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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0801yestopre-K-ON.html
State-funded pre-K programs recognize importance of good start
Gannett News Service
Aug. 1, 2005 04:30 PM
The states-led universal pre-kindergarten movement appears to be gaining steam.
Some states are moving toward using tax dollars to pay for pre-kindergarten education for all 3- and 4-year-olds, with an eye to making children better learners and future citizens.
Research from as far back as 1960s demonstrates 3- and 4-year-olds who receive high-quality education before entering kindergarten do better in higher grades and are more likely to finish school and stay out of prison, says Sherry Cleary of the University of Pittsburgh.
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There is an immediate political consideration, researchers say.
Passed in 2002, the No Child Left Behind law has spurred states to consider offering universal pre-K because of increased testing and accountability.
Some governors propose setting aside more money in the coming year to allow many, if not all, 3- and 4-year-old children to attend pre-kindergarten programs.
More than two-thirds of states spent more than $2.5 billion on early childhood programs to build on the federal Head Start program's efforts to prepare low-income kids for school. Preparing younger children academically helps them do better throughout their school years, educators say.
States increasingly realize that children who get an early start will be better equipped to pass the third-grade tests, says Susan Catapano of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
"The movement for public preschool programs was there before No Child Left Behind. But No Child Left Behind and accountability at grade three has definitely been given a boost," she says.
Meanwhile, the nation's 9-year-olds are better at reading and math now than 9-year-olds in 1971, according to a long-term assessment released July 14 by the Education Department. Experts say the results show that elementary schools across the country are doing a good job.
The best pre-K programs allow children to be creative, provide props like dolls and books they can play with, and employ teachers skilled in helping students learn new words and math and science concepts through play, not lectures, experts say.
Private pre-K programs can cost from $3,000 a year to $18,000 or more, says Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.
State-funded universal pre-K, under which parents who choose to participate pay little to nothing, seeks to provide that high-quality learning to all children.
Georgia was the first state to fund universal pre-K in 1995. The state used lottery revenue to cover all 4-year-old children, according the early education institute.
Oklahoma began its universal pre-K program three years later. West Virginia, Kentucky, New Jersey and New York fund pre-K for most residents based on family income, although increased funding has been a challenge as states face higher Medicaid expenditures.
Florida begins its universal pre-K program in August and Massachusetts will have its initiative in place by 2012, according to the institute's report, which is considered the most comprehensive survey of the universal pre-K movement.
Other states have more limited pre-K programs, with the exception of 11 that offer no funding.
About 740,000 children were in state pre-K programs in the 2002-03 school year, the period the report covered. That was an increase of 45,000 from the previous year, proving that universal pre-K is popular among parents.
The governors of Iowa, Hawaii, Louisiana, New Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia - states that lack universal pre-K - received high praise from the Pre-K Now advocacy group for proposing to increase pre-K expenditures in the 2006 fiscal year.
More than half of states also have developed teaching and learning standards, according to Victoria Carr of the University of Cincinnati.
The standards vary, but generally spell out things like what and how students must be taught and the qualifications pre-K teachers and their aides must have.
California, the most populous state, is now writing its standards.
Such standards, which would give educators a master list to assess how well pre-K centers are performing, should not culminate in formal testing, says Alan Simpson, communications director for the National Association for the Education of Young People.
"Our greatest concern is about what we consider high-stakes testing - for instance, a decision being made that a child isn't ready for kindergarten," he says. "Children have vastly different levels of skills and abilities. That's natural. Most of those differences will even out as kids get older, but an assessment that says some kids should be held back can be ... very dangerous and unproductive."
Some kindergarten programs already require such entry tests, experts say, adding that 3- and 4-year-olds must develop emotional stability and learn math and science through creative games and exploration, not through rote learning.
"Direct teaching - flashcards, worksheets, etc. - has no place in preschool," Carr said in an e-mail interview.
On the Web:
http://nieer.org, National Institute for Early Education Research.
www.preknow.org, PreK-Now.
www.ed.gov/parents/earlychild/ready/preschool, U.S. Department of Education
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http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/lake/orl-lklprek05080505aug05,0,1163640.story?coll=orl-news-headlines-lake
Push for pre-K inspires new college degrees
By Stephanie Erickson | Special to the Sentinel
Posted August 5, 2005
LEESBURG -- Responding to demand for pre-kindergarten teachers, child-care providers and other early-childhood workers, Lake-Sumter Community College is offering two new degrees to help students striving for such careers.
Students at Lake-Sumter can choose from either an associate in science or associate in applied science degree, with one of two specializations: child-development-center management or preschool.
Students who begin the program this fall semester will be the first graduating classes of the two programs. Open enrollment began this week. Classes begin Aug. 23.
Students who plan to earn a bachelor's degree and ultimately teach in a public-school classroom can begin by enrolling for an associate in arts degree with an emphasis in early-childhood education before transferring to a four-year college.
But many students want to take a different route.
Students who want to earn an associate's degree, for example, but not work in the classroom -- perhaps work instead for a school-readiness program such as Head Start -- can choose from one of the two new degrees.
Because the degrees are not set up to transfer into a bachelor's program, there are fewer general-education requirements, with classes more specific to early-childhood issues.
The main difference between the associate in applied science and associate in science degree is the math requirement.
The applied-science degree is well suited for students averse to math.
"You'd be amazed at how many people come in and have a math phobia," said Diane Edwards, who heads the new early-childhood development degree programs.
Many child-care workers hold child-development associate credentials. Lake-Sumter officials said up to nine of those credits may be transferred into either of the new early-childhood degrees.
The degree courses integrate activities supporting language and reasoning skills for children from birth through age 8, including those with disabilities and limited-English proficiency. They are also designed to meet state mandates for the No Child Left Behind, Head Start and voluntary preschool programs.
Lake-Sumter's new early-childhood program, Edwards said, was a result of requests from the Early Learning Coalition of Lake County and local child-care providers combined with legislative requirements -- Florida's new pre-kindergarten program.
A constitutional amendment passed by Florida voters in November 2002 required a voluntary pre-kindergarten program for all 4-year-old children by fall 2005.
"Demand for the program is what drove its creation," Edwards said.
Copyright © 2005, Orlando Sentinel | Get home delivery - up to 50% off
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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/editorial/sfl-editdlpre-kaug04,0,4306253.story?coll=sfla-news-editorial
Pre-K Program
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Editorial Board
August 4, 2005
ISSUE: Upset parents take pre-K frustrations out on public school officials.
Don't blame South Florida's school districts for the problems surrounding the state's pre-kindergarten program. They didn't create this early education service that can't be used by most public schools.
The ire should be directed at state lawmakers who crafted this shell of an educational reform and foisted it upon an unsuspecting public. Currently, the new pre-K program seems more effective in frustrating parents than helping to educate 4-year-olds.
Most pre-K services are run out of private day-care centers or churches. Many parents, however, would prefer their children attend neighborhood public schools.
But, many school boards, including Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, can't offer pre-K because their districts don't meet the state's class-size reduction requirements. Broward County meets the class-size requirements, but has a problem with money. There simply isn't enough state funding for pre-K for school districts to pay for teachers and supplies to operate a quality early education program.
State officials estimate that the pre-K program would allow providers to charge between $2,000 and $3,000 per child, a far cry from the money most educators believe is needed to operate a quality early education program. The issue of funding has cast a cloud over pre-K, and the Legislature must address it if the initiative is to become successful in Florida.
In 2002, voters passed a constitutional amendment that would establish a "high quality," free, universal pre-kindergarten program. The idea was to create a tool that would help pre-schoolers prepare for the rigors of a challenging academic experience from kindergarten through the 12th grade.
Unfortunately, the voters are still waiting.
BOTTOM LINE: The blame lies with state lawmakers and the governor who foisted a sham of an early education program on the public.
Copyright © 2005, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
That's from Hoax-Slayer.com. It's amazing what people will put in themselves for a quick buzz, but what's even more amazing is often the side-effects that these people, nor the medical professionals that treat them, would ever think of. <p><div style="text-align:center"></div></p>Quote:
It's not just compressed air. It also contains a propellant. I think it's R2. It's a refrigerant like what is used in your refrigerator. It is a heavy gas; heavier than air. When you inhale it, it fills your lungs and keeps the good air, with oxygen, out. That's why you feel dizzy, buzzed. It decreases the oxygen to your brain, to your heart. Kyle was right. It can't hurt you. IT KILLS YOU. The horrible part about this is there is no warning. There is no level that kills you. It's not cumulative or an overdose; it can just go randomly, terribly wrong. Roll the dice and if your number comes up you die. IT'S NOT AN OVERDOSE. It's Russian roulette. You don't die later. Or not feel good and say I've had too much. You usually die as your breathing it in. If not you die within 2 seconds of finishing "the hit."
<p>http://www.canada.com/edmonton/edmontonjournal/news/local_story.html?id=826a61e5-b53a-47c5-9f2f-39d0d3fbcdf0
Man sentenced in cartoon child porn case
Edmonton Journal
October 19, 2005
A 26-year-old Edmonton man has been spared jail time in what is believed to be the first case of cartoon child pornography in Canada.
Gordon Chin pleaded guilty in provincial court today to importing thousands of pages of a Japanese cartoon called Anime featuring characters that look like Pokemon and Astro Boy engaging in explicit sex acts. He purchased the cartoon over the Internet. Police seized 15 comic books in Vancouver destined for his Edmonton address. They also seized 63 more books at his Edmonton home and four binders of the cartoon printed off the Internet.
Some of the scenes reviewed in court featured adult cartoon characters having sex with tied up children, some in diapers. Other scenes portrayed adults using weapons while raping babies.
“Why would anyone want to look at stuff like this?†asked an angry Judge David Tilley. “I don’t think this is the kind of filth that should be available to the public.â€
But he agreed to spare Chin any jail time because production of the cartoons didn’t involve the actual exploitation of real children. He handed Chin an 18-month conditional sentence, to be served in the community. Chin will also have to do 100 hours of community service.
Anime is illegal in Canada but not illegal in Japan and the United States. Defence lawyer D’arcy Depoe said Chin didn’t know the cartoon was illegal here.
© Edmonton Journal 2005
<p>http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/pas/PR_PAS.html
The Leadership Council
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Child Abuse Experts Applaud Legal Community for Rejecting Parental Alienation Syndrome
July 12, 2006
Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
People who care about abused children finally have something to celebrate. Two recent high profile legal publications have rejected “Parental Alienation Syndrome†(PAS), a controversial label often used to discredit allegations of child abuse or domestic violence in family courts. According to PAS theory, children's disclosures of abuse by one parent are reinterpreted as evidence of “brainwashing†by the other parent. The solution proposed by PAS theory is to immediately award custody to the alleged child abuser.
The newly revised, 2006 edition of "Navigating Custody and Visitation Evaluations in Cases with Domestic Violence: A Judge's Guide,†published by The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, includes a strong statement condemning the use of PAS which it calls a “discredited†syndrome that favors child abusers in custody determinations. [see excerpt]
At the same time the Spring 2006 issue of the American Bar Association's Children's Legal Rights Journal provides a comprehensive analysis of all legal case involving allegations of PAS. This definitive review concludes that science, law, and policy all oppose the admissibility of PAS in the courtroom. [Download PDF of article].
“PAS is junk science at its worst,†says Dr. Paul Fink, President of the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence, and a former President of the American Psychiatric Association [see bio]. Dr. Fink explains, “Science tells us that the most likely reason that a child becomes estranged from a parent is that parent's own behavior. Labels, such as PAS, serve to deflect attention away from those behaviors.â€
Judge Sol Gothard is glad to see that the legal community has joined other professionals in recognizing the harm that PAS can cause. Recently retired from Louisiana's 5th Circuit Court of Appeal, Judge Gothard has been involved in over 2000 cases of allegations of child sexual abuse. He states, “PAS has caused emotional harm, physical harm and in some cases, even death to children.†[read about Nathan's death; see also Jana Bommersbach. Parental Alienation. Phoenix Magazine, May 2006]
Joyanna Silberg, PhD, a Clinical Psychologist and Executive Vice President of the Council [see bio], has also seen first hand the long-term emotional damage this so-called syndrome has caused. “How do you explain to young children forced to live with abusers why the courts have considered them liars and ignored their cries for help?†Silberg has found that it can take years for these children to get past their feelings of betrayal by the system that was supposed to protect them. [see article about Tiffany; more children's stories]
Dr. Silberg views PAS allegations as part of a larger strategy in which abusive parents try to fool the courts, attorneys, child custody evaluators, and mental health professionals into believing that their children and ex-spouses are crazy when they raise concerns about safety. She notes the recent case of Darren Mack, accused of shooting his custody judge and stabbing his wife to death. Mack successfully convinced a custody evaluator that he was a loving parent with no violent tendencies, notes Silberg.
Stephanie Dallam, MS, a researcher with the Leadership Council, has spent the last 10 years researching PAS [see bio]. She traces the syndrome to a controversial psychiatrist, Richard Gardner, who described sex between fathers and their offspring as normal and natural. In his voluminous self-published writings, Gardner blamed abused children's suffering on our society's “overreaction†to sexual abuse, notes Dallam. [more on Gardner's views on pedophilia]
Dr. Paul Fink concludes, "Children suffer when law embraces a 'syndrome' just because a so-called 'expert' coined a snappy phrase. Increasingly, courts are seeing through the PAS charade and refusing to allow the courtroom to be used as theater for the promotion of junk science."
The Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence is composed of national leaders in psychology, psychiatry, medicine, law, and public policy who are committed to the ethical application of psychological science and countering its misuse by special interest groups. Members of the Council are dedicated to the health, safety and well-being of children and other vulnerable populations. More information can be found at: www.leadershipcouncil.org
More about Abuse and Custody issues
The Leadership Council © 2005
<p>Mystery of explosive star solved
By Ker Than
SPACE.comexternal link
(SPACE.com) -- In February, a faint star a few thousand light-years away flared suddenly, beaming so brightly that for a few days it was visible to the naked eye.
The star is a stellar corpse the size of Earth, known as a white dwarf, and it is paired in a binary system with a red giant, a dying, bloated star that once resembled our sun. The red giant has been dumping gas onto the surface of the white dwarf, and every few years, enough matter accumulates to set off a giant thermonuclear explosion.
It was one of these explosions, called a "nova," that astronomers and stargazers detected earlier this year.
The two-star system, called RS Ophiuchi, is known as a recurrent nova because five similar eruptions have been detected before. The first observation occurred in 1898; the last eruption prior to this latest one happened in 1985.
The new observations, made using advanced radio and X-ray telescopes not available during the last outburst, reveal the explosion to be more complex than was previously assumed.
Standard computer models had predicted a spherical explosion with matter ejected in all directions equally. The latest observations instead showed that the explosion evolved into two lobes, confirming suspicions that the nova outburst produces twin jets of stellar material that spews out from the white dwarf in opposite directions.
"The radio images represent the first time we've ever seen the birth of a jet in a white dwarf system. We literally see the jet 'turn on,'" said Michael Rupen, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory who studied RS Ophiuchi using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA).
As impressive as the nova are, they might just be precursors for a more violent supernova explosion that will occur in the future, scientists say.
The white dwarf's thermonuclear blasts are similar to those that occur on the surface of the sun, but they can be over 100,000 times more powerful. During each outburst, an amount of gas equal to the mass of the Earth is flung into space.
Some of this ejected matter slams into the extended atmosphere of the inflated red giant, creating blast waves that accelerate electrons to nearly the speed of light. As the electrons travel through the stars' magnetic fields, they emit radio waves that can be detected by telescopes on Earth.
The blast waves move at over four million miles (about 6.4 million kilometers) per hour. For a few weeks during each outburst, the white dwarf becomes a red giant.
"After the [thermonuclear explosion], the white dwarf will puff up into a red giant for a few weeks as the hydrogen that has been blasted into space fuses into helium," explains Richard Barry of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
All eyes on Ophiuchi
Japanese astronomers first detected signs of RS Ophiuchi's latest nova on the night of February 12. Follow-up observations by radio telescopes revealed an expanding blast wave whose diameter was already the size of Saturn's orbit around the Sun.
In the weeks following, several radio and X-ray telescopes around the world tracked RS Ophiuchi closely, including the MERLIN array in the UK, the European EVN array, the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and Very Large Array (VLA) in the United States, and NASA's Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellites.
Findings from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and the VLBA/EVN observations are detailed in two separate studies published in the July 20 issue of the journal Nature.
The red giant and white dwarf stars making up RS Ophiuchi are separated by about 1.5 astronomical units, or one and a half times the distance the Earth is from the sun. The binary star system is located in the constellation Ophiuchus, about 5,000 light-years away -- very close by astronomical standards.
"We have a ringside seat for this very important event," Barry told SPACE.com. Barry is a co-author on another study on RS Ophiuchi that will appear in an upcoming edition of Astrophysical Journal.
Supernova precursor?
When the outburst is over, gas will once again build up on the white dwarf and the explosions will begin anew, perhaps in some 20 years time. It's unknown whether the white dwarf casts off all of its accumulated matter during each eruption, or whether some of the material is being hoarded and slowly increasing the mass of the dead star.
"If the white dwarf is increasing in mass then it will eventually be ripped apart in a titanic supernova explosion and the cycle of outbursts will come to an end," said Tim O'Brien of the University of Manchester, a co-author on one of the Nature studies.
White dwarfs must attain a critical 1.4 solar masses before they can explode in what scientists call a Type 1a supernova. The white dwarf in RS Ophiuchi is near this critical limit now, but it will still probably need hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate the final bit of mass, scientists say.
Because all Type 1a supernovas emit the same amount of light at their peak, they serve as important "standard candles" which astronomers use to calculate cosmic distances.
"Our understanding of these objects is exceedingly important as any miscalculation or uncertainty in the total light of output of supernovae could have a dramatic effect on our calculations of the scale and size of the entire universe," Barry said.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/07/20/explosive.star/index.html
Bush would do well to remind some members of his conservative base of this message.America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. … And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.
GROSS: Don’t discriminate based upon race, creed, color, country of national origin.
GALLAGHER: Let’s have a Muslim-only line.
GROSS: What uniform you are wearing. What we want to do is look at behavior. We want to stop people who behave wrongly.
JERRICK: Michael, I think you missed a Mike Gallagher line there. What did you just say about different lines?
GALLAGHER: It’s time to have a Muslims check-point line in American airports and have Muslims be scrutinized. You better believe it. It’s time.
GROSS: Of course, your prejudice, which means to prejudge when you say Muslims or any people of any faith should be treated unequally because of their faith. You are absolutely wrong. Most Arabs are not Muslims. Most Muslims are not Arabs. You don’t have your facts straight. And Mr. Gallagher, how would you feel if we had a line for the Irish which English people were doing during the I.R.A. problems.
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