New Geography

Author: admin

  • Michael Mckean

  • Natural Gas Vehicles Floor It in Long Beach

    The Alternate Clean Transportation Expo held in Long Beach earlier this month was a spectacular display of engineering ingenuity by Natural Gas Vehicle providers. The event’s theme was that America’s self sufficiency in natural gas has decoupled our energy resources from petroleum prices. But the consensus among the gathered engineers and scientists was to look beyond the current prices of petroleum alone, and consider that domestic self sufficiency includes keeping jobs at home.

    The NGVs (Natural Gas Vehicles, which include Compressed Natural Gas—CNG, as well Liquefied Natural Gas—LNG) reduce greenhouse gas emissions almost 20 percent on medium and heavy duty models, and 30 percent on light duty vehicles.

    All fuels, including natural gas, release energy by burning. But cleanliness and renewability are probably the single most talked-about aspect of NGVs. From energy field to vehicle engine, natural gas needs very little processing to make it usable, compared to crude oil, which is processed into gasoline by complex and expensive refining techniques. A naturally occurring fuel, its chemical formulation is about 90% methane, with smaller amounts of ethane, propane, butane and carbon dioxide, a high octane rating of about 120 – 130, and clean burning characteristics.

    Biomethane gas is extracted from biomass, and is therefore renewable, and it can be produced economically in large quantities. Current estimates are that the US has proven reserves of over 1500 TCFs (trillion cubic feet) of natural gas which, by some estimates, should last for the next 100 years.

    Potentially, natural gas will create jobs not only through vehicle manufacturing, but through the construction of new CNG stations. A landfill processing plant near Dallas, Texas, owned by a pioneering company in CNG station installation, Clean Energy™, creates up to 9,000,000 GGEs (gasoline gallon equivalents)of biomethane gas for fueling stations. It has agreements with airports in Tampa, New York City, New Orleans and Philadelphia to build CNG filling stations that will support ground transport vehicles and off-airport parking shuttles.

    Of course, legitimate concerns have been expressed about the safety of natural gas vehicles. Notably, in a tragic 1998 accident a stopped bi-fueled Honda (a vehicle that can run on CNG or gasoline) was impacted by another vehicle moving at almost 100 mph. A fire started by the gasoline engine broke out.

    NGV supporters counter that the 50 liter CNG tank was intact and remained secure in its support bracket, that NGVs are subject to same federal standards as regular vehicles, and that natural gas cylinders are thicker and stronger than conventional gas tanks.

    The NVG safety record also includes a survey of more than 8,000 natural gas utility, school, municipal and business fleet vehicles that have traveled 178 million miles, in which the vehicle injury rate was 37% lower than in a gasoline fleet. Under federal and state regulations, fueling stations, indoor parking structures, repair garages and car dealerships must all meet high safety standards. Leaking gasoline forms puddles and creates a fire hazard; if the CNG engine leaks at all, the fuel will normally rise to the ceiling and disappear. Insurance companies nationwide have looked at the safety of natural gas buses and fleets and have no reservations about insuring them.

    Hybrids were also on display at the Expo, including a notable innovation by Parker Hannifin Company. Says Tom Decoster, business development manager of the Cleveland-based firm, “We are going to let California know there are alternatives to electric and CNG.” Parker’s alternative is the hydraulic hybrid, with regenerative braking energy stored as a pressurized gas in a vessel. These vessels are known to be accumulators, which Parker compares to batteries. While stored electricity from a battery drives a motor, energy from an accumulator powers a pump-motor to drive wheels. This assistance increases fuel efficiency and sometimes permits a smaller engine.

    Average fuel consumption for a conventional Class 8 vehicle is about 9,800 gallons per year. RunWise™, Parker’s vehicle, reduces the fuel consumption by 30 to 50 percent, depending on route density and operating conditions. “The more stops a vehicle makes during the day, the more efficient the system becomes relative to a conventional drive train,” Decoster says, adding that the NGV also reduces CO2 emissions, compared to a conventional vehicle, by 38 tons per year, the equivalent of about six midsize cars or planting 1,500 trees. It has reduced brake replacement cycles from every few months to almost 2 years. Parker’s technology is intended for refuse trucks and for fleets that need frequent stops, such as those run by FedEx and UPS.

    This highly technical conference and engineering-driven trade show was innovative in one other way, too. Expo organizer GNA designed events to reach out beyond the technorati to ordinary consumers who — it hopes — will one day be its loyal customers.

    Shashi Parulekar is a Los Angeles-based engineer. He holds an MBA, and served as Asia Pacific M.D. with Parker Hannifin Co in Michigan for over ten years.

  • Why Outsiders Have Wound Up Running So Much of L.A.

    When I was young and my brother was a little older, we would be in bed before dark on mid-summer evenings. (The times were different then.) We would lay in our separate beds, but only an arm’s length apart as shadows lengthened up the far wall of our room, until the dial of the Zenith radio on top of the dresser was the only light left. The Dodgers’ game would be on. Vin Scully was calling the plays.

    The consolations in the tenor murmur of that voice came with a price. But my brother and I did not know it. We knew vaguely that the Dodgers had broken Brooklyn hearts, but we believed, as we drifted between the last pitch and sleep, that the Dodgers could never again break other boys’ hearts so deliberately. The Dodgers had come here, to this almost perfect place, to be with us.

    My brother and I were wrong. The Dodgers’ arrival in Los Angeles in 1958 was a historic break in the way sports loyalties worked. Until then, a baseball team and most of its fans expected to share a highly specific sense of place. After that – and with increasing callousness – a team’s connection to a place would lag behind corporate values. My brother and I listened to Vin as a boyhood gift, but his voice was (and is) just another opportunity for branding a commodity. From the beginning, the Dodgers’ arrival in L.A. wasn’t an embrace. It was a deal.

    The sale of the team in 1998 to Fox Entertainment Group, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Australia-based News Corp., was a $311-million deal Murdoch needed to anchor Fox’s cable sports network. It was equally a deal that team owner Peter O’Malley needed to manage the tax implications of inheriting the Dodgers. When Fox sold the team to Boston parking lot entrepreneurs Frank and Jamie McCourt in 2004 for $420 million, the deal was eagerly blessed by MLB Commissioner Bud Selig as a business favor to Fox, holder of baseball’s television broadcast rights. Apparently, everyone inside baseball knew how much that deal stank, how overleveraged the McCourts really were. By taking the Dodgers into receivership last week, Selig is trying to engineer another deal. That probably won’t have much to do with us or Los Angeles either.

    When I was young, on the morning after a game, over the plate of two fried eggs and four strips of bacon my mother made us every school day, I would read Jim Murray’s column in the sports section of the Los Angeles Times, but not for his thoughts on the Dodgers. I read Murray for the sound of the voice in his columns, the same way I read Matt Weinstock, Jack Smith, Art Seidenbaum, and Charles Champlin in the Times. I learned from all of them the centrality of place in an imaginative life, a hunger for the stories, and the power of having a voice. But those are boyhood values that are gone for deals, too.

    Like the arrival of the Dodgers in Los Angeles, the sale of the Times to the Chicago-based Tribune Company in 2000 was a deal that sounded good to Angeleños. Instead of bitter Chandler family members, real journalists would run the paper, even if nearly all of them were out of town. And like the sale of the Dodgers to the McCourts, which floated on so much borrowed money that the franchise is now $525 million in debt, the leveraged sale of the Tribune Company in 2007 to developer Sam Zell turned out to be a cynical farce. Another fast-talking out-of-towner took control of an iconic L.A. institution for cents on the dollar and with no idea of Los Angeles. What mattered was getting the deals done. The deals had nothing to do with this place or our story.

    The deals still do not. The Delaware bankruptcy court overseeing the dismantling of Zell’s empire of paper is only interested in getting its assets sold. Commissioner Selig’s takeover of the Dodgers was only a last-ditch maneuver to prevent the McCourts from saving their borrowed lifestyle by mortgaging the Dodgers’ future broadcast rights.

    Something narrow and coarse in the imaginations of the McCourts and Zell and Selig and their business partners squeezed out any moral dimension to their deals or any feeling for Los Angeles. But to question how they acquired so much of our place so cheaply is uncomfortable for Angeleños. Better to grumble about indifferent outsiders. Seen from their perspective, Los Angeles has only market value, the sort of value that sold Los Angeles to the world as one of the most successful lifestyle products of the 20th century.

    Not anymore. Too many deals have soured; too much of the city has been taken into receivership. Even our citizenship – already problematic – has been foreclosed. Deals under duress have taken too many of our civic institutions from local control and put them in the hands of monitors and special masters, raising another question we would prefer to duck: Do we have the capacity to govern ourselves?

    In 1992, retired Superior Court Judge James Kolts, picked by the county Board of Supervisors to investigate systemic abuses in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, hired attorney Merrick Bobb to review excessive force complaints against deputies. Bobb continues to monitor the LASD’s performance.

    From 1996 to 2006, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority operated under federal supervision, after religious and civil rights organizations charged the MTA with “transit racism.” A special master was appointed by the federal court to oversee the MTA’s bus service under a consent decree to insure that buses would meet demand in low-income neighborhoods.

    Complaints in the early 1990s that special education students were being systematically underserved by the Los Angeles Unified School District led to a civil rights suit and another consent decree under which an Office of the Independent Monitor evaluates the district’s compliance with court orders and federal law. The OIM was supposed to complete its work by 2006, but the district has yet to meet all twelve of the goals set by the consent decree.

    In the aftermath of the Rampart CRASH scandal, in which members of an anti-gang police unit were charged with widespread corruption and unprovoked violence in late 2000, the Los Angeles Police Department entered into a consent decree that made the federal Department of Justice arbiter of virtually every aspect of the department, its officers, and their interactions with suspects. The consent decree ended in 2009 – after the department was turned around by a police chief imported from New York – but a transition agreement compels the LAPD to continue demonstrating compliance to the DOJ.

    Grudging compliance to special masters and appointed monitors may be the best we have to give in a city fragmented by institutional barriers and so distracted from civic concerns. Few of us want to see Los Angeles as it is or what it should be; we’ve let others do it for us. This city’s unaccountable political structure, its conception of power merely as the means to another deal, and the city’s air of disconnected neutrality have let thugs police its streets, unfeeling technocrats run its services, and the McCourts loot its most-loved institution. And when those faults became intolerable, others – not us – imposed their solutions. We’ve come to expect this – and worse – from Los Angeles and ourselves. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” might as well be the motto on the city seal.

    Los Angeles succeeded once, less as a place and more as a succession of slick real estate deals that have reached the limits of our landscape. Truthfully, we never needed a shared moral imagination until now, when so many desertions from the common good have shown us how little loyalty the once powerful had for this place. And no deal, no special master, no court-ordered monitor can supply what we lack.

    D. J. Waldie is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times and a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine. He is the author most recently of California Romantica with Diane Keaton. He blogs for KCET TV at http://www.kcet.org/user/profile/djwaldie.

    Photo by johnwilliamsphd

  • Skepticism Greets US DOT’s Draft Transportation Bill

    An undated— and possibly still unvetted by OMB—draft of US DOT’s legislative proposal for surface transportation reauthorization, the “Transportation Opportunities Act,” has been making the rounds in Washington for the past week. Its publication, however, has been largely ignored by the inside-the-Beltway transportation community. What would ordinarily be an eagerly awaited event and an occasion to compliment the Department , has passed virtually unnoticed. Even the usual cheering squad of Administration-supportive advocacy groups such as Transportation for America, the Building America’s Future coalition and US PIRG has been muted in their approval.

    The reason for this indifference is twofold. Partly, it’s because the DOT draft contains no surprises: it merely restates the proposals already revealed in the President’s FY 2012 Budget request. But more importantly, the draft has been ignored because it has been judged to lack political savvy and realism. Even the highly partisan liberal Streetsblog was obliged to pronounce the draft bill as irrelevant. Wrote Tanya Snyder, its Capitol Hill correspondent in a level-headed assessment, “…don’t expect it to be central to the debate in Congress. By refusing to adjust to a still-struggling economy, high gas prices, and a deficit-obsessed Congress, the president has rendered his own plan moot.”

    Snyder’s dismissive verdict is understandable. Consider the following:

    Item: Multiple congressional spokesmen have stated in recent months that future surface transportation funding will be limited to the tax revenues deposited into the Highway Trust Fund. There will be no further rescue or “bailout” of the Trust Fund using general funds; “deficit funding is out of the question”; “government must learn to live within its means.” The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee reaffirmed this position as recently as March 15 in its “Views and Estimates for Fiscal Year 2012” report. Yet the US DOT chose to ignore these unambiguous congressional signals. Its legislative draft has reaffirmed the initial White House proposal for a six-year surface transportation program totaling $556 billion, with an up-front FY 2012 appropriation of $50 billion. Meanwhile, transportation-related tax revenues are expected to average only $38 billion/year, for a six-year total of $230 billion according to the latest Congressional Budget Office estimates. In recent appropriation hearings on the FY 2012 transportation budget, Transportation Department officials failed to explain how the resulting shortfall of over $300 billion would be funded.

    Item: In its draft bill, the US DOT has proposed to devote $53 billion over six-years to pursue a “high-speed” rail program that would eventually (in 25 years) give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail service. Yet Congress has rescinded all of FY 2011 funding for the high-speed rail program and House Republican leadership has announced its intention to totally eliminate support for high-speed rail beginning next year. Even if a modest passenger rail program should survive, it is likely to be focused on the Northeast Corridor, as Rep. Mica has strongly suggested, and not pursue a quixotic multi-billion dollar national “high-speed” rail vision as conceived and advocated by the White House.

    Item: In its draft bill, the US DOT has proposed to expand the existing Highway Trust Fund into a successor “Transportation Trust Fund.” The expanded Fund would include four accounts – for Passenger Rail, Highways, Transit and an Infrastructure Fund. To fund the two new accounts plus the expanded Highway and Transit accounts, the Transportation Department has proposed an unspecified new “energy tax” to supplement the existing sources of revenue (i.e. transportation-related taxes on fuel, heavy trucks and tires). However, the initiative for any new tax measures must originate with the House Ways and Means Committee. With the House Republicans on record as opposed to any new taxes, and with bipartisan desire not to increase the consumers’ cost of energy, any proposed “energy tax” has virtually zero chance of success in the 112th Congress. (Note: it’s not even certain whether the energy tax proposal would survive OMB review).

    Item: The US DOT has proposed a three-part “Livability” program totaling $27.5 billion over six years. The program would subsume existing formula-based transportation enhancement activities and include a program of discretionary grants for bicycle, pedestrian and capacity building activities. However, the ill-defined “livability” concept has met with profound skepticism on the part of House Republicans. Congressional sources have made it known that a “livability” program is unlikely to be a part of any future surface transportation bill.

    Item: The US DOT has proposed a “National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund” to finance transportation infrastructure projects of national and regional significance through grants, loans, loan guarantees and lines of credit. The Fund, administered by a heavily bureaucratized structure (executive director, nine-member Investment Council, Advisory Committee) would receive $30 billion over six years. This proposal, also know as the National Infrastructure Bank, faces considerable bipartisan skepticism and overt opposition by several influential House and Senate leaders. Its chances of passage are rated at less than 50-50.

    In sum, the unreality of its fiscal ambitions and the lack of political support for its key programmatic initiatives has rendered the DOT’s legislative proposal “dead on arrival” in the judgment of congressional observers. That is not to say that the proposal deserves to be totally ignored. Many of its programmatic provisions – for example, those dealing with accelerated project delivery, tolling, highway and motor vehicle safety, “state of good repair” policy, pursuit of VMT fees, performance management and freight policy—are worthy of consideration and will likely find their way into the final bill.

    However, the Washington policy establishment is largely ignoring what it considers a stubborn refusal by the drafters of the US DOT bill to face the facts and adjust to political realities. Instead, transportation stakeholders are awaiting the release (probably in late June) of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee bill that will more correctly reflect the mood of the Congress, the stakeholders and of the country. It is safe to conclude that what is likely to emerge from that committee — and eventually approved by the full House and the Senate— will bear little resemblance to the U.S. Transportation Department’s unrealistic draft legislative proposal.

    Ken Orski has worked professionally in the field of transportation for over 30 years.

    Flickr photo of Seattle’s I-90, I-5 Interchange, by Flickr user “rutlo”, available online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rutlo/3197844879/

  • Lauren Leskovac

  • About me

  • 2011 How We Pick the Best Cities For Job Growth

    The methodology for the 2011 rankings largely corresponds to that used last year, which emphasizes the robustness of a region’s growth both recently and over time. It allows the rankings to include all of the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports monthly employment data. They are derived from three-month rolling averages of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics “state and area” unadjusted employment data reported from November 1999 to January 2011.

    “Large” areas include those with a current nonfarm employment base of at least 450,000 jobs. “Midsize” areas range from 150,000 to 450,000 jobs. “Small” areas have as many as 150,000 jobs. This year’s rankings reflect the current size of each MSA’s employment, unlike last year when some were “held over” in size categories to facilitate comparisons.

    This year’s rankings use four measures of growth to rank all areas for which full data sets were available from the past 10 years. Because of the expanded availability of data since last year, we were able to include another small MSA (Manhattan, KS) in this year’s rankings for a total of 398 regions. Generally, this year’s rankings can be directly compared to the 2010 rankings for MSAs for the large and midsize categories, although there are eight MSAs that are reported in the Small size category that were Medium last year and one (Honolulu, HI) that was large that is now reported as medium-sized. In instances where the analysis refers to changes in ranking order, these adjustments are made accordingly, reporting the changes in ranking as if they had been categorized in their current category last year.

    The index is calculated from a normalized, weighted summary of: 1) recent growth trend: the current and prior year’s employment growth rates, with the current year emphasized (two points); 2) mid-term growth: the average annual 2005-2010 growth rate (two points); 3) long-term trend and momentum: the sum of the 2005-2010 and 1999-2004 employment growth rates multiplied by the ratio of the 1999-2004 growth rate over the 2005-2010 growth rate (two points); and 4) current year growth (one point).

    The data reflect the North American Industry Classification System categories, including total nonfarm employment, manufacturing, financial services, business and professional services, educational and health services, information, retail and wholesale trade, transportation and utilities, leisure and hospitality, and government.

  • iziel

  • Diverging Demographics Leads to Fewer Babies in Singapore

    Two interesting statistics were recently released in the same week. Singapore clocked in a population of just over 5 million and a sex ratio of 974 males per 1000 females.  Its neighbour and ally India inched closer to beating China in the population game by notching up 1,210 million people as its head count, along with the more news-worthy sex ratio of 940 females to every 1000 males.

    If you happen to be a Singaporean female who belongs to the Club of 26 (1000 less 974) you can forget about ever finding a mate amongst your countrymen.  Even with its low girl child ratio, India’s large population base will ensure that the overall country continues to grow at a healthy pace for some decades with or without policy interruptions.  If Singapore’s declining birth ratio continues to favour women, at some stage there will be a shortage of men.

    This is part of a larger demographic dilemma. Singapore is increasingly worried about not having enough babies to replace its residents. In the past the government has tried to counter the declining numbers by attracting a work force of immigrants. Most believe that that this has led to over-crowding of an already small country and driven up prices of everything that is already in short supply. Meanwhile the Singaporean birth rate has continued its southward march.

    The leading explanation for the low birth rate centers around the high and rising cost of living. Life in one of the world’s ten richest countries can be a struggle even with a home ownership rate of more than 80%. Tax rates are low but everything else that contributes to living, i.e. a car, food items, apparel most of the time are imported and hence quite expensive.

    Here are some observations that I hope can explain people’s concern about the “affordability” of having children.

    The entire vibe of Singapore is progress. The government pumps in millions of dollars to ensure the country doesn’t fall behind in the ”world-class” game. Casinos, malls, theatres, world famous artists, and Formula 1 car racing all have been here, underlining Singapore’s ambitions to play cosmopolitan.  No private building is allowed to stand for more than 30-40 years. It is torn down to make room for swankier apartments with an appropriately swankier name.  Escalating property prices drive down the size of new apartments. The name of the game is upgradation. A Singaporean living in an HDB (housing development board) flat dreams of upgrading to an ”executive condominium” and from there to a ”luxury condominium with full facilities”. Adding fuel to the fire are comparisons with the foreigners many of whom live a better life than the native residents.

    It is this constant comparison and hence the drive for a ”better” life that discourages the Singaporean from taking a break. Competition at work is fierce, work schedules are gruelling and flexi-hours not really an option without seriously compromising either money making or a chance at a promotion.

    The policy of attracting talented foreigners has consequences on the birth rate of the nation. While foreign talent fuels the nation, the presence of upper end mobile foreigners ensures that Singaporeans do not assume that “the good life,” especially compared to their peers in the region. It also keeps them slogging away for more at the cost of parenthood.

    Every Singaporean male has to serve in the Army compulsorily for a couple of years. That means for anyone aspiring for a regular career in the corporate or government world, a female colleague can get ahead of her male counterpart by two years. Over a period of a lifetime, two years do not matter much but in the early years of life, a two year lead time can put a woman in her 20s significantly financially ahead of her male counterpart. When it comes to choosing a life partner, she has the choice of a slightly older but financially compatible colleague or a younger but not yet established in his career co-worker.

    Like most sensible women would, she chooses to push the marriage age away, and marry someone older than her. The median age for women at marriage is 27.5 years and for men 29.8 years (2009 data).  At that age, most people are at mid-level management, hence taking a career break for parenthood necessarily compromises not only earnings but also their future career options in a increasingly competitive job world.

    In comparison, Singapore is a great place for foreigners to live as outsiders. By definition, foreign talent comes here in search of a better life than the one they can afford back home. To a large extent, that desire is fulfilled. To retain and continue to attract this talent, the country will have to maintain the distinct treatment of locals and foreigners.

    However unlike most immigrant-attracting societies llike the US, Canada and Australia, there is precious little planned assimilation of these foreigners within the Singaporean society.  Most foreigners live, seek and mix with those of their own kind or closest to their own kind. Beyond familiarising themselves with food, there is very little ‘local flavor” in their life.   Tolerance and racial harmony are well-nurtured values, but integration is largely missing. 

    Even as children, there is little mixing.  There are two distinct sets of students, those educated byt the international school system Vs. the competitive and compulsory local education system. Cross admission into either type is tightly controlled, by purse size, policy or peer pressure

    If you do not study in the same school or do not live in the same area you are unlikely to hang-out together or assimilate anything from each other, neither in your formative growing up, “open-minded” years or later.

    It is possible for a permanent resident to live for decades in Singapore as a guest, oblivious to the problems of the native Singaporeans, even unaware that there is a world outside of luxury condos and wall-to-wall shopping. Amongst the foreigners there is likely to be little empathy for the real issues facing their borrowed “workland” and its people. Yet it is not possible as a native of the country to ignore the people who come into their country, live a better life than them and do not seem to go through similar life pains.

    The children of these semi-residents ,even those  born here, often view  the country as a stepping stone to migrate to larger, more developed economies or in tighter times like these, receive their higher education abroad and come back to a life not dissimilar from their parents. Their parents often then choose to go back to their much more affordable native countries than stay on and watch the cost of living overwhelm their diminishing retirement funds.

    Barring a few exceptions, natives would live and retire in and inexpensive country leaving it to their children to fulfil dreams of an upgraded life.

    Isn’t it time the two sets got together to create a better future, one for their land of birth and the other for their land of work? Perhaps balancing these two groups, and working towards their integration, is critical to maintaining Singapore’s progress in the future.

    Vatsala Pant is a management graduate with several years of business leadership experience and a connoisseur of people, places and cultures. She currently lives in Singapore.

    Photo by Lip Jin Lee

  • Tests, Lies and The Race to the Top

    Obama had his “Sputnik Moment,“ when standardized test scores around the world pointed to the mediocrity of American students in reading, math and sciences. There is now a major mantra coming from Washington to all state capitals: the “race to the top” is on, and it doesn’t include a continuation of the downward spiral of test scores. The new modus operandi: Leave aside achievement throughout the years in high school, the stream of G.P.As., the difficulty of courses taken during the years in 9 to 12, and any creative projects done by students. Base everything on standardized tests.

    When career prospects, prestige, and job security are connected to one and only one criteria — score on a standardized test — human nature is bound to creep in. Baseball players start taking steroids; Olympic athletes try every means to beat the system. Will it happen to dedicated teachers who are working hard to educate our next generation? Will temptation overtake honesty, integrity and ethical behavior?

    The jury is out regarding schools in Washington DC, which was considered a shining star of improvement in math, sciences and reading. Many teachers were given bonuses exceeding $8,000; higher-ups were also rewarded.

    However, the statistical analysis of erased incorrect answers — replaced with correct answers —on standardized tests have created serious doubts in the minds of the general public and of educators. Acting School Chancellor Kaya Henderson has asked the D.C. Inspector General to investigate reports that a sharp gain in some standardized tests scores may be the result of cheating, and members of the press have asked for subpoenas to be issued to get at the truth. Obviously, a thorough investigation is needed.

    Similarly, in Georgia, test scores improved in Atlanta while several officials were indicted and a few resigned. In Indiana, a Department of Education official believes that a test coordinator from the school system copied a test question and distributed it on Facebook. And Texas Education Agency Commissioner Shirley Neeley has launched an effort to catch cheating on standardized tests, not by students, but by teachers.

    The all powerful teachers unions, as well as budget-cutting tea party-influenced elected legislators are all pushing their own agendas. The forgotten question: How will an extreme emphasis on standardized tests affect students?

    India may offer a possible clue. A country of over 1 billion in population, with several million graduating from high school per year (with average class sizes at 50 or larger), the competition to get into most prestigious institutions is extreme: consider 455,000 students attempting to land a seat in the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, the globally recognized English language Engineering College, with less than few thousand seats. The competition for good medical and, business schools throughout the country is equally fierce. And remember— all that matters is your score on the standardized test.

    A Mumbai publication recently highlighted the human cost of Indian education “successes”. The statistics draw a bleak picture of elite students in India. About 19 students commit suicide per day, with six of these attributed to the “fear of failure on standardized test,” the sole school selection criteria. Student suicides in India were 6,060 in the year 2008, and increased to 6,761 by 2009. The states with above average literacy, with extreme competition for prestigious education institutes, are number one and two in suicides. Psychologists and education professionals are attributing this to “excessive emphasis” on standardized tests, parental expectations, and social pressure to succeed. Think Tiger Mom!

    The suicide rate is so alarming that the Minster of Law (comparable to an Attorney General) has suggested “decriminalizing” suicide (currently, anyone who survives a suicide is subject to prosecution). The local English language columnist, Gitanjali Maria, observes that “Childhood should be the days of fun, not memorizing equations.” Hone your talents and discover your hidden strengths, Maria recommends, instead of spending every waking moment preparing for the next standardized test.

    The system of standardized tests rarely allows a student to enjoy any subject or to discover the beauty of math or physics. All the knowledge, fun, desire and ability to enjoy and excel is filtered down to one scantron that will decide the zip code you will live in, your bank balance, and whether you will have a good job or just get by. We all need to recognize the difference between a ‘race to the top’, and a race to memorize formula with the sole objective of “fill the correct blank with a Number 2 pencil”.

    Shashi Parulekar is an engineer by training. He holds an MBA, and served as Asia Pacific M.D. with Parker Hannifin Co in Michigan for over ten years. He is a global business executive by profession and a demographer by passion.

    Photo by By Shannan Muskopf, biologycorner: Standardized Test