The largest study done to date clearly indicates that the No Child Left Behind policy significantly increases the rate of high school dropouts. Frankly, this is no surprise to me, as the misguidedness of NCLB's test-and-accountability approach has been very clear to me from the beginning, because it incentivizes teachers and schools to teach test-taking rather than general education and flexible thinking.

And the study concurs with that thinking, but also brings up another, darker effect: because schools are scored by the test results of their students, school administrators have a strong incentive to "help" low-performing students drop out. When poor performers drop out, the school's scores go up. It's likely not that the administrators kick the kids out. Low performing students are the ones most likely to want to leave anyway. But now the schools have no incentive to fight to keep those kids in class.

It's always been easier to let the struggling, drop-out-minded kids slip away. But now it's actively better for the school if they do, because the school's performance rating will improve. And the study shows that this is exactly what is happening. The actual drop-out rate of urban Texas highschools is 33%, way up from before NCLB, and the more strictly punitive the NCLB implementation, the more students dropped out!

It's amazing to me how Republicans are horrified at the thought of "rewarding someone for breaking the law" when it's a poverty-stricken Mexican father crossing the border to work for $4 an hour at some scut job so he can feed his children, but they're totally in favor of it when it's a billion-dollar telecom corporation that's been illegally spying on US citizens for five years.

What's pathetic is that, if surveillance is needed, there are legal ways to make it happen. The court that approves emergency wiretap orders has approved tens of thousands and only denied a very few in several decades. And the law doesn't even require the order to happen first - only within three days of the beginning of surveillance. And if broader powers were really needed, it could have been a new law passed by Congress. But this administration doesn't even bother with the law, they simply asked AT&T et al. to start the spying even though they knew it was illegal.

And here we are, years later, passing a bill to reward them for the lawbreaking. Frankly, it sickens me.

Last July, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled in Andersen v. King County that the state had a legitimate interest in limiting marriage to only those couples which could bear children. The issue, of course, was a lawsuit against the county that the state's 1998 Defense of Marriage act, which prevented gay couples from marrying.

But the court made a big mistake in the reasoning they used to support the DoMA: by basing their reasoning entirely on childbearing, their entire case falls apart, and this leaves them open to an amusing, if no less serious, legal challenge.

It's been a while since an election went my way, even in California.

But yesterday, CA voters sent down every single ballot initiative. Not just down, but down in flames. That will, hopefully, teach the governator that he can't bypass the system and try to deal with "the mess in Sacramento" by making himself King of California. And it will hopefully deter all parties from declaring expensive special elections in the future, and from farking up our state constitution further with overuse of the ballot initiative process.

If you haven't voted yet, go do so.

My voting guide this time is easy: no on everything.

The reason is primarily that ballot initiatives are on the whole an extremely bad idea. They create constitutional amendments, not laws. This means even in an emergency, the legislature cannot change them - not to balance the budget, not anything. Constitutions should include only broad statements of principle and the details of the mechanisms of government, not basic policies that should be law instead.

Because of ballot inititatives, nearly 80% of California's state budget is already fixed by the constitution ... and the Governor thinks more of them will help reduce the gridlock? I'll vote for an initiative, but it needs to be overwhelmingly positive and/or necessary, and none of these pass that test. 77 comes close, but not close enough for me.

By way of a second justification, I think it's irresponsible of the Governor to try to impose his will on the state's legal structure by going over the legislature's head this way. More, it's irresponsible to spend the money necessary to run the special election for that purpose. I don't want to reward that irresponsible activity by contributing to the success of any initiative.

Ah yes, Republican policies are good for our country. Not.

Despite the largest increases in government spending in history, hunger in America has grown by 43 percent since Bush took office.

As if to top it off, Congress last week cut the ranks of food stamps by some 300,000 in a strict party-line vote.

Another couple of GOP terms and we'll be a third-world country!

My two favorite topics on this blog are science and politics. So when my go-to site for science news, Science Blog publishes a detailed description of the function of CIA Non-Official Cover intelligence agents vis-a-vis the Valerie Plame scandal, I'm surprised, and absolutely obligated to link to it.

The Importance of the Plame Affair at Science Blog. An excellent read, I might add.

ABC does it again! Today's headline:

Bush: Militants Seek to Establish Empire

Some editor at ABC must have really loved the screenshot from Ireland's Sky News a few weeks back, and is performing flattery through imitation.

News headline this morning:

Bush: Radicals Seek to Intimidate World

A snippet from a story I read online:

"A kid’s part of your program, and he comes to you and says, 'You know, I’m going to have sex. I’ve reached a point and I’m going to do this. Should I use a condom?' What do you say?" asks Bradley.

"My own daughter, my 16-year-old daughter, tells me she’s going to be sexually active. I would not tell her to use a condom," says Pattyn. "I don't think it'll protect her. It won’t protect her heart. It won’t protect her emotional life. And it’s not going to protect her. I don’t want her to get out there and think that she’s going to be protected using a condom."

But wouldn't his daughter be more protected with a condom than without? "Not long term," says Pattyn.

Nice. I bet if his 16-year-old daughter did get pregnant, he'd just disown her and kick her out on the street.