Friday, March 19, 2010

More from the State of Education in the America - Good Knewz from Chicago's South Side

Urban Prep Academy senior Keith Greer, along with his classmates, celebrates the news they will receive a free prom in Chicago because 100 percent of the graduating class was accepted into 4-year colleges or universities.
(Tribune photo by Heather Charles / March 5, 2010)




Charter School in Tough Neighborhood Gets All its Seniors into College

By Duaa Eldeib
Tribune staff reporter


March 5, 2010

1:14 PM CST



The entire senior class at Chicago's only public all-male, all-African-American high school has been accepted to four-year colleges. At last count, the 107 seniors had earned spots at 72 schools across the nation.



Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman surprised students at an all-school assembly at Urban Prep Academy for Young Men in Englewood this morning to congratulate them. It's the first graduating class at Urban Prep since it opened its doors in 2006.



Huberman applauded the seniors for making CPS shine."All of you in the senior class have shown that what matters is perseverance, what matters is focus, what matters is having a dream and following that dream," Huberman said.The school enforces a strict uniform of black blazers, khaki pants and red ties -- with one exception. After a student receives the news he was accepted into college, he swaps his red tie for a red and gold one at an assembly.The last 13 students received their college ties today, to thunderous applause.



Ask Rayvaughn Hines what college he was accepted to and he'll answer with a question."Do you want me to name them all?"For the 18-year-old from Back of the Yards, college was merely a concept--never a goal--growing up. Even within the last three years, he questioned if school, let alone college, was for him.



Now, the senior is headed to the prestigious Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga. next fall.Hines remembers the moment he put on his red and gold tie."I wanted to take my time because I was just so proud of myself," he said. "I wanted everyone to see me put it on."



The achievement might not merit a mayoral visit at one of the city's elite, selective enrollment high schools. But Urban Prep, a charter school that enrolls using a lottery in one of the city's more troubled neighborhoods, faced difficult odds. Only 4 percent of this year's senior class read at grade level as freshmen, according to Tim King, the school's CEO."



I never had a doubt that we would achieve this goal," King said. "Every single person we hired knew from the day one that this is what we do: We get our kids into college."



College is omnipresent at the school. Before the students begin their freshman year, they take a field trip to Northwestern University. Every student is assigned a college counselor the day he steps foot in the school.



The school offers an extended day--170,000 more minutes over four years compared to its counterparts across the city--and more than double the number of English credits usually needed to graduate.



Even the school's voicemail has a student declaring "I am college bound" before it asks callers to dial an extension. Normally, it takes senior Jerry Hinds two buses and 45 minutes to get home from school. On Dec. 11, the day University of Illinois at Champaign- Urbana was to post his admission decisions online at 5 p.m., he asked a friend to drive him home. He went into his bedroom, told his well-wishing mother this was something he had to do alone, closed the door and logged in.



" Yes! Yes! Yes!" he remembers screaming. His mother, who didn't dare stray far, burst in and began crying.


That night he made more than 30 phone calls, at times shouting "I got in" on his cell phone and home phone at the same time."


We're breaking barriers," he said. "And that feels great."


deldeib@tribune.com
Copyright © 2010

Saturday, March 6, 2010

If You Care About the Direction of Education in America, Do Not Miss This Interview




Leading Education Scholar Diane Ravitch:


No Child Left Behind Has Left US Schools with Legacy of “Institutionalized Fraud”






Below is Part One of the transcript from an interview on the popular Democracy Now! daily TV/radio program. The program, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez airs on over 800 stations.


I have highlighted portions of the text of the interview in red for editorial emphasis. If you feel the information in this interview is important, please share this post with others, in particular parents, teachers, school administrators and school board members. The policies presented here need to be questioned and widely discussed in our communities. These discussions must also engage our appointed bureaucrats, elected representatives and those running in upcoming school board elections.


A link to the website is included at the end of the post. There you should also be able to find Part Two of the interview.
Kentke


March 05, 2010


As the Obama administration touts No Child Left Behind and the “Race to the Top” competition for school grants, we speak to leading education scholarand former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch.


She’s long been known as an advocate of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, standardized testing, and using the free market to improve schools. But she’s had a radical change of heart, as chronicled in her latest book, The Death andLife of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.


Ravitch says, “The evidence says No Child Left Behind was a failure, and charter schools aren’t going to be any better.”


Guest: Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education and counselor to EducationSecretary Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush and appointed tothe National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton. She is the author of over twenty books, is research professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her latest book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing andChoice Are Undermining Education.


JUAN GONZALEZ: The Department of Education announced sixteen finalists Thursday in the first round of its “Race to the Top” competition, which will deliver $4.35 billion in school reform grants. The finalists were selected from a pool of forty-one applicants and include Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Tennessee. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said, quote,“These states are an example for the country of what is possible when adults come together to do the right thing." The winners will be chosen in April, and a second round of applications accepted in June.


The Washington Post reports that all the first round finalists, except for Delaware and South Carolina, received financial help from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in preparing their “Race to the Top” application. The foundation gave many states grants of up to $250,000 each to pay for a consultant to help them craft their application.


While protests around cuts to public education took place across the state, California learned it was among the twenty-five states rejected in the first round. Governor Schwarzenegger said the decision from the Education Council showed that, quote, “we need to be more aggressive and bolder in reforming our education system.”



AMY GOODMAN: Well, for a critical appraisal of “Race to the Top” and the Obama administration’s approach to education reform, we’re joined by a woman who’s long been known as an advocate of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, standardized testing, and using the free market to improve schools. But she’s had a radical change of heart in recent years.


I’m talking about the influential education scholar Diane Ravitch. She wasAssistant Secretary of Education and counselor to Education Secretary LamarAlexander under President George H.W. Bush and appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton. She’s the author of over twenty books. She’s research professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her latest book chronicles how and why she decided to break with the conservative education policies she once championed. It’s called The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.


Diane Ravitch, welcome to Democracy Now! With this latest news, what is your assessment of where we are going under the Obama administration?


DIANE RAVITCH: Well, unfortunately, the Obama administration has adopted and is building on the foundation of No Child Left Behind. And as I explain in this book, I believe that No Child Left Behind has been a failed policy,that it’s dumbed down the curriculum, narrowed the curriculum. Our kids arebeing denied a full education, because so much time is being spent on testprep and on tests that are really not very good tests and, in some cases,even fraudulent scoring of the test. The kids are getting a worse education as a result of No Child Left Behind.




The Obama administration, however, has bought into this rhetoric of accountability and choice, and they’re actually taking the Bush policies to a greater extreme. There is more support from the administration, this administration, for choice, because they have no opposition in the Congress, because it’s a Democratic president and because they had all this money, this $5 billion, to use as play money with no authorization, no oversight from Congress.


They’ve said to the states in the “Race to the Top,” this competition that was just held, that the requirements to be considered are, first of all,that the states have to be committed to privatizing many, many, many public schools. These are called charter schools. They’re privatized schools. The Bush administration would have never gotten away with that, because Congress would have stopped them.


They’ve also required states to commit to evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, which means that that will put even more emphasis on standardized testing, more drill down of test prep, more emphasis on basic skills. And also, it’s a very unfair measure, because it means that the students who live in poor communities, that they’re likely to get small gains, whereas the kids in the affluent communities will get big gains. And so, we’ll see the third emphasis of the Obama plan, which is close low-performing schools.


And Obama has said that he wants to see 5,000 low-performing schools transformed or closed, as we saw just recently in Rhode Island, where the only high school in a desperately poor community is supposed to fire all the teachers, close the school. And I think this is a terrible thing for public education. And I think we’re going to see a devastation of public education over the next—however long this president is in office, unless he changes course, which I hope he will, and doubt that he will.


JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the things that fascinated me as I was going throughyour book last night was how you’ve traced historically how the leaders ofboth political parties over the last few decades—it was the same way underBill Clinton, that Democrats and Republicans have reached sort of aconsensus on what they call school reform. And when you were in theDepartment of Education under George H.W. Bush, you had an idea of schoolreform that was based on the curriculum—


DIANE RAVITCH: Right.


JUAN GONZALEZ: —strengthening the content of the education, not the bells and whistles and the structures for measurements, but that that was actually defeated and that Lynne Cheney had something to do with that. Could you talk about that, bring us some of that history?


DIANE RAVITCH: Right. Well, when I went to work for the Department of Education, I came in as a Democrat, and I thought, somewhat naively, that education was somehow a nonpartisan issue. And so, I came in to work on the idea of promoting arts education, science education. And in the department—part of the department I was in, we gave grants to different professional associations of educators to develop voluntary national standards of the arts, science, history, geography, economics, civics, lots of different areas. We wanted people, educators across the country, to say this is what an education is, this is what all American children should have. It was not a race to the top. It was based on the idea of equal educational opportunity means that all children get these wonderful things.


But I think, within the Bush administration, the more important dialogue that was going on, that I was just very peripheral to, was the idea of school choice, vouchers, charter schools, and then also accountability. And where the Democrats and the Republicans began to make common cause was around this theme of accountability. And what accountability ultimately meant, not just in the Bush administration, but in the Clinton, and now in the Obama—in the, you know, next Bush and then this administration, accountability means who should be punished. If the scores don’t go up, who should be punished? Teachers. Teachers should be punished. The unions should be demonized.


But you asked me about Lynne Cheney. The reason that Lynne Cheney gets into this conversation is that she was the one who saw that the history standards were—you know, she attacked them. And there got to be a huge national brouhaha back in 1994, 1995, about whether the history standards were politically correct. And it caused such an uproar in the press with—you know, the right-wing talk-show hosts jumped all over it, and then you had people on the left defending it. Congress and the administration just said—and this was in the Clinton administration years. They said, “Let’s not touch this whole idea of standards. Let’s just stick with basic skills.”


And that’s how we today have inherited this legacy of the only thing you’re allowed to really talk about is reading and math, don’t touch science, the arts. They’re all too controversial. You might get into an argument over evolution if you try to talk about science.



JUAN GONZALEZ: But you also say that in many state curriculums that have been developed now, even in reading, it’s more about the functions of reading—


DIANE RAVITCH: Right.


JUAN GONZALEZ: —than the actual content of the literature that people are reading.


DIANE RAVITCH: Right, sure. I mean, this is—to most people, it would come as a shock, if you pick up your state standards and you say, “Well, where’s the literature?” Because what they talk about is strategies and processes and previewing and reviewing and predicting. And you think, you know, why aren’tkids getting good literature? Aren’t they reading the great stuff, you know, world literature, American literature, English literature, Spanish literature? No, it’s not there, because if you make a choice about literature, then choosing this means you’re not choosing something else, therefore choose nothing at all.


AMY GOODMAN: Diane Ravitch, what caused your change of heart?


DIANE RAVITCH: Many things. Firstly, I grew up going to public school. I grew up in Texas. I went to the Houston public schools. My brothers and—I was part of a large family. I was one of eight children. We all went to public schools, except for the ones who were really bad. The really bad ones had to go to military school or be sent off. They weren’t allowed to go to public school. They didn’t behave. So public school, to me, was a really good thing, and I always had a very great affection and respect for public education.

As I became a scholar and, you know, got into the academic world, I found myself—I don’t know. I fell into a sort of a conservative mindset about alot of things, but when I got into the Bush administration, I found myself trying to justify why—I believed always in a strong curriculum. That was considered very conservative. If you believed that children should study history and geography and real things, you’re conservative in the academic world, because you’re not supposed to believe in a real curriculum.



I believe that it’s not conservative; it’s actually very liberal and empowering to have real knowledge. So this has always been my shtick, is kids of all backgrounds should have lots of knowledge. If you want to empower people, you give them access to the knowledge of the world. But having been castigated as a conservative for believing in having a traditional curriculum, when I went into the Bush administration, I found myself kind of getting caught up in the choice rhetoric. And so, for about ten years or so, I was advocating for charter schools. They didn’t exist, soI didn’t know how things would turn out.



Over the years, from the period in which charters started and in which the whole accountability movement started, I began looking at the results. When I looked at No Child Left Behind and saw, you know, we’re not really making any improvements under No Child Left Behind—the test scores have been either stagnant or made tiny improvement. Actually, the gains before No Child Left Behind on national tests were larger than since No Child Left Behind was adopted. I mean, I looked at the evidence, and I thought, all these things that I hoped would work didn’t work.


And now I find myself castigated. First of all, I’m castigated by people on the right who say, “You were never a real conservative.” Of course, they’re right. I never was a real conservative. But people on the left are saying,“You had your hand in this stuff. How dare you change sides?” Well, I guess the answer is, look at the evidence. I’m not on anybody’s side.


I’m just trying to say the evidence says No Child Left Behind was a failure,and the evidence says that charter schools are going to lead us into a swamp of—well, first of all, they’re not going to be any better, because if you look at national test scores—charter schools were first part of the national tests in 2003—they didn’t do any better than regular public schools. They were tested again in 2005, 2007, 2009. They have never outperformed regular public schools. So if we’re looking for a quantum leap in educational performance, as the President—as President Obama says, charter schools have no evidence behind them. You can find one charter school here or there that did spectacularly well, but on the other side will be others that were terrible.


JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the things that you’ve pointed out many times is that the entire testing system of the country right now is rife with corruption and with fraud—


DIANE RAVITCH: Yes.


JUAN GONZALEZ: —because you basically have every state deciding its own test standards, and they keep reporting that their kids are doing better. But then every time the national government does a national assessment test, these same states are not improving.


DIANE RAVITCH: Well, this is the great legacy of No Child Left Behind, is that it has left us with a system of institutionalized fraud. And the institutionalized fraud is that No Child Left Behind has mandated that every child is going to be proficient by the year 2014. Except they’re not, because no state and no nation has ever had 100 percent of the children proficient. Kids have all kinds of problems. And whether it’s poverty or a million things, there’s no such thing as 100 percent proficiency.


But every year we get closer to 2014, the bar goes up, and the states are told, “If you don’t reach that bar, you’re going to be punished. Schools will be closed. They’ll be turned into charter schools.” That’s part of the federal mandate, is that schools will be privatized if they can’t meet that impossible goal. So in order to preserve some semblance of public education, the states have been encouraged to lie, and many of them are lying, and so we see states that are saying, “90 percent of our kids are proficient in reading,” and then when the national test comes out, it’s 25 percent.


AMY GOODMAN: Diane Ravitch, we said at the top of this segment that the Department of Education announced sixteen finalists for its first round of the “Race to the Top” competition. They’re going to deliver something like $4.35 billion in school reform grants. And the Washington Post is reporting almost all of these finalists got money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In your book, chapter ten is called “The Billionaire Boys Club.” Explain.


DIANE RAVITCH:The Billionaires Boys Club” is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations—the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations—Gates, Broad and Walton—are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the US Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding.


The Obama administration appointed somebody from the NewSchools Venture Fund to run this so-called “Race to the Top.” The NewSchools Venture Fund exists to promote charter schools. So, what we’re seeing with the proliferation—with this demand from the federal government, if you want to be part of this $4 billion fund, you better be prepared to create lots more charter schools. Well, it’s all predetermined by who the personnel is. And, you know, so we see this immense influence of the foundations.


And I think that with the proliferation of charter schools, the bottom-line issue is the survival of public education, because we’re going to see many, many more privatized schools and no transparency as to who’s running them, where the money is going, and everything being determined by test scores.


So the whole picture, I think—I just wish that people wouldn’t refer to this as reform, because when we talk about “Race to the Top,” we’re talking about a principle that is antithetical to the fundamental idea of American education.


The fundamental idea, which has been enshrined at least since the Brown decision of 1954, was equal educational opportunity. “Race to the Top”is not equal educational opportunity. It is a race in which one or two or three states race to the top to have more privatized schools, more test-based accountability, more basic skills, no emphasis on a broad curriculum for all kids, and no equal educational opportunity. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s also not the role of the federal government to do what’s being done and to call it reform.


AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, Diane Ravitch. This is part one of our conversation. Diane Ravitch is professor of education atNYU, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her book is called The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
And she didn’t always feel that way.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

My 1 Day Employment



So after landing my new job as a Wal-Mart greeter, a good find for many retirees,
I lasted less than a day......
About two hours into my first day on the job a very loud, unattractive, mean-acting woman walked into the store with her two kids,
yelling obscenities at them all the way through the entrance.
As I had been instructed, I said pleasantly, 'Good morning and welcome to Wal-Mart.
Nice children you have there. Are they twins?'
The ugly woman stopped yelling long enough to say,
'Hell no, they ain't twins. The oldest one's 9, and the other one's 7. Why the hell would you think they're twins? Are you blind, or just stupid?'
So I replied,
'I'm neither blind nor stupid, Ma'am, I just couldn't believe someone slept with you twice. Have a good day and thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart.'


My supervisor said I probably wasn't cut out for this line of work.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Once Again The Arrogant Thinking of Human Beings

Trainer Dawn Brancheau with the 5-ton marine mammal Tilikum.


I really disagreed with two of the people interviewed in the article below. Their thinking really baffles me. In particular, one of them asserts two things that I strongly do not believe.


Number one, Thad Lacinak, former head trainer at SeaWorld believes that these animals serve as "ambassadors of the species to educate the public and help protect them in the wild."


That is pure bullshit.
Pardon my language, but that sentence doesn't even make sense. Are humans treating the ambassadors of other nations in a similar fashion? Do we lock them up in small enclosures, deny them normal interaction with their people, and force them to do the dance, or sing the song, or perform the act, that we Americans (humans) have associated with their culture? This ofcourse, all for the amusement of us , the host nation, or in this case, those holding the kidnapped victim?


Lacinak also insults our intelligence. He states, "....We know for a fact that people do not learn in static conditions. They learn from these animals when they are entertained by them," Lacinak said. "That's just how people learn. They don't learn when they're bored ..."


So Lacinak believes that the only way you and I can learn or be interested in an animal, is by having it do circus tricks for us! That is supposed to teach us about the intelligence, and help us discover the depth of abilities of these creatures. Yes, seeing a bear ride a tricycle, or a a whale jump through a hoop is so enlightening!

How did he ever get his job as head trainer, if this is how he thinks about animals? And equally bad is his limited understanding of the myriad ways humans learn, or the human capacity for focus, interest and intelligent engagement with our world.


Anyone that's spent any time in the wild, will tell you, the way to learn about an animal begins with quietly observing it in it's habitat. Stillness is key to this, just as it is to a private investigator in our world. If you want to know a subject you make yourself as invisible, still and quiet as possible. And you plan to stay that way for as long as you can.


In loud and noisy settings such as those arenas at SeaWorld, the audience isn't learning anything about the animals. They are watching a show created to entertain them. We might as well be back in ancient Rome, because it's the same idea as those daily events where the gladiators fought wild animals they'd captured from Africa. When that got old, a few Christians would be thrown into the arena, to excite the crowd watching them being torn apart and devoured
SeaWorld is just the evolution of a watered down version (don't pardon my pun) of the same cruelty that entertained the masses at the Coliseum. And because we know these are dangerous animals, subconsciously everyone there is open to the possibility of the titilation of seeing such accidents and dramas of tragedy as transpired last week.


As far as any real "learning" going on~

Sadly, what I see happening, is that these highly intelligent, thinking, communicating animals are learning about us...the human species of the animal kingdom.


I sincerely regret that Dawn Brancheau's life was lost in the bigger lesson that humans are being taught. We hold tenaciously to our attachment of old ways of thinking of human superiority, and a long ingrained 'right' to use the animals and plants of Earth any way we want.
Whether this thinking is based in one's religious dogma, Darwinian science, or psychological assertions of a hierarchy in the animal kingdom based on how intelligent we think another life form is, and the capacity speech, it's really time to stop and question these beliefs. Because I've come to the revelation that they are all based on a pile of whale 'KaKa'.


In my opinion, the lesson that is one of our primary responsibilities right now, is to understand our need to correct our thinking and behaviour so that we humans can be a member in good standing, amongst the family of Earth's animals.
Yes be a good member of the animal kingdom first!
That alone, will start a domino effect in our subsequent behaviour, that would clean up and regulate how we omniact with all of the planet's different life forms, in all of the systems of life here that we are a part of.
We just don't get it!!!
I encourage you to contact SeaWorld if you have feelings about this.
I encourage you to join your local zoo associations and get in the discussion there.
I encourage you to get out in the wild, and watch an animal with your binoculars from afar, and then use your imagination to let yourself feel what that animal would feel like being captured, caged, separated from it's kind, and forced to entertain people.
Let your Heart feel this.


We can learn about animals, but only if we approach their world with the utmost of respect. If we are forcing, limiting or altering their natural way, then we'd better be about using that human brain, directed by our Heart's loving intelligence to inform us of new ways to experience the majesty of animal wild Life.
If I sound passionate about all this, it's because I wish you all could live in my world. I am experiencing such a renaissance of fulfillment and discovery, because I am allowing Nature to be my teacher. What I observe in animals and plants, I search within myself for traces of similar evidence, or ways I can relearn qualities that an egoic way of thinking has surpressed.
These are our Master teachers. These are our parents, and rather than engage them in a way to reap from their genius and abilities, we shrink their habitat, deny them their biological needs, cage and enslave them. And foolish humans, in doing so, we rob ourselves of the knowledge and habits we need to live on Earth in harmony. And thus, we hasten our own annihilation.
We are one world, one planet of Life, one pulsing Being. The Masters of Life on Earth are by no means people of any particular culture, civilization or time.
As human beings, we really need to 'get over' ourselves.
Kentke


Orca Attack Raises Question of Captive Animals




ORLANDO, Fla. — Rocky, a 700-pound grizzly considered one of the most gentle animals of all Hollywood's performing beasts, bites down on the neck of a veteran trainer. Illusionist Roy Horn is severely mauled by a show tiger during a Las Vegas performance. An elephant at an Indonesian tourist resort tramples its longtime handler to death.




And now the latest — a 40-year-old trainer at SeaWorld Orlando is drowned by a massive 12,000-pound killer whale named Tilikum, an incident that raises anew the question of whether some beasts, especially the biggest ones, have any business being tamed to entertain.
Descriptions of Tilikum, the 22-foot orca which has now killed two trainers, inevitably come around to his intimidating size.




At nearly six tons, the bull bought for breeding is a giant among killer whales, the largest in captivity.




"Humans trying to incarcerate orcas or elephants or any type of large brain or large society species, it's proven it doesn't work," said Mark Berman, associate director at the environmental group Earth Island Institute in Berkeley, Calif. "They're just too big."




No animals were meant to entertain humans, he said.




In fact, an investigation by California's workplace safety office into a 2006 attack by an orca on a trainer at SeaWorld's San Diego park initially reported that it was only a matter of time before a trainer was killed. That trainer escaped with a broken foot.




However, after objections from SeaWorld that the office had no place offering opinions that a trainer's death was inevitable, the workplace safety officials rescinded the report and apologized. They noted its investigation required expertise it didn't have.




Former SeaWorld head trainer Thad Lacinak says captive killer whales serve as ambassadors of the species to educate the public and help protect them in the wild.




"These animals are invaluable in terms of what we can learn from them. And you cannot learn about killer whales through a pair of binoculars," Lacinak said.




Using killer whales to perform, or displaying animals at zoos, brings them to life for the public, he said, something that watching the Discovery Channel just can't do.


"We know for a fact that people do not learn in static conditions. They learn from these animals when they are entertained by them," Lacinak said. "That's just how people learn. They don't learn when they're bored ... They have a greater appreciation of the animals when they walk out." Lacinak also stated the obvious — that trainers know their jobs are inherently dangerous but take the risks because they believe they're outweighed by the rewards.




Orlando SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau was rubbing Tilikum from a poolside platform on Wednesday when the whale reached up, grabbed her ponytail and dragged her underwater. She died from multiple traumatic injuries and drowning.




Brancheau's funeral was set for Monday at a church in Chicago, where a wake was held Sunday.
Killer whales are the largest of the dolphin species. They are extremely intelligent and the most efficient predators in the sea. Some say killer whales are just too smart to be penned in pools that can bore them and possibly lead to trouble.




"Orcas are simply too big, too complex, too intelligent to be adequately accommodated in captivity," said Naomi Rose, a marine mammal scientist with the Humane Society of the United States. "The tanks are always going to be too featureless, too small. ... The number of incidents where trainers have been injured is much greater than most people know. They aren't all reported."




Orcas in the wild can travel up to 100 miles in a day and thousands of miles in a lifetime in the ocean, where they are generally harmless to humans, said Howard Garrett, co-founder and director of the Washington-based nonprofit Orca Network.




"In their natural habitat, there is no record of any harm to a human anywhere," Garrett said. "You cannot say that about elephants or wolves or any other highly evolved social mammal, and that really is extraordinary."




Even in captivity, orcas rarely attack out of aggression, Lacinak said, adding that they are usually cases of a killer whale trying to play with a trainer.




"It was not a bloodthirsty attack," Lacinak said of the recent incident at SeaWorld.




He said the whale likely saw the trainer's ponytail as a toy, then dragged the woman into the water and turned it into a game.




Gary Wilson, a professor at Moorpark College in California, the country's only school where students can learn to train marine mammals, believes that interacting with animals in the wild would be better, but that's not possible for most people.




"If it was a perfect world we wouldn't need to have any animals in captivity, but the reality is in order to learn about these animals and to actually ensure their survival in the wild, we need to have them in captivity so we can study them and people can learn to appreciate them," Wilson said. "If SeaWorld didn't have dolphins and whales in captivity, there would be many fewer people in the world that even cared about them at all."


_
AP writers Kelli Kennedy contributed to this report from Fort Lauderdale and Noaki Schwartz from Los Angeles.




Dawn Brancheau Pictures: SeaWorld Trainer Loved Whale That Killed Her



February 25, 2010 8:39 AM



NEW YORK (CBS) Veteran SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau was living her dream when Tilikum, a 12,000 pound killer whale, turned it into a nightmare.



According to the Orlando Sentinel, witnesses said that "the animal suddenly grabbed Brancheau by the upper arm, tossed her around in his mouth and pulled her beneath the water as dozens of tourists looked on in horror." SeaWorld workers rushed to her rescue, but it was too late. Brancheau drowned Wednesday.



"There wasn't anything to indicate to us that there was a problem," Chuck Tompkins, head of animal training at all SeaWorld parks, told the CBS "Early Show." He said the whale had performed well in the show and that Dawn was rubbing him down as a reward for doing a good job.





Dawn Brancheau playing with an unnamed whale.






But some spectators who attended an earlier performance told the Associated Press that the whale was acting like an ornery child.



Joao Lucio DeCosta Sobrinho and his girlfriend were at an underwater viewing area when Brancheau was attacked. They said they suddenly saw a whale with a person in its mouth. "It was terrible. It's very difficult to see the image," Sobrinho said. The couple said they watched the whale show at the park two days earlier and came back to take pictures.



But on Wednesday the whales appeared agitated. Because of his size and the previous deaths, trainers were not supposed to get into the water with Tilikum, and only about a dozen of the park's 29 trainers worked with him. Brancheau had more experience with the 30-year-old whale than most. She was one of the park's most experienced trainers overall.



"We recognized he was different," said Tompkins. He said no decision has been made yet about what will happen to Tilikum, such as transferring him to another facility. SeaWorld has also suspended the killer whale shows at all of its parks, which also include locations in San Diego and San Antonio, to review procedures.



A SeaWorld spokesman said Tilikum was one of three orcas blamed for killing a trainer in 1991 after the woman lost her balance and fell in the pool at Sealand of the Pacific near Victoria, British Columbia. Tilikum was also involved in a 1999 death, when the body of a man who had sneaked by SeaWorld security was found draped over him. The man either jumped, fell or was pulled into the frigid water and died of hypothermia, though he was also bruised and scratched by Tilikum.



But despite Tilikum's difficult past, Brancheau's sister, Diane Gross, said that she loved working with whales and would never want any harm to come to Tilikum.



She knew she wanted to work with animals and Sea World was her dream," Gross said.


When she got hired at SeaWorld "it was the happiest day in everybody's life in our family."

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