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The 19" LCD I ended up buying only cost US$299, which is not that expensive.

A CRT of that size will cost $200 or so.

The difference is only a hundred dollars, and a hundred dollars won't buy you much (maybe just a fancy chassis).

A new graphics card costs more than $200, if you want anything better than a Radeon 9800 Pro.

Besides, my 9800 Pro still does everything I want it to do. So for me there's no reason to upgrade that now.

15" monitor, however, is so yesterday. I can't stand it anymore.

I have a single dead pixel on my current ViewSonics, and it still bothers me sometimes.

When you have a nice wallpaper setup, you don't want to have a little black dot in the middle of a nice-looking sky.

Has anyone seen this before?

I am trying to help another mapper, but I don't know how to solve this issue.

Thanks in advance.

I have my current 15" LCD pushed all the way to the back of my desk, so I have plenty of room on my desk for reading, writing, and making clay models of devil's head.

I love the feel of a large clean desktop.

CRT is fine, but it takes way too much desk space, especially when it's a 19". It also weighs a ton.

From what I read, the actual response time for the Hyundai monitor is great. Hardware experts say that never trust the response time posted by the manufacturer. The actual one might be significantly slower, especially with contrast adjustment.

For example, the actual response time for the Hyundai monitor is around 10 ms. However, for most Samsung monitors, the actual response time is around 15 to 18 ms. And there are worse monitors out there that advertise a response time of 8 ms but actually has it around 25 ms.

Tricky huh?

Thanks, Snpbond. That Hyundai one looks better than the Samsung one. I am reading more raving reviews about your monitor.

And $300 isn't that bad, considering these monitors used to sell for more than $2,000 a piece a few years ago.

I have a 15" ViewSonic LCD now (VE510+). It's plenty old. I want a bigger one. I will give the old one to my parents. They still have a 14" CRT.

The Hyundai one has built-in speakers. That might be a good thing for me, because I can't use very good speakers anyway (my wife works at home).

That'll save me the trouble of getting another pair of speakers separately. I don't like to have too many things on my desktop.

I'll consider that one.

I am buying a new LCD this weekend. What do you guys think of this one?

The price is good, and the specs appear to be decent too.

I was seeing the kid. I am a pediatrician.

I don't know why some mothers want to wear little sexy outfit to the doctor's. Perhaps they're single and they want to get a date with the young doctor?

Too bad that most doctors are already married.

Yeah, imagine the kid breastfeeding.

Yum!

It's always a challenge to stay professional when the mother of a toddler is hotter than a Victoria Secret model.

I was checking this kid out for coughing, and the young mother has 80% of her breasts hanging out of her dress. It took all of my inner strength to stay focused and not get distracted. Of course, my eyes drifted every now and then, but I am only human.

I wish I could show you what she looks like, but taking a picture of her is simply out of the question.

By the way, GLM="good looking mom" in pediatrics

I saw the horns now.

I made that devil out of clay myself.

Logins (per day): 1231 (2.4)
Forum posts: 710 (1.4)
Shouts: 198 (0.4)
Maps: 8 (0)
MV comments: 109 (0.2)
Journal entries: 57 (0.1)

Cheney is bad for America and Americans. His policies and the policies that he endorses are fiscally irresponsible and destroy the environment.

All things aside, he made some very poor judgement in shooting the guy. He is suppose to be an experienced hunter, yet he violated one of the golden rules of hunting. He turned more than 90 degrees from his line of vision and fired his weapon.

Yes, I am a liberal, and I can't wait for the Bush administration to be over. Americans are dying like flies fighting this pointless war.

P.S. Note to myself...never be on the same team as Cheney in a CS:S server when FF is on.

TWHL is well and alive. New members aren't always annoying and dumb.

If a map is so laggy that's unplayable, then the purpose of the map is lost.

I turned down the graphics setting so I can have high framerates. If there is anyone who does that (and there are plenty), then all of us are solid proof that performance is more important.

He shot the guy with a shotgun. It's pretty serious.

And the 78-year-old dude suffered a heart attack yesterday. If he dies, I hope Cheney gets some jail time.

There are members here with tens of thousands of logins. 200 is still a baby chick.

I have 1229 logins, and that's a very small number still.

From the LA Times:

---

Once it seemed clear that Austin, Texas, lawyer Harry Whittington would survive getting accidentally shot by Vice President Dick Cheney, the incident became instant fodder for headline writers and comedians.

The foreign press zeroed in on the shooting as a metaphor for Cheney's political outlook.

The Herald in Scotland wrote, "Cheney Bags a Lawyer," while the Sydney Morning Herald headlined its online story "Cheney Hunts Quail and Everyone Else Ducks."

The blogosphere took its shots as well.

"Dick Cheney Finally Takes a Stand Against Trial Lawyers," declared the political blog Wonkette.

The public health blog Effect Measure said: "After the incident, the Vice quit for the day, as he'd bagged his limit of rich Republican contributors."

But it was the late-night comics who seemed like they couldn't get enough.

"Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction?. It's Dick Cheney," David Letterman said Monday on CBS' "Late Show." "We can't get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney.

satchmo has been married for some time and he's still in TWHL. He's ~30 years old.

I'll be here for some time to come. I can even imagine myself, sitting at a retirement home with dentures in my mouth, typing away and deathmatching.

In a few years, you'll see the little satchmo here as a new member.

Diane Reeves - "In My Solitude"
from the soundtrack of "Good Night, Good Luck"

I still have a relatively large collection of MIDI's from the 80's. I kept transferring them from one computer to the other.

I had them on my 286 initially in 1987. It took me years to collec them.

Trans-Whipple Hippocampal Ligation - a procedure where the surgeons passes a rigid scope from the great toe, through the left testicle, via the tail of the pancreas, all the way to the left orbital crease.

It's typically done without anesthesia, and the patient must ingest his own fecal matter for 72 hours after the procedure.

Success rate varies, and mostly depends on the patient's tolerance for pain.

I hope everyone can take a step back and look at the whole thing in proper perspective.

CS and HL are just games. The objective of these games is to have fun.

If some players find some extremely simple and visually lacking maps fun to play, then more power to them.

If someone finds drinking horse urine fun, so be it. Let them do it, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

True, I don't like these "n00b" maps, but that's just me. If someone else finds them to be a great source of entertainment, what's wrong with that?

But it doesn't stop me from laughing at them though. I have a right to express how I feel too.

...thinly disguised Navy recruiting site.

Anyone who ends up joining the Navy from that site deserves to be shot because of their stupidity.

You know, you're obviously very dedicated.

But what I have in mind is a project that combines the theme of de_inferno in Source and the layout of de_dust2.

People criticize de_inferno because they don't like the unbalanced layout, but it looks a heck a lot better than the dust textures.

Make a map called de_duserno and you think people will play it?

I was going to do it, but I just don't have the time for mapping anymore.

Are you going to get this update?

If you do, please post your ATI model and let us know whether you noticed any performance boost in HL2 or CS:S.

Ideally, you'll write down your current Catalyst driver version and run HL2, noting the framerates. And after the upgrade, run HL2 again with the same display settings and record the framerates at the same location in the game.

I am curious whether this upgrade actually makes any difference.

There is no light_environment?

There's no 100% mapper. What's the point of mapping if you don't play it?

Mappers map because they love playing the game.

I do wonder sometimes about the percentage of gamers who are also mappers. I am guessing less than 1%.

I used to map more than I play, but now I hardly map anymore.

I mapped for HL1 and HL2 before I played the game itself, however,

I actually played Pong myself, back in 1985. It was the first console game.

However, even before that, there were PC games like Kung Fu something. It's like Codename Gordon, a 2D game. I also played Joust on the PC. It's quite fun actually.

I remember my first Ninetendo handheld game. It's called Popeye or something like that. The player had to catch cans of spinach tossed to him by Oliveoyl. That dates back to 1982.

some people come, totally new in the CS community, and do shit, "fun" "maps"

Well, we are all free-thinking individuals blessed with free will. I know very well that this planet is populated with dumbf**ks, but I have the ability to avoid their maps.

On my computer, the only custom CS:S maps installed are the cream of the crop ones (plus my own CS:S maps, which aren't great but they're special to me). I truly enjoy playing cs_militia and de_inferno--because they got stunning visuals and great gameplay. Sometimes I don't even play those maps. I simply load up the maps and walk around in them alone on my LAN server, admiring the mapping beauty of it all.

There's so much hatred and intolerance now at TWHL. Where is the love?

That's quite an amazing ability. Some people always find new ways to be annoying.

For some reason, people always think that older is better.

We reminesce about the golden era of Jazz and the heroes of past wars (WWII). People were larger than life and with a higher level of ethics. Things were brighter (even though they're black-and-white), and the society more innocent. Government was less corrupt.

But people and human nature seldom change. Twenty years from now, newer members of TWHL will be discussing us and the year 2006 as the golden lost era.

Wine ages with time.

Well, it's up to you.

I know it can be frustrating at times, but if you really love it, you'll come back to mapping.

When did this "new" versus "old" begin? I mean, how long ago do you consider as the "old" TWHL? B.S. (Before Source)?

Maybe their mommies didn't love them?

Hear this one. It's very touching.

It's just the newness of the Source engine that's causing this dichotomy.

Overtime, new will become old, and all will be well again.

Human nature doesn't change, and neither will the new members. They won't stay as n00bs.

Its so epic and... alive, its like, your in this real world...

...except that you suddenly get this music that starts playing in your head for no apparent reason.

the carrier thing was also pretty nasty really

Yeah, I refer them as "zombies with emphysema" because they're always wheezing.

I don't mind the poisonous headcrabs though, because they're so slow. The fast headcrabs I hate. You can spray bullets all over the room with your SMG and not hit one of them because they're just everywhere.

Remember that one closet full of them in City 17? Nasty shit.

I think a lot of people are afraid to build their own computer because they think they might not know how.

But the instruction manual that comes with the motherboard tells you exactly what to do. Unless someone is illiterate, anyone can build his own machine.

I heard of this ambitious documentary project called StoryCorps yesterday on the radio. It's an extraordinary peek into the lives of these otherwise ordinary people.

Hear some of the remarkable recordings at their website.

Listen to this one in particular, for all us shooters.

This is an excerpt from the second part of the series in today's LA Times:

---

Tina, who says math has mystified her since she first saw fractions in elementary school, spends class time writing in her journal, chatting with friends or snapping pictures of herself with her cellphone.

Her teacher wasn't surprised when Tina bombed a recent test that asked her, among other things, to graph the equations 4x + y = 9 and 2x - 3y = - 6. She left most of the answers blank, writing a desperate message at the top of the page: "Still don't get it, not gonna get it, guess i'm seeing this next year!"

Teachers wage a daily struggle in classes filled with students like Tina.

Her teacher, George Seidel, devoted a class this fall to reviewing equations with a single variable, such as x - 1 = 36. It's the type of lesson students were supposed to have mastered in fourth grade.

Only seven of 39 students brought their textbooks. Several had no paper or pencils. One sat for the entire period with his backpack on his shoulders, tapping his desk with a finger.

Another doodled an eagle in red ink in his notebook. Others gossiped as Seidel, a second-year teacher, jotted problems on the front board.

Seidel once brokered multimillion-dollar business deals but left a 25-year law career, hoping to find a more fulfilling job and satisfy an old desire to teach. Nothing, however, prepared him for period five.

"I got through a year of Vietnam," he said, "so I tell myself every day I can get through 53 minutes of fifth period?. I don't know if I am making a difference with a single kid."

Seidel did not appear to make a difference with Gabriela Ocampo. She failed his class in the fall of 2004 ? her sixth and final semester of Fs in algebra.

But Gabriela didn't give Seidel much of a chance; she skipped 62 of 93 days that semester.

After dropping out, Gabriela found a $7-an-hour job at a Subway sandwich shop in Encino. She needed little math because the cash register calculated change. But she discovered the cost of not earning a diploma.

"I don't want to be there no more," she said, her eyes watering from raw onions, shortly before she quit to enroll in a training program to become a medical assistant.

Could passing algebra have changed Gabriela's future? Most educators would say yes.

Algebra, they insist, can mean the difference between menial work and high-level careers. High school students can't get into most four-year colleges without it. And the U.S. Department of Education says success in algebra II and other higher-level math is strongly associated with college completion.

Apprenticeship programs for electricians, plumbers and refrigerator technicians require algebra, which is useful in calculating needed amounts of piping and electrical wiring.

"If you want to work in the real world, if you want to wire buildings and plumb buildings, that's when it requires algebra," said Don Davis, executive director of the Electrical Training Institute, which runs apprenticeship programs for union electricians in Los Angeles.

---

And mapping would be out of the question if you can't even master algebra.

I think it's just my personality, but I never cared how other people think of me, even when I was in high school.

I was the biggest nerd my high school has ever seen (and probably will never see another like me). I read books on assembly language on my spare time, and I read textbooks for fun. Heck, I memorized more than 200 digits of the value of pi for fun.

Fortunately, my wife loves a nerd. And me being a nerd really paid off. I got a nice job (even though I have long hours) and a good life as an adult.

we'd be playing Duck Hunt instead of these new games

The funny thing is, that's my friend's favorite game.

He has no interests in any of the new games, either console or PC. Instead, he's old school and dwells on Pac-Man or Asteroid.

I got the article from the Los Angeles Times. Here is the article in its entirety if you don't want to take my words for it.

---

Los Angeles Times

THE VANISHING CLASS
Back to Basics: Why Does High School Fail So Many?
Shockingly high dropout rates portend a bleak future for youths who fall by the wayside and for society. For many, the traditional U.S. education system is a dead end.
By Mitchell Landsberg
Times Staff Writer

January 29, 2006

On a September day 4 1/2 years ago, nearly 1,100 ninth-graders ? a little giddy, a little scared ? arrived at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys. They were fifth-generation Americans and new arrivals, straight arrows and gangbangers, scholars and class clowns.

On a radiant evening last June, 521 billowing figures in royal blue robes and yellow-tasseled mortarboards walked proudly across Birmingham's football field, practically floating on a carpet of whoops and shouts and blaring air horns, to accept their diplomas.

It doesn't take a valedictorian to do the math: Somewhere along the way, Birmingham High lost more than half of the students who should have graduated.

What happened to the Class of 2005?

It is a crucial question, not just for Birmingham but for all American schools.

High school dropouts lead much harder lives, earn far less money and demand vastly more public assistance than their peers who graduate.

To understand why students leave high school and what they do next, six Times reporters and two photographers spent eight months studying Birmingham ? by most measures a typical Los Angeles high school ? and interviewing hundreds of former students and their parents, teachers, friends and siblings.

These students failed high school and high school failed them. Yet most haven't given up on education.

The most likely place to find someone who had left Birmingham turned out to be in another school. More than 350 members of the Class of 2005 left to study elsewhere ? about half at other traditional high schools and about half at alternatives like vocational school or independent study.

Those who transferred to traditional schools were more likely than not to graduate on time. But of those who went to alternative schools, fewer than one in three received a diploma or its equivalent.

The more students transferred, the less likely they were to graduate ? an ominous development in a district in which one-quarter of the students change schools annually. Of 18 students who attended three or more schools, only one graduated.

For students at Birmingham, the act of dropping out was generally the last twist in a long downward spiral. Sometimes it began as early as elementary school. Year after year, students were allowed to fail upward, promoted despite a trail of Ds and Fs.

"Here you can get straight Fs," said Barbara Mezo, a teacher at Mulholland Middle School, which sends students to Birmingham, "and the best they can do is keep you out of eighth-grade graduation ceremony."

Then came high school, where credits were granted only for passing grades. Failing students found themselves on a treadmill, never reaching their goal of 230 credits for graduation. And with an increased focus on improving student performance, schools have little incentive to keep those who fail.

By the time he turned 18, Elias Fuentes had just 95 credits ? enough to place him in 10th grade, next to 15- and 16-year-olds. Birmingham officials "just told me I have to leave," he said. "They said, 'The best thing you can do is enroll in an independent school so you can work at your own pace.' "

Instead, he went to work at a Sears store in Burbank, unloading televisions, DVD players and refrigerators for $7.70 an hour.

About two weeks before Birmingham's graduation, Fuentes agonized over what to tell his extended family. "They're kind of expecting an invitation to graduation," he said. "I have to tell them soon, my uncles and aunts?. It's not that I want to hide it. It's just that it's hard to tell somebody who had so much confidence in me that I messed up."

For many students, frustration over failure was compounded by personal problems ? pregnancies, financial pressure to work, drugs, brushes with the law. Parents became ill or died, sometimes violently. One girl lost her boyfriend when he was shot seven times in the chest. There was often pressure from friends who were also failing.

Many began cutting classes and were surprised to find that there were few, if any, consequences. Soon, some were racking up 30 or 40 ? even 60 ? absences in a 90-day semester.

"I ditched for two months straight; it was the thing to do at the time," recalled Nicole Burns, who left Birmingham before her senior year and eventually graduated from a continuation school in Texas. "They never notified my parents that I was ditching. They never called and said I was absent." Other students told similar tales, although some said the school did make an effort to reach their parents.

Some truants hung out with friends, watching TV and smoking pot. Others remained on campus, lurking in the halls, avoiding prying adults.

"We have 20, 30 kids or so who are constantly out of class," said Marsha Coates, who became Birmingham's principal in September. "They're on campus, they're not dropouts and they haven't disappeared?. They just roam."

When students are caught, she said, they receive $250 tickets that require them to appear in court with a parent. About 200 such tickets were given out last school year.

"And they still roam," she said in exasperation.

Erick Vindel said he gave up on Birmingham after receiving three or four of the tickets in his junior year. "It got too complicated," he said.

The school has instituted a new system of taking attendance each period, rather than just once a day, and is developing a new disciplinary system to punish truants. Since the attendance system went into effect Nov. 6, students have skipped more than 2,000 classes.

Ultimately, behind in credits, beleaguered by problems that would stagger many adults, some students reached a point at which staying in school ? at least in a traditional school ? made no sense. "What was I doing there if I wasn't going to graduate on time?" wondered Ruben Vazquez, 18, who left Birmingham in what should have been his senior year.

The school typically has made little effort to keep such students. It has few resources to spend on them and is often happy to be rid of the ones considered troublemakers.

"Why do we have to jump through hoops for kids with 40 absences?" Dean Matt Mowry asked. "We should be able to say, 'You have to go.' "

*

Statistics Versus Reality

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, in conjunction with UCLA, produced a controversial report last spring saying that official dropout statistics in California's largest school districts were shockingly out of sync with reality. The researchers found that only 48% of the L.A. Unified students who started ninth grade in 1999 graduated four years later. The district claims a graduation rate of 66%.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who wants to take over the school district, jumped on the study to assert that half of the students in L.A. Unified were dropping out.

School district officials said that was wrong, since the UCLA numbers included as dropouts students who had left to continue their education elsewhere. They put the dropout rate for 2003-04 at 33%.

One of the problems with trying to understand the dropout problem is that experts can't even agree on the definition of a dropout: Should it include, for instance, a student who quits school but continues in home study that is unlikely to lead to graduation?

The debate can be seen in microcosm at Birmingham High. UCLA calculated the graduation rate at Birmingham at 50%. L.A. Unified, using federal formulas, puts it at nearly 80%, with just 3.5% classified as dropouts.

School officials make no pretense of defending that dropout figure. Schools Supt. Roy Romer was flabbergasted when he heard it. "Whoa! Wait a minute!" he said. "Can you tell me that number again?"

But they also believe the dropout rate is not as high as UCLA's figures imply.

The Times determined that at least 53% of the students who began at Birmingham in ninth grade graduated four years later, many from other schools.

At least 9% more were continuing their education, most of them hoping to graduate eventually. At least 12% were not in school of any kind. The rest couldn't be found, although extensive inquiries at area schools suggested most were not active students.

It would be easy to see Birmingham as just another bad public school. But for many students, it's not.

It has a dedicated core of teachers and offers a variety of honors and Advanced Placement classes. Its journalism magnet program draws many high-achieving students.

Birmingham sent more than 60 members of the Class of 2005 to the University of California, and three-quarters of its graduates planned to pursue higher education.

Motivated students find their way. But sometimes it takes more. Danny Rangel said he was on the road to dropping out when he was admitted to Birmingham's journalism magnet. Rangel, from Pacoima, wound up with a scholarship to Dartmouth College.

What set him apart from his childhood friends, many of whom dropped out? Like most successful students, Rangel credited both a demanding parent and inspiring teachers ? especially one, Kevin Kelly, who told him to aim high when he applied to college.

Rangel said his mother, a Salvadoran immigrant, never made it past second grade but made school a top priority for her children. "She's forceful when it comes to that subject," he said.

Not all students get that kind of attention. "I think the majority" of parents are "just too busy keeping food on the table," said Coates, the Birmingham principal. And with 35 or 40 students in many classes, teachers confront a formidable problem: If half their students are at risk of failing, how many can they possibly save?

Coates hopes that one answer will be the transition to "small learning communities" ? theme-based schools within schools. She also has plans to get parents more involved.

Perhaps Birmingham's greatest accomplishment is that, by some measures, it has narrowed the "achievement gap" between rich and poor, white and nonwhite, that bedevils most American schools. In the last six years, standardized test scores for Latino and African American students at the school have improved substantially. The scores of white students have also risen, but more modestly.

According to Times research, poor students in the Class of 2005 were just as likely as more affluent students to graduate from Birmingham, and African American and Latino students were slightly more likely than whites to get diplomas.

That is significant, especially given how much Birmingham has changed over the last half century.

Opened in 1953 on the site of a former military hospital, the school was designed to accommodate the epic migration of young families, most of them white, to the San Fernando Valley in the years after World War II.

Graduates have included junk bond pioneer and philanthropist Michael Milken, actress Sally Field, former Disney President Michael Ovitz and slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. But over the last couple of decades, Birmingham's demographics have shifted dramatically.

The most common last name at Birmingham now is Garcia, closely followed by Hernandez and Martinez. Two-thirds of the student body is Latino; fewer than one in six students is non-Hispanic white. Many students are immigrants or the children of immigrants; roughly one-third of the students are learning English as a second language.

Until recently, the school was also forced to absorb students bused in from elsewhere in the city. The Class of 2005 included 102 students who were squeezed out of overcrowded Belmont High School near downtown.

The school's adjustment to these changes hasn't been easy. But academic standards have not suffered; if anything, a Birmingham diploma today is more difficult to obtain than it was a generation ago.

Even some of those who left the school are wistful about what they gave up.

"I wish I would have finished high school in Birmingham," said Leonardo Portillo, who left after ninth grade and now works in construction, his dream of a diploma receding. He attended five other schools before dropping out and says of Birmingham: "It was the only school I was comfortable in."

Still, with nearly 4,000 students, Birmingham is a big, crowded, at times violent place. "It's a huge school with people who look so grown up," said Debora Elias, who felt so uncomfortable that she left for another school in her sophomore year.

Said Doris Lasiter, principal until last summer: "I think part of it is being overwhelmed and not being able to connect and not feeling ? that maybe there's a teacher who really cares about what they're doing."

Ethnic tensions turned off some students. Problems arose between the majority Latino population and a much smaller group of Armenian students and between Latinos and African Americans. Privately, teachers and administrators readily admit that the staff includes instructors who are either burned out or never caught fire.

All of which means that some students ? in fact, many students ? get lost.

That's what happened to Mayra Mendez. At least, that's part of her story.

Raised by a single mother from Mexico who didn't finish middle school, Mayra had lived in at least half a dozen cities by the time she started kindergarten, and she bounced from school to school before settling in at Noble Elementary in North Hills. She liked school and was eventually classified as gifted.

But like so many students, she began to founder in middle school. At Mulholland, she said, her social life began to eclipse academics. "I had some friends who I knew were a bad influence," she said. Mayra began having disciplinary problems.

Ninth grade felt like a fresh start. In her classes at Birmingham, "I thought, 'Oh, I know this. I could do this.' "

But soon she began getting into fights. She cut class. She felt rebellious. "I wanted to push, to see how far I could go," she said. "And no one ever disciplined me. I blame myself at times. But at other times, I think, 'Well, it is their job. They are getting paid. It's not just my fault.' "

At the end of her first semester, she had failed every class. She didn't bother to go back.

"I didn't have anyone tell me to stay in school, and people were just encouraging me to get out as soon as possible," she said. Four years later, she couldn't recall if she'd ever spoken to a counselor. Only one adult had seemed to care, she said ? an English teacher, Joe Rosenthal.

Rosenthal, who sees around 200 students a day, instantly remembered Mayra.

"This girl, Mayra Mendez, was very intelligent," he said. "She was very aggressive. I told her she should be a lawyer."

There was just one problem: She rarely did her work.

"When she did," he said, "it was always really good."

Mayra, now 20, eventually enrolled in the federal Job Corps program and earned her general educational development degree. She got a job conducting telephone surveys. She still wants to go to college, with one goal in mind.

She'd like to be a lawyer.

Debate has long raged in education circles over who's to blame for students failing high school. Is it the school or the student? The educational system or the society? The parents or the culture?

Teachers, the adults with the closest view of this slow-motion disaster, tend to have the most nuanced view. Even the best of them often express frustration and disappointment in their inability to reach failing students.

Paula Sargent teaches senior English composition at Birmingham and takes pains to stimulate her students.

Students adore Sargent, a former professional singer who appeared on the front page of this newspaper in 1968, when her singing troupe was ambushed in Vietnam en route to a performance for U.S. troops; two musicians died, and Sargent suffered back and leg wounds that afflict her still.

"Best teacher in the world," one boy said as he shuffled into her class. "I love you, Ms. Sargent," another exclaimed.

But Sargent, a wisecracking combination of mother hen and free-spirited aunt, is discouraged.

"There's no love of learning," she said. "If that's not there from the get-go" ? she scanned the students slouching at their desks, the ones who were there on time ? "then we have what we have."

Teachers complain that students come to school with a sense of entitlement ? "seat time" alone, they believe, should be enough for a passing grade. Teachers also say they believe that popular culture demeans education.

But teachers also are among the first to admit that, for many students, the traditional American high school is broken. They can't handle its academic rigor and they chafe at its restrictions.

The large, comprehensive high school ? the place where most Americans learned to calculate pi and compete for prom dates ? is a 20th century invention that managed to both mirror and feed a giant industrial economy.

Throughout its history, it has been at the center of a tug of war between advocates of rigorous academic standards and those who believed in more of a smorgasbord approach to education.

During the 1950s, the buffet approach was ascendant: Schools tried to offer something for everyone, from Latin and calculus for the college-bound to vocational education and home economics for those considered unlikely or unable to continue their education.

But eventually, the tracking system went the way of bobby sox and bomb shelters.

Today, the operating philosophy is that every student should be prepared for college, and high schools have little room for courses that don't further that goal.

At the same time, especially in large cities, high schools have become huge, with student populations that are often double the number for which the school was planned. It is not uncommon to see 40 students in a class. Counselors have caseloads of 600 students. There is little glue holding it all together.

The result is a large segment of students who struggle anonymously until, dispirited, they give up.

School district officials told The Times late last week that they will unveil a comprehensive plan this week to attack the dropout problem. The district will try to help struggling middle school students prepare for high school and will offer an array of options to reclaim dropouts, said Robert Collins, chief instructional officer for the district's secondary schools.

California Education Secretary Alan Bersin said in a recent interview that the traditional high school model still works in many suburban areas. But, he said, it "is a structure that has not been successful in many urban areas and rural areas."

"Many educators," he added, "believe it is time for a change."

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Tracking Missing Kids

Sandy Olson has been Birmingham High's last line of defense against dropouts. He has been the school's pupil services and attendance counselor, a cross between an advisor and an old-fashioned truant officer.

His status at Birmingham suggests something about the importance that the school ? and the district ? historically placed on tracking down dropouts. The district gives schools no money to hire pupil services counselors, and most schools don't have one. Olson, who began working as a teacher in 1956, is retired and now works only one day a week.

He does not speak Spanish, limiting his ability to communicate with many parents or their former neighbors.

A typical workday: Olson tries calling the parents of absent students, often to find that their phone has been disconnected, with no forwarding number, or that the number they gave the school was wrong. He might get far enough to leave a voicemail message; it is rare that he gets a return call.

He might drive to the address listed in a student's records only to find that the family moved and left no forwarding address. Or never lived there. Neighbors are typically less than helpful, especially when the student's parents are illegal immigrants.

"People are getting evicted constantly, they're moving here, they're moving there," Olson said. Often, they are trying to stay a step ahead of bill collectors and don't want to be found. "There's so much falsification," he said.

Olson is being replaced next month with a full-time bilingual pupil services counselor.

Collins said Birmingham's remarkably low official dropout rate is a tribute to Olson's work and that of other school officials.

"My assumption is that they have been very aggressive in accounting and documenting every kid who leaves that school," Collins said.

But simply accounting for students who leave doesn't tell the whole story. The drive to improve student achievement in American schools has created a perverse incentive for schools to push out struggling students, ideally without having to count them as dropouts.

These are the students who drag down standardized test scores, leading to penalties for their schools under school accountability measures that include the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Without them, test score averages rise. If a student can be counted as having left the country or as having transferred to an alternative educational program, there is no downside: Those students are not counted as dropouts.

"No school really wants to have these children, who bring their test scores down, who bring their attendance rates down," said Debra Duardo, pupil services coordinator for one of LAUSD's local districts. She didn't deny that some schools fudge the way dropouts are reported to lower their rate; it happens, she said, "more often than what I think is appropriate or ethical."

Although there is no direct evidence that anyone at Birmingham has intentionally falsified records to lower the dropout rate, The Times found that the school erroneously reported that some students had transferred to other schools, allowing Birmingham to classify them as transfers, not dropouts.

Devora Arauz and Marco Galen were listed as having transferred to Independence High School, a continuation school adjacent to Birmingham, but Principal Cynthia Gladstone said neither showed up. Marcos Gonzalez was reported to have checked out of Birmingham en route to Dorsey High in the Crenshaw district, but Dorsey has no record of him.

Birmingham records say Denisse Jacobo transferred to Pioneer High School in Provo, Utah, but Jacobo ? who earned a diploma in independent study ? said she hadn't left Los Angeles and had no intention of moving to Utah.

Moreover, there is no Pioneer High School in Provo.

Benedick Gata was reported to have transferred to Houston High School in Austin, Texas. There is no Houston High School in or near Austin, and a relative said Benedick was still in the Los Angeles area.

The Times found several cases ? Mayra Mendez and Elias Fuentes, to name two ? in which students said they were encouraged to leave.

"I'm trying to save kids here," Olson, the attendance counselor, said when asked about another student. "I can't save this kid."

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'Just What I Needed'

What seems most remarkable in conversations with dropouts is that nearly all of them yearn for an education ? or at least for a diploma.

When Ray Villegas left Birmingham in March of his senior year, he was short on credits and tired of the pressure of classes and homework. His counselor suggested West Valley Occupational Center, a vocational school that also offers independent study. Villegas was skeptical, but he found that he loved the center's informality.

On June 24, one day after Birmingham's graduation, Ray and 65 other independent study students graduated in a modest outdoor ceremony at West Valley. They wore silky blue gowns, one of which covered a student's very pregnant belly.

Ray's teachers had picked him to speak. "I found this program ? no, this school ? to be just what I needed," he said. "I cannot explain what drove me to work so arduously, but what I do know is that I'm thankful to be here today."

But for every Ray Villegas there are plenty of other students for whom the alternative school is just another meandering path to failure. The success rates of such schools are difficult to gauge because the students are so transient ? some leave and return three, four or five times.

"I never have a kid who makes a decision to drop out," said Gladstone, the longtime principal at Independence. "They just drift away."

Once they do, the evidence is overwhelming that their prospects for a good life ? by practically any definition ? decline.

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was possible for a dropout to get a job that could eventually lift him into the middle class. Those days are pretty much over. In 1964, a typical high school dropout earned 64 cents for every dollar earned by someone with a diploma. By 2004, it was 37 cents and dropping.

At a conference last fall at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York, some top educational researchers released their findings about the consequences of dropping out.

The researchers calculated that dropouts will cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost income taxes and increased welfare and healthcare costs.

Dropouts will die, on average, nine years earlier than high school graduates.

Dropouts will commit far more crimes than high school graduates.

Economist Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley estimated that if high school graduation rates were just 1% higher, there would be 100,000 fewer crimes in the United States annually, including 400 fewer murders, and that the savings would be $1.4 billion a year.

In an economy that increasingly relies on educated workers, "those who are not properly educated are going to fall by the wayside," said Michael Rebell, director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College.

It is a fate that Svetlana Pogosyan is desperately trying to avoid.

Svetlana dropped out of Birmingham in her junior year. By then, school had become a cycle of failure and humiliation. Svetlana, a Russian immigrant, was growing awkwardly out of a difficult childhood. At school, she was unfashionable and unpopular and proud of it.

"High school was so overrated," Svetlana said. "It was a fashion show, that's it."

She had started skipping class in her freshman year, visiting a hookah bar and smoking apple-flavored tobacco with her one close friend. Her parents worked long hours, her mother as an X-ray technician, her father as a floor-layer. Teachers didn't encourage her.

She checked out that first year, trying a continuation school and home study, before returning to Birmingham. But she found that little had changed. If anything, the social scene had intensified. After one semester, she left and re-enrolled in home study.

Then, in what would have been her senior year, her father was diagnosed with lung cancer. She began taking care of him and her 4-year-old brother while her mother worked.

Finishing school became a distant worry.

Last June, her little brother graduated from preschool and proudly waved his diploma in his big sister's face. A month later, Svetlana was called to her father's bedside. She kissed his swollen forehead five times. He called her his "bunny" in Russian. Then he died.

Svetlana, 18, is now enrolled in West Valley Occupational Center, where she is studying to earn her GED degree. She plans to enroll in beauty school.

She has one more goal: to make sure her brother stays in school.

"I'm going to make him go to school," she said. "It's going to be my duty ? to guide him."

*

Graduates

Here's what happened to the 1,087 freshmen who entered Birmingham High in the fall of 2001:

Graduated: 582

From: Birmingham: 425*

Other traditional schools: 110

Nontraditional schools**: 47

Did not graduate: 224

Status unknown: 281

• In addition to these students, the graduating class included students who transferred to Birmingham

** Includes a variety of alternative programs, such as vocational schools, continuation schools and independent study programs that provide more personal instruction

--

The transfer students

Three hundred and fifty students are known to have transferred from Birmingham. With each transfer, the chance of graduation grew slimmer. Number of
other schools Number of Percent who
attended students graduated
1 287 48%
2 53 32
3 13 8
4 or more 5 0
Source: Los Angeles Unified School District, Times reporting

Data analysis by Sandra Poindexter

*

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