Fascinating Facts and Trivia.

Are Charter Schools Gaming the System to Get the Best Students?

A Reuters investigation of charter schools finds that many use elaborate strategies to ensure that they get the best students in their schools:

Thousands of charter schools don’t provide subsidized lunches, putting them out of reach for families in poverty.  Hundreds mandate that parents spend hours doing “volunteer” work for the school or risk losing their child’s seat.  In one extreme example the Cambridge Lakes Charter School in Pingree Grove, Illinois, mandates that each student’s family invest in the company that built the school – a practice the state said it would investigate after inquiries from Reuters.

And from New Hampshire to California, charter schools large and small, honored and obscure, have developed complex application processes that can make it tough for students who struggle with disability, limited English skills, academic deficits or chaotic family lives to even get into the lottery.

The impact may be profound for public schools in the same area:

Charter-school advocates say the shift in resources is warranted because charters often excel where traditional schools have failed, posting stellar test scores even in impoverished neighborhoods with little history of academic success.

But a growing number of education experts – including some staunch fans of charter schools – see that narrative as flawed.  They point to application barriers at some charter schools and high expulsion rates at others as evidence that the charter sector as a whole may be skimming the most motivated, disciplined students and leaving the hardest-to-reach behind.

That, in turn, can drive down test scores and enrollment at traditional public schools.  In Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities, officials have cited just such trends as justification for closing scores of neighborhood schools to make way for still more charters.

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Dolphins Identify Each Other by Name

NPR is reporting that a recent study shows that dolphins have the ability to call each other by name, making them the first animals researchers have proven do so:

Science continues to show that what we think makes us human may not be so unique: New research finds that bottlenose dolphins call the “names of loved ones when they become separated,” Discovery News reports.

Wired reports that researchers analyzed recordings made by the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which captured pairs of dolphins and held them in separate nets.

“During the captures, the dolphins can’t see each other, but can hear each other and continue to communicate,” Wired writes.  “In their analysis, King and Janik showed that some of the communications are copies of captured compatriots’ signature whistles — and, crucially, that the dolphins most likely to make these were mothers and calves or closely allied males.”

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John Steinbeck on Love

Since it’s Valentine’s Day and we are finishing a test over The Grapes of Wrath, it seems appropriate to hear what John Steinbeck thought about love. He wrote the following letter to his son who had recently written the family to tell them that he had fallen in love with a girl named Susan.

 

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa”

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Reimagining the Fifty States

Artist Neil Freeman has created a map of the United States, envisioning the country as divided into 50 states of equal population.

 

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North Dakota Oil Boom Lights Up the Night

Perhaps nothing better explains how the oil boom has changed North Dakota than lights. This satellite image of the United States at night shows just how significantly this formerly dark part of the American prairie has changed:

ND-Lights-1

 

The New York Times has more about the boom in North Dakota in this long piece:

It’s hard to think of what oil hasn’t done to life in the small communities of western North Dakota, good and bad. It has minted millionaires, paid off mortgages, created businesses; it has raised rents, stressed roads, vexed planners and overwhelmed schools; it has polluted streams, spoiled fields and boosted crime. It has confounded kids running lemonade stands: 50 cents a cup but your customer has only hundreds in his payday wallet. Oil has financed multimillion-dollar recreation centers and new hospital wings. It has fitted highways with passing lanes and rumble strips. It has forced McDonald’s to offer bonuses and brought job seekers from all over the country — truck drivers, frack hands, pipe fitters, teachers, manicurists, strippers. It has ginned up an unreleased reality show called “Boomtown Girls,” which follows the lives of “five bold and brave sisters” in the formerly drowsy farm center of Williston, N.D. Williston, whose population has tripled in the past 10 years, lies in the middle of the 150,000-square-mile Williston Basin, a depression in the crust of the earth that geologists now believe contains one of the largest oil fields in the world.

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