AT&T U-verse: 24 Mbps downstream (not sure about up) w/ 250 GB/month for $45/mo (first 12 months; $63/mo after that).
Time Warner Cable: 50 Mbps downstream (5 Mbps up) (not sure about monthly usage cap) for $80/mo (first 12 months; not sure after that).
1. The adoption rate of Jellybean among Android users whose devices actually have the upgrade available is probably about the same as the adoption rate of iOS 6 among Apple users whose devices have the upgrade available.
2. In other news 25% of iOS users are now pissed about their device's Maps app.
If Helium is scarce and there are actual shortages, shouldn't the price rise to correspondingly high levels? High enough, perhaps, to make it not economically feasible for use in kids' balloons?
There is plenty of disagreement on this in the days of computers, spell checkers, smart phones, and voice recognition.
There is some disagreement at the margins. For instance, some folks don't think spelling is that important anymore. There is no serious disagreement that children need to learn to read and acquire basic non-verbal communication skills.
And you're just thinking about the "typical" student, but most students are atypical: dyslexics, immigrants, gifted students, football players, etc. Some of them will never be able to meet those goals, others will be bored to tears by them.
I'm not sure I was ignoring these students. Sure, some mentally disabled kids will never be able to meet these kinds of goals. So exempt them from the testing system. Come up with an alternate means of evaluating special ed teachers. ESL students would be accounted for in my testing scheme; their initial scores might be depressed due to language issues, but it would still be possible to measure improvement over time.
You have a point about students at the high and low ends of the performance spectrum, however. Perhaps instead of focusing on a single median value, break students into multiple buckets and track the median value for each bucket. Or one can imagine more sophisticated statistical methods of measuring "broad-spectrum" improvement.
I think that's a horrible prescription for an education system, but it is actually pretty close to what we are doing in primary and secondary education.
You raised a valid objection to focusing on the median score, which I addressed above (albeit with a bit of hand-waving). As to whether that's what we're doing now, I agree we pretty much throw low-performers under the bus. High-performers though? They often don't get a bad deal, depending on where you live. Where I am the magnet middle and high school campuses are actually pretty good. At least, the students who attend them perform at a high level. As always, I'm not sure how much of that performance is attributable to student demographics and/or self-selection and how much is due to the actual quality of instruction, but the kids are presumably being challenged and getting adequate enrichment opportunities.
I disagree. Assistance to people in need is not a justification to start running their lives for them.
Establishing a reasonable accreditation system is hardly "running peoples' lives for them".
If I lend you money because your business is experiencing a shortfall, you would object strenuously if I then started to tell you what schools to send your kids to (or what to eat or whatever).
Seems like a flawed analogy. The state isn't telling people what to eat or what clothes to wear when it gives them a subsidy earmarked for education. In the case of a business, yes, if I was your primary creditor I might expect to have some input into how you run your business. VC firms do this all the time. It's one reason not to take VC money; you don't want them getting "all up in your business" when things don't develop as quickly as they expected.
That's why I said "ghettoization has little to do with school or school vouchers".
Fair enough. Just realize that this statement runs counter to what many voucher proponents are saying, who claim that vouchers will help poor students escape the crappy public schools they're assigned to.
The goal of school vouchers is to give everybody an opportunity to improve their lot. The majority will waste that opportunity, but that is their right in a free society.
Okay, now we're talking. I'm skeptical vouchers can deliver that goal. Certainly they'll create more choice, but I suspect for a poor, low-performing student, those choices will all be approximately as bad as (if not worse than) the ones available to him now.
No, I'm saying that there isn't even agreement on what "math proficiency" or "language profiency" means, or whether they are desirable or relevant.
Guess I disagree then. At least with respect to these sorts of fundamental skills. There's generally not much disagreement over what it means to be able to read. To communicate in written form using grammatically correct, coherent English. To add, subtract, do fractions, understand weights and measures, what a "percentage" means, compound interest, etc.
lBut the whole discussion is largely about what "effective" even means
How well they assisted students in internalizing the subject matter that was the focus of a course, or a series of courses. If Dick and Jane can both add and subtract equally well but, after another year of schooling, Jane can multiply and divide while Dick can't, maybe Jane's instructor did a better job. Obviously such a small sample size wouldn't let us conclude anything, but we're talking about comparing hundreds of Dicks and Janes on the aggregate level.
improvements in test scores? dropout rates? improvements in the worst students? in the best students? jobless rates after graduation? college acceptance rates?
I'd say improvement in test scores. Focus on the median score, and, at the higher grades, treat dropouts as the equivalent to the minimum possible test score. This assumes its possible to a) agree on what skills to test, and 2) come up with tests that measure grasp of these skills with at least some reasonable level of accuracy. (They don't have to be perfect, mind, in order to measure improvement on an aggregate level).
The main problems I see are these. First, in order to be objective and inexpensive the tests are almost necessarily going to be "gameable". That is to say the best strategy for doing well may be to study "test taking" rather than the actual subject matter, especially given many students woeful test-taking skills. That the teaching of test-taking skills should supplant the teaching of "whatever else we're trying to teach" is counterproductive. Second, testing every single year in order to gauge individual teachers' effectiveness on a year-to-year basis would be overly burdensome (and expensive). Third, the "measure improvement via test score improvements" doesn't work well for all subjects.
If all schools had approximately the same demographic mix of students, same mix of family situations, same level of parental education and involvement in their children's education, etc. then it would be much easier to compare schools' effectiveness. As it stands, though, some schools (and teachers) are essentially handicapped relative to others. A direct comparison of the outputs isn't meaningful since two schools may have had vastly different inputs. (Which, by the way, is why I call B.S. on claims that home-schooling is fundamentally more effective than classroom schooling because home-schooled kids, on the aggregate, outperform public school kids).
If we were to accept the principle you seem to imply, namely that it is the purpose of government to protect people from suboptimal choices, then we are pretty much giving up on liberty altogether.
When we are, collectively, via the state, funding primary and secondary education, we/it has a stake in how that money's spent.
Furthermore, "ghettoization" I think has little to do with schools or school vouchers, and more to do with where people choose to live.
Clearly. Look at that "Waiting for Superman" movie, though. It highlights one of the big justifications often given for vouchers: there are kids who are "stuck" in low-performing schools. I pointed out earlier that my district's policies allow most such kids to transfer to the "good" schools in the name of racial diversity. Very few do so. So why would vouchers make a differen
Someone who died for inability to afford adequate health care in the 1960s might disagree with you on whether the program's opportunity cost was justifiable. There's also the question of whether the same money might not have generated even more jobs and economic growth had it been used to fund non-moon-mission related scientific endeavors.
Just choosing what the subject matter ought to be is itself a difficult decision, and it's unclear that our current mechanism for determining curricula are doing a good job.
So you're saying it's more or less impossible to gauge in any meaningful way whether one set of students improved "more" (or "less") than another set over some period of time in a trait like "math proficiency" or "language proficiency". Just not sure I buy that.
Because you implicitly keep returning to arguing within the framework of a school system in which most students attend public schools that are run by principals evaluated by government officials.
Because for the most part that's the system that's in place. You can argue that shouldn't be the case, and there's certainly a case to be made, but that's not the question I was attempting to address. The question I was attempting to answer is, "How might we evaluate teachers and/or schools in such a way as to accurately differentiate the effective ones from the ineffective ones."
You seem to vacillate between free market principles (letting principals make their own decisions and holding them responsible) and a centrally planned education system (fixed curricula and evaluation criteria etc.).
Evaluating principals according to the performance of their schools (which would derive in large part from their ability to differentiate effective and ineffective staff) came to mind as a mean to get around having to test students yearly. Instead of evaluating teachers directly you evaluate the evaluators, so to speak. To your other points, I do see some benefit to having standardized curricula. At least loosely so. Not every English course needs to be exactly the same, but it seems reasonable to require that a school which receives state subsidy (either directly or via voucher) be held to certain minimum standards.
then the way to do it is to open up the education market and privatize it, with some regulatory protections in place.
I'm sympathetic to this argument. At the same time I'm also highly skeptical of education consumers' ability to make optimal choices and of voucher schemes' effectiveness at counteracting the ghettoization of poor and/or low-performing students.
The "delta" measurement is still totally arbitrary. And who decides what "delta" you even measure?
Not arbitrary at all, unless you're of the opinion it's impossible to objectively measure students' grasp of subject matter. If a school (or teacher) is doing an "average" job of educating students then the students who pass through that school (or teacher) should do about as well on subject matter assessments after attending that school (or being taught by that teacher) as they did prior to entering that school (or being taught by that teacher).
Take two sets of 500 students each of which has the same mean (or median; whichever) percentile rank on a test of mathematics proficiency. The first set attends high school A for four years and the second set attends high school B for four years. If, after those four years, the first set's average percentile rank is significantly higher than that of the second set then it's likely school A is doing a better job at mathematics education than school B.
Students and parents are supposed to be the beneficiaries of public schools; why don't you let them decide on the criteria that they, individually, set for each school?
First of all, nothing in what I wrote even addressed school choice. So I'm not sure why you assume I'm against it. All I did was muse on how one might go about assessing and/or maximizing teacher quality.
Or are you saying that low income parents are simply too stupid to figure what constitutes a good school?
Some most certainly are. As are many/most high-income parents. For the most part, what people perceive to be "good schools" are schools with high test scores. They totally ignore the demographics of these schools and their contribution to those high scores. Even still, that's not a great reason to lock people into certain schools. What might be a better reason is that school choice would most likely result in some number of kids who live close to in-demand schools losing the lottery and being forced to attend campuses further away.
It's worth noting the school district where I live has a policy whereby any student can transfer from a school at which he'd be in the ethnic majority to a school where he'd be an ethnic minority. The schools in my district that are perceived to be "the best" are all majority-white. So, essentially, an African-American (or Latino) student at a majority-African-American (or Latino) school already has the freedom to transfer to one of these "good" schools. I don't have stats, but I'm not led to believe many make use of it. (Not least of which because the district won't pay to bus a kid clear across town.)
It takes a certain minimum set of cognitive skills to get to the point where you can be moderately successful in the software industry. IMO it takes a special person to write what I would consider "really good code". I'm skeptical that this can be taught. I'd add that most software developers, including many who enjoy long and reasonably successful careers in the field, don't fall into this category.
And who is going to make that evaluation? How are they going to hire and fire?
Principals would evaluate their staff via whatever means they see fit. Maybe it's teacher peer evaluations. Maybe it's test scores. Who knows. Principals would likewise be given more flexibility to hire and fire staff, and would themselves be rewarded (or removed) based on the aggregate performance of their staff. And when I say "performance" I'm talking about the sort of "delta" measurement I described two posts up.
Yes I did. And closed shops was just one example of a concession the state might take of the table. I wasn't implying it's relevant in this particular case. The state could instead legislate a salary schedule and tie negotiators' hands in that way instead.
The way it would be accomplished is to restrict what concessions the state can make when negotiating with unions. For instance, many unions pressure employers to be "union only" shops. The state of Illinois could pass a law saying that no public school district within its borders can refuse to hire a public school employee because he or she is not a union member. Make it a "right to work" state. Since unions charge fees this would motivate many teachers to simply drop their union membership since it would no longer be a requirement for employment. Losing its monopoly on employees would greatly weaken the union's leverage. Whatever improvements in pay/benefits/etc. the union extracts would benefit all employees, members and non-members alike, further minimizing an individual teacher's motivation to join.
I'd be all for evaluation if I thought it would be done right. I lack that confidence. If you just look at how a given teacher's students perform then that's not fair to the teacher, since he has no control over those students' educational experience prior to arriving in his classroom. The only objective way to evaluate individual teachers' performance would be to test students every year and measure the delta between each teacher's students over the course of the year that teacher had them. If a given teacher has 5 classes of 25 students each, and those 125 students scored, on average, at the 30th percentile at the beginning of the year, but at the 35th percentile at the end of the year, then maybe we say that teacher did a good job despite his students scoring well below the state-wide average.
There are problems with testing students so frequently though:
1. It's expensive.
2. It cannibalizes classroom time.
3. It encourages teachers to try to game the system by teaching to the test or teaching "test-taking skills" instead of their actual subject matter.
4. It encourages teachers (and principals) to allow (or assist) their students to cheat.
5. It's not necessarily applicable to all types of teacher. How are you going to objectively measure the effectiveness of an art teacher?
Another way to go would be to only evaluate principals and give them more leeway to hire/fire teachers they like and use whatever in-house evaluation methods they want. Test only at school level jumps, i.e. prior to elementary, between elementary and middle, between middle and high school, then after high school. You'd want to be sure to evaluate the principals using the average percentile change of students who went through all grades at the given school. If the set of 8th graders leaving a given middle school has an average percentile rank of 50, but that same set of students averaged in the 40th percentile before starting 6th grade, maybe you give that principal a good rating. The problem here, though, is that it encourages principals to try to get kids who appear likely to regress to leave their school.
Without necessarily disagreeing with anything else you wrote...
Do *you* get to keep your job if you just sorta, meh, show up and just do what you have to do?
Actually, yes. In my experience most jobs are like that. You have to really suck to get fired. *Maybe* if you're just phoning it in you get to be first in line when there are layoffs. Maybe. But then only if your employer does a good job of identifying who's just phoning it in. Not all do.
I'm with them on the complaint about test pushers. But privatization? Why should they care? Can't the union accept private school teachers as members and negotiate with private employers just like it negotiates with the City of Chicago? Other unions agitate for their members who're employed by private entities.
I'm also curious what would stop the city from hiring scabs. Parents would no doubt be unhappy with the decrease in teacher quality (since everybody would be brand new) but at least their kids would be going to school. If nothing else, giving the credible appearance of being willing to hire scabs might give the city more leverage over the union.
He frames the definition of "win" incorrectly. If "win" means "possible to get media for free in some capacity" then yes, the pirates will always "win". But I'd argue a better definition is "easy for a non-technical person to conveniently access high-quality copyrighted media free of charge with no legal risk." If we use that definition then I don't think it's a given that the pirates will always win. Enforcement efforts have the potential to make it less easy (harder to find sites, sites frequently disappear, degraded throughput due to overuse, blocks that require technical knowledge to work around, garbage content masquerading as the real thing, etc.), more expensive (pay-per-byte price structures for network access) and more risky (draconian punishments, forcing ISPs to police activity and/or store data, etc.) Taken together these three may be enough to motivate many "casual" pirates to go legit. Will it make everybody do that? Certainly not. But it might make enough do it that the studios see it as a worthwhile investment to lobby for these types of policies.
If I'm choosing between two candidates then, all else being equal, I'm going to choose the one with the degree over the one without a degree. Moreover I'm probably going to choose the one from the "better" school. My feeling is that most employers follow this same logic. Key words: "all else being equal". If you're 18 years old and such a badass that you can reasonably expect to be hired (at a market or above-market wage) without a degree, and if there's no way you can get one without going significantly into debt, then you're probably better off just getting a job. The vast, vast majority of people never find themselves in that situation.
1. Riots aren't always a bad thing when they precipitate the overthrow of autocratic regimes and create the possibility for self-rule. It remains to be seen the extent to which this is true of the "Arab Spring", but there's a distinct possibility that at least some of the affected states will see lasting and positive change.
2. It's not necessarily a given that a warming planet will lead to food shortages. Some guys in the U.K. seem to think we could see yields (for some crops) increase by 50% by 2050. They could very well be wrong. Or they could be right.
You either need cross-distro compatibility or you need the number of "distros important enough to care about" to shrink to one or two. Then you just develop and test on those one/two.
My experience is entirely anecdotal (like yours) but I took my first programming course around the same time I started learning algebra. Which is to say when I was about 11 or 12 years old. I'm not sure it taught me anything about math. Looking back, I question whether it would have benefited me to start studying "programming" when I was six. What would have benefited me? Better math instruction at the primary level.
Teaching calculus and linear algebra is less useful, but we are doing that with quite a bit of effort.
Oh? In primary school? I'll grant that calculus and linear algebra aren't as worthwhile (for many students) as many seem to think. But here we're not weighing "programming" vs. "calculus". We're weighing "some really watered down primary school version of programming" vs. "reading". Or "numeric concepts". Or "language composition". At the primary level I'll take the those over "programming" any day of the week.
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Ridiculous troll post is ridiculous.
AT&T U-verse: 24 Mbps downstream (not sure about up) w/ 250 GB/month for $45/mo (first 12 months; $63/mo after that).
Time Warner Cable: 50 Mbps downstream (5 Mbps up) (not sure about monthly usage cap) for $80/mo (first 12 months; not sure after that).
Why is the U.S. govt. dumping helium at sub-market prices instead of asking the going rate?
1. The adoption rate of Jellybean among Android users whose devices actually have the upgrade available is probably about the same as the adoption rate of iOS 6 among Apple users whose devices have the upgrade available.
2. In other news 25% of iOS users are now pissed about their device's Maps app.
If Helium is scarce and there are actual shortages, shouldn't the price rise to correspondingly high levels? High enough, perhaps, to make it not economically feasible for use in kids' balloons?
There is some disagreement at the margins. For instance, some folks don't think spelling is that important anymore. There is no serious disagreement that children need to learn to read and acquire basic non-verbal communication skills.
I'm not sure I was ignoring these students. Sure, some mentally disabled kids will never be able to meet these kinds of goals. So exempt them from the testing system. Come up with an alternate means of evaluating special ed teachers. ESL students would be accounted for in my testing scheme; their initial scores might be depressed due to language issues, but it would still be possible to measure improvement over time.
You have a point about students at the high and low ends of the performance spectrum, however. Perhaps instead of focusing on a single median value, break students into multiple buckets and track the median value for each bucket. Or one can imagine more sophisticated statistical methods of measuring "broad-spectrum" improvement.
You raised a valid objection to focusing on the median score, which I addressed above (albeit with a bit of hand-waving). As to whether that's what we're doing now, I agree we pretty much throw low-performers under the bus. High-performers though? They often don't get a bad deal, depending on where you live. Where I am the magnet middle and high school campuses are actually pretty good. At least, the students who attend them perform at a high level. As always, I'm not sure how much of that performance is attributable to student demographics and/or self-selection and how much is due to the actual quality of instruction, but the kids are presumably being challenged and getting adequate enrichment opportunities.
Establishing a reasonable accreditation system is hardly "running peoples' lives for them".
Seems like a flawed analogy. The state isn't telling people what to eat or what clothes to wear when it gives them a subsidy earmarked for education. In the case of a business, yes, if I was your primary creditor I might expect to have some input into how you run your business. VC firms do this all the time. It's one reason not to take VC money; you don't want them getting "all up in your business" when things don't develop as quickly as they expected.
Fair enough. Just realize that this statement runs counter to what many voucher proponents are saying, who claim that vouchers will help poor students escape the crappy public schools they're assigned to.
Okay, now we're talking. I'm skeptical vouchers can deliver that goal. Certainly they'll create more choice, but I suspect for a poor, low-performing student, those choices will all be approximately as bad as (if not worse than) the ones available to him now.
Guess I disagree then. At least with respect to these sorts of fundamental skills. There's generally not much disagreement over what it means to be able to read. To communicate in written form using grammatically correct, coherent English. To add, subtract, do fractions, understand weights and measures, what a "percentage" means, compound interest, etc.
How well they assisted students in internalizing the subject matter that was the focus of a course, or a series of courses. If Dick and Jane can both add and subtract equally well but, after another year of schooling, Jane can multiply and divide while Dick can't, maybe Jane's instructor did a better job. Obviously such a small sample size wouldn't let us conclude anything, but we're talking about comparing hundreds of Dicks and Janes on the aggregate level.
I'd say improvement in test scores. Focus on the median score, and, at the higher grades, treat dropouts as the equivalent to the minimum possible test score. This assumes its possible to a) agree on what skills to test, and 2) come up with tests that measure grasp of these skills with at least some reasonable level of accuracy. (They don't have to be perfect, mind, in order to measure improvement on an aggregate level).
The main problems I see are these. First, in order to be objective and inexpensive the tests are almost necessarily going to be "gameable". That is to say the best strategy for doing well may be to study "test taking" rather than the actual subject matter, especially given many students woeful test-taking skills. That the teaching of test-taking skills should supplant the teaching of "whatever else we're trying to teach" is counterproductive. Second, testing every single year in order to gauge individual teachers' effectiveness on a year-to-year basis would be overly burdensome (and expensive). Third, the "measure improvement via test score improvements" doesn't work well for all subjects.
If all schools had approximately the same demographic mix of students, same mix of family situations, same level of parental education and involvement in their children's education, etc. then it would be much easier to compare schools' effectiveness. As it stands, though, some schools (and teachers) are essentially handicapped relative to others. A direct comparison of the outputs isn't meaningful since two schools may have had vastly different inputs. (Which, by the way, is why I call B.S. on claims that home-schooling is fundamentally more effective than classroom schooling because home-schooled kids, on the aggregate, outperform public school kids).
When we are, collectively, via the state, funding primary and secondary education, we/it has a stake in how that money's spent.
Clearly. Look at that "Waiting for Superman" movie, though. It highlights one of the big justifications often given for vouchers: there are kids who are "stuck" in low-performing schools. I pointed out earlier that my district's policies allow most such kids to transfer to the "good" schools in the name of racial diversity. Very few do so. So why would vouchers make a differen
Someone who died for inability to afford adequate health care in the 1960s might disagree with you on whether the program's opportunity cost was justifiable. There's also the question of whether the same money might not have generated even more jobs and economic growth had it been used to fund non-moon-mission related scientific endeavors.
So you're saying it's more or less impossible to gauge in any meaningful way whether one set of students improved "more" (or "less") than another set over some period of time in a trait like "math proficiency" or "language proficiency". Just not sure I buy that.
Because for the most part that's the system that's in place. You can argue that shouldn't be the case, and there's certainly a case to be made, but that's not the question I was attempting to address. The question I was attempting to answer is, "How might we evaluate teachers and/or schools in such a way as to accurately differentiate the effective ones from the ineffective ones."
Evaluating principals according to the performance of their schools (which would derive in large part from their ability to differentiate effective and ineffective staff) came to mind as a mean to get around having to test students yearly. Instead of evaluating teachers directly you evaluate the evaluators, so to speak. To your other points, I do see some benefit to having standardized curricula. At least loosely so. Not every English course needs to be exactly the same, but it seems reasonable to require that a school which receives state subsidy (either directly or via voucher) be held to certain minimum standards.
I'm sympathetic to this argument. At the same time I'm also highly skeptical of education consumers' ability to make optimal choices and of voucher schemes' effectiveness at counteracting the ghettoization of poor and/or low-performing students.
Not arbitrary at all, unless you're of the opinion it's impossible to objectively measure students' grasp of subject matter. If a school (or teacher) is doing an "average" job of educating students then the students who pass through that school (or teacher) should do about as well on subject matter assessments after attending that school (or being taught by that teacher) as they did prior to entering that school (or being taught by that teacher).
Take two sets of 500 students each of which has the same mean (or median; whichever) percentile rank on a test of mathematics proficiency. The first set attends high school A for four years and the second set attends high school B for four years. If, after those four years, the first set's average percentile rank is significantly higher than that of the second set then it's likely school A is doing a better job at mathematics education than school B.
First of all, nothing in what I wrote even addressed school choice. So I'm not sure why you assume I'm against it. All I did was muse on how one might go about assessing and/or maximizing teacher quality.
Some most certainly are. As are many/most high-income parents. For the most part, what people perceive to be "good schools" are schools with high test scores. They totally ignore the demographics of these schools and their contribution to those high scores. Even still, that's not a great reason to lock people into certain schools. What might be a better reason is that school choice would most likely result in some number of kids who live close to in-demand schools losing the lottery and being forced to attend campuses further away.
It's worth noting the school district where I live has a policy whereby any student can transfer from a school at which he'd be in the ethnic majority to a school where he'd be an ethnic minority. The schools in my district that are perceived to be "the best" are all majority-white. So, essentially, an African-American (or Latino) student at a majority-African-American (or Latino) school already has the freedom to transfer to one of these "good" schools. I don't have stats, but I'm not led to believe many make use of it. (Not least of which because the district won't pay to bus a kid clear across town.)
It takes a certain minimum set of cognitive skills to get to the point where you can be moderately successful in the software industry. IMO it takes a special person to write what I would consider "really good code". I'm skeptical that this can be taught. I'd add that most software developers, including many who enjoy long and reasonably successful careers in the field, don't fall into this category.
Principals would evaluate their staff via whatever means they see fit. Maybe it's teacher peer evaluations. Maybe it's test scores. Who knows. Principals would likewise be given more flexibility to hire and fire staff, and would themselves be rewarded (or removed) based on the aggregate performance of their staff. And when I say "performance" I'm talking about the sort of "delta" measurement I described two posts up.
Yes I did. And closed shops was just one example of a concession the state might take of the table. I wasn't implying it's relevant in this particular case. The state could instead legislate a salary schedule and tie negotiators' hands in that way instead.
The way it would be accomplished is to restrict what concessions the state can make when negotiating with unions. For instance, many unions pressure employers to be "union only" shops. The state of Illinois could pass a law saying that no public school district within its borders can refuse to hire a public school employee because he or she is not a union member. Make it a "right to work" state. Since unions charge fees this would motivate many teachers to simply drop their union membership since it would no longer be a requirement for employment. Losing its monopoly on employees would greatly weaken the union's leverage. Whatever improvements in pay/benefits/etc. the union extracts would benefit all employees, members and non-members alike, further minimizing an individual teacher's motivation to join.
I'd be all for evaluation if I thought it would be done right. I lack that confidence. If you just look at how a given teacher's students perform then that's not fair to the teacher, since he has no control over those students' educational experience prior to arriving in his classroom. The only objective way to evaluate individual teachers' performance would be to test students every year and measure the delta between each teacher's students over the course of the year that teacher had them. If a given teacher has 5 classes of 25 students each, and those 125 students scored, on average, at the 30th percentile at the beginning of the year, but at the 35th percentile at the end of the year, then maybe we say that teacher did a good job despite his students scoring well below the state-wide average.
There are problems with testing students so frequently though:
1. It's expensive.
2. It cannibalizes classroom time.
3. It encourages teachers to try to game the system by teaching to the test or teaching "test-taking skills" instead of their actual subject matter.
4. It encourages teachers (and principals) to allow (or assist) their students to cheat.
5. It's not necessarily applicable to all types of teacher. How are you going to objectively measure the effectiveness of an art teacher?
Another way to go would be to only evaluate principals and give them more leeway to hire/fire teachers they like and use whatever in-house evaluation methods they want. Test only at school level jumps, i.e. prior to elementary, between elementary and middle, between middle and high school, then after high school. You'd want to be sure to evaluate the principals using the average percentile change of students who went through all grades at the given school. If the set of 8th graders leaving a given middle school has an average percentile rank of 50, but that same set of students averaged in the 40th percentile before starting 6th grade, maybe you give that principal a good rating. The problem here, though, is that it encourages principals to try to get kids who appear likely to regress to leave their school.
Actually, yes. In my experience most jobs are like that. You have to really suck to get fired. *Maybe* if you're just phoning it in you get to be first in line when there are layoffs. Maybe. But then only if your employer does a good job of identifying who's just phoning it in. Not all do.
I'm with them on the complaint about test pushers. But privatization? Why should they care? Can't the union accept private school teachers as members and negotiate with private employers just like it negotiates with the City of Chicago? Other unions agitate for their members who're employed by private entities.
I'm also curious what would stop the city from hiring scabs. Parents would no doubt be unhappy with the decrease in teacher quality (since everybody would be brand new) but at least their kids would be going to school. If nothing else, giving the credible appearance of being willing to hire scabs might give the city more leverage over the union.
He frames the definition of "win" incorrectly. If "win" means "possible to get media for free in some capacity" then yes, the pirates will always "win". But I'd argue a better definition is "easy for a non-technical person to conveniently access high-quality copyrighted media free of charge with no legal risk." If we use that definition then I don't think it's a given that the pirates will always win. Enforcement efforts have the potential to make it less easy (harder to find sites, sites frequently disappear, degraded throughput due to overuse, blocks that require technical knowledge to work around, garbage content masquerading as the real thing, etc.), more expensive (pay-per-byte price structures for network access) and more risky (draconian punishments, forcing ISPs to police activity and/or store data, etc.) Taken together these three may be enough to motivate many "casual" pirates to go legit. Will it make everybody do that? Certainly not. But it might make enough do it that the studios see it as a worthwhile investment to lobby for these types of policies.
The game changer would be significant climate change. AFAIK they're not basing the "50% higher yields" prediction on normal, incremental advances.
If I'm choosing between two candidates then, all else being equal, I'm going to choose the one with the degree over the one without a degree. Moreover I'm probably going to choose the one from the "better" school. My feeling is that most employers follow this same logic. Key words: "all else being equal". If you're 18 years old and such a badass that you can reasonably expect to be hired (at a market or above-market wage) without a degree, and if there's no way you can get one without going significantly into debt, then you're probably better off just getting a job. The vast, vast majority of people never find themselves in that situation.
1. Riots aren't always a bad thing when they precipitate the overthrow of autocratic regimes and create the possibility for self-rule. It remains to be seen the extent to which this is true of the "Arab Spring", but there's a distinct possibility that at least some of the affected states will see lasting and positive change.
2. It's not necessarily a given that a warming planet will lead to food shortages. Some guys in the U.K. seem to think we could see yields (for some crops) increase by 50% by 2050. They could very well be wrong. Or they could be right.
Haven't dug through the details to figure out who's more believable, but here are some criticisms of the study.
You either need cross-distro compatibility or you need the number of "distros important enough to care about" to shrink to one or two. Then you just develop and test on those one/two.
My experience is entirely anecdotal (like yours) but I took my first programming course around the same time I started learning algebra. Which is to say when I was about 11 or 12 years old. I'm not sure it taught me anything about math. Looking back, I question whether it would have benefited me to start studying "programming" when I was six. What would have benefited me? Better math instruction at the primary level.
Oh? In primary school? I'll grant that calculus and linear algebra aren't as worthwhile (for many students) as many seem to think. But here we're not weighing "programming" vs. "calculus". We're weighing "some really watered down primary school version of programming" vs. "reading". Or "numeric concepts". Or "language composition". At the primary level I'll take the those over "programming" any day of the week.