There remains so much wrong with the No Child Left Behind act that I hesitate to even begin to address it. One of the most deplorable chasms, and, coincidentally, most easily addressed by the federal Department of Education, has, however, been the law’s allowance that individual states may calculate graduation rates in any way they desire. Many states initially took advantage of this disconnect between the law-as-written- and the law-as-applied and have, since 2002 at the law’s inception, relied upon a variety of inaccurate formulas producing misleading data, thus artificially inflating their graduation rates.

Georgia is one of these states.

In September of 2007, State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox released a statement on the Georgia Department of Education website publicizing an overall graduation rate of “an all-time high of 72.3 percent.” Were our education system in even adequate shape, this figure, and its attendant crowing, would be woeful enough. Our education system is in a shambles, however, and deeply, possibly systemically, flawed, and Georgia takes advantage of the law’s ambiguity in the state’s favor in order to preen its own ragged feathers. By this I mean, of course, that the figure on the website is inflated, vis-à-vis the meaning that the average parent would expect that figure to reference, anyway.

I have long held that the problem with letting Christians erect religious monuments on public land is not necessarily that I will have to look at those monuments, but that if we allow Christians the privilege of memorializing their religion in stone on public property we must, as a free and fair people in premise if not always in practice, allow other adherents of other religions to erect their own monuments to their own gods, demigods, sacred books, and pasta.

I mean, really, that's why people have previously told Christians to erect their monuments on private land.  It's not because they're not allowed to have monuments, but because if they put a monument on public land, pretty soon Jews or Muslims will want a monument, and then the Buddhists start feeling left out, and once you let them in, well, you have to let everybody in.

Imagine, a ten commandments monuments goes up.  Okay.  Then a golden seagull perches nearby, then we add a Buddha and a Shiva and maybe a statue of L. Ron Hubbard.  Next someone erects a crescent, and some of the Pagans get in with a statue of Gaia.  And then there's the modern art with the plate of actual spaghetti and meatballs with a nice lighting effect indicating a heavenly glow.  That one has to be changed daily.

Not only would it be a mishmash of competing ideologies, such a hodgepodge would have little aesthetic value.  Quite frankly, I think it would make for a very crowded park.  What might make for an interesting example of roadside object d'art, a la Route 66 circa 1960, would, I think, be terribly out of place in a city park - or courthouse, for that matter.

Having gone through the preamble of what should be the ridiculous, the LA Times reports that the Supreme Court has agreed to consider a case along this vein:

But last year, the U.S. appeals court in Denver extended this free-speech rule to cover the monuments, statues and displays in a public park. It ruled in favor of a religious group called Summum, which says it wants to erect its "Seven Aphorisms of Summum" next to the Ten Commandments in Pioneer Park in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

Its ruling left the city with an all-or-nothing choice: Allow Summum and others to erect their own displays in the park, or remove the other monuments.

The city is apparently upset that it will have to either allow everybody to put up religious monuments, or remove the Christian-only material which it currently allows.  Some of these monuments are old, you see.  I get that.  We often place historical value on certain items that the newfangled contraptions just can't claim yet.  It's tradition.  Just because a thing is traditional, however, doesn't make it right.  Take slavery, for example, or female genital mutilation, or torturing a confession out of an enemy.  Or haggis, for that matter.  Tradition, for all it is often beloved, can be wrong, and being forced to choose otherwise can be tough.

Myself, I think if the city believes in the value of ancient Christian monuments so much that they are willing to spend precious tax dollars to defend them, they should keep them.  They just have to desegregate and let the other kids in, too.

The city could always plant lots of trees and other flora to obscure all of the monuments, make a sort of wild ramble out of it.  Then they could print up maps and charge a dollar a person to enter the park and hunt for the monuments.  It'd be like a modern day treasure hunt, only with civics and history and tolerance and stuff.