I Speak of Dreams

Good(ish) News on the Seidel Subpoena, and another Shoemaker Fishing Expedition

Update: Orac writes a much clearer and more convincing post on inequity of the McCormick subpoena.

As most of you know, Kathleen Seidel was issued an invasive and intimidating subpoena in a personal-injury case, by the vaccine-injury attorney Clifford Shoemaker. Ms. Seidel has no connection to that case.

I kept track of internet responses to the subpoena at this post.

The good news: Ms. Seidel announced yesterday that:

Last week, the First Amendment team at Public Citizen agreed to provide me with legal assistance. As of this morning, no response was forthcoming from Mr. Clifford Shoemaker, attorney for Rev. Lisa Sykes and Seth Sykes.

The not-so-good news: Clifford Shoemaker also issued a similar "fishing expedition"  subpoena personally to  Marie McCormick, M.D.   Dr. McCormick chaired the Institute of Medicine's Immunization Safety Review Committee, the subpoena demands that McCormack produce documents that are are readily available on the National Academies of Science website.

The McCormick subpoena is just as inappropriate as the Seidel subpoena.

Update: Skeptico has the perfect clarification:

There is an old saying in legal circles that if the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if the law is on your side, pound the law; if neither is on your side, pound the table.  Clifford Shoemaker, with neither the facts nor the law on his side, prefers to pound the table. Or more accurately, to pound his opponents with frivolous intimidatory subpoenas.

  As Ms. Seidel writes,

Dr. McCormick has my solidarity and sympathy — as do any other critical participants in public discourse about autism and vaccines who might join our ranks.

 

PKids' Campaign: Silence the Sound of Pertussis

As I told you here, PKids has launched a campaign to get all children and adults vaccinated against pertussis, "Silence the Sound of Pertussis".

Below the fold, bloggers who have joined the campaign.  Tell your friends.  Write about the campaign.

From Pertussis.com: Complications of Pertussis

• Young infants are at highest risk for pertussis-related complications, including seizures, encephalopathy (swelling of the brain), otitis media (severe ear infection), anorexia (severe restriction of food intake) and dehydration.
• Pneumonia is the most common complication and cause of infant pertussis-related deaths.
• Whooping cough can be life-threatening for infants who are not fully vaccinated.  In fact, over the last decade, 80 percent of whooping cough deaths occurred in infants under 6 months of age.
• In adolescents and adults, whooping cough can cause severe coughing that can make it hard to breathe, eat, or sleep, and can result in cracked ribs, pneumonia, or hospitalization.

Up to half of the infants who contract pertussis acquire it from a parent or other caregiver.  Recently, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that all adults and caregivers of children to be immunized against pertussis, which will then prevent transmission to young infants. 

Why Vaccinate?

Recently, I received an email from PKids on their campaign, "Silence the Sounds of Pertussis."  ER Nursey was also on the email list, and tells this story:

The baby was 9 months old, his birth weight was 8 lbs 5 ounces. At six months he weighed just shy of 20 pounds. Today he weighed 15 pounds - he was a skeleton and he was dying.

Mom had brought him in after treatment by his naturopath had failed. Constant coughing had made it impossible for him to take in adequate nutrition and starvation, coupled with a raging bacterial pneumonia were conspiring to shortly end his very short life.

We worked feverishly. Intubation, IV boluses, major antibiotics, vasopressors. All futile.

At 9:03 pm, after 30 minutes of cardiopulmonary resuscitation we pronounced him dead.

This boy had pertussis. His mother choose not to vaccinate him. I won't enter that debate. Anyone who has ever watched a child die or become permanently disabled from a preventable illness supports vaccination.

Watch and listen to the sounds of pertussis.

The immunity given by vaccination in infancy wanes over time, just like the tetanus vaccine.  The CDC recommends that teens receive a booster, in the form of Tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis vaccine (TDaP).

Up to half of the infants who contract pertussis acquire it from a parent or other caregiver.  Recently, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that all adults and caregivers of children to be immunized against pertussis, which will then prevent transmission to young infants. 

Response to Intervention (RTI) Action Network

The National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) is a national, not-for-profit center founded in 1977.  The mission:

NCLD works to ensure that the nation's 15 million children, adolescents and adults with learning disabilities have every opportunity to succeed in school, work and life.

Its latest initiative is the Response to Intervention (RTI) Action Network.   The Director, Kathleen A. Whitmire, Ph.D., explained the need for the RTI Action Network:

The adoption of RTI will of course require some deep, system-wide changes.  While change is hard, and sometimes uncomfortable, we can reach our goal of providing high-quality instruction to all students if we work collaboratively and collectively.  It is paramount that state and local policies and practices evolve in order to help inform building-level leadership.  School leadership in turn will be able to galvanize school staff to embrace the necessary changes in roles and responsibilities and help facilitate the breaking-down of barriers between general education and special education.

The tagline for the RTI Action Network is: The Information You Need to Take Action, The Networking You Need to Be Successful.

The RTI Action Network's website is http://www.rtinetwork.org/, which has sections on Learn More About RTI, Get Started In Implementing RTI, Include Essential Components, Connect with Others, and Professional Development.  The organization also offers an email bulletin of upcoming events.

The first online talk will be on Managing Ongoing Student Assessments, with Stanley Deno  April 23, 2008, 1-2 p.m. EDT.

Progress measures have become a central component of the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach. Contemporary assessment has shifted focus from describing differences between students to measuring their progress toward important educational outcomes.

Curriculum-Based Measurement procedures are used to monitor basic skills growth, to identify students at risk of learning difficulty, to evaluate efforts to prevent and remediate low achievement, and to aid in making instructional decisions to accelerate learning.

Join our expert, Stanley Deno, Ph.D., best known for his research leading to the development of Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) progress monitoring procedures and their use in the RTI model, as he answers your questions on CBM.

Fighting Back Against "The World Is Soooo Dangerous Now": Free Range Kids

Lenore Skenazy let her son Izzy make his own way home from Bloomingdale's in New York City a couple of weeks ago, and wrote about the experience in the New York Sun.  It was a man-bites-dog story, as Izzy is only nine--.  Lenore wrote another column for the Huffington Post:

Last week I wrote a column for my newspaper, The New York Sun, titled, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride The Subway." It basically said that I let him do this because he wanted to take a trip solo, he knew how to read the map, and I had every confidence that he could find his way home.

Two days later, said son and I found ourselves on the Today Show, MSNBC and FoxNews, trying to convince anchor after anchor after anchor that:

1) This was not a crazy idea - as they could see from the fact the kid was sitting there, grinning. And

2) I am not a crazy mom, as they could see from...

Well, that's the point. Not all of them could see. The mere fact that I'd let my son out of my sight made me seem nuts to more than a few people, who wondered why didn't I follow him, or keep checking in with a cell phone, or wait until he was 34 and balding before I let him go out on his own.

Skenazy is looking to give her son "a longer leash."

But here's what I've learned from all the folks who don't want to do that, and send bile-filled notes instead: For some reason we live in a society that sees little difference between letting a child frolic in the front yard and letting a child frolic in front of a firing squad. It's impossible for people to calculate the difference between real and remote risks.

So she's started a blog, Free Range Kids, to counter the coddling and hypervigilance -- even countering the helicopter parenting phenomenon.

At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail.

Go and tell your story of raising Free Range Kids.

 

Why Should You Care About Ben Stein's "Documentary", Expelled?

The reason you should care is that the movie wallows in falsehood.  It presents a religious doctrine dressed up in a sciency-looking suit, and when actual scientists point out the anti-science nature of intelligent design, its' backers claim victimhood.  The movie is a good example of manufactroversy.

The tag line for the movie  Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed  reads "Big Science has expelled smart new ideas from the classroom.  What they forget is that every generation has its rebel.  Ben Stein blows the horn on SUPPRESSION"

The movie overview page on reads in part:

[Ben Stein's ] heroic and, at times, shocking journey confronting the world’s top scientists, educators and philosophers, regarding the persecution of the many by an elite few.

Ben realizes that he has been “Expelled,” and that educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired – for the “crime” of merely believing that there might be evidence of “design” in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance.

Who are these allegedly persecuted individuals? 

• Richard Sternberg (an academic)
• Guillermo Gonzalez (an academic)
• Caroline Crocker (an academic)
• Robert Marks (an academic)
• Pamela Winnick (a journalist)
• Michael Egnor (a surgeon)

Every assertion the movie makes about the "persecution" these individuals allegedly experienced  is false.

The big change I want in the coming years is to live in a country where policies are made on reality-based principles, not faith or lies and distortions.

 

Variety Reviews Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

It is far from glowing.

There's an intelligent case to be made for intelligent design, which is why "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," a flimsy attempt to discredit Darwinist theory as the cornerstone of modern biology, reps such a missed opportunity. While roving interviewer Ben Stein extracts some choice soundbites from scientists on both sides of the creation-vs.-evolution debate, the film's flippant approach undermines the seriousness of its discourse, trading less in facts than in emotional appeals. A probable punching bag for film critics and evolution proponents alike, docu will be a natural selection for Christian audiences and should spread like the gospel on homevid.

[snip]

First-time director Nathan Frankowski strikes a relentlessly jokey tone throughout, using black-and-white film clips as comic punctuation (after news of a professor's axing, pic cuts to a shot of a guillotine). In addition to being just plain irritating, this jittery style seems to reinforce the perception of the pic's target audience as a bunch of intellectual lightweights.

Even more offensive is the film's attempt to link Darwin's "survival of the fittest" ideas and Hitler's master-race ambitions (when in doubt, invoke the Holocaust), complete with solemnly scored footage of the experimentation labs at Dachau. Evocations of the Berlin Wall, treated as a symbol of a bullheaded scientific establishment on the verge of collapse, are equally fatuous.

Heavily sampling footage from classic films (including "Inherit the Wind," natch), "Expelled" is technically well-mounted, though its aesthetics trump its ideas at every turn. If evolution is worth debating, it's worth debating well, and by a more intelligently designed film than this one.

For a complete list of responses in responsible media, go to Expelled, the National Center for Science Education's response to the film.

 

Jesse Drews, 21, Alcohol Poisoning

Jesse Drews turned 21 on March 24.  Starting just after midnight, he celebrated at a bar in Waupun, Wisconsin, evidently engaging in "power hour" or "21 for 21".   Several hours later, he was found unresponsive on a couch in his home.

His mother, quoted in the New York Times:

“I never in a million years thought we would be in this situation,'’ Mrs. Drews said. “Kids have to know about this risk. I hope anybody who goes into a bar and sees this happening will say something.'’

My deepest condolences to Mr. Drews' family and friends.

 

A Boarding School Runs Into Admissions Drop and Allows Mission Drift

The difficulties facing Pine Ridge School, in Williston, Vermont, should serve as a case-study for boards of directors of independent schools.

Pine Ridge was founded in 1968 as a co-ed boarding school for students with language-based learning disabilities (primarily dyslexia) and uses an Orton-Gillingham approach to remediation.

Enrollment began dropping five or six years ago, and the admissions department began admitting students with problems outside the school's area of expertise, specifically "students with emotional and behavioral challenges who would be better served at a therapeutic school with extensive counseling," according to Board of Trustees Chair Mitch Roman.

Enrollment continued to drop, and in January, the school faced a crisis.  The school responded by laying off a number of employees.

As difficult as the past few months have been, Roman is confident that the school will recover, grow and thrive under careful budgeting based "not on what we think, not on what we wish, but on actual numbers."

The board also moved to re-focus on the primary mission, educating students with dyslexia.  Specialized schools for dyslexic students are an important part of the range of educational opportunities available.  I hope for the best for Pine Ridge.

Vote in the Bogus Bowl!

John Wills Lloyd has a regular feature at his blog, Teach Effectively!, in which he asks readers to chose between a set of bogus reform initiatives. Bogus Bowl III is up.  Go vote.  The choices are Which of these is the most bogus reason for not testing whether students have learned what educators purport to teach?

• Testing might injure students' self-esteem.
• Some children are just not good test takers.
• Testing disrupts learning itself.
• Testing will take time away from teaching.
• Tests can never reveal what students have truly learned.

But remember, you have to go to Teach Effectively! to vote. Bogus Bowl I: Which of the following reform movements is the most bogus?

• Brain-based instruction. (59%, 57 Votes)
• Differentiated instruction. (16%, 15 Votes)
• Block scheduling for classes at the secondary level. (15%, 14 Votes)
• Inclusion of students with disabilities in general education settings. (10%, 10 Votes)

Bogus Bowl II Which of the following is the most bogus reason for refusing to provide effective instruction to students?

• That kind of instruction may be good for some students, but it just doesn’t fit my teaching style. (35%, 34 Votes)
• Students will learn it when they’re ready. (33%, 32 Votes)
• Nobody can teach students who come from bad homes. (24%, 24 Votes)
• Some students just have crossed wires in their heads. (8%, 8 Votes)

Cross-Posted at Kitchen Table Math