Under the proposal, home-schooled children with behavioral and emotional disabilities would have to have individualized education plans approved by the special education director of the local public school district. Allowing for the continued home-schooling of such children would be predicated on the individualized plans and "adequate progress" documented in mandatory annual reports.
Why?
In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren't even thinking about political orientation.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns.
As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.
Psychology Today
You are welcome!
How did psychologists from Berkeley define "liberal" in 1989?
Psychologists from Berkley did not 'define' liberals or conservatives...they defined themselves.
Um, you read your post, right?
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults.
"They" = Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block
1. How did they know the political preferences of the adult subjects, and 2. how did they determine that these preferences were "liberal" or "conservative."
Umh...they asked them..
Umh......Here a revolutionary idea for a pea brain like you...READ the ******* thing...you posted it
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/03/block.pdf
2.2. Establishing a conceptually tenable and reliable index of LIB/CON
Political orientation represents a domain of attitudes, preferences, and behaviors rather
than simply a single, presumed sufficient measure. As presumed relevant indicators of this
domain, seven divergent political measures were employed when the participants were age
23, administered over the course of several weeks by divergent examiners:
1. Participants self-identified their position on a 5-point continuum ranging from “very
liberal,” “liberal,” “middle of the road,” “conservative,” to “very conservative.” No reliability
estimate could be calculated for these liberalism/conservative Ideological Self ratings
but test–retest correlations of similar measures attest to the dependability of
such measures.
2. Participants indicated their direction of agreement regarding 10 issues generally viewed
as then distinguishing the Democratic and Republican parties: abortion rights, amount
of money spent on welfare, national health insurance, income tax rates, environmental
protection, affirmative action, extent of funding for national defense, support of use of
military force to remove a hostile foreign government, government job guarantees, and
civil rights for suspected criminals. The reliability of this measure was .63.
3. Participants indicated their position regarding Political Rights (via an updated version
of McClosky’s Dimensions of Political Tolerance approach (1958)): 12 stands were
taken regarding freedom of political expression (e.g., flag-burning, TV appearances of
Nazi and Ku Klux Klan), opposition to various kinds of censorship (of books in high
school libraries, of speakers), the right to remain silent, etc. The reliability of this measure
was .54.
4. Participants expressed their attitude, on a 6-point scale, toward the 15 items of the
Kerlinger Liberalism Scale (1984), concerned with such ultimately political symbolic
issues as civil rights, racial equality, socialized medicine, social planning, labor unions,
equality of women, the United Nations, and so on. The reliability of this measure
was .82.
5. Participants expressed their attitude, on a 6-point scale, toward the 15 items of the
Kerlinger Conservatism Scale (1984), concerned with such ultimately political symbolic
issues as patriotism, religion, social stability, capitalism, government price controls, law
and order, moral standards, and so on. The reliability of this measure was .87.
6. Participants were questioned regarding their personal Political Activism, whether the
subject had written letters to express political views, attended political rallies or
demonstrations, or boycotted companies and products singled out as politically aversive.
A 3-item scale resulted for which the reliability was .56.
7. Participants responded to the Political Information Scale, a 10-item measure of the
extent of knowledge of the positions of the Democratic and Republican Parties (see 2,
above). The reliability of this measure was .71.
Via conceptual analysis, further supported by empirical factor analysis, the first 6 measures
proved convergent and were separated from the seventh, amount of political information.
A composite score, termed LIB/CON, for each participant was then generated by
averaging the standard scores of the 6 convergent variables. The (lower bound) reliability
of this composite measure was .73. The measure, because it is based on diverse political
indices each broadly conceived as conceptually relevant, may be presumed to have a larger
representativeness of the liberalism/conservatism construct than any of its components.
The LIB/CON score distribution in this sample leans toward liberalism, with relatively
few participants tilting toward conservatism. However, the crucial composite score, on
which all data analyses are based, displays a wide, albeit somewhat skewed, distribution.
To the extent there is skew, it follows that individuals toward the Conservative end of the
score distribution can be expected to be characterologically more homogeneous
