If someone dumped 99 tons of sand on you, and you weren’t in good shape, you’d collapse, too.
The National Transportation Safety Board has released its fifth update of its investigation of the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minn., that killed 13 people and injured 145. The NTSB says it has not yet identified a specific cause for the collapse, only contributing factors. NTSB chair Mark V. Rosenker (speaking as cautiously as federal officials everywhere), said only “significant progress continues to be made in the investigation.” The board expects to issue a final report by year’s end.
What is known:
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It’s fair to ask whether a college kid should have to wash dishes in the dining
hall to pay his tuition when his college has a billion dollars in the bank.
— Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, “the ranking Republican on the Senate committee that oversees tax policy, [who] has written to the nation’s 135 leading universities, asking them to explain what they do with their tax-free endowments“; according to The New York Times, “Last year a record 76 American colleges passed the $1 billion mark in total endowments”; March 18.
I liken N.C.L.B. to a mile race. 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.
— Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that seeks to improve schools; according to The New York Times, “… 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”; March 20.
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A couple of weeks ago I spoke with you about poetry of ideas. Today’s entry will look at poetry that controls emotion.
The poet pictured above is Ben Jonson – “O rare Ben Jonson” an admirer said of him. Jonson is like most great poets – a person of contradictions. Known as perhaps the greatest poet of controlled language (and subsequently of emotion) in the English language, he could be irascible to the point of misanthropy – and once killed a fellow actor in a duel – and almost went to the gallows for it (he did bear the brand of felon on his thumb the rest of his days). He was understated and subtle in his verse – yet his chief vehicle in his plays was satire. He feuded with the literary establishment often and yet became the first English Poet Laureate. Like most of us, Jonson was complicated. Full story »
Three-year-olds can be very trying, and not least because, once they find something that works for them, say, some action that made adults laugh, they’ll do it over and over and over and over expecting belly-bustin’ guffaws each time.
You’d think the venerable US News (formerly US News & World Report) would be too old for that sort of behavior, but it’s not. If the editors there can come up with some new ranking issue to “leverage the brand” they’ve built with their popular undergraduate college rankings, they’ll do it, and if they give a tinker’s dam if there is insufficient data to rank, or if their methodology is specious, they haven’t demonstrated it so far. Selling magazines is all, and the hell with those who get hurt.
Even children.
US News’ most recent foray into the ranking business, their new raison d’etre, is the November 29, 2007 issue that is their first-ever ranking of US high schools. Their website asks themselves the question: “Why rank?” They answer their own question, saying “For accountability.” Great. Let’s have our high schools be accountable for doing their jobs well. I’m all for that. But I’m absolutely against measuring things that tell us almost nothing about whether high schools are doing their jobs well and pretending those measurements tell us something useful. And that is what US News has done. Full story »
