National Endowment for the Arts issues alarming report on reading

Click on the title to this post to go to the New York Times for an article about the release today of a new study from the NEA that shows that across all age groups and economic levels, reading for pleasure is dropping off dramatically. The article correlates this pleasure reading with general levels of skill in reading, and other skills such as in math and science.

Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle school students and slightly declining among high school seniors. These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

The study also examined results from reading tests administered to adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.

In 2004, the NEA released a report,

Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline - 28 percent - occurring in the youngest age groups.

The study also documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, representing a loss of 20 million potential readers. The rate of decline is increasing and, according to the survey, has nearly tripled in the last decade. (snip)

(from the NEA press release accompanying the 2004 report) At the NEA web page you will be able to download a PDF of this older report. or you can purchase it. This report was based on a census question that asked about reading in several categories: fiction, poetry and drama. The report was cricized by some as being too narrow. The new report combines about two dozen other studies, including federal reports and private foundations' work. See the NEA page here that announces the new report and has some links and information about it. You can either download a PDF of the report or an executive summary of it, or buy them here, http://www.arts.gov/pub/pubLit.php.

These are our future students we are reading about, which certainly alarms me. Reading skills underlie a great deal that we take for granted with law students. Being able to keep up with the daily assignments for class, and being able to think about what they read are key to the way we teach law school. If our upcoming students can no longer be assumed to come with strong reading skills, we will certainly have to rethink the way we teach.

The Times article does note that already scholars are taking issue with the alarming new report:

Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Southern California, said that based on his analysis of other data, reading was not on the decline. He added that the endowment appeared to be exaggerating the decline in reading scores and said that according to federal education statistics, the bulk of decreases in 12th-grade reading scores had occurred in the early 1990s, and that compared with 1994 average reading scores in 2005 were only one point lower.

Timothy Shanahan, past president of the International Reading Association and a professor of urban education and reading at the University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that the endowment’s report was not nuanced enough. “I don’t disagree with the N.E.A.’s notion that reading is important, but I’m not as quick to discount the reading that I think young people are really doing,” he said, referring to reading on the Internet. He added, “I don’t think the solutions are as simple as a report like this might be encouraging folks to think they might be.”

Anita Hill looks back at her testimony

Click on the link to this post to read an essay by Anita Hill that appeared in today's Boston Globe. She considers her testimony in the Senate confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas, and the many letters, notes and e-mail she has received as a result. She looks back and thinks about the effects her testimony have had on sexualharassment policies, and the attitudes of women and men about this issue. A thought-provoking, and as she says, bitter-sweet, essay.

Martin Luther King archives will be available digitally

Click on the title to this post for some great news, for a change. The link will take you to Boston University's press release about a grant they are receiving.

...the Martin Luther King, Jr., collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center — more than 83,000 letters, manuscripts, speeches, and photographs belonging to the late civil rights leader ...

The Gotlieb Center has entered into a partnership with the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center Consortium and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University to create a joint online catalogue of their respective King holdings. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is funding the effort, the first-ever comprehensive inventory of multiple archives for one public figure, and has given the Gotlieb Center more than $600,000 for the project.

The King collection dates from 1955 to 1961 and consists of letters, clippings, itineraries, and meeting minutes. There is extensive material on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Montgomery Improvement Association and letters from prominent figures of the time, among them Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell, Medgar Evers, Roy Wilkins, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, William Sloane Coffin, Allan Knight Chalmers, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Robinson, A. Philip Randolph, Harry Belafonte, Ralph Abernathy, and Coretta Scott King.

The archive also features material used in King’s doctoral dissertation, including his class notes and research material, and a piece titled “Autobiography of My Religious Development.” Draft manuscripts of King’s books Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story and Why We Can’t Wait, which includes his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, are part of the collection as well.

In order to catalog the material, the center is closing to the public as of last November 1 for two years. But the digital archive will be keyword searchable, tagged with the same controlled vocabulary at all locations, making searching much easier for King scholars and the public alike.

You gotta watch 'em every minute!

Visit the Boston Globe article about Mass. Governor Deval Patrick quietly inserting a provision in his bill to allow casinos in our Commonwealth, that will make internet gambling illegal. Sheesh. Way to force ‘em into the casinos, Gov!

Shazaam! Have you heard about N-CEL?

Click on the title to this post to go to the National Clean Elections Lawsuit website (N-CEL). A group of citizens from every state is suing election officials in each state in the federal district court for the Northern District of New York. The website includes a link to a PDF of the complaint, and a link to an article explaining the suit. They are basically suing to force every state to provide paper-based voting and publicly viewed vote counting in upcoming elections. Some states have already had bills introduced to do just that. But ... Take a look at the complaint and accompanying article. The effort appears to be coordinated by the We The People foundation (http://www.wethepeoplefoundation.org/) . These folks have been busy! It will be interesting to watch.

Take a break and get some perspective!

Click on the title to this post to visit the NASA.gov image gallery. Besides an image of the day, they offer an archive, and interesting links to other image galleries on related themes, and even other branches of NASA. They even offer a library of the favorite and most famous images, that's searchable in a number of ways. A pretty sophisticated search function at GRIN (Great Images In NASA) -- doncha love government acronyms!?

Or you can use your X-ray vision by stopping that the Chandra site, http://chandra.harvard.edu/. I finally chose a beautiful image from Chandra, combining x-ray and other images to clarify mysterious extra "arms" on the spiral galaxy NGC 4258 (M106), which seem to be sheets of gas being superheated by shockwaves as twin jets spray out from near the disk of the galaxy. There are two spiralling arms that can be seen in visible light, but these two extra arms appear in x-ray ranges.

When we look at this image, we are looking both far away and long ago, about 25 million light years away, the young stars in the visible arms must be very different. When the light and x-rays that made these images left the constellation Canes Venatici (the two dogs that hunt Ursa Major, the Great Bear), what was happening on our little planet? According to the Wikipedia Timeline of Evolution, blue-green algae had been making oxygen for about 300 million years, making the air toxic to the anerobic microbes that had been happily burbling about until then. The anerobes retreated deep beneath the ocean and into rocks beneath the ground where the poisonous oxygen could not reach them. The oxygen, poisonous to the majority of life on earth then, actually created an opportunity for new microbes to evolve that could use the large amounts of oxygen now available. Hooray! Eukaryotes began the long, slow evolution into all manner of animals, plants, fungi and protists.

When you take the long view, almost any catastrophe starts to look a little better.

Blog Readability

So is Slaw. Shakesville, though? Junior high. Meh.

More on Pakistani Lawyers & Judges in Revolt

The Boston Globe article which supplied the image of protesting lawyers (in Islamabad, not Karachi -- sorry 'bout that!), also carries a good deal of worthwhile commentary and background. Here is a snip, read the full article by clicking on the title to this post.

Political scientist Rasul Bakhsh Rais said the judiciary and lawyers, two main pillars of Pakistan's fragile civil society and historically at the forefront of political movements, sense that a line has been crossed that could end any hope for constitutional rule in the future.

"They feel if Musharraf has his own way and is able to restructure the system according to his whims, that is the end of Pakistan as a progressive and moderate country and the state will never be able to rehabilitate itself," said Rais, a professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Police have squashed the lawyers' protests, often brutally, and the legal system has been brought to a virtual standstill. Only 50 of Pakistan's 95 senior judges have agreed to take the oath under Musharraf's "provisional" constitution.

In the capital, criminal and civil courts were empty Thursday. Hundreds of lawyers have refused to appear before judges who have been sworn in since the emergency. Advocates' chambers remain empty, letter writers idle at their desks and court clerks just chat and drink tea.

The author, Matthew Pennington, writing for the AP, goes on to note that Pakistan's judiciary and lawyers actually have often bowed before military juntas before, and actually have something of a reputation for dysfunctionality. So this is actually a watershed moment, apparently spearheaded by Justice Chaudhry:

Chaudhry's resolve in standing up to the military-led establishment has marked a sea change in public notions of how the judiciary could act as a check on the executive and defend citizens' rights.
more stories like this

"The past year has seen a revolution in Pakistan as the judiciary fought successfully for its independence and held the government to account," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

In one notable example, Chaudhry started pushing the government to disclose the whereabouts of 485 Pakistanis secretly detained by intelligence agencies on suspicion of involvement in terrorism or ethnic nationalist movements and held for months or years without charge.

So far, some 105 have been released -- often mysteriously dropped on highways or suddenly reappearing in police custody two or three years after disappearing. Musharraf accuses the court of freeing more than 60 terrorists.

"The chief justice was our hope and still is our hope," said Amina Masood Janjua, 42, who is still trying to trace her husband, businessman Masood Janjua, 47, who disappeared in December 2005. She believes he is in the custody of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence but has no idea what for.

"The chief justice was the one working for the public and the poor, and who for the first time in Pakistan was summoning people from the agencies to appear in court," she said.

The political parties in Pakistan, including opposition leaders such as Benazir Bhutto apparently have reputations for mismanagement and corruption, with little wide-spread trust. This makes this recent work from the judiciary and lawyers more momentous, even. I wish our government would speak more strongly in support of these courageous lawyers and judges. They are working for some of the key values that underlie democracy and transparent government! (of course, these are some of the values that our current administration seems most likely to flout themselves, so perhaps I should not hold out much hope)

National Lawyers Guild Demonstrates in Solidarity with Pakistani Lawyers

Click on the title to this post to read a brief story in the Boston Business Journal about a demonstration earlier this week in Boston, In part it reads:

In a protest against the firing of the Chief Justice of Pakistan and the beating and jailing of lawyers opposed to martial law in Pakistan, the Boston Bar Association, the Massachusetts Bar Association and other bars groups rallied on the steps of the Massachusetts State House Tuesday.

The rally was organized by the National Lawyers Guild.

"The purpose of a constitution is to establish citizens' basic rights and liberties, and by suspending his nation's constitution President Musharraf has usurped the rule of law," said MBA President David W. White Jr., in a statement.

Boston Bar Association president Tony Doniger also urged BBA members to attend a national rally at noon on Wednesday at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., which is being organized by the American Bar Association.

The gorgeous thing about the Boston rally was that it included "legal workers," not just lawyers. I saw a photo of the rally in the Globe, but cannot seem to locate a copy of the image online. What I added here is an image from the Boston Globe, Nov. 8, of Pakistani lawyers protesting in Karachi. Note that some of the protesters are women -- lawyers?

There were also two rallies in New York: one through the bar associations and law school deans, and another through the National Lawyers Guild in front of the Pakistani Consulate. The larger, more mainstream rally:

About 700 lawyers rallied Tuesday afternoon in front of New York Supreme Court in Manhattan to show support for lawyers and judges in Pakistan battling for the restoration of the rule of law.

Addressing the throng that poured down the courthouse steps and spilled onto the sidewalk, Barry Kamins, president of the New York City Bar Association, said the rally was called "to embolden" the Pakistani lawyers and judges who have been "physically manning barricades and trying to face down an entire army."

Kathryn Madigan, president of the New York State Bar Association, also called for lawyers to speak "with one voice in defense of the rule of law" in Pakistan. And Catherine Christian, president of the New York County Lawyers' Association, said Pakistani lawyers "are showing the world what it means to be a lawyer -- fighting for liberty and an independent legal system." (snip)

The crisis was precipitated on Nov. 3, when Musharraf suspended the constitution and replaced seven of the 11 justices on Pakistan's Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who refused to promise to abide by a "provisional constitution."

In declaring "emergency rule" shortly before the Pakistani Supreme Court was expected to rule on the legality of his re-election, Musharraf also banned protests and closed down independent TV stations.

According to press reports, thousands of lawyers protesting the imposition of emergency rule have been arrested and hundreds beaten.

In addition to being sponsored by the city and state bars and the county lawyers, Tuesday's rally was backed by the New York Women's Bar Association, the Muslim Bar Association of New York, the New York Council of Defense Lawyers and the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The deans of three area law schools -- CUNY's Michelle J. Anderson, Mary Daly of St. John's and Fordham's William Treanor -- attended the rally as did Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes.

Read here for the full text on law.com

The ABA-sponsored rally in Washington, DC, is mentioned in the ABA Journal here. In typical OOTJ fashion, this seems to have all happened before I put it in the blog. Apparently, lawyers in Texas were urged to wear black suits in a show of support for the Pakistani attorneys (well, how would you know it was a different day?!?). And there seems to have been another rally in Akron, Ohio.

I have been cheering for the courageous lawyers in Pakistan, who are struggling to maintain the principle of a rule of law that applies equally to all.

Great New Issue of AALL Spectrum!

I looked in the November, 2007 issue of AALL Spectrum and was just blown away by the number of excellent, interesting and relevant articles. Congratulations to Mark Estes, new Editor, and to the various authors who created a very exciting issue. Special shout out to these folks who have been involved one way or another with OOTJ:

Jacqueline Cantwell (co-blogger, and author of a great article on the various technologies that librarians need to understand when working with victims of stalking or domestic violnce)

Meg Kribble (visitor & commentor and now author of a wonderful article on Second Life, mentioning OOTJ co-blogger Jim Milles and visiting blogger Connie Crosby)

Don't overlook the other wonderful articles including a fascinating one by Joyce Manna Janto on solving an old mystery and understanding how law students treat legal research. And the always important CRIV Sheet! Awesome issue, guys!