The New York Times – March 20, 2008

States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School
By SAM DILLON

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.

“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site. Delaware reported 84 percent to the federal government but publicized four lower rates at home.

The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.

The No Child law is also at fault. The law set ambitious goals, enforced through sanctions, to make every student proficient in math and reading. But it established no national school completion goals.

“I liken N.C.L.B. to a mile race,” said Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that seeks to improve schools. “Under N.C.L.B., students are tested rigorously every tenth of a mile. But nobody keeps track as to whether they cross the finish line.”

Furthermore, although the law requires schools to make only minimal annual improvements in their rates, reporting lower rates to Washington could nevertheless cause more high schools to be labeled failing — a disincentive for accurate reporting. With Congressional efforts to rewrite the law stalled, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has begun using her executive powers to correct the weaknesses in it. Ms. Spellings’s efforts started Tuesday with a measure aimed at focusing resources on the nation’s worst schools. Graduation rates are also on her agenda.

In an interview, Ms. Spellings said she might require states to calculate their graduation rate according to one federal formula.

“I’m considering settling this once and for all,” she said, “by defining a single federal graduation rate and requesting states to report it that way. That would finally put this issue to rest.”

In 2001, the year the law was drafted, one of the first of a string of revisionist studies argued that the nation’s schools were losing more students than previously thought.

Jay P. Greene, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization, compared eighth-grade enrollments with the number of diplomas bestowed five years later to estimate that the nation’s graduation rate was 71 percent. Federal statistics had put the figure 15 points higher.

Still, Congress did not make dropouts a central focus of the law. And when states negotiated their plans to carry it out, the Bush administration allowed them to use dozens of different ways to report graduation rates.

As an example, New Mexico defined its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma. That method grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave before the 12th grade.

The law also allowed states to establish their own goals for improving graduation rates. Many set them low. Nevada, for instance, pledged to get just 50 percent of its students to graduate on time. And since the law required no annual measures of progress, California proposed that even a one-tenth of 1 percent annual improvement in its graduation rate should suffice.

Daniel J. Losen, who has studied dropout reporting for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he once pointed out to a state official that, at that pace, it would take California 500 years to meet its graduation goal.

“In California, we’re patient,” Mr. Losen recalled the official saying.

Most troublesome to some experts was the way the No Child law’s mandate to bring students to proficiency on tests, coupled with its lack of a requirement that they graduate, created a perverse incentive to push students to drop out. If low-achieving students leave school early, a school’s performance can rise.

No study has documented that the law has produced such an effect nationwide. Experts say they believe many low-scoring students are prodded to leave school, often by school officials urging them to seek an equivalency certificate known as a General Educational Development diploma.

“They get them out so they don’t have them taking those tests,” said Wanda Holly-Stirewalt, director of a program in Jackson, Miss., that helps dropouts earn a G.E.D. “We’ve heard that a lot. It happens all over the system.”

After several research groups questioned graduation rates, the federal Department of Education in 2005 published an estimated rate for each state, to identify those that were reporting least accurately. The figures suggested that nine states had overstated their graduation rates by 10 to 22 percentage points.

Part of the discrepancy is because many states inflate their official rate by counting dropouts who later earn a G.E.D. as graduates or by removing them from calculations altogether.

The undercounting of dropouts can be striking.

In Mississippi, the official formula put the graduation rate for the state’s largest district, Jackson Public Schools, at 81 percent. Mr. Bounds, the state schools superintendent, said the true rate was 56 percent.

At Murrah High School, one of eight here, the official graduation rate is 99 percent, even though yearbooks show that half of Murrah’s freshmen disappear before becoming seniors. Even Murrah’s principal, Roy Brookshire, expressed surprise.

“I can’t explain how they figured that, truly I can’t,” Mr. Brookshire said.

Governors also stepped in, worried that schools were not preparing the work force their states need. In December 2005, all 50 agreed to standardize their graduation rate calculations, basing them on tracking individual students through high school.

Fifteen states have begun to use the formula, said Dane Linn, director of the education division at the National Governors Association. And it has produced some stunning revelations.

In North Carolina, the rate plummeted a year ago to 68 percent from 95 percent. The News & Observer in Raleigh likened the experience to the shock of hearing a doctor diagnose a terrible illness.

“But now doctors can start treatments that can lead to a cure,” the paper said in an editorial.

Mississippi is among the states that have become the most serious about confronting their dropout problem, Mr. Linn said.

The state has been building a record system capable of tracking student data from year to year, and in 2005 used it to estimate a graduation rate of 61 percent, 24 points below the official rate.

Mr. Bounds took office that fall and was initially consumed with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But he eventually had time to pore over the data.

“It was time to boldly confront the facts,” he said.

Mr. Bounds has used the new figures to persuade the Mississippi Board of Education to require school districts to prepare dropout prevention plans. Last month he told 2,000 community leaders that the state’s dropout crisis was like “a Katrina hitting our schools every year.”

The state will eventually report the lower rate to Washington but has set no schedule, Mr. Bounds said. One problem, he said, is that when Mississippi sends revised rates for its more than 200 high schools, their success levels will appear to plummet and many schools could be exposed to sanctions.

“It’ll look like everybody has dropped, when actually everybody’s doing a better job,” Mr. Bounds said. “But we’re capturing the right score on the scoreboard.”

AUDIO SLIDESHOW: “Pomona College’s new architectural installation, designed by the artist James Turrell, plays with light and sound.”

PRESS RELEASE:

Pomona College is pleased to announce an exhibition and symposium for a Skyspace created by Pomona College alumnus (1965) James Turrell. This will be the first Skyspace in Southern California to be regularly accessible to the public.

Turrell–an internationally acclaimed light and space artist and the architect of Roden Crater–has completed private commissions for Skyspaces in Southern California in the past, but none of them are available for public viewing. The new Skyspace, located in the Draper Courtyard of the new Lincoln and Edmunds Buildings on the Pomona campus, has been realized in collaboration with consulting architects Marmol Radziner + Associates AIA.

The exhibition and symposium offer audiences an in-depth look at Turrell’s work—work that was profoundly influenced by his undergraduate studies at Pomona College in perceptual psychology and mathematics “I value greatly my time at Pomona College. That kind of education is tailored to people, and was very responsible to each student. I’m grateful for that,” said James Turrell. The academic buildings surrounding the Skyspace house the College’s departments and programs related to the science of mind—such as computer science, psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science—as well as the earth sciences of geology and environmental analysis.

“We are very honored that James Turrell has created a work for the courtyard of the Lincoln and Edmunds buildings,” says Pomona College President David Oxtoby. “He is a distinguished alumnus, and his intellectual concerns— art grounded in the psychology of perception—are central to many of the academic disciplines housed in the new building complex.”

The Skyspace—a precisely designed architectural installation that heightens the viewer’s awareness of light, sky and the activity of perception—is the form for which Turrell is renowned. Building on this formal vocabulary, the artist has created an open, transparent courtyard space in which a floating metal canopy shades the seating area and provides a frame for the sky. During the transition from twilight to full night, lighting elements, programmed to change in intensity and hue as they wash the underside of the canopy, create the changing perception of sky as space, form, object and void. A shallow pool centered beneath the opening to the sky mirrors the daytime sky and reflects a dark echo of the night sky.

In honor of the new Skyspace, the Pomona College Museum of Art will present James Turrell at Pomona College, an exhibition uniting the various threads of Turrell’s artistic practice. “My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it with vision. It is about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking into fire,” said Turrell. The exhibition includes End Around, one of the artist’s Ganzfeld works; two LED Tall Glass works from 2006, Gathered Light and Silent Leading; and a selection of models and drawings. The exhibition opens Tuesday, September 4, 2007 and continues through May 17, 2008. The exhibition opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 8 from 5- 7 p.m. The public is welcome.

The Tall Glass pieces consist of a core of LEDs individually programmed by Turrell to create a subtle shift in color over time, similar to the deliberate but beautiful fashion in which the sky changes from late afternoon to night. However, the careful construction of these works ensures that the viewer sees only a floating, changing field of light—a subtle revelatory experience of photons as tangible entities and physical presence.

In a Ganzfeld space, depth, surface and color are replaced by a thick, all-encompassing mist of light. Upon entering the chamber of End Around, the visitor instinctively approaches what appears to be a faint wall of light in the distance. But upon reaching the light source, the viewer’s entire visual field is consumed by an apparently limitless field of blue light. Turrell engineers the Ganzfeld works to eliminate all visual cues that the human brain processes to construct depth and surface. As a result, the viewer is unable to tell whether the ethereal blue field seen from the platform extends for inches, feet or into infinity. Here, light is perceived as light, not as illumination on an object or surface.

“The exhibition and Skyspace define the issues that have animated Mr. Turrell’s distinguished career—the complex interplay of light, sky, atmosphere and human perception,” says Kathleen Stewart Howe, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Pomona College Museum of Art. “We are delighted to have this important and inviting work of art as the centerpiece of a dynamic academic cluster where it can play a vital role in our intellectual community.”

In conjunction with the exhibition and dedication, Pomona College will host a program titled James Turrell: Knowing Light on Saturday, October 13, 2007, 1:30–4 p.m. The program includes Michael Govan—CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art—as the keynote speaker; William Banks, Professor of Psychology at Pomona College, on perceptual psychology; and a conversation with Turrell and Arden Reed, Arthur M. Dole and Fanny M. Dole Professor of English at Pomona College. The symposium is free and open to the public.

Turrell is a native of Los Angeles who grew up in Pasadena, California. He received his undergraduate degree in perceptual psychology from Pomona College in 1965, and an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate School in 1973. His work has been recognized with a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” a Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple grants through the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2001, Turrell received an honorary doctorate from Pomona College. His creations have graced the halls and collections of institutions throughout the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the DeYoung Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, P.S.1 and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Turrell currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona where he has worked for more than 30 years on his largest and most ambitious project—the Roden Crater, an ancient volcano crater that he is molding into one of the world’s most unusual and compelling light observatories.

New Worlds #1 (July 1946). Originally a science fiction fanzine founded by Ted Carnell, Arthur C Clarke and John Wyndham in the 1930s. The magazine was edited by Ted Carnell from 1946 to 1963 when Michael Moorcock took over and transformed it into the most important literary magazine of the 1960s.

Michael Moorcock
Saturday March 22, 2008
The Guardian

Michael Moorcock fondly remembers his friend Arthur C Clarke, the Ego, visionary and gentleman

I was a very young journalist of 17 or so when Arthur C Clarke invited me to celebrate his birthday before he returned to Ceylon, where he had recently settled. The party was scheduled for November 5 in north London. Flattered to be asked, I gave up plans to get drunk and do exciting things with explosives and set off into the terra incognita of Tottenham where Arthur’s brother Fred lived a modest and respectable life. A bottle in my pocket, I knocked at the door to be greeted by Fred. “It’s round the corner,” he said. “I’m just off there myself.” He turned a thoughtful eye on the bottle. “I don’t think you’ll need that.”

Promising, I thought. Ego (Arthur’s nickname since youth) has laid every-thing on. I let Fred place the bottle on the hallstand and followed him for a few hundred yards through misty streets, determinedly reenacting the Blitz with Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels, until we arrived at a church and one of those featureless halls of the kind where the Scouts held their regular meetings. Sure enough, inside was a group of mostly stunned friends and acquaintances holding what appeared to be teacups, one of which was shoved into my hand as I was greeted by Arthur in that Somerset-American acent that was all his own. “Welcome,” he said. “Got everything you want?”

“Um,” I stammered. “Is there only tea ?”

“Of course not!” beamed the mighty intelligence, who had already published the whole concept of satellite communications on which our modern world is based. “There’s orange juice, too.” He indicated a serving hatch. “But you’d better hurry, Mike. The film show’s starting soon.” I saw that ladies of the kind who help out at church socials were organising chairs. I strolled up to Ted Carnell who, in the 1930s, had founded New Worlds with Arthur and John Wyndham when it was still a mimeographed fanzine.

Ted had the air of melancholy satisfaction I’d spotted on the faces of boys at school as they saw you turn up beside them on the headmaster’s carpet. It read “Caught you, too, did he?”

Once we were seated, Fred downed the lights and the real ordeal began. Arthur’s early home movies of the Great Barrier Reef. The projector breaking down was the high point. When it did, the relief was tangible.

In spite of it all, my liking for Arthur continued. Everyone knew he was gay. In the 1950s I’d go out drinking with his boyfriend. We met his proteges, western and eastern, and their families: people who had only the most generous praise for his kindness. Self-absorbed he might be, and a teetotaller, but an impeccable gent through and through.

He had absolutely unshakeable (and why not?) faith in his own visions. After all, SatCom was by no means his only accurate prediction. He retained a faith in the power of reason and science to cure our ills. At one point, when the Tamil Tigers emerged on the Sri Lankan political scene, I asked if he wasn’t worried. He assured me that it was all a misunderstanding and that the Tigers, who subsequently became expert terrorists, were basically sound chaps who’d soon give up their wild ideas.

His view of our world, rather like PG Wodehouse’s (whom he resembled physically) didn’t include much room for the Four Horsemen galloping through his rhododendrons. His preferred future was extremely Wellsian, full of brainy people sitting about in togas swapping theorems.

And he was unflappably The Ego. After we watched the preview of 2001, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard and I all admitted it had left us a bit cold in the visionary department. He took our poor response with his usual amused forgiveness reserved for lesser mortals and told us how many millions the movie had already made in America.

Around that time, I was able to introduce Arthur to William Burroughs. Everyone invited to my party expected the master of optimistic hard SF and the master of satirical inner space to get on about as well as Attila the Hun and Pope Leo. In fact, they spent the entire evening deep in animated conversation, pausing only to sip their OJ and complain about the rock ‘n’ roll music on the hifi. At the end of the evening both were warm in their gratitude for the introduction.

I scarcely read a word of his, apart from a few classic short stories, though I came to publish him occasionally in New Worlds, and he knew I was broadly unfamiliar with his work.

He understood this to be my loss. And, as he became a massive bestseller, partly because of 2001 but perhaps even more because of his TV series investigating the paranormal, he didn’t change. He would still turn up in the pub to show us brochures for his latest ventures and mention casually all the famous people who admired him, including Rupert Murdoch and Richard Nixon, showing us 10×8 glossies of himself with the world’s movers and shakers.

He still understood that we would rather watch his home movies than enjoy a drunken evening playing with rockets whose only technical secrets lay in the length of their blue touch-paper. But, I have to admit, I became much warier of accepting his “party” invitations.

Angus Wilson once returned from Sri Lanka exasperatedly describing Arthur as the most egocentric person he had ever met. Yet somehow, in spite of everything, Arthur remained a beloved friend of whom I retain only the fondest memories. He was a sweet-natured optimist in a world of grief. I’m really going to miss him.

His thirst for scapegoats shows how poorly George Bush understands the meaning of Easter

Giles Fraser
The Guardian, Saturday March 22 2008

Somewhere in the Middle East, Jesus Christ is strapped to a bench, his head wrapped in clingfilm. He furiously sucks against the plastic. A hole is pierced, but only so that a filthy rag can be stuffed back into his mouth. He is turned upside down and water slowly poured into the rag. The torturer whispers religious abuse. If you are God, save yourself you fucking idiot. Fighting to pull in oxygen through the increasingly saturated rag, his lungs start to fill up with water. Someone punches him in the stomach.

Perhaps this is how we ought to be re-telling the story of Christ’s passion. For ever since the cross became a piece of jewellery, it has been drained of its power to sicken. Even before this the Romans had taken their hated instrument of torture and turned it into the logo of a new religion. Few makeovers can have been so historically significant. The very secular cross was transformed into a sort of club badge for Christians, something to be proud of.

Two weeks ago, the most powerful Christian in the world vetoed a bill that would have made it illegal for the CIA to use waterboarding on detainees. “We need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists,” said George Bush in a passable impersonation of Pontius Pilate. “This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe.”

Throughout his time in office, the president has frequently been photographed in front of the cross. Yet as his support for torture demonstrates, he has understood little of its meaning. For the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is supremely a moral story about God’s identification with victims.

The French anthropologist René Girard is the modern voice that has done most to explain the nature of this moral change. Human societies, he argues, are often held together by scapegoating. From the playground to the boardroom, we pick on the weak, the weird or the different as a way of securing communal solidarity. At times of tension or division, there is nothing quite as uniting as the “discovery” of someone to blame – often someone perfectly innocent. For generations of Europeans, the Jews were cast in the role; in the same way women have been accused of being witches, homosexuals derided as unnatural, and Muslims dismissed as terrorists.

The crucifixion turns this world on its head. For it is the story of a God who deliberately takes the place of the despised and rejected so as to expose the moral degeneracy of a society that purchases its own togetherness at the cost of innocent suffering. The new society he called forth – something he dubbed the kingdom of God – was to be a society without scapegoating, without the blood of the victim. The task of all Christians is to further this kingdom, “on earth as it is in heaven”.

Yet, for all his years in office, it is hard to think that President Bush has done anything much to make this kingdom more of a reality. Instead he has given us rendition, so-called specialised interrogation procedures, and the blood of many thousand innocent Iraqis. Given all this, what can it possibly mean for George Bush to call himself a Christian?

Easter is not all about going to heaven. Still less some nasty evangelical death cult where a blood sacrifice must be paid to appease an angry God. The crucifixion reveals human death-dealing at its worst. In contrast, the resurrection offers a new start, the foundation of a very different sort of community that refuses the logic of scapegoating. The kingdom is a place of shocking, almost amoral, inclusion. All are welcome, especially the rejected. At least, that’s the theory. Unfortunately, very few of us Christians are any good at it.

Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney, London.

March 21 7:30pm

Les Blank Program Three

~Les Blank in attendance for a Q & A!~

Yum, Yum, Yum!: A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking
Blank’s talent for making our mouths water hits another high point with this spicy whirlwind tour of Cajun and Creole culture. Once again, the marriage of sensory pleasures takes center stage-music and food are depicted with equal reverence as Blank delves deeper into the heart of French-speaking Louisiana. Directed by Les Blank, 1990, 31 min

Always for Pleasure
“One critic said about Always for Pleasure that it looked like it was shot by a guy wandering through New Orleans with a bottle of beer in one hand and a camera in the other,” says Blank. What the camera captures is glorious and trance-inducing. The filmmaker’s loose, intimate style comes through wonderfully in this document of New Orleans’ singular celebrations: Second-line parades, Mardi Gras, and Jazz Fest. Features live music from Professor Longhair, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Neville Brothers and more. Directed by Les Blank, 1978, 58 min

~New Orleans style red beans & rice will be served on the Spanish Patio between films.~

$10

TICKETS & INFO

Star Explodes Halfway Across Universe

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 21, 2008

Filed at 3:01 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye.

The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday.

The gamma rays were detected by NASA’s Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. ”We’d never seen one before so bright and at such a distance,” NASA’s Neil Gehrels said. It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.

However, NASA has no reports that any skywatchers spotted the burst, which lasted less than an hour. Telescopic measurements show that the burst — which occurred when the universe was about half its current age — was bright enough to be seen without a telescope.

”Someone would have had to run out and look at it with a naked eye, but didn’t,” said Gehrels, chief of NASA’s astroparticles physics lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The starburst would have appeared as bright as some of the stars in the handle of the Little Dipper constellation, said Penn State University astronomer David Burrows. How it looked wasn’t remarkable, but the distance traveled was.

The 7.5 billion light years away far eclipses the previous naked eye record of 2.5 million light years. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles.

”This is roughly halfway to the edge of the universe,” Burrows said.

Before it exploded, the star was about 40 times bigger than our sun. The explosion vaporized any planet nearby, Gehrels said.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission–pages/swift/main/index.html

The great science fiction writer and futurist appeared in the very first issue of Arthur.

Tues March 18 @ 8pm and 10pm

Jim Henson’s Commercials & Experiments

An exclusive screening selected from muppets, music & magic: Jim Henson’s legacy

A mind-blowing collection of shorts, crazy commercials, and other rarities from the Henson vault. Highlights include: an industrial film for Wilson’s Meat that must be seen to be believed, commercials featuring the LaChoy Dragon, a full-body character that caused Frank Oz to swear off doing any others, animation utilizing techniques ranging from stop-motion to early computer animation, excerpts from The Cube and Youth 68, the two episodes Jim and company created for NBC’s Experiment in Television, and a 35mm print of Time Piece, an Academy Award nominated 8-minute masterpiece that showcases Henson’s talent for making music out of everyday sounds.”

Tickets – $12/ $8 for members
Cinefamily at Silent Movie Theatre
611 N Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323-655-2510