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JISHOU, HUNAN — Here’s a novel idea. A very well educated school board member in Orange County, Florida, took his state’s mandatory assessment test, which tests reading, math, science and writing, and he did very poorly. So, he wonders, how valid are those tests, really?
The board member, Rick Roach, is no dummy. He has two master’s degrees in education and educational psychology, and he’s working on a doctorate. He’s trained 18,000 teachers in 25 states, and served on his school board for four terms.
But his reading score on a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test was 62%, which would have sent him to remediation classes. On the math part, he guessed on all 60 questions, getting only 10 right.
In an email to education critic Marion Brady, Roach wrote:
It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.
Roach went on to note how his life would have much different had he been required to take the FCAT in high school, and done as poorly as he did now.
If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.
It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s
Continue reading Florida school board member takes state skills test, says test is crap
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Fathima Rifqa Bary, 17, who made headlines several months ago after she ran away from her Muslim parents claiming they would kill her as an Islamic apostate, is being treated for uterine cancer.
The Sri Lankan-born high school graduate has had two operations already, and awaits a third.
Bary ran away to Florida in July with the help of a Christian pastor who had befriended her. Once arriving in Orlando, the girl, who says she converted to Christianity at 13, lived with married pastors Blake and Beverly Lorenz for nearly two weeks before the Lorenzes told child welfare officials where Bary was.
In interviews, Bary claimed that her parents were upset with her conversion and that she was afraid that her father would kill her if she returned home. Law enforcement officials from Florida and Ohio, however, reported there was no credible threat to her safety.
Nevertheless, Bary has lived with foster parents in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, after her court-ordered return to Ohio in October. She turns 18 in August, at which point she will be able to leave foster care.
Her conversion and flight to Florida have become a rallying point for anti-Islamic Christian polemicists, who have used Bary as a “poster child” for honor killings, though there was never any real threat to her life. Meanwhile, they have accused Bary’s parents and their mosque of being Islamic extremists, though again there is no evidence of the allegations.
The whole situation is a sad commentary on the abuse of religious belief. That a young girl is so ill is even
Continue reading Christian runaway Rifqa Bary treated for uterine cancer
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LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY — Here’s the short version. Fathima Rifqa Bary, the teenaged Muslim-to-Christian-convert runaway, does not have to rejoin her parents in Columbus, Ohio. She and her folks agreed that she will stay in foster care until she turns 18 in August.
Bary became a minor celebrity several months ago when she ran away from her parents, saying she feared she would be put to death for being an “apostate,” someone who had abandoned Islam. Aided by Christian church leaders in Columbus, she boarded a Greyhound bus for Orlando, Florida, to stay secretly with husband-and-wife pastors, Blake and Beverly Lorenz, for a week or so. Once her whereabouts became known, Bary entered the world of child protection services in first Florida, then Ohio, and became a poster child for religious nutjobs building up anti-Islam fervor.
In the aftermath, the Lorenzes have lost their jobs. (Their church board took issue with the Lorenzes breaking the law by harboring a runaway child without notifying the proper authorities.) Her parents have lost their privacy and a great deal of their reputation. (Law enforcement investigations found the parents posed no threat to their daughter’s safety, but Bary’s anti-Islam fans still trumpet that the girl’s life was in danger.) And Bary will likely end up with a new identity as a “persecuted Christian” who escaped the clutches of Islam — a newly minted spokeswoman for the Religious Fear-mongering Right.
You wait. There’s bound to be a book or movie deal waiting in the wings. And the obligatory appearance
Continue reading The Rifqa Bary saga ends with a whimper
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JISHOU, HUNAN — The Rifqa Bary saga just gets weirder and weirder.  Now that the 17-year-old is back in her home state, her “benefactors” and “supporters” plan to hold a rally during the hearing that will decide whether she will return to her parents’ home.
In the reality-based world, a runaway child returning home would be a good thing, if the parents are decent, upstanding members of society, which the Barys appear to be.
In the apocalyptic world of the far-far-rightwing, however, Rifqa’s Muslim parents are sure to kill their Christian convert daughter, because, you know, all Muslims do that sort of thing, every day. Pamela Geller and her fellow Muslim-haters have themselves worked up into a froth, accusing the Bary family of every crime known to humanity, merely because the Barys are Muslim …
… and because Rifqa, whose own grip on reality seems kind of tenuous, has people convinced that her family will either kill her or arrange for her sudden demise once she returns to that lawless hotbed of Islamic terrorism, Columbus, Ohio.
Law enforcement officers and child welfare officials say the likelihood of Rifqa being killed is nil. Her parents are pretty normal sounding, middle-class Americans who have the “misfortune” of being dark-skinned Muslim immigrants with exotic names.
The parallels to the “birther” crusade are obvious. A lot of folks also cannot accept that a dark-skinned son of a foreign-born Muslim with an exotic name became president of the USA.
Meanwhile, Rifqa’s rightwing Christian supporters are now claiming that the child protection services of both Florida and Ohio (two hotbeds of flaming liberalism and soon-to-be Islamic republics) are violating the girl’s freedom of religion by restricting her access to the Internet, email and her cellphone. You know, Pontius Pilate did the same thing to Jesus, just before his execution.
Rifqa
Continue reading Wingnuts rally for Rifqa
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JISHOU, HUNAN — The Orlando Sentinel reports that Fathima Rifqa Bary, the Muslim girl turned Christian (pawn), returned to her home state of Ohio, where she is in foster care pending family court proceedings.
Bary, 17, fled her Columbus home last summer with the assistance of conservative Christians, who bought her a bus ticket to Orlando, where she lived for two weeks with Christian crusaders Blake and Beverly Lorenz. Several days later, the Lorenzes reported Bary’s arrival to Florida’s child protection services.
The immigrant girl from Sri Lanka has become a poster child for those Christians who believe the world is heading for a showdown between the forces of good (Christians) and the forces of evil (Muslims). Feeding on apparently false accusations that Bary’s parents will kill her for leaving her faith, rabid Christians have flocked to her cause like bears to honey.
An Ohio judge has wisely restricted the impressionable girl’s access to the Internet and her cell phone, which has led one anti-Islam nutjob to accuse the Ohio judge of enforcing Muslim sharia law.
Last month, while under foster care in Florida, Bary appeared on a telephone conference call prayer meeting, during which she manically prayed to Jesus, then abruptly stopped, leaving her handlers fellow Christians at a temporary loss for words. The conference call was scheduled to counter the sinister and cosmic influence of the Muslim Prayer Rally in Washington, D.C.
Florida’s child protection service officials have still not explained how Bary was allowed to participate in the event. The Ohio judge seems to have learned something from Florida’s cluelessness.
Bary has fallen in with an extremist set of believers, who even mainstream Christians distrust, according to the website Loonwatch. These folks variously believe that Christians — led by a “Joel’s Army” of young evangelical “soldiers” — are divinely appointed
Continue reading Religious runaway Rifqa Bary back in Ohio, in foster care
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[UPDATE 10/16/09: For an excellent narrative of Rifqa Bary's life before, during and after her running away, check this feature at tampabay.com. It's the best -- and least biased -- account of her saga I've seen.]
JISHOU, HUNAN — Rifqa Bary, the Muslim teen who converted to Christianity and fled to Florida (with help), will be sent back to temporary foster care in her home state of Ohio, a Florida family court judge ruled Tuesday.
Bary, 17, ran away from home at age 16, saying she feared her parents would kill her for converting. Christian ministers helped her take a Greyhound to Orlando, Florida, where she lived with a pastor and his wife for two weeks before they finally reported the situation to local authorities and the girls’ parents.
Law enforcement officers investigating the Bary family found no indication Bary’s life was in danger, and the Florida judge assigned to her case ruled that Ohio’s child protection office is more suitable to decide her case.
Once she arrives in Ohio, Bary will be placed in temporary custody with the Franklin County Children’s Service department.
Bary made headlines recently after she participated in a conference call Christian prayer session preceding the Muslim Prayer Rally in Washington, D.C., last month. Her appearance sparked questions about Bary’s foster parents, who were supposedly keeping her separate from the Christians who had helped her flee her home.
Her story has become the latest cause celebre among fundamentalist Christians, who have adopted her as a kind of “poster child” for anti-Islam rhetoric and quasi-martyrdom. Meanwhile, her parents, who by all appearances are moderate Muslims from Sri Lanka, say they mean the girl no harm and in fact were perfectly comfortable with her Christian faith months before her departure.
It’s shameful that the same people who claim the family is next to importance to
Continue reading Teenage convert Rifqa Bary to return to Ohio
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JISHOU, HUNAN — I was too tired last night to fill in some of the details about Rifqa Bary, the runaway Muslim teenager from Ohio now living in Florida. It’s morning now, and I have some more interesting background on that conference call.
According to Right Wing Watch, the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a Christian group, organized the conference call to counter the Muslim prayer rally in Washington, D.C., last Friday. It seems the task force was quaking in its boots about the possibility of 50,000 Muslims gathering near the Capitol Building.
(Actually, only about 3,000 showed up. They had to put up with Christian hecklers. Welcome to America.)
Part of their fears stems from their mistaken impression that President Barack Obama is secretly Muslim, and his friendly and conciliatory gestures to the world’s Muslims signal a Muslim takeover of the USA. (Incidentally, in case you missed it, the new America will also be simultaneously Marxist, communist, socialist and fascist, as well as an Islamic state. Just so we’re clear.)
From OneNewsNow.com, a wingnut website:
Associated Press says Christian leaders in last night’s conference call were unconvinced the gathering will be a time for Muslims to pray together, read the Quran, and celebrate America’s religious freedom — as its organizers insist. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins wondered if the Muslims would be “praying for the well-being of our nation.”
Perkins called the Muslim gathering “a wake-up call for the church” and a warning that if Christians do not “fill the void that’s in this nation with the truth, it will be filled with something else.”
It was Perkins and Shirley Dobson, the head of the task force, who were on the conference call with Bary I highlighted in the last post. As a presumed convert from Islam to Christianity, she was a convenient and suitable
Continue reading More about Rifqa Bary’s surprise appearance
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