Chief Justice nominee grilled over ties to powerful political action committee

[HiloJulie]

Vladimir Devens confirmed as Hawaii Supreme Court Chief Justice with 20 YES and 5 No.

And while this will surely rankle a few, but after seeing the performance of our Puna Senator during the committee hearing as well as both the Puna and Hilo Senator during today's confirmation, it is quite apparent to me why Hilo & Puna get nothing. 

We MUST elect much better.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

We MUST elect much better.

We have.
Previous reps have thrown staplers at people in meetings.  Also fought with maintenance workers about pictures hung in their office.  The worker tried to explain he didn’t pick them out.  He just puts them up.

[ChunksterK]

We keep electing ignoramuses and crooks in Hawaii at least partly because we are a one party state with a primary system where a majority of votes is not required to get the nomination. In the two decades plus I have voted in Hawaii I have seen candidates get the Democratic nomination with as little as 24 percent of the vote. That means that 76% preferred someone else. Add ethnic and union block voting, and you get what we've got. As backward as they are, the southern states mostly have requirements for a runoff primary if no one gets 50% plus one. They realized long ago that having smallish factions win the whole show in the primary was not a good idea.

As a lifelong Democrat, I have brought up this subject at party meetings and caucuses, and you should have heard the howls of alarm. I think all of those howlers are hoping to get in with 24% themselves.

I'll never forget Frau Chunkster's comment after a five minute conversation with Joy Sanbuenaventura. "Did she bribe someone to pass the bar exam? Nobody that ignorant could pass it on their own." I will say, however, that Joy or her staff always reply to my emails. They never do anything about my concerns, but they do reply.

[MyManao]

We keep electing ignoramuses and crooks in Hawaii..

Because those are the types of people attracted to becoming politicians.

Oh, and btw, if anyone thinks its screwed up now, just wait until the kids of today are in charge of the place..

From.. https://archive.is/SbUdP

AMERICA IS SLIDING TOWARD ILLITERACY
Declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.

Where it begins..

The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.

We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4—the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.

So, basically, it says we're rapidly becoming a nation of ignorant fools with the attention span of a nit.. who will gladly waste their lives away on some social media nonsense..

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

we're rapidly becoming a nation of ignorant fools 

Retired people better start tutoring the ones who need help to keep the social security system solvent.  Otherwise, AI will suggest the proper age to power up the incin-a-tron.  As long as it doesn’t take too much electricity from the data centers.

[HiloJulie]

What struck me the most with both the Hilo & Puna Senators today, was much like what struck me with the Puna Senator at the committee hearing. I could care less if the vote each Senator cast was YES or NO with respect to this nomination, what I saw was a "performance" scripted by someone else (whom I would love to know who) and being read back very poorly, as in maybe not being that good of a reader in the first place, but as if to add insult to injury, for what seemed to be the first time they ever saw the words they seemingly were told to read. Their performance was like a continual audio loop that constantly glitched. 

I'm left with the distinct feeling that someone else is behind these two. They are just simply the "paid actors." I just wonder who is really behind them.

[randomq]

If I had to guess, probably their poorly paid government staff. You will see all the time in county and state jobs there is the "person in charge" with high pay, and then the clerks or assistants that actually do the work, research, writing, accounting, etc and get paid shit. Second guess: whatever union or special interest the particular legislation affected.

[Punatang]

We keep electing ignoramuses and crooks in Hawaii..

Because those are the types of people attracted to becoming politicians.

Oh, and btw, if anyone thinks its screwed up now, just wait until the kids of today are in charge of the place..

From.. https://archive.is/SbUdP

AMERICA IS SLIDING TOWARD ILLITERACY
Declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.

MyMan! That may be one of the best articles I have read this year. Thank you. Anyone in Puna who votes hoping to help our keiki, or who are posting on Punaweb or elsewhere about education really should absorb the entire article.  Idress Kahloon nails it over and over.  Enjoy some informed truths from this extremely well written article below. 

Idrees Kahloon is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for The Economist.


"The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards."

"A seemingly plausible culprit, and a familiar boogeyman for progressives, is insufficient spending. The problem with this tidy explanation is that it’s not tethered to reality. School spending did not decline from 2012 to 2022. In fact, it increased significantly, even after adjusting for inflation, from $14,000 a student to more than $16,000."

"Besides, America recently ran a very large natural experiment in dropping money on schools that, in a word, failed. During the pandemic, Congress appropriated a gargantuan sum of money, $190 billion, to ameliorate learning loss, most of it as part of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan. (For scale, this is roughly the sum recently given to the Trump administration to fund its border wall and immigration-enforcement agenda.) States were given latitude to spend their funds as they saw fit, which, it seems, was a mistake. Instead of funding high-quality tutoring programs or other programs that benefited students, districts spent money for professional development or on capital expenditures such as replacing HVAC systems and obtaining electric buses. “The scientific term for this is that we didn’t get jack shit out of that money,” says Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-policy think tank. “There are some studies that can detect small impacts, but they’re small. I think it’s also fair to say that a lot of the money was wasted.”

"An explanation that deserves equal consideration is what one might call the low-expectations theory. In short, schools have demanded less and less from students—who have responded, predictably, by giving less and less. The timing lines up here, too. Around the same time that smartphones were taking off, a counterrevolution was brewing against the old regime of No Child Left Behind, the George W. Bush–era law passed in 2002 that required schools to set high standards and measured school progress toward them through stringent testing requirements. Bush famously said that he wanted to tackle “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and there’s real evidence that he did. As controversial as it was, No Child Left Behind coincided with increased school performance, especially for those at the bottom."

"The past decade also marked a shift in concern among educators, toward equity and away from excellence. Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."

"Their analysis of the 2024 NAEP results found that Mississippi was best at educating kids in fourth-grade math, fourth-grade reading, and eighth-grade math. (In 2013, Mississippi was at the bottom of the unadjusted league table.) When I computed the correlation between these demographically adjusted scores and state spending, I found that there was none. If you’re an underprivileged kid in America, you will, on average, get the best education not in rich Massachusetts but in poor Mississippi, where per-pupil spending is half as high.
This is a recent phenomenon. Some have called it the “Mississippi miracle” or—if you include relative outperformance in states such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee—the “southern surge.” From 2013 to 2024, reading performance declined among fourth graders in 46 out of 50 states. In only two states, Mississippi and Louisiana, did they meaningfully improve."

"The “Mississippi miracle” should force a reckoning in less successful states and, ideally, a good deal of imitation. But for Democrats, who pride themselves on belonging to the party of education, these results may be awkward to process. Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least unionized in the country. And these red states are leaning into phonics-based, “science of reading” approaches to teaching literacy, while Democratic-run states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have been painfully slow to adopt them, in some cases hanging on to other pedagogical approaches with little evidentiary basis. “The same people who are absolutely outraged about what” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is doing on vaccines are untroubled by just ignoring science when it comes to literacy,” Andrew Rotherham, a co-founder of the education-focused nonprofit Bellwether, told me."

Thanks MyMan!  Puna needs this food for thought.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Yes, good article.
We definitely need blueprints on improving test scores and student learning skills. 
A couple of comments. 

Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning

Some of the Southern Surge is comparing student scores that were ranked at the bottom for decades to the amount of improvement made, as well as “demographically adjusted.”  4th grade scores were cited, but did that hold through junior high and high school?

It was also noted that education expenditures in Massachusetts were much higher than in Mississippi(?) without comparatively higher test scores.  Isn’t that due to cost of living?  Land, construction, teachers salaries are all substantially higher in Massachusetts.

Like land, construction, and cost of living in Hawaii.  We always seem to have a shortage of qualified teachers here.  Living expenses are high, and starting salaries are not encouraging for someone who considers moving here.  A student in east Hawaii who does well and looks at their options for future employment might not have teacher near the top of their list. 

Now, many years later after Bush’s No Child Left Behind program was left behind we still wonder as W. himself did when he asked, “Is our children learning?”

[ironyak]

The "Mississippi Miracle" is a well-document decade long project that shows providing state funding for hiring highly trained reading coaches to support students, as well as special literacy-based professional development for all teachers, screening and identifying early those kids that need extra support with individualized reading plans, and funding for pre-K education, can all have a huge impact on reading scores, especially when starting from near last place (that is, percent improvement is easiest when your scores are the lowest, but there are diminishing gains at already high achieving states and schools). Note too a decade of investment before the 4th grade scores reached 9th in nation (no results yet for those higher grades Edge) so it's a long-term commitment needed.

Could Hawai'i benefit from these programs, sure! But that means leilanidude has to pay an extra 3 cents on a filet mignon, which obviously is socialism, as everyone knows you can't spend your way to wealth (but apparently you can spend your way to wide-spread literacy and academic achievement).

This year's budget for Hawai'i has lots of funding for capital improvement projects for schools across the state, and some pre-school funding as well so it's a start. Maybe if we pass a "Investment is Aloha" act, kids could get the same supports as belle-of-the-"all you need is high expectations"-ball Mississippi and see similar gains in their academic performance.