Caveat Lector! I sense the odor of mendacity!

Lately, I’ve been having this strange feeling about how things are going in our world. It seems to me that the world is chock full of liars, pedants, and people who think that bending the truth is not the same as lying outright. The stank is somewhat akin to the comment Big Daddy makes to his son Brick in the Tennessee Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?... There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity... You can smell it. It smells like death.

And so we have the summation of this presidential election cycle. It’s hard enough to try to figure out who’s telling the truth and who is not. Indeed both candidates have been guilty of stepping over the lines here and there, and the media has not done a good job as the fourth estate.  The fourth estate, journalists according to Edmund Burke, has done as much to confuse the public as they have to support their own political biases.

They seem to, at a whim, grab a comment and decide how they want to interpret it, and then build momentum by dunning the public with article after article supporting their interpretation of an event. Whatever happened to putting out the facts and letting the public make its own interpretation?

During my days working as a reporter in Chesterfield County, I witnessed what I would call a bit of tampering. It was in the heyday of Chesterfield’s dealing with the infamous shrink swell soil problems. The public was justly upset with the county’s handling of the problem, as their houses suffered from a multitude of issues ranging from cracked foundations to chimneys pulling away from the sides of their homes.

In whole, it was a mess. The county appeared to be less than up front in their dealings with the public. And the issue languished in the newspapers for months, with a new angle or storyline nearly every week. One citizen was behind most of the movement to get the county to help make things right. But behind the scenes, a local reporter was coaching the citizen in what to say and when to say it.

The stories made great reading for local news. The reporter’s stories were submitted for a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, but did not win. And I was left wondering about the ethics involved. Should the reporter have inserted himself into the debate? If he was writing the stories, at what point does his “help” fall into the category of conflict of interest?

Currently, we see the same kind of mess in the current Presidential race. It seems that when either side makes a misstep or misquote, the opposing media, not the same as the impartial media, takes one another to task over the incident.

Take for instance Mitt Romney’s assertion that upon his previous election President Barack Obama went on an apology tour throughout the Mideast and Europe. Some members of the media have said that this is not true, because Obama never said the word apology at any time in any of his speeches. But his comments appear to have the ring of apology.

On the other hand, some members of the media want to say that Obama’s comments about “acts of terror” following the Benghazi consulate disaster indicates that the administration stated it was a terror attack from the very beginning. But a closer reading of his speech doesn’t show that his comments related in any way to the organized Al Qaeda assault on the consulate and the murder of four Americans.

There is no question that both sides have dabbled in grey areas regarding the truth. They are after all human beings. And, when studying up for debates or speeches, I suppose it would be easy to tangle thoughts and ideas.

I don’t blame the candidates for that.

But the media is another question. The media used to simply present the facts. Now, it presents the facts so that the conclusions one draws relate to how they want you to think. Most of that kind of writing used to be the domain of the Op/Ed (opinion-editorial) pages, but today a bias can easily be spotted in just about every story published and varies from paper to paper depending on the opinion of the writer and journal.

Caveat lector!

Not contrast ads; just negative ads

There’s a scene at the start of the movie Slum Dog Millionaire where the hero, Jamal Malik, is attempting to make a great escape from some bad guys who are chasing him because of an autograph of Indian movie star Amitabh Bachchan. He dodges through the town, past piles of what appears to be trash, and finds an outhouse, the only place where he can hide. As the bad guys close in, he realizes he has but one way out, through the seat to the dreck below. Of a sudden, he makes his decision and drops through the hole.

When I think about the political ads running nearly non-stop on the telly today, I come to the same conclusion that Jamal reached. The only difference is that the hole Jamal falls into stinks just a little bit less than the sewage reeking from my TV set.

Why is it that politicians have a penchant to pummel the electorate with base, foul, and often lie-filled tirades?

Truth is, for some reason, negative campaign ads seem to work. We, the public, wandering around in our herds, seem to like the fodder and are bent willy-nilly by whichever ad seems to be the most on point, clever, or direct.

In truth, the sponsoring parties have other names for such nasty devices. According to Peter Callaghan, staff writer for Tacoma’s The News-Tribune. He says that if the ad is against your candidate, then it is a negative ad. But if it favors your candidate, it’s a contrast ad.

Contrast, really? I guess, in some way, the sponsoring party can feel good since it’s not polluting the country’s air waves with more crap than the Richmond sewage treatment plant on I-95.  If you travel the Interstate anywhere near south Richmond on a sultry summer day, you know the place by its bouquet.  It can blanch your nostrils and completely overpower the sweet smell of tobacco from the warehouse on the other side of the highway.

Okay, I think you get the point.

Now I don’t consider myself old fashioned or much of a prude, but there are times when I could use a little less mudslinging from my TV. For years, we members of the electorate would hunker down behind our couches praying that neither candidate would feel so insecure in their chances for election or re-election for that matter, that they would feel compelled to break out the WMD ads and obliterate the country.

Today, we don’t have to worry about hunkering down. There isn’t a nice little space in time when the ads build up a candidate, or talk to the salient points of why they ought to be elected. Nope. Today we go directly to nuclear proliferation. And what’s worse no holds are barred.

Misinformation, personal digs, or outright mendacity – to quote President Obama, “all options are on the table” as the candidates, or more precisely their handlers, pummel the people with negative ad after negative ad.

But it isn’t just the presidential ads that are negative. They even extend to senatorial campaigns, right on down to local offices. Sorry, but I can do without that. I guess we should feel blessed that there are only three weeks left before they reap the benefits of their contrasts in negative campaigning. Here’s to November 7^th.

Move over Jamal; I’m ready to jump.

Testing will continue until morale improves

The Virginia Department of Education (DOE) has finally figured out how to get students better prepared for college and the work force—harder SOL Testing.  This improvement is not just the run-of-the-mill competency style testing. Nope, this is the raise-the-standard-to-increase-student-knowledge type of improvement.

So what are the results?

Well, if you want to quantify how effective raising the Math standard was, it’s pretty easy. Statewide math scores dropped a robust 19 percent.  Last year, said math scores scorched the statistics at 87 percent passing; this year the number dwindled to 68 percent.

Good job, Virginia DOE! The net result of their tinkering with the test to improve the education of Virginia’s math students failed by pretty much any practical standard you may want to employ.

And, even the lowest scoring student could have seen that one coming. How in the world did they expect raising the standard would better prepare students for college or the work force?  Whose brain child was that, and what are they doing in education?

It seems incredibly short-sighted that making something harder would net positive results, without providing assistance to help the other side. You can look at it as if it were a teeter-totter; you know what some people call a see-saw.

You put a certain amount of a load on one side, and then on the other you put another load. If you’re lucky the two offset and find some sort of balance.  For the old SOL test, the balancing point was 87 percent, which meant that the weight of the SOL was already greater than the weight of the students by 13 percent. So now, to improve student scores, the DOE has a brilliant idea:  put more weight on the SOL side while doing nothing to shore up the student side.  Guess what happens?  Yup, the students go flying up in the air and who knows when they might come down to earth.

Raising a standard does not improve scores. It just doesn’t follow. If you want to improve scores, you have to start with the students. Why not try to get the old standard to reach 90 percent instead of dunning 19 percent more students as failures? I am sure there are those at the State who say, “Well the students are just not trying.” But that’s junk.

What is really happening is that we end up testing the bejesus out of the students we have. It seems like they spend more time learning how to take a multiple choice test, or taking a pre-SOL test, or a post-SOL test, or a practice SOL-test or any one of a myriad of other placement exams. Or the Stanford Nine or some other crock that is supposed to evaluate a student’s knowledge or their ability to learn or whether they even really care anymore.

Is it any wonder why some students simply blow off the tests and randomly dot the score sheet to create a pointillist copy of the Mona Lisa? It’s amazing to think that we haven’t put one iota of logic behind this testing scenario.

Now, I am not saying that the DOE supports all this testing. But, due to how the accreditation process is implemented and what the ramifications of failing can mean to the school districts, they DOE can certainly make the school systems’ jump out of their boots. What do they expect the schools to do? Nothing?

The schools are going to work the students and try to prepare them for this high-pressure exam. They will make sure they know to use a No. 2 pencil, and to fully erase any wrong marks they may make when changing an answer. They will beat them with practice test after practice test. And the students are destined to continue not meeting the standard set by the DOE. Heck, they failed to meet the old standard to the tune of a low B or high C average.

It would be different, I suppose, if the results of the old test were consistently in the upper 90s. Then it would make sense to up the ante, so to speak, by increasing the degree of difficulty. But the only people who benefit from the current DOE approach are those who sit around after the fact, polish their respective sheriff’s badge, and profess what a great job they have done to improve education throughout Virginia.

Those knob polishers need to get down and dirty and help the kids in the classroom instead of whipping them via the SOL test. So it’s no surprise to anyone, except perhaps the DOE, that the Math scores plummeted and as a result many schools didn’t attain full SOL accreditation and in turn jeopardize state school funding. The DOE probably feels they have done such a good job on the Math portion that it’s time to turn their talent to the English portion as well. Heck, they can glean an additional negative 19 percent there and really teach those students how ill-prepared they are for college and the work force.