The interesting thing was that the rate of price decrease before the deregulation date was greater than after deregulation.
I would suggest, though of course I can't prove, that the deregulation allowed all sorts of inefficiencies to be wrung out of the system at once. Once all the low-hanging fruit are gone, though, it's a lot harder to keep increasing efficiency at the same rate forever.
Sure, that would be a good story if there was a fast drop at deregulation followed at some later time by a slower drop - but these graphs did not show that. The graphs showed relatively steep drops before dereg, and shallower ones after, with no particular big dips or drops in the time around deregulation.
Now my memory of a graph in a consumer mag from more than a decade ago is not particularly convincing - it would be nice if we could find some more reliable data.
Given the prices we paid in the fully-regulated days before the Ma Bell breakup, I'm not sure that regulation would do much to lower prices. Making all companies operate on the same spectrum would help, though.
I recall some pretty high per-minute long distance charges back in the 1970s that's for sure.
However I recall a bit of info from Consumer Reports back in the late 1990s that was interesting. It was a graph of the cost of phone service and airline travel and one some other industry I cannot recall, plotted against time. For each industry, there was a fairly linear drop in pricing up until the date when the industry was "deregulated", and at that date, there was a deflection point followed by a new linear decrease in pricing. The interesting thing was that the rate of price decrease before the deregulation date was greater than after deregulation. From this data at least, it is not clear that deregulation actually acted to decrease pricing.
A bit of web sleuthing by me at least does not turn up much data one way or another to support this position. I find lots of articles comparing prices before and after deregulation in the phone and airline industries, but no data about the rate of price change.
Thus, while there were undoubtedly many many great benefits from deregulation of various industries, it is not absolutely clear that pricing is significantly lower than it would have been without deregulation in all cases. It is also not completely clear that similar results could not be achieved while maintaining tighter control over business practices that are undesirable for society at large.
Children with malaria don't go to school. Siblings of children with malaria stay home and take care of their siblings. And if one of the parents gets malaria?
There is a very real loss of education and economic growth here, not to mention all
When you solve malaria, you will now cut the death rate. That will put pressure on the local community. LOADS of it. Right now, the reason why Malaria spread so quickly and easily is because mosquitoes carry it from one person to another. They are right next to each other. Once malaria is cured, then another disease will step right up there because more ppl will occupy the same space, but with the same amount of money to solve issues. Actually less overall as well as less per person. Once it is realized by gates that he screwed up, he will not want to solve the next symptom..
I don't think you understand the drain on resources that malaria is. While many do die from malaria, most do not. Most are just chronically sick, and unless you are going to advocate shooting them in the head, these current chronically sick people are a much bigger drain on the entire social structure than the increased costs associated with fewer deaths due to malaria.
"Annual economic growth in countries with high malaria transmission has historically been lower than in countries without malaria. Economists believe that malaria is responsible for a ‘growth penalty' of up to 1.3% per year in some African countries. When compounded over the years, this penalty leads to substantial differences in GDP between countries with and without malaria and severely restrains the economic growth of the entire region.
The direct costs of malaria include a combination of personal and public expenditures on both prevention and treatment of the disease. Personal expenditures include individual or family spending on insecticide treated mosquito nets (ITNs), doctors' fees, anti-malarial drugs, transport to health facilities, support for the patient and sometimes an accompanying family member during hospital stays. Public expenditures include spending by government on maintaining health facilities and health care infrastructure, publicly managed vector control, education and research. In some countries with a heavy malaria burden, the disease may account for as much as 40% of public health expenditure, 30-50% of inpatient admissions, and up to 50% of outpatient visits.
The indirect costs of malaria include lost productivity or income associated with illness or death. This might be expressed as the cost of lost workdays or absenteeism from formal employment and the value of unpaid work done in the home by both men and women. In the case of death, the indirect cost includes the discounted future lifetime earnings of those who die.
Malaria has a greater impact on Africa's human resources than simple lost earnings. Although difficult to express in dollar terms, another indirect cost of malaria is the human pain and suffering caused by the disease. Malaria also hampers children's schooling and social development through both absenteeism and permanent neurological and other damage associated with severe episodes of the disease.
The simple presence of malaria in a community or country also hampers individual and national prosperity due to its influence on social and economic decisions. The risk of contracting malaria in endemic areas can deter investment, both internal and external and affect individual and household decision making in many ways that have a negative impact on economic productivity and growth."
At least the musicians had a driver who didn't seem to be doing anything but driving. The person doing the filming was either sitting in the lap of the car driver, or was in fact the car driver.
"The chromium forms a passivation layer of chromium(III) oxide (Cr2O3) when exposed to oxygen. The layer is too thin to be visible, and the metal remains lustrous. The layer is impervious to water and air, protecting the metal beneath. Also, this layer quickly reforms when the surface is scratched. This phenomenon is called passivation and is seen in other metals, such as aluminium and titanium. Corrosion-resistance can be adversely affected if the component is used in a non-oxygenated environment, a typical example being underwater keel bolts buried in timber."
Niven wrote a story(ies?) about that. At one point there were organ banks, and the smallest infringement of law got you sent there. Sorry, can't remember the name.
You've definitely have a streak of optimism in you if you think that's going to happen. I'm guessing you're a democrat. Me too. Listen, one of the attractive but weak points of this philosophy is it's optimism. If your plan doesn't account for snot nosed little brats being horrible to each other, if your plan for that scenario is "let's hope it doesn't happen" or "get the parents to fix that", then you really don't have a plan. If you want kids to be doves and co-operate with the other prisoners, you're going to have to give them a real psychological and sociological reason to do so. And even then you'll only have maybe 70% of them on board and you'll still have the occasional little bastard to deal with.
Yeah, I'm a dreamer, but the thing that is probably unobtainable is not the effective schooling system - there are plenty of examples from around the country and around the world that point to the possibility of educational systems that serve the vast majority of students (I would guestimate that the potential is for +95% rather than 70%) much more effectively than those systems we are most familiar with. What I am most pessimistic of is the political ability to enact the types of widespread changes that would need to occur for this type of radical change to happen. Almost nobody is going to support the funding needed to drop the student-instructor ration down to something radical like 10:1 or lower for example.
In any case, one of your criticism is that I stated a "goal" rather than a "proposal", and I agree with you that I have not really stated one. However one important point I would like to make is that I feel that a weakness of many of our current educational systems is that they have not clearly stated what their goals are. As much as we like to make fun of "mission statements" and "vision statements", when implemented properly they can very much assist in setting an organization's priorities. One of Steve Jobs' strengths when returning to Apple in the 1990s was his ability to say "no" to many projects that did not fit into the vision of Apple. If our schools had clearly defined goals that were not mutually contradictory we could more easily decide if various programs or plans were optimal for reaching those goals.
How about worrying about the other end of the spectrum? How can we ensure that the 8-9% of US high school dropouts (wow, is it that low?) become productive, fulfilled members of society?
If schools has an achievement reward system similar to World of Warcraft, kids would be addicted to school.
Some education systems (martial arts belts for examples) do have a similar achievement reward system - and there are some parts of that type of system that could be usefully applied to the more "traditional" school system to great effect.
Heck, my 6 year old and many of his classmates became "addicted" to the learning to read booklet/quiz system they used in class - with informal competition to see who could reach the "high level" books. Humans learn within a social context very effectively and much of our educational system ignores this or actively works to prevent it ("Eyes on your own paper Pat!"). Cheating is certainly to be avoided, but collaborative learning has much to speak for it.
Sure, we want to celibate success so maybe the top performer deserves a gold star,
Which is exactly what they're trying to do here, and which is exactly what you're arguing against. Give out gold starts to the top 10%, and you've shown the bottom 90% that they are, in fact, not gold star sort of people.
Actually this isn't "exactly" what the are talking about. By "gold star" I mean something more akin to a teacher saying "good job" rather than this whole "front of the line" type of thing.
but even more important would be to give positive reinforcement for those who manage great improvements
This is what you're getting after. But it leads to little Jimmy, who got 9/10, being neglected as Tommy gets praised and rewarded when he gets 6/10. Just because he was a real fuckup at the start of the year. This destroys the meritocracy.
Unfortunately what we are talking about are just attempts to make the current system a bit better. What I think we really need is a fundamental shift in the entire culture of education - both within the school and in the wider society. We don't need a strict dog-eat-dog meritocracy, we need a system that encourages and enables all members to be more engaged in their own learning and encouraging of everyone's successes. When Chris or Patt can't read, their peers should want to help them and they should want that help too. When Patt or Chris becomes expert at some skill or field, their peers should congratulate them and be inspired to perform as well.
If this were the case, they should be calling schools places that condition future workers of america to submit to busy work, not places of education.
My interest in school was learning the material. If I fail to do so with un-enforced homework, then I fail. However, if I learn the material and find no reason for busy work, that should be my prerogative- giving me an opportunity to use my time refining other skills. As it was, I liked spending my afternoons after school teaching myself programming (my highschool did not offer programming classes).
Perhaps I did not get across my ideas very well. I agree with you that "busy work" has little value, however what does have value to helping the student to understand the link between work and reward and helping them to develop effective work habits. In your case, perhaps such lessons were unnecessary, and perhaps you made your decisions on what to spend your time on in a rational assessment of your situation. Many students (particularly at much younger ages) however are not able to make such decisions in a fully informed manner and can benefit greatly in being shown the relationship between effort and result. Helping students learn that initial lack of success does not always mean the material is uninteresting or worthless.
Unfortunately testing how well different methods work is difficult, costly, and takes time. Evidence based education is a great idea, but doesn't sell as well as quickly doing pretty much anything (lets give everyone a computer! lets build a new building! lets brand the under performers! )
....the top performers were mostly just culturally average kids who weren't especially intellectual who had good memory or seemed to be enthusiastic about school somehow.
Too bad we couldn't engineer a school system that would make a larger fraction of the student body "enthusiastic about school somehow".
Too bad we don't even seem to be trying to do that. Certainly this proposal seems unlikely to do it.
Don't forget the disparity in pay between the people who do the actual grunt work that makes it all happen, and those at the top who "risk it all" by making "bold decisions" with pay 300 times higher, along with full benefits.
In my country kids get measured in first or second grade and then the school gets payed based on the improvement from that. Still imperfect, but I think it's better then leaving the schools without any objective measurement of performance.
So it pays them to lower those initial assessment numbers as much as possible? Make sure the kids take the test as tired and hungry as possible? (School open house/fun-fair set to run late the night before? School marathon the day before the test?)
But, yeah, trying to get high improvements is probably better than shooting to just the highest absolute scores.
If you don't "teach to the exam", what exactly are you teaching to? And if making it up as you go along is the way to go, what is it you're going to measure? How much fun and creativity happened during classtime?
Generally "teaching to the exam" is a short handed way of talking about spending significant class time working on bubble-sheet-skills or knowledge that is very easy to test. My grade school aged son has managed to jump between school districts in three different countries and lucked out to hit the "standardized test" year multiple times. He has been trained extensively on how to take standardized tests - how to fill in bubbles, how to choose the "best" answer when things are ambiguous, how to write summaries and sentences that are easy for unknown graders to grade. He has also been taught factual knowledge that is easy to ask questions about (names, dates, etc.)
Granted, some of these things are useful to know - people will be filling out bubble-sheets for a long time to come certainly. But knowing the important dates in the War of 1812 is probably less useful than having some understanding on the political, economic and social factors involved in the conflict. Understanding of the latter is much more difficult to test. Learning the dates is probably going to be boring. Playing a role playing game to simulate the latter is probably going to be more fun. Spending a day or more simulating the decisions that people taking part in the California gold rush (part of the California grade 4 curriculum I think) provides a whole bunch of opportunities to learn and practice all sorts of knowledge and skills that are likely to be retained long after the fact. Spending that same time in intensive preparation for a standardized test on the material can probably provide higher scores on that test - so there is no surprise that schools and teachers are devoting more time to that preparation.
Compared to what is possible, we do a terrible job of instilling knowledge, skills, work ethic, or a love of learning in a large fraction of our primary school age children. I have seen estimates that state that the a motivated 12 year old of average intelligence could learn the entire grades 1-5 curriculum in about six months if presented in an effective manner. We waste a lot of time, energy, money, and frustration teaching many kids the wrong lessons about learning, work, ability, and success. If every class in the country at every grade level taught completely different subject material, but taught it all with enthusiasm and gave all students an opportunity to learn things that were of interest and useful and challenging we would be much better off than if every graduate was only able to perform to a minimum level on one standardized test.
If you punish or reward in school, at least make it realistic and TRY and come close to the harshness of what lies ahead for these students in the real world. Extreme action in either direction merely paints an illusion, and does more harm than good.
The whole point of an educational system is that it can help people learn WITHOUT the "hard knocks" common in the "real world". We don't toss non-swimmers in the deep end of the pool just because that's what the "real ocean" is like. Similarly giving a six year old a gold star for tying their shoes probably won't ruin their later work place environment. By the 12th grade one would hope that you've developed students who no longer need these types of rewards, or at least adjusted the reward system to encourage the types of growth we are interested in.
What we need to do it to try to ignore our preconceptions of how education "should be", and focus instead of clearly stating what outcomes we want from our educational system (maybe certain math skills, science skills, social skills, work ethic, civic knowledge, etc.) and then apply evidence based methods to help our graduates attain those skills. There is some evidence to suggest that paying kids a few quarters per book in the second grade can be very effective at increasing reading levels at a very critical point in their development, but the effectiveness of such a system seems to depend very much on the details of its implementation. Using methods that can be shown to work, and not using methods that cannot be shown to work (or can be shown to not work), should be a foundational principle of any endeavor.
An education is like a stool. To get a good, solid one, you need three legs: a committed student, a good teacher, and supportive parents.
For a good solid stool, I thought you just needed a good balance of liquid consumption and fiber. A nice bowl of bran cereal with milk each morning can do wonders. And prunes - very good too.
P.S.=> I.E.-> If you can't "cut it"? Get into something else then, OR plan your future accordingly to be doing something else (non-academic related, or, tech-trade related etc./et al instead), because that's just life showing you that you "can't make the grade" in that particular area is all (for WHATEVER reasons & yes, there are avenues for academic review, in case 1 particular teacher is unfairly grading a student (lol, for whatever good those are for that is)) & not all of us are "I can do it ALL, and WELL, 'supermen'". In this case, on "making the grade", & literally in this case, in that particular area? Hey - it only shows these kids it's time to move on to something else that you CAN "excel" in is all...
... apk
The point of school however is not to help people find out what they cannot do, but to assist them in being able to actually do things. At what age to we want to cut people off from certain future careers? Does it make sense to take some arbitrary grade and say "if you can't do it at this point, you never will"? Perhaps it does, but only if up until that point you have been providing the type of training and incentives that actually assist people in gaining the skills needed to reach whatever cutoff level has been decided. In this case it seems more like we have created a system that doesn't do a particularly effective job at providing that assistance to large number of students and then slapped a "you're stupid" sign on those who don't perform well. That doesn't seem like a system that is likely to produce lots of highly skilled graduates that can take care of the needs of the country when winners like us are old and grey.
Seriously, I was an unchallenged child in school. I got horrible grades because I didn't find any use in homework. I always aced the tests because I knew the material well, but saw no value in wasting my time on homework. I would regularly get Cs and Ds because homework was weighed heavily in deciding the grade. At no point was my actual grasp on the material considered.
That being said, the kids who didn't learn the material well, but did a lot of busy work at home usually passed as well with similar grades. It was a system that benefited nobody.
I've seen some studies (very preliminary, poorly controlled, not much more than anecdotes really, but they fit well with my preconceptions) of correlations between various factors and success (ie not failing) introductory first year physics. Those kids who learned to "do a lot of busy work at home" tend to end up doing OK at the much more challenging later work. Those kids who did not learn to do hard work outside of class often had a very difficult time when faced with material that required it.
There has been serious discussion, at some institutions, of changing acceptance methods to place more emphasis on "work habits" types of evaluations. Everyone getting an average of a "B" is probably "smart" enough to be able to understand the material in almost any program, but the student who has excellent "study skills" and "work habits" given that minimum GPA will probably have more success (on average) than those who have poor habits. From the institution point of view, a group of 100 "solid B" freshmen who all go through 4 years of schooling is much better from a "getting money out of them" point of view than a group of 100 "straight A" freshmen if half of those students do not complete their degrees, even if the other half end up winning Nobel prizes.
Once a child is pegged as being a penny, it is pretty hard to become a quarter. Not because the child is unable or unwilling, but because continuous lack of expectation from the teacher is killing all forms of motivation.
Even worse - the teacher doesn't even have to supply these expectations - the kids will do it themselves. A similar experiment was done where they gave a bunch of little kids a math test, and then told half of them they did well, and half they did poorly then tracked their future math prospects. The kids they told did poorly ended up doing poorly going forward - even if those kids had actually done well!
Similarly, they (whoever "they" were) took a bunch of kids and gave them some word puzzles, and afterwards told half "Hey you did great! You must be smart!", and the other half "Hey you did great! You must have worked hard!" then they let them choose some new puzzles to try. The group labeled "smart" tended to choose the simpler puzzles to work on, while those labeled "hard workers" tended to choose the more challenging ones. Seemingly the "smart" kids wanted to get more "your're smart" praise, while the "hard work" kids were trying to demonstrate more of their "hard work".
Most of the evidence-based ideas on how to best run an educational system back up the idea of promoting the model of "hard work leads to success" rather than the model of "innate talent leads to success". Sure, we want to celibate success so maybe the top performer deserves a gold star, but even more important would be to give positive reinforcement for those who manage great improvements and make it part of the culture of learning to recognize the rewards of hard work and practice. In every field that I have seen research on (math skills, violin skills, hockey skills, etc.) all the people at the "top of the game" did a whole bunch of work, and everyone who did a whole bunch of work was at the top of the game. Once one is beyond a pretty basic level of physical and mental innate ability (in other words, excepting those with significant mental or physical disability) success at every field studied is almost entirely predicted by the amount of training done.
"Color-Coded IDs" do not really seem likely to be an effective tool to assist in the goal of better learning.
Yes, everyone benefits from far superior labor (One unbelievably talented singer or engineer can entertain or solve a problem for millions or billions) but we also suffer because we only need the super-stars to fill our lives with content.
The problem seems fundamental to the entire economic system. When a company or industry or sector manages to increase productivity by 10% there are only a few ways that make sense to take advantage of that increase: make more things with their new efficiencies, reduce their overhead by getting rid of no-longer-needed production (close plants, etc.), send more profit home for the owners, pay their workers more, or reduce pricing. (Did I miss anything?) Or some combination of all of these things. The decision on what to do is largely influenced by what other competitors are doing and what the "ecosystem" is like - if there is a worker shortage increased wages might result; lots of competitors then maybe decreased prices would be "best"; etc.
Unfortunately, none of the "standard" choices of what to do include any reasonable spreading of the benefit to the society as a whole - at best that happens indirectly through decreased prices. With all the increases in efficiencies since the 1900s, by now society could have full employment for everyone, with generous wages and vacations, and a 10 hour work week - instead we have high unemployment or underemployment, little increases in wages, no changes in working hours for almost 2 generations, and lots of cheap cool stuff (and even more cheap shit) that is relatively easy to afford assuming you are employed.
Figuring out how to get to a place with a better spread of income and leisure from where we are is a challenge to say the least.
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting thing was that the rate of price decrease before the deregulation date was greater than after deregulation.
I would suggest, though of course I can't prove, that the deregulation allowed all sorts of inefficiencies to be wrung out of the system at once. Once all the low-hanging fruit are gone, though, it's a lot harder to keep increasing efficiency at the same rate forever.
Sure, that would be a good story if there was a fast drop at deregulation followed at some later time by a slower drop - but these graphs did not show that. The graphs showed relatively steep drops before dereg, and shallower ones after, with no particular big dips or drops in the time around deregulation.
Now my memory of a graph in a consumer mag from more than a decade ago is not particularly convincing - it would be nice if we could find some more reliable data.
Given the prices we paid in the fully-regulated days before the Ma Bell breakup, I'm not sure that regulation would do much to lower prices. Making all companies operate on the same spectrum would help, though.
I recall some pretty high per-minute long distance charges back in the 1970s that's for sure.
However I recall a bit of info from Consumer Reports back in the late 1990s that was interesting. It was a graph of the cost of phone service and airline travel and one some other industry I cannot recall, plotted against time. For each industry, there was a fairly linear drop in pricing up until the date when the industry was "deregulated", and at that date, there was a deflection point followed by a new linear decrease in pricing. The interesting thing was that the rate of price decrease before the deregulation date was greater than after deregulation. From this data at least, it is not clear that deregulation actually acted to decrease pricing.
A bit of web sleuthing by me at least does not turn up much data one way or another to support this position. I find lots of articles comparing prices before and after deregulation in the phone and airline industries, but no data about the rate of price change.
Oh, maybe this is useful:
Data listed at http://transition.fcc.gov/wcb/iatd/lec.html such as the 2008 book report on pricing at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-284934A1.pdf does show on pg 36, table 2.2 that the US average household expenditure on phone service rose each year from 1980 ($325) through 2006 ($1,087) (from 1.94% of total household expenses to 2.25%). So at least from 1980, telephone costs have been higher. There is also data for consumer price indexes from before 1980 and price for 10 minute calls of various distances (local, medium, coastal, etc.) in some of the earlier publications, such as that for 1997 ( http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/ref97.pdf ).
Thus, while there were undoubtedly many many great benefits from deregulation of various industries, it is not absolutely clear that pricing is significantly lower than it would have been without deregulation in all cases. It is also not completely clear that similar results could not be achieved while maintaining tighter control over business practices that are undesirable for society at large.
Children with malaria don't go to school. Siblings of children with malaria stay home and take care of their siblings. And if one of the parents gets malaria?
There is a very real loss of education and economic growth here, not to mention all
very good points
When you solve malaria, you will now cut the death rate. That will put pressure on the local community. LOADS of it. Right now, the reason why Malaria spread so quickly and easily is because mosquitoes carry it from one person to another. They are right next to each other. Once malaria is cured, then another disease will step right up there because more ppl will occupy the same space, but with the same amount of money to solve issues. Actually less overall as well as less per person. Once it is realized by gates that he screwed up, he will not want to solve the next symptom..
I don't think you understand the drain on resources that malaria is. While many do die from malaria, most do not. Most are just chronically sick, and unless you are going to advocate shooting them in the head, these current chronically sick people are a much bigger drain on the entire social structure than the increased costs associated with fewer deaths due to malaria.
Have a read:
http://www.rbm.who.int/cmc_upload/0/000/015/363/RBMInfosheet_10.htm
"Annual economic growth in countries with high malaria transmission has historically been lower than in countries without malaria. Economists believe that malaria is responsible for a ‘growth penalty' of up to 1.3% per year in some African countries. When compounded over the years, this penalty leads to substantial differences in GDP between countries with and without malaria and severely restrains the economic growth of the entire region.
The direct costs of malaria include a combination of personal and public expenditures on both prevention and treatment of the disease. Personal expenditures include individual or family spending on insecticide treated mosquito nets (ITNs), doctors' fees, anti-malarial drugs, transport to health facilities, support for the patient and sometimes an accompanying family member during hospital stays. Public expenditures include spending by government on maintaining health facilities and health care infrastructure, publicly managed vector control, education and research. In some countries with a heavy malaria burden, the disease may account for as much as 40% of public health expenditure, 30-50% of inpatient admissions, and up to 50% of outpatient visits.
The indirect costs of malaria include lost productivity or income associated with illness or death. This might be expressed as the cost of lost workdays or absenteeism from formal employment and the value of unpaid work done in the home by both men and women. In the case of death, the indirect cost includes the discounted future lifetime earnings of those who die.
Malaria has a greater impact on Africa's human resources than simple lost earnings. Although difficult to express in dollar terms, another indirect cost of malaria is the human pain and suffering caused by the disease. Malaria also hampers children's schooling and social development through both absenteeism and permanent neurological and other damage associated with severe episodes of the disease.
The simple presence of malaria in a community or country also hampers individual and national prosperity due to its influence on social and economic decisions. The risk of contracting malaria in endemic areas can deter investment, both internal and external and affect individual and household decision making in many ways that have a negative impact on economic productivity and growth."
Yeah! Speak truth to power, brother!
or not...
This is the correct way to play instruments while on the road:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zxxM9EYQzY
Safety first!
At least the musicians had a driver who didn't seem to be doing anything but driving. The person doing the filming was either sitting in the lap of the car driver, or was in fact the car driver.
That doesn't seem to be correct
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel#Properties
"The chromium forms a passivation layer of chromium(III) oxide (Cr2O3) when exposed to oxygen. The layer is too thin to be visible, and the metal remains lustrous. The layer is impervious to water and air, protecting the metal beneath. Also, this layer quickly reforms when the surface is scratched. This phenomenon is called passivation and is seen in other metals, such as aluminium and titanium. Corrosion-resistance can be adversely affected if the component is used in a non-oxygenated environment, a typical example being underwater keel bolts buried in timber."
Niven wrote a story(ies?) about that. At one point there were organ banks, and the smallest infringement of law got you sent there. Sorry, can't remember the name.
It was pretty much all of them.
You've definitely have a streak of optimism in you if you think that's going to happen. I'm guessing you're a democrat. Me too. Listen, one of the attractive but weak points of this philosophy is it's optimism. If your plan doesn't account for snot nosed little brats being horrible to each other, if your plan for that scenario is "let's hope it doesn't happen" or "get the parents to fix that", then you really don't have a plan. If you want kids to be doves and co-operate with the other prisoners, you're going to have to give them a real psychological and sociological reason to do so. And even then you'll only have maybe 70% of them on board and you'll still have the occasional little bastard to deal with.
Yeah, I'm a dreamer, but the thing that is probably unobtainable is not the effective schooling system - there are plenty of examples from around the country and around the world that point to the possibility of educational systems that serve the vast majority of students (I would guestimate that the potential is for +95% rather than 70%) much more effectively than those systems we are most familiar with. What I am most pessimistic of is the political ability to enact the types of widespread changes that would need to occur for this type of radical change to happen. Almost nobody is going to support the funding needed to drop the student-instructor ration down to something radical like 10:1 or lower for example.
In any case, one of your criticism is that I stated a "goal" rather than a "proposal", and I agree with you that I have not really stated one. However one important point I would like to make is that I feel that a weakness of many of our current educational systems is that they have not clearly stated what their goals are. As much as we like to make fun of "mission statements" and "vision statements", when implemented properly they can very much assist in setting an organization's priorities. One of Steve Jobs' strengths when returning to Apple in the 1990s was his ability to say "no" to many projects that did not fit into the vision of Apple. If our schools had clearly defined goals that were not mutually contradictory we could more easily decide if various programs or plans were optimal for reaching those goals.
How about worrying about the other end of the spectrum? How can we ensure that the 8-9% of US high school dropouts (wow, is it that low?) become productive, fulfilled members of society?
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16
Worrying about the 0.001% at the top-end seems like misplaced attention.
If schools has an achievement reward system similar to World of Warcraft, kids would be addicted to school.
Some education systems (martial arts belts for examples) do have a similar achievement reward system - and there are some parts of that type of system that could be usefully applied to the more "traditional" school system to great effect.
Heck, my 6 year old and many of his classmates became "addicted" to the learning to read booklet/quiz system they used in class - with informal competition to see who could reach the "high level" books. Humans learn within a social context very effectively and much of our educational system ignores this or actively works to prevent it ("Eyes on your own paper Pat!"). Cheating is certainly to be avoided, but collaborative learning has much to speak for it.
Sure, we want to celibate success so maybe the top performer deserves a gold star,
Which is exactly what they're trying to do here, and which is exactly what you're arguing against. Give out gold starts to the top 10%, and you've shown the bottom 90% that they are, in fact, not gold star sort of people.
Actually this isn't "exactly" what the are talking about. By "gold star" I mean something more akin to a teacher saying "good job" rather than this whole "front of the line" type of thing.
but even more important would be to give positive reinforcement for those who manage great improvements
This is what you're getting after. But it leads to little Jimmy, who got 9/10, being neglected as Tommy gets praised and rewarded when he gets 6/10. Just because he was a real fuckup at the start of the year. This destroys the meritocracy.
Unfortunately what we are talking about are just attempts to make the current system a bit better. What I think we really need is a fundamental shift in the entire culture of education - both within the school and in the wider society. We don't need a strict dog-eat-dog meritocracy, we need a system that encourages and enables all members to be more engaged in their own learning and encouraging of everyone's successes. When Chris or Patt can't read, their peers should want to help them and they should want that help too. When Patt or Chris becomes expert at some skill or field, their peers should congratulate them and be inspired to perform as well.
Ah, what a utopia I would want.
If this were the case, they should be calling schools places that condition future workers of america to submit to busy work, not places of education.
My interest in school was learning the material. If I fail to do so with un-enforced homework, then I fail. However, if I learn the material and find no reason for busy work, that should be my prerogative- giving me an opportunity to use my time refining other skills. As it was, I liked spending my afternoons after school teaching myself programming (my highschool did not offer programming classes).
Perhaps I did not get across my ideas very well. I agree with you that "busy work" has little value, however what does have value to helping the student to understand the link between work and reward and helping them to develop effective work habits. In your case, perhaps such lessons were unnecessary, and perhaps you made your decisions on what to spend your time on in a rational assessment of your situation. Many students (particularly at much younger ages) however are not able to make such decisions in a fully informed manner and can benefit greatly in being shown the relationship between effort and result. Helping students learn that initial lack of success does not always mean the material is uninteresting or worthless.
Unfortunately testing how well different methods work is difficult, costly, and takes time. Evidence based education is a great idea, but doesn't sell as well as quickly doing pretty much anything (lets give everyone a computer! lets build a new building! lets brand the under performers! )
He has a great article on grading - calling into question most of the reasons we go through the process of assigning grades in the first place.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/grading.htm
....the top performers were mostly just culturally average kids who weren't especially intellectual who had good memory or seemed to be enthusiastic about school somehow.
Too bad we couldn't engineer a school system that would make a larger fraction of the student body "enthusiastic about school somehow".
Too bad we don't even seem to be trying to do that. Certainly this proposal seems unlikely to do it.
Don't forget the disparity in pay between the people who do the actual grunt work that makes it all happen, and those at the top who "risk it all" by making "bold decisions" with pay 300 times higher, along with full benefits.
In my country kids get measured in first or second grade and then the school gets payed based on the improvement from that. Still imperfect, but I think it's better then leaving the schools without any objective measurement of performance.
So it pays them to lower those initial assessment numbers as much as possible? Make sure the kids take the test as tired and hungry as possible? (School open house/fun-fair set to run late the night before? School marathon the day before the test?)
But, yeah, trying to get high improvements is probably better than shooting to just the highest absolute scores.
Generally "teaching to the exam" is a short handed way of talking about spending significant class time working on bubble-sheet-skills or knowledge that is very easy to test. My grade school aged son has managed to jump between school districts in three different countries and lucked out to hit the "standardized test" year multiple times. He has been trained extensively on how to take standardized tests - how to fill in bubbles, how to choose the "best" answer when things are ambiguous, how to write summaries and sentences that are easy for unknown graders to grade. He has also been taught factual knowledge that is easy to ask questions about (names, dates, etc.)
Granted, some of these things are useful to know - people will be filling out bubble-sheets for a long time to come certainly. But knowing the important dates in the War of 1812 is probably less useful than having some understanding on the political, economic and social factors involved in the conflict. Understanding of the latter is much more difficult to test. Learning the dates is probably going to be boring. Playing a role playing game to simulate the latter is probably going to be more fun. Spending a day or more simulating the decisions that people taking part in the California gold rush (part of the California grade 4 curriculum I think) provides a whole bunch of opportunities to learn and practice all sorts of knowledge and skills that are likely to be retained long after the fact. Spending that same time in intensive preparation for a standardized test on the material can probably provide higher scores on that test - so there is no surprise that schools and teachers are devoting more time to that preparation.
Compared to what is possible, we do a terrible job of instilling knowledge, skills, work ethic, or a love of learning in a large fraction of our primary school age children. I have seen estimates that state that the a motivated 12 year old of average intelligence could learn the entire grades 1-5 curriculum in about six months if presented in an effective manner. We waste a lot of time, energy, money, and frustration teaching many kids the wrong lessons about learning, work, ability, and success. If every class in the country at every grade level taught completely different subject material, but taught it all with enthusiasm and gave all students an opportunity to learn things that were of interest and useful and challenging we would be much better off than if every graduate was only able to perform to a minimum level on one standardized test.
If you punish or reward in school, at least make it realistic and TRY and come close to the harshness of what lies ahead for these students in the real world. Extreme action in either direction merely paints an illusion, and does more harm than good.
The whole point of an educational system is that it can help people learn WITHOUT the "hard knocks" common in the "real world". We don't toss non-swimmers in the deep end of the pool just because that's what the "real ocean" is like. Similarly giving a six year old a gold star for tying their shoes probably won't ruin their later work place environment. By the 12th grade one would hope that you've developed students who no longer need these types of rewards, or at least adjusted the reward system to encourage the types of growth we are interested in.
What we need to do it to try to ignore our preconceptions of how education "should be", and focus instead of clearly stating what outcomes we want from our educational system (maybe certain math skills, science skills, social skills, work ethic, civic knowledge, etc.) and then apply evidence based methods to help our graduates attain those skills. There is some evidence to suggest that paying kids a few quarters per book in the second grade can be very effective at increasing reading levels at a very critical point in their development, but the effectiveness of such a system seems to depend very much on the details of its implementation. Using methods that can be shown to work, and not using methods that cannot be shown to work (or can be shown to not work), should be a foundational principle of any endeavor.
An education is like a stool. To get a good, solid one, you need three legs: a committed student, a good teacher, and supportive parents.
For a good solid stool, I thought you just needed a good balance of liquid consumption and fiber. A nice bowl of bran cereal with milk each morning can do wonders. And prunes - very good too.
Of course you don't want it too solid....
P.S.=> I.E.-> If you can't "cut it"? Get into something else then, OR plan your future accordingly to be doing something else (non-academic related, or, tech-trade related etc./et al instead), because that's just life showing you that you "can't make the grade" in that particular area is all (for WHATEVER reasons & yes, there are avenues for academic review, in case 1 particular teacher is unfairly grading a student (lol, for whatever good those are for that is)) & not all of us are "I can do it ALL, and WELL, 'supermen'". In this case, on "making the grade", & literally in this case, in that particular area? Hey - it only shows these kids it's time to move on to something else that you CAN "excel" in is all...
... apk
The point of school however is not to help people find out what they cannot do, but to assist them in being able to actually do things. At what age to we want to cut people off from certain future careers? Does it make sense to take some arbitrary grade and say "if you can't do it at this point, you never will"? Perhaps it does, but only if up until that point you have been providing the type of training and incentives that actually assist people in gaining the skills needed to reach whatever cutoff level has been decided. In this case it seems more like we have created a system that doesn't do a particularly effective job at providing that assistance to large number of students and then slapped a "you're stupid" sign on those who don't perform well. That doesn't seem like a system that is likely to produce lots of highly skilled graduates that can take care of the needs of the country when winners like us are old and grey.
Seriously, I was an unchallenged child in school. I got horrible grades because I didn't find any use in homework. I always aced the tests because I knew the material well, but saw no value in wasting my time on homework. I would regularly get Cs and Ds because homework was weighed heavily in deciding the grade. At no point was my actual grasp on the material considered.
That being said, the kids who didn't learn the material well, but did a lot of busy work at home usually passed as well with similar grades. It was a system that benefited nobody.
I've seen some studies (very preliminary, poorly controlled, not much more than anecdotes really, but they fit well with my preconceptions) of correlations between various factors and success (ie not failing) introductory first year physics. Those kids who learned to "do a lot of busy work at home" tend to end up doing OK at the much more challenging later work. Those kids who did not learn to do hard work outside of class often had a very difficult time when faced with material that required it.
There has been serious discussion, at some institutions, of changing acceptance methods to place more emphasis on "work habits" types of evaluations. Everyone getting an average of a "B" is probably "smart" enough to be able to understand the material in almost any program, but the student who has excellent "study skills" and "work habits" given that minimum GPA will probably have more success (on average) than those who have poor habits. From the institution point of view, a group of 100 "solid B" freshmen who all go through 4 years of schooling is much better from a "getting money out of them" point of view than a group of 100 "straight A" freshmen if half of those students do not complete their degrees, even if the other half end up winning Nobel prizes.
Once a child is pegged as being a penny, it is pretty hard to become a quarter. Not because the child is unable or unwilling, but because continuous lack of expectation from the teacher is killing all forms of motivation.
Even worse - the teacher doesn't even have to supply these expectations - the kids will do it themselves. A similar experiment was done where they gave a bunch of little kids a math test, and then told half of them they did well, and half they did poorly then tracked their future math prospects. The kids they told did poorly ended up doing poorly going forward - even if those kids had actually done well!
Similarly, they (whoever "they" were) took a bunch of kids and gave them some word puzzles, and afterwards told half "Hey you did great! You must be smart!", and the other half "Hey you did great! You must have worked hard!" then they let them choose some new puzzles to try. The group labeled "smart" tended to choose the simpler puzzles to work on, while those labeled "hard workers" tended to choose the more challenging ones. Seemingly the "smart" kids wanted to get more "your're smart" praise, while the "hard work" kids were trying to demonstrate more of their "hard work".
Most of the evidence-based ideas on how to best run an educational system back up the idea of promoting the model of "hard work leads to success" rather than the model of "innate talent leads to success". Sure, we want to celibate success so maybe the top performer deserves a gold star, but even more important would be to give positive reinforcement for those who manage great improvements and make it part of the culture of learning to recognize the rewards of hard work and practice. In every field that I have seen research on (math skills, violin skills, hockey skills, etc.) all the people at the "top of the game" did a whole bunch of work, and everyone who did a whole bunch of work was at the top of the game. Once one is beyond a pretty basic level of physical and mental innate ability (in other words, excepting those with significant mental or physical disability) success at every field studied is almost entirely predicted by the amount of training done.
"Color-Coded IDs" do not really seem likely to be an effective tool to assist in the goal of better learning.
Yes, everyone benefits from far superior labor (One unbelievably talented singer or engineer can entertain or solve a problem for millions or billions) but we also suffer because we only need the super-stars to fill our lives with content.
The problem seems fundamental to the entire economic system. When a company or industry or sector manages to increase productivity by 10% there are only a few ways that make sense to take advantage of that increase: make more things with their new efficiencies, reduce their overhead by getting rid of no-longer-needed production (close plants, etc.), send more profit home for the owners, pay their workers more, or reduce pricing. (Did I miss anything?) Or some combination of all of these things. The decision on what to do is largely influenced by what other competitors are doing and what the "ecosystem" is like - if there is a worker shortage increased wages might result; lots of competitors then maybe decreased prices would be "best"; etc.
Unfortunately, none of the "standard" choices of what to do include any reasonable spreading of the benefit to the society as a whole - at best that happens indirectly through decreased prices. With all the increases in efficiencies since the 1900s, by now society could have full employment for everyone, with generous wages and vacations, and a 10 hour work week - instead we have high unemployment or underemployment, little increases in wages, no changes in working hours for almost 2 generations, and lots of cheap cool stuff (and even more cheap shit) that is relatively easy to afford assuming you are employed.
Figuring out how to get to a place with a better spread of income and leisure from where we are is a challenge to say the least.