Right Wing Nation

Hat tip to Tim Blair for yet another example of moonbats showing their ignorance:

JAMESTOWN - Holding “Shame on Jamestown” signs and surrounded by police in riot gear, more than 30 members of the New Black Panther Party gathered outside Historic Jamestowne on Saturday to protest violence and slavery in America’s first English settlement.

Members of the Panthers pumped their fist to shouts of “Black power!” and “Death to white supremacy!”

Problem 1: If you follow the link and look at the poster the “activsts” are holding, you’ll notice that it’s a photograph. Jamestown was settled in 1607, more than two hundred years before photographs.

Problem 2: There were no slaves at the Jamestown Settlement. Look up Captain John Smith.

Had these idiots been in school instead of running around in gangs, selling crack, and participating in drive-by shootings for fun, they might have learned something. But it does get better, because of course, there were guilty little rich kid liberals there:

“It’s a point well-taken,” said Robin List, a 28-year-old social worker from Denver, who watched through a bus window.

During her entire trip to Jamestown, List saw not a mention of slavery in the early colony. More exhibits should be dedicated to the issue, she said, “especially if you’re celebrating the anniversary of a country built on the backs of other people.”

Because there weren’t any, you idiot. But better yet:

Grant Jenkins, who watched the entire protest, said he had mixed feelings about it. Some of their concerns were legitimate, he said, such as their protest of violence in the colony. But he found it disturbing when one speaker called King James I a derisive term for a homosexual.

“It bothers me she would use sexuality as a way to insult somebody,” said Jenkins, 38, who teaches English at the University of Tulsa.

Forget their ignorance. Forget the sheer hutzpah of a self-defined violent group protesting violence. Black power, Death to America, this doesn’t bother him, but slurring James I does. What a frigging moron.

Overall, he said, free speech is “what America is about.”

“It’s healthy,” he said.

The freedom to make a drooling idiot of yourself. Yes, that’s extremely healthy.

The Manhattan Institute published a study, "The Effect of Residential School Choice on Public High School Graduation Rates." It’s an interesting study, although the authors make several dubious claims, such as:

Decreasing the size of school districts could improve educational outputs, including graduation rates, because it would increase the choice that parents have in the school system that educates their child. By making it easier to relocate from one school system’s jurisdiction to the next, smaller school districts make it possible for a larger number of families to exercise choice among different school districts. The more families are able to move from district to district, the less students can be taken for granted by schools, which, for a variety of reasons, don’t want to lose enrollment. This study provides empirical evidence that increasing the choice parents have in their child’s school district contributes to higher public high school graduation rates.

There are several problems with this general assertion. First, there are people moving into an area, and people who already reside in the area. While the former may, with relative ease, be able to buy a home in the school district of their choice (and many do), it’s a significantly greater burden (economically and psychologically) for the latter to sell their home and, say, move ten miles down the road to the next district. New residents, then, get more choice than current residents. Second, from this point on in the study, the authors use school district geographical size as a proxy variable for school choice, even though the two are very different variables.

I spent several hours trying to find data on school district size and graduation rates, first at NCES, then at several state education websites (one of these days, I’m going to rant and rave about the idiotic way data are organized and made available, by both the federal government and the states). I finally went where I should have gone in the first place, to the Indiana Department of Education site, because data are comparatively easy to retrieve and search. There was no way to retrieve both graduation rates and school district sizes in the same table, so I had to put two together and use a lookup function to pull the data together (there were a number of school districts that appeared in one but not the other; these data are only school districts that reported both geographical size and graduation rates). The Indiana data also code school districts by "demographic type," that is, rural, town, suburban, and metro (1-4).

First, here is a histogram of the district sizes, mean graduation rates, and number of districts for the Indiana data (the smallest school district in Indiana is 2 square miles, the largest is 457 square miles, and the mean is 122 square miles):

The graduation rates of the largest cohort (school districts that are 250 square miles or greater) and the smallest (smaller than 50 square miles) differ by only 1.7%. This does not seem to support the authors’ assertion that there is a statistically significant negative correlation between school district size and graduation rate, but these are aggregated data. First, I ran a Spearman correlation on the school district size ranks (see above) and the graduation rate (Spearman, and not Pearson, because one of the variables is a rank).

There is a negative correlation, but only a very weak one, far smaller than the authors reported. The next step was to run a Pearson correlation on school district size in square miles and graduation rate on all the Indiana school districts, instead of the data aggregated by district size rank:

And again, although there is a negative correlation, it is negligibly small. If there is a significant correlation between school district size and graduation rates, as the authors claim, it should show up in the Indiana school districts represented here, yet it is not. One reason for this may be that the authors analyzed data over several years and looked specifically at changes in school district sizes over time, and these are data from one year (2002-2003). That’s only a partial explanation. If, as the authors claim, decreasing school district size will positively affect graduation rates, we should see higher graduation rates in smaller districts, and at least in Indiana, we do not.

The Indiana data also ranked school districts as metro, suburban, town,, and rural (1-4) based on population density (Bloomington North is ranked as metro, whereas my high school is ranked as rural). Comparing the graduation rates of these four types yields interesting results:

From these aggregated data, we see differences in graduation rates between the groups. Metro school districts have the lowest mean graduation rate, followed by town, but rural and suburban schools have the highest graduation rates. It doesn’t look like we have a significant correlation between population density and graduation rate, but to check, I ran a Spearman correlation on school district type and graduation rate:

This correlation is stronger than either of the geographical size correlations, but it’s still a weak correlation. From these data, it appears that something is going on between graduation rate and population density somehow, but from the low rs, it looks like some variable embedded in district type is affecting graduation rate. It could have something to do with culture, or crime rate, or any number of variables that factor into population density. But from these Indiana data, I cannot verify the authors’ claim.

July 1, 2005, a cool clear Friday morning. That was the day the movers came (to move us out of that wonderful great big ranch in the country in Monroe County–a house I will always miss) and Dolly and I got in the Explorer, loaded so tightly I could barely see behind me in the rear view mirror, and left Monroe County at 7 am. I had only been out here once, and just past the Pittsburgh exit we had taken some godawful two-lane all the way here, full of traffic, and impossible to make good time on. It may have been fewer miles, but I was going to take the Pennsylvania Turnpike to I-99. Trust me. After you’ve driven all the way across Ohio, you really, really, really want to get here as soon as possible.

We stopped at nearly every available opportunity, not just because I needed to pee (and half the time, I didn’t), but because I had a puppy with me. There was much sniffing and excitement along the way. Traffic was awful from Bloomington to Indianapolis (rush hour), and even worse on 465 (Indianapolis rush hour), but once I was on I-70 and past the business district, the traffic was thin.

There was very little traffic in Ohio, which is a good thing, because even though it’s one of the most boring, soporific drives imaginable, if the State Troopers aren’t out (and I didn’t see even one), you can make really good time. I-70 is wide and straight and level, until you get to the eastern part of the state. That’s when you start to climb into the Appalachian foothills, just before you get to Zanesville, and Ohio is no longer boring.

Wheeling, then the Pennsylvania Visitor’s Center in Claysville. We stopped there (it’s a good thing, too, because it’s the last one for a good two hours) and Dolly stretched her legs, hopped around, and did a great deal of sniffing. There still wasn’t much traffic, though I’d never driven the road, and I’d forgotten the map, so when we got to Pennsylvania, I slowed down because I had only a vague idea of how far I was from here.

You have to exit I-70 to get onto the Turnpike. I didn’t miss that exit, but as soon as you exit, you have to take another exit (depending on whether you’re going west to Pittsburgh, or east to Philadelphia), and the exit is ass-backwards (you exit to the LEFT to go east). I almost ended up going to Pittsburgh, and would have, had there been anybody else on the road, but I switched lanes and got on the Turnpike.

The Turnpike was almost spooky. The whole time I was on it, I saw fewer than ten cars. Of course, that’s when I found out what the Pennsylvania Turnpike is like–forget making good time, even if it is empty. That’s also when I found out you go for miles between exits, and how few rest areas there are in this state (much like Indiana). Since I’d forgotten the map and didn’t really know how far it was to the exit, and since it was so far between exits, it seemed like the longest part of the trip, but I finally got to the I-99 exit at Bedford–and chuckled, because the first sizable town south of Bloomington is Bedford (Indiana).

It’s astounding how many place names the two states share. Dubois (pronounced the same way, doo-boiz). Bedford. Palmyra. Paoli. Oh. I’m off on a tangent. Sorry. I-99.

I might have gotten lost as soon as I got off the Turnpike had the “Altoona” signs not been there. Left, another left, then exit onto I-99. It’s a little rough when you first get on it, but it smooths out, and once you climb into the mountains, all I can say is wow. I-99 is one, great big, picture postcard, following the mountain ridge, with the adjacent ridge on your immediate left as you drive northeast, and the valley beneath. I knew I was about two hours from here when I got on I-99.

Thank God I was driving an Explorer. Maybe the best thing is how comfortable the seats are. My butt never got tired, and it was probably about 4 pm when I got to I-99 (yeah, yeah, I know, but I’d never driven out here before, and wasn’t quite sure where I was). But when I got to where I-99 abruply ends in Tyrone, I knew where I was.

Almost here, in Centre County. One thing I find strange is that the first sign you see that mentions Penn State isn’t until you get to Centre County. You’d think there would be Penn State signs on the Turnpike, or even on I-99, but there aren’t. I climbed Skytop, and in less than five minutes, parked in the driveway to let Dolly pee (the last time we’d stopped was at the truck plaza on the Turnpike). I pulled into the garage and parked, then entered the empty house. I was just glad to be here. Dolly, however, was a ball of curious energy, and wanted to play as soon as we got into the garage (click on the pictures to see the larger ones).

As soon as I unlocked the garage door and went into the house, there had to be much bounding and running and other doggy behaviors–particularly when she discovered the stairs:

Then, of course, much sniffing about:

The last thing I wanted to do was drive, but it was an empty house, and I nothing to sleep on, and we were both hungry. So I put food down for Dolly, and went to (ta-da!) Wal-Mart to get an inflatable bed. By the time I’d turned around, she’d finished one side and was ready for the other:

By the time I’d inflated the bed and tossed the pillows and sheets on it, Dolly decided it was just for her:

I did manage to scoot her over far enough that I could sleep on the bed.