A study released by the American Institutes for Research and WestED says that no one approach shows significant gains over others in teaching English learners, whether it be English immersion, or bilingual education courses.

What does show a relationship? Not surprisingly, the report cites poverty is the one indicator that is determinant in test scores more than how quickly students complete an English remediation program.

Five years ago, California voters passed Proposition 227, which proponents said would "mainstream" students for whom English was a second language, and opponents said would hurt children by throwing them into classes in English without proper preparation.

Why can't results be seen? Well, test scores for English learners did go up in the past few years. However, scores across the board rose. The gap in score between English learners and others didn't close significantly.

And the saga continues....

Last Friday a Federal Judge prolonged the anxious misery for millions of Blackberry addicts by declining to rule on an injunction that would have compelled Research In Motion to shut down Blackberry Service for infringing on the patent held by NTP. 3.2 million Users took a sigh of relief and Wall Street brokers collectively took a collective step away from their windows as the stock price went up 8.2% to $75.28.

But what's left (until the next court appearance) is a confusing standard of patent protection when the "public interest" opposes patent law.

A post I left a few weeks ago about the strange connection between employment and healthcare, apparently mirrors a debate that took place in 2000 between Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell in the Washington Monthly.
A number of blogs have recently resurrected the debate, in which Gopnik and Gladwell discuss the merits of the Canadian system. Malcolm Gladwell, who once took the role of the single-payer skeptic, has come around. He tells the tale in his new blog. It's actually a two parter.

It's worth a read, especially for his simplistic but effective comparison of healthcare to public transportation.

President Bush has a spotty philosophy on government power: he thinks the Feds should wiretap your phones and inspect your airline luggage, but not control your Social Security benefits. Nevertheless, my bet is that this week, he's damn happy the Coast Guard controls port security.

Think that labor rights aren't completely eroded in the United States? Check out this story from SF Chronicle gossip hounds Matier and Ross for chilling evidence to the contrary.

A local AmTrak conductor was fired recently after getting injured while getting a drunk passenger off the train. On August 15, 2005 Rebecca Gettleman noticed a visibly intoxicated passenger and got him off the train and into the hands of authorities. In the process of stepping off the train, the passenger pitched forward, falling down the stairs. Gettleman grabbed him, and in the process injured herself, requiring a month of physical therapy.

In today's New York Times, the editorial board comes out in favor of Network Neutrality legislation.

This comes on the heels of three Senate Commerce Committee hearings discussing Net Neutrality, Municipal Broadband, and video franchising. These intertwined issues are just a few of the topics under consideration as a part of the 1996 Telecom Act rewrite.

The Class of 2006 will be the first high school class in California that has to pass the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE)… or will they?

Last Wednesday, a lawsuit was filed in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of 20 high school students and their parents seeking an injunction to delay implementation of the consequences of the exam.

The lawyers in this case picked at least one blockbuster plaintiff. Liliana Valenzuela has a 3.84 GPA and is #12 in her class at Richmond High School in the East Bay. However, she has not passed the English portion of the examination.

Testing advocates at this point must be asking, “What’s going on at Richmond High?” and opponents are probably saying, “Aha, this proves the test is a poor indicator!”

Ray Bradbury wrote an editorial in the L.A. Times this week hoping to restart the debate for a monorail system in Los Angeles. In his assessment the traffic is five years away from total gridlock. The city’s slow and costly effort to develop an underground subway system has had a history of funding and infrastructural problems. The creation of a light rail, which includes low emission “trains” that can travel along streets, has been in various stages of development since 2001.

GetEnough.gov still on hiatus...

Yesterday the Office of Management and Budget launched its Expect More website.

It is designed to encourage more accountability from federal programs by giving each a star rating, from three stars signifying “effective” to no stars “ineffective.”

About 800 federal programs are currently on the website, representing 80% of the federal budget. The OMB hopes to have all federal programs on the site by the end of the year.

Each program has a few bullet points about what’s going well, as well as a few areas of improvement where action plans are briefly discussed.

It’s all very glossy and is easily accessible, but what does it really tell us? A series of soundbytes seems awfully shallow considering these are major programs confronting difficult problems.

Sasha gave me the heads-up about this article in the Times about AOL & Yahoo’s plan to create a “tier” for email service. The plan would allow companies to pay a premium to get their mail to your inbox in a more reliable manner, bypassing these companies’ spam filters.

Today Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly weighs in on the matter, highlighting that it may be another front in the network neutrality war.

But, I’m not too concerned about this – not nearly as concerned as I am about the telco’s plans to create a tiered Internet.

Why?

Are Americans building a house of straw by spending more than they earn?

The US Department of Commerce recently released its monthly report on national savings for December 2005. For the first time since 1932 and 1933, Americans spent more than they brought in for an entire year.

What's going on?

Considering the stakes and the profound values at play, most abortion "debates" -- those hyped-up events between your college's pro-choice and the pro-life clubs -- are pretty insipid affairs. It's just the nature of the issue: you can only define "zygote" and "personhood" so many times before, eventually, you trip over your own repetitive arguments, and the audience once again fails to learn anything new.

So I was surprised by just how incisive this discussion in Slate has become, even more so because it's just between two avowed pro-choicers.

Variations of the word “confidence” appeared in the Bush’s State of the Union six times. At times, one could not help envisioning Bush prancing down an Austrian path singing “I Have Confidence” on his way to the von Trapp family home. And like Frauline Maria as she approached the gate, Bush demonstrated anything but confidence in his State of the Union address by admitting defeat, failing to make bold proposals, and…by backing away from the word “reprocessing.”

OK, so here's my quick, instant reaction to Bush's speech and Kaine's response... well, instant for me, since I missed the broadcast and had to stream it at a coffee shop. Hear that noise that sounds suspiciously like a cappuccino machine? That's Ernie succumbing to yuppie creep, $2.55 at a time.