Saturday, January 22, 2011

Auctioneer Roundup

Law school auction on Thursday. I didn't win anything -- probably a good thing. The last time I "won" something at the law school auction, I paid for it and never received it.

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Bradley Burston gives ten reasons to be optimistic that Israel has finally turned a corner.

Unqualified Offerings offers a revised schedule of illegal drugs.

Tablet Mag profiles the extremist anti-Zionist Jew Phillip Weiss. It's an interesting read.

A Muslim? As a judge? Oh noes!

New research on why Texas' "top 10%" plan, envisioned as a race-neutral replacement for affirmative action, is not working out.

While Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will be given the GOP's official SOTU response, Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) is delivering her own response as a representative of the Tea Party movement. I'm sure Dems are just quaking.

I cannot imagine the trauma of having one's own teacher burn a cross into one's arm.

1 comment:

PG said...

Hmm -- the early problem with top 10% was that it essentially relied on schools' remaining segregated in order to achieve racial diversity at the college level. Unfortunately, many schools that are 90%+ black/Latino are underfunded (unsurprising in a property tax system) and providing a poor education. This left the state schools in the position of having to take top 10% grads who needed remedial English and math courses to be college-level, while shutting out minority students who attended more competitive schools. In particular, it made the AP tests (once a great tool for determining a student's preparedness for college work) useless for admissions. Then there's the unfairness to students in tiny rural schools or private schools with only 30 in each graduating class.

Gaming the system by deliberately choosing a school where one feels confident of making top 10% is a phenomenon I'd heard of (I'd read about Asian students in LA doing something similar so they could mark "50% or more students on free/reduced lunch" on college apps). But I would have thought its utility limited to the big cities where there are multiple high schools in reasonable distance.