Environmentalist propaganda at elementary school

Third-grade teacher Debbie Robles made her acting debut before a packed auditorium of youngsters at Rancho Elementary School in Novato. She bombed. Playing the villain in a school assembly Wednesday aimed at educating the students about global warming, Robles - dressed in a witch's black attire and prancing around the auditorium as "Queen Carbon" - drew the biggest response from more than 500 students who attended two "Curb Your Carbon" assemblies. "My own daughter Hannah asked me, 'Do you have to be my mother today?'" Robles said.

Teachers, parents and volunteers helped organize the assemblies and participated in the skits to help raise awareness about global warming and what people can do about it - exchanging traditional light bulbs for compact fluorescent bulbs, for example. School officials distributed more than 500 CFLs last week. On Friday, Rancho students will be given bilingual "Cancel-a-Car" coupon books filled with ways they can fight global warming. Once the coupons are returned to school, teachers will track what conservation efforts are made and the date. Teachers will help monitor the progress. As the carbon reduction increases, images of cars will be crossed out on a giant poster kept at school.

Another Novato school, Lu Sutton, joined the program last month, bringing to eight the number of Marin schools that have introduced the program that began earlier this year at Bacich Elementary and Kent Middle schools in Kentfield. The program is being financed by a $200,00 donation from the Earth Day Every Day Fund of the Marin Community Foundation. Three nonprofits, the Marin Conservation Corps, Strategic Energy Innovations and Cool the Earth are implementing the program and hope to introduce it to 25 Marin schools by the end of the year.

Robles wasn't the only teacher making her acting debut. Principal Candee Adams played "Mother Earth," fifth-grade teacher Sue Spry played "The Sun" and Debbie Dees was "Mother Nature." Fourth-grade teacher Cathy Stanek played "Polar Bear." The title of the skit was "Save Some for Me." "Too much carbon makes me feel like I'm wearing a blanket," Adams said as Robles' character swirled around the stage.

"I'm Queen Carbon, not a role model," Robles said in her introduction. "Do you want to save the Earth? It's up to you to choose. "Yes, I'm Queen Carbon, and I've got the Carbon Dioxide Blues."

Eco-friendly ideas in the coupon book include buying reusable water bottles instead of bottled water, walking or cycling to school, reducing junk mail, washing clothes with cold water and reducing time showering. Toward the end of the skit, "Mother Earth" asked the students, "Boys and girls are you willing to help me?" A resounding "yes" was the response.

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Columbia's high intellectual standards again

`All modern discoveries are by Muslim scientists'

Muslim scientists have made all discoveries of the current age, said University of Columbia's Arabic and Islamic Studies prof George Saliba at a seminar at the Government College University (GCU) on Monday. The seminar, titled The Problems of Historiography of Islamic Science, was held at Fazl-e-Hussain Hall. Saliba gave a critique of the standard classical accounts of the rise of Islamic science. He detailed problems in the accounts and explained alternative historiography that described the rise of an Islamic scientific tradition as a result of social and political conditions within the nascent Islamic empire.

He said Muslim philosophy was the impetus behind Islamic science that had contributed to various disciplines including botany, zoology, algebra, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology and mathematics in the pre-industrial era. He said the use of decimal fractions was not a Western invention and that it was discovered by a Muslim scientist. He said the binary system, on which the computer was based, was also invented by a Muslim scientist. He said Arab/Islamic science was not an intermediary between Greek science and European science, but was rather the Renaissance that integrated the Islamic science with European science. Saliba also visited the English Language and Literature Department where he engaged faculty members in a conversation on the Islamic and Renaissance paradigms. staff report

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Not all charter schools work well

Schools that take problem kids have an uphill battle

Ohio became a test tube for the nation's charter school movement during a decade of Republican rule here, when a wide-open authorization system and plenty of government seed money led to the schools' explosive proliferation. But their record has been spotty. This year, the state's school report card gave more than half of Ohio's 328 charter schools a D or an F.

Now its Democratic governor and attorney general, elected when Democrats won five of Ohio's six top posts last November, are cracking down on the schools, which receive public money but are run by independent operators. And across the country, charter school advocates are watching nervously, fearful the backlash could spread. Attorney General Marc Dann is suing to close three failing charter schools and says he is investigating dozens of others. It is the first effort by any attorney general to close low-performing charter schools.

Gov. Ted Strickland said he wanted to carry out his own crackdown. "Perhaps somewhere, charter schools have been implemented in a defensible manner, where they have provided quality," he said. "But the way they've been implemented in Ohio has been shameful. I think charter schools have been harmful, very harmful, to Ohio students."

Some 4,000 charter schools now operate across the nation, most advertising themselves as a smaller, safer alternative to the neighborhood school. Nationwide, the movement has gained traction among Democrats, partly because of the successes of a few quality nonprofit operators. But some charters are mediocre, and Ohio has a far higher failure rate than most states. Fifty-seven percent of its charter schools, most of which are in cities, are in academic watch or emergency, compared with 43 percent of traditional public schools in Ohio's big cities.

Behind the Ohio charter failures are systemic weaknesses that include loopholes in oversight, a law allowing 70 government and private agencies to authorize new charters, and financial incentives that encourage sponsors to let schools stay open. Even the Republican-controlled legislature recognized a problem in December, passing a law that requires failing charter schools to improve or face closing in mid-2009. Speaker Jon Husted of the Ohio House, the Republican who wrote the law, said Mr. Dann's lawsuits, based on an untested legal strategy, were precipitous and had usurped the legislature's powers. "This is like suing the American Cancer Society just because they haven't yet cured cancer," Mr. Husted said.

The partisan struggle here comes just as the charter school movement has been making important inroads among Democrats. In the 1990's, President Bill Clinton and other centrist Democrats endorsed charters as a useful new option that could improve public schools through competition. But teachers' unions, a backbone of the party, have fought them, partly because most operate nonunion. This year, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and former Gov. Bill Richardson, candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, have all voiced support for quality charters. So have a few teachers' union officials.

Charter school advocates worry that Mr. Dann's crackdown may prove popular with Democratic and independent voters nationwide. Ohio's labor leaders enthusiastically applaud it. "If chronically lousy charters aren't closed, the charter movement will continue under assault from its opponents," said Todd Ziebarth, a policy analyst at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. After Ohio's first 15 charters were authorized in the fall of 1998, they proved popular, especially in Cleveland, Dayton and other cities where parents were dissatisfied with often chaotic public schools. Others were added at a breakneck pace. Experts said too many opened too fast.

Federal money helped fuel the growth, with up to $450,000 available to every new school in its first three years. Ohio sweetened that incentive with $50,000 more. Some Ohio charters were formed, not to innovate in the classroom, but to take advantage of the start-up money, experts said, which is in addition to state financing allocated by enrollment numbers.

Ohio's charter authorization system also encouraged rapid growth. Most states limit the number of authorizing agencies to a handful; New York, for instance, has three. Ohio allows 70 groups, including universities, nonprofits and many unconventional agencies to be authorizers. One provincial sponsor, the Lucas County Educational Service Center, has authorized scores of schools around the state, more than any similar agency in the nation.

Many people with good intentions but few educational credentials rushed to open charter schools. William Peterson, a former University of Dayton football star with no experience in school administration, opened four, all now in academic emergency. One, the Colin Powell Leadership Academy in Dayton, is the target of a lawsuit by Mr. Dann.

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