Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/484312
GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@red bluffdailynews.com Phone: 530-527- 2151ext. 112 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS By Jason Stanford A6thgraderinEastTexas recently challenged state law- makers to do what she and ev- ery other public-school kid have to do during testing sea- son: "Sit in a room for up to four hours, without talking, writing, drawing, reading, or using your cell phone." Because millions of children are taking Common Core stan- dardized tests this time of year, I did her one better. I took a 4th-grade English Language Arts practice test. The good news is I passed. The bad news is that the test is basically worthless, high- lighting the folly of using stan- dardized tests to measure a child's ability to read and write. And to the Texas 6th grader's point, in no way whatsoever was I able to quietly sit still for that long. Of course, it didn't take me four hours to complete the sample test. I don't want to brag, but I'm very advanced for a 4th grader. I took a sample test from the Smarter Balanced Assess- ment Consortium, one of two groups doing the Common Core testing. Twenty-one states belong to the SBAC, mostly on the west coast, the Black Hills, New England, and some of the Great Lakes area. Other states, such as Alabama, Alaska, Kan- sas, Pennsylvania, and Utah, have voted to pull out of SBAC mostly because their legisla- tures have political differences with President Obama, and not for any pedagogical reasons. Common Core—originally a state-driven guideline to make sure Americans got a good edu- cation—isn't a bad idea. Unfor- tunately, trying to measure the growth of a child's mind with a standardized test just corrupts the whole process. To get stu- dents ready to take an English Language Arts test, they don't do what you and I would rec- ognize as reading and writing. An education that prepares a kid to take a standardized test is a perversion of the idea of education. Completely absent from the sample test on English Lan- guage Arts was any litera- ture, AKA the art of the Eng- lish language. A nine-year-old in the English-speaking world is heir to a cultural fortune, including "James and the Gi- ant Peach" by Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Nar- nia," and "Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White, among many oth- ers. Sadly, this canon is not aimed at our children. Instead, a prepubescent test- taker will have to read antisep- tic "selections." In one passage that recalled Native American folk tales but was not described as such (depriving the student of any cultural appreciation of literature), a coyote dresses up like a bear to steal honey. It was so boring I had to make blinders of my hands to force myself to focus on the text. Then there were the ques- tions, some of which seemed confusing for a 9-year-old and some that puzzled a middle- aged columnist. One question asked which sentence out of a paragraph "best supports the inference that Coyote uses his imagination." A kid could get tripped up on the word "infer- ence," and it was irrelevant to the concept being tested. Ask- ing what "best shows Coyote uses his imagination" would have worked better. Then there were the ques- tions that made me want to strangle the committee that wrote this test. None of the possible answers for what "best describes the lesson Coyote learned" had any- thing to do with the real meaning of the parable, and a student is asked to decide whether a particular meta- phor about a "tree's belly" is humorous, playful, or sur- prising, even though humor is often playful and surpris- ing. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that people who write standardized tests do not fundamentally under- stand humor. The writing portion of the test was ludicrous. Stu- dents were given a business card-shaped rectangle in which to record their analy- sis. You could replace this en- tire test with a book report and come out ahead. Actu- ally, you could probably buy every child in America first editions and come out ahead. The price tag on SBAC tests in California alone is $1 bil- lion. We're so focused on mea- suring children that we've stopped developing them. These tests don't measure what we want our children to learn and are a waste of money. That Texas 6th grader has a point. I can't sit quietly. This test is failing our chil- dren. JasonStanfordisaregular contributor to the Austin American-Statesman, a Democratic consultant and a Truman National Security Project partner. You can email him at stanford@oppresearch. com and follow him on Twitter @JasStanford. Commentary Common Core tests are failures Cartoonist's take The writing portion of the test was ludicrous. Students were given a business card-shaped rectangle in which to record their analysis. You could replace this entire test with a book report and come out ahead. Sounding off A look at what readers are saying in comments on our website and on social media. So surround the casino with some fast food restaurants and a car wash. Nate Jaeger: On a story about the unemployment rate in Tehama County Starring as Peter Pan is Red Bluff and Cottonwood's own Mariah Skillman! Macy Skillman: On a preview of Peter Pan opening April 17at Redding's Cascade Theatre StateandNational Assemblyman James Gallagh- er: 150Amber Grove Drive, Ste. 154, Chico 95973, 530895- 4217, http://ad03.asmrc.org/ Senator Jim Nielsen: 2634 Forest Ave., Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530879-7424, senator. nielsen@senate.ca.gov Governor Jerry Brown: State Capital Building, Sacramento 95814, 916445-2841, fax 916 558-3160, governor@governor. ca.gov U.S. Representative Doug LaMalfa: 507Cannon House Office Building, Washington D.C. 20515, 202225-3076 U.S. Senator Dianne Fein- stein: One Post St., Ste. 2450, San Francisco 94104, 415393- 0707, fax 415393-0710 U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer: 1700Montgomery St., San Fran- cisco 94111, 510286-8537, fax 202224-0454 Your officials The Tea Party Patriots have scheduled another high-profile public servant: Tehama County Chief Administra- tor Bill Goodwin. Attendees will be able to hear an update on current county business and issues, as well as ask questions on topics of interest. The meet- ing is at 6 p.m. at the Westside Grange on Walnut Street west of Baker Road. The monthly pronouncements of employment/unemployment figures are invariably used by journalistic analysts to gauge Obama's economic progress. What is regarded as a "plow horse" economy — by Brian Wes- bury, First Trust chief economist — compares unfavorably to a "race horse" which would char- acterize Ronald Reagan's eco- nomic growth. Just to roughly summarize previously written points, America's economy un- der Reagan over-performed ex- pectations: 1) our GDP recovered the lost growth of the early '80s re- cessions within several years whereas Obama's economy has under performed and failed to fully recover lost GDP; 2) Employment under Reagan rebounded by objective stan- dards to robust and full employ- ment whereas Obama's 6-year recovery term has succeeded only in driving record numbers of workers and work-seekers out of the labor pool (lowest labor participation rate in 30 years) which provides an artificially re- duced 5.8% unemployment rate. Please closely follow and avoid "eye-glazing" over the fol- lowing information. It's not dif- ficult to use local data to illus- trate how numbers have been "massaged," shall we say, to pro- duce so-called "improvement" in employment statistics. From last Saturday's report (based on EDD data and press releases) by the Daily News' Andre Byik: "Te- hama County's jobless rate fell to 9 percent in February, break- ing a three-month streak of ris- ing unemployment rates. Fig- ures released Friday by the state Employment Development De- partment peg the county's un- employment rate down 0.4 per- cent from a revised 9.4 percent in January. "While overall civilian em- ployment in February was down 1.3 percent compared to January — 23,180 to February's 22,890 — the county's labor force also shrank. The civilian labor force in Tehama County was 25,150 in February, down from January's figure of 25,590." Also, the raw number of unemployed civilians was shown to have fallen from January to February by 150 peo- ple — 2,400 in January to 2,250 in February — which begs a few questions and observations. We are apparently supposed to nod and shrug shoulders over a locally disturbing narrative (that is replicated nationally). They tell us that the local "job- less rate dipped to 9 percent" (or, nationally, to 5.8%)—hooray! However, in February compared to January, there were 1) fewer people actually employed, and 2) fewer people considered to be in "the civilian labor force." The first is explained by "Hundred of farm jobs were lost accompa- nied by 'minimal gains' in fed- eral government jobs, financial activities and other services." Of the second point, one could ask, "How is the labor force de- termined to have declined?" Is there a numerical method that identifies each person no lon- ger part of the labor force? Or, is there a formula that estimates the number of people retiring compared to those turning 16 or 18, leaving high school or col- lege? Are reductions in the labor force actually a way of saying people by the droves just aren't looking for work anymore? I meant to ask someone how they calculate it but people at the EDD wouldn't take my ques- tions. They referred me to the EDD web site—I looked things up and have shocking results. First, we have previous monthly employment news re- ports. In the December 20 Daily News article, "Jobless rate rises to 8.6 percent," Mr. Byik con- veyed that month's report, which also had numbers to de- scribe jobs and jobless progress. "Progress" may be a misnomer because 1) a falling unemploy- ment rate should represent an improvement but 2) fewer peo- ple working clearly is not and 3) people leaving the work force because they are discouraged and no longer looking for a job is clearly not an improvement. That last point is, in fact, what is going on and driving the rate of unemployment down, locally and nationally. So, when you read that the unemployment rate was 8 per- cent in October, 8.6 in Novem- ber, then 8.8 in December, 9.4 in January and now 9 percent, it might seem on the surface to be improved from 10 to 12 percent. But is that the real story? Our national, state and county pop- ulation hasn't declined but has rather grown around 1 percent a year for quite some time. Mil- lions of young people start look- ing for work yearly. While the EDD can proclaim that our "la- bor force" has declined, from almost 26,000 in October to 25,150 in February (because, re- member, of able-bodied people no longer looking for work)—it defies logic. Here is what I discovered with the help of a calculator and almost 20 years worth of Te- hama County employment and population data (www.labor- marketinfo.edd.ca.gov): Our population increased about 18 percent over the period. Our "la- bor force," if it increased simi- larly — why wouldn't it — would be about 26,740 compared to EDD's 25,150. That means that EDD has effectively, gradu- ally, "erased" about 1,600 peo- ple from the ranks of those that ought to be counted as "unem- ployed"; if you add those to the official tally of 2,250 persons un- employed in February, that to- tal of about 3,800 unemployed people would give us — I hope you're sitting down — an unem- ployment rate more than 15 per- cent. The local observable econ- omy would seem to support just that conclusion. Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988. He can be reached by e-mail at donplsn@ yahoo.com. The way I see it Real unemployment is more than 15 percent Don Polson OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Tuesday, March 24, 2015 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A6