Culture Vulture

The connection between the Wall Street meltdown and the recent New England Common Assessment Program science test results released last week by the state Department of Education may not be blatantly obvious, but there is a link.
As noted above, many of the “best and the brightest” in recent years have flocked to Wall Street or to other financial service jobs, where they “engineered” financial instruments of an increasingly complex nature. They went there because that was where the money, the rewards, the status and the best salaries were. Meanwhile, old-line manufacturing industries migrated in large numbers offshore. While the global economy is here to stay, presumably — unless energy costs continue to make the word a big place again and provide a cost benefit to businesses that stay close to their customers — it’s hard to shake a feeling that it would be nice if the best minds we produce here in the U.S. went into industries that actually made genuine, tangible wealth, instead of the paper version.
State-directed economies have crashed and burned trying to direct outcomes of this sort, and history has shown, in our view, that free markets do the most efficient job of allocating such resources. But it’s hard to allocate anything when you don’t have a good supply of it, and one thing the U.S. seems to have less and less of, as our once formidable lead in science and technology shrinks, is an abundance of scientific talent.
We’re not just talking about PhD’s and other advanced degree holders. There’s a lot of science waiting to be done by ordinary people, who don’t wear a white lab coat to work.
Test scores have been the subject of controversy for years, and probably always will be. For schools that post less than scintillating grades, the temptation will always be to say the test is flawed in some way. It’s interesting that you never hear that complaint from schools that score well.
Compared to statewide levels, our local schools didn’t fare badly in the NECAP testing, but there’s still something that doesn’t scan right when only 25 percent of Vermont’s 11th graders tested proficient. In other test, the National Assessment of Education Progress Test, which uses national standards for scoring, compared to the standards developed by educators in Vermont, Rhode Island and New Hampshire for the NECAP tests, Vermont’s 11th graders scored in at the 77 percent proficient mark. So what’s the difference in the difficulty level of the two tests? The NAEP tests are widely regarded as being good indicators of what students should know, so it’s puzzling the NECAP scores were so much lower.
Locally, Burr and Burton Academy scored at 36 percent on the NECAP test; Arlington Memorial High School had 22 percent proficient.
Look at those numbers again. Even BBA’s score of 36 means that only slightly more than one third of its 11 th graders are “proficient” in science. It’s hard to know just what the NECAP test developers consider proficient, but our understanding of proficiency in other tests means something along the lines of what a reasonably well-educated person should know about a subject. We’re not talking Einstein levels — just what an average, well-educated student who has had the time and resources to learn more about this that regular working folks do should know.
There may be a an explanation as to how a score of 22, 25, 36 percent or even higher is “good enough” or better than what used to be, or about the same as what students in other countries know. If there is we’d like to hear it. Is it the test? Is the teaching? Is it the students themselves and a culture that has downgraded the importance of science as we’ve come to take a lot of its amazing developments — from iPods to medical breakthroughs — for granted?
The connection between all of this and Wall Street is that while one sector of the economy — financial services — sizzled incandescently for the past few years before crashing spectacularly in recent weeks and months, the numbers of secondary school students venturing into academically rigorous areas of study like science and math have dwindled. This is a trend that hopefully will be reversed when the nation gets its groove back and hits the re-start button economically. Just figuring out new ways the re-engineer products to counter global warming would be enough, you would think, to keep a lot of bright young minds working late into the night.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

People have probably loved to bash the news media for suspected bias since the beginning of time, or at least since the invention of the printing press. Those who hold views that are so sacred as to not permit of further re-examinination when the facts shift often find it a faster route to reassurance to inveigh against the messenger – in this case the much-maligned news media.

There’s probably nothing really new in the widespread finger pointing that seems to have reached new highs in the past few months as the Presidential campaign enters its final few weeks (mercifully, at last). Democrats have accused the media of failing to critically examine and reveal some of the (to them) malicious distortions perpetrated by the Republicans against their candidate, Barack Obama. Republicans in turn went to a new level, or perhaps depth is a better word, by making the news media the issue during their nominating convention. It sure was red meat for Sarah Palin, their vice presidential nominee, when she said she wasn’t planning to go to Washington to be popular with the, horror of horrors, Eastern Media Elite.

It’s a free country, and anyone can say what they want (so long as you don’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said), and certainly the news media gets it wrong from time to time. Sometimes news stories go our without all facts being checked as carefully as they might. More so today than ever before, straight news and opinion pieces are getting blurred. Are blogs news? It’s hard to imagine Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow or any of the other titans of yesterday confusing a blog, or even some of the talking heads pontificating on some of the major TV networks, with being objective, to the best of their ability, sources of news.   

In the recent case where Republican political operatives engaged in an outrageous distortion of Obama’s opinions on a sex education curriculum for elementary age schoolchildren, readers of responsible news agencies – the New York Times being one example – have consistently had the benefit of having such distortions and misinformation corrected with facts. And by and large, over the long run, the facts do catch up with the story. That’s a job not made easier by political campaigns which are willing to stoop to the low road in the first place. And just to be bi-partisan, Democrats have been just as guilty of manipulating facts to skew opinion and votes their way.

Gathering news and presenting both sides of a story has never been an easy task, and can be made more complicated by officials who are conveniently unavailable for comment in a timely manner. We’re happy to say that this phenomenon, while not unheard of in Vermont, certainly seems a good deal less prevalent than elsewhere. It’s part of the joys of working in a small state where if you don’t know someone yet, you probably will, and what goes around, comes around. 

The upcoming Presidential election and the issues of economics and foreign affairs that are driving it is far too important for voters to allow themselves to be distracted by nonsense from hardcore partisans of either political extreme that it’s really the news media that’s to blame for everything, as we play the role of master puppeteer and distorting the facts. If only, many news executives must think, we really were that powerful. News flash – we’re not, nor do we suffer from the illusion we’re that wise, either.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the fall’s political campaigns get underway in earnest after next week’s primaries, one issue that ought to merit the attention of Vermonters is how well we are doing with regard to meeting the goal of having the entire state accessible to highspeed, affordable broadband Internet service by the end of 2010. The same goes for mobile, cellular telephone service.
Last year, the Legislature, with the enthusiastic backing of Gov. James Douglas, voted through Act 79, which established a Vermont Telecommunications Authority to push for the establishment of high speed Internet and cellular telephone services throughout the state. Known as the “E-State” initiative, it’s an effort to bring Vermont into the 21st century in terms of information infrastructure, and the authority was empowered to issue up to $40 million in revenue bonds for this purpose. It can also establish partnerships with providers of telecom services, construct, own and provide communications facilities and form nonprofit subsidiary corporations for special projects, among other things.
This was, and remains, a great idea, one that was supported by both major political parties. Achieving bi-partisan agreement on an issue so central to Vermont’s economic growth doesn’t happen everyday. But in this case, the obvious worth of helping foster the communications capability of the state to handle the ever-increasing needs of private sector, jobs producing enterprises reverberated clearly across the political spectrum.
With the state’s tax structure on both the personal and corporate sides more or less maxed out — a further jump in tax rates should really be off the table — and public spending being slashed about as close to the bone as it can probably get without affecting important services — the only way out of the tight budgetary box the state finds itself in is through economic growth. Today, and in the future, economic growth will hinge more than ever on sturdy broadband links that connect Vermont with not only the rest of the country but the world.
For many years Vermont has been viewed by its cheerleaders as ideally situated to attract high-income entrepreneurs who may be consultants, or may own businesses, but in either case would inject some welcome revenue into the state’s economy in one way or another. That vision has been thrawted by a poor-to-middling broadband infrastructure, along with punishingly high tax rates on high income earners. While it’s not fashionable to lament the plight of those pulling down six figures and beyond and the amounts they’re asked to fork over in state taxes, it is a disincentive to those who might otherwise move to Vermont and bring that wealth with them, and who have the freedom to pretty much live where they want. The point is, while it’s proper to worry more about how, for example, the less well-off will afford to heat their homes this winter, continually raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for additional government services isn’t a free lunch either. There comes a point when it’s self-defeating.
The state has at least tried to address the broadband issue through the E-state initiative, but one problem is that the goal posts keep getting moved back. It may be all well and good to be able to claim with a straight face that 100 percent of the state will have broadband access by 2010, but what kind of access will that be? Technology keeps marching on, bandwidth needs keep rising, and what might have been considered state-of-the-art in 2007 will seem barely more than dial-up two years from now.
And given the difficulties of attracting telecom companies to actually install and maintain towers to service often sparsely populated corners of the state, getting to the bare minimum of how the state defines accessibility — transfer rates of 1.5 megabytes of data per second in one direction, plus mobile cell phone access everywhere in the state — will be a big challenge. According to the best estimates from state officials, we’re only about 80 percent or so there. Getting the final mile — or the final 5 percent — will be the really hard part, because those areas aren’t likely to be very profitable, if at all.
If the state were flush with cash, you could argue that this is where the government should step in and build the infrastructure and own it until it could be sold to a private entrepreneur. But we’re not flush, and probably won’t be for awhile. What the state can do is continue to emphasize and make pushing broadband a high priority and resist backsliding on a commitment to high technology. There are so many ways that the presence of robust Internet services can save money — from health care to education to all manner of economic services — that the minuscule investment the state is really calling upon itself to make seems like a bargain. And let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that access translates into actual usage. It only means we theoretically can.
It seems amazing that in this day and age many communities in Vermont — including nearby Dorset — are still only partially covered by broadband Internet and its cousin, cellular phone service. Go anywhere in Europe, and in growing parts of Asia, and it’s not an issue. If Vermont wants to be part of the 21st century and reverse its aging population statistics, we should be pushing harder on the hi-tech front — and not be content or pat ourselves on the back for making it “accessible.” There isn’t any harm in going to the next level on this one.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)