The police emergency analogy is interesting in that I've never heard it before. Can you link or point me to more extended presentations of this?
My main complaint with this approach is that I don't view the world as a battlefield because that renders the term meaningless. It also renders terms like "civilian" meaningless. Or not maybe I have it wrong that's why I'd like to read more.
I think you've identified one crucial thing that NBC has to address before they can treat this like regular TV. Just now I tried to watch an episode of "Life" and ran into the DRM issue. So now I've uninstalled the player. That's not the issue though. While I was realizing that this DRM thing wasn't going away, I saw and heard that same Bertolli ad 5 times. Once just for kicks I tried fullscreen and it was horribly, obviously interlaced. Still not the problem. The real issue is that to achieve Google-level location specific advertisement, NBC would have to change its relationship with advertisers for the online product. When I'm watching NBC on TV now, I never see ads for local businesses because they can't afford the rates for ads on shows like these. As such, NBC never deals with the local companies at all. Who's going to do that for them in the online case? The ISP? Maybe they could hire a company to deal with regional advertisers, but probably not just one company could do that for all regions. I think they don't want to spend the money on this complexity.
Maybe rightly so, nobody really expects them to operate this at a loss after all.
The telecoms are in an awkward position (of their own making) for sure. The same people who said "help us or the terrorists win" aren't the ones who would see them prosecuted. The problem with your argument is that the government we have now is factionalized. While both factions operate under the same title of "US Government" they don't exercise their power in the same way. The executive branch seems to be taking the position of Nixon who famously said "If the President does it, it isn't illegal." They won't come out and say they're above the law, they'll change the law so that what they did can't be punished. If Congress weren't steadily selling out the people, the strategy wouldn't work. People complain about Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer, but really anyone from any party who supports this crap should be voted out. Republicans should be expected to do the right thing too.
And I think the answer to your question is "both."
Re:EA Not Being Evil for a Change
on
One SimCity Per Child
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been reading Good to Great, and I think EA's acquisition of Bioware is interesting. Bioware not only makes good games, but they also develop some interesting engine technology. For example their infinity engine was used by a number of other games and recently we read that Mass Effect's chat system will be used in other EA titles. It seems like a more sensible acquisition to buy a company for their catalog and game tech expertise than to do it just to exploit the popularity of certain games. It could be that EA is quietly changing. I don't follow the games industry closely enough to make the statement for certain, but it does seem like something is different.
One of the main questions a good company should answer to become great is "what can we do better than anyone else?" If someone has found the answer to this at EA and is doggedly pursuing it, your list and this recent simcity move could be part of a bigger transition.
All the people in a corporation are already receiving representation through the normal means. Some people are party to several corporations and would be overrepresented. You've heard of holding companies, I assume. Dummy corporations? The same mechanisms that make money laundering possible would be put to use in politics, even more than they are already.
As long as Erik Wolpaw from Old Man Murray is still involved, any sequel should be good. For those who don't know, Old Man Murray was one of a few honest game review sites. In days when most websites would gush over upcoming games to secure future access, Chet (Faliszek) and Erik applied their knowledge of what was wrong with games in general to their review of each new game. Read their preview of Serious Sam (linked below). It's hilarious on many levels, and very incisive besides. So it's easy to see why Psychonauts was fun fun fun.
From Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and some journalist (available at Google Books):
If you are taking a trip and have the choice of driving or flying, you might wish to consider to consider the per-hour death rate of driving versus flying. It is true that many more people die in the United States each year in motor vehicle accidents (roughly forty thousand) than in airplane crashes (fewer than one thousand). But it is also true that most people spend a lot more time in cars than in airplanes. (More people die even in boating accidents each year than in airplane crashes; as we saw with swimming pools versus guns, water is a lot more dangerous than most people think.) The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying, however, is about equal.
The book contains a lot of that kind of analysis and is worth reading simply for the insight into incentives (which I found in the first chapter.)
If they had any guts at all they'd cast James Cawley as Kirk. His performance on Star Trek: New Voyages evokes Shatner's hamminess occasionally, but more often you forget it's someone else playing Kirk and you're just watching Star Trek again. If you've soured on the franchise like some posters have I encourage you to watch some episodes:
Our school system recently made a transition from individual electronic gradebook servers per school to centralized gradebook servers serving the district. The troubles they didn't foresee in testing came from not having actual teachers around to place a realistic load on the system. Not just in the number of concurrent users, but the varying operating systems in place at schools, the varying age of equipment from room-to-room, and other factors have popped up. I'm responsible at my school site for handling people's issues with the system, but I had no part in the decision to move to a centralized server. It makes sense though, I just wish it had been set up in parallel for a while last year so that we wouldn't have all this failure to deal with that could have been anticipated.
The worst case with our gradebooks is that we get a little behind putting scores into the computer. No one's livelihood is at stake. I would hope that with something like payroll they could have tried it in parallel for a while to catch issues like the ones they're having now.
If this man is the one I'm thinking of, he's saving a lot of computers from landfills. Even those of us in the movement have heard what an ecological disaster that can be. "Reuse" is often the best thing you can do with a used item, even better than recycling.
Blizzard has had open postings for people to work on "next-generation" MMO development for some time now. Since they certainly can't think of World of Warcraft as "next-generation," I think you're right. Personally I'm hoping for a Diablo game.
FWIW here in Calvert County Maryland you'd have a hard time getting good housing at that rate. I think part of the perception of what's middle class and upper and lower etc has to do with the recent housing bubble. People I know bought their townhouses for $130k 6 years ago and now those houses are selling for $300k. Whereas 60k might have been pretty livable here at that time it isn't anymore, certainly not for a family.
That's a separate issue really. The hierarchy of a business is not germane to policy of this nature. If the president of Gamestop decided to do this, there would be a parallel hue and cry about it. Many of the arguments here are along the lines of "if parents don't do the right thing for their kids then no one else should either." The president of Gamestop could and would be suspended or removed by whoever can do that. Everyone is someone else's peon. Besides, parents were still allowed to go in and buy games for their flunking child at the Oak Cliff store. The manager only placed a restriction on school-aged kids buying games.
I just got an interactive whiteboard for my room, and I've been looking around for useful animations for the kids. Classzone has a number of these, you just have to select the right textbook. I'm teaching in Maryland with the "Algebra 2 2007" book. If you choose a different book, you may wind up with the older version of their site. That's just a bunch of PDF's of the supplemental workbooks. Animations of concepts are the way to go I think. This is especially true when kids can manipulate the process themselves. Classzone has these in Shockwave format. There's one for slope where you can move either of two points on a 2d line, and the slope computation appears, the rise and run are shown, the line is redrawn, etc. You could certainly do the same lesson with a chalkboard or overhead projector but for visual learners, seeing the change will make a big difference. That's my hope anyway.
The best approach seems to be like one of the other posters said: don't think of it as "what can I present with a projector," instead think of it as "what can I do to present Chain Rule interactively?" Also, please do avoid powerpoints. One of the other teachers in my building has written a series of powerpoints and just stands at the board flipping pages. Make sure you have kids using the new system and thinking about ways it can help them. For example, being able to enlarge, recolor, print, etc your handwritten notes can be a boon for students with certain special needs.
Some of the other posters in this thread are talking about the larger issue of technology in classrooms. That's fine and all, but I didn't ask for this interactive whiteboard. Now that I have it, I'm trying to make it worthwhile for the kids. Often that's as much control over the larger issues as teachers have.
It's because they haven't read A People's History of the United States. All the same kind of posturing, politicking, coordinated oppression, all that has been going on forever and ever. The Constitution, while clearly laid out and functional, was into that shit up to its neck. At least read the story of the Whiskey rebellion.
Thanks for the link. I'm still reading it and I want to point out a problem I'm having with Mr. Paul's position:
The American Revolutionaries clearly chose liberty over security, for their economic security and their very lives were threatened by undertaking the job of forming a new and limited government. Most would have been a lot richer and safer by sticking with the King. Economic needs or desires were not the driving force behind the early American patriotic effort.
The Revolution and subsequent Constitution settled the question as to which authority should rule man's action: the individual or the state. The authors of the Constitution clearly understood that man has free will to make personal choices and be responsible for the consequences of his own actions. Man, they knew, was not to be simply a cog in a wheel, or a single cell of an organism, or a branch of a tree, but an individual with a free will and responsibility for his eternal soul as well as his life on earth. If God could permit spiritual freedom, government certainly ought to permit the political freedom that allows one to pursue life's dreams and assume one's responsibilities. If man can achieve spiritual redemption through grace, which allows him to use the released spiritual energy to pursue man's highest and noblest goals, so should man's mind, body, and property be freed from the burdens of unchecked government authority. The Founders were confident that this would release the creative human energy required to produce the goods and services that would improve the living standards of all mankind.
Minimizing government authority over the people was critical to this endeavor. Just as the individual was key to salvation, individual effort was the key to worldly endeavors. Little doubt existed that material abundance and sustenance came from work and effort, family, friends, church, and voluntary community action, as long as government did not obstruct.
I'm not really sold on the Constitution as much more than preserving the status quo for landowners and political enfranchisees at the time. The problem with democracy for the founding fathers was that a large number of people in the country at that time didn't have political power (slaves, women, natives.) The story of the whiskey rebellion is pretty revealing of the founding fathers' intentions for our government. I'm talking about the taxes and the assumption of debt. The war bonds were held by a relatively small number of people. During the war itself, soldiers were often paid with bonds, but since they didn't have much money to begin with, a bond that could be redeemed later didn't do them much good. They thus sold their bonds to people who could afford to float them, for less than face value. From the wikipedia page:
The weak and ineffective government of the United States under the Articles of Confederation had been replaced by a stronger federal government under the United States Constitution in 1789. This new government, at the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, assumed the states' debt from the American Revolutionary War. One of the steps taken to pay down the debt, that was requested by Hamilton, and approved by Congress, was a tax imposed in 1791 on distilled spirits. Large producers were assessed a tax of six cents a gallon. However, smaller producers, most of whom were of Scottish or Irish descent, the so-called cohee located in the more remote western areas, were taxed at a higher rate of nine cents a gallon. These Western settlers were short of cash to begin with, and lacked any practical means to get their grain to market other than fermenting and disti
A corrupt campaign finance system, coupled with vulnerable electronic voting have eroded America's confidence in our elections. The USA Patriot Act and secret strategy meetings to set policy tear into the very concept of We the People. As President, Dennis will protect individual liberty and privacy and restore balance and fairness in America's electoral system.
Democracy can not flourish when the government shrouds itself in secrecy and citizens lose their privacy. It should be the other way around.
The term "Special Education" is supposed to apply to the low and the high end. The high end gets ignored because those kids are going to learn even in spite of you. What different needs does a gifted student have? Do any of you even know? Here's a hint: they're not just smarter. It's not IQ that determines giftedness. You almost need a whole different environment for gifted children in the same way that ED kids get a classroom with an attached crisis room. With NCLB's mandates of Adequate Yearly Progress in certain measurable areas, it's all schools can do to get enough Special Ed teachers to bring the low end up and deal with the mountain of paperwork that is Special Education.
NCLB is designed to take money out of public schools and move it to private schools. This is accomplished by increasing the Federal government's role in education to the point where people get fed up and opt out. Can't afford to opt out? Maybe vouchers are the solution! Perhaps you should vote GuilianiVote Giuliani. Private schools have an easier time dealing with the high end because they're equipped to dismiss whoever they want. With "free and appropriate public education" guaranteed to all children, private schools couldn't do what they do without public schools there to catch the ones they throw out. The private school around here notifies their students sometime around January that they're not going to be invited back the following year. Guess where they end up.
This problem has been around a lot longer than NCLB though. Teachers don't know how to deal with kids "smarter" than we are. I use quote marks because it's not simply a matter of intellect. It doesn't happen to me that often that my students outthink me but it does make me uncomfortable when it does. It doesn't help that a lot of times such kids have a sort of learned-smartass attitude. You have to push through that, often many times per year, to get them to let you offer them something worth their time. Lots of teachers aren't emotionally equipped to handle that kind of thing because they have an authoritarian style. As in: "I don't care how smart you think you are there's no way you know more than me I'm an adult."
It also doesn't help that special needs are so misunderstood that people boil kids down to smart/average/dumb. Most kids with learning disabilities have average or above average intelligence. Special needs aren't a case of kids being lazy or stupid.
The one good thing that ever came out of MTV was Austin Stories, a short-lived series. Through scrounging I found a DVD of the series a couple of years ago. That source seems to have dried up. It has, however, been put up on youtube.
Also, the way achievement is measured is another separate issue. In my mind, I associate national standards with high stakes testing, but that's not the only way performance can be assessed. Judging from my experience, it's the most likely way, problematic as it is.
Slashdot Mirror
The police emergency analogy is interesting in that I've never heard it before. Can you link or point me to more extended presentations of this?
My main complaint with this approach is that I don't view the world as a battlefield because that renders the term meaningless. It also renders terms like "civilian" meaningless. Or not maybe I have it wrong that's why I'd like to read more.
I think you've identified one crucial thing that NBC has to address before they can treat this like regular TV. Just now I tried to watch an episode of "Life" and ran into the DRM issue. So now I've uninstalled the player. That's not the issue though. While I was realizing that this DRM thing wasn't going away, I saw and heard that same Bertolli ad 5 times. Once just for kicks I tried fullscreen and it was horribly, obviously interlaced. Still not the problem. The real issue is that to achieve Google-level location specific advertisement, NBC would have to change its relationship with advertisers for the online product. When I'm watching NBC on TV now, I never see ads for local businesses because they can't afford the rates for ads on shows like these. As such, NBC never deals with the local companies at all. Who's going to do that for them in the online case? The ISP? Maybe they could hire a company to deal with regional advertisers, but probably not just one company could do that for all regions. I think they don't want to spend the money on this complexity.
Maybe rightly so, nobody really expects them to operate this at a loss after all.
The telecoms are in an awkward position (of their own making) for sure. The same people who said "help us or the terrorists win" aren't the ones who would see them prosecuted. The problem with your argument is that the government we have now is factionalized. While both factions operate under the same title of "US Government" they don't exercise their power in the same way. The executive branch seems to be taking the position of Nixon who famously said "If the President does it, it isn't illegal." They won't come out and say they're above the law, they'll change the law so that what they did can't be punished. If Congress weren't steadily selling out the people, the strategy wouldn't work. People complain about Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer, but really anyone from any party who supports this crap should be voted out. Republicans should be expected to do the right thing too.
And I think the answer to your question is "both."
I've been reading Good to Great, and I think EA's acquisition of Bioware is interesting. Bioware not only makes good games, but they also develop some interesting engine technology. For example their infinity engine was used by a number of other games and recently we read that Mass Effect's chat system will be used in other EA titles. It seems like a more sensible acquisition to buy a company for their catalog and game tech expertise than to do it just to exploit the popularity of certain games. It could be that EA is quietly changing. I don't follow the games industry closely enough to make the statement for certain, but it does seem like something is different.
One of the main questions a good company should answer to become great is "what can we do better than anyone else?" If someone has found the answer to this at EA and is doggedly pursuing it, your list and this recent simcity move could be part of a bigger transition.
All the people in a corporation are already receiving representation through the normal means. Some people are party to several corporations and would be overrepresented. You've heard of holding companies, I assume. Dummy corporations? The same mechanisms that make money laundering possible would be put to use in politics, even more than they are already.
Give Anachronox a try if you haven't already.
As long as Erik Wolpaw from Old Man Murray is still involved, any sequel should be good. For those who don't know, Old Man Murray was one of a few honest game review sites. In days when most websites would gush over upcoming games to secure future access, Chet (Faliszek) and Erik applied their knowledge of what was wrong with games in general to their review of each new game. Read their preview of Serious Sam (linked below). It's hilarious on many levels, and very incisive besides. So it's easy to see why Psychonauts was fun fun fun.
Not knowing what E For All was, I assumed it was Ecstasy for All. Which seems like it would be well attended.
The book contains a lot of that kind of analysis and is worth reading simply for the insight into incentives (which I found in the first chapter.)
Don't give the Bush administration any more ideas.
If they had any guts at all they'd cast James Cawley as Kirk. His performance on Star Trek: New Voyages evokes Shatner's hamminess occasionally, but more often you forget it's someone else playing Kirk and you're just watching Star Trek again. If you've soured on the franchise like some posters have I encourage you to watch some episodes:
http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/Payroll won't pay you if they have a choice.
Our school system recently made a transition from individual electronic gradebook servers per school to centralized gradebook servers serving the district. The troubles they didn't foresee in testing came from not having actual teachers around to place a realistic load on the system. Not just in the number of concurrent users, but the varying operating systems in place at schools, the varying age of equipment from room-to-room, and other factors have popped up. I'm responsible at my school site for handling people's issues with the system, but I had no part in the decision to move to a centralized server. It makes sense though, I just wish it had been set up in parallel for a while last year so that we wouldn't have all this failure to deal with that could have been anticipated.
The worst case with our gradebooks is that we get a little behind putting scores into the computer. No one's livelihood is at stake. I would hope that with something like payroll they could have tried it in parallel for a while to catch issues like the ones they're having now.
If this man is the one I'm thinking of, he's saving a lot of computers from landfills. Even those of us in the movement have heard what an ecological disaster that can be. "Reuse" is often the best thing you can do with a used item, even better than recycling.
Blizzard has had open postings for people to work on "next-generation" MMO development for some time now. Since they certainly can't think of World of Warcraft as "next-generation," I think you're right. Personally I'm hoping for a Diablo game.
FWIW here in Calvert County Maryland you'd have a hard time getting good housing at that rate. I think part of the perception of what's middle class and upper and lower etc has to do with the recent housing bubble. People I know bought their townhouses for $130k 6 years ago and now those houses are selling for $300k. Whereas 60k might have been pretty livable here at that time it isn't anymore, certainly not for a family.
Computer games? Tchah! In my day, all we had was Aragorn.
I thought the kid had sold his company for $6.5m
That's a separate issue really. The hierarchy of a business is not germane to policy of this nature. If the president of Gamestop decided to do this, there would be a parallel hue and cry about it. Many of the arguments here are along the lines of "if parents don't do the right thing for their kids then no one else should either." The president of Gamestop could and would be suspended or removed by whoever can do that. Everyone is someone else's peon. Besides, parents were still allowed to go in and buy games for their flunking child at the Oak Cliff store. The manager only placed a restriction on school-aged kids buying games.
I just got an interactive whiteboard for my room, and I've been looking around for useful animations for the kids. Classzone has a number of these, you just have to select the right textbook. I'm teaching in Maryland with the "Algebra 2 2007" book. If you choose a different book, you may wind up with the older version of their site. That's just a bunch of PDF's of the supplemental workbooks. Animations of concepts are the way to go I think. This is especially true when kids can manipulate the process themselves. Classzone has these in Shockwave format. There's one for slope where you can move either of two points on a 2d line, and the slope computation appears, the rise and run are shown, the line is redrawn, etc. You could certainly do the same lesson with a chalkboard or overhead projector but for visual learners, seeing the change will make a big difference. That's my hope anyway.
The best approach seems to be like one of the other posters said: don't think of it as "what can I present with a projector," instead think of it as "what can I do to present Chain Rule interactively?" Also, please do avoid powerpoints. One of the other teachers in my building has written a series of powerpoints and just stands at the board flipping pages. Make sure you have kids using the new system and thinking about ways it can help them. For example, being able to enlarge, recolor, print, etc your handwritten notes can be a boon for students with certain special needs.
Some of the other posters in this thread are talking about the larger issue of technology in classrooms. That's fine and all, but I didn't ask for this interactive whiteboard. Now that I have it, I'm trying to make it worthwhile for the kids. Often that's as much control over the larger issues as teachers have.
It's because they haven't read A People's History of the United States. All the same kind of posturing, politicking, coordinated oppression, all that has been going on forever and ever. The Constitution, while clearly laid out and functional, was into that shit up to its neck. At least read the story of the Whiskey rebellion.
Thanks for the link. I'm still reading it and I want to point out a problem I'm having with Mr. Paul's position:
The American Revolutionaries clearly chose liberty over security, for their economic security and their very lives were threatened by undertaking the job of forming a new and limited government. Most would have been a lot richer and safer by sticking with the King. Economic needs or desires were not the driving force behind the early American patriotic effort.
The Revolution and subsequent Constitution settled the question as to which authority should rule man's action: the individual or the state. The authors of the Constitution clearly understood that man has free will to make personal choices and be responsible for the consequences of his own actions. Man, they knew, was not to be simply a cog in a wheel, or a single cell of an organism, or a branch of a tree, but an individual with a free will and responsibility for his eternal soul as well as his life on earth. If God could permit spiritual freedom, government certainly ought to permit the political freedom that allows one to pursue life's dreams and assume one's responsibilities. If man can achieve spiritual redemption through grace, which allows him to use the released spiritual energy to pursue man's highest and noblest goals, so should man's mind, body, and property be freed from the burdens of unchecked government authority. The Founders were confident that this would release the creative human energy required to produce the goods and services that would improve the living standards of all mankind.
Minimizing government authority over the people was critical to this endeavor. Just as the individual was key to salvation, individual effort was the key to worldly endeavors. Little doubt existed that material abundance and sustenance came from work and effort, family, friends, church, and voluntary community action, as long as government did not obstruct.
I'm not really sold on the Constitution as much more than preserving the status quo for landowners and political enfranchisees at the time. The problem with democracy for the founding fathers was that a large number of people in the country at that time didn't have political power (slaves, women, natives.) The story of the whiskey rebellion is pretty revealing of the founding fathers' intentions for our government. I'm talking about the taxes and the assumption of debt. The war bonds were held by a relatively small number of people. During the war itself, soldiers were often paid with bonds, but since they didn't have much money to begin with, a bond that could be redeemed later didn't do them much good. They thus sold their bonds to people who could afford to float them, for less than face value. From the wikipedia page:
The weak and ineffective government of the United States under the Articles of Confederation had been replaced by a stronger federal government under the United States Constitution in 1789. This new government, at the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, assumed the states' debt from the American Revolutionary War. One of the steps taken to pay down the debt, that was requested by Hamilton, and approved by Congress, was a tax imposed in 1791 on distilled spirits. Large producers were assessed a tax of six cents a gallon. However, smaller producers, most of whom were of Scottish or Irish descent, the so-called cohee located in the more remote western areas, were taxed at a higher rate of nine cents a gallon. These Western settlers were short of cash to begin with, and lacked any practical means to get their grain to market other than fermenting and disti
Give me something besides innuendo to read if you don't have time to explain.
Dennis Kucinich has a good record on this and many other issues too. From his campaign site:
A corrupt campaign finance system, coupled with vulnerable electronic voting have eroded America's confidence in our elections. The USA Patriot Act and secret strategy meetings to set policy tear into the very concept of We the People. As President, Dennis will protect individual liberty and privacy and restore balance and fairness in America's electoral system.
Democracy can not flourish when the government shrouds itself in secrecy and citizens lose their privacy. It should be the other way around.
The emphasis is mine.
The term "Special Education" is supposed to apply to the low and the high end. The high end gets ignored because those kids are going to learn even in spite of you. What different needs does a gifted student have? Do any of you even know? Here's a hint: they're not just smarter. It's not IQ that determines giftedness. You almost need a whole different environment for gifted children in the same way that ED kids get a classroom with an attached crisis room. With NCLB's mandates of Adequate Yearly Progress in certain measurable areas, it's all schools can do to get enough Special Ed teachers to bring the low end up and deal with the mountain of paperwork that is Special Education.
NCLB is designed to take money out of public schools and move it to private schools. This is accomplished by increasing the Federal government's role in education to the point where people get fed up and opt out. Can't afford to opt out? Maybe vouchers are the solution! Perhaps you should vote GuilianiVote Giuliani. Private schools have an easier time dealing with the high end because they're equipped to dismiss whoever they want. With "free and appropriate public education" guaranteed to all children, private schools couldn't do what they do without public schools there to catch the ones they throw out. The private school around here notifies their students sometime around January that they're not going to be invited back the following year. Guess where they end up.
This problem has been around a lot longer than NCLB though. Teachers don't know how to deal with kids "smarter" than we are. I use quote marks because it's not simply a matter of intellect. It doesn't happen to me that often that my students outthink me but it does make me uncomfortable when it does. It doesn't help that a lot of times such kids have a sort of learned-smartass attitude. You have to push through that, often many times per year, to get them to let you offer them something worth their time. Lots of teachers aren't emotionally equipped to handle that kind of thing because they have an authoritarian style. As in: "I don't care how smart you think you are there's no way you know more than me I'm an adult."
It also doesn't help that special needs are so misunderstood that people boil kids down to smart/average/dumb. Most kids with learning disabilities have average or above average intelligence. Special needs aren't a case of kids being lazy or stupid.
The one good thing that ever came out of MTV was Austin Stories, a short-lived series. Through scrounging I found a DVD of the series a couple of years ago. That source seems to have dried up. It has, however, been put up on youtube.
Also, the way achievement is measured is another separate issue. In my mind, I associate national standards with high stakes testing, but that's not the only way performance can be assessed. Judging from my experience, it's the most likely way, problematic as it is.