And yes there remain millions of barrels of U.S. oil that can be discovered, extracted and recovered, but Congress has created a vast matrix of laws that obstructs or discourages this process. Today’s population of 300 million Americans doesn’t care much about the logistics of oil until it becomes too expensive at the pump. They are convinced that Big Oil is always going to provide oil and natural gas, and they are right. Ponder this, on October 17 the U.S. Census made its announcement and Negative Population Growth, Inc. issued its warning. On October 15, however, ExxonMobil quietly announced it had signed an agreement with Qatar Petroleum to build a $3 billion world-scale petrochemical complex. The new facility will be devoted to the production of liquefied natural gas. That’s the good news. The bad news is that America desperately needs to close its southern border to prevent obscene numbers of illegal immigrants arriving daily. We need to pause our current immigration to let new Americans assimilate or, to put it another way, to learn English! We can have our expanding suburbs. We can respond to the needs of older Americans. We can pass on the America we know to a new generation. This will not occur if our economy continues to be victimized by environmental policies that deter access to our nation’s energy reserves, puts curbs on new housing, and opposes our nation’s agricultural and corporate communities. Ultimately, with three hundred million or four hundred million, if America fails to protect and assert its national sovereignty there won’t be a nation to save. |
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No column this week. R.A. Hawkins Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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The New Orleans Saints have started their season 5-1. Supposedly this is the NFL’s feel-good story of the year. Well, guess what? I don’t feel good for them. I don’t feel good about their record. I think it’s abnormal. And I hope they start to lose. I realize a hurricane destroyed the city of New Orleans last year. I realize people died. And I realize, only a year ago, the place where the Saints play football was being used to house thousands of homeless refugees. The whole thing sucked. I hope the Big Easy bounces back better than ever — for its sake, as well as for Girls Gone Wild. But I’m not buying this idea that the Saints are “everyone’s second favorite team” now. I’m not buying this idea that everyone should support them. Why? Would that make things all better? Would the Saints winning football games somehow bring back the people who died? In 2001, nineteen a-holes stole four planes and turned one beautiful morning into a funeral for 3,000 people. It was largely considered the worst day in American history. Roughly a month later, the New York Yankees played the Arizona Diamondbacks in one of the best, most memorable, most gut-wrenching World Series that anyone who still watches baseball could ever remember seeing. To make a long story short, the Yankees lost. And life went on. I was a lifelong Yankee fan. I was someone who grew up outside the Big Apple. It offended me that anyone rooted for those cheesy, expansion-draft D-backs that year. Even President Bush said he was pulling for Arizona — said he was tired of seeing the Yankees always winning. What did that mean? Was he tired of New York? Tired of America? Tired of freedom? No. It meant this time wasn’t different, even if people had died this time. The Yanks had won the previous year. And the year before that. And the year before that. In fact, they’d won four of the previous five World Series, for a grand total of 26. People were tired of seeing this. And this shouldn’t have changed just because there were no Twin Towers. Yankee fans have always been offended by the idea of other teams existing. And fans of other teams have always been offended by the Yankees. George Bush wasn’t rooting against New York City in 2001; he was rooting against a team that he hated, which happened to play there. In this way, the president was rooting for normalcy. And that’s the way I am looking at New Orleans. The Saints were not a winning franchise before Hurricane Katrina. Nor should I want them to be a winning franchise after. If the Saints are winning now, that’s great for Saints fans. It’s not great for Eagles fans when the Saints beat the Eagles; it’s not great for Falcons fans when the Saints beat the Falcons. Anyone who cheers for the Saints for the sake of New Orleans misses the point here. You think, by them winning, the city will “bounce back.” That’s impossible. Bouncing back means returning to normal. And normal is New Orleans football futility. If you really care about New Orleans, you will root for the Saints to be dreadful, and for Saints fans to pack the Superdome anyway. That’s how it was before, and so it should be thereafter. Unless, of course, you hate freedom. In which case Katrina changed everything. Jonathan David Morris Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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No column this week. Rep. Ron Paul Web Site Back to Top |
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In the Summer of 2001 Dame Marie Clay, creator of the New Zealand based Reading Recovery program, and her entourage came to the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC, to speak with House Education Committee Staffer Bob Sweet. Her purpose was to ascertain whether Reading Recovery would be eligible for Reading First funding once the bill was passed. Bob explained to Ms. Clay that explicit, systematic phonics instruction had to be included in any program eligible for RF funding because it was one of the necessary key components of reading instruction that had been established through decades of carefully conducted quantitative research. These findings had been validated in the Report of the National Reading Panel in 2000 and were now going to become an essential part of the Reading First Law. He pleaded with Ms. Clay to use her extensive network of teacher training programs all over the US to help in the implementation of the RF program. He encouraged her to provide the leadership within the RR family to make the modifications necessary, and thus make RR eligible for RF funding consideration. With a stare as cold as ice, Marie Clay replied that RR would not be making any changes to their program; however, Mr. Sweet could be certain a new description of its components would be written in such a way as to bring it into compliance with the RF law. Momentarily dumbfounded, he maintained that Reading Recovery could not be eligible for RF funding without modification, and his initial estimation then still stands today. A little background about Clay’s Reading Recovery program reveals it to be a very expensive program to implement, averaging more than $8,000 per student per year when the expense of teacher development is considered. This cost is more than one whole year of education in all subjects for one student in many districts around the country, yet, only the lowest 10 to 20 percent of first graders is even eligible for such services. It seems hardly worth implementing given that students who complete the first grade Reading Recovery sequence lose much of their gains, and that unpaid trained volunteers can prepare students to perform equally as well. Given the importance of explicit phonics instruction for the poorest readers, it shouldn’t be shocking that they make almost zero gains when instructed with Reading Recovery. Students who do not respond have been found to be weak in decoding skills because phonics instruction in Reading Recovery is not sufficiently explicit and systematic. Interestingly, New Zealand researchers found that adding an explicit phonics component to a standard Reading Recovery intervention reduced the time required to complete the program by about 30%. President Bush initiated Reading First soon after he took office. It marked the first time that the findings of scientific research became the basis of federal law. This research dealt with teaching methods, brain function; positron emission tomography (PET) scans, and many other aspects of reading research that were summarized in the Report of the National Reading Panel in 2000. The findings of this extensive 30 year long effort to discover how children learn to read concluded that changes could be made in instructional practices to apply those findings in the classroom and to offer both prospective and veteran teachers the tools they need to succeed. Its objective was to change the teaching of reading from the latest fad to instruction based on scientific evidence. The practical application of the research boiled down to the identification of five essential components of reading instruction. Those components are: phonemic awareness; phonics; vocabulary development; fluency, including oral reading fluency; and comprehension strategies. If taught explicitly and systematically children could learn to read proficiently. These five components of reading instruction were written into law (Sec. 1208 (3)) and became the heart and soul of Reading First. This was the measure which states were to use in the proposals and applications they submitted to the Reading First Office. It was up to the states to choose products that would fit the new standard. It is not astounding that this law spurred an internal feud within the education industry. Chris Doherty, the Director of Reading First who was asked to resign in the aftermath of the release of the Inspector General’s Report on Reading First’s grant application process, was faced with an enormous task. He and his two assistants had to develop state application forms, guidance documents (which were approved by staff on both the House and Senate Education Committees), review panels, and training sessions making sure that all states knew the deadlines for applying for their share of funds. Then, the real work began with the review of state applications to make sure they were in compliance with the new law. Unfortunately, many of the states sent back their applications and proposed they use the ‘same ole, same ole’ reading programs used up until then. The Reading First law was different because it required states to change practices that had been used for decades, and voluntarily use reading programs that were consistent with the latest findings of scientific reading research. For example one state wanted to use the new money from Reading First to pave parking lots; another submitted requests to use the money for library books, and still others wanted to use the old basal textbooks, which did not follow the findings of scientifically based reading research. Some states did not want to submit specific products they would use for Reading First classrooms and simply gave their assurance that they would comply with the law. Other states actually did include programs that met the standards of Reading First, but had little leverage to insist that local educational agencies comply with the requirements of Reading First. There was resistance up and down the line to voluntarily adopting reading programs which included the essential components of reading instruction. In spite of the challenges in implementing the new law, Director Doherty and his small staff did an outstanding job. Reports are now coming in that make clear Reading First is making a substantive improvement in reducing illiteracy in the US. Many states who were skeptical about the “paradigm” shift away from untested programs to those that were aligned with explicit, systematic instruction in the essential components of reading instruction are now the law’s strongest advocates. The testimony of Reading First State Directors tells the story: Alabama: “Reading First is the most helpful thing about No Child Left Behind and the most helpful federal program I’ve seen in my career.” Katherine Mitchell, Assistant State Superintendent for Reading. Washington: Reading first encompasses all the things that research says effective schools do. That is unique. It’s seen as a place to learn. I love everything about it. I love it every day.” Lexie Domaradzke, Reading First Administrator New York: “An awful lot of non-Reading First schools are starting to implement the tenets of RF on their own. Veteran teachers are raving about what RF has done for them. The whole field is learning together. Before Reading First, reading instruction was all over the map.” Cindy Gallagher, Reading First Director. But one of the most moving comments comes from the principal of a school in Wyoming. “In 25 years in education it has been one of the most well-researched, results-oriented programs I have even seen. The results in our school speak for themselves. We’d been the state leader in Reading Recovery/Balanced literacy, and were not seeing the results there. Reading First is an exceptional model every school in the country should be following. The results for children learning to read are amazing!!” When we keep in mind that the I.G. Report was initiated by two disgruntled publishers for Reading Recovery and Success for All, because they didn’t get “their fair share of the federal largess,” one can only wonder how far selfishness can go. Reading Recovery’s publisher even has the audacity to ask for reparations for loss of revenue. Success for All’s publisher complains that not enough states chose to use their program since it is scientifically based and is demanding that the Department of Education require states to use it, even though that is forbidden by law. There are other publishers who have squawked that they too have not been treated fairly under Reading First, although their products are not supported by the findings of scientific research. We can be thankful that Director Chris Doherty stood his ground under great pressure and established a strong national foundation through the initial five years of Reading First. We will miss his leadership and his dedication to the cause of insuring that all children learn to read proficiently in the early elementary grades. One can only hope that the Secretary of Education will find someone who is worthy to replace him, and who can match his grace under fire. Nancy
Salvato
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©2004-2006 by their respective authors. Reprinted by permission. |
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