Kudos to UVM: Offering Total Education To Low-Income Vermonters

Hurray for UVM, which happens to be an excellent set of schools.

It's not that UVM isn't feeling the financial stress. But it makes sense for them to want more Vermonters to stay within a state that loses so many of its young adults to other markets (a living wage up here can be damned hard to find).

More Benefit To Corrupt Bushie Friends Than Kids In "No Child Left Behind" Reading Program

Read all about the Justice Department probe of a $6 billion windfall to those providing "reading" materials under Bush's "No Child Left Behind (in a Public School) initiative. Too bad the head of the DoJ, U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales, cannot read or make a single decision not surely Bush-profitable and partisan.

Is Tennessee Looking To Reprise the Scopes "Monkey" Trial on Evolution?

Looks like in this piece from the Nashville Post. I do worry, however, that such a "stunt" could turn around and bite not just Tennessee but the U.S. which, under Bush, seems to have rolled the War on Science into the War on Terror:

Somewhere in heaven, John T. Scopes is watching the Tennessee Senate. Either that or he was reincarnated as a monkey and is too busy peeling bananas.

A Tennessee State Senate member has filed a resolution asking the Tennessee Department of Education to address a few basic questions about life, the universe and all that:

* "Is the universe and all that is within it, including human beings, created through purposeful, intelligent design by a Supreme Being, that is a Creator?"
* "Since the universe, including human beings, is created by a supreme being (a creator), why is creationism not taught in Tennessee public schools?
* "Since it cannot be determined whether the universe, including human beings, is created by a supreme being (a creator), why is creationism not taught as an alternative concept, explanation, or theory, along with the theory of evolution in Tennessee public schools?"

State Sen. Raymond Finney (R-Maryville), a retired physician, is asking the Senate to endorse his questions to the Department of Education, and for the department to come back with a response by January 15, 2008.

The evolution of this argument has deep Tennessee roots, going back to the famous "Monkey Trial" in 1925.

In 1925, business leaders in the Rhea County town of Dayton decided to test the Butler Act which stated, "... that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normals and all other public schools of the state which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the state, to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."

Dayton's city leaders felt that by challenging the act they would put the town on the map and it would be good for commerce, no matter what the verdict was. They convinced Rhea County football coach and substitute teacher John T. Scopes to teach a class on evolution in order to bring about a jury trial.

In short order, legendary barristers William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow descended on the town to argue the law and the case.

Is anyone besides me getting VERY tired of having to explain why that which has some real physical proof should get higher billing than that which cannot be seen?