dice are rolling, the knives are out?

Tom Ridge has a 9 o'clock with John Ashcroft. But Ashcroft is running late so Ridge is left to putter outside the Attorney General's office. He is performing what is, in essence, the soul of his job -- waiting.

There is macro waiting, for Something Awful to Happen. And micro waiting, like this. Ridge checks his watch: 9:05. No sign of Ashcroft. He picks up the USA Today sports page while an Ashcroft aide compliments his peach-pink tie. "It's never boring in the Department of Justice," he says to the aide. "Never boring at all."

The Secretary of Homeland Security checks his watch again: 9:07. Ashcroft walks in three minutes later.

The two share an extended handshake, one of those Washington celebrity clenches that persist for several seconds and that, one suspects, is done for the benefit of people watching. One suspects this because Ashcroft and Ridge were together just an hour earlier.

"Mr. Secretary, how are you doing?" Ashcroft says. "Sorry to keep you waiting."

So... John Ashcroft decided to make Tom Ridge wait in front of a Washington Post reporter.

Could have been an attack of the runs, right?

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge have settled a bitter dispute between their agencies, signing a truce that gives the FBI sole control over financial investigations related to terrorism. But many Homeland Security officials say the deal is a dangerous mistake.

W. Ralph Basham, director of the Secret Service, which is now part of Homeland Security, wrote a memo to Ridge after the agreement was signed last week complaining that it "would severely jeopardize thousands of ongoing investigations and could compromise the federal government's ability to effectively prevent future attacks against our financial and critical infrastructures."

A number of investigators and ranking officials at the former Customs Service, which also was folded into the new Department of Homeland Security, added that it is ill-advised to locate all expertise in the financial war on terrorism in a single agency, the FBI.

Many officials and analysts predicted last year that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security would spark bitter bureaucratic struggles over terrorism investigations and intelligence collection. The friction over financial investigations in the war on terrorism is perhaps the first major example of this turf consciousness to emerge publicly.

In a memo dated Tuesday, Basham asked Ridge to scrap the agreement with Ashcroft, which was the subject of tense negotiations that lasted several months. Basham contends that the deal's wording suggests the Secret Service -- the nation's lead agency for investigations of counterfeiting, cyber-crime and many other kinds of financial fraud -- must check with the FBI before undertaking many investigations.

"This agreement unnecessarily and inexplicably alters the Secret Service's historic criminal investigative mission," Basham wrote. "The agreement is contradictory to the Secret Service's explicit statutory mandate to prevent and investigate financial crimes and provides an unworkable framework for current and future financial crime investigations."...

So, Ashcroft made Ridge wait in front of a Washington Post reporter a week after he'd successfully completed a huge bureaucratic powergrab.

You don't suppose Ridge is being marginalized, do you?

Let's see what the eponymous grovel@washpost.com has to say:

Nobody knows better than Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge: It's a dangerous world out there.

Just this week, in response to lethal bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, Ridge declared an increase in the "national threat level" to orange, indicating a "high risk of terrorist attack." On Monday, two suspected members of al Qaeda were arrested in Saudi Arabia in connection with a plot to hijack a airplane. And on Wednesday, disturbingly close to home, what may have been a pipe bomb exploded at Yale Law School.

The same day, amid massive security, Ridge accompanied President Bush to the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. But that night, he was noticeably absent from Bush's fundraising speech at Washington Convention Center.

So where was the president's designated protector of American citizens on U.S. soil?

He was enjoying Six Flags Over America in Largo with his 15-year-old son Tommy.

Dressed in casual khakis, a rain slicker and a baseball cap, Ridge was spotted first at one of the video arcades and then beside the Joker's Jinx thrill ride by a group of Capitol Hill staffers who also were attending Six Flags' VIP Night. Park spokeswoman Karin Korpowski told us the Ridges, accompanied by a security detail, were guests of Roger White, an executive headhunter who does business with the park.

"I met Tom Ridge, and he was a very nice man," she added.

Although the secretary didn't try his luck on any of the stomach-wrenching attractions, he did take in the "Batman Thrill Spectacular" stunt show. Korpowski said the Ridges arrived at the park around 7 p.m., and had so much fun that they stayed till the 10:30 closing time.

"The secretary was just following the same advice that he has been giving to American citizens," Ridge's spokesman told us yesterday. "They need to go about their lives and be assured that the homeland security professionals are taking measures to ensure the security of all Americans."


It would not amaze me if Mr. Ridge decides to spend more time with his family before the election.

hee.

"You can promise to do obscene things to peoples' bodies if they'll go with you to an opera, and they'll say "Sorry, I don't need that done today."." -- Nikki Giovanni on Survival Kit

school daze

I wrote last week about some stress we're having with the kid.

I blame George Bush.

OK, to some extent I blame George Bush because I think George Bush is the seething boil rising to a head on the massive infection that's been raising America's temperature until it doesn't seem as if its brain works any more.

Mostly, though, I blame George Bush because of testing.

Jesse and Jeanne and the Daily Howler have all written about our schools and our teachers and our kids in the last two days, and what they've written is well-thought-out and reasoned and sensible. I figure that gets me off the hook, so I'm freed up just to tell you why I'm pissed.

HM goes to public school. (So did I, and so did Procrustes (cause he's the procrustiest!) and my dad was an elementary school teacher in the NYC school system). We're very lucky - I researched all of the schools that were available to us, and with the exception of one which was far too expensive (12k, and they expected parents, oh OK mothers, to donate their time regularly during the day), our school had the best scores of anything public or private within five miles of us (and we don't keep a car, urbanites that we are).

It was useful, that score, and it's a terrific school.

HM's teacher this year is a disaster.

She seems to be a nice enough woman, a bit querulous, but nice enough, but her class is unruly and they're not learning and she has no control over them at all. It's not completely her fault, though.

This is the part where President Bush comes in.

See, no-one wants to teach fourth grade.

Fourth grade is when they've scheduled the big d0-or-die test that elementary schools are assessed on. Given the importance of the test, and the increasing pressure to link teachers' raises and their jobs to "performance," senior teachers understandably don't want to teach fourth grade - understandably because you can be the greatest teacher in the world and you're still not going to be able to cram four years of cumulative learning into a fourth-grader who hasn't learned what they were supposed to in grades K-3 (particularly if amongst the things they haven't learned are Sitting Attentively in Class and Working and Playing Well with Others).

So, the senior teachers threatened to quit if they were asked to teach fourth grade, including the ones who actually had experience in teaching fourth grade. No-one particularly seems to want two or three either. So, how do we resolve this?

If we want to hold on to our best teachers, we move them to fifth and sixth grade, and that's just what our school did. That's what a lot of schools are doing.

What does that mean? It means a few things.

- It means that the most senior teachers with the most experience are teaching children whose groundwork has already been laid by the least senior teachers

- It means that teachers who are used to teaching students in lower grades are now teaching children in upper grades - children who challenge all their hard-learned assumptions about how classes behave, how they process information, and how they respond.

- It means that children in lower grades are being taught by teachers who don't have experience in teaching lower grades, because they've been bumped out of their upper-grade classes by more senior teachers. (The most experienced teachers didn't traditionally gravitate to the children who were approaching puberty, for obvious reasons).

- It means that teachers who are used to riding herd on pre-pubescent children are carrying their disciplinary methods and expectations into classrooms of seven- and eight-year-olds.

- It means that HM's teacher is a disaster.

I have no idea if she's a good teacher when she's teaching the children she's been working with throughout her career until this year.

I do know that my happy, energetic child is being asked to sit perfectly still all day in the midst of chaos and disorder, and that she and all the rest of the children who don't accomplish that feat (not characteristic of seven-year-olds, to say the least) are told that they aren't good students.

I know that a child who has always gotten As is bringing home Bs, because her teacher assumes that she and her classmates already know how to handle misleading multiple-choice questions and hasn't taught them how.

I know that her uncle and her father and I are teaching her the strategies she needs to cope with the things she's learning, and that we aren't teaching the rest of the kids in her class, and no-one else is, so what we teach her isn't being reinforced by the other kids.

I know that by the time they get to the classrooms with the senior teachers in them, a lot of those kids are going to have it very, very wrong.

I know that after years of being in classes who buy desksful of presents for their teachers, HM has to deal with her feelings of disloyalty when her classmates trash her teacher in the lunchroom - the same children who bought the presents last year.

I know that there's no money for teacher's aides and there's no money for toilet paper (the PTA funds it) but there's money for tests. Lots and lots and lots of tests.

No money to fix the schools. Just enough money to keep current on the level of decay we allow.

My kid isn't going to be left behind, but it's despite our fearless leader and his Great and Good friends at McGraw Hill and the other companies that are getting a windfall from testing.

Go ahead, guess who they gave money to in the last election cycle.

OK, this time it's the IMDB top 250

( the ones I've seen are in bold )