Don't Back Down

I'm not talking about the free, kookily fun software here. I'm talking about the math that is used by the government to measure our schools. Let's start with the basics. The government recently passed the No Child Left Behind Act to try and make sure our schools do a better job of educating our children. Nevermind that the people who are in positions to make such acts went through schools without the benefit of such a thing, and in general they've turned out okay.

Let's assume for a moment that this is a good idea. The results of this year's testing for North Carolina show that just over 70 percent of the schools in the state met the standard. Yet nearly 80 percent of the districts failed. Huh? The difference between the individual schools and the districts that they make up are due to some simply bizarre calculations that could only come from the government.

Let's assume that this is okay and take an even deeper look. Apparently a change in the law allowed those schools who were pretty close to the target to apply a margin of error and pretend that they made it. Why in the world do they even create a benchmark if you let people miss it? Didn't pass, Timmy? You were really close - we'll let you move to the next grade anyway. If this was a percent or two, I'd say it's not a big deal. But if you remove this requirement, the schools that passed drop to just 56 percent, meaning that nearly 15 percent of schools (and just over 21% of those that passed) did so because they came really close to their goals, even though they didn't achieve them.

And this is making things better? What exactly does it teach those children that in order to increase your performance, you need to make up new methods of calculating that performance?

They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

Nice. Oh, I'm sure he meant to say something about how they are always vigilant in order to make sure they've thought of everything so that they can defend against the same - but I find it refreshing when the government can be so open and forthright. It's downright refreshing that we have a president like Dubya, who doesn't try and hide his true thoughts from us.

During the process of checking things out recently, I noticed that Shockwave Flash movies had stopped displaying in Firefox at some point. I think it was the loading of 0.9.

So I went through the ritual of uninstalling and reinstalling, but it didn't really help. Then I started looking at Flashblock again. Looking through some posts here and there, it seemed that while Flashblock may work with the newer versions, it did seem to have some install problems. So I installed it to see what happened.

Flashblock no longer shows up in the extension list (it hadn't for a while anyway), but it does seem to work as expected. And more importantly, my movies are back. But only when I want them. Sweet.