So are charter schools more diverse or not? Reducing cow methane emissions via vaccine. I don't think Hank done it this way.
So are charter schools more diverse or not?
The op ed linked first below brought up some interesting questions for me.
Before that discussion, let me preface the below with a quick bio. I am a teacher, have been for a long time now.
I started my teaching career a thousand years ago working at a private, Jesuit high school named Arrupe Jesuit in Denver. The school was specifically set up to educate students/families who wanted a Catholic, college-prep education, but who lacked the resources to be able to pay for one. I forget the exact percentages, but I can say that the school was (by a long chalk) a majority of students who were minority (mostly Hispanic and first-generation from Spanish speaking countries) and who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch.
I mention this because it colors my view of school choice, charter schools, and diversity.
Returning to the op ed, I'll leave it to you to read the whole thing, but the author's main theme here is that Charter/Independent schools are more diverse now than in the past and certainly more than the current favorite narrative among some in public education and the media has it.
For balance, and for a glimpse at the opposing side (or alternatively, a look at how the narrative of charter schools not being diverse shows up in media), I offer you the second link below. It is an older Chalkbeat article from 2016.
Quick note: due to its age, I'm not willing to say that this is a narrative pushed by Chalkbeat presently, nor that the statements/data they have in this article still hold today. I offer it mainly as an example of the other side and representative of many of the arguments you see used even to this day.
What is my take on this issue? My perspective on this issue is mixed. First I don't think that a system that has school choice will ever be fully mixed. Second, when we focus on mixing, I think we are missing the point. Success in schools should not be measured by simply counting up the numbers of various races.
Charter schools, just like the private school I used to teach at, are almost by their very design NOT examples of diversity. My school specifically excluded wide swaths of the population because they had an income cap. That is, you could have made too much money to attend the school I taught at. A pretty good limit on diversity right there.
The school was also not anywhere near racially mixed. This, I can assure you, was not at all the policy of the school. It was just the way things were. I am not going to try to speculate as to the reason. People choose one thing over another for their own reasons. But again, the point is that we shouldn't expect randomness or even mixing here. People having a choice of where to go to school is the polar opposite of defaulting to the one nearest their home.
I look at it this way too: people are individuals and they learn differently. Maybe it's too simple an analogy (and a reflection of liking plants), but I look at my students like plants sometimes. There are some that like cool, some that like blistering hot, some that can do fine with either. Some students learn better in mixed environments, some learn better among those that look like them (socially, racially, economically).
Unlike, plants, however, I don't think we should be working so hard to try and "type" students like plants and decide for them the kind of environment we think is best. Let they and their families make the decision!
I think the best strategy to adopt is to not pay attention to who goes where and how many of this race or that are in any particular school. Why spend time arguing and counterarguing the point? Diversity is not the sole metric by which we should define "good" in this world.
What we should focus on is making each and every school, charter/public/private, religious/secular, as good as it can possibly be and then let families and students pick where they want to go and where they think their best chance of success lies.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/12/03/opinion-colorado-charter-school-student-integration/
https://www.chalkbeat.org/colorado/2016/7/25/21098796/colorado-s-charter-schools-more-diverse-more-segregated/
Reducing cow methane emissions via vaccine.
Yes. You read that right. Cows by the nature of their digestion, produce methane. Methane, in terms of its ability to reflect back infrared radiation, is "stronger" as a greenhouse gas than is, say, CO2.
Whether or not they generate enough methane to be a huge concern, that (to me at least) is an open question.
Not for someone like Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, however. He's a believer enough to plunk down $9.4M on a grant to try and see if there's a way to reduce cow methane emissions, including doing it by vaccine, according to the Fence Post article linked below.
As a quick aside, can you imagine the strange bedfellows that emerging from the alliances around vaccines and climate change?
I'm not entirely clear on how a vaccine could do this. From the article it seems the strategy is to try and give the cows a vaccine to preferentially target the gut bacteria that produce methane. Given young enough, the hope would be to get the calves' immune systems to not allow the bacteria, etc. that make methane to establish themselves.
Whether or not this would work, would work long term, or would cause some other problem I'm not sure. My intuition tells me that you'd have to keep giving boosters all the time unless you wanted the bacteria to sneak in and I wouldn't wonder if it would cause some other issue.
I see things like this, like the battery train I wrote about earlier, like the growing food under solar panels on urban rooftops that I also wrote about, as being all thematically related.
Related in the sense that we are investing hugely in these highly-speculative (one of the people in the article linked below call this effort a "moon shot") solutions to a problem we don't yet have. A problem that might not be the problem that justifies this kind of effort.
We dump all these resources into things seemingly meant to comfort us that we can fix climate change by the application of gee-whiz technology while at the same time not suffering any loss in our standard of living. None at all.
All the while, people die in their millions because of CURRENTLY preventable disease. People burn dung and slash forests to stumps for wood fuel when we could be getting other, more modern (though carbon generating) energy to them.
A wasted effort if you ask me, scattering money around just like a fart in a whirlwind.
https://www.thefencepost.com/news/amazon-boss-funds-research-into-reducing-methane-in-cattle-via-vaccines/?fbclid=IwY2xjawG9Kw9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHScfE-yEqezsKuRuuvb1D6uKza6Eix2rQo-4Gdpuzg3uYsgd0hroJpiufg_aem_9Pr32hlLtHBBKCUuQUhDwQ
I don't think Hank done it this way.
That time of the week again. Last post on a Friday and thus time for something for fun, something not related to politics.
I am not sure if you're familiar with it, but there is a subgenre of Country music called "Outlaw Country". Outside of occasionally picking it as what I want to listen to when I'm listening to radio online, I don't know much, so I put a link to the Wikipedia page on the topic first below in case you (like me) were wanting some context.
When I think of the songs I hear listening to Outlaw Country, for some reason I keep thinking about the freedom of trucking in the 70s and 80s: big cabovers, thumbing your nose at the man, living the way you want, and not filling in your logbook or stopping at ports (though one hopes that the safety checks prior to driving continued).
Mentally, it's also wrapped up in things like the movies "Every Which Way But Loose" and "Smokey and the Bandit". Probably the two are related based on when I grew up and what was on TV at the time.
At any rate, I thought I'd share an Outlaw Country artist and one of my favorite songs by him with you today. The song is "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way" and the artist is Waylon Jennings. A YouTube video is linked second below.
Give it a listen and branch out from there if you like it.
That's it for today. Have a good rest of the Friday and see you back at it Sunday!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlaw_country#:~:text=According%20to%20Michael%20Streissguth%2C%20author%20of%20Outlaw:,reflected%20in%20the%20music%20of%20the%20time.