Richardson Schools: Recognized for Success
An editorial in The Dallas Morning News points out what residents of Richardson have known for a long time -- it has schools worth bragging about.
"The Richardson school district's enrollment is about 34 percent white, 31 percent Hispanic, 26 percent black and 8 percent Asian-American. The Texas Education Agency also reports that nearly half of Richardson's students qualify as economically disadvantaged. ... The state has awarded Richardson its second highest-ranking the last two years. That's a feat for a diverse district and requires large numbers of students progressing in math, science, reading, language and social studies."Congratulations, teachers, administrators, parents and students of the Richardson Independent School District. Great job.
Plano and Diversity: Not So Contradictory
Trey Garrison recently moved to Plano and is awfully defensive about it in a Viewpoints column in The Dallas Morning News. He simultaneously protests that Plano is a lot more diverse than people think and that he doesn't really want diversity in his neighborhood anyway. He's fine with diversity in the workplace and nightclubs, so long as it isn't class diversity. You're welcome in his neighborhood if you can afford weekly trips to Home Depot to keep up appearances. Keep poor people away from him, I guess.
Well, to each his own. I'm perfectly content in Richardson, where, as the story above points out, the schools' student body is truly diverse in ethnic background as well as socio-economic status. The school district's state rating demonstrates that kids can get a good education there, book learning in the classrooms, while simultaneously learning something about the rest of the world in the hallways and lunch room. I imagine that Plano is trending that way, too, to the benefit of everyone with schoolchildren living there, even Trey Garrison's family.
Mark Davis: What Me Worry?
Mark Davis isn't a climatologist, but he plays one in the newspapers. Al Gore issued a challenge to America to convert our electricity production away from use of fossil fuels within 10 years. This is a massive undertaking, almost impossible to imagine achieving, not least because of active opposition of the climate change deniers like Mark Davis. His latest attempt to talk Americans out of doing anything to stop climate change appears in a weekend op/ed column in The Dallas Morning News.
In truth, even Mark Davis is showing progress. Climate deniers originally denied that the climate was, in fact, changing. There are very few naysayers like that left. Even Mark Davis appears to have abandoned that argument.
The opposition has shifted to denying human involvement in climate change. Mark Davis says, "The logical flaw in assuming human blame is as simple as the understanding that one event may follow another without necessary causation. Global temperatures rose before man walked the Earth." Mark Davis' own logical flaw is thinking that because global temperatures have always fluctuated, then it follows that all fluctuations are therefore natural. There is a sound, factual, chain of causation between human burning of fossil fuel and global warming.
Davis isn't quite there yet, but many climate change deniers eventually retreat to a third argument -- maybe climate change is real, maybe humans are involved, but who's to say climate change is bad? Mark Davis himself is starting to use this argument. He says, "Who are we to assert that we know the planet's ideal temperature?"
This is a straw man argument. Scientists aren't claiming that there is an "ideal" temperature for earth. They do try to understand the effects of global warming on our existing environment. They certainly understand that some changes may benefit civilization, some harm civilization. Maybe a slightly warmer earth would reduce the cost of heating homes in currently frigid climates. Maybe global warming would open the arctic to agriculture and oil exploration. But Davis ignores the likelihood that some changes would be devastating. Flooding coastlines that are currently home to a billion people would be a disaster. Turning currently arable land into deserts, when a billion people still live by subsistence farming, would be a disaster. Davis says adapt. Six billion people trying to adapt to drastic climate change within a few decades or a century is certain to lead to unimaginable human suffering. But Mark Davis himself will probably survive quite comfortably, so why worry.
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