Fort Wayne Observed

FWCS Grad Ceremonies to be One Week Later

Fort Wayne Community Schools announced this afternoon that snow days have caused the school system to reschedule high school graduations one week later than earlier planned.

From the FWCS release:

The 2011 graduation dates for Fort Wayne Community Schools' high schools have been moved back (sic) by one week after six snow days pushed the last day of school past the originally scheduled graduation dates.

Graduations for the district's five high schools were originally planned for June 10 and 11 at the Coliseum. Commencement ceremonies will remain at the Coliseum but will now take place June 17 and 18, according to the following schedule:

• South Side – Friday, June 17, 6 p.m.
• Northrop – Friday, June 17, 7:30 p.m.
• Snider – Saturday, June 18, 10 a.m.
• Wayne – Saturday, June 18, noon
• North Side – Saturday, June 18, 1:30 p.m.

Lincoln Financial's Radio Station Income Up in 2010

Lincoln Financial Group is many things. The Fort Wayne founded company sells life insurance, annuities and ... radio commercials.

RBR and TVBR covers the radio and television broadcasting industry.  That includes Lincoln Financial Media, the Lincoln subsidiary that owns radio broadcast stations in Atlanta, Denver, Miiami and San Diego.  The broadcasting companies are a legacy of Lincoln's merger with Jefferson Pilot.

RBR and TVBR reports:

Since selling its TV stations and narrowing its radio group to four markets, Lincoln Financial Group has had little to say about its broadcast operations in its quarterly earnings reports [ ... ]

For all of 2010 Lincoln Financial Media had net revenues of $75 million, which was up 10% from $68 million in 2009. But expenses were also up, rising 11% from $53 million in ’09 to $59 million last year.

By our calculation then, broadcast income increased only slightly, rising about 7% from $15 million in 2009 to $16 million in 2010.

 

Greater Waynedale

The Waynedale Cafe has spread its wings by opening up a new location on Columbia Street at The Landing in downtown Fort Wayne.

Waynedale residents are proud of their community and many still identify it more as a town taken over by Fort Wayne than as merely a neighborhood area.  If other Waynedale businesses follow the Cafe's lead, it may be that Waynedale will soon be the overtaker.

Think about that the next time you pick up a copy of the Waynedale News at Time Corners.

 

Guest Weblog Post: Stouder on FWCS

Fort Wayne Observed invites submissions for guest posts on topics relating to life in Fort Wayne. Guest posts are invited to spur discussion and present a wider variety of viewpoints.

Fort Wayne resident and guest blogger Brian Stouder writes about his family's experience with Fort Wayne Community Schools:

A year ago, our family included an 8th grader and a 5th grader at Towles Montessori school, and a pre-K student at Bunche Montessori school - the only public Montessori school in the United States accredited by the American Montessori Society. My wife and I were quite taken by the innovative, forward-looking, and results oriented environment at these schools, and our young folks absolutely thrived. We valued that in these Montessori schools, if a student is motivated to press on and work ahead, the nature and the culture within these schools encourages and empowers them to do exactly that. Indeed we were (and remain) very proud of these schools, and our students' success within them.

But our 8th grader then finished up at Towles, and the prospect of high school appeared on the near horizon; specifically, South Side High School loomed before us. South Side was my high school, 31 years ago(!), and that was a source of some solace; but, truth be told, we were somewhat frightened. It's a very large school, and we had the general impression that it was a pretty rough place; it looked like the deep end of the pool (so to speak). Further, our general impression was that it was in turmoil, with the massive staff shakeup, including the principal and assistant principals. 

I don't precisely remember how we came to the decision, but a year ago or so, attending Fort Wayne Community School Board meetings became very important to me. Sometimes one or the other kids would accompany me, and every so often I could even get my lovely wife to come downtown with me; but in any case, I felt a need to understand how things were operating, and what challenges were being faced by the district. (Our TV service provider doesn't offer the public access channel, but even if it did, it couldn't offer the chance to informally chat with this or that administrator or board member)

In the course of the last year, I've learned many acronyms, and many highly significant facts about our Fort Wayne Community Schools, and - importantly - I've also seen firsthand how those things addressed at the board meetings flow into the schools where we have students. The most crucial "fact of life" I learned about downtown was the all-important "AYP", or Adequate Yearly Progress cell. In a nutshell, all students, sorted by defined subgroups, must be tested in reading/language arts and mathematics. Those "subgroups" include various racial and economic metrics, so that a large, diverse school system like FWCS (within which 79 different languages are spoken, for example) starts out with a much tougher task, and many more AYP cells to satisfy, than a smaller school system might have; and you cannot fail in any of them. 

FWCS has lots of tools at their disposal, including Pyramid for Success (which boils down to extra attention and supplemental instruction for students who need it, and getting out of the way of students who do not) and an engaged school board that does NOT presume to micromanage daily operation of the schools, but instead resolutely sets district goals and standards, and then holds the administration accountable to those goals, every month.

I plainly confess that I remained apprehensive as our 15 year old entered South Side. We attended a meeting for freshmen at the South Side auditorium, presided by the principal, Mr. Mable, and that was somewhat reassuring. It was good to be inside my old school, but it seemed even more enormous then it had 30 years ago. In fact, it really was quite different from when I attended there, but the principal seemed calm and professional, and that was good. At some point - possibly during that meeting - we learned that Mr. Mable and Mr. Houser (an assistant principal) held monthly parent meetings at the school, called "Inside the Ivy", and we immediately put that onto our calendar. 

Those meetings are simply marvelous. They consist of detailed updates of how South Side is progressing, with regard to key metrics such as attendance, testing, assessments, and any other issues that arise. Every so often, you get a "bonus", too. For example, at one of those Inside the Ivy meetings, I learned that State Superintendent of Public Education Tony Bennett was coming to town a day later. So then, two days later at the beautiful North Side auditorium, I got to meet Mr. Bennett, and ask him a question or two, and take his measure.  I almost certainly would not have learned of his visit AHEAD of time, if not for that Inside the Ivy meeting.

Adding the monthly Inside the Ivy meetings to the week-to-week progression of data we get from Ed-Line (essentially electronic report cards that you get weekly via e-mail), plus the school board meetings, has given me a great deal of reassurance, and peace of mind. For one thing, South Side no longer resides in my imagination as a big scary place full of fearful and unknown things. Instead, I feel like a stakeholder there; it is my school again. And for another, FWCS itself doesn't seem like some huge and technically unexplainable thing that only exists to collect and spend vast sums of money, but instead, strikes me as a genuinely hard-working and dedicated bunch of people successfully navigating a very complex challenge.

And, not for nothing, informally talking about FWCS with my friends and colleagues has become a point of pride. Others are rightly happy with their suburban school systems, or their parochial schools, and that's fine; in fact, that's the way it should be. Ideally, we should all be happy with our schools; and in fact, I am very happy with Fort Wayne Community Schools in general, and with Bunche and Towles and South Side, specifically.

I think that the Fort Wayne School Board of Trustees' resolution of support for the teachers and their collective bargaining rights, as discussed by board president Mark GiaQuinta, is superb, and indeed, it should be remembered just how crucial the cooperation of the teachers' union has been to our schools' current success. I intend to be at Monday's school board meeting, if only to personally applaud when that resolution is adopted.

Andy Downs Writes in The Indy Star on Crossover Voting

The Indianapolis Star published a guest column by Indiana Purdue Fort Wayne professor Andy Downs. 

Mr. Downs was a former Chief of Staff to Fort Wayne Mayor and was a longtime Democratic Party appointee to the Allen County Election Board.

Mr. Downs wrote about the prospect of 'crossover voting' affecting the 2010 primary election contest between State Treasurer Richard Mourdock and incumbent US Senator Richard G. Lugar.

Andy Downs writes in part:

One interesting theme [is] that Democrats might vote in the Republican primary. Political scientists refer to this as crossover or strategic voting, and have been studying it for decades. They have identified two reasons voters do this. One is to try to ensure that the weakest candidate from the opposite party gets the nomination. The hope is that the weak candidate will be defeated in the general election by the strategic voter's preferred candidate. The second reason is to try to ensure that the strategic voter's second favorite candidate makes it to the fall election. As a result, the strategic voter is assured that his first or second favorite candidate will win the general election.

[ ... ]

What decades of research have taught us is that it is rare for strategic voters to be successful. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that it is difficult to identify enough voters willing to cross over to make a difference in the outcome of an election. Anyone who has worked a campaign knows it can be challenging to get people to go out and vote for their candidate. It's an even bigger challenge to convince voters that the best course of action for their candidate is for people to vote in the other party's primary.

The second is that it is difficult to get the strategic voters to agree on the appropriate strategy to pursue. Is it better to vote for the weak candidate or the second favorite candidate? Obviously, if a candidate's campaign organizes the strategic voting effort, supporters would be encouraged to support the opposition party's weaker candidate. However, if the crossover effort isn't organized by a candidate and then voting for the more preferred candidate from the opposition party may seem to be the better choice.

Indiana's primary election laws provide other barriers to successful strategic voting campaigns.

Pancakes and Shrimp

Sign of the times at Coldwater and Coliseum in Fort Wayne:

Photo credit: Derek Pillie

Oscar Night: Is Sorkin's Mark Zuckerberg Like Sorkin's Philo Farnsworth?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated "The Social Network" in eight categories including Best Picture.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has been nominated for best Adapted Screenplay.

While Mr. Sorkin is best known for work such as "The Social Network" and television's "West WIng" he also wrote a play about one of Fort Wayne's most famous residents.  Sorkin's "The Farnsworth Invention" was a stage play adapted from an unproduced screenplay about Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television.

The play had a short run on Broadway from December 2007 to March 2008.

That it was a fictionalized account of Mr. Farnsworth's life is something of an understatement.  Mr. Sorkin took numerous liberties with the historical account of Mr. Farnsworth's legal battle with RCA over the origin of television. Mr. Sorkin also took liberties with Mr. Farnsworth's character.

One wonders whether Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg feels the same way about the manner his life has been portrayed in "The Social Network" as members of Mr. Farnsworth's family about the way in which Mr. Sorkin portrayed the great inventor's life.

Here is a comment made to Fort Wayne Observed by Linda Farnsworth in April of 2008 in response to an FWOb post regarding the close of the three month Broadway performance of The Farnsworth Invention:

Yes, The Farnsworth Invention lives on, but it has so many lies in it about history that it has gone far beyond creative drama. It is fiction. See TheFarnsworthInvention.com Facts and Fiction by Paul Schatzkin and Kent Farnsworth, Phil's Son.

The author of Distant Vision; Romance and Discovery on an Invisible Frontier (May 1990) spent many years working to correct the history books only to have Aaron Sorkin (who was hired in 1991 to write the script for the movie from the book (see above)) of Mr. Farnsworth life.

[Mr. Sorkin] now claims he read all the material out there and he wrote the play the way he saw history. He claims he never read Distant Vision (I was present when I gave him the book to read on his flight back to California. Are we going to let Hollywood writers decide what history is and put it out there for the masses?

Dr. Farnsworth was a genius mathematician. Mrs. Farnsworth spent years talking to school kids about "follow their dreams, never say it is impossible". All Pem Farnsworth's work and effort to encourage kids to follow their dream and make it come true will stay with those kids but anyone seeing this play will miss the message. Dreams that are hard to do can be done. Dreams that are impossible just take longer.

Pem’s book was published in 1990. Since then there have been many books written about Mr. Farnsworth - the inventor of television. Most of the writers obtained documents from her.

Books published after 1990 are: The Boy Who Invented Television by Paul Schatzkin; The Last Lone Inventor by Evan Schwartz; The Boy Genius and the Mogul by Daniel Stashower; Philo T. Farnsworth the Father of Television by Donald G. Godfrey. Children’s Books available are: Dreams Do come True by Corrie Lynne Player; The Teen Who Invented Television by Edwin Brit Wyckoff; and,  TV's Forgotten Hero by Stephanie Sammartino McPherson. I apologize if I have omitted any books. These were ones I could put my hands on in the house. Documentaries [include] PBS Big Dream Small Screen the American Experience (excellent).

Aaron Sorkin states it took many people to invent television. If that is the way it is then look at the Wright Brothers. [The Wright Brothers]  didn’t invent flying - they ... [took] what had been tried and failed [by] many before them and added their ideas. Hence they are named the inventors of flying. Dr. Farnsworth started to think about this when he was 13 or 14 years old. Do any of you have a son or grandson that again that are thinking about inventing a whole new medium? I think about what I was doing at that age.  -    Linda Farnsworth

The New York Post's Skip Card wrote in November of 2007 in the article "The Facts vs. 'Farnsworth":

CAN Aaron Sorkin handle the truth - or does he just not care? So wonder Philo T. Farnsworth fans who've seen Sorkin's new Broadway play.

Opening Monday, "The Farnsworth Invention" describes Farnsworth's struggle to build a TV system and protect his work against RCA and its leader, David Sarnoff. Audiences leave believing Farnsworth was a failed, drunken genius.

In truth, Farnsworth won his patent fight, showed off a working TV system in 1934 and was manufacturing TVs by 1939.

Farnsworth's admirers, who've tried for decades to adjust the fuzzy historical picture, say Sorkin's drama plays like a bad rerun.

"After 30 years of telling that story, we finally see it turned into popular entertainment, and it's wrong!" says Paul Schatzkin, author of the Farnsworth biography "The Boy Who Invented Television."

Sorkin, the Emmy-winning writer of TV's "The West Wing" and playwright of "A Few Good Men," refused to comment for this story, as did "Farnsworth" director Des McAnuff.

Granted, it's not easy cramming decades of history into two hours, but the play, Farnsworth aficionados say, often veers into falsehood.

As played by Jimmi Simpson, this Farnsworth is frequently intoxicated, even on the night in 1926, when he proposed to Elma "Pem" Gardner - an action that would have infuriated Pem's devout Mormon family.

And it wasn't (as the play depicts) Pem's cigarette smoke visible in Farnsworth's first TV test - because Pem never smoked.

Pem, who died in 2006, sold the rights to her 1989 memoir, "Distant Vision," to producer Fred Zollo, who brought in Sorkin to write a script.

"She had a lot of respect for Aaron, but she was a straight talker," says Georja Skinner, who has known the Farnsworth family since the 1970s. If Pem were alive, "She would be greatly appalled," Skinner says.

From his home in Indiana, Kent Farnsworth, the couple's youngest surviving son, tells The Post that working with Zollo and Sorkin was "a long and mostly miserable relationship."

"I am a staunch Sorkin fan," he writes in an e-mail. " 'West Wing' was such a joy to me. I hate like hell to be at odds with him now." Neither he nor his brother Russell were invited to the play's opening night, even though Russell lives in Manhattan.

The JG Missed Two - Including the Closest One

There was two law schools missing in the Journal Gazette's Saturday morning report on the announcement made by Indiana Tech that it was exploring creation of an additional Indiana law school.

The JG reported:

There are six law schools within three hours of Fort Wayne: the University of Notre Dame; Indiana University School of Law, Indianapolis; Valparaiso University; Thomas M. Cooley Law School, Lansing, Mich; Michigan State University in East Lansing; and the University of Toledo.

One the JG missed is the Claude W. Pettit School of Law at Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio.  Ada is located near Lima, Ohio. 

The ONU Law School is actually the closest law school to Fort Wayne. Google Maps show it as only 78 miles from downtown; less than an hour and a half driving time. Most of the drive is on four-lane US 30.

The University of Dayton School of Law is shown by Google to be two hours and 44 minutes from Fort Wayne.

Thomas M. Cooley has three additional campuses including one in Ann Arbor. 

NYT: Law Schools are Cash Cows

Thanks to FWOb reader Justin Stalter for the reference to a January article on law schools by David Segal of the New York Times.

An excerpt:

[Law Schools] are also cash cows.

Tuition at even mediocre law schools can cost up to $43,000 a year. Those huge lecture-hall classes — remember “The Paper Chase”? — keep teaching costs down. There are no labs or expensive equipment to maintain. So much money flows into law schools that law professors are among the highest paid in academia, and law schools that are part of universities often subsidize the money-losing fields of higher education.

“If you’re a law school and you add 25 kids to your class, that’s a million dollars, and you don’t even have to hire another teacher,” says Allen Tanenbaum, a lawyer in Atlanta who led the American Bar Association’s commission on the impact of the economic crisis on the profession and legal needs. “That additional income goes straight to the bottom line.”

Mr. Segal also wrote that the placement success rate of law schools is ... well, fudged:

[I]mprobably enough, law schools have concluded that life for newly minted grads is getting sweeter, at least by one crucial measure. In 1997, when U.S. News first published a statistic called “graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation,” law schools reported an average employment rate of 84 percent. In the most recent U.S. News rankings, 93 percent of grads were working — nearly a 10-point jump.

In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy — they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.

How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves. “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”

IT is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

The World is Not Crying Out to Mint More Lawyers

Now comes word that Fort Wayne's Indiana Tech is considering establishment of a law school. 

So, it is time to publish what I republished in 27 when St. Francis was considering establishment of a law school.  And that was a post I wrote in December 2005 when Indiana State University was thinking of creating a law school.

The News-Sentinel is reporting that the University of Saint Francis is seriously looking at the possibility of opening a law school.

On December 12, 2005, I wrote a post on Indiana Parley about the proposal being considered by Indiana State University to open a law school at Terre Haute.  As you read what I wrote then, please know that my opinion is somewhat softened by the fact that a Saint Francis law school would be at a private university and would, of course, be in my hometown.

I also have a great deal of respect for the administration of Sister Elise at Saint Francis.

Still, the idea of a another lawyer generator is not something for which the world is crying out.

Indiana Parley, December 12, 2005:

The Indianapolis Star is reporting today that Indiana State University of Terre Haute is thinking about adding a law school to its array of top-flight professional and graduate programs.The Sycamores beat Indiana University at basketball. That's given them all sorts of ideas.

There already exist two public university law programs in Indiana. The Indiana University School of Law at Bloomington and the Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis are both fine schools. In recent years, the Indianapolis School has improved its standing by moving toward becoming a center for the study of international law.

Additionally, Valparaiso University and the University of Notre Dame both operate long-established and well-regarded law schools.

Why would Indiana State University want to establish a law school?

Indiana Parley would suggest the reason is that, compared to establishing other professional programs, creating a law school is cheap.

Relatively cheap, mind you. A school needs to establish a library and it needs to hire staff. Other than that, you need to have lecture space. You don't need to equip laboratories; you don't need to equip students. The per student cost of educating a lawyer is pretty darn inexpensive compared to training a physician, a dentist or a veterinarian.

It's well established that there will be a demand by students to matriculate at such a school. Yet it's also well established that there isn't a huge market demand for American lawyers that isn't already being supplied by the nation's existing law schools.

That is, there isn't a real market signal to produce more lawyers. Certainly there is no crying need for more lawyers to be milled at a publicly supported university.

Posted by Mitch Harper at 3:06 PM - December 12, 2005.

More: December 2005 post on Marcia Oddi's Indiana Law Blog about ISU law school proposal landing with the "biggest thud" of 2005.