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Americans Win 2006 Nobel Physics Prize
Davemania writes "CNN reports that the Nobel Prize in Physics has been award to John C. Mather and George F. Smoot for their contribution to the big-bang Theory." From the article: "Their work was based on measurements done with the help of the NASA-launched COBE satellite in 1989. They were able to observe the universe in its early stages about 380,000 years after it was born. Ripples in the light they detected also helped demonstrate how galaxies came together over time. 'The very detailed observations that the laureates have carried out from the COBE satellite have played a major role in the development of modern cosmology into a precise science,' the academy said in its citation." If you're interested, you can read a rundown on the prize-winning work (pdf) provided by the prize organization.
So all 4 Nobel winners this year so far have been Americans. Brain drain?! Bah!
Of course, the true test will be to see if we can keep it up in a few years.
Zndrew Fire and Craig Mello won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering a way to turn off the effect of very specific genes by using RNA to interfere with cell function, a technique they expect to be able to use to fight cancer.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Science++, Superstition--
Trolling is a art,
Americans winning the Nobel Peace Prize...
Since when was the Nobel Prize a team sport?
Just imagine, winning a Nobel prize for the "big bang" theory.
:-/
Why everyone knows that the world was created in 7 days, not with a big bang -- the "big bang" theory is just scientific hokum. Just ask our president or the millions of Christian fundamentalists who know the truth.
oops - wrong Smoot. My bad.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I can just see the list of this year's Nobel Prize winners, if the Nobel Prize was based in US.
Nobel Prize in Physics - Henry Morris and John Whitcomb on their ground breaking work The Genesis Flood which proved that earth is only 6000 years old.
Nobel Prize in Physiology - Michael Behe, who, using irreducible complexity, proved beyond doubt that evolution is just a "theory".
Nobel Prize in Literature - Ann Coulter Treason, who exposed the greatest perils that free societies face today - Gutless Lying Liberals who will sell your daughters and sisters to Kim Jong Il.
Nobel Prize in Peace - George Bush, who freed millions of Iraqis from a brutal dictator.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry - Discontinued.
Actually, it's been pretty common since the beginning of the prize, at least for things other than Literature. Heck, the 1904 Nobel Peace prize was give to the entire Institute of International Law. The entire International Committee of the Red Cross has won multiple times. The 1902 Nobel for Physics was given to Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Pieter Zeeman for ""in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena". Etcetera.
Lots more examples here.
Can we PLEASE get a "-1 Stupid" mod option?
A better understanding the universe is of use to humanity.
For those of you who are too lazy to use Google:
COBE is the COsmic Background Explorer, and it measured the spectrum of the, guess what, cosmic background radiation.
It was able to prove that the background radiation is identical to that of a black body with T = 2.7K. The fluctuations are in the order of 10^-5.
The Wikipedia article is quite informative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBE
Moritz
--
http://moritz.faui2k3.org/
If you're interested, you can read a rundown on the prize-winning work (pdf) provided by the prize organization.
That's still several pages, and while it's all good, there is a more concise description of the COBE observations available.
I think understanding our origins is of tremendous use. You're right - it won't pay off tomorrow, but a better understanding of the world we live in is ultimately a good thing. Mankind is nothing if not curious. And self-destructive.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
USA USA USA USA We're #1
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
>> "A better understanding the universe is of use to humanity.
Now I understand the Universe has limits, I'm starting to feel quite claustrophobic.
Just as a quick pointer. The discovery that the earth isnt flat is, by your standards, just as pointless as understanding how the universe looks. But by that logic, america wouldnt even exist today(if thats a good thing or not i will leave up to you, however).
No.
FYI, we've been the homeland of at least one of the winners 19 out of the 93 years that it's been awarded. That's better than 20%. In fact, 2002 was President Jimmy Carter.
Read the list.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
My work here is dung.
No? Nothing more than this? I'm not saying it is true, I'm just saying that's the first thing I thought, and wanted to hear others' thoughts (though more than one syllable ;).
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Well, didn't god create the world as one big bang? And then over the next 7 days all that will and ever was evolution took place.
The parent poster makes a good point. What exactly is the use of this "research". I'm not saying they shouldn't do it but it's not something I would expect they should get an award over.
The various "injustices" of the prizes awarded for the microwave cosmic background are well known in physics circles. It's old, it's over, it sucks, whatever, get over it.
Sarcasm Nice response. /Sarcasm
incorrect, you can get immediate use of that. Knowing that the world is round, means you can keep sailing over the horizon without fear of falling off. The fact is, there is *no* immediate use to the whole or greater part of humanity from this, so it really is not a nobel'able research.
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Uh, actually, you need to adjust for relativity. In the frame of reference of the observers giving out this award, we're a couple of decades back. That is, they don't give out nobel prizes for something that happened this year, they give them out for things that have stood for a while and had impact etc.
Consequently, I think you meant to say: Of course, the true test will be to see if we kept it up for a few years subsequent to 1989. We should already know the answer to that. I'm sure we're still doing good work. But are we keeping pace with the tremendous degree of investment in math and science abroad? I bet the Nobels that are given a decade or two from now will be clear on that. It's a matter of national pride for many countries. But here, we have "No Child Left Behind", which sounds good on paper but often plays out as "No Child Gets Ahead" -- lest it be "unfair" to someone. It's politically unsafe here to suggest that it's worth investing in our high end at the expense of our low end, and that's going to trend badly toward the middle. Other countries are not thus hampered.
MIT recently opened a research center in Singapore. I suspect the next thing we'll hear is that it's headquarters has moved--for convenience. And then finally, that the largely unused Cambridge center is being mothballed as a quaint relic, perhaps turned into a science museum. And perhaps after that protests may ensue, more over lost jobs or unfair treatment than the question of how our nation's leaders sold us out. No one worries about that.
The problem is that US politics sees everything as one-place predicates. Politicians like education. They like the environment. They like kids. It's easy to like things when you don't have to make hard choices, and all our public dialog is framed about people voting for X or not voting for X. Politicians don't talk about choices, about comparisons, about 2-place predicates that put one thing up against another. No one says "When it came to X vs Y, I chose Y." That alienates voters. Voters want the fictionalized choice that you can have it all, that all choices/votes are independent of one another, and that no choice or policy robs another. They don't want honesty, so politicians don't sell it. And then the policies the voters have elected don't work. We'll spend a billion dollars to keep a few from getting attacked when the same billion would save many more lives if spent on food, health care, jobs, or education.
I'm not against less intelligent kids. I don't want to hold them back. BUT the more intelligent kids will be making the money that will pay for the welfare, the head start, etc. that the less intelligent ones need. And if push comes to shove, I know where I'd put money to make sure we still have money in the future. Any business person knows it. You invest in the "low-hanging fruit", the "easy mark", the people who are poised to succeed. And no, that doesn't mean the rich kids--this isn't about class. There are smart kids and dumb kids in the same family. There are smart poor kids and dumb rich kids. We need to figure out which ones are going to succeed and invest in them. And if we don't start investing in science, instead of kidding ourselves that investing in Creationism is the same thing, we'll be rightly pushed aside by other countries, who know that our kind of nonsense/nonscience is not what business is hiring. If it hasn't happened already.
I'm not trying to troll this forum. I think this is on topic since the headline says "Americans win...", so it's clear that some of this story is about who won, about American national pride and implicitly about American national investment in doing it again. And I have strong opinions on this.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
It works, bitches.
Can this produce results that immediately better the lives of all/most-of humanity?
No, it's an interesting thing that intelectuals can enjoy, and some day maybe help people with, but at this point in time, no one is going to be saved from sickness or death from this, no one is going to be prevented from starving because of this, no ones life will be extended from this. With the possible exception of the scientists involved and their families of course.
Humanity is a lot larger than that group.
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It's quite a bit different in that knowing the geometry of our planet is immediately useful to those who would navigate around it. As far as we know, it is physically impossible to travel far enough to need to worry about most of the things that we learn from astronomy (on any time scale relevant, and ignoring solar system astronomy). Most of the research is pretty strictly academic -- it's interesting, but not useful.
Personally, I think it's valuable (I'm a physics grad student working in CMB astronomy, so that's not a totally idle statement). However, I don't have a good concrete answer as to why for those who don't like knowledge for its own sake. The best I can say is that there's been a long, long history of valuable knowledge coming out of unexpected places.
We know a lot about the laws of physics, but we don't know everything there is to know. Are we at the point where we know everything that's relevant? Not even close. Where will the next breakthrough come from? High energy phyics? Mesoscopic condensed matter? CMB cosmology? No one knows. If we knew what the breakthrough would be well enough to target it in our search, then we'd already be there. It'll be a surprise and the only way to get there is to carry out research in every remotely promising area.
Anyway, I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I do think the case for astronomy research is a bit more subtle.
For science!
Wow. Hard to believe you're posting at -1.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
I double checked this too. MIT has nine Smoots in the alumni directory, several attending about the same time as the Nobel winner.
I have two points here:
First, You have to remember these guys are the product of yester-year's educational system (i.e. they were educated long ago probably from the 50's through 70's). It will be interesting to see what happens 20 years from now when the current generation of students reach maturity. Most students in the US probably spend more classroom time learning about the values of "diversity" and "self-esteem" than they do learning the periodic table or Newton's laws of physics. Its a very different time from the "OMG, the Russians have sputnik" era that launched a crash-program of science education throughout the 50's and 60's.
Second, As far as a "brain drain", I think it goes the other direction. Right now America's university system is considered by most measures to still be the best, but it is increasingly populated by foreign students. Lot's of them manage to stay in the US by hook-or-crook when their student visa run out (i.e. the get sponsored by US companies for H1b or they marry an American), so we still manage to reap the reward of other nation's "brain drain".
We are also still a magnet for overseas educated foreigners. I've heard stories of a nurses shortage in the Phillipeans because they are all being sponsored by US hospitals with special visas.
The prizes in Chemistry, Economics, and Physics usually are for highly theoretical work that may take decades to utilize. Prizes in Medicine and Peace usually are for more practical and may have immediate benefits. Einstein won in 1921 for the photoelectric effect. It wasn't until WWII that anyone created a solar cell. Raymond Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba shared the prize in 2002 for their work on neutrinos. One of the consequences of their work was that the Standard Model of physics required tweaking. Their work showed that neutrions have mass, contrary to Standard Model predictions. Who knows what will reap from this discovery?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I understand your concern, but its misplaced in this instance. Mather and Smoot conceived of COBE, helped secure the funding, managed the instrument development, and processed the data. Of course, they didn't do it themselves, but the scores of engineers at NASA Goddard (where the spacecraft was built), UC berkeley, LLNL, and other partners that worked on COBE and its instruments will take some pride in today's selection.
Show me a creationist "scientist" or group of creationist "scientists" that have done solid, ground breaking and peer-reviewed work in the area of Physics in the past year that is a demonstrable application that contributes to our understanding of the universe and then you might have a worthwhile discussion on your hands.
As an economic conservative, seeing anything that suggests our universe is older than 10,000 years being characterized as "anti-conservative" is like nails on the chalkboard. This award is no different than the past 178 awards in the field of physics in demonstrating a bias towards *scientific* work, or if there must be a flip side, an "anti-bias" towards pseudoscience.
Ok, give me some kind of evidence, besides your own preconceptions, that "diversity" is crowding out anything in the US education system.
The reality is that in the US, we have very bad schools that produce some good students and very good schools that produce more very good students. Either way, school is ultimately what an individual makes of it.
Ok, sorry, I thought you were being glib.
CMB physics is a powerful probe into the origins of the universe. That it is consistent with our big bang / inflation models is a powerful fact, independent of any spin the politicos might try to put on it. The measurement of anisotropies, first in temperature (what COBE found) and more recently in polarization are our best probes of the conditions in the early times. So far, it's all very consistent with the big bang model and extremely hard to explain otherwise.
Anyway, there's a lot more to say about why CMB is important, but that doesn't really address your question. First, there is a lot of interest in CMB research at the moment largely due to its power as a cosmological probe, so it's clear that the COBE work was groundbreaking in a burgeoning field. The Nobel committee doesn't like to reward work that turns out to have been a false start, so they often wait a few years (in this case about 14) to see that the breakthrough is corroborated and remains important. That has definitely happened.
Also, it's hard to give a prize in astronomy without touching the big bang model, so I don't think it's fair to read anything in to that. Among working cosmologists, the idea of inflation and the big bang is so central that it's now essentially assumed as fact. There just isn't a realistic useful model that doesn't involve inflation. Thus, although CMB research does happen to be tied pretty intrinsically to the big bang model, the fact that it involves the big bang model at all only says that it's related to cosmology.
So, no, I don't think there's any nose-rubbing at all, except to the extent that presenting cold facts about observations and a successful scientific theory makes certain dogmas look pretty ridiculous.
...mod this up.
I don't think it's necessarily more subtle, but it is a lot more long term, and less certain in practical application. Therein lies the problem for awarding Nobels off of it.
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It is not how the world is, but that the world is, that is the mystical. --Wittgenstein
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
The scientific prizes are almost always split. The last time the physics prize was unsplit was '92. Even the second prize they gave was split. The chemistry prize was solo as recently as '99, but split every time since, and often before.
Science is never just some guy working alone in a lab. People publish every accomplishment, and every other lab is working on the same thing you are, with slight variations. Often the first guy with the insight shares the prize with the guy(s) who completed the explanation and performed the experiments to demonstrate that the explanation is correct. Science is always both theory and experimentation, and it's rare to find one lab capable of doing both exceptionally well.
Even the guy who does win it by himself has an army of grad students and colleagues who busted their butts to make it happen.
Besides an admonition not to consider the nationality of candidates, the entirety of the criteria set forth in Alfred Nobels will for the Nobel prize in Physics is as follows:
"...to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics"
So, no, it's not only for imediately useful things; it's for whatever the Swedish Academy of Sciences decides is "most important".
So you're saying that we should abandon all things with no immediate return for humanity? Shit, we shouldda stopped on calculus then. It was worked on for a matter of years before it ever did anything of use.
So what's your proposition? We feed african children? Send money to china? Yeah, like that would do any good. The money and food would be hijacked by their own people before it ever made it there.
Religion and greed should be eliminated first, then everyone may be able to live in peace. Until then, you will have upper classes, middle classes and lower classes. You will also have warring factions intent on killing unbelievers.
As someone who used to work for Sau Lan Wu (and if you're a HEPper, you'll be familiar with that name), and remembers how excited she'd get around this time of the year, and then how crestfallen after the announcement, I'd just like to say this: "HA! HA! You lose again. No prize for you."
The parent is not flamebait. Alfred Nobel's original letter specified that the award should go to those who made "the most important invention or discovery" in that field. The "invention" clause has kind of vanished over time; you see it more often earlier, such as the 1912 prize for automatic gas flow regulators, or the 1909 prize for wireless telegraphy. You still see those awarded today, like the 2000 prize for integrated circuits, but it's less frequent. The "discovery" clause was also originally interpreted in an experimental context, but the prize goes to theoretical work nowadays much more than in the past.
. . . all Americans were fat, lazy, and stupid.
That's what a lot of /. posters keep telling me anyway.
Huh.
He's not the only one. I post at minus values here all the time; it's a point of honor. Nex
The Big Bang and God are not incompatible. See God invented Mexican food first, the "Big Bang" was inevitable after that.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Um... why suddenly insert the "religion vs. science debate" into every possible mention about science unless it is to Karma whore (as this is a sure slam-dunk winner on Slashdot), or unless you have some irrational axe to grind with religious people and you just decide to take every tangentially germane opportunity to exercise your animus (in which case, your post really was flamebait). And here is my answer to your blunt question: My strategy is to applaud scientific achievement and promote the expansion of inquiry and knowledge; all the while refraining from gratuitously belittling other people's religion or inserting politics into every discussion.
I wonder how tall Smoot is in Smoots.
Know what? You americans should arrange a nobel prize in weaponry and warfare. You'd win it every year for sure!!
Don't gimme no rundown, I wan't a blueprint.
I think the bigger issue, for me at least, is that this is not quite up to the standards for a Nobel prize. Yes, it was hard and challenging experimental work - but for all intents it confirmed what was already known or believed true with near certainty. Important? Yes. Groundbreaking? No.
No that's just you we were calling fat, lazy, and stupid. Unfortunately in English, second person singular and plural are the same word. It's understandable how someone as fat, lazy, and stupid as yourself could get confused.
What a predictable and utterly cheap shot!
We've already had the sickening sight of Jimmy Carter campaigning for the prize via a campaign of open sedition against the US. In a less-decadent society he'd be booed in the streets and pelted with rotten cabbage.
The next Nobel Peace Prize presented to an American will probably go to Bill Clinton, for a series of lip-trembling apologies for American exceptionalism.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
It works, bitches.
Check out the shirt based on the COBE mission. Read the comic, too. it's all good.
Being anonymous is not cowardice.
It is my humble understanding that one cannot moderate and post in the same discussion. You seem to imply that you modded a submission and then posted your reason why. Am I missing something? Are there editors and software to keep such things from occuring? -genuinely curious...
Ignoring that distribution is what "No Child Left Behind" does..
You're confused about this legislation. It's a big non-leveler. It's primary intent is to force (by threat of withholding Federal funding) states to test all their students yearly in core subjects, e.g. math now, and science coming up in a few years. The tests have to be standardized and state-wide (i.e. no cheating by re-designing the tests to make them easier for some students, or by evaluating your students with some fuzzy warm-feeling 'holistic' evaluation: the test is simply whether you know the hard, cold facts of the subject, and can produce 'em on demand.)
Once the results are in, the state has to do something about the schools where most of the kids are failing. Either bring them up to snuff, or let the parents choose other schools. Not surprisingly, the teachers' unions hate NCLB with an undying passion. Incompetent teaching and administration is pitilessly exposed to the light of day. Districts can't hide their pathetic screw-ups under some feel-good bullshit about serving their students spiritual or diversity needs, or some other PC crap. If you aren't teaching your kids to know that (x+2)^2 = x^2 + 4x + 4, then that fact will be exposed for all to see, and you'll catch hell over it.
Some of the Nobel Prizes are not leftarded crapthink. The science prizes have the highest ratio of deserved winners to idiots.
And next time any libertine whines about non-leftards hating science, ask 'em about nuclear power.
Had Smoot as my prof a couple of years ago as my Physics 7B prof.... Nice guy, but not the best instructor. I'm glad to see that he's a genius at what he does, though.
-Palal
You want to define the word "access" in that beautiful-sounding phrase "everyone should have access to equal resources"? Because it seems to me what you're saying, and whether you're talking about a disastrous 'Animal Farm' train-wreck of a system, turns critically on the definition of that word.
(1) Does everyone having 'access' to equal resources mean everyone gets to use equal resources? Like, everyone gets to go to MIT or Harvard, regardless of their abilities or performance in high-school? Well, this is clearly impossible, since MIT and Harvard can't take everyone. What history shows you do, when this is your goal, is either reduce MIT and Harvard's intellectual rigor to the same (low) common-denominator quality of Foo State U, your neighborhood football powerhouse where the big majors are Journalism and Leisure Studies -- in other words you reduce the best to the same level as the worst, in a futile pursuit of 'equality' -- or you produce a bogus 'Animal Farm' equality where people in favor with the leadership get to go to the best places by some backdoor. This is the famous Soviet model, where technically all universities are equal, but of course, ha ha, some are more equal than others...
(2) Or does everyone having 'access' to equal resources mean everyone gets a clear chance at proving he deserves the resources he uses? That is, everyone gets to apply to MIT or Harvard, but MIT and Harvard are perfectly justified in evaluating their performance in high school and skimming off the best-prepared to actually attend? In that case, you're not saying anything different than the OP, not even saying things should be materially different than they are.
There is no universal metric for "human worth" but only a construct created by societies and their institutions.
Been reading a lot of Sartre, have we? Who's talking about general measures of 'human worth'? That's a straw man. I think we're talking about ability in specific types of effort -- for example the ability to learn chemistry and physics -- and there are plenty of reliable and objective metrics for that. Give me 15 minutes with any person on Earth speaking one of my languages, and I can tell you reliably and reproduceably what his ability in chemistry is, and whether he can benefit from additional instruction in it, and at what level. Any expert in a quantitative discipline can do the same. No doubt it's tough to rank people according to their honesty, empathy, morality, quality of parenting, dating skills or worth as friends -- but for what conceivable purpose would we need to? And why would the fact that we can't in those areas prevent us from ranking people in other areas, e.g. their abilities in math, science, in speaking foreign languages, in repairing cars or in growing crops?
Colbert is going to be up in arms first the Feilds Medal now this. Someone nominate him already damn it.
" I think that freedom is Americas biggest export. Atleast untill China can stamp it out for 20 cents a unit."
Smoot must also be happy because he's finally getting a RESERVED parking space at UC Berkeley - a privilige only for Nobel Lauriates.
-Palal
I couldn't disagree more. This work is eminently Nobel-worthy. In fact, we cosmologists have been expecting this Prize for a long time. I'd say that the COBE announcement in 1992 is widely seen as the beginning of modern "precision" cosmology.
I agree that in 1992 the Big Bang was extremely well established, if only because we already knew the CMB existed (it had been awarded the Prize in the 1960s, after all). Most physicists also expected that we would see anisotropies at the level of 1 part in 100,000 - that's why COBE was built, of course. So in that sense I agree that we saw things we already expected (but didn't know!) we'd see.
It wasn't clear, however, that we'd see coherent structure in the CMB on scales larger than 1 degree. Inflation predicts this, and many people liked the inflationary idea, but there were other models for structure formation (notably cosmic strings) which don't. The COBE spectrum basically proved that inflation was more than just speculation, which was astonishing. Overnight a world of theories died and a world of others were born. This was a monumental achievement!
I know it's not what you mean, but if you read the rest of the thread Smoot is just such a creationist scientist. It's just that for him "creationism" means "God created the universe", not "God created the universe out of whole cloth six thousand years ago".
Vote MacGyver for President! In Episode #56 he actually kicks the butts of a couple of these 'war is peace' neocon types. What better choice is there in 2008? He disarmes missiles with a paperclip and diffuses bombs with hockey tickets for crying out loud! - Oh yea, and of course Mr. T needs to be secretary of defence!
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I counter-quote, from http://aether.lbl.gov/www/personnel/Smoot-bio.html :
"Much of the excitement outside of the scientific world stemmed from Smoot's comment at the press conference that "if you're religious, it's like seeing God." Smoot did not intend to imply that the discovery offered proof of God's existence, but other scientists, nevertheless, added to the religious metaphors."
I got a piece of toast and it had black stripes on it, dating from its creation as toast. Surely those were "marks of the toaster"!
Therefore, toasters are sentient beings who design toast! For my next trick, I will not only prove that the toaster is sentient, but also lead the Jews out of Egypt!
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Yes, and then we can have an option in our user preferences to set comments marked with it as "+6". We can call it "the O'Reilly Factor".
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Physics: Smoot is a Berkeley Prof (went to MIT), the other guy had PhD at Cal Medicine: Andrew Fire was an undergrad from Cal. 3:1 so far Go Bears .. :-)
Smoot's a great guy, I'm currently enrolled in his undergraduate class as a freshman at Berkeley - Physics 7B: Electricity and Magnetism. How awesome is it to come to a school and end up having your professor win a Nobel Prize? We have a midterm tomorrow, I hope he somehow uses this recognition in a positive light with respect to our test.....
Go Bears!
Funny how Americans can win the Nobel Prize for Big Bang work, but Bush is still trying deny it and replace real empirical science being taught in schools with religious mumbo-jumbo.
c le/2005/08/02/AR2005080201686.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
"So fucking what"
What comment exactly is this directed at and why?
p.s. This is out of interest, not picking...
Slashdot is powered by your submission.
I agree with the sentiment in a kind of theoretical way, but I don't agree that it comes out the way you suggest because the implementation is flawed. It's not the school but the teachers and administration that needs to be shut down in that case. Students can't stand in the street waiting for a new school. The town needs a new school immediately. Students get lost in the process.
In the meantime, you lose a whole block of students who were already being punished by bad education.
This reminds me of the way people chastised the people in New Orleans for not leaving when told. As the comedians (trained observers in this case, because there's nothing funny in it) remarked, the problem wasn't that these people didn't get into their BMW and drive to their summer home, it's that they had jobs they couldn't leave, they couldn't afford gas, they didn't have cars, etc. And to say that when a school closes, it implies there will be other schools for these children is wrong.
I'm sure there are schools that are in disrepair. They need fixing. But closing the school won't help. Firing the administration, firing the teachers, maybe. And even then, not all of the teachers are bad. So what about the good ones. We can't separate good from bad? We have to make the good teachers casualties, too?
No Child Left Behind is a way to claim one has taken responsibility when one has not. By creating a poison pill, you hope that the supervising agencies (school boards, local government, etc.) will be freed of having to deal. I don't think those people have any lack of desire to deal. I see the problem as, in many cases, teachers' unions making it hard to deal directly with merit-based pay, etc. There are surely some good things about unions, and I am not anti-union per se. But when unions get in the way of common sense judgments that organizations need to run, whether they are private organizations or public, and they start to threaten the organization as a whole, it's time for the pendulum to swing back some toward the middle.
A braver thing for politicians to do would be to pass a law saying that in any school where standards are not up to par, either the union is dissolved or any contract item relating to hiring or firing for merit is null and void. Because that's the minimal requirement to assure that a manager can make the necessary changes without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And I think some politicians are too afraid to confront unions directly so they've created this secret way of dealing with them: no school, no messy union.
The other lurking issue that your comments don't address is the large amount of money that a small-town school can be forced to spend to add equal access for handicapped students. (Don't tell me they're just "challenged" or I'll ask why they need extra money spent on them. They have a handicap if they require extraordinary expenditures. There's no shame in that. But let's use clear terms about what is being asked for.) I think it's nice for an affluent society, when there's extra money to spend, to give generously to such causes. But when money is tight, I think it's unfair to say that the needs of one person can use up the scarce resources that are needed to keep the community intact. There seems to be no bound on what a community can be forced to expend on such situations. And yet when I've inquired of schools why they don't use computers more, there is always the question of whether it would be fair to those who don't have them to let the people who do "get ahead". If there is to be catering to the low end, there has to be balance in the other direction. And NCLB is silent on that matter.
I think a lot of this school poison pill
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer