When Sarah got back from Dresden week before last, she said she really wanted some ethnic food. Tom had planned to make egg rolls for her the evening she got home, but with the delays in her flight out of Philadelphia, she didn't make it home til late; so Tom got some frozen ones and once they were cooked in the deep fat fryer they were apparently passable. Then I think it was the next evening we went to The Cottage for dinner. The Cottage is an Ethiopian restaurant in a former Burger King at East Rock Springs and Piedmont, and is one of Sarah's favorite restaurants. I am not sure what Sarah ate in Germany, but apparently not Chinese or Ethiopian food.
While we were at the Cottage, I noticed it - in the corner of the parking lot, behind the taxis, was a green bin from Better World Books. I'd seen one or two of these bins in other locations around Atlanta but had never figured out exactly what Better World Books was and how my book donation would support literacy and make a Better World. But that weekend I'd spent a little time on Rhyne family history - my maternal grandmother is a Rhyne - and come across a reference to book about early German settlers in Pennsylvania that apparently included information about my Rhine/Rein/Reinau ancestors. I found a copy on line, and one of the places that had it for sale was Better World Books. So I ordered it, and in the process learned about Better World Books and those green bins that are around Atlanta.
It's a business that keeps books out of landfills and sells them to people who want them, and partners with groups supporting literacy efforts worldwide. As someone whose heart ached when I saw books in the dumpster in front of our house (for the record, the only ones *I* put there were guidebooks that were so out of date as to be useless but not so out of date as to be interesting), I am so glad to be able to feel good about purging the shelves of old college Required Reading and some of the quasi-academic books I've accumulated over the years but I know I will never read again (if I ever read them in the first place). We've taken many boxes of books to Goodwill but I have no idea if Goodwill actually has a model that can help these books make their way to someone who wants them.
But Better World Books does, and earlier this week I dropped off a few books in the green bin behind the Cottage. I'm cleaning out my office, anticipating a move to a new, smaller office, and we still have stuff piled up all over the place at home. At least now I know something I can do with books and feel good about it.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
House of Cards
Last week, the team appointed by the state released the report summarizing the investigation of cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools. I didn't read the whole thing (it's three volumes, and hundreds of pages), but I stayed up late the other night and read enough of it. The evidence is overwhelming. In some schools, there were organized, systematic efforts to change test scores. Hundreds of people were involved, many confessed, some invoked their 5th amendment rights. In the implicated schools, the too-good-to-be-true test results disappeared with the 2010 Criterion-Referenced Compentency Test (CRCT), which was administered with outside monitoring.
Beverly Hall, the then-superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, said she didn't know. And she was shocked - shocked - to learn that there was cheating going on in the schools. She accumulated awards and bonuses and national-level recognition for her work in Atlanta, but when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution began to report on test score increases that simply were Too Good To Be True, the result was denial and a failure of leadership. Finally, belatedly, she says she's responsible, now that it's too late to say anything else, but she says she didn't know, she really didn't.
But she should have. She should have been curious enough to have a couple of her central office staff (I think she has more than a few people who worked for her in headquarters) go to the implicated schools, where impossible gains were made in scores, and see what exactly had been done in the classrooms that had produced these miracles. See what kind of work the students were doing, listen to them in class, review their writing and classroom work. It wouldn't have been hard, but apparently no one did it. They didn't do it because they didn't want to know.
I told Tom the other evening that it reminded me of the crumbling of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Knowledgeable outsiders who looked carefully at Madoff's investment strategy and reported returns knew it didn't add up, and some of them reported their suspicions to the Securities and Exhange Commission. Some of the investors themselves probably had suspicions, but at long as the money kept coming, they didn't really want to know.
And what happened at the Atlanta Public Schools was like a Ponzi scheme. Once you start cheating, you can't stop, because the goals for the next year just get racheted up. So every year more kids have to do better on the exams, more teachers and staff have to get pulled in. More children denied extra help that they needed and families misled about how their children were doing in school. And now that it's all come tumbling down, more careers ruined.
The report documents a massive failure of leadership of the Atlanta Public Schools. Beverly Hall says she didn't know. But she should have, and she could have, if she had bothered to investigate the initial allegations that the AJC reported.
Beverly Hall, the then-superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, said she didn't know. And she was shocked - shocked - to learn that there was cheating going on in the schools. She accumulated awards and bonuses and national-level recognition for her work in Atlanta, but when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution began to report on test score increases that simply were Too Good To Be True, the result was denial and a failure of leadership. Finally, belatedly, she says she's responsible, now that it's too late to say anything else, but she says she didn't know, she really didn't.
But she should have. She should have been curious enough to have a couple of her central office staff (I think she has more than a few people who worked for her in headquarters) go to the implicated schools, where impossible gains were made in scores, and see what exactly had been done in the classrooms that had produced these miracles. See what kind of work the students were doing, listen to them in class, review their writing and classroom work. It wouldn't have been hard, but apparently no one did it. They didn't do it because they didn't want to know.
I told Tom the other evening that it reminded me of the crumbling of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Knowledgeable outsiders who looked carefully at Madoff's investment strategy and reported returns knew it didn't add up, and some of them reported their suspicions to the Securities and Exhange Commission. Some of the investors themselves probably had suspicions, but at long as the money kept coming, they didn't really want to know.
And what happened at the Atlanta Public Schools was like a Ponzi scheme. Once you start cheating, you can't stop, because the goals for the next year just get racheted up. So every year more kids have to do better on the exams, more teachers and staff have to get pulled in. More children denied extra help that they needed and families misled about how their children were doing in school. And now that it's all come tumbling down, more careers ruined.
The report documents a massive failure of leadership of the Atlanta Public Schools. Beverly Hall says she didn't know. But she should have, and she could have, if she had bothered to investigate the initial allegations that the AJC reported.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Homecoming
On Saturday, the two kids who had been gone both came home. Iain was back from Boy Scout camp. He'd had a lot of the adventures you'd expect boys to have at camp,and a few that were a surprise; for example, I was a little surprised that he came home with a zombie survival (spoof) merit badge. He said it cooled off at night and wasn't too hot in the daytime, and the food was bad but he ate it all anyway. Lots of merit badge work at camp, besides the zombie survival one; he has a couple of requirements left to do for his Citizenship in the Nation merit badge.
Saturday was also the day that Sarah was due back from Dresden, where she'd been for 7 weeks staying with her friend Mimi and attending school there. Thanks to email and Facebook, we felt like we'd kept in pretty close touch with her even though we didn't talk to her on the phone while she was gone. From the sound of it she'd had many adventures, including attending a four day Mexican/Bavarian wedding celebration. But on Saturday she was coming home, which entailed flying from Dresden to Frankfort, from Frankfort to Philadelphia, and then Philadelphia to Atlanta. The flight out of Philadelphia was delayed for several hours, so she didn't get back til late. But U.S. Airways did a good job with the automated flight notifications, and her plane finally arrived a little after 9 p.m. She got back with overweight baggage and lots of stories, and plans for visiting again. She said that while she was gone, she'd had two dreams that were in German; one of them was actually in French and German, but she didn't understand the French.
The Rhyne family reunion is in North Carolina next month, so I spent some time over the weekend learning about the Rhynes. Thanks to lots of work by other people, there's a lot known about the Rhynes, who emigrated from Durlach, near present-day Karlsruhe, Germany (they may have moved to that area from around Zurich, but that's not completely clear - the first records of the family in Durlach date from 1707). In 1738, my 6th great-grandfather Hans Martin Reinau and his family emigrated to the colony of Pennsylvania. They arrived in Philadelphia in October on a ship called the Snow Fox. In Philadelphia, immigration officials kept good records, so unlike other points of entry during the colonial era, there's good documentation of who arrived when. My 5th great-grandfather, Jacob Rein, was 12 years old when his family came to Pennsylvania.
So I was thinking about that on Saturday, while Sarah was making her way home. Jacob Rein was Iain's age, when he came here to the country that became the United States. His family had boarded a ship in Amsterdam, crossed the Atlantic, and settled in York County, Pennsylvania. Jacob married there, and then he and his family moved to what's now Gaston County, North Carolina, in the 1760s. Although he did not serve in the military during the Revolutionary War, he signed the petition to nominate the Lincoln County, North Carolina, militia officers in 1779 and provided material aid to the revolutionary cause, including furnishing supplies and provisions.
It doesn't take so long to make the trip, now, even though I'm sure on Saturday it felt like forever for Sarah. Jacob was born in Germany, but died an American, in a new country that he played a small part in helping to create.
A lot of things - like travel and communications - are easier now than they were then, but that doesn't mean we all get a free ride on the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. Our country needs informed and engaged citizens who will constructively participate in civil society and public discourse. Every day, not just on the 4th of July.
Saturday was also the day that Sarah was due back from Dresden, where she'd been for 7 weeks staying with her friend Mimi and attending school there. Thanks to email and Facebook, we felt like we'd kept in pretty close touch with her even though we didn't talk to her on the phone while she was gone. From the sound of it she'd had many adventures, including attending a four day Mexican/Bavarian wedding celebration. But on Saturday she was coming home, which entailed flying from Dresden to Frankfort, from Frankfort to Philadelphia, and then Philadelphia to Atlanta. The flight out of Philadelphia was delayed for several hours, so she didn't get back til late. But U.S. Airways did a good job with the automated flight notifications, and her plane finally arrived a little after 9 p.m. She got back with overweight baggage and lots of stories, and plans for visiting again. She said that while she was gone, she'd had two dreams that were in German; one of them was actually in French and German, but she didn't understand the French.
The Rhyne family reunion is in North Carolina next month, so I spent some time over the weekend learning about the Rhynes. Thanks to lots of work by other people, there's a lot known about the Rhynes, who emigrated from Durlach, near present-day Karlsruhe, Germany (they may have moved to that area from around Zurich, but that's not completely clear - the first records of the family in Durlach date from 1707). In 1738, my 6th great-grandfather Hans Martin Reinau and his family emigrated to the colony of Pennsylvania. They arrived in Philadelphia in October on a ship called the Snow Fox. In Philadelphia, immigration officials kept good records, so unlike other points of entry during the colonial era, there's good documentation of who arrived when. My 5th great-grandfather, Jacob Rein, was 12 years old when his family came to Pennsylvania.
So I was thinking about that on Saturday, while Sarah was making her way home. Jacob Rein was Iain's age, when he came here to the country that became the United States. His family had boarded a ship in Amsterdam, crossed the Atlantic, and settled in York County, Pennsylvania. Jacob married there, and then he and his family moved to what's now Gaston County, North Carolina, in the 1760s. Although he did not serve in the military during the Revolutionary War, he signed the petition to nominate the Lincoln County, North Carolina, militia officers in 1779 and provided material aid to the revolutionary cause, including furnishing supplies and provisions.
It doesn't take so long to make the trip, now, even though I'm sure on Saturday it felt like forever for Sarah. Jacob was born in Germany, but died an American, in a new country that he played a small part in helping to create.
A lot of things - like travel and communications - are easier now than they were then, but that doesn't mean we all get a free ride on the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. Our country needs informed and engaged citizens who will constructively participate in civil society and public discourse. Every day, not just on the 4th of July.
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