Wharton Esherick’s copy of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”
Excursus I: Reference Library —
Up on My Back,
and I Will Take You Thither
through December 11, 2011
“The proprietor [of the Centaur Book Shop], Harold Mason, was a twenty-nine-year-old of independent means who was fascinated with books, particularly first editions by liberal intellectuals. His bookshop was a small, comfortable room in a three-hundred-year-old house outfitted with bookshelves, wicker chairs, candlesticks, Japanese prints, and a fireplace. Here one could find first editions of avant-garde books and current issues of the intellectual magazines of the day…
The bookshop’s name was taken from a line in the banned book Jurgen, by James Branch Cabell: ‘Up on my back,’ said the Centaur, ‘and I will take you thither.’ The association with Jurgen ‘lent a mild wickedness to the enterprise,’ Mason recalled. When importation of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, considered at the time to be as sinful as booze, was prohibited, Mason arranged for a shipment of a case of books, after the spines had been replaced with those of another book of the same size.
A room over the shop became an after-hours gathering place for select patrons, artists, people of letters, and other friends. It was, like a Greenwich Village salon, bohemian and arty. This was during Prohibition, and ‘in’ members had their own liquor lockers and keys to the room. The outgoing Wharton [Esherick] was quickly inducted into the club, and he made a sign to hang over the door, a modernist centaur of wood and bent iron straps (the ‘sign of the Centaur’).”
From Wharton Esherick: Journey of a Creative Mind,
by Mansfield Bascom, Abrams, 2010.
Designer Andy Beach, known for his blog and curatorial interventions under the name Reference Library, inaugurates the series with Up on My Back, and I Will Take You Thither, a project that takes inspiration from the Centaur Book Shop, Philadelphia’s own Prohibition-era radical press, record store, and bohemian meeting place.
Institute of Contemporary Art University of Philadelphia
September 15th, 2011
No Title (Box Edition), 2011
16 3/8 x 13 1/8 x 4 1/2 inches (41.6 x 33.3 x 11.4 cm)
September 23 – October 29, 2011
Gagosian as part of Pacific Standard Time
September 15th, 2011
“Sun Reflections on Wave, Zuma Beach, CA” (2000)
September 17– October 29, 2011
Opening Reception Saturday, September 17, 7-10pm
DKRM as part of Pacific Standard Time
Thanks to David
Los Angeles Times
September 12, 2011
A pack of coyotes that has moved into a vacant home in north Glendale will be euthanized after they are caught, a Los Angeles County official told the Glendale News-Press on Monday, adding that the focus “is on human life.”
County officials will assess areas around Brockmont Drive this week to decide where to set traps to catch several coyotes that neighbors say have taken up residence in a burned, hollowed out home that has sat vacant since November.
Neighbors say they fear that the coyotes, whose pups have been raised on the street, could turn territorial and dangerous.
Once caught, the animals will be euthanized because they cannot be returned to the wild, said Ken Pellman, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner/Weights and Measures.
September 12th, 2011
Abacus tubular steel lighting
David Mellor, 1955
The Observer, Sunday 11 September 2011
The 10 best product designs – in pictures
Fashion designer Margaret Howell’s choice of timeless classics that marry function and aesthetic
As well as street furniture, David Mellor designed tableware – I have two sets of his children’s cutlery used by my own, and in reserve for theirs: it’s hard to discard good design. Here I’ve chosen his Abacus street lighting. Like the motorway signs (see 10), his designs work without drawing attention to themselves, as the best design should. These minimal columns of tubular steel, unobtrusive by day, invisible by night, were radically different from the heavy cast concrete lamp posts they replaced in the mid 1950s. Today they remain a treat for the eye in our cluttered urban surroundings
Thanks to Matt Connors
September 11th, 2011
Jessica Walsh
By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
NY Times Published: September 10, 2011
WHEN you think of America’s students, do you picture overworked, stressed-out children bent under backpacks stuffed with textbooks and worksheets? Or do you call to mind glassy-eyed, empty-headed teenagers sitting before computer screens, consumed by video games and social networking sites, even as their counterparts in China prepare to ace yet another round of academic exams? The first view dominates a series of recent books and movies, including the much-discussed film “Race to Nowhere.” The second image has been put forth by other books, with titles like “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.”
Divergent though they are, these characterizations share a common emphasis: homework. The studying that middle school and high school students do after the dismissal bell rings is either an unreasonable burden or a crucial activity that needs beefing up. Which is it? Do American students have too much homework or too little? Neither, I’d say. We ought to be asking a different question altogether. What should matter to parents and educators is this: How effectively do children’s after-school assignments advance learning?
The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality. And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Although surveys show that the amount of time our children spend on homework has risen over the last three decades, American students are mired in the middle of international academic rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to results from the Program for International Student Assessment released last December.
In a 2008 survey, one-third of parents polled rated the quality of their children’s homework assignments as fair or poor, and 4 in 10 said they believed that some or a great deal of homework was busywork. A new study, coming in the Economics of Education Review, reports that homework in science, English and history has “little to no impact” on student test scores. (The authors did note a positive effect for math homework.) Enriching children’s classroom learning requires making homework not shorter or longer, but smarter.
Fortunately, research is available to help parents, teachers and school administrators do just that. In recent years, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human brain learns. They have founded a new discipline, known as Mind, Brain and Education, that is devoted to understanding and improving the ways in which children absorb, retain and apply knowledge.
Educators have begun to implement these methods in classrooms around the country and have enjoyed measured success. A collaboration between psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis and teachers at nearby Columbia Middle School, for example, lifted seventh- and eighth-grade students’ science and social studies test scores by 13 to 25 percent.
But the innovations have not yet been applied to homework. Mind, Brain and Education methods may seem unfamiliar and even counterintuitive, but they are simple to understand and easy to carry out. And after-school assignments are ripe for the kind of improvements the new science offers.
“Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach, students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction throughout the semester.
It sounds unassuming, but spaced repetition produces impressive results. Eighth-grade history students who relied on a spaced approach to learning had nearly double the retention rate of students who studied the same material in a consolidated unit, reported researchers from the University of California-San Diego in 2007. The reason the method works so well goes back to the brain: when we first acquire memories, they are volatile, subject to change or likely to disappear. Exposing ourselves to information repeatedly over time fixes it more permanently in our minds, by strengthening the representation of the information that is embedded in our neural networks.
A second learning technique, known as “retrieval practice,” employs a familiar tool — the test — in a new way: not to assess what students know, but to reinforce it. We often conceive of memory as something like a storage tank and a test as a kind of dipstick that measures how much information we’ve put in there. But that’s not actually how the brain works. Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting, so that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply reading over material to be learned, or even taking notes and making outlines, as many homework assignments require, doesn’t have this effect.
According to one experiment, language learners who employed the retrieval practice strategy to study vocabulary words remembered 80 percent of the words they studied, while learners who used conventional study methods remembered only about a third of them. Students who used retrieval practice to learn science retained about 50 percent more of the material than students who studied in traditional ways, reported researchers from Purdue University earlier this year. Students — and parents — may groan at the prospect of more tests, but the self-quizzing involved in retrieval practice need not provoke any anxiety. It’s simply an effective way to focus less on the input of knowledge (passively reading over textbooks and notes) and more on its output (calling up that same information from one’s own brain).
Another common misconception about how we learn holds that if information feels easy to absorb, we’ve learned it well. In fact, the opposite is true. When we work hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known as cognitive disfluency, promotes learning so effectively that psychologists have devised all manner of “desirable difficulties” to introduce into the learning process: for example, sprinkling a passage with punctuation mistakes, deliberately leaving out letters, shrinking font size until it’s tiny or wiggling a document while it’s being copied so that words come out blurry.
Teachers are unlikely to start sending students home with smudged or error-filled worksheets, but there is another kind of desirable difficulty — called interleaving — that can readily be applied to homework. An interleaved assignment mixes up different kinds of situations or problems to be practiced, instead of grouping them by type. When students can’t tell in advance what kind of knowledge or problem-solving strategy will be required to answer a question, their brains have to work harder to come up with the solution, and the result is that students learn the material more thoroughly.
Researchers at California Polytechnic State University conducted a study of interleaving in sports that illustrates why the tactic is so effective. When baseball players practiced hitting, interleaving different kinds of pitches improved their performance on a later test in which the batters did not know the type of pitch in advance (as would be the case, of course, in a real game).
Interleaving produces the same sort of improvement in academic learning. A study published last year in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology asked fourth-graders to work on solving four types of math problems and then to take a test evaluating how well they had learned. The scores of those whose practice problems were mixed up were more than double the scores of those students who had practiced one kind of problem at a time.
The application of such research-based strategies to homework is a yet-untapped opportunity to raise student achievement. Science has shown us how to turn homework into a potent catalyst for learning. Our assignment now is to make it happen.
September 11th, 2011
Edward Weston, Big Sur, 1929
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: September 10, 2011
AT a time when Americans fret about terrorism and war and are afflicted by the worst economic downturn in 70 years, let’s embrace a remarkable treasure possessed by every citizen of our country.
It doesn’t count in our net worth, but its value is incalculable: our national parks, national forests and other public lands. I spent a chunk of the summer doing some ultralight backpacking along the Pacific Crest Trail out West — my ambition when I grow up is to hike the full length of the trail, from Mexico to Canada — and the trip allowed my family to relish some of America’s finest real estate, without spending a dime.
America’s most valuable assets aren’t controlled by hedge funds; they’re shared by us all. Gaps between rich and poor have been growing, but our national lands are a rare space of utter democracy: the poorest citizen gets resplendent views that even a billionaire is not allowed to buy.
Roll out a ground sheet, lay down your sleeping bag and the vistas are yours. Particularly in a grim post-9/11 era — an age shaped by anxiety and suspicion — there is something profoundly therapeutic about reconnecting with simplicity and nature.
After one 20-mile day in August of trudging mostly upward, sometimes struggling over huge snowfields, we arrived exhausted at Thielsen Creek in central Oregon. The majesty of the scene — snow-clad Mount Thielsen soaring overhead, the creek burbling below us, no one within miles — took our breath away.
Yet if these national lands are one of America’s greatest triumphs, two additional points must be noted.
First, they are under threat. Republicans have proposed opening more than 50 million acres of federal lands to logging, grazing and other uses. They argue that this would allow responsible “multiple use” of lands now locked up as wilderness. Bruce Babbitt, the interior secretary under President Bill Clinton, has described the Republican bill as “the most radical, overreaching attempt to dismantle the architecture of our public land laws that has been proposed in my lifetime.” He said it would be “nothing more than a giveaway of our great outdoors.”
It’s painful to see the G.O.P. take this stance because it was a great Republican — Theodore Roosevelt — who helped preserve America’s natural treasures. The writer Wallace Stegner called our parks America’s “best idea,” and it’s a legacy that Republicans should embrace, not undermine.
The second challenge is more complicated. It is that Americans love their national parks, but they sometimes love video games more.
The National Park Service reports that the number of recreational visits to our national parks was lower in 2010 than a decade earlier — lower even than in 1987 and 1988. There were 35 percent more backcountry campers in the national parks in 1979 than in 2010.
“Fewer and fewer youth are heading outdoors each year,” the Outdoor Foundation concluded in a “special report on youth.” It added that “the American childhood has rapidly moved indoors, leading to epidemic levels of childhood obesity and inactivity.”
It’s tougher to make the argument for wilderness when Americans show less relish for it. Hunting and fishing were once the gateway to outdoor activities, but they’re declining, and backpackers, cross-country skiers and rock climbers haven’t been able to pick up the slack.
Conservationists need to expand their focus from preserving nature to encouraging the public to experience it. The only way to protect wilderness in the long run is to build a constituency for it, to grow the number of people who revel in camping under the stars (I’m not a fan of tents!), Americans who accept mosquito bites as a cheap price for some of the world’s freshest air.
A few years ago, a writer named Richard Louv coined the term “nature deficit disorder” to describe the way children grow up deprived of wading in muddy creeks. He has followed that up with a new book, “The Nature Principle,” arguing that adults need nature as well — as a tonic, as a balancing force, as therapy.
I’m convinced of that. Our family backpacking trips leave us exhausted, blistered, filthy and sweaty, and drinking from creeks and ponds that make my wife shudder. Yet we also gain perspective.
On one segment of the Pacific Crest Trail near Crater Lake this year, we faced 26 miles without a creek or other water source — a reminder that in the backcountry, nature does not exist for our convenience. On other days, we struggled and slipped as we crossed steep snowfields covered with an icy glaze.
The wilderness trims our bravado and puts us in our place. Particularly in traumatic times like these, nature challenges us, revitalizes us, humbles us, exhilarates us and restores our souls. It reminds us that we are part of a larger universe, stewards rather than masters of our world. That’s the lesson you learn as you snuggle exhausted in your sleeping bag and fall asleep outside to the magical sight of owls flitting against shooting stars.
September 10th, 2011
Circle Excellent
2011
4.875 x 5.5 x 3.475 in.
September 8 – October 15, 2011
September 9th, 2011
17 September – 22 October 2011
Opening reception: Saturday, September 17th, 7:00 – 9:00 pm
Edgard Garrido Carrera for The New York Times
Wilmer Allen Marly, 27, was treated for decompression sickness at a clinic operated by Dr. Elmer Mejía.
By ELISABETH MALKIN
NY Times Published: September 9, 2011
La Ceiba, Honduras AT a modest clinic down a dirt road, there are rocking chairs on the front porch and a hyperbaric chamber in the front room where Dr. Elmer Mejía treats deep-sea lobster divers who arrive paralyzed but walk out days later.
Courtly in manner and crisply dressed despite the tropical heat, Dr. Mejía could pass for an accountant in a suburban office park. But his appearance masks a fierce sense of mission. He calls what is happening to his impoverished patients “economic genocide,” and compares the lobsters they collect on the ocean floor to the “blood diamonds” that finance African civil wars.
“Here, the problem is strictly about money, where money is given more value than human life,” Dr. Mejía said.
Since fishing for spiny lobster off the Caribbean coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua became industrialized in the 1980s to meet demand from the United States, the Miskito Indian divers who are the first link in the supply chain have moved farther and farther out to sea as stocks vanish in shallow waters.
They descend to depths of 100 to 120 feet, repeatedly diving and resurfacing, pushed by poverty to ignore all the safety rules. A few die every season; many more are paralyzed by decompression sickness, commonly known as the bends.
During a two-week fishing trip, they make as many as 12 to 16 dives a day — no more than two are recommended at that depth — to scrabble for a catch that earns them about $3 a pound. (On a productive trip, they may catch as much as 100 pounds of lobster, but they must pay expenses that total about 40 percent.)
Aside from the drug trade, most Honduran Miskito Indians have no other way of making a living. They live in a region so remote that it is reached only by sea or air, and they are among the most neglected inhabitants of an already poor country.
“The only way to avoid the deaths and the injuries is to shut it down completely,” Dr. Mejía said of the lobster diving industry. “But you can’t do that unless you provide alternatives.”
Every two or three years, the Honduran government starts to discuss a moratorium. This year, the Central American regional body known as Ospesca, which regulates fishing, did the same, but the fishermen asked for a two-year delay. In 2013, they will ask for a new extension, Dr. Mejía predicted.
He is also skeptical of intervention by outside groups. The Global Fish Alliance, promoted and largely financed by Darden Restaurants, which owns the Red Lobster chain, has sponsored conferences in La Ceiba to encourage conservation in the lobster fisheries and map out alternatives for the fishermen. “The money doesn’t get to the Miskito Indians,” Dr. Mejía said. “Nothing has changed so far.”
Rich Jeffers, a spokesman for Darden Restaurants in Orlando, Fla., pointed to efforts to encourage the fishermen to use traps to catch the lobsters rather than dive for them. The restaurant chain requires its suppliers to purchase only trap-caught lobsters and sends teams to monitor compliance, he said in an e-mail.
But getting into the trapping business requires capital that virtually no Miskito Indians have. Moreover, trapping boats employ only a few fishermen, so a wholesale switch would leave most of the Miskitos without jobs.
HOWEVER the issue is finally decided, if ever, the rickety boats stocked with air tanks at the port here suggest that dive-caught lobster is still in demand.
“There is still a lot of lobster being pulled by hand, and it is being chilled and brought to the U.S.,” said Eric Douglas, a diving safety expert and author who has studied divers in Honduras, Brazil and Mexico. Consumers have forced the tuna industry to protect dolphins and sea turtles, but when it comes to lobster fishing “we don’t seem to care about the human beings,” he said.
Dr. Mejía, 42, has made easing the plight of the fishermen — he estimates there are about 2,100 of them in Honduras — the purpose of much of his adult life. Raised in a poor family in the capital, Tegucigalpa, he joined the Honduran Navy at 18 because it offered a chance to continue his studies. He became a navy diver and trained as a nurse and a paramedic.
When he left the navy three years later, he moved to Roatán, a Caribbean island where Episcopal missionaries had set up the first hyperbaric chamber for Miskito Indian divers.
Throughout medical school in Tegucigalpa, Dr. Mejía never wavered. He has climbed aboard the lobster boats to learn more about the fishing trips and endure the same conditions as the divers. Typically, 100 sleep on hammocks slung together in the cramped cabin of a boat measuring no more than 80 feet. To dull pain and fear, they smoke marijuana, clouding the boat with so much smoke that Dr. Mejía said he had to go to the prow for fresh air.
Finally, in 2009, through contacts in the United States and with financial help from the Episcopal Diocese of Wyoming, he was able to buy the hyperbaric chamber. He rented a truck and drove the chamber to Honduras from Virginia in nine days.
“He is a man of strong conviction,” said Dr. Caroline Fife, the director of clinical research at the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston, where Dr. Mejía studied in 2008. “He practices what he believes.”
The clinic here, called La Bendición, or the Blessing, gets no outside help and is financed by what Dr. Mejía charges fishing boat owners for treating divers, an average of $300 to $350 per diver. The shoestring operation is a family affair: Dr. Mejía’s wife, a nurse, their son and a brother, work with him.
Compression sickness occurs when a diver ascends too fast and nitrogen in the bloodstream that is normally expelled by the lungs forms bubbles. The bubbles can lodge in the joints or along the spinal cord, causing paralysis. A bubble that reaches the brain causes an arterial gas embolism, which can be fatal.
In the hyperbaric chamber, the atmospheric pressure is raised to what the diver would experience underwater and then reduced over several hours as the diver breathes oxygen through a mask, allowing the nitrogen to be expelled.
Many of the injured divers have spent days on a boat after becoming sick because captains are reluctant to lose money by returning to shore. Dr. Mejía has shown that, contrary to standard medical thinking, it is possible to cure patients even after a delay.
“Elmer is seeing some really impressive recoveries,” Dr. Fife said.
IN June, Dr. Mejía and Mr. Douglas held workshops for boat captains to teach them basic first aid for injured divers. This season, more divers have come into the clinic, but far fewer of them for severe illness.
During an interview, Dr. Mejía got a call from a boat owner telling him that a new patient was on his way in. The clinic’s “ambulance” — a red pickup truck — picked up the diver at the port.
At the clinic, Dr. Mejía took the patient’s history: Rolando Pita Gómez, 55. Mr. Pita has been diving since 1975, a testament to the Miskito Indian divers’ extraordinary resilience. “Theoretically they should be dead,” Dr. Mejía said. “They violate all the physiological diving laws. They dive for 20 or 30 years; we are looking at superhumans.”
Mr. Pita looked far from superhuman, but he was on his feet two days later.
Wilmer Allen Marly had been brought to the clinic unconscious a week earlier. Somewhat dazed, the 27-year-old fisherman was preparing to return home.
“After this, I don’t want to dive anymore. I have small children,” he said. A cousin of his died in June in a diving accident. “I have to find something else to do to support us.”
After he said goodbye to Mr. Marly, who had been close to death a week earlier, Dr. Mejía spoke, almost to himself. There was no sigh, no shrug of resignation, just a simple fact.
“He’ll dive again.”
September 9th, 2011By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 8, 2011
First things first: I was favorably surprised by the new Obama jobs plan, which is significantly bolder and better than I expected. It’s not nearly as bold as the plan I’d want in an ideal world. But if it actually became law, it would probably make a significant dent in unemployment.
Of course, it isn’t likely to become law, thanks to G.O.P. opposition. Nor is anything else likely to happen that will do much to help the 14 million Americans out of work. And that is both a tragedy and an outrage.
Before I get to the Obama plan, let me talk about the other important economic speech of the week, which was given by Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve of Chicago. Mr. Evans said, forthrightly, what some of us have been hoping to hear from Fed officials for years now.
As Mr. Evans pointed out, the Fed, both as a matter of law and as a matter of social responsibility, should try to keep both inflation and unemployment low — and while inflation seems likely to stay near or below the Fed’s target of around 2 percent, unemployment remains extremely high.
So how should the Fed be reacting? Mr. Evans: “Imagine that inflation was running at 5 percent against our inflation objective of 2 percent. Is there a doubt that any central banker worth their salt would be reacting strongly to fight this high inflation rate? No, there isn’t any doubt. They would be acting as if their hair was on fire. We should be similarly energized about improving conditions in the labor market.”
But the Fed’s hair is manifestly not on fire, nor do most politicians seem to see any urgency about the situation. These days, the best — or at any rate the alleged wise men and women who are supposed to be looking after the nation’s welfare — lack all conviction, while the worst, as represented by much of the G.O.P., are filled with a passionate intensity. So the unemployed are being abandoned.
O.K., about the Obama plan: It calls for about $200 billion in new spending — much of it on things we need in any case, like school repair, transportation networks, and avoiding teacher layoffs — and $240 billion in tax cuts. That may sound like a lot, but it actually isn’t. The lingering effects of the housing bust and the overhang of household debt from the bubble years are creating a roughly $1 trillion per year hole in the U.S. economy, and this plan — which wouldn’t deliver all its benefits in the first year — would fill only part of that hole. And it’s unclear, in particular, how effective the tax cuts would be at boosting spending.
Still, the plan would be a lot better than nothing, and some of its measures, which are specifically aimed at providing incentives for hiring, might produce relatively a large employment bang for the buck. As I said, it’s much bolder and better than I expected. President Obama’s hair may not be on fire, but it’s definitely smoking; clearly and gratifyingly, he does grasp how desperate the jobs situation is.
But his plan isn’t likely to become law, thanks to Republican opposition. And it’s worth noting just how much that opposition has hardened over time, even as the plight of the unemployed has worsened.
In early 2009, as the new Obama administration tried to come to grips with the crisis it inherited, you heard two main lines from critics on the right. First, they argued that we should rely on monetary policy rather than fiscal policy — that is, that the job of fighting unemployment should be left to the Fed. Second, they argued that fiscal actions should take the form of tax cuts rather than temporary spending.
Now, however, leading Republicans are against tax cuts — at least if they benefit working Americans rather than rich people and corporations.
And they’re against monetary policy, too. In Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney declared that he would seek a replacement for Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, essentially because Mr. Bernanke has tried to do something (though not enough) about unemployment. And that makes Mr. Romney a moderate by G.O.P. standards, since Rick Perry, his main rival for the presidential nomination, has suggested that Mr. Bernanke should be treated “pretty ugly.”
So, at this point, leading Republicans are basically against anything that might help the unemployed. Yes, Mr. Romney has issued a glossy, well-produced “jobs plan,” but it might best be described as 59 bullet points with nothing there — and certainly nothing to justify his assertion, bordering on megalomania, that he would create no fewer than 11 million jobs in four years.
The good news in all this is that by going bigger and bolder than expected, Mr. Obama may finally have set the stage for a political debate about job creation. For, in the end, nothing will be done until the American people demand action.
September 9th, 2011
Cherry Tree, Spring, 2003
oil on board
48 x 55 7/8 in. (122 x 142)
8 September – 8 October 2011
Opening reception: Thursday, 8 September, 6 – 8 pm
French Comedie
2011
Oil, wax, and pencil on linen
84 x 58 inches
Opening September 15th, 2011 6-8pm
September 6th, 2011
Rich Addicks for The New York Times
Anders Lewendal wants to use only American-made components in the house he is building in Bozeman, Mont.
By KIRK JOHNSON
NY Times Published: September 4, 2011
BOZEMAN, Mont. — Anders Lewendal, a general contractor who managed to survive the housing collapse, has hit upon a plan that he thinks will revive the construction industry and help lead the nation out of the economic wilderness: build houses using only American-made materials.
He is trying to do just that with a new home here on a side street a few blocks from downtown. But it is not as easy as it sounds.
Some things are simple enough. Wood literally grows on trees, of course, especially here in forested western Montana. And no one ships cement or concrete mix any farther than needed.
After that it can get tough. In a global economy, even American-assembled appliances probably have at least some foreign made or mined components, Mr. Lewendal said.
Tiny components like nails, screws and light bulbs, mundane but crucial, are significantly cheaper if bought from China or other developing nations. High-end frills — which tend to be imported, like Italian marble or mahogany — may be doomed to stay on the dock or in the showroom.
And all that does not even address the question of whether using illegal immigrant labor, a mainstay of the construction industry around the nation, counts as foreign.
“Part of the impact of the recession has been healthy, in making people rethink what housing is for,” said Mr. Lewendal, who conceded that perfection in his goal is probably not possible. The locally made cement, he suspects, could have some imported chemicals, for example, and the recycled glass from Yellowstone National Park that he laid down as a base layer under the garage could well have contained an imported beer bottle or two. As for his workers, he said, they are all here legally.
“The point is that little things can add up,” he said. “I think we could solve this recession if everyone shifted just 5 percent of their purchases to U.S.-made products.”
In some ways, it is an old idea, echoing a hard-hat refrain from the 1970s or earlier: Buy American. In other ways, though, it is as current as the environmental message that hangs over every urban farmers’ market: Buy Local.
Mr. Lewendal said that because the 2,280-square-foot, three-bedroom house he is building will conform to high energy-conservation standards — more points are awarded for materials obtained close to the site — the economic and social implications all blur. And in a brutally competitive local market, he added, pitching all-American could also be a marketing niche in tune with the times.
“I don’t see any politics to it at all,” said Mr. Lewendal, 51, who described himself as a conservative and is the chairman of the local homebuilder association’s green building committee. “It’s about jobs.”
The house’s owner, Kat Quinn, also has a complex agenda. For health reasons, she wanted a house built to strict environmental standards, and after she met Mr. Lewendal and heard about the all-American home idea, she became convinced that buying American could put pressure on foreign companies to raise wages for their workers.
She said she does plan, though, on having a Canadian-made trampoline in the house, to use in therapy for a daughter with cystic fibrosis.
Bozeman’s economy was not devastated across the board by the recession. Montana State University, a big local employer, created a base of stability, and the proximity to Yellowstone, about 90 minutes south, kept up a flow of tourists.
But where bad times bit, they bit hard, and that was in construction. The vacation- and second-home market that plumbers, roofers and framers depended on dwindled to almost nothing starting in 2007, taking out more than a third of all the construction work here in Gallatin County in just 24 months, according to state figures.
Justin Tribbitt, a former general contractor now working in computer software, lost his company; three of his five former employees left town. Mike Wilhelm, an electrician, went from six employees to two. Rock Larocca, also a contractor, survived with the aid of a chainsaw, helping cut down trees killed by a beetle infestation.
“It’s kind of like getting a drink out of the garden hose and suddenly the valve shuts off and it’s dry,” said Mr. Tribbitt, 32. “It was gone just like that.”
Some who managed to hang on said that whether the all-American home idea is good marketing for Lewendal Construction or good economics for the country, or both, it feels right to them. Mr. Lewendal, admirers said, is taking action.
“More power to him,” said Ryan Engbretson, a builder who said that his company had survived mainly by doing repair work.
Economists say it is hard to verify Mr. Lewendal’s assertion that about 75 percent of the average American home is made in the United States already, mainly because it does not appear to be something anyone has deeply studied. His estimates that going American will add only 2 percent to 3 percent to the $265,000 construction cost of the Bozeman house by the time final purchases are done — he is still shopping for things like light fixtures — are also difficult to independently confirm.
“The truth is that we are in a global economy and it’s very interconnected, for good or bad,” said Albert Saiz, an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania and co-editor of the journal Housing Economics. “It’s very hard to know the impact of your purchasing decisions and the consequences of what you do.”
Professor Saiz said the fluid nature of labor markets could also make the implications of all-American more complicated. In much of the nation, for example, though less so in this working-class corner of Montana, houses are built with Mexican or other foreign-born labor, which is a kind of foreign input since a part of the wages often goes back across the border.
And if demand for, say, nails or screws made in the United States did go up, Professor Saiz said, the basic manufacturing industry jobs created — low skill and probably low pay — are the kind that American workers are often disinclined to take anyway.
But Mr. Lewendal, who earned an undergraduate degree in economics before going into construction, said costs and benefits are more complicated than a spreadsheet can convey. The nails he bought from a company in Illinois are about $5 more per box, for instance, but he said they jam the nail guns less often than the cheaper Chinese brands, which are less uniform.
“If a guy has to get down three times a day to clear the gun, that’s time wasted,” he said.
Some elements of his experiment are certain to endure, if only inside the home itself. Mr. Lewendal, in showing a reporter around the house, which he hopes to complete this fall, repeatedly illustrated his ideas with diagrams and math equations, scrawling with a black marker on the bare beams and panels — writing that will be preserved, like a time-capsule message to the future, behind the wallboard when the work is done.
September 5th, 2011By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 4, 2011
Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, “My God, what have we done?”
One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, almost as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these numbers almost scream that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has been worrying about the wrong things, and inflicting grievous harm as a result.
Ever since the acute phase of the financial crisis ended, policy discussion in Washington has been dominated not by unemployment, but by the alleged dangers posed by budget deficits. Pundits and media organizations insisted that the biggest risk facing America was the threat that investors would pull the plug on U.S. debt. For example, in May 2009 The Wall Street Journal declared that the “bond vigilantes” were “returning with a vengeance,” telling readers that the Obama administration’s “epic spending spree” would send interest rates soaring.
The interest rate when that editorial was published was 3.7 percent. As of Friday, as I’ve already mentioned, it was only 2 percent.
I don’t mean to dismiss concerns about the long-run U.S. budget picture. If you look at fiscal prospects over, say, the next 20 years, they are indeed deeply worrying, largely because of rising health-care costs. But the experience of the past two years has overwhelmingly confirmed what some of us tried to argue from the beginning: The deficits we’re running right now — deficits we should be running, because deficit spending helps support a depressed economy — are no threat at all.
And by obsessing over a nonexistent threat, Washington has been making the real problem — mass unemployment, which is eating away at the foundations of our nation — much worse.
Although you’d never know it listening to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty good test of the theory that slashing government spending actually creates jobs. The deficit obsession has blocked a much-needed second round of federal stimulus, and with stimulus spending, such as it was, fading out, we’re experiencing de facto fiscal austerity. State and local governments, in particular, faced with the loss of federal aid, have been sharply cutting many programs and have been laying off a lot of workers, mostly schoolteachers.
And somehow the private sector hasn’t responded to these layoffs by rejoicing at the sight of a shrinking government and embarking on a hiring spree.
O.K., I know what the usual suspects will say — namely, that fears of regulation and higher taxes are holding businesses back. But this is just a right-wing fantasy. Multiple surveys have shown that lack of demand — a lack that is being exacerbated by government cutbacks — is the overwhelming problem businesses face, with regulation and taxes barely even in the picture.
For example, when McClatchy Newspapers recently canvassed a random selection of small-business owners to find out what was hurting them, not a single one complained about regulation of his or her industry, and few complained much about taxes. And did I mention that profits after taxes, as a share of national income, are at record levels?
So short-run deficits aren’t a problem; lack of demand is, and spending cuts are making things much worse. Maybe it’s time to change course?
Which brings me to President Obama’s planned speech on the economy.
I find it useful to think in terms of three questions: What should we be doing to create jobs? What will Republicans in Congress agree to? And given that political reality, what should the president propose?
The answer to the first question is that we should have a lot of job-creating spending on the part of the federal government, largely in the form of much-needed spending to repair and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure. Oh, and we need more aid to state and local governments, so that they can stop laying off schoolteachers.
But what will Republicans agree to? That’s easy: nothing. They will oppose anything Mr. Obama proposes, even if it would clearly help the economy — or maybe I should say, especially if it would help the economy, since high unemployment helps them politically.
This reality makes the third question — what the president should propose — hard to answer, since nothing he proposes will actually happen anytime soon. So I’m personally prepared to cut Mr. Obama a lot of slack on the specifics of his proposal, as long as it’s big and bold. For what he mostly needs to do now is to change the conversation — to get Washington talking again about jobs and how the government can help create them.
For the sake of the nation, and especially for millions of unemployed Americans who see little prospect of finding another job, I hope he pulls it off.
September 5th, 2011
Robert Heinecken
Mutliple Solution Puzzle
1965
Sixteen gelatin silver prints on two-inch wood squares with wood base
Overall 11 1/4 x 11 1/4 x 1 1/4 inches
September 10 – October 22, 2011
Opening reception:
Saturday, September 10, 6-8pm
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Students using an interactive whiteboard, part of an ambitious technology plan in the Kyrene School District in Arizona.
By MATT RICHTEL
NY Times Published: September 3, 2011
CHANDLER, Ariz. — Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but not in any traditional way.
In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.
The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.
The digital push here aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide instead of a lecturer, wandering among students who learn at their own pace on Internet-connected devices.
“This is such a dynamic class,” Ms. Furman says of her 21st-century classroom. “I really hope it works.”
Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores.
Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen.
To be sure, test scores can go up or down for many reasons. But to many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.
This conundrum calls into question one of the most significant contemporary educational movements. Advocates for giving schools a major technological upgrade — which include powerful educators, Silicon Valley titans and White House appointees — say digital devices let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets.
Some backers of this idea say standardized tests, the most widely used measure of student performance, don’t capture the breadth of skills that computers can help develop. But they also concede that for now there is no better way to gauge the educational value of expensive technology investments.
“The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data,” said Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an investor in educational technology companies. When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”
And yet, in virtually the same breath, he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: “It’s one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.”
Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.
The spending push comes as schools face tough financial choices. In Kyrene, for example, even as technology spending has grown, the rest of the district’s budget has shrunk, leading to bigger classes and fewer periods of music, art and physical education.
At the same time, the district’s use of technology has earned it widespread praise. It is upheld as a model of success by the National School Boards Association, which in 2008 organized a visit by 100 educators from 17 states who came to see how the district was innovating.
And the district has banked its future and reputation on technology. Kyrene, which serves 18,000 kindergarten to eighth-grade students, mostly from the cities of Tempe, Phoenix and Chandler, uses its computer-centric classes as a way to attract children from around the region, shoring up enrollment as its local student population shrinks. More students mean more state dollars.
The issue of tech investment will reach a critical point in November. The district plans to go back to local voters for approval of $46.3 million more in taxes over seven years to allow it to keep investing in technology. That represents around 3.5 percent of the district’s annual spending, five times what it spends on textbooks.
The district leaders’ position is that technology has inspired students and helped them grow, but that there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again.
“My gut is telling me we’ve had growth,” said David K. Schauer, the superintendent here. “But we have to have some measure that is valid, and we don’t have that.”
It gives him pause.
“We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”
A Dearth of Proof
The pressure to push technology into the classroom without proof of its value has deep roots.
In 1997, a science and technology committee assembled by President Clinton issued an urgent call about the need to equip schools with technology.
If such spending was not increased by billions of dollars, American competitiveness could suffer, according to the committee, whose members included educators like Charles M. Vest, then president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and business executives like John A. Young, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard.
To support its conclusion, the committee’s report cited the successes of individual schools that embraced computers and saw test scores rise or dropout rates fall. But while acknowledging that the research on technology’s impact was inadequate, the committee urged schools to adopt it anyhow.
The report’s final sentence read: “The panel does not, however, recommend that the deployment of technology within America’s schools be deferred pending the completion of such research.”
Since then, the ambitions of those who champion educational technology have grown — from merely equipping schools with computers and instructional software, to putting technology at the center of the classroom and building the teaching around it.
Kyrene had the same sense of urgency as President Clinton’s committee when, in November 2005, it asked voters for an initial $46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.
Before that, the district had given 300 elementary school teachers five laptops each. Students and teachers used them with great enthusiasm, said Mark Share, the district’s 64-year-old director of technology, a white-bearded former teacher from the Bronx with an iPhone clipped to his belt.
“If we know something works, why wait?” Mr. Share told The Arizona Republic the month before the vote. The district’s pitch was based not on the idea that test scores would rise, but that technology represented the future.
The measure, which faced no organized opposition, passed overwhelmingly. It means that property owners in the dry, sprawling flatlands here, who live in apartment complexes, cookie-cutter suburban homes and salmon-hued mini-mansions, pay on average $75 more a year in taxes, depending on the assessed value of their homes, according to the district.
But the proof sought by President Clinton’s committee remains elusive even today, though researchers have been seeking answers.
Many studies have found that technology has helped individual classrooms, schools or districts. For instance, researchers found that writing scores improved for eighth-graders in Maine after they were all issued laptops in 2002. The same researchers, from the University of Southern Maine, found that math performance picked up among seventh- and eighth-graders after teachers in the state were trained in using the laptops to teach.
A question plaguing many education researchers is how to draw broader inferences from such case studies, which can have serious limitations. For instance, in the Maine math study, it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training.
Educators would like to see major trials years in length that clearly demonstrate technology’s effect. But such trials are extraordinarily difficult to conduct when classes and schools can be so different, and technology is changing so quickly.
And often the smaller studies produce conflicting results. Some classroom studies show that math scores rise among students using instructional software, while others show that scores actually fall. The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.
One broad analysis of laptop programs like the one in Maine, for example, found that such programs are not a major factor in student performance.
“Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring — for better or worse,” wrote Bryan Goodwin, spokesman for Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, a nonpartisan group that did the study, in an essay. Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.
A review by the Education Department in 2009 of research on online courses — which more than one million K-12 students are taking — found that few rigorous studies had been done and that policy makers “lack scientific evidence” of their effectiveness.. A division of the Education Department that rates classroom curriculums has found that much educational software is not an improvement over textbooks.
Larry Cuban, an education professor emeritus at Stanford University, said the research did not justify big investments by districts.
“There is insufficient evidence to spend that kind of money. Period, period, period,” he said. “There is no body of evidence that shows a trend line.”
Some advocates for technology disagree.
Karen Cator, director of the office of educational technology in the United States Department of Education, said standardized test scores were an inadequate measure of the value of technology in schools. Ms. Cator, a former executive at Apple Computer, said that better measurement tools were needed but, in the meantime, schools knew what students needed.
“In places where we’ve had a large implementing of technology and scores are flat, I see that as great,” she said. “Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”
For its part, Kyrene has become a model to many by training teachers to use technology and getting their ideas on what inspires them. As Mr. Share says in the signature file at the bottom of every e-mail he sends: “It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”
So people here are not sure what to make of the stagnant test scores. Many of the district’s schools, particularly those in more affluent areas, already had relatively high scores, making it a challenge to push them significantly higher. A jump in students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches was largely a result of the recession, not a shift in the population the district serves, said Nancy Dundenhoefer, its community relations manager.
Mr. Share, whose heavy influence on more than $7 million a year in technology spending has made him a power broker, said he did not think demographic changes were a good explanation.
“You could argue that test scores would be lower without the technology, but that’s a copout,” he said, adding that the district should be able to deliver some measure of what he considers its obvious success with technology. “It’s a conundrum.”
Results aside, it’s easy to see why technology is such an easy sell here, given the enthusiasm surrounding it in some classrooms.
Engaging With Paper
“I start with pens and pencils,” says Ms. Furman, 41, who is short and bubbly and devours young-adult novels to stay in touch with students. Her husband teaches eighth grade in the district, and their son and daughter are both students.
At the beginning of the school year, Ms. Furman tries to inspire her students at Aprende Middle School to write, a task she says becomes increasingly difficult when students reach the patently insecure middle-school years.
In one class in 2009 she had them draw a heart on a piece of paper. Inside the heart, she asked them to write the names of things and people dear to them. One girl started to cry, then another, as the class shared their stories.
It was something Ms. Furman doubted would have happened if the students had been using computers. “There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
But, she said, computers play an important role in helping students get their ideas down more easily, edit their work so they can see instant improvement, and share it with the class. She uses a document camera to display a student’s paper at the front of the room for others to dissect.
Ms. Furman said the creative and editing tools, by inspiring students to make quick improvements to their writing, pay dividends in the form of higher-quality work. Last year, 14 of her students were chosen as finalists in a statewide essay contest that asked them how literature had affected their lives. “I was running down the hall, weeping, saying, ‘Get these students together. We need to tell them they’ve won!’ ”
Other teachers say the technology is the only way to make this generation learn.
“They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,” said Sharon Smith, 44, a gregarious seventh-grade social studies teacher whose classroom is down the hall from Ms. Furman’s.
Minutes earlier, Ms. Smith had taught a Civil War lesson in a way unimaginable even 10 years ago. With the lights off, a screen at the front of the room posed a question: “Jefferson Davis was Commander of the Union Army: True or False?”
The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.
The students hooted and hollered, reacting to the instant poll. Ms. Smith then drew the students into a conversation about the answers.
The enthusiasm underscores a key argument for investing in classroom technology: student engagement.
That idea is central to the National Education Technology Plan released by the White House last year, which calls for the “revolutionary transformation” of schools. The plan endorses bringing “state-of-the art technology into learning to enable, motivate and inspire all students.”
But the research, what little there is of it, does not establish a clear link between computer-inspired engagement and learning, said Randy Yerrick, associate dean of educational technology at the University of Buffalo.
For him, the best educational uses of computers are those that have no good digital equivalent. As examples, he suggests using digital sensors in a science class to help students observe chemical or physical changes, or using multimedia tools to reach disabled children.
But he says engagement is a “fluffy term” that can slide past critical analysis. And Professor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.
“There is very little valid and reliable research that shows the engagement causes or leads to higher academic achievement,” he said.
Instruct or Distract?
There are times in Kyrene when the technology seems to allow students to disengage from learning: They are left at computers to perform a task but wind up playing around, suggesting, as some researchers have found, that computers can distract and not instruct.
The 23 kindergartners in Christy Asta’s class at Kyrene de las Brisas are broken into small groups, a common approach in Kyrene. A handful stand at desks, others sit at computers, typing up reports.
Xavier Diaz, 6, sits quietly, chair pulled close to his Dell laptop, playing “Alien Addition.” In this math arcade game, Xavier controls a pod at the bottom of the screen that shoots at spaceships falling from the sky. Inside each ship is a pair of numbers. Xavier’s goal is to shoot only the spaceship with numbers that are the sum of the number inside his pod.
But Xavier is just shooting every target in sight. Over and over. Periodically, the game gives him a message: “Try again.” He tries again.
“Even if he doesn’t get it right, it’s getting him to think quicker,” says the teacher, Ms. Asta. She leans down next to him: “Six plus one is seven. Click here.” She helps him shoot the right target. “See, you shot him.”
Perhaps surprisingly given the way young people tend to gravitate toward gadgets, students here seem divided about whether they prefer learning on computers or through more traditional methods.
In a different class, Konray Yuan and Marisa Guisto, both 7, take turns touching letters on the interactive board on the wall. They are playing a spelling game, working together to spell the word “cool.” Each finds one of the letters in a jumbled grid, touching them in the proper order.
Marisa says there isn’t a difference between learning this way and learning on paper. Konray prefers paper, he says, because you get extra credit for good penmanship.
But others, particularly older students, say they enjoy using the technology tools. One of Ms. Furman’s students, Julia Schroder, loved building a blog to write about Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
In another class, she and several classmates used a video camera to film a skit about Woodrow Wilson’s 14-point speech during World War I — an approach she preferred to speaking directly to the class.
“I’d be pretty bummed if I had to do a live thing,” she said. “It’s nerve-racking.”
Teachers vs. Tech
Even as students are getting more access to computers here, they are getting less access to teachers.
Reflecting budget cuts, class sizes have crept up in Kyrene, as they have in many places. For example, seventh-grade classes like Ms. Furman’s that had 29 to 31 students grew to more like 31 to 33.
“You can’t continue to be effective if you keep adding one student, then one student, then one student,” Ms. Furman said. “I’m surprised parents aren’t going into the classrooms saying ‘Whoa.’ ”
Advocates of high-tech classrooms say computers are not intended to replace teachers. But they do see a fundamental change in the teacher’s role. Their often-cited mantra is that teachers should go from being “a sage on the stage to a guide on the side.”
And they say that, technology issues aside, class sizes can in fact afford to grow without hurting student performance.
Professor Cuban at Stanford said research showed that student performance did not improve significantly until classes fell under roughly 15 students, and did not get much worse unless they rose above 30.
At the same time, he says bigger classes can frustrate teachers, making it hard to attract and retain talented ones.
In Kyrene, growing class sizes reflect spending cuts; the district’s maintenance and operation budget fell to $95 million this year from $106 million in 2008. The district cannot use the money designated for technology to pay for other things. And the teachers, who make roughly $33,000 to $57,000 a year, have not had a raise since 2008.
Many teachers have second jobs, some in restaurants and retail, said Erin Kirchoff, president of the Kyrene Education Association, the teacher’s association. Teachers talk of being exhausted from teaching all day, then selling shoes at the mall.
Ms. Furman works during the summer at the Kyrene district offices. But that job is being eliminated in 2014, and she is worried about the income loss.
“Without it, we don’t go on vacation,” she said.
Money for other things in the district is short as well. Many teachers say they regularly bring in their own supplies, like construction paper.
“We have Smart Boards in every classroom but not enough money to buy copy paper, pencils and hand sanitizer,” said Nicole Cates, a co-president of the Parent Teacher Organization at Kyrene de la Colina, an elementary school. “You don’t go buy a new outfit when you don’t have enough dinner to eat.”
But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint and educational games.
To some who favor high-tech classrooms, the resource squeeze presents an opportunity. Their thinking is that struggling schools will look for more efficient ways to get the job done, creating an impetus to rethink education entirely.
“Let’s hope the fiscal crisis doesn’t get better too soon. It’ll slow down reform,” said Tom Watkins, the former superintendent for the Michigan schools, and now a consultant to businesses in the education sector.
Clearly, the push for technology is to the benefit of one group: technology companies.
The Sellers
It is 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. Mr. Share, the director of technology at Kyrene and often an early riser, awakens to the hard sell. Awaiting him at his home computer are six pitches from technology companies.
It’s just another day for the man with the checkbook.
“I get one pitch an hour,” he said. He finds most of them useless and sometimes galling: “They’re mostly car salesmen. I think they believe in the product they’re selling, but they don’t have a leg to stand on as to why the product is good or bad.”
Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup.
“It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.
He can make that kind of decision because he has money — and the vendors know it. Technology companies track which districts get federal funding and which have passed tax assessments for technology, like Kyrene.
This is big business. Sales of computer software to schools for classroom use were $1.89 billion in 2010. Spending on hardware is more difficult to measure, researchers say, but some put the figure at five times that amount.
The vendors relish their relationship with Kyrene.
“I joke I should have an office here, I’m here so often,” said Will Dunham, a salesman for CCS Presentation Systems, a leading reseller of Smart Boards in Arizona.
Last summer, the district paid $500,000 to CCS to replace ceiling-hung projectors in 400 classrooms. The alternative was to spend $100,000 to replace their aging bulbs, which Mr. Share said were growing dimmer, causing teachers to sometimes have to turn down the lights to see a crisp image.
Mr. Dunham said the purchase made sense because new was better. “I could take a used car down to the mechanic and get it all fixed up and still have a used car.”
But Ms. Kirchoff, the president of the teachers’ association, is furious. “My projector works just fine,” she said. “Give me Kleenex, Kleenex, Kleenex!”
The Parents
Last November, Kyrene went back to voters to ask them to pay for another seven years of technology spending in the district. The previous measure from 2005 will not expire for two years. But the district wanted to get ahead of the issue, and leave wiggle room just in case the new measure didn’t pass.
It didn’t. It lost by 96 votes out of nearly 50,000 cast. Mr. Share and others here said they attributed the failure to poor wording on the ballot that made it look like a new tax increase, rather than the continuation of one.
They say they will not make the same wording mistake this time. And they say the burden on taxpayers is modest.
“It’s so much bang for the buck,” said Jeremy Calles, Kyrene’s interim chief financial officer. For a small investment, he said, “we get state-of-the-art technology.”
Regardless, some taxpayers have already decided that they will not vote yes.
“When you look at the big picture, it’s hard to say ‘yes, spend more on technology’ when class sizes increase,” said Kameron Bybee, 34, who has two children in district schools. “The district has made up its mind to go forward with the technologically advanced path. Come hell or high water.”
Other parents feel conflicted. Eduarda Schroder, 48, whose daughter Julia was in Ms. Furman’s English class, worked on the political action committee last November to push through an extension of the technology tax. Computers, she says, can make learning more appealing. But she’s also concerned that test scores haven’t gone up.
She says she is starting to ask a basic question. “Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”
September 4th, 2011
An undated photograph of Ned Kelly, top, and his headless remains in Melbourne.
By CHRISTINE KENNEALLY
NY Times Published: August 31, 2011
MELBOURNE, Australia — Even with the best scientific techniques, you can’t always get what you want. But if you try, as the Rolling Stones put it, sometimes you get what you need.
Consider the case of Ned Kelly’s skull.
In Australia, Kelly needs no introduction; for Americans, it may help to think of him as Jesse James, Thomas Paine and John F. Kennedy rolled into one.
Born about 1854 to an Irish convict exiled to Australia, Kelly became a folk hero as a very young man. He took up arms against a corrupt British constabulary, robbed banks, wrote an explosive manifesto — and in a final shootout in which he wore homemade metal armor, he was shot, arrested and hanged in 1880 by the Anglo-Irish establishment he despised.
As with any semimythical hero, Kelly’s public has always hungered to get closer to the legend. His armor, cartridge bag, boots and a bloody sash became state treasures.
But perhaps the most priceless among them is his missing skull — the subject of a tangled forensic drama that was finally resolved on Wednesday, at least in part, after decades of investigation, debate, tantalizing leads, stalemates, false starts and what can only be called skulduggery.
After his execution, Ned Kelly was buried in a mass grave at a prison, the Melbourne Gaol. There his remains might have quietly and invisibly decomposed but for a mistake by 19th-century gravediggers: they used a type of lime that slowed decomposition instead of hastening it.
So when the grounds were dug up for development in 1929, startled workers found the site full of skeletons. Officials began to move the remains to another prison. But in a scene of chaos that became a local scandal, a watching crowd of schoolboys and onlookers ran amok between the coffins, seizing bones — including, it was thought, the skulls of Ned Kelly and Frederick Bailey Deeming, the notorious British serial killer who may have been Jack the Ripper.
While the gaol remains were reburied at Pentridge prison, the skulls were recovered soon after they had been stolen. They then embarked on a separate, winding journey through the back doors of a number of institutions.
In the 1970s, one skull was put on display in a gaol museum alongside Kelly’s death mask, a plaster cast impression made shortly after his execution. (It is unknown whether that mask was the original or a copy.)
But in 1978 the skull was stolen again, and a man named Tom Baxter told journalists that he had it.
Mr. Baxter held onto the skull for over three decades, promising to return it if the government gave Kelly a Christian burial. The government did not respond, and the stalemate continued until 2008, when yet another excavation uncovered more prisoners’ remains. At least 3,000 bone fragments were exhumed and sent to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. It was thought that Ned Kelly’s bones might be among them.
Shortly after that, Mr. Baxter handed over a fragile, sun-bleached skull to the authorities.
The forensic institute conducted a 21-month investigation of the skull, mixing historical detective work with an array of innovative scientific analyses.
Scientists used historical photographs, cranial plaster casts and a copy of the Kelly death mask to make sure that the skull from Mr. Baxter had indeed been unearthed in the 1929 exhumation. When it came to the skull’s genetic material, however, the scientists faced some serious obstacles. DNA is well preserved in bone but highly vulnerable to contamination. Furthermore, they could not simply cut a square out of the skull, grind it to a powder and extract DNA from that; Joy Beyer, a molecular biologist at the institute, says she was told that the skull could not be damaged.
Finally, the institute sent samples from the skull and other remains to a forensic laboratory in Argentina that specializes in degraded and aged remains. That lab successfully extracted DNA from almost all of the samples.
Even so, the DNA meant little in isolation. The investigators needed something, or someone, to match it against.
Hoping to find DNA in Kelly’s dried blood, they located the boots, bag and sash he wore the night he was shot. “Dried specimens on cloth can preserve DNA for hundreds, even thousands, of years,” said David Ranson, a pathologist at the institute.
But the boot and the bag had no usable DNA. The sash, which they found in a country museum, had been thoroughly washed before it was put on display. And a search for the original of the Kelly death mask — which might hold a stray eyelash or some skin — came up empty.
Next, the investigators looked for relatives. They found Leigh Olver, an art teacher who was descended from Ned Kelly’s mother, down a direct line of women. He donated blood for analysis, and they compared his mitochondrial DNA to that of the skull.
On Wednesday, the forensic institute announced the disappointing results of that analysis. It appears that after all this time, after being abducted more than once, placed on display for the world to see, hidden for decades, cherished, handled, sought after and tested, the skull is not Ned Kelly’s. “Mr. Olver’s DNA and the DNA from the skull do not match,” said Fiona Leahy, a legal adviser at the institute who conducted research for the project.
There was one rather powerful note of consolation. The investigators found a match between the Olver DNA and one set of bones dug up at Pentridge, including a palm-size fragment of skull. So while most of Kelly’s skull is still missing, the rest of him appears to have been found.
As for the stolen skull, it could belong to the serial killer, Frederick Deeming, who died in 1892. The forensic institute is seeking a maternal relative to test DNA.
What of Kelly’s skeleton? Should it be returned to the extended family? Or should there be a public grave? Many Australians regard Kelly as a national hero. Countless books and movies tell the story of his life. But others see him as a villain.
“You can’t just bury the man,” Mr. Olver said. “Someone is going to dig him up again in half an hour.”
September 4th, 2011