Remembered: Jaime Escalante and the Public Schools of California

CNN reported the death of legendary teacher Jaime Escalante on Tuesday. Escalante was a mathematics teacher in East Los Angeles. He was made famous only in part by his wondrous ways with students, but also by the sheer disbelief that the state and district had that any teacher could helped students in that district score well in math. He was then immortalized in the movie Stand and Deliver, starring Edward James Olmos.

We need more teachers like him, and we need more people to believe that there can be teachers like him. The so-called “No Child Left Behind” Act, is leaving all children behind, and desperately needs to be reformed. Perhaps one thing we could do is pay for more teachers’ educations in exchange for several years of service. Perhaps another thing we can do is fund schools properly. It’s a particularly serious problem in California, with no easy answer. Here is a well written article that explains how the local tax base cannot even take matters into their own hands unless they expend a WHOLE LOT. Not that it would help East LA, mind you. Perhaps this obituary should be for the California public school system.

A social network not to be part of

We’ve discussed the unintended evils of social networking sites in the past. But here is a story about a “Social Networking” site that seems to have intended evils. The site, which I won’t name, uses video cameras, and people are randomly connected to one another. You can then chat with the person, click “next” to go to the next person, or report the person for inappropriate content. Doing so blocks an individual for about 10 minutes. When a friend of mine told me about the site, I thought it was an interesting concept. But then he told me that what he saw quite often would disgust most any normal person. And then he told me that he saw young children using the program.

This raises all sorts of questions:

Where the heck are parents of such children, and why would they ever let them near this type of “social network”? Where’s the little report button to report them?
As someone who believes in free speech, if the primary use of a technology is to violate the law, in this case child protection laws, perhaps I’ve just found my limit. If we look at how Napster fared in the courts, because their business model was predicated on breaking the laws, in the end they had no legal defense. Can this business argue that they have a viable model, absent the lurid behavior being demonstrated?
Even if they claim to have such a valid business model, should this site be required to exercise due diligence in protecting children? A report button that knocks someone off for 10 minutes doesn’t seem like much of a deterrence. How about the report button sending identifying information to the service so that they can review the video, where it could be used as evidence in a prosecution?

Here’s one reason I won’t go to the site in question, and neither should you: what if law enforcement finds even a hint that you’ve been there? Could this be turned around such that you could be assumed to have participated in a lewd act in front of a minor? After all, we’ve seen other instances where the presence of porn was enough for someone to lose his job and face prosecution.

More Airline nonsense!

Yes the airlines are at it again. This time, according to the Wall Street Journal, they are complaining about the idea that you might actually want to get off of a plane after some number of hours of sitting on a tarmac. The pendulum has swung so far to the side of the airlines that they think that they can simply bully the FAA into backing off on the meager regulations they’ve proposed. I have another idea.

With the airlines threatening to cancel flights at the first hint of trouble, I propose that the FAA institute one additional rule: when a flight is canceled, the airline responsible must rebook a passenger for a flight to his or her destination on that same day, or allow the passenger to book the next available flight to his or her destination on any airline. Just for spice, we might add something about allowing that booking to be in a higher class of service if it is the only available manner to get a passenger moving.

Still think we don’t need a real Passenger’s Bill of Rights?

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