David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Republican Criteria for President

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Republican Criteria for President: Republicans Debate Republican candidate, Donald Trump bragged about his penis size during the debate on March 3, 2016. What have we come ...

Republican Criteria for President

Republicans Debate


Republican candidate, Donald Trump bragged about his penis size during the debate on March 3, 2016. What have we come to in American politics?

This is for any of you men thinking of running for President. It is short and sweet - no pun intended

"If I ran for President"

You won't be elected if you run for President.
Even if you're born here and are a resident.

It's not lies caught by Fact Checker.
It's because you have a little pecker.

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: The Public School Advantage

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: The Public School Advantage: My childhood friend wrote the following article. It is re-printed here with his permission. Dave Markward is considered an authority figure ...

The Public School Advantage

My childhood friend wrote the following article. It is re-printed here with his permission. Dave Markward is considered an authority figure on this subject. I hope it stirs some debate. Feel free to comment and express your views.

The Public School Advantage

I have watched the presidential debates and town hall meetings with interest and anticipation. I keep thinking that there will be some questions about the candidates’ plans for public education. With total government expenditures for education approaching $1 trillion in fiscal 2016 (Chantrill, 2016), isn’t a question or two about how our next leader-in-chief feels about spending our money to educate the students who will shape our future reasonable?

On my radar only Dr. Ben Carson’s statement has appeared: “The best-educated students are home-schooled, then from private, charter and, lastly, public schools,” (Turner, 2015). I thought at the time that his statement would surely lead to some additional talk about education. I was wrong.  And so, it stands, unchallenged and representing what may likely be the prevailing thought among many.

I admit that I have a warm spot in my heart for public schools. My oldest brother recently retired after 40 years as a music professor at Rhode Island College. My other older brother just retired after 45 years of work as a pharmacist. I worked for 38 years as an educator in the public schools of Illinois and Iowa.

What did we have in common?  We were educated in the public schools of Dubuque, Iowa.  Our elementary and junior high schools were located in the northeast part of town. Dubuquers past and present will tell you there were no silver spoons in those neighborhoods. Yet, most of the kids have gone on to do credible and, in some cases, remarkable work.

All four of my children were educated in public schools.  All four have degrees from four-year universities.  Two of the four are teachers in public schools with very large percentages of students living in poverty. They are hard working and dedicated to kids who don’t have the advantages many families take for granted. 

I am proud of them for doing that, and they are not alone.  The number of schools with large numbers of students in poverty grows each year, often becoming more concentrated as students move to the perceived ‘greener pastures’ of other public schools in neighborhoods of wealth, charter schools, private schools, or are educated at home. The comments of Dr. Carson and others may tend to exacerbate that trend. Is his an accurate statement?

At the time of Dr. Carson’s’ remarks, I was reading The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools(2014) by Christopher and Sarah Lubienski of the University of Illinois. It is a straightforward presentation by two professors who attended public and private schools – parochial in one case, Christian in another.  Their own families send their children to schools that are public, Lutheran, evangelical, or they homeschool.  In short, the Lubienskis have no axe to grind and have skin in the game in all of the entities they have researched.

They analyzed nationally representative student mathematics performance data from the 2003 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) datasets consisting of a sample of over one-third of a million students in grades 4 and 8 as well as the 21,000 student sample from the National Center for Eduation Statistics (NCES) Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99, with follow-up assessments to determine learning growth in their first, third, fifth and eighth grade years (Pollack, 2005). These are the largest student population samples ever analyzed.

In a nutshell, the Lubienskis found: On average, private and charter schools have higher scores, but not because they are better institutions. The higher results are produced by students largely coming from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After statistically controlling for demographics, the Lubienskis show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private and charter schools.

They are not alone in their findings. Studies conducted at Stanford University, Educational Testing Service, and the University of Notre Dame produced some of the same results.  In the Lubienski’s words “While the findings presented in this book may appear to be surprisingly counterintuitive, or even outlandish to some, they are increasingly in good company.”

I am sure there will be those who say, “This can’t be!” Some may refute the statistics and present different findings. And that’s OK. I’m just encouraging discussions and decisions that are based on reliable, empirical evidence rather than pre-formed, self-serving preferences.

When politicians and others offer sweeping comments about the quality of education, ask them where they are getting their statistics.  I’ve told you where I am getting mine, and I invite you to take a closer look at them.

Dave Markward

Former Superintendent, Rock Island and Cedar Rapids Schools

Director of the Iowa Instructional Rounds Network

*References in this article available upon request.

References

Braun, H., Jenkins, F., and Grigg, W. (2006). Comparing Private Schools and Public Schools Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling.(NCES 2006-461). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved February 25, 2016 from https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/studies/2006461.pdf.

Carbonaro, W. (2006). Public-Private Differences in Achievement among Kindergarten Students: Differences in Learning Opportunities and Student Outcomes. American Journal of Education, 113 (1), p31-67 Retrieved February 23, 2016 from http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ750303.  

Chantrill, Christopher. (2016). Government Spending Chart Gallery.  Retrieve February 21, 2016 from http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/charts.

Lubienski, C. A., & Lubienski, S. T. (2014). The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Pollack, J. M., Najarian, M. J., Rock, D. A., & Atkinson-Burnett, S. A. (2005). Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K), Psychometric Report for the Fifth Grade. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.

Reardon, S.F., Cheadle, J.E., & Robinson, J.P. (2009). The effect of Catholic schooling on math and reading development in kindergarten through fifth grade. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2(1), 45-87.  Retrieved February 24, 2016 fromhttp://cepa.stanford.edu/content/effect-catholic-schooling-math-and-reading-development-kindergarten-through-fifth-grade. 

Turner, J. (November 23, 2015). Carson Highlights Education, Jobs. The Dispatch and Rock Island Argus.

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Christmas Fruitcake - Yum or Yuk

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Christmas Fruitcake - Yum or Yuk: Christmas Fruitcake - Yum or Yuk The Christmas Fruitcake © I like all kinds of traditions. I especially like the Christmas tradition of...

Christmas Fruitcake - Yum or Yuk

Christmas Fruitcake - Yum or Yuk

The Christmas Fruitcake ©

I like all kinds of traditions. I especially like the Christmas tradition of standing in long lines at the post office to mail packages that have a high probability of getting lost or delivered six months later. The term Postal Service is an oxymoron. I like watching television reports of people standing in long lines outside closed stores, in the middle of the night waiting for the store to open. I enjoy the news showing the rush of people fighting, punching, and kicking to buy some toy that the media convinced us we should own. I wonder if that’s what is meant by tidings of good cheer? 

I like food and I like to eat. I like the tradition of preparing treats that are only made at Christmas. It’s fun to re-invent the learning curve because I forgot how to make an item during the past year. It’s also fun to learn the same thing new each December. I think that might be one definition of insanity. The added holiday stress is something my Type A personality enjoys. So does my pharmacist because I have to load up on anxiety medications. My heritage is German and Norwegian. We talk a little funny but we enjoy our Christmas foods.

Each year at Christmas my family makes potato bread and a cookie. The bread is called lefse. It’s a large round flat piece of dough. It’s warmed in the oven, covered with butter, rolled up and vigorously chewed with every bit of jaw strength one can muster. And that’s just to bite off a piece. The Norse god, Odin, first had it served to the souls of slain warriors because it would last an eternity. My brother, Richard calls it reindeer hide. He doesn’t like the stuff. But he’s not much of a traditionalist. Lefse is a Norwegian version of beef jerky. It can last forever. Krumkake is a Norwegian waffle cookie that takes a long time to make. Each cookie is made by hand one at a time. The first bite crumbles the cookie into hundreds of tiny pieces. As a kid I always liked watching adults make a mess. Uff-Dah!

There is one tradition I do not like - that is the re-appearance each December of fruitcake, the most disgusting food item ever created. Fruitcake was discovered by accident by a Greek fella named Imus Disgustus.

He was sitting around one day fully crocked on some fermented apple juice and felt creative. You probably don’t know this, but he was the first person the see a chicken lay an egg. There he was, soused to the gills and saw what appeared to be a white oval-shaped thing fall from what he thought was the chicken’s butt. He scratched his head and pondered. “Hey, we can crack that thing open and eat it.”

Later that day, ole Imus was out of his happy juice and was scrounging around his bachelor pad trying to find more alcohol of any type. All he could find was dried up raisins, hardened cranberries, crusty blueberries, chunks of cherries, fermented figs, dehydrated apricots and he finally came upon some brandy. He thought he’d have some fun.

He decided to cook something during his drunken stupor. He mixed the five-year old, dried up ingredients with some flour, sugar, baking powder, allspice and baking soda. He tipped some brandy into the mess for good measure. And presto! He created the first fruitcake. The year was 1170 AD. There are still edible pieces of his original cake displayed in Athens at the Martha Stewart Museum for Aged Products.

I got to thinking. Who in the world should be given this disgusting, vile, repulsive food as a holiday tradition? Politicians should be given fruitcake. The descriptions of the food and the profession are the same. An added benefit might be their inability to swallow and thus hinder their ability to talk. We could all prosper from that. When a politician isn’t talking, there’s no lies being told.

I think we should give one to our judges each December. Surely, they would write a court order of protection that no normal citizen could be within a half-mile of fruitcake. Those folks waiting in lines in the middle of the night at closed stores would be exempt from that order because they are not normal anyway. Plus the name itself pretty much describes those people – fruitcakes.

I gave a loaf to my neighbor last year. He owned a dog that barked constantly. The neighbor fella must not have liked my fruitcake. I saw the thing thrown out into his back yard. He probably figured the dog would eat it. That dog has been trying all year to eat and swallow the stuff. Ah-ha. I just noticed there has been no more barking.

Workers in the pharmaceutical industry should be given fruitcake and forced to eat it. The side effects include constipation, upset stomach, difficulty swallowing and nasty residual taste, inability to speak for hours, loss of sex life (because all they are too busy chewing), painful jaws, and seventeen others.

I sent one last Christmas to some prisoners sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. I figured it would take them that length of time to eat my gift. After all, fruitcake does last a lifetime. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Some dentists set out trays with bite size morsels in their lobbies. This stuff will chip or loosen a perfectly good tooth after just three bites. I figure it’s good for the dental business. But then, maybe some of the dentists just want to use their new reciprocating saws they bought at Home Depot. I found that to be the best tool to cut this stuff into pieces.

There is one time a person should never eat fruitcake. Never attempt to consume this vile concoction if you are scheduled for a colonoscopy in the next six months. The ingredients will still be embedded inside and can appear as radioactive polyps. Then your medical insurance rates will increase because you will have a new diagnosis.

Lastly, I don’t know of a single person who claims to like fruitcake. If I hear of someone who claims to enjoy fruitcake, I can never locate him or her for an interview. Trust me, I have tried. They are nowhere to be found. That’s like the people who were supposedly asked questions in a national survey or a political poll. I’ve lived a long time. I know lots of people and never met a person yet who claims to have been a part of some survey.

If you do ever meet one of those folks, they are probably lying. I’ll bet they will tell you that they like fruitcake also.

This story is from my book, "If The Hills Could Talk" and can be found at Amazon or my web site. www.davidnelsonauthor.com

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: The Touch That Tingles

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: The Touch That Tingles: The Touch That Tingles Shadows danced across the wall and the silence was broken when Edith shifted her weight against the mattress. “O...