Source: Maui Time, Maui News, Best of Maui, Maui Activities

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This Week in Review
WEDNESDAY, Mar. 30

April 07, 2005

Hawaii’s public schools are ranked 50th out of 50 in a new nationwide survey of how our educators are meeting George W. Bush’s vaunted No Child Left Behind law, says a new study conducted by the nonprofit Education Commission of the States, which I had always thought was a hate group, but hey—nobody’s perfect. Anyway, the law says each student’s math and reading test scores have to go up, or the schools risk getting “restructured”—ie, no mo’ money. Now all this news sounds just dreadful, except for a couple things. First, each state has to come up with the reading and math tests, so you have 50 different states using 50 different criteria to compete for federal money. Second, and more importantly, is that using tests to gauge how schools are doing is nonsense. And we’ve known this for some time. “The most profound misuse of educational tests these days is to employ a traditionally constructed standardized achievement test… and use those scores as a reflection of school quality,” said UCLA professor emeritus and nationally-recognized expert on testing James Popham three years ago during the Mar. 28, 2002 Frontline documentary “Testing Our Schools.”  Popham further said that standardized tests only measure “what children bring to school, not what they learn there” and that most policymakers advocating No Child Left Behind “are dirt-ignorant regarding what these tests should and should not be used for.”







THURSDAY, Mar. 31



During the really nasty times of the Cold War, Pentagon officials and generals would wait until Congressional Budget Hearings to unleash their scariest estimates of how many bombers and nuclear missiles the Soviets were aiming at us. That way, they correctly reasoned, Congress would get nervous and let the generals take whatever they needed from the taxpayers’ cashbox.  I recalled this when I read today’s Maui News story on the “crisis” facing the Maui Police Department’s overworked police dispatchers. “We’re at a crisis,” the News quoted Chief Tom Phillips as telling the County Council Budget and Finance Committee. “It could be a lot worse by this time next year.” Now I’m not saying that the police department doesn’t need the nine new dispatchers Phillips is requesting. But I am saying that Phillips is pretty clever to hold off on the “crisis” talk until the council starts dealing with “appropriations.”







FRIDAY, Apr. 1



On this Day of Fools comes news that television empress Oprah Winfrey is going into the bed and breakfast business. Okay, maybe. But the County Council did give her nine-acre O.W. Ranch in Kula a five-year conditional permit to operate as vacation rental. The ranch has been managed by Bob Greene Enterprises—the parent corporation of Oprah’s personal trainer Bob Greene—since Oprah and her subsidiary Harpo, Inc. bought the place in 2003 for a mere $3.2 million. In any case, I can just see that all this is going to work perfectly. I can just see Oprah behind the front desk, laughing with guests as she tells them to sign the register… What? Oh yeah, I guess she wouldn’t do all that herself. Yeah, she’s really busy, what with her TV show and her… I mean, what else does she got? Does she still appear in movies and stuff? I know she owns like half of Hana, but other than sit in a comfy chair on TV for an hour a day, what does she do? Anybody? She’s got more money than God—she must do something...







SATURDAY, Apr. 2



With Terri Schiavo and the Pope now dead, will CNN go back to covering the news?



 



SUNDAY, Apr. 3



Boy, this affordable housing planning thing is infectious. A week after Maui Time reported on the plan put forth by the citizen group Maui Tomorrow—which can be best summed up with the eminently logical question Why-don’t-you-just-make-the-developers-do-it?—the Maui County Housing and Human Concerns office has decided to get into the act. This plan, outlined in today’s Maui News, is actually a lot like Maui Tomorrow’s plan, except for a few details like requiring developers to build 15 percent of their project as affordable instead of the group’s 25 percent. The plan would also only affect those developers who are trying to rezone land to get their project built. Now it goes without saying that the county’s proposed policy is an improvement over the current situation—after all, there is no policy right now. Everything is done on a case-by-case basis, with the developers rarely, if ever, actually building the affordable homes they agree to. But come on! Push those developers! They can afford it!







MONDAY, Apr. 4



Oh Governor Linda Lingle, don’t ever stop exceeding my expectations. I don’t know what I’d do without you and your capacity to perform shamelessly naked political acts with a straight face. You can’t imagine the joy I experienced when reading this morning’s Associated Press story on your recent one-minute radio ads urging listeners to call their legislators and support your proposals. The ads are propaganda—the beginning of next year’s reelection campaign, just as state Democrats are crying—but I never doubted for a moment that you’d try to whitewash them as “public service announcements.” You even told the AP that the ads allow “me to say what I feel are the most important issues of this session.” What balls! You’re the frickin’ governor! You can get on TV or make speeches any time you want! Man, even Dubya doesn’t end his weekly radio address with a “call your legislators” line. But hey, don’t change on my account.







TUESDAY, Apr. 5



Great news on the Superferry! And by “great,” of course I mean “bad, bad for the ferry itself.” According to a press release I just got  from state Senator Shan Tsutsui (D, 4th District), “The Hawaii State Senate Committee on Ways and Means has decided not to appropriate $40 million in the Senate budget for the proposed Superferry. Tsutsui added that while he supports the Superferry “in concept,” he also “doubts that it’ll pass this year.” Turns out a big problem was the Department of Transportation’s “inability to release information on requested specifics.” Go figure.







Anthony Pignataro has hosted many television game shows in his career, including Buyer Beware, One Bullet Left! and the long-running, semi-crooked Who Ate My Lunch? MTW