Figured I should fill folks in.
I’ve taken a new position at my job. I’m now the education coordinator. This means I’m doing all I can to help students succeed at school. Hopefully I’ll do well for them.

(Welcome Baltimore City Community College Students! Please comment below if you found the information useful. And for what class. Thanks!)

From
Investing in Literacy

Indiana’s former governor has stated that determining the number of new prisons to build is based, in part, on the number of second graders not reading at second-grade level.

From
Dialects, Teaching Reading and Literacy to Dialect Speakers: Educational CyberPlayGround™

In California they plan how many jail cells they will build in the future by how many children are not reading on grade level by third grade.

From
Democracy and Equity: CES’s Tenth Common Principle

“Based on this year’s fourth-grade reading scores,” observes Paul Schwartz, a Coalition principal in residence at the U. S. Department of Education, “California is already planning the number of new prison cells it will need in the next century.”

From
Evidence Based Education Science and Learning to Read

David Boulton: We were interviewing Lesley Morrow, the Past-President of the International Reading Association, and she made a statement which flabbergasted me. She said this was a fact: that there are some states that determine how many prison cells to build based on reading scores.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. Again, the predictability of reading for life success is so strong, that if you look at the proportion of middle schoolers who are not at the basic level, who are really behind in reading, it is a very strong predictor of problems with the law and the need for jails down the line.

Literacy for societies, literacy for states, literacy for individuals is a powerful determinate of success. The opposite of success is failure and clearly, being in jail is a sign of failure.

People who don’t read well have trouble earning a living. It becomes attractive to, in some cases the only alternative in terms of gaining funds, to violate the law and steal, to do things that get you in trouble. Few options in some cases other than to pursue that life. Of course reading opens doors.

Brothers, you can believe in stones as long as you don’t throw them at me.

I was a little weary of putting up this interview with Wafa Sultan on my site. My fear was, and is, that I would seem like so many Muslim-bashers who see her words as an opportunity to praise a token Muslim who sees things their way. It’s a token mentality that bothers me, and I worry about being misinterpreted as (more on this later).
But I was moved by Sultan’s words and courage and they challenged me even more. First, she is a women. Both in the culture she was speaking to and largely in this culture, women’s views and opinions are not given the weight and credit that is due them. Dr. Sultan also challenged and thought critically about the history and culture from which she had come. If there is one thing I can learn from her it is that I must be a critical thinker as it relates to my own culture.
Many will hear her words and just point at it as a way to tout their own views even more. I say we look at her words and then check our history and see if there needs to be some harsh words spoken about our actions.

You can read a partial Transcript here.

Follow-up story in NYT.