Word: peckham
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...PECKHAM'S MARBLES...
Today there are 3,000 clown ministry groups in the U.S. who put on big noses and suits of many colors in order to serve God. Yet it was only seven years ago that Methodist Minister Bill Peckham organized one of the earliest clown ministries in Elkhart, Ind., among the young people of his parish. Calling themselves the Holy Fools, they began visiting hospitals, mental institutions and nursing homes, where they fanned out to chat with individual patients, occasionally performed short skits or magic tricks and made balloon sculptures. Often they just talked quietly with a patient, held or hugged...
Meanwhile, across the continent, a judge has just given a boost to one group of testing reformers. In San Francisco, U.S. District Court Judge Robert F. Peckham last month ruled that California could not use the common Stanford-Binet IQ test to screen pupils for placement in a special program for the "educable mentally retarded." California's EMR program is 25% black, although blacks make up only 10% of the statewide school population. Even under the improbable assumption that black children have 50% more mental retardation than white children, said Peckham, the EMR enrollment pattern had just one chance...
...culprit, he declared, is the culturally biased IQ test. Peckham quoted a similar ruling in which Judge J. Skelly Wright summarized the reformers' point. Said Wright: "Although test publishers and school administrators may exhort against taking test scores at face value, the magic of numbers is strong...
...hope Britain will not follow that peculiar Americanism known as affirmative action, in order to help immigrants. Such programs exacerbate a feeling of resentment among the majority population and can only exacerbate the immigrants' inferiority complex. Sean O' Sullivan East Peckham, England...