Times recommends
Baker for mayor
St. Petersburg has made considerable progress recently. Rick Baker is the candidate best able to keep the city on its positive track and guide it into the future.

Editorials
Undercutting the FCAT
Gov. Jeb Bush sold his school-grading plan -- with its almost total reliance on one test, the FCAT -- as a reliable way to judge schools on how well they teach students. But now the state has decided to discount the very portion of the FCAT that had the most potential for assessing the true extent of learning. Whatever validity the FCAT once had to measure school quality -- and many educators believe it had little to begin with -- it has even less now.

Letters
Racial problems rooted in lack of trust
Re: Denial gets us nowhere living with racism, Bill Maxwell, Feb. 11.

Educators only accountable for those they teach
Educators have expressed varying reactions to data recently released by the Florida Department of Education showing that most schools with mobile student populations would have received lower grades last year had those children's test scores been counted.

Robyn E. Blumner
Lawmakers should reject proposals that would clip judiciary’s wings
Locke Burt, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, insists there is no Republican agenda to punish Florida judges for rulings against a number of legislative enactments by conservative lawmakers.

Robyn E. Blumner
Standards in schools have less meaning
It took decades of social promotion, grade inflation and high school graduates who could barely spell their own names, but education reformers finally awoke to the fact that lowering standards for disadvantaged children was not the way to promote success.

Bill Maxwell
Harming more than helping our teachers
Of all of the hare-brained schemes to come out of Jeb Bush's Tallahassee office and his shadow world of "commissions," his latest proposal ranks as the dumbest yet.

Robert Friedman
The university system teetering on the edge
Public universities are facing a crucial time with the Board of Regents being dismantled and Florida's university system being rebuilt, the brainchild of Gov. Jeb Bush and former House Speaker John Thrasher.

Martin Dyckman
The kind of logrolling hated by conservatives, except Feeney
TALLAHASSEE -- Some people think they are conservatives if they're simply for slashing spending, repealing taxes and getting the government out of everything except, perhaps, your bedroom.

Philip Gailey
The future of St. Petersburg is in the hands of voters
Nine candidates, most of them credible, are running for mayor of St. Petersburg in the Feb. 27 primary election. With so many wild cards in the deck, anything could happen.

Tim Nickens
Baker’s supporters are nervous
Rick Baker has it all.

Books
Africa from the inside
My mom and dad looked particularly distraught when they drove me to preschool every morning in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1977. I was not allowed to look out the window because, they said, the sight outside was inappropriate for a five-year-old like myself.

More on Africa
AFRICAN TRAVELOGUE: In 1980 Ann Jones, a middle-aged adventure writer hooked up with British photographer Keven Muggleton for an overland journey from one end of Africa to the other.

Thrillers
THE PROGRAM, by Stephen White (Doubleday, $24.95) The condemned man's final words to New Orleans prosecutor Kirsten Lord were ominous: "For every precious thing I lose, you will lose two."

Africa and celebrities difficult mix for Fielding
Traveling no doubt on the popularity of the international bestseller Bridget Jones' Diary, Cause Celeb, an earlier work by British author Helen Fielding, has just been published for the first time in the U.S.

Schaap does himself well
On several occasions (usually when I'm about to cover a Super Bowl or another major sport event), a few friends and acquaintances have said they wished they had my job.

Great beginnings
"When tomorrow was still a given and ignorance was still bliss, I was floating along like a paper sailboat on a lazy river, too caught up in my life to know that I was dying."

Check it out
NOBLE NOBEL CELEBRATION: This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes.

Book talk
FLORIDA WRITES: Entry in the 18th annual CNW/FFWA Florida State Writing Competition is now open to everyone; the deadline is March 15.