<p>“Liberal educators had decided phonics wasn’t important and many students suffered long term damage as a result.”</p>
<p>Evidence, please? (beware - I’ve read ALL the studies, and written professionally on this subject. It’s a lot more nuanced than you think.)</p>
<p>“Fortunately for him, we had already taught him to read, but many children weren’t so lucky and spent years struggling with basic reading skills.”</p>
<p>If you were like most parents who help their children learn to read (you didn’t teach him to read; he LEARNED), you probably did a modified version of “look and say” - you read a page, there were pictures on the page, you asked what was this word, and had him read it, and soon the individual words turned into phrases he knew by heart; and he learned that there were phonemic elements common to words that he learned as well.</p>
<p>EVERY child I have ever met - and I mean that, literally - every single one learned to read without phonics. I can do a very simple demonstration of this fact. Write the particular squiggle on a blackboard or a piece of paper that is a signifier for the number/quantity “Two”. I have yet to meet a single child who was reading words before they could “read” the squiggle and make the sound two. And they not only know that two is a sound, but that it stands for a number in a sequential series, or quantity of things, they know what the quantity of things is, and they can use it correctly in a meaningful sentence. Oh, and many of them can write it correctly two. Now look at the squiggle. It has not one bit information that remotely resembles phonemic content. (The closest I’ve ever gotten is the script version of the letter “Q”.)</p>
<p>This, of course, is pretty close to the way one reads hieroglyphics, or Chinese characters. Nothing particularly strange about it. </p>
<p>Here’s an article I recently did with a former dean at Brown on the subject:</p>
<p>That Austrian had the drive and street smarts to be able to buy and sell anybody on this board 10 times over and marry a Kennedy. Give him some credit. California is in deep crap in a large number of areas and some tough choices need to be made( most states did that several years ago now) but just keep putting them off–soon you’ll have a deficit large enough to give Washington a run.</p>
<p>Oh, I do give him credit where he has earned it: I freely concede that “True Lies” was a funny movie. And even though most of the credit for that goes to Jamie Lee Curtis, I will say that at Arnold was at least good enough that he didn’t ruin an entertaining movie.</p>
<p>By your standards, Barrons, Arnold does deserve some credit. One problem, though: I don’t dole out credit based on how many times somebody can buy and sell my friends–or by the name of the person he may have married.</p>
<p>Obviously you miss the point. He built himself from nothing as an immigrant who was laughed at when he first went to Hollywood. Thats says something about the man.</p>
<p>You gotta love it. We export tax dollars to the federal government year in and year out - that’s right, those savvy, self-reliant red states with their low-tax economies are basically parasites supported by “blue” California’s extras. Then we get lectured on what a bad job we’re doing! </p>
<p>[OOps - ignore that. California BAD!!! Bad state, BAD!]</p>
<p>California is 1/8 of the population of the United States and yet we have to send our federal tax dollars to those backward Republican States, instead of spending it here. Then the Republicans say we don’t manage our money well. LOL you gotta admire their chutzpah.</p>
<p>As for Phonics vs. Whole language; you can’t lay that at the feet of the teachers…School districts, States, and the Feds above them force programs down the throats of schools. They think kids are like some type of widget that can be pressed out uniformly. Give teachers the authority to teach any style and then evaluate their results… Most kids can read with a whole language approach…show a MacDonald’s ad to a three year old and ask them what it says. Some kids do benefit from understanding phonetic rules. But consider the word "PHOTI " With the Ph from the ph sound in PHoton; o as in the o in wOmen and ti as the ti in intuiTIon. What does Photi spell?</p>
<p>Under funding education and the decline of California’s ranking in education are directly correlated. Increase funding to the class room and give teachers some spending authority.</p>
<p>Teacher tenure is something that could be studied more, but there doesn’t seem to be a relationship between the length of time for tenure and success. Connecticut’s teachers are not seen as below Missouris’ but they are tenured in 1/5 the time. The quality is probably related to teacher support programs, which cost money.
I am working on a new bumper sticker
“If we out law union political fund-raising then only out laws will have political funds.”</p>
<p>The Governor has a lot to think about on his trip to China…I wonder if he will realize that his absence in the Capital has been a big part of the problem. He needs to do the job, even if he doesn’t collect a pay check.</p>
<p>Governor Schwarzenegger has surrendered to the nurses and has dropped his appeal regarding nurse to patient ratios. He had tried to suspend a law after being rejected by the courts last winter filed an appeal. He was trying to earn his donations from the California Hospital Association but has caved now that he was tromped in the special election that he forced upon the state.(one of the most expensive elections to date) He is bringing at least one member of the Hospital Association on his junket to China. </p>
<p>The Administration insists they were going to drop the appeal anyways and that it was not related to their huge losses last Tuesday. The nurses see it otherwise, “Now, 107 portests later, $300 million wasted in an election, we have been extended an olive branch.” said one nurse. Nurses indicate they will be campaigning against him in the next election as will most teachers, firefighters, police and parents.</p>
<p>Arnold has been reported to have signed up to do two more movies and is no longer actively looking for a house in Sacramento…Well, some posters have said he is smart. Now if he would only give that money back to the school children.</p>
I’ve heard variations on this theme from relatives in California for some time, and I’m not sure I understand the point. Is it not true that individuals in California pay the same federal taxes, based on their individual incomes, as residents of other states? There isn’t a special ‘extra’ federal tax JUST for residents of California, is there? Just because there are more residents of a particular state doesn’t mean that that state, whether California or New York, should dictate terms to the rest of the country, in my opinion. That’s why we have both houses of Congress.</p>
<p>Do Californians not also benefit from the federal government in the areas of national defense, medicare, interstate road construction and other areas as the rest of the country? In what way do the, “parasitic” red states take money from California? I happen to live in just about the bluest state in the Union, Massachusetts, and I can tell you that we seem to soak up more than our share of federal money, via the Big Dig. While I will always consider myself a Californian at heart (born and lived there until early 30s) I think this line of thinking represents a particular geo-centric point of view that I never seem to find anywhere else but in California.</p>
<p>Finally, the quote above seems to imply that all Californians think alike, and want the same things from governement – that there are not varied points of view about all areas of life. I really don’t think that that is the case.</p>
<p>SJMom, there are various tax studies that show what states have net get our losses on Federal spending from their taxes. California is among the net exporters to other states by a large margin. As a matter of fact, the so-called Red States are mostly tax dollar importers, a trend that has accelerated the past five years (if one were paranoid, one would think that the Bush administration rules in the style of Chinese emperors, sending grain to loyal provinces and punishing the disloyal). I don’t object to California being a tax dollar exporter, myself, because of the general principle that we’re all in this together. But the smug self-righteousness of the recipients, both along the lines of their self-alleged sturdy self-reliance and their disdain of that from whence the tax dollars come, is fair game to be called on.</p>
<p>kluge, if things are so great in your state, why on earth did you vote to recall Gray Davis? I’d say that when a very blue state kicks out a Democratic governor and replaces him with a Republican that they are admitting that something is seriously wrong with their state. Their main problem, however, is that they think that the solution to the problem is in the man and not the policies. Kind of like a patient who thinks just changing doctors will cure him but refuses to take the medicine that the new doctor prescribes.</p>
<p>TD, my problem with this approach is the idea that ALL Californians have a particular political attitude and want the same things from government. If the population is higher in a particular state, i.e. California, then obviously that state pays more in federal taxes, but the state is not a single entity. Nor are the ‘Red’ states a single entity, and I don’t think it’s fair or helpful to any discussion to label residents of these states as, “smug” or “self-righteous.” Do you expect states like Wyoming to send an annual thank you note? I somehow imagine that residents of Wyoming, Ohio and other ‘Red’ states (and I’m not sure what they all are) have a variety of opinions, and aren’t subject to groupthink. It’s just the attitude of noblesse oblige that I find hard to understand.</p>
<p>California gets back 15 billion less than it sends to Washington.If we received what we pay into the system, our fiscal problems would probably be over.</p>
<p>Maybe, our governer should be working on getting our federal tax money back.</p>
<p>In contrast, of the 16 states that are “losers” – receiving less in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes – 69% are Blue States that voted for Al Gore in 2000. Indeed, 11 of the 14 (79%) of the states receiving the least federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Blue States. Here are the Top 10 states that supply feed for the federal trough (with Blue States highlighted in bold):</p>
<p>States Receiving Least in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:</p>
<p>So, I think I must be missing the point here. I don’t doubt that the data is correct. But it is the idea that money=power here that makes me very uncomfortable. If political power is accorded to citizens based on the taxes they pay, then a very few wealthy individuals would be making decisions for the rest of us. It reminds me a little of the idea that the spouse making the most money should make the decisions in a relationship. I prefer the one vote per person way of operating. And at the state level, that’s what the House of Representatives is for.</p>
<p>The one man one vote does not quite work that way in Congress. That’s why we have pork barrel politics, the most egregious example of which are the $453k bridges to nowhere:</p>