School Consolidation

In the 1930's the cost to educate one child was around $400 per year. Now, its around $8000 per year. Ya ya, times have changed, we all know that. But that doesn't deter us from asking if school consolidation has really returned good benefits, or if there might have been a different approach to educating children.
Recent studies on school consolidation--its been happening since the 1920's---have suggested that the drivers for school consolidation were two: efficiency and quality of education. So, how have each faired. This report goes on to say that at first, efficiency was gained by consolidation, but then lost as large districts got to be more bureaucratic and government loaded them up with new requirements. So far, that does not intersect with the quality of education---get to that later.
Efficiency improvement might have been achieved by a different route: Some parts can be consolidated into central management, like purchasing, but that would not mean that local control has to be lost. (more on this later)

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Smithville, USA

If you are not observant while traveling northwest on Highway 71, Smithville will be in the rearview mirror and so then you will have missed it all. It's not on the main road but off to the south a block or so. We have driven past Smithville many times but this time, in order not to miss it, we decided to make that our destination. Smithville's main street runs parallel to the highway that runs north-south and therefore parallel to Highway 71. Highway 71 connecting Houston with Austin runs on the north side of the Colorado River and Smithville is on the south side of the river. This narrow separation from the main trunk line highway is what has spared Smithville from the ultimate doom of either death from isolation or ruin from big city influence. We often travel miles and miles for a new lunch experience and this trip was no different in that it was a 90-minute drive to reach our destination of the Old World Bakery and Cafe. The bakery part is ...

Cause and Effect

We have this great world atlas book published by the National Geographical Society, which by the way, we bought at the local library used book sale for $2. Probably this low price of the book pains the Society but it sure makes my reference to maps an easy task without having to wake up my computer. The book occupies a permanent spot on a book stand in our breakfast room, standing ready to supply map information on request. The book happened to be open to the page showing the whole of Antarctica featuring all the outposts and even some commentary of scientific significance. One such comment was on ice coring data of historic temperatures and carbon dioxide content. I can understand how the CO2 content of the ice can be preserved over many centuries at varying depths, but I am unsure how the prevailing temperature of some thousand years ago can be preserved in the ice cores--but that's another issue that we will not get into here. So here is the comment on the data of the ice...

Aermotor Windmill Lives

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