>>But you should be looking at the effective tax rate
No, the effective tax rate is inappropriate. If you make $60k a year and you're considering having your wife work for another $60k a year, that's a marginal gain, so you have to do the math on the marginal taxes you'll pay to determine if its worth it. It might not be. After child care and taxes, she'll be working full time ostensibly at ~30$/hour for only ~$10k cash in the bank at the end of the day.
Given that companies currently ignore the provisions in the EULAs that say that "if you don't like these terms you can return them", I don't see how they can be enforced at all, really.
I think all the guys needed to win would be a videotape of them trying to return AutoCAD after it had been opened.
Oops, sorry, forgot about CA SDI, which is another tax. And maybe unemployment, too.
The point is, if you consider social security and medicare a tax (which they are, really), or just look at what the government takes out of your take home pay, losing half is a pretty good rule of thumb.
>>The effective tax rate for our hypothetical couple making $160k per year is 21.41%.
We're not looking at total tax rate, but rather the marginal tax rate as you move from $60k to $120k, which is going to be around 27%. This doesn't include state income tax (9.3% here in CA), and I believe social security and medicare is at 7.5%. So you're going to be losing 44% of your take-home pay from your second job. Nearly half your take-home pay gone.
You have to pay for child-care using post-tax dollars.
I'm not saying you won't come out ahead with a second earner in the family (that's why families work two jobs), but that the way our marginal tax system is set up it encourages people to not work, which hurts our economy as well as lowering tax revenues for the government. Since you were talking about money acceleration, consider that you'll no longer having a second earner paying taxes, buying childcare (which then gets taxed), and likely spending the additional money, which then also gets taxed and respent. Ignoring human factors, it is best for the economy for the entire population being productive.
>>This is going to mean bad things for all the rest of us.
We need a new amendment to the constitution it looks like: "The doctrine of first sale shall not be abridged."
Or in detail -
Entities are allowed sell things in one of three ways, which must be clearly specified: 1) Sale - and the seller forfeits all claims to the item after the sale. The buyer can alter it or modify it. 2) Sale for limited time (rent/lease) - as above, but the seller can demand the item be returned in good condition. 3) License - The seller allows the buyer to use the product as long as the buyer is not in default of the terms. The seller must make all reasonable accommodations to make sure the buyer can use the software, even if the buyer loses the original CDs, for example.
First of all, let me preface this by saying that I enjoy talking about education. The trouble is, it's very easy to have an opinion about what works and what doesn't work without having rigorous evaluation results supporting your premise. And it's very hard to get good results, because people are so complicated - it's not like administering a drug to someone and seeing how much their rash decreases (http://xkcd.com/790/).
It's important to evaluate claims for merit, otherwise the situation of having *too many* solutions just gets worse. For example, Gatto et al think the problem with schools is that they're part of a secret conspiracy to turn students into docile sheep for the Secret Masters of the Universe to exploit. To use your summation of his stance, he thinks that students need more freedom, and more chance to exercise their freedom, in order to not become these mindless factory slaves. So that's a claim. What evidence is there for it that this approach works?
1) You mention home schooling, and imply that I am against it or something (I'm not - in fact, I'll help my sister out with math and science if she home schools my niece.) This isn't an especially useful alternative, though, since aside from offering vouchers to parents to home school, you can't really implement it in a widespread fashion. Two-working-parent households means you still need to have to have traditional schooling.
2) You mention that students are held at gunpoint and forced to go to school. Well, there's a reason for that. =) Even before the Prussian model was adopted, parents would force their kids to go to the local schoolhouse, if they didn't just have a private tutor. It didn't seem to turn them into mindless drones.
3) The efficacy of private schools and charter schools is also hard to assess cleanly, since by their very nature parents who are actively engaged in their students' education are going to go to the extra effort of researching different educational options in their area, and involved parents are one of the most powerful indicators for educational success. If you disaggregate achievement data just by the socioeconomic status of the parents (rich parents tend to be more engaged in their students' learning than poor parents), this is one of the most consistent predictors of success for students, regardless of if they go to Montessori schools or the local public school. School culture is also important, and even poor kids going to La Jolla High are going to do better than their peers in the ghetto.
4) You claim that giving students more freedom to self-direct studies (such as with the Montessori method) will improve student learning. The trouble is that giving too much freedom (which I've alluded to before), such as Independant Study Plans and with Alternative Schools are known to have the highest dropout rates. Yes, as you say, these kids are already the kids that have been kicked out of the normal system, but if they're failing in the normal system due to the "prison-like" environment, should they not respond positively to being given more freedom? You asked for a reference for this, but you can pull the data yourself, if you'd like. The CDE STAR reporting system is all online: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/ For example, Chaparral High (an alternative school - http://star.cde.ca.gov/star2010/ViewReport.asp?ps=true&lstTestYear=2010&lstTestType=C&lstCounty=37&lstDistrict=68130-000&lstSchool=3732559&lstGroup=1&lstSubGroup=1) has a pass rate of between 0% and 16% on the standardized tests, compared with rates that are two or three times higher at Grossmont High (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2585597/posts). You can use the dataquest system on CDE's website to pull dropout rates to study yourself, if you'd like. It c
Of course child care is not $63k. But you're forgetting that the government will take roughly half your income at that point, and childcare at good preschools in the Bay Area exceeds $20k/year.
While I completely agree overwork is a serious problem, if you're looking at it from the point of view of the gov't trying to maximize tax revenue, this is an easy example of how high tax rates can decrease income.
>>And yes, if my wife made as much as I do, we'd be wealthy, and should pay more in taxes because of that.
After paying for childcare and the increased taxes, you wouldn't make much more than what do you now. (If you don't see how taxes are a disincentive to work, your own family is the perfect example.)
If they raised taxes on the "rich", you'd be worse off than you are now, if your wife was also working.
>>You'd have to raise taxes mych more on the poor to get the same amount as a small increase for the rich.
Nope. Run the numbers some time. There's a lot more poor people. There's a reason a flat tax makes a lot of sense.
>>How can you call Alfie Kohn or John Holt or Jeff Schmidt anarchistic?
In this context, yes. Dispensing with grades, etc., and they're anti-authoritarian by nature.
>>BTW, if Gatto is insane, how was he selected as NYS Teacher of the Year
While I know you're joking, it's a reverse ad-hominem fallacy. It's quite possible for very smart people to also be crazy. (http://www.cracked.com/article_18638_4-nobel-prize-winners-who-were-clearly-insane.html)
My AP English teacher (Jan Gabay) was Teacher of the Year for the entire country in 1990. She had very strong opinions on what works and doesn't work in education, but they're different from Gatto's.
This is kind of one of the points I made a few posts back - there's a plethora of opinions on how to fix education. It's not like everyone is walking around saying everything is fine - there's clearly a problem, but people can and do disagree on what exactly is wrong, and on how to fix it. There's literally thousands of solutions floating around out there, most of which don't have rigorous evaluation supporting their claims.
You seem to think that I think the system is fine ("If the schooling idea is so great..."), when I think my first post here is quite clear that I believe the way school is being taught currently is badly broken. However, I believe part of the problem is having *too many* solutions - teachers are told to forget everything they know on a yearly basis. So they more or less ignore the reforms and keep doing their traditional, failed, way of teaching most of the time.
The anarchistic model doesn't work. If you give kids freedom to do work, or not... they don't do it. And then they drop out. Simple as that. There's ample evidence supporting this. I'm not saying that kids don't need *more* freedom - just that giving them too much freedom is pretty much proven not to work.
>>How can you say that the Prussian model was rejected when just about everything about schools reflects it?
Sure, things like teacher certification and mandatory education are still around, but that's not what the Prussian system was all about. The Prussian system was ultimately designed to produce students for industrial work. For repetitive regimented work, with just enough critical thinking skills to be able to build stuff. This is the part that Gatto is fixated upon, not realizing this hasn't been true in the American educational system for quite a while. I believe the Factory School model was tried and rejected circa-WWI. Rejected because kids weren't learning as much as with traditional schooling.
If you've been keeping abreast of overarching goals in the educational system, Gatto's paranoid fantasies are laughable. Currently, one trendy thing to talk about are "21st Century Skills". (http://www.p21.org/) Take a look at the goals for this movement (http://www.p21.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=120): 1. Core Subjects and 21st Century Themes
2. Learning and Innovation Skills
* Creativity and Innovation
* Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
* Communication and Collaboration
3. Information, Media and Technology Skills
* Information Literacy
* Media Literacy
* ICT Literacy
4. Life and Career Skills
Does this seem to match, in the slightest what Gatto is talking about?
>>Did you go to school? Do you spend much of your time talking to school people? Then you are in the system...
Snort. By that definition Gatto is still part of the same system, because he "went to school". Believe it or not, there's a lot of people that study the problems of education, and I've had long conversations with a lot of them. When you study something, and not participating in it, you're effectively outside of it.
>>If for some reason you decide to smooth the GCM output and sensor data at only 10 years, the error bars will be large. That's why professional climatologists usually smooth data and model output using ~20 year averages.
If you'd like to engage in a gedankenexperiment, consider if predictions after 20 years had error bars from +0C to +10C. (Error bars themselves are fuzzy things, but I digress.) The same paradox applies to the notions of falsification and verification. No change verifies AGW, but a massive +20C change falsifies AGW (technically, the current-best-guess-AGW theory).
>This proposed "falsification" is woefully misguided because modern GCMs are dynamical physical models
They are models which create predictions which can either be verified or falsified. If you say verification and falsification don't apply, then climatology is not science. If you say that AGW can never be disproven by temperature data, then climatology is not a science. Alternatively, our notions of verification and falsification are flawed measures of "science".
This is philosophy of science type stuff, which I know you don't have much appetite for, Khayman. But the point of my original post above was to talk about the very paradox of verification and falsification in regards to climate science... which I think it seems you agree with. They are very problematic.
>>Falsification applies to theories, not to observations.
Theories generate predictions which are then tested.
For example, the Extremely Simple Theory of Everything might predict the existence of new particles. A physicist does the math, and figures out a way to generate these new particles (if they exist). He runs the experiment. If the results come back positive, it adds +1 verification points to the ESTOE. If it doesn't, it adds +1 falsification points to it.
The point is, if we do have a theory (AGW) and it results in certain predictions with a certain, very wide, error range, we can't run tests on it. (This is a key difference between climatology and hard sciences.) There's just one experiment running (Earth), and it takes a long time to results back. But the paradox that I mention is this: even if we have no global warming, the +0C result is within the band of error bars, so this counts as verification of the prediction. But a +5C change counts as invalidating the prediction. So we have less confidence in AGW than before. Even though, paradoxically, the world heated up faster than we thought, and we really do have AGW.
What you're talking about is the fact that if the-current-best-guess-AGW theory is falsified, people can always adjust it to account for the new data, and develop new predictions. But there's two major problems with this: one, we don't know if they'll be any more accurate (until another 10 or 20 years has gone by) and two, this means that AGW can never be falsified, and so it is not a scientific theory at all.
>>Poor couple only making $140k/year.. I make $63k, supporting a child and a wife with $60k in student loan debt that we'll likely never be able to pay off. And I'm a software engineer (and a rather good one). Not sure why I should feel sorry for your hypothetical couple.
If you had a wife making the same amount as you, that's a $126k salary. Guess what, you're top 85%. After accounting for the increased cost of living and rent in the Bay Area, you're probably making more than our "hypothetical" couple.
Since you must have a lot more spare cash floating around than our couple, perhaps you'd like to pony up an extra $10k a year in taxes? I mean, fair is fair, right?
>>Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators
In other words, it IS a conspiracy. He's paranoid.
>>The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian.
And WAS REJECTED when evaluation efforts revealed that these methods were less effective than others. See for example the Factory model used in WWI-era New York, which were explicitly designed around these principles. They sucked, evaluators found that they didn't work, and the city rejected them.
>>Do you say this is not a more or less accurate assessment of that history?
Gatto's screed only resonates with people who don't know the history or practice of education. No offense.
>>They never get to practice democracy, as they might in, say, a "democratic free school".
All sorts of kids get to practice democracy and freedom. They're called Alternative Schools. They have the highest dropout rates of any schools in our system. (Unless you count schools in Juvenile Hall, I guess, but that doesn't really count.)
Read your own link. Ad Hominem is a valid criticism when it is relevant to the argument being made. Stating that a guy is a flat-earther is a valid criticism of his bold new math on calculating Satellite orbits. Gatto being paranoid is a completely germane criticism of his twisted viewpoint on education. Because it is exactly a reflection of his paranoia.
>>Anyway, it might take years to decompress after being in such an environment. Thanks for trying a little.
I'm not *in* the environment. I'm an evaluator, so I assess what elements of education are effective, and which are not. Which is why I can state with certainty Gatto is batshit insane.
>>Years worth of reading if you want to do it:
All anarchistic links, it appears. Which is great, except anarchy fails, in education. Miserably.
As I said. Consider a married pair of Master's Degree CS majors making $80k to start in Silicon Valley - they're well within the top 10% of all earners. Out of grad school.
Are these people fat cats that "don't deserve" the money they earned working overtime as a code monkey for the Evil Empire?
Or are they living in a small apartment, saving all they can so that they can pay down their student loans, afford a baby, and get a house some time before they retire?
Are these the people we want to punish for working hard? Do we want to drive them out of their jobs by taking so much of their disposable income they can no longer afford to live there?
Chomsky IS also crazy. For a lot of the same reasons - he believes in secret evil plots lurking behind every curtain in America, and contrawise minimizes the evil of anything not-American. He's a nutcase. Smart, but a nutcase.
>>What he says is that the system itself is evil in terms of the goals behind it
Precisely. I can attest from personal experience that there are no "evil goals" behind the school system. It's overcomplicated and ineffective, but not evil. From the top to the bottom, everyone in the school system wants their kids to do well.
Gatto implying there's Secret Masters of the Earth or whatever (Rockefellers? Jews?) is why I call him a paranoid schizophrenic. I read enough of his stuff to become completely disgusted with his nightmare delusions.
>>They've made 3 predictions, all with 95% confidence intervals, and the new prediction falls out of all 3 of them
That's why I especially like one prediction they did (in AR4, I think) that included no change in the predicted models for 10 years out within the error bars (which was something like +0C to +4C).
So even if there's no climate change, it verifies climate change. But if there's +5C change, then, by golly, global warming has been falsified! The results didn't match prediction.
In all seriousness, though, I think there's a real paradox in what we consider falsification and verification in science if the above two statements are both true.
Some bright researchers managed to refine a previous model and come up with better and more accurate predictions. You may want to note how, contrary to some "skeptics" beliefs this wasn't suppressed or refused publication or any other such shenanigans. In the word of a famous person "When I'm proven wrong I change my opinion, what do you do ?".
An honest skeptic would look at the Greenland melt data and say that there wasn't enough evidence. An honest Al Gore would have looked at the Greenland melt and put large error bars around his predictions. Dishonest people on either side refuse any results that disagree with their presumptions.
I recall watching CSPAN and seeing climatologists talking about how the Greenland melt rate would be 10 times greater than we'd expected, because of the wet pancake effect or something. I'm not an AGW skeptic, though I *am* critical of idiots like that, that claim more evidence than there is. He's up there scaring senators, and... he's wrong. (Or probably is - the Greenland melt is an active area of research.) I'm also critical of people like Sarah Palin who think that human beings can't possibly, ever, affect the climate.
Unfortunately, it seems most people are dishonest dogmatists for one side or another.
>>So you prefer to lose half your income to insurance companies and lawsuits? To each their own I guess.
I'd rather not lose half of it at all.:p
Our 1M/2M liability insurance runs about a thousand dollars a year. Hard to say how much health insurance costs all total since it's subsidized, but before I got married it was around $300/month. Lawsuits? We do what we say we'll do, and have only gotten into litigation twice in the last decade, and won both.
Taxes, though.... off the top of my head, it's around 15% for Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, etc., and then a top marginal tax rate of 35%, and a state tax rate of 10% or so here in California. You get to write off some taxes against the others, so it's not quite as high as it looks, but the government taking half of everything you make is a reasonable rule of thumb if you're moderately successful. And you want to increase it further? Go fuck yourself.
>>To most software engineers who aren't living in NYC or Silly Valley $110k/year is a bit more than "a decent wage".
For people in NYC or Silicon Valley it isn't eye-raising. A friend of mine started at $80k or so a year and is in the six digits now. Hard worker. Lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his wife and kids. If Obama raises taxes on him... it won't be good for him. Might force him to quit and move elsewhere. Bad for him, bad for the US's economy as they lose taxes off his wages.
I'm not saying $110k is average (I think it's rather obvious it's not... it's 90th percentile), but rather that the 10% cutoff is a LOT lower than people think. The notion that people in the top 10% are all fat cats lounging around benefiting from the labor of others is fucking preposterous. It's 4AM and I'm still working. Joys of running one's own corporation.
>>I always laugh whenever the Republicans complain about taxing the richest 10%
Idiot.
If you make a decent wage as a software engineer, and you're married to another worker, guess what? You're in the top 10%.
The cutoff for the top 10% of income is $110,000.
It's ridiculous to pretend that all of these people are all executives and fat cats that don't produce. I work my ass off, as does my wife, and we would both rather prefer not losing half our income to the government.
I've been working as a consultant to educators for the last decade, and, well, he's completely wrong about teachers *wanting* to stifle intellectual curiosity and creative thinking. That might be the result, but it's not the intent. Our teachers and our schools *love it* when kids become independent thinkers - the rub is that the methods they use are often counterproductive.
Let me pull out just one example: You're an average 11th grade kid sitting in a history class. The teacher is talking about Bacon's Rebellion. You don't know anything about it, except maybe that the name makes you hungry. The teacher starts lecturing on it, then asks a question: "Anyone know where Bacon's Rebellion took place?" Some smarty-pants raises his hand in the row next to you, and answers it correctly. The teacher nods happily (my kids know their stuff!) and then moves on, potentially even skipping this fact because his class apparently knows it already.
This is de rigor, but there's a number of problems with it. Let's see how many we can list: 1) The question was a fact check. It didn't engage any higher thinking skills. He could have asked, after explaining what it was all about, if the kids thought it was justified or not, for example. 2) He asked for a fact the kids shouldn't know. (Nobody *just knows* where Bacon's Rebellion took place, unless you're cheating and looking it up on Wikipedia.) 3) This makes the "stupid kids" feel stupider, and the good student that read the chapter the night before smug. Neither benefits learning. 4) It encourages students to not raise their hands and guess, because they might be wrong. And the smart kid will know it anyway. 5) The teacher gets a false sense of accomplishment because an obscure question was answered correctly, even though the other 29 students don't know anything about it. 6) When teachers fact check, they use it to quickly assess how much their students know. Because it came back positive, he will breeze over the content, potentially hurting the students who don't know anything (the 29 out of 30). 7) Some other kid answering a trivia question is not going to result in the fact getting stuck in the head of the other students. Our brains just don't work that way. They've never mentally processed it and worked with it. By contrast, if they have to answer a question that needs them to make use of the facts taught in that class ("Where do you think Bacon moved next?"), they'll tend to remember it. 8) The kids might not even know where Virginia (the right answer, BTW) *is*. It's doubly meaningless to him - an imaginary event taking place in an imaginary colony. You have to have a mental framework to fit facts in in order to retain them. The kids need to know first where Virginia is, and ideally see on a map, where the rebellion took place. 9) Ditto for the context of the time the event took place in. No kid knows what the context of the whatever decade in the 1600s the Bacon Rebellion took place in.
I could go on, but in a nutshell, this is my point: This is how history is taught, but it's not conducive to higher level thinking, or even remembering bare facts. They might cram for a test, and remember the specific date (whatever it is), but a month later they'll have completely forgotten the whole thing. And then when they take their AP test and get a 1, their teacher will be confused - "But they did so well on the quiz questions!"
In other words Gatto is confusing effect for intention. The effect is that we're failing to teach our students history (or whatever), but teachers absolutely do NOT want that to happen. He's right about structural issues that can happen due to administrators or district policies, but your man on the ground, the person actually working with kids, absolutely wants kids to be higher level thinkers. They'd have a moment of bliss if a kid in that class were to raise their hand and say, "But is that why they switched from white indentured servants to black slaves? To make them
>>half the appeal of learning from a book (especially for a subject like math) was the ability to quickly flip between half a dozen pages to get to the right charts
I hate e-books, too, but mainly due to their craptastic form factors, flashing screen refreshes (on e-ink displays), and slow page turning, just as you say.
But I have several books in both physical copies and scanned PDFs. It's usually faster for me to pull up the PDF and ctrl-F find something than it is to go pull the book from the bookshelf and flip through it looking for stuff. I make sure all of my PDFs are OCRed, and I heavily annotate them with notes and bookmarks as well, so I find them much faster to search through than physical books.
Physical books are easier to read for long durations though.
B) School pays $50 per student per book for the iPad
Is the digital model. The paper model is
A) School buys a paper book for $50 per student per book.
What the fuck universe do you live in? Textbooks are $200 now. (http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Early-Transcendentals-Stewarts/dp/0495011665) At $50 for an e-copy, the iPads will save money.
I think the iPad is a bad choice though. Nooks are a lot cheaper, and a local community college uses them very successfully as replacement textbooks.
>>You are a hostile lawyer's fantasy come true.;-)
We've won a couple lawsuits because I save all of my email.
We had a contract to do a workshop with Maricopa County - the same people whose Sheriff is under investigation by the FBI right now, and of Immigration Law fame. And who have a lot of other shady things going on right now, but I digress.
I'd traded a series of emails with them planning the workshop. Everything was all set. Then, about a week before the workshop, they say they don't need me to come after all. Ok, sure. So I try to reschedule with them. Nope, sorry, you didn't show up to the workshop, so you breached the contract. I sent them a copy of all the emails. Nope, sorry.
Filed a lawsuit. They wouldn't settle. Showed the email trail of everything. Got a check for over $30k. Didn't have to do the work. (Of course, I'd have preferred if everyone had just done as they'd said, and it was much more of a hassle to sue than to just do the damn work.)
Lawsuits are often won over who has the best documentation. If you do your work honestly, having full email records is probably going to help you more than hurt you in lawsuits.
A friend of mine works for Google as an IP lawyer.
After about a month of working for him, he canceled all of his online accounts, canceled his cell phone, and basically would only contact people using prepaid cellular numbers that he'd rotate every month.
I'm not quite sure what that means, but it doesn't sound very good.
Slashdot Mirror
>>But you should be looking at the effective tax rate
No, the effective tax rate is inappropriate. If you make $60k a year and you're considering having your wife work for another $60k a year, that's a marginal gain, so you have to do the math on the marginal taxes you'll pay to determine if its worth it. It might not be. After child care and taxes, she'll be working full time ostensibly at ~30$/hour for only ~$10k cash in the bank at the end of the day.
Given that companies currently ignore the provisions in the EULAs that say that "if you don't like these terms you can return them", I don't see how they can be enforced at all, really.
I think all the guys needed to win would be a videotape of them trying to return AutoCAD after it had been opened.
Oops, sorry, forgot about CA SDI, which is another tax. And maybe unemployment, too.
The point is, if you consider social security and medicare a tax (which they are, really), or just look at what the government takes out of your take home pay, losing half is a pretty good rule of thumb.
>>The effective tax rate for our hypothetical couple making $160k per year is 21.41%.
We're not looking at total tax rate, but rather the marginal tax rate as you move from $60k to $120k, which is going to be around 27%. This doesn't include state income tax (9.3% here in CA), and I believe social security and medicare is at 7.5%. So you're going to be losing 44% of your take-home pay from your second job. Nearly half your take-home pay gone.
You have to pay for child-care using post-tax dollars.
I'm not saying you won't come out ahead with a second earner in the family (that's why families work two jobs), but that the way our marginal tax system is set up it encourages people to not work, which hurts our economy as well as lowering tax revenues for the government. Since you were talking about money acceleration, consider that you'll no longer having a second earner paying taxes, buying childcare (which then gets taxed), and likely spending the additional money, which then also gets taxed and respent. Ignoring human factors, it is best for the economy for the entire population being productive.
>>This is going to mean bad things for all the rest of us.
We need a new amendment to the constitution it looks like: "The doctrine of first sale shall not be abridged."
Or in detail -
Entities are allowed sell things in one of three ways, which must be clearly specified:
1) Sale - and the seller forfeits all claims to the item after the sale. The buyer can alter it or modify it.
2) Sale for limited time (rent/lease) - as above, but the seller can demand the item be returned in good condition.
3) License - The seller allows the buyer to use the product as long as the buyer is not in default of the terms. The seller must make all reasonable accommodations to make sure the buyer can use the software, even if the buyer loses the original CDs, for example.
First of all, let me preface this by saying that I enjoy talking about education. The trouble is, it's very easy to have an opinion about what works and what doesn't work without having rigorous evaluation results supporting your premise. And it's very hard to get good results, because people are so complicated - it's not like administering a drug to someone and seeing how much their rash decreases (http://xkcd.com/790/).
It's important to evaluate claims for merit, otherwise the situation of having *too many* solutions just gets worse. For example, Gatto et al think the problem with schools is that they're part of a secret conspiracy to turn students into docile sheep for the Secret Masters of the Universe to exploit. To use your summation of his stance, he thinks that students need more freedom, and more chance to exercise their freedom, in order to not become these mindless factory slaves. So that's a claim. What evidence is there for it that this approach works?
1) You mention home schooling, and imply that I am against it or something (I'm not - in fact, I'll help my sister out with math and science if she home schools my niece.) This isn't an especially useful alternative, though, since aside from offering vouchers to parents to home school, you can't really implement it in a widespread fashion. Two-working-parent households means you still need to have to have traditional schooling.
2) You mention that students are held at gunpoint and forced to go to school. Well, there's a reason for that. =) Even before the Prussian model was adopted, parents would force their kids to go to the local schoolhouse, if they didn't just have a private tutor. It didn't seem to turn them into mindless drones.
3) The efficacy of private schools and charter schools is also hard to assess cleanly, since by their very nature parents who are actively engaged in their students' education are going to go to the extra effort of researching different educational options in their area, and involved parents are one of the most powerful indicators for educational success. If you disaggregate achievement data just by the socioeconomic status of the parents (rich parents tend to be more engaged in their students' learning than poor parents), this is one of the most consistent predictors of success for students, regardless of if they go to Montessori schools or the local public school. School culture is also important, and even poor kids going to La Jolla High are going to do better than their peers in the ghetto.
4) You claim that giving students more freedom to self-direct studies (such as with the Montessori method) will improve student learning. The trouble is that giving too much freedom (which I've alluded to before), such as Independant Study Plans and with Alternative Schools are known to have the highest dropout rates. Yes, as you say, these kids are already the kids that have been kicked out of the normal system, but if they're failing in the normal system due to the "prison-like" environment, should they not respond positively to being given more freedom? You asked for a reference for this, but you can pull the data yourself, if you'd like. The CDE STAR reporting system is all online: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/ For example, Chaparral High (an alternative school - http://star.cde.ca.gov/star2010/ViewReport.asp?ps=true&lstTestYear=2010&lstTestType=C&lstCounty=37&lstDistrict=68130-000&lstSchool=3732559&lstGroup=1&lstSubGroup=1) has a pass rate of between 0% and 16% on the standardized tests, compared with rates that are two or three times higher at Grossmont High (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2585597/posts). You can use the dataquest system on CDE's website to pull dropout rates to study yourself, if you'd like. It c
Of course child care is not $63k. But you're forgetting that the government will take roughly half your income at that point, and childcare at good preschools in the Bay Area exceeds $20k/year.
While I completely agree overwork is a serious problem, if you're looking at it from the point of view of the gov't trying to maximize tax revenue, this is an easy example of how high tax rates can decrease income.
>>And yes, if my wife made as much as I do, we'd be wealthy, and should pay more in taxes because of that.
After paying for childcare and the increased taxes, you wouldn't make much more than what do you now. (If you don't see how taxes are a disincentive to work, your own family is the perfect example.)
If they raised taxes on the "rich", you'd be worse off than you are now, if your wife was also working.
>>You'd have to raise taxes mych more on the poor to get the same amount as a small increase for the rich.
Nope. Run the numbers some time. There's a lot more poor people. There's a reason a flat tax makes a lot of sense.
>>How can you call Alfie Kohn or John Holt or Jeff Schmidt anarchistic?
In this context, yes. Dispensing with grades, etc., and they're anti-authoritarian by nature.
>>BTW, if Gatto is insane, how was he selected as NYS Teacher of the Year
While I know you're joking, it's a reverse ad-hominem fallacy. It's quite possible for very smart people to also be crazy. (http://www.cracked.com/article_18638_4-nobel-prize-winners-who-were-clearly-insane.html)
My AP English teacher (Jan Gabay) was Teacher of the Year for the entire country in 1990. She had very strong opinions on what works and doesn't work in education, but they're different from Gatto's.
This is kind of one of the points I made a few posts back - there's a plethora of opinions on how to fix education. It's not like everyone is walking around saying everything is fine - there's clearly a problem, but people can and do disagree on what exactly is wrong, and on how to fix it. There's literally thousands of solutions floating around out there, most of which don't have rigorous evaluation supporting their claims.
You seem to think that I think the system is fine ("If the schooling idea is so great..."), when I think my first post here is quite clear that I believe the way school is being taught currently is badly broken. However, I believe part of the problem is having *too many* solutions - teachers are told to forget everything they know on a yearly basis. So they more or less ignore the reforms and keep doing their traditional, failed, way of teaching most of the time.
The anarchistic model doesn't work. If you give kids freedom to do work, or not... they don't do it. And then they drop out. Simple as that. There's ample evidence supporting this. I'm not saying that kids don't need *more* freedom - just that giving them too much freedom is pretty much proven not to work.
>>How can you say that the Prussian model was rejected when just about everything about schools reflects it?
Sure, things like teacher certification and mandatory education are still around, but that's not what the Prussian system was all about. The Prussian system was ultimately designed to produce students for industrial work. For repetitive regimented work, with just enough critical thinking skills to be able to build stuff. This is the part that Gatto is fixated upon, not realizing this hasn't been true in the American educational system for quite a while. I believe the Factory School model was tried and rejected circa-WWI. Rejected because kids weren't learning as much as with traditional schooling.
If you've been keeping abreast of overarching goals in the educational system, Gatto's paranoid fantasies are laughable. Currently, one trendy thing to talk about are "21st Century Skills". (http://www.p21.org/) Take a look at the goals for this movement (http://www.p21.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=120):
1. Core Subjects and 21st Century Themes
2. Learning and Innovation Skills
* Creativity and Innovation
* Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
* Communication and Collaboration
3. Information, Media and Technology Skills
* Information Literacy
* Media Literacy
* ICT Literacy
4. Life and Career Skills
Does this seem to match, in the slightest what Gatto is talking about?
>>Did you go to school? Do you spend much of your time talking to school people? Then you are in the system...
Snort. By that definition Gatto is still part of the same system, because he "went to school". Believe it or not, there's a lot of people that study the problems of education, and I've had long conversations with a lot of them. When you study something, and not participating in it, you're effectively outside of it.
>>If for some reason you decide to smooth the GCM output and sensor data at only 10 years, the error bars will be large. That's why professional climatologists usually smooth data and model output using ~20 year averages.
If you'd like to engage in a gedankenexperiment, consider if predictions after 20 years had error bars from +0C to +10C. (Error bars themselves are fuzzy things, but I digress.) The same paradox applies to the notions of falsification and verification. No change verifies AGW, but a massive +20C change falsifies AGW (technically, the current-best-guess-AGW theory).
>This proposed "falsification" is woefully misguided because modern GCMs are dynamical physical models
They are models which create predictions which can either be verified or falsified. If you say verification and falsification don't apply, then climatology is not science. If you say that AGW can never be disproven by temperature data, then climatology is not a science. Alternatively, our notions of verification and falsification are flawed measures of "science".
This is philosophy of science type stuff, which I know you don't have much appetite for, Khayman. But the point of my original post above was to talk about the very paradox of verification and falsification in regards to climate science... which I think it seems you agree with. They are very problematic.
>>Falsification applies to theories, not to observations.
Theories generate predictions which are then tested.
For example, the Extremely Simple Theory of Everything might predict the existence of new particles. A physicist does the math, and figures out a way to generate these new particles (if they exist). He runs the experiment. If the results come back positive, it adds +1 verification points to the ESTOE. If it doesn't, it adds +1 falsification points to it.
The point is, if we do have a theory (AGW) and it results in certain predictions with a certain, very wide, error range, we can't run tests on it. (This is a key difference between climatology and hard sciences.) There's just one experiment running (Earth), and it takes a long time to results back. But the paradox that I mention is this: even if we have no global warming, the +0C result is within the band of error bars, so this counts as verification of the prediction. But a +5C change counts as invalidating the prediction. So we have less confidence in AGW than before. Even though, paradoxically, the world heated up faster than we thought, and we really do have AGW.
What you're talking about is the fact that if the-current-best-guess-AGW theory is falsified, people can always adjust it to account for the new data, and develop new predictions. But there's two major problems with this: one, we don't know if they'll be any more accurate (until another 10 or 20 years has gone by) and two, this means that AGW can never be falsified, and so it is not a scientific theory at all.
>>Poor couple only making $140k/year.. I make $63k, supporting a child and a wife with $60k in student loan debt that we'll likely never be able to pay off. And I'm a software engineer (and a rather good one). Not sure why I should feel sorry for your hypothetical couple.
If you had a wife making the same amount as you, that's a $126k salary. Guess what, you're top 85%. After accounting for the increased cost of living and rent in the Bay Area, you're probably making more than our "hypothetical" couple.
Since you must have a lot more spare cash floating around than our couple, perhaps you'd like to pony up an extra $10k a year in taxes? I mean, fair is fair, right?
>>Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators
In other words, it IS a conspiracy. He's paranoid.
>>The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian.
And WAS REJECTED when evaluation efforts revealed that these methods were less effective than others. See for example the Factory model used in WWI-era New York, which were explicitly designed around these principles. They sucked, evaluators found that they didn't work, and the city rejected them.
>>Do you say this is not a more or less accurate assessment of that history?
Gatto's screed only resonates with people who don't know the history or practice of education. No offense.
>>They never get to practice democracy, as they might in, say, a "democratic free school".
All sorts of kids get to practice democracy and freedom. They're called Alternative Schools. They have the highest dropout rates of any schools in our system. (Unless you count schools in Juvenile Hall, I guess, but that doesn't really count.)
>>Let's take 'em out with an ad hominem until the phasers are back online. :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Read your own link. Ad Hominem is a valid criticism when it is relevant to the argument being made. Stating that a guy is a flat-earther is a valid criticism of his bold new math on calculating Satellite orbits. Gatto being paranoid is a completely germane criticism of his twisted viewpoint on education. Because it is exactly a reflection of his paranoia.
>>Anyway, it might take years to decompress after being in such an environment. Thanks for trying a little.
I'm not *in* the environment. I'm an evaluator, so I assess what elements of education are effective, and which are not. Which is why I can state with certainty Gatto is batshit insane.
>>Years worth of reading if you want to do it:
All anarchistic links, it appears. Which is great, except anarchy fails, in education. Miserably.
As I said. Consider a married pair of Master's Degree CS majors making $80k to start in Silicon Valley - they're well within the top 10% of all earners. Out of grad school.
Are these people fat cats that "don't deserve" the money they earned working overtime as a code monkey for the Evil Empire?
Or are they living in a small apartment, saving all they can so that they can pay down their student loans, afford a baby, and get a house some time before they retire?
Are these the people we want to punish for working hard? Do we want to drive them out of their jobs by taking so much of their disposable income they can no longer afford to live there?
>>See also, for another crazy guy (Chomsky):
Chomsky IS also crazy. For a lot of the same reasons - he believes in secret evil plots lurking behind every curtain in America, and contrawise minimizes the evil of anything not-American. He's a nutcase. Smart, but a nutcase.
>>What he says is that the system itself is evil in terms of the goals behind it
Precisely. I can attest from personal experience that there are no "evil goals" behind the school system. It's overcomplicated and ineffective, but not evil. From the top to the bottom, everyone in the school system wants their kids to do well.
Gatto implying there's Secret Masters of the Earth or whatever (Rockefellers? Jews?) is why I call him a paranoid schizophrenic. I read enough of his stuff to become completely disgusted with his nightmare delusions.
>>They've made 3 predictions, all with 95% confidence intervals, and the new prediction falls out of all 3 of them
That's why I especially like one prediction they did (in AR4, I think) that included no change in the predicted models for 10 years out within the error bars (which was something like +0C to +4C).
So even if there's no climate change, it verifies climate change.
But if there's +5C change, then, by golly, global warming has been falsified! The results didn't match prediction.
In all seriousness, though, I think there's a real paradox in what we consider falsification and verification in science if the above two statements are both true.
An honest skeptic would look at the Greenland melt data and say that there wasn't enough evidence. An honest Al Gore would have looked at the Greenland melt and put large error bars around his predictions. Dishonest people on either side refuse any results that disagree with their presumptions.
I recall watching CSPAN and seeing climatologists talking about how the Greenland melt rate would be 10 times greater than we'd expected, because of the wet pancake effect or something. I'm not an AGW skeptic, though I *am* critical of idiots like that, that claim more evidence than there is. He's up there scaring senators, and... he's wrong. (Or probably is - the Greenland melt is an active area of research.) I'm also critical of people like Sarah Palin who think that human beings can't possibly, ever, affect the climate.
Unfortunately, it seems most people are dishonest dogmatists for one side or another.
>>So you prefer to lose half your income to insurance companies and lawsuits? To each their own I guess.
I'd rather not lose half of it at all. :p
Our 1M/2M liability insurance runs about a thousand dollars a year. Hard to say how much health insurance costs all total since it's subsidized, but before I got married it was around $300/month. Lawsuits? We do what we say we'll do, and have only gotten into litigation twice in the last decade, and won both.
Taxes, though.... off the top of my head, it's around 15% for Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, etc., and then a top marginal tax rate of 35%, and a state tax rate of 10% or so here in California. You get to write off some taxes against the others, so it's not quite as high as it looks, but the government taking half of everything you make is a reasonable rule of thumb if you're moderately successful. And you want to increase it further? Go fuck yourself.
>>To most software engineers who aren't living in NYC or Silly Valley $110k/year is a bit more than "a decent wage".
For people in NYC or Silicon Valley it isn't eye-raising. A friend of mine started at $80k or so a year and is in the six digits now. Hard worker. Lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his wife and kids. If Obama raises taxes on him... it won't be good for him. Might force him to quit and move elsewhere. Bad for him, bad for the US's economy as they lose taxes off his wages.
I'm not saying $110k is average (I think it's rather obvious it's not... it's 90th percentile), but rather that the 10% cutoff is a LOT lower than people think. The notion that people in the top 10% are all fat cats lounging around benefiting from the labor of others is fucking preposterous. It's 4AM and I'm still working. Joys of running one's own corporation.
>>I always laugh whenever the Republicans complain about taxing the richest 10%
Idiot.
If you make a decent wage as a software engineer, and you're married to another worker, guess what? You're in the top 10%.
The cutoff for the top 10% of income is $110,000.
It's ridiculous to pretend that all of these people are all executives and fat cats that don't produce. I work my ass off, as does my wife, and we would both rather prefer not losing half our income to the government.
Gatto's also a paranoid schizophrenic.
I've been working as a consultant to educators for the last decade, and, well, he's completely wrong about teachers *wanting* to stifle intellectual curiosity and creative thinking. That might be the result, but it's not the intent. Our teachers and our schools *love it* when kids become independent thinkers - the rub is that the methods they use are often counterproductive.
Let me pull out just one example: You're an average 11th grade kid sitting in a history class. The teacher is talking about Bacon's Rebellion. You don't know anything about it, except maybe that the name makes you hungry. The teacher starts lecturing on it, then asks a question: "Anyone know where Bacon's Rebellion took place?" Some smarty-pants raises his hand in the row next to you, and answers it correctly. The teacher nods happily (my kids know their stuff!) and then moves on, potentially even skipping this fact because his class apparently knows it already.
This is de rigor, but there's a number of problems with it. Let's see how many we can list:
1) The question was a fact check. It didn't engage any higher thinking skills. He could have asked, after explaining what it was all about, if the kids thought it was justified or not, for example.
2) He asked for a fact the kids shouldn't know. (Nobody *just knows* where Bacon's Rebellion took place, unless you're cheating and looking it up on Wikipedia.)
3) This makes the "stupid kids" feel stupider, and the good student that read the chapter the night before smug. Neither benefits learning.
4) It encourages students to not raise their hands and guess, because they might be wrong. And the smart kid will know it anyway.
5) The teacher gets a false sense of accomplishment because an obscure question was answered correctly, even though the other 29 students don't know anything about it.
6) When teachers fact check, they use it to quickly assess how much their students know. Because it came back positive, he will breeze over the content, potentially hurting the students who don't know anything (the 29 out of 30).
7) Some other kid answering a trivia question is not going to result in the fact getting stuck in the head of the other students. Our brains just don't work that way. They've never mentally processed it and worked with it. By contrast, if they have to answer a question that needs them to make use of the facts taught in that class ("Where do you think Bacon moved next?"), they'll tend to remember it.
8) The kids might not even know where Virginia (the right answer, BTW) *is*. It's doubly meaningless to him - an imaginary event taking place in an imaginary colony. You have to have a mental framework to fit facts in in order to retain them. The kids need to know first where Virginia is, and ideally see on a map, where the rebellion took place.
9) Ditto for the context of the time the event took place in. No kid knows what the context of the whatever decade in the 1600s the Bacon Rebellion took place in.
I could go on, but in a nutshell, this is my point: This is how history is taught, but it's not conducive to higher level thinking, or even remembering bare facts. They might cram for a test, and remember the specific date (whatever it is), but a month later they'll have completely forgotten the whole thing. And then when they take their AP test and get a 1, their teacher will be confused - "But they did so well on the quiz questions!"
In other words Gatto is confusing effect for intention. The effect is that we're failing to teach our students history (or whatever), but teachers absolutely do NOT want that to happen. He's right about structural issues that can happen due to administrators or district policies, but your man on the ground, the person actually working with kids, absolutely wants kids to be higher level thinkers. They'd have a moment of bliss if a kid in that class were to raise their hand and say, "But is that why they switched from white indentured servants to black slaves? To make them
>>half the appeal of learning from a book (especially for a subject like math) was the ability to quickly flip between half a dozen pages to get to the right charts
I hate e-books, too, but mainly due to their craptastic form factors, flashing screen refreshes (on e-ink displays), and slow page turning, just as you say.
But I have several books in both physical copies and scanned PDFs. It's usually faster for me to pull up the PDF and ctrl-F find something than it is to go pull the book from the bookshelf and flip through it looking for stuff. I make sure all of my PDFs are OCRed, and I heavily annotate them with notes and bookmarks as well, so I find them much faster to search through than physical books.
Physical books are easier to read for long durations though.
What the fuck universe do you live in? Textbooks are $200 now. (http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Early-Transcendentals-Stewarts/dp/0495011665) At $50 for an e-copy, the iPads will save money.
I think the iPad is a bad choice though. Nooks are a lot cheaper, and a local community college uses them very successfully as replacement textbooks.
>>You are a hostile lawyer's fantasy come true. ;-)
We've won a couple lawsuits because I save all of my email.
We had a contract to do a workshop with Maricopa County - the same people whose Sheriff is under investigation by the FBI right now, and of Immigration Law fame. And who have a lot of other shady things going on right now, but I digress.
I'd traded a series of emails with them planning the workshop. Everything was all set. Then, about a week before the workshop, they say they don't need me to come after all. Ok, sure. So I try to reschedule with them. Nope, sorry, you didn't show up to the workshop, so you breached the contract. I sent them a copy of all the emails. Nope, sorry.
Filed a lawsuit. They wouldn't settle. Showed the email trail of everything. Got a check for over $30k. Didn't have to do the work. (Of course, I'd have preferred if everyone had just done as they'd said, and it was much more of a hassle to sue than to just do the damn work.)
Lawsuits are often won over who has the best documentation. If you do your work honestly, having full email records is probably going to help you more than hurt you in lawsuits.
A friend of mine works for Google as an IP lawyer.
After about a month of working for him, he canceled all of his online accounts, canceled his cell phone, and basically would only contact people using prepaid cellular numbers that he'd rotate every month.
I'm not quite sure what that means, but it doesn't sound very good.