Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk

A large number of schools participating in a pay-for-grades program have seen test scores in reading and math go up by almost 40 percentage points. The Sparks program will pay seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for good performance on 10 assessment tests. About two-thirds of the 59 schools in the program improved their scores by margins above the citywide average. "It's an ego booster in terms of self-worth. When they get the checks, there's that competitiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven. Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.

As anticipated by a Cooley Law School symposium in March, the Supreme Court has ruled in a landmark case on the question of whether judges must recuse themselves in cases where one of the parties has given major financial contributions to the judge's election campaigns. The court ruled 5-4 that a judge must recuse themselves from such a case. [...]

The case was Caperton v Massey, which deals with an energy company owner who spent $3 million to get a justice, Brent Benjamin, elected to the West Virginia Supreme Court. Once in office, the justice refused to recuse himself from hearing an appeal that was pending before the court involving the energy company, casting the deciding vote in favor of his campaign contributor.

The court ruled that a party to the case does not need to prove actual bias on the part of the justice, concluding that when a situation contains such a clear conflict of interest, due process requires that they step aside from deciding in the case [...]