AdamSmith

Agree with zip. His point now is to try and keep his nuts out of the Hotel Bradley Manning.

Is this proof the Virgin Queen was an imposter in drag? Shocking new theory about Elizabeth I unearthed in historic manuscripts By Christopher Stevens PUBLISHED: 18:58 EST, 7 June 2013 | UPDATED: 06:29 EST, 8 June 2013 Daily Mail UK The bones of Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess, lie mingled with those of her sister, Bloody Mary, in a single tomb at Westminster Abbey. But are they really royal remains — or evidence of the greatest conspiracy in English history? If that is not the skeleton of Elizabeth Tudor, the past four centuries of British history have been founded on a lie. And according to a controversial new book, the lie began on an autumn morning 470 years ago, when panic swept through a little group of courtiers in a manor house in the Cotswold village of Bisley in Gloucestershire. Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth in the film 'Elizabeth: The Golden Age'. Could the virgin queen be a part of the biggest deception in British history? The king, Henry VIII, was due at any hour. He was travelling from London, in great discomfort — for the 52-year-old monarch was grossly overweight and crippled by festering sores — to visit his daughter, Elizabeth. The young princess had been sent there that summer from the capital to avoid an outbreak of plague. But she had fallen sick with a fever and, after weeks of bleeding, leeches and vomiting, her body was too weak to keep fighting. The night before the king’s arrival, his favourite daughter, the only child of his marriage to Anne Boleyn, had been dangerously ill. In the morning, Elizabeth lay dead. Elizabeth’s governess, Lady Kat Ashley, and her guardian, Thomas Parry, had good reason to fear telling the king this awful news. It would cost them their lives. Four of Henry’s children had died in infancy and, of the survivors, one — Edward — was a sickly boy of five and the other an embittered, unmarried woman in her late 20s. The ten-year-old Elizabeth was Tudor England’s most valuable child in many ways. She could surely be married to a French or Spanish prince to seal an international alliance — and her own children would secure the Tudor dynasty Henry so desperately craved. Now she was dead, and when the king discovered it, Parry and Lady Ashley would surely be executed. Their sole duty had been to keep the princess safe: failure was treason. The penalty would not even be beheading, but death by the most gruesome torture imaginable. They would be bound and dragged through the mud for a mile to the scaffold. There they would be hanged, cut down and disembowelled. Their entrails would be hauled from their bodies and held in front of their faces as they died, and then their limbs would be hacked off and displayed on spikes, to be picked bare by the birds. Helen Mirren pictured as Elizabeth I in a Channel Four mini-series Their only chance of concealing the truth, and perhaps buying themselves a few days to flee the country, was to trick the king. Kat Ashley’s first thought was to find a village girl and dress her up in the princess’s robe, with a mantle, to fool the king. Bisley was a tiny hamlet, however, and there were no female children of Elizabeth’s age. But there was a boy, from a local family called Neville. He was a gawky, angular youth a year or so younger than Elizabeth, who had been the princess’s companion and fellow pupil for the past few weeks. And with no time to look further afield for a stand-in, Parry and Lady Ashley took the desperate measure of forcing the boy to don his dead friend’s clothes. Remarkably, the deception worked. Henry saw his daughter rarely, and was used to hearing her say nothing. The last time she had been presented in court, meeting the new Queen Catherine Parr, she had been trembling with terror. The princess was known as a gentle, studious child, and painfully shy — not a girl to speak up in front of the king who had beheaded her mother. So when ‘she’ stood at Bisley manor, in the dimness of an oak-beamed hall lit by latticed windows, it was not so surprising that the king failed to realise he was being duped. He had no reason to suspect his daughter had been ill, after all, and he himself was tired and in pain. But after he left later that afternoon, the hoax began in earnest. Parry and Lady Ashley realised that if they ever admitted what they had done, the king’s fury would be boundless. They might get out of the country to safety, but their families would surely be killed. On the other hand, few people had known the princess well enough to be certain of recognising her, especially after an interval of many months. This boy had already fooled the king, the most important deception. Meanwhile, there was no easy way to find a female lookalike, and replace the replacement. As the courtiers buried the real Elizabeth Tudor in a stone coffin in the manor grounds, they decided their best hope of protecting themselves and their families was to teach this Bisley boy how to be a princess. Attributed to painter William Scrots, this portrait is of Elizabeth I as a Princess in 1546-7 Of course this entire theory sounds absurd, given that every child grows up with tales of our glorious Virgin Queen, celebrated by Shakespeare and venerated in innumerable plays, songs and films over the centuries. And yet the many corroborating details around this extraordinary tale about the Bisley boy were enough to convince the 19th-century writer Bram Stoker, most famous as the author of Dracula. He included the story as the final chapter in his book, Imposters. Stoker had heard persistent stories that a coffin had been discovered by a clergyman at Bisley during the early 1800s, with the skeleton of a girl dressed in Tudor finery, even with gems sewn onto the cloth. It seemed to chime with local legends persisting for centuries that an English monarch had been, in reality, a child from the village. Above all, Stoker believed, it was the most plausible explanation why Elizabeth, who succeeded to the throne in 1558, aged 25, never married. Her most urgent duty, as the last of the Tudor line, was to provide an heir — yet she described herself as a Virgin Queen, and vowed she would never take a husband, even if the Emperor of Spain offered her an alliance with his oldest son. She stayed true to that oath, provoking a war which almost ended in Spanish invasion in 1588. But Elizabeth did not waver — and never even took an acknowledged lover. She was fond of proclaiming that she was more of a king than a queen. ‘I have the heart of a man, not a woman, and I am not afraid of anything,’ she declared. Her most famous speech, to her troops at Tilbury as the Spanish Armada approached, was cheered to the skies as she roared: ‘I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too.’ American author Steve Berry believes Elizabeth could have been telling the literal truth — that she had the heart of a man, because her body was male. He has spent 18 months researching the conspiracy for his novel The King’s Deception, a Dan Brown-style thriller set in 21st-century London. Could the real reason the 'Virgin Queen' never married was that she was secretly a man? For Berry, who has written 12 thrillers, the trail began with a chance question during a tour of Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire three years ago. ‘I always ask if there are any secrets or mysteries, and the guide told me: “There’s nothing at Ely but I’ve heard an incredible rumour in the Cotswolds.” ’ Sceptical at first, Berry uncovered tantalising hints and references in books and ancient manuscripts. When the ‘princess’ reached her teens, for instance, she was assigned a tutor named Roger Ascham, who was puzzled by her behaviour. ‘The constitution of her mind,’ he wrote, ‘is exempt from female weakness, and she is embued with a masculine power of application … In the whole manner of her life she rather resembles Hippolyte than Phaedra.’ That last, classical allusion was quite venomous: Phaedra was an ancient princess driven mad by her lust for men, while Hippolyte was queen of the Amazons, who lived without any need for men at all. Most convincing to Berry were the contemporary portraits, which are reproduced in his novel. One picture exists of Elizabeth as a child, attributed to the court painter William Scrots. She had slender shoulders, a delicate neck and a heart-shaped face with ginger hair and eyebrows. In the next known portrait, shortly after she was crowned queen, her broad shoulders and neck are disguised with heavy furs. She is wearing a wig, and her eyebrows are plucked bare. Her jaw is heavy and square. All subsequent pictures of the queen were painted to an ideal, showing Elizabeth as she wished to be seen, not as she was. Even the official portrait commissioned after her death by her chief adviser, Sir Robert Cecil, conformed to what was known as ‘The Mask Of Youth’ — the idealised face of the monarch, which never aged. Many Tudor courtiers suspected that Elizabeth had a deep secret. Lord Somerset was the power behind the boy king Edward VI’s throne, after Henry VIII died in 1547 when Elizabeth was just 13. One of his spies, Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, wrote to him: ‘I do verily believe that there hath been some secret promise between my Lady, Mistress Ashley, and the Cofferer [Thomas Parry, the principal officer of the court] never to confess to death, and if it be so, it will be never gotten of her, unless by the King’s Majesty or else by your Grace.’ In modern English: ‘I am certain Lady Ashley and Thomas Parry have a secret, and that there is a pact between them to take it to the grave. If that’s the case, the only people who could force them to divulge this secret are you and the King.’ Those were ominous words: only Somerset and the King had the right to put a suspect to the rack, using torture to extract information. Bram Stoker believed it was the sheer scale of the deception that made it possible. When Elizabeth returned to London from Bisley, more than a year after she first left the court, it would have been treason for any sceptics to suggest ‘she’ was not the king’s daughter. ‘It is conceivable,’ Stoker remarked drily, ‘that in the case of a few individuals, there might have been stray fragmentary clouds of suspicion. This portrait of Queen Elizabeth I is by an unknown artist and is from the period 1580-1590 ‘After a time, even suspicion became an impossibility. Here was a young woman growing into womanhood whom all around her had known all her life — or, what was equivalent, believed they had.’ Any differences in her appearance were dismissed as the natural effects of growing up. Elizabeth had been a timid child — now she was a bold and imperious adolescent. As a little girl, she was exceptionally bright, poring over her books and learning as quickly as her tutors could teach her; now she was slower at her lessons and, though far from stupid, more academic plodder than prodigy. Her tutor was warned to make her lessons shorter. Roger Ascham commented that the girl who had been said to soak up facts like a sponge was now more like a shallow cup — if wine was poured in too quickly, it would simply splash out again. Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry — the pair who are suspected of carrying out the deception — remained loyal to the sovereign throughout their lives, as England’s political pendulum swung wildly after the death of Henry VIII. During Edward VI’s reign, they were Elizabeth’s closest friends, and they stood by ‘her’ during her years of imprisonment in the Tower when her Catholic sister Mary was queen and decided the safest place for Elizabeth was under lock and key, where she could not threaten the throne. When Mary died at the age of 42, one of Elizabeth’s first acts as queen was to make Lady Ashley her First Lady of the Bedchamber. For the next seven years, she controlled all access to the young monarch. Elizabeth was devastated when Ashley died in 1565, and went into heavy mourning. Thomas Parry was knighted, and made a Privy Counsellor and Comptroller of the Household — the richest rewards Elizabeth could bestow. He was a bad-tempered man who made many enemies, and few at court grieved when he died in 1560 — one wag said he expired ‘from mere ill-humour’. Steve Berry believes the queen must have confessed her secret to her chief minister, William Cecil. The politician had a reputation for an almost supernatural ability to read people and discover facts: she needed Cecil to understand that a marriage would not just have been pointless, it would have been ruinous. This painting by an unknown artist is known as the 'Darnley portrait' after a previous owner, and is from around 1575 If her secret was betrayed, the country could be plunged into civil war. There was no obvious heir, and Mary’s former husband was now Britain’s greatest enemy, Philip II of Spain. Certainly, Cecil was surprisingly stoic about the queen’s determination never to wed. Publicly, Elizabeth sometimes claimed that people needed to feel their monarch was wedded to the whole country, rather than one man. On other occasions, she hinted that the debacle of her father’s six wives, and her mother’s death at the block, had put her off marriage for life. If those reasons sound flimsy, the queen’s determination to control her image was iron. She wore thick make-up and heavy wigs at all times: no one was permitted to see her without them. And she controlled her succession with equal ruthlessness. On her deathbed, she commanded that the crown must go to her cousin’s son — James VI of Scotland, whose mother was Mary Queen of Scots. But the command itself was cryptically worded: ‘I will have no rascal to succeed me, and who should succeed me but a king?’ Was there a hint in those words that for 45 years the figure on the throne had herself been a ‘rascal’, playing a part? Author Steve Berry believes there is only one way to discover the truth. After Elizabeth died in 1603, there was no autopsy. Instead of a magnificent state funeral for the monarch the nation called ‘Gloriana’, the queen’s bones were interred with those of her sister in Westminster Abbey. Berry points to the recent DNA analysis that proved that remains discovered under a Leicester car park were those of Richard III, who ruled a century before Elizabeth. Such high-tech methods would not even be necessary to establish whether the bones in the Abbey tomb were all female, or whether a male skeleton was buried there. ‘Elizabeth’s grave has never been breached,’ Berry says. ‘Now it’s time to open it up and see what’s in there.’ n The King’s Deception by Steve Berry is published by Hodder at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.49 (p&p free), call 0844 472 4157. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337774/Is-proof-Virgin-Queen-imposter-drag-Shocking-new-theory-Elizabeth-I-unearthed-historic-manuscripts.html#ixzz2YeiBHouO Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Agree, except that with the economy the way it is, there is an abundance of talent here in NC, and I think a lot of other places, that is eager or even desperate for work, or for better work. And of course not every worker who objects to local politics has the freedom to move somewhere that better suits his conscience. In all, it is an employer's market.

I just posted this in the N.C. voting rights act thread, but on reflection it deserves a standalone post, I think. Editorial The Decline of North Carolina By THE EDITORIAL BOARD The New York Times Published: July 9, 2013 Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damage that a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage. In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot. The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks. The state has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, and many Republicans insulted workers by blaming their joblessness on generous benefits. In fact, though, North Carolina is the only state that has lost long-term federal benefits, because it did not want to pay back $2.5 billion it owed to Washington for the program. The State Chamber of Commerce argued that cutting weekly benefits would be better than forcing businesses to pay more in taxes to pay off the debt, and lawmakers blindly went along, dropping out of the federal program. At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled children are being chopped. “We are losing ground,” Superintendent June Atkinson said recently, warning of a teacher exodus after lawmakers proposed ending extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees, cutting teacher assistants and removing limits on class sizes. Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics. And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters. One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham. North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build. http://www.nytimes.c...d=fb-share&_r=0

Editorial The Decline of North Carolina By THE EDITORIAL BOARD The New York Times Published: July 9, 2013 Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damage that a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage. In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot. The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks. The state has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country, and many Republicans insulted workers by blaming their joblessness on generous benefits. In fact, though, North Carolina is the only state that has lost long-term federal benefits, because it did not want to pay back $2.5 billion it owed to Washington for the program. The State Chamber of Commerce argued that cutting weekly benefits would be better than forcing businesses to pay more in taxes to pay off the debt, and lawmakers blindly went along, dropping out of the federal program. At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled children are being chopped. “We are losing ground,” Superintendent June Atkinson said recently, warning of a teacher exodus after lawmakers proposed ending extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees, cutting teacher assistants and removing limits on class sizes. Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics. And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters. One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham. North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/opinion/the-decline-of-north-carolina.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Seriously:

ROFL very good

So what's going on there? I went to college with Joe Gordon, who once had, justifiably I thought, high hopes and confidence in the place as Democratic. What gives today?

Ever been to Indiana? JK.

RA1 may rap my knuckles for posting this speculation so far in advance of release of much real information about the accident. But it was interesting to see this reader comment posted below a CNN article: Tim Sall I am a current airline capt. flying a 767, with 29 years experience. If you understand the automatization modes of a B757,767,747,777 and what they do, or don't do, then it is fairly easy to understand what most likely happened. The ILS was out of service, they were doing a visual approach, not being being backed up by the ILS, which would cause the autothrottles to be working. Instead they were decending down using flt. level change mode, where the autothrottles are not active and they forgot this, because 98% of the time they are backed up by the ILS. Nobody was watching the airspeed, because they are so use to the autothrorttles working. Then when they realized it it was to late. http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/07/us/asiana-214/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

http://www.hecklerspray.com/paula-deen-without-makeup

Not quite a joke...

No, same old same old...

Agreed. A human pustule waiting to burst. Like some of his brethren... "If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox." -- Christopher Hitchens

LOL Now be nice, suck -- jarheads have their place. And they know it

Warmest congratulations. But don't do that!

Pope Francis criticizes indifference toward immigrants' plightBy Tom Kington LA Times July 8, 2013, 10:06 a.m. ROME -- Against a backdrop of growing anti-immigration sentiment in Europe, Pope Francis on Monday used his first papal trip outside the Vatican to denounce the "globalization of indifference" to migrants, calling their suffering "a painful thorn in my heart." The pontiff traveled to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa to drop a wreath of flowers into the Mediterranean in mourning for the thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who have drowned while sailing from Africa to Europe in search of a better life. "We have become used to the suffering of others," said Francis, who made the surprise decision to visit Lampedusa after reading about the recent sinking of a boat that resulted in the deaths of a dozen migrants. "Has any one of us wept for these persons who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who were looking for a means of supporting their families?" he asked. "We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion." Addressing Muslims on the island, the pope said that "the church is with you in the search for a more dignified life for you and your families." Francis' fiercely worded homily, delivered before a crowd of 10,000 people, highlighted his focus on the plight of the poor and marginalized. Just 70 miles off the coast of Tunisia, Lampedusa is a favored landing point in Europe for African migrants, who travel on rickety fishing boats that often run out of fuel or sink in rough weather. About 8,400 migrants landed in Italy and the nearby island of Malta in the first half of this year, up from 4,500 in the same period last year, but down from the many thousands who headed for Lampedusa during the political upheaval of the Arab Spring in 2011. More than 6,000 people are believed to have drowned in the waters around Lampedusa between 1994 and 2012. The United Nations recorded 500 deaths of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean during 2012. Hostility toward immigrants is on the rise in Europe as the region contends with a stubborn economic recession. Countries such as Britain are trying to tighten restrictions on newcomers; anti-immigrant political parties, some on the far right, have become potent forces in France, Greece, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. In 2009, Italy struck a deal with Libya's then-ruler, Moammar Kadafi, to send back migrants intercepted at sea without hearing claims for asylum. Pope Francis, whose own forebears migrated from Italy to Argentina, was accompanied by a flotilla of local fishing boats as he sailed into Lampedusa's harbor after dropping a wreath of yellow and white flowers from an Italian coast guard vessel. The pope celebrated Mass on a sports field near where the wrecks of migrants' vessels have been piled up. He used an altar fashioned from a small boat and a lectern made from the helm of one of the vessels. His staff and chalice were also made from piece of wood taken from the wrecks. The pope met a group of migrants and thanked locals for their kind treatment of new arrivals. After his visit, he tweeted: "God will judge us on the basis of how we have treated the most needy." http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-pope-immigration-20130708,0,4473843.story

Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring business Behind the scenes of standardized testing By Jessica Lussenhop Minneapolis CityPages published: February 23, 2011 After three years working as a scorer, Dan DiMaggio says he's a skimming machine. "It's ugly," he says. "You just go as fast as possible." Todd Farley worked for 15 years in the testing industry before quitting to write a tell-all book about his former employer's scoring procedures Dan DiMaggio was blown away the first time he heard his boss say it. The pensive, bespectacled 25-year-old had been coming to his new job in the Comcast building in downtown St. Paul for only about a week. Naturally, he had lots of questions. At one point, DiMaggio approached his increasingly red-faced supervisor at his desk with another question. Instead of answering, the man just hissed at him. "You know this stuff better than I do!" he said. "Stop asking me questions!" DiMaggio was struck dumb. "I definitely didn't feel like I knew what was going on at all," he remembers. "Your supervisor has to at least pretend to know what's going on or everything falls apart." DiMaggio's question concerned an essay titled, "What's your goal in life?" The answer for a surprising number of seventh-graders was to lift 200 pounds. Although DiMaggio had been through a training process, he found himself tripped up as he began scoring the essays. What made the organization "good" as opposed to "excellent"? What happens when the kid doesn't answer the question at all, but writes with excellent organization about whatever the hell he wants? Did it matter that it was insane for seventh-graders to think they'd be benching 200 pounds? DiMaggio had good reason to worry. His score could determine whether the school was deemed adequate or failing—whether it received government funding or got shut down. DiMaggio soon learned that his boss was a temp like him. In fact, the boss was only the team leader because he'd once managed a Target store. DiMaggio found out that the human resources woman who'd hired them both was a temp. He realized that their office space—filled with long tables lined with several hundred computer monitors and generic office chairs—was rented. Eventually, DiMaggio got used to not asking questions. He got used to skimming the essays as fast as possible, glancing over the responses for about two minutes apiece before clicking a score. Every so often, though, his thoughts would drift to the school in Arkansas or Ohio or Pennsylvania. If they only knew what was going on behind the scenes. "The legitimacy of testing is being taken for granted," he says. "It's a farce." THOUGH THE EFFICACY of standardized testing has been hotly debated for decades, one thing has become crystal clear: It's big business. In 2002, President George Bush signed the infamous No Child Left Behind Act. While testing around the country had been on the rise for decades, NCLB tripled it. "The amount of testing that was being done mushroomed," says Kathy Mickey, a senior education analyst at Simba Information. "Every state had new contracts. There was a lot of spending." The companies that create and score tests saw profits skyrocket. In 2009, K-12 testing was estimated to be a $2.7 billion industry. The Twin Cities were early beneficiaries of the gold rush. Minnesota's history as an early computer hardware hotbed led to the creation of some of the earliest data-scanning and numbers-crunching businesses here, including Scantron and National Computer Systems. By the '90s, NCS was grading 85 percent of the standardized tests for the nation's largest school districts. In 2000, NCS was bought by Pearson, a multinational corporation based in London, making it a part of the largest education company in the world. In 2009, it posted $652 million in profits. Today, tens of thousands of temporary scorers are employed to correct essay questions. This year, Maple Grove-based Data Recognition Corporation will take on 4,000 temporary scorers, Questar Assessment will hire 1,000, and Pearson will take on thousands more. From March through May, hundreds of thousands of standardized test essays will pour into the Twin Cities to be scored by summer. The boom in testing has come with several notable catastrophes. The most famous happened in 2000, when NCS Pearson incorrectly failed 8,000 Minnesota students on a math test. Pearson shelled out a $7 million settlement to the students, and Gov. Jesse Ventura participated in a makeup graduation for students who were wrongly denied their diplomas. In 2010, Pearson again miss-scored two questions on Minnesota's fifth- and eighth-grade tests. Delays in its Florida scoring resulted in a $3 million fine and glitches in Wyoming led the company to offer a $5.8 million settlement. But while a mistake on a bubble form is a black-and-white problem, few scandals have broken on the essay side of the test-scoring business. "It requires human judgment," says Michael Rodriguez, of the University of Minnesota's educational psychology department. "There is no way to standardize that." Now scorers from local companies are drawing back the curtain on the clandestine business of grading student essays, a process they say goes too fast; relies on cheap, inexperienced labor; and does not accurately assess student learning. "The entire testing system in the U.S. needs to be restructured," says Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest. "That would likely result in the disappearance of these essay-scoring sweatshops." DANI INDOVINO DIDN'T want to score tests. She wanted to work in nonprofit administration. But she was fresh out of school in September 2008, just as the economy was entering its freefall. Desperate to get out of her parents' house, she perked up when some friends told her about becoming a "reader" for one of the local test companies. It was easy work to get and there was lots of it. All you needed was a college diploma. "I was like, 'Yeah, I have a degree, I can do that,'" she recalls. On Indovino's first day, she drove out to Questar Assessment in Apple Valley, a beige warehouse, and followed the signs that said "Scoring Center" in bright red letters. During her brief interview, she'd been asked repeatedly if she was able to follow a "rubric"—a set of guidelines to assess the essays in as uniform a way as possible. "I guess they've had bad experiences with English teachers," she says. Inside Questar, Indovino took a seat in a room that looked like a classroom, crammed with as many computers and desks as could fit. It was here that the team leaders unveiled the scoring rubric, which was like a secret decoder ring for the job. The rubrics are most often developed in conjunction with the state's department of education and its testing contractor. Currently, Minnesota contracts both its test writing and scoring to Pearson. Local teachers are included in the rubric-writing process, as well as test-writing academics called "psychometricians." At first blush, the rubric seemed simple enough to Indovino. It was a chart with one- or two-sentence explanations of each number grade. Scorers are forbidden from taking the rubrics out of the Questar building or talking about them, but they generally look something like this: 6. An excellent response, the essay includes• excellent focus and development • excellent organization • excellent language skills and word choice • excellent grammar, usage, and mechanics 5. A good response, the essay includes • good focus and development • good organization • good language skills and word choice • good grammar, usage, and mechanics 4. An adequate response ... On down to 1s, which were reserved for barely decipherable language. As part of their training, Indovino and her co-workers read through pre-graded examples out loud, then discussed why each had been scored the way it was. The process quickly divided the room into two camps—the young, unemployed kids who were just there for a paycheck, and the retired teachers. "The retired teachers would argue everything," says Indovino. After two days of going through example papers, each scorer had to pass a qualifying exam. Indovino scored three sets of ten pre-scored papers. In order to be approved to work on the project, she had to pass two of the sets with at least an 80 percent "agreement rate" with the rubric. She did so with relative ease; most of the rest of the room passed on their second try. Her first project was from Arkansas, an essay written by eighth-graders on the topic, "A fun thing to do in my town." And that's where the troubles began. Suddenly, she was being asked to crank through 200 real essays in a day. The scanned papers popped up on the screen and her eyes flitted as fast as they could down the lines. The difference between "excellent" and "good" and "adequate" was decided in a matter of seconds, to say nothing of the responses that were simply off the reservation. How do you score a kid who rails that his town sucks? What about an exceptionally well-written essay on why the student was refusing to answer the question? All over the room, the teachers were raising their hands and disputing the rubric. Indovino preferred to keep her head down and just score the way she was told to. "I was good at the bad system," she says. Over the next several months, Indovino got to know her co-workers better. The young people were mostly laid off or in foreclosure. They came straight from paper routes and went off to waitressing jobs afterward. They also made for a very dedicated workforce. Indovino says she saw her co-workers hung-over, extremely ill, and even fresh from surgery. "I scored a full day without glasses on," Indovino says with a shrug. "I sat with my nose up to the glass all day. I couldn't read it." When she eventually got a full-time job, Indovino quit scoring. Although she'd done well by the company's standards, following the rubric provided little sense of accomplishment. "Nobody is saying, 'I'm doing good work, I'm helping society,'" she says. "Everyone is saying, 'This isn't right.'" DAVID PUTHOFF WAS an experienced reader with Questar when he started getting the warnings that his job performance wasn't up to snuff. "Your numbers are down a little bit," his supervisor said at the end of one day. "Make sure you bring those back up." Most essays, depending on the criteria established in the state, are scored by two readers. As Puthoff and his fellow scorers whipped through their essays, their supervisor had their own eyes glued to a screen, keeping them apprised of whether Reader #1 agreed with Reader #2. If so, both got a 100 percent agreement score for that essay. If one differed by a point or so, the essay would be counted as "adjacent" agreement. Puthoff had thus far been an agreement-rate superstar. He was consistently in the high 80s. Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: "What are the qualities of a good leader?" One student wrote, "Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader." With artfulness far beyond the student's age, the essay delved into King's history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the key moments that had shown his leadership. There was just one problem: It didn't fit the rubric. The rubric liked a longer essay, with multiple sentences lauding key qualities of leadership such as "honesty" and "inspires people." This essay was incredibly concise, but got its point across. Nevertheless, the rubric said it was a 2. Puthoff knew it was a 2. He hesitated the way he had been specifically trained not to. Then he hit, "3." It didn't take long before a supervisor was in his face. He leaned down with a printout of the King essay. "This really isn't a 3-style paper," the supervisor said. Puthoff pointed out the smart use of examples and the exceptional prose. The supervisor just shook his head and pointed out how short the paragraphs were. "You know, it's more of a 2," the supervisor repeated. "Not enough elaboration." Puthoff quickly learned these were not arguments he could win. But as time went on, he found himself having more and more of them. There were the students who wrote extremely well but whose responses were too short—in his mind he saw them, bored with the essay topic, hurrying to finish. Or the essays where the handwriting got rushed and jumbled at the end, then cut off abruptly—he imagined the proctor telling the frantic student to lay down his pencil on a well-written but incomplete response. And there were the kids who just did what they wanted. Like the boy from Arkansas who, instead of writing about the most fun thing to do in his town, instead wrote a hilarious essay on why his town is terrible and how he wanted to burn it down and pee on the ashes. "I wanted the kid to get the score they deserved," Puthoff says of his time in the business. "But they want to put them in boxes." In defiance, Puthoff started giving creatively written essays an illicit score bump. His agreement numbers noticeably suffered. The industry calls this "scorer drift," a well-documented tendency to begin deviating from the rubric over time. One case of scorer drift actually resulted in some 4,100 teachers failing the essay portion of their certification exams. The teachers successfully sued for $11.1 million. What was different about Puthoff's scorer drift was that he was doing it on purpose. "I'll bring them up, don't worry," he'd say of his agreement rate, then go back the next day and do the exact same thing. "I know this kid is good," he'd tell himself. "I know this kid's a good writer." TODD FARLEY TREATED his supervising position at a scoring company like a joke. "At the time, testing wasn't that big," he says. "I never had to feel like I'm actually deciding someone's future. It was just silly." Farley had started at the bottom rung of the testing industry in Iowa City. A part-time graduate student with bills to pay, he was more interested in partying and trying to become a writer than he was in getting a real job. So he took one scoring job after another for NCS. "It was always a temporary gig," he remembers. "It was a lovely, slacker-y life." Farley had no official training in teaching, education, or test writing, but the longer he remained at NCS, the more responsibilities he was handed. He took the offer to become a team leader because it paid a little extra money and got him out of scoring. Teaching his first group of scorers, Farley walked them through the rubric the same way he'd been shown. He fielded the inevitable bombardment of confused questions as best he could, in particular from one man: Harry the laid-off refrigerator plant worker. Even though Harry eventually passed his qualifying exams, he was a disaster. As Farley monitored Harry's scoring, he found himself walking back over to Harry repeatedly. "Look," Farley would say. "You're giving this essay a 2 even though it's perfectly formatted." Harry would nod. But a short time later, another ridiculous low ball from Harry would land on Farley's desk. Before long, Harry began to drag down the all-important agreement level. Farley now understood the reasons why, when he'd been a scorer, his team leaders would tell the room he wanted to start seeing more 3s or 4s or whatever. Supervisors were expected to turn the test scores into a nice bell curve. If his room did not agree at least 80 percent of the time, the tests would be taken back and re-graded, wasting time and money. The supervisor would be put on probation or demoted. When Farley complained to a fellow supervisor about his problem, she smiled wryly and held up a pencil. "I've got this eraser, see," she told him. "I help them out." So Farley simply began changing Harry's scores to agree with his peers'. The practice soon spread well beyond Harry. "I'd just change a bunch of answers to make it look like my group was doing a great job," Farley says. "I wanted the stupid item to be done, and so did my bosses." There were a few other tricks to keep the numbers up. One was to send a wayward scorer off into a corner to study example papers long enough for the group's numbers to rebound. Another was to pair up a couple of bad scorers and make them decide together what to give a paper. Or he could make the same announcement he'd heard from his supervisor back when he was a scorer. "It's time we see more sixes," Farley would tell the group, which was code that his bell curve was off. "We're in trouble here, we need higher scores, give higher scores." Though Farley and his fellow team leaders were fudging the numbers, even he was shocked when a representative from a southeastern state's Department of Education visited to check on how her state's essays were doing. As it turned out, the answer was: not well. About 67 percent of the students were getting 2s. That's when the representative informed Farley that the rubric for her state's scoring had suddenly changed. "We can't give this many 1s and 2s," she told him firmly. The scorers would not be going back to re-grade the hundreds of tests they'd already finished—there just wasn't time. Instead, they were just going to give out more 3s. No one objected—the customer was always right. Eventually, Farley was hired away by a rival testing company and moved to the East Coast. As he saw standardized tests becoming more and more important to the fate of schools and kids, he got fed up, quit the industry, and decided to write a whistle-blowing book. Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, came out in 2009. Though the tell-all chronicles Farley's many misdeeds while scoring tests and supervising, he has nonetheless been invited back to work for the testing companies several times. The boom has just made his experience too valuable. "They get paid money to put scores on paper, not to put the right scores on papers," he says. "They have a bottom line. Why anyone would expect anything else is beyond me." PEARSON SPOKESMAN ADAM Gaber warns against taking the opinions of former scorers too seriously. In an email, he characterized their concerns as "one-sided stories based upon people who have a very limited exposure and narrow point of view on what is truly a science." Questar declined a request to visit their facilities, but reached by phone, Susan Trent, vice president of assessment services, said that the essays are scored as objectively as is possible. "We're really insistent that readers understand they're dealing with kids," she says. "Decisions are being made about these kids based on these scores, and we're absolutely committed to getting them right." She denies that graders are pressured to work too quickly and says that any evidence of scorer drift results in test re-scoring. She is also adamant that well-trained temps are the best way to score essays objectively. "You do not have to be a teacher in order to score student response," adds Terry Appleman, vice president of performance assessment. "You have to have a good rubric and good training." Asked what to make of the former Questar employees who felt they couldn't do a good job given their training and time constraints, Appleman quickly answers: "If they don't think they're qualified, it's not the job for them." Most of the scorers interviewed for this story agree, but nearly all plan to return to the scoring center. They say they need the money. http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/1782234/