I was astounded a few days ago to learn that Promise Neighborhoods is not revealing the results of the $60 million grant it made to the Castle Park neighborhood in Chula Vista two years ago. I attended Castle Park Elementary as a student and worked there as a teacher, so I'm quite familiar with the culture of the school. I had a feeling that the Promise grant wasn't going to help much because the people in charge were basically the same people who had driven Castle Park Elementary into the ground ten years ago.
Here's my recent post on the problem.
Below is an article with some thoughts about why we have inadequate leaders most of the time in most areas of endeavor.
The problem? Hypocognition. We just don't know enough, and we don't know what we're missing. It's the "unknown unknowns" that Donald Rumsfeld talked about.
Why are these clowns winning? Neuroscience explains incompetence of all sides
Paul Rosenberg
Salon
Nov 29, 2014
...[W]hen a very smart idea or very smart person comes along, the
organizations are not necessarily very skilled at recognizing that
person’s genius,” Dunning said. “We have lots of data showing that very
top performers, their top performances are very much missed. The genius
of their ideas are just missed by the group.”
...University of California, Berkeley, cognitive linguist George Lakoff,
whose work illuminating the cognitive and communicative differences
between liberals and conservatives—”Moral Politics,” “Don’t Think of An Elephant,” “Whose Freedom,”
etc.—has found a wide audience centered in the progressive activist
base, but has yet to seriously impact the political professionals whose
collective failure I alluded to in this story’s first paragraph.
When I interviewed him recently for Salon, Lakoff even highlighted the concept of hypocognition—that “we don’t have
all the ideas we need.” One example he cited was the concept of
reflexivity, “the fact that thought is part of the world. That when
you’re thinking, it’s not separate from reality, it’s part of reality.
And if your understanding of the world is reflected in what you do, then
that thought comes into the world through your actions,” which helps to
explain, in part, the power of conservative mythos, even when it’s mistaken as a matter of fact, a matter of logos.
Lakoff also pointed out that “Hypocognition itself is
an idea that we need.” There are things going on in our social and
political world that we don’t have names for—and because we don’t have
names for them, we can’t think and talk about them coherently. So, we
have conservatives on the one hand acting on their mythos, mistakenly believing it’s true as a matter of logos—which
is one kind of incompetence—and yet, nonetheless reshaping reality
through the power of reflexivity. (Think of how invading Iraq in
response to 9/11 helped bring ISIS into existence, for example.) On the
other hand, we have liberals seeing things only in terms of logos,
who can’t understand how wildly mistaken conservatives can nonetheless
reshape the world to reflect their paranoid fantasies, because they’re
missing the crucial concept of reflexivity (and even the very concept of
missing concepts, the concept of hypocognition)—which is another, very
different, but very real form of incompetence.
So, when Dunning
told me, “The genius of their ideas are just missed by the group,”
Lakoff’s discussion of hypocognition naturally came to mind. What could
be a worse idea to miss than the very idea of missing ideas? If you
don’t think they’re out there, you’ll never go looking for them—never
believe anyone who claims to have found one of them, either.
Showing posts with label incompetence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label incompetence. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 03, 2014
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Latest revelation of incompetence and dishonesty among professionals: nuclear launch officers cheated on proficiency tests; do we properly evaluate ANYONE?
There are huge numbers of highly competent people in all professions--so why do less competent people so often rise to the top?
Why do our most crucial professions fail to root out incompetence and dishonesty?
For years the evidence has been accumulating that we don't properly evaluate teachers and doctors and police and judges. What I'm wondering now is if ANYONE in ANY job or profession gets effectively evaluated.
Why is this such a widespread problem?
Because politics matters more than competence in almost every venue--not just in schools.
What can we do about it? We can start in our schools, giving real educations, and teaching young people to rely on their abilities instead of manipulating people and situations. And we need to teach the value of honesty and a job well done.
Major General Michael Carey was dismissed for conduct unbecoming
US nuclear launch officers suspended for 'cheating'
Beth McLeod
BBC News
16 January 2014
Thirty-four US Air Force officers in charge of launching nuclear missiles have been suspended over accusations that they cheated in proficiency tests.
The air force said some staff had texted answers to the routine tests to others, while others had known about the cheating but failed to report it.
The ranks involved range from 2nd lieutenants to captains.
The allegations emerged during investigations into alleged drug use by personnel at other bases.
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said the cheating had involved officers based at the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, and related to a monthly test all nuclear missile staff must take.
"Some officers did it," she said of the cheating. "Others apparently knew about it, and it appears that they did nothing, or at least not enough, to stop it or to report it."
Illegal gambling
Ms James said it was "absolutely unacceptable behaviour" but that the security of the nuclear programme was not in doubt.
"This was a failure of some of our airmen. It was not a failure of the nuclear mission," she said.
The 34 officers have had their security clearance revoked and the entire team in charge of overseeing missile launches will be re-tested.
A further three officers have been suspended for allegedly possessing recreational drugs.
It is the latest scandal to hit the air force and nuclear missile force.
In August, a nuclear missile unit at Malmstrom failed a safety and security inspection, leading to a senior security officer being relieved of duty.
And in May, it was reported that 17 officers in charge of maintaining nuclear missiles were sidelined over safety violations at Minot Air Force base in North Dakota.
In October, the general in charge of America's long-range nuclear missiles, Maj Gen Michael Carey, was sacked, with officials citing a "loss of trust and confidence".
It later emerged he had engaged in conduct "unbecoming of a gentleman" during a work trip to Russia in July.
Gen Carey's removal came days after the Navy sacked Vice-Adm Tim Giardina, second-in-command of the US Strategic Command, over illegal gambling.
Strategic Command oversees everything from America's land-based nuclear missiles to space operations governing military satellites.
US nuclear programme scandals
October 2013 -
Maj Gen Michael Carey, a two-star general in the 20th Air Force, is sacked after accusations of drunken misconduct
October 2013 -
US Navy Vice-Adm Tim Giardina is removed as deputy head of US Strategic Command and investigated for illegal gambling
August 2013 -
the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base fails a safety test, and its commander is relieved of duty
May 2013 -
The US Air Force temporarily strips 17 officers at Minot base in North Dakota of their nuclear watch authority following a poor grade in a missile launch test.
October 2007 -
The air force relieves several officers of their duties after a B-52 bomber was mistakenly flown across the US loaded with nuclear-armed missiles
Why do our most crucial professions fail to root out incompetence and dishonesty?
For years the evidence has been accumulating that we don't properly evaluate teachers and doctors and police and judges. What I'm wondering now is if ANYONE in ANY job or profession gets effectively evaluated.
Why is this such a widespread problem?
Because politics matters more than competence in almost every venue--not just in schools.
What can we do about it? We can start in our schools, giving real educations, and teaching young people to rely on their abilities instead of manipulating people and situations. And we need to teach the value of honesty and a job well done.
Major General Michael Carey was dismissed for conduct unbecoming
US nuclear launch officers suspended for 'cheating'
Beth McLeod
BBC News
16 January 2014
Thirty-four US Air Force officers in charge of launching nuclear missiles have been suspended over accusations that they cheated in proficiency tests.
The air force said some staff had texted answers to the routine tests to others, while others had known about the cheating but failed to report it.
The ranks involved range from 2nd lieutenants to captains.
The allegations emerged during investigations into alleged drug use by personnel at other bases.
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said the cheating had involved officers based at the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, and related to a monthly test all nuclear missile staff must take.
"Some officers did it," she said of the cheating. "Others apparently knew about it, and it appears that they did nothing, or at least not enough, to stop it or to report it."
Illegal gambling
Ms James said it was "absolutely unacceptable behaviour" but that the security of the nuclear programme was not in doubt.
"This was a failure of some of our airmen. It was not a failure of the nuclear mission," she said.
The 34 officers have had their security clearance revoked and the entire team in charge of overseeing missile launches will be re-tested.
A further three officers have been suspended for allegedly possessing recreational drugs.
It is the latest scandal to hit the air force and nuclear missile force.
In August, a nuclear missile unit at Malmstrom failed a safety and security inspection, leading to a senior security officer being relieved of duty.
And in May, it was reported that 17 officers in charge of maintaining nuclear missiles were sidelined over safety violations at Minot Air Force base in North Dakota.
In October, the general in charge of America's long-range nuclear missiles, Maj Gen Michael Carey, was sacked, with officials citing a "loss of trust and confidence".
It later emerged he had engaged in conduct "unbecoming of a gentleman" during a work trip to Russia in July.
Gen Carey's removal came days after the Navy sacked Vice-Adm Tim Giardina, second-in-command of the US Strategic Command, over illegal gambling.
Strategic Command oversees everything from America's land-based nuclear missiles to space operations governing military satellites.
US nuclear programme scandals
October 2013 -
Maj Gen Michael Carey, a two-star general in the 20th Air Force, is sacked after accusations of drunken misconduct
October 2013 -
US Navy Vice-Adm Tim Giardina is removed as deputy head of US Strategic Command and investigated for illegal gambling
August 2013 -
the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base fails a safety test, and its commander is relieved of duty
May 2013 -
The US Air Force temporarily strips 17 officers at Minot base in North Dakota of their nuclear watch authority following a poor grade in a missile launch test.
October 2007 -
The air force relieves several officers of their duties after a B-52 bomber was mistakenly flown across the US loaded with nuclear-armed missiles
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Vergara v. California challenges practice of protecting incompetent teachers
See all posts on evaluating teachers.
Students Matter and Vergara v. California Plaintiffs Oppose Motions for Summary Judgment
Plaintiffs Submit Compelling Evidence that the State of California Is Knowingly Forcing School Districts to Keep Ineffective Teachers in the Classroom, Harming Their Students
By Students Matter
Nov. 14, 2013
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 14, 2013 -- /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday, Plaintiffs in Vergara v. California filed their summary judgment opposition in the Los Angeles Superior Court, asking the court to reject Defendants' baseless efforts to avoid a trial. Vergara v. California is a groundbreaking lawsuit that seeks to strike down five statutes in California's Education Code that prevent California's public schools from providing a quality education to all of their students.
"Over the past thirteen months, we have uncovered a wealth of evidence that the challenged statutes deprive students of their Constitutional right to equal access to a quality education," said Plaintiffs' co-lead counsel Theodore J. Boutrous. "We have thousands of documents, hours of testimony from Superintendents and human resources officials across the state, and compelling data from leading education experts. The evidence clearly demonstrates that the statutes prevent California school districts from prioritizing the best interests of their students when making decisions about teacher employment and retention. Plaintiffs deserve the opportunity to present their evidence at trial."
The Defendants, including the State of California, the State Superintendent, the California Department of Education, and the State Board of Education, asked the court in September to summarily dismiss Plaintiffs' claims without a trial. State Defendants were joined by the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, who intervened in the case to defend the statutes.
But Plaintiffs—nine public schoolchildren from all over California ranging in age from eight to seventeen years old—have amassed a mountain of evidence demonstrating that the statutes violate the Equal Protection Clause by forcing school districts to keep failing teachers in the classroom year after year, with devastating consequences for the students assigned to their classrooms. Highlights from the evidence include:
Ineffective teachers are entrenched in California's public school system. The Superintendents of many school districts affirm that their districts are beleaguered by grossly ineffective teachers and attribute the continued employment of these teachers to the challenged statutes. Both the State Defendants and the teachers' unions concede that students in California are being taught by ineffective teachers.
Minority and low-income students are disproportionately likely to be taught by grossly ineffective teachers...
Students Matter and Vergara v. California Plaintiffs Oppose Motions for Summary Judgment
Plaintiffs Submit Compelling Evidence that the State of California Is Knowingly Forcing School Districts to Keep Ineffective Teachers in the Classroom, Harming Their Students
By Students Matter
Nov. 14, 2013
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 14, 2013 -- /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday, Plaintiffs in Vergara v. California filed their summary judgment opposition in the Los Angeles Superior Court, asking the court to reject Defendants' baseless efforts to avoid a trial. Vergara v. California is a groundbreaking lawsuit that seeks to strike down five statutes in California's Education Code that prevent California's public schools from providing a quality education to all of their students.
"Over the past thirteen months, we have uncovered a wealth of evidence that the challenged statutes deprive students of their Constitutional right to equal access to a quality education," said Plaintiffs' co-lead counsel Theodore J. Boutrous. "We have thousands of documents, hours of testimony from Superintendents and human resources officials across the state, and compelling data from leading education experts. The evidence clearly demonstrates that the statutes prevent California school districts from prioritizing the best interests of their students when making decisions about teacher employment and retention. Plaintiffs deserve the opportunity to present their evidence at trial."
The Defendants, including the State of California, the State Superintendent, the California Department of Education, and the State Board of Education, asked the court in September to summarily dismiss Plaintiffs' claims without a trial. State Defendants were joined by the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, who intervened in the case to defend the statutes.
But Plaintiffs—nine public schoolchildren from all over California ranging in age from eight to seventeen years old—have amassed a mountain of evidence demonstrating that the statutes violate the Equal Protection Clause by forcing school districts to keep failing teachers in the classroom year after year, with devastating consequences for the students assigned to their classrooms. Highlights from the evidence include:
Ineffective teachers are entrenched in California's public school system. The Superintendents of many school districts affirm that their districts are beleaguered by grossly ineffective teachers and attribute the continued employment of these teachers to the challenged statutes. Both the State Defendants and the teachers' unions concede that students in California are being taught by ineffective teachers.
Minority and low-income students are disproportionately likely to be taught by grossly ineffective teachers...
Friday, September 20, 2013
Occidental College reaches an agreement with women who say that officials bungled campus investigations
Petition at Occidental College, 2013
We'd have better leaders if schools were interested in teaching more than how to make money. It seems that the officials at Occidental (and other colleges) don't understand what a real education is. Perhaps a year's suspension would help. And perhaps the transgressors would be required to complete other tasks, such as writing papers or participating in truth and reconciliation meetings and reparations, before they would be allowed to return.
Occidental College settles in sexual assault cases
Occidental College reaches an agreement with women who say that officials bungled campus investigations.
By Jason Felch and Jason Song
LA Times
September 18, 2013
Occidental College has quietly reached a monetary settlement with at least 10 current and former students who have alleged that the Eagle Rock liberal arts school repeatedly mishandled sexual assault accusations, according to three sources with knowledge of the agreement.
During confidential settlement talks last week, senior Occidental officials agreed to pay the women an undisclosed sum to avoid a lawsuit.
Under the terms of the pact, they are barred from discussing publicly the college's handling of their cases and participating in the Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition, a campus advocacy group of students and faculty that over the last year has been battling fiercely with the college administration over its handling of sex assault allegations.
The women, all represented by the firm of high-profile women's rights attorney Gloria Allred, were among 37 Occidental students and alumni who in April alleged in a federal civil rights complaint that the school deliberately discouraged victims from reporting sexual assaults, misled students about their rights during campus investigations, retaliated against whistle-blowers, and handed down minor punishment to known assailants who in some cases allegedly struck again. The settlement won't affect the federal action.
The federal complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, has since been revised to include allegations from an additional 13 people, including some supportive faculty members. A parallel complaint was filed the same month under the Clery Act, a federal law that requires colleges and universities to report campus crime.
Federal investigators are expected to visit the college in coming weeks to investigate both complaints, records show.
In a prepared statement on the Allred settlement, Occidental spokesman Jim Tranquada said:
"We cannot comment except to say that this matter has been resolved. It is a confidential matter and we intend to honor the confidentiality and privacy of those involved. The college continues to move ahead with its efforts to address this important issue and make Occidental a national leader in dealing with sexual misconduct."
After the federal complaints were filed, the college adopted an interim sexual misconduct policy and recently hired an advocate for abuse victims, Tranquada said. The college has created a 24/7 telephone hotline and expanded the preventative education programs for all students...
The Times has reviewed the federal complaints detailing the allegations of 10 of the women who settled their claims last week. They allege a pattern in which the college downplayed the incidents or tried to dissuade women from stepping forward.
Most of the men involved in the settled cases were ultimately found responsible for misconduct.
Not all of the incidents were reported to law enforcement, a decision left up to those who said they were victims.
According to the federal complaint, a female student who reported to administrators that she had been assaulted at a fraternity in February, said she was told by a school dean not to talk about the incident to prevent lawsuits against the college.
In addition, the complaint said, officials deliberately drew out the disciplinary proceedings. The case "fits a troubling pattern of school administrators running out the clock so alleged perpetrators who are found responsible can still complete their semester," the complaint alleges.
Throughout the complaint are allegations that men found responsible for sexual assaults at Occidental were given only minor sanctions.
In one case, a student admitted to administrators that he had sexually assaulted a woman in 2011 and went on to warn officials that other victims might come forward. The student was allowed to stay on campus while being barred from some campus activities and required to write an apology letter and a 15- to 20-page essay.
The final paper was "less than two and a half pages," according to the complaint. "The incredibly casually written paper was ridden with grammatical errors, incomplete sentences, and no works [footnotes] cited. It is an exemplary example of what a paper looks like that has been given zero effort, care or thought," the complaint alleges...
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Report: U.S. teacher training an "industry of mediocrity"
Report: U.S. teacher training an "industry of mediocrity"
AP
June 18, 2013
The nation's teacher-training programs do not adequately prepare would-be educators for the classroom, even as they produce almost triple the number of graduates needed, according to a survey of more than 1,000 programs released Tuesday.
The National Council on Teacher Quality review is a scathing assessment of colleges' education programs and their admission standards, training and value. The report, which drew immediate criticism, was designed to be provocative and urges leaders at teacher-training programs to rethink what skills would-be educators need to be taught to thrive in the classrooms of today and tomorrow.
"Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms" with an ever-increasing diversity of ethnic and socioeconomic students, the report's authors wrote.
"A vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars," the report said.
The report was likely to drive debate about which students are prepared to be teachers in the coming decades and how they are prepared. Once a teacher settles into a classroom, it's tough to remove him or her involuntarily and opportunities for wholesale retraining are difficult — if nearly impossible — to find.
The answer, the council and its allies argue, is to make it more difficult for students to get into teacher preparation programs in the first place. And once there, they should be taught the most effective methods to help students.
"There's plenty of research out there that shows that teacher quality is the single most important factor," said Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, a supporter of the organization's work.
Democrat Markell said: "We have to attract the best candidates" possible.
To accomplish that goal, Markell earlier this year signed into law a measure making admission to education programs more difficult in his state. Potential teachers must either post a 3.0 grade point average or demonstrate "mastery" results on a standardized test such as the ACT or SAT before they're even admitted to a program.
It's an idea the council has applauded and suggests other states should consider to limit the number of candidates entering teacher training programs.
"You just have to have a pulse and you can get into some of these education schools," said Michael Petrilli, a vice president at the conservative-leaning Fordham Institute and a former official in the Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement. "If policymakers took this report seriously, they'd be shutting down hundreds of programs."
Some 239,000 teachers are trained each year and 98,000 are hired — meaning too many students are admitted and only a fraction find work.
Among the council's other findings:
— Only a quarter of education programs limit admission to students in the top half of their high school class. The remaining three quarters of programs allow students who fared poorly in high school to train as teachers...
AP
June 18, 2013
The nation's teacher-training programs do not adequately prepare would-be educators for the classroom, even as they produce almost triple the number of graduates needed, according to a survey of more than 1,000 programs released Tuesday.
The National Council on Teacher Quality review is a scathing assessment of colleges' education programs and their admission standards, training and value. The report, which drew immediate criticism, was designed to be provocative and urges leaders at teacher-training programs to rethink what skills would-be educators need to be taught to thrive in the classrooms of today and tomorrow.
"Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms" with an ever-increasing diversity of ethnic and socioeconomic students, the report's authors wrote.
"A vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars," the report said.
The report was likely to drive debate about which students are prepared to be teachers in the coming decades and how they are prepared. Once a teacher settles into a classroom, it's tough to remove him or her involuntarily and opportunities for wholesale retraining are difficult — if nearly impossible — to find.
The answer, the council and its allies argue, is to make it more difficult for students to get into teacher preparation programs in the first place. And once there, they should be taught the most effective methods to help students.
"There's plenty of research out there that shows that teacher quality is the single most important factor," said Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, a supporter of the organization's work.
Democrat Markell said: "We have to attract the best candidates" possible.
To accomplish that goal, Markell earlier this year signed into law a measure making admission to education programs more difficult in his state. Potential teachers must either post a 3.0 grade point average or demonstrate "mastery" results on a standardized test such as the ACT or SAT before they're even admitted to a program.
It's an idea the council has applauded and suggests other states should consider to limit the number of candidates entering teacher training programs.
"You just have to have a pulse and you can get into some of these education schools," said Michael Petrilli, a vice president at the conservative-leaning Fordham Institute and a former official in the Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement. "If policymakers took this report seriously, they'd be shutting down hundreds of programs."
Some 239,000 teachers are trained each year and 98,000 are hired — meaning too many students are admitted and only a fraction find work.
Among the council's other findings:
— Only a quarter of education programs limit admission to students in the top half of their high school class. The remaining three quarters of programs allow students who fared poorly in high school to train as teachers...
Monday, May 27, 2013
Middle class and poor kids are scoring lower on tests than in the past compared to rich kids
Our society discards the potential contributions of gifted poor kids in order to keep the children of rich and middle class families in top positions. The rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago. This statistic has nothing to do with race.
Obviously, this situation does not benefit our country since it puts less competent people in charge of progress. Nor does it benefit the planet, since our society is so powerful.
No Rich Child Left Behind
By SEAN F. REARDON
New York Times
April 27, 2013
...What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.
In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.
The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.
In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.
These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.
In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?
We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.
Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.
The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.
Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.
The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.
It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.
There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.
But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.
High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.
With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.
The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.
It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.
We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.
We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.
Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.
We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.
So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.
But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.
It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.
The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.
Obviously, this situation does not benefit our country since it puts less competent people in charge of progress. Nor does it benefit the planet, since our society is so powerful.
No Rich Child Left Behind
By SEAN F. REARDON
New York Times
April 27, 2013
...What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.
In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.
The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.
In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.
These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.
In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?
We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.
Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.
The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.
Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.
The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.
The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.
It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school.
There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.
My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.
But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.
High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.
With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.
The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.
It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.
We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.
We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.
Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.
We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.
So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.
But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.
This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.
It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.
The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Teachers union head Elba Gordillo, who made big bucks fighting teacher accountability in Mexico, has been arrested
Teachers union leader Elba Esther Gordillo fought against assessments for teachers in Mexico. I guess she figured that's what teachers pay dues for. American teacher union leaders seem to feel the same way.
Mexican union boss arrest sounds warning to reform foes
The arrest of Mexico's best-known trade union leader on fraud charges has thrown down the gauntlet to powerful interests standing between President Enrique Pena Nieto and his plans to shake up Latin America's second-biggest economy.
By Dave Graham
MEXICO CITY
Feb 28, 2013
(Reuters)
The arrest of Mexico's best-known trade union leader on fraud charges has thrown down the gauntlet to powerful interests standing between President Enrique Pena Nieto and his plans to shake up Latin America's second-biggest economy.
For a generation, even presidents shied away from taking on teachers' union boss Elba Esther Gordillo, making her Mexico's most prominent female politician and a formidable enemy to those who accused her of fostering corruption rather than education.
Pena Nieto, who has been in office for less than three months, crossed that line on Tuesday when police arrested Gordillo and three other people with her at Toluca airport near Mexico City.
Mexican television showed Gordillo, 68, wearing a prison uniform and standing behind bars as a state prosecutor formally charged her with embezzling around $200 million from union coffers and using the money to pay for U.S. property, luxury goods, designer clothes, works of art and plastic surgery.
She is not allowed to apply for bail under the charges.
Gordillo, who deferred comment to her lawyers, faces a maximum jail sentence of 30 years, though prisoners can apply to be moved to house arrest at age 70.
"It is clearly a criminal case," Attorney General Jesus Murillo said in a television interview. "The case is very solid."
A former grandee of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Gordillo has denied accusations of corruption.
She was snared a day after Pena Nieto signed a law aimed at improving education standards that she had opposed because it would weaken her union's clout.
Mexico union leader Elba Esther Gordillo arrested
BBC
26 February 2013
Union head Elba Esther Gordillo, known as Mexico's most powerful woman, has been arrested on corruption charges.
Ms Gordillo, who runs the 1.5 million-member Mexican teachers' union, is alleged to have diverted about $200m from union funds to personal accounts.
No-one from her legal team has responded to the allegations, but in the past she has denied any wrongdoing in handling the funds.
The arrest came after major reforms to the education system on Monday.
President Enrique Pena Nieto signed the sweeping reforms, which seek to change a system dominated by Ms Gordillo in which teaching positions could be sold or inherited.
"We are looking at a case in which the funds of education workers have been illegally misused, for the benefit of several people, among them Elba Esther Gordillo," Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said.
His office alleges Ms Gordillo, 68, spent the funds on plastic surgery and a luxury home.
Real influence
The BBC's Will Grant in Mexico City says that Ms Gordillo is one of the highest profile figures in Mexican political life, known simply as "la maestra" or "the teacher".
For more than 20 years she has led the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE).
With an estimated 1.5 million members, Ms Gordillo has held real influence over governments and individual presidents by persuading her union members to vote as a single bloc, our correspondent says.
The teachers were also responsible for manning polling stations on election day.
Her union is also very wealthy, and can count on an annual budget of tens of millions of dollars.
It is on claims that she mishandled those funds, allegedly diverting money intended for the union's coffers to her personal accounts, that she has now been arrested.
The reforms appeared set to weaken the powerful teachers' union, which has largely controlled access to the profession.
The union has argued that reforms could lead to massive lay-offs.
Critics also say the changes could signal the start of the privatisation of education in Mexico.
Mexico's education system currently ranks bottom in a list of members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The reforms will require teachers to undergo regular assessments, something that has previously never taken place inside Mexico's primary and secondary schools.
Many teachers in Mexico are said to have a very low standard of education themselves, with some only having graduated from high school.
Another change is intended to tackle the problem of absent or even deceased teachers receiving wages.
Ms Gordillo has been an outspoken critic of the current education minister and his approach to the reforms.
Mexican union boss arrest sounds warning to reform foes
The arrest of Mexico's best-known trade union leader on fraud charges has thrown down the gauntlet to powerful interests standing between President Enrique Pena Nieto and his plans to shake up Latin America's second-biggest economy.
By Dave Graham
MEXICO CITY
Feb 28, 2013
(Reuters)
The arrest of Mexico's best-known trade union leader on fraud charges has thrown down the gauntlet to powerful interests standing between President Enrique Pena Nieto and his plans to shake up Latin America's second-biggest economy.
For a generation, even presidents shied away from taking on teachers' union boss Elba Esther Gordillo, making her Mexico's most prominent female politician and a formidable enemy to those who accused her of fostering corruption rather than education.
Pena Nieto, who has been in office for less than three months, crossed that line on Tuesday when police arrested Gordillo and three other people with her at Toluca airport near Mexico City.
Mexican television showed Gordillo, 68, wearing a prison uniform and standing behind bars as a state prosecutor formally charged her with embezzling around $200 million from union coffers and using the money to pay for U.S. property, luxury goods, designer clothes, works of art and plastic surgery.
She is not allowed to apply for bail under the charges.
Gordillo, who deferred comment to her lawyers, faces a maximum jail sentence of 30 years, though prisoners can apply to be moved to house arrest at age 70.
"It is clearly a criminal case," Attorney General Jesus Murillo said in a television interview. "The case is very solid."
A former grandee of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Gordillo has denied accusations of corruption.
She was snared a day after Pena Nieto signed a law aimed at improving education standards that she had opposed because it would weaken her union's clout.
Mexico union leader Elba Esther Gordillo arrested
BBC
26 February 2013
Union head Elba Esther Gordillo, known as Mexico's most powerful woman, has been arrested on corruption charges.
Ms Gordillo, who runs the 1.5 million-member Mexican teachers' union, is alleged to have diverted about $200m from union funds to personal accounts.
No-one from her legal team has responded to the allegations, but in the past she has denied any wrongdoing in handling the funds.
The arrest came after major reforms to the education system on Monday.
President Enrique Pena Nieto signed the sweeping reforms, which seek to change a system dominated by Ms Gordillo in which teaching positions could be sold or inherited.
"We are looking at a case in which the funds of education workers have been illegally misused, for the benefit of several people, among them Elba Esther Gordillo," Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said.
His office alleges Ms Gordillo, 68, spent the funds on plastic surgery and a luxury home.
Real influence
The BBC's Will Grant in Mexico City says that Ms Gordillo is one of the highest profile figures in Mexican political life, known simply as "la maestra" or "the teacher".
For more than 20 years she has led the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE).
With an estimated 1.5 million members, Ms Gordillo has held real influence over governments and individual presidents by persuading her union members to vote as a single bloc, our correspondent says.
The teachers were also responsible for manning polling stations on election day.
Her union is also very wealthy, and can count on an annual budget of tens of millions of dollars.
It is on claims that she mishandled those funds, allegedly diverting money intended for the union's coffers to her personal accounts, that she has now been arrested.
The reforms appeared set to weaken the powerful teachers' union, which has largely controlled access to the profession.
The union has argued that reforms could lead to massive lay-offs.
Critics also say the changes could signal the start of the privatisation of education in Mexico.
Mexico's education system currently ranks bottom in a list of members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The reforms will require teachers to undergo regular assessments, something that has previously never taken place inside Mexico's primary and secondary schools.
Many teachers in Mexico are said to have a very low standard of education themselves, with some only having graduated from high school.
Another change is intended to tackle the problem of absent or even deceased teachers receiving wages.
Ms Gordillo has been an outspoken critic of the current education minister and his approach to the reforms.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Are schools better than the CIA at keeping secrets?
I was struck by how much the following article reminded me of the manner in which school districts and their attorneys conceal problems in schools.
"...[R]edacted passages revealed the agency's incompetence, rather than sensitive information."
Aug 30, 2011 20:31 ET
Censored by the CIA
A 23-year veteran of the agency reveals how the vetting process is used to stifle critics of the war on terror
By Laura Miller
News that the CIA has demanded "extensive cuts" from a forthcoming book by former FBI agent Ali Soufan made the front page of the New York Times last week. But Soufan's isn't the only recent memoir to earn the intelligence agency's wrath by, in part, criticizing its use of brutal interrogation techniques in the decade since 9/11. There's also "The Interrogator," by Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran who was given the task of questioning a purported al-Qaida kingpin in 2002. Carle's book was published earlier this summer with many passages -- and occasionally entire pages -- blocked out with black bars to show where the agency had insisted on redactions.
Soufan has called many of the CIA's excisions from his own book "ridiculous," pointing out that some of the "classified" information is a matter of public record and appears in the 9/11 report and even in a memoir by former CIA director George Tenet. Carle had a similar experience; "The Interrogator" is laced with caustic footnotes explaining that redacted passages revealed the agency's incompetence, rather than sensitive information.
When I reviewed Carle's book in July, I made a few guesses about facts the author was obliged to leave out of "The Interrogator." Less than a day had passed before I learned that most of my guesses were wrong. Readers sent me helpful emails with links to articles supplying all the missing details, including the identity of the detainee Carle interrogated, a man he eventually came to believe was innocent.
If the CIA is trying to prevent information in Soufan's and Carle's manuscripts from reaching the public, they've obviously already failed. If anything, the agency's efforts to censor these and other books only seem likely to inflame interest in the forbidden material, which will surface anyway. Does the CIA's power to vet the writings of former government employees have any teeth in the Internet age? I decided to call up Carle to ask about his experience with the agency's censors...
"...[R]edacted passages revealed the agency's incompetence, rather than sensitive information."
Aug 30, 2011 20:31 ET
Censored by the CIA
A 23-year veteran of the agency reveals how the vetting process is used to stifle critics of the war on terror
By Laura Miller
News that the CIA has demanded "extensive cuts" from a forthcoming book by former FBI agent Ali Soufan made the front page of the New York Times last week. But Soufan's isn't the only recent memoir to earn the intelligence agency's wrath by, in part, criticizing its use of brutal interrogation techniques in the decade since 9/11. There's also "The Interrogator," by Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran who was given the task of questioning a purported al-Qaida kingpin in 2002. Carle's book was published earlier this summer with many passages -- and occasionally entire pages -- blocked out with black bars to show where the agency had insisted on redactions.
Soufan has called many of the CIA's excisions from his own book "ridiculous," pointing out that some of the "classified" information is a matter of public record and appears in the 9/11 report and even in a memoir by former CIA director George Tenet. Carle had a similar experience; "The Interrogator" is laced with caustic footnotes explaining that redacted passages revealed the agency's incompetence, rather than sensitive information.
When I reviewed Carle's book in July, I made a few guesses about facts the author was obliged to leave out of "The Interrogator." Less than a day had passed before I learned that most of my guesses were wrong. Readers sent me helpful emails with links to articles supplying all the missing details, including the identity of the detainee Carle interrogated, a man he eventually came to believe was innocent.
If the CIA is trying to prevent information in Soufan's and Carle's manuscripts from reaching the public, they've obviously already failed. If anything, the agency's efforts to censor these and other books only seem likely to inflame interest in the forbidden material, which will surface anyway. Does the CIA's power to vet the writings of former government employees have any teeth in the Internet age? I decided to call up Carle to ask about his experience with the agency's censors...
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Bill Gates researchers suggest firing good teachers while keeping bad ones
Bill Gates' researchers are suggesting that teachers be let go if their school needs fewer teachers and they can't find an empty spot to fill at another school. Hey, Bill Gates, how about letting go incompetent teachers to make a spot at another school for good teachers?
Report says L.A. principals should have more authority ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn hiring teachers
June 07, 2011
By Howard Blume
Los Angeles Times
School principals should be able to hire any teacher of their choosing, and displaced tenured teachers who aren't rehired elsewhere within the system should be permanently dismissed, according to a controversial new report on the Los Angeles Unified School District. The report will be presented Tuesday to the Board of Education.
The research, paid for largely by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a roadmap for improving the quality of teaching in the nation's second-largest school system, with recommendations strongly backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
The report gave L.A. Unified credit for improvement in some areas, noting, for example, that more teachers are being fired for poor performance, a sign of better quality control, said researchers from the Washington, D.C.-based National Council on Teacher Quality.
In 2008, the district dismissed seven tenured teachers. The number for the current year, through April, was 94; 105 others have resigned to avoid dismissal.
...The report also concluded that teacher evaluations must be stepped up: 40% of tenured teachers and 70% of non-tenured teachers are evaluated annually.
Duffy and Deasy agreed that such scarce supervision failed to help teachers improve.
Another of the report's recommendations was that the earning of tenure be more demanding and take longer, but that those who get it receive a significant pay increase.
Sixty-six percent of surveyed principals admitted advising "an underperforming teacher to voluntarily transfer" to another school.
"Sending a problem to another school is the very last thing we should be doing," Deasy said....
Report says L.A. principals should have more authority ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn hiring teachers
June 07, 2011
By Howard Blume
Los Angeles Times
School principals should be able to hire any teacher of their choosing, and displaced tenured teachers who aren't rehired elsewhere within the system should be permanently dismissed, according to a controversial new report on the Los Angeles Unified School District. The report will be presented Tuesday to the Board of Education.
The research, paid for largely by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a roadmap for improving the quality of teaching in the nation's second-largest school system, with recommendations strongly backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
The report gave L.A. Unified credit for improvement in some areas, noting, for example, that more teachers are being fired for poor performance, a sign of better quality control, said researchers from the Washington, D.C.-based National Council on Teacher Quality.
In 2008, the district dismissed seven tenured teachers. The number for the current year, through April, was 94; 105 others have resigned to avoid dismissal.
...The report also concluded that teacher evaluations must be stepped up: 40% of tenured teachers and 70% of non-tenured teachers are evaluated annually.
Duffy and Deasy agreed that such scarce supervision failed to help teachers improve.
Another of the report's recommendations was that the earning of tenure be more demanding and take longer, but that those who get it receive a significant pay increase.
Sixty-six percent of surveyed principals admitted advising "an underperforming teacher to voluntarily transfer" to another school.
"Sending a problem to another school is the very last thing we should be doing," Deasy said....
Monday, May 24, 2010
Whistle-Blower in 'Kafkaesque Nightmare' After Push for GI Safety
Whistle-Blower in 'Kafkaesque Nightmare' After Push for GI Safety
Sharon Weinberger
AOL News
May 24, 2010
Several years ago, Franz Gayl began began pushing the Marine Corps to field urgently needed protective equipment to troops in Iraq. He thought he was just doing his job.
Instead, Gayl, a civilian scientist employed by the Marine Corps, says he has been stripped of his professional responsibilities, denied educational opportunities typically available to federal workers and subjected to a criminal probe he says was instigated as part of the professional retaliation against him.
Franz Gayl / AP
Franz Gayl is pictured in 2006, when he was a civilian science adviser in Iraq.
Tom Devine, the legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, a Washington-based organization that represents federal whistle-blowers, including Gayl, says that despite legislation that is supposed to prevent retaliation, in reality, people like Gayl face a "Kafkaesque nightmare."
At the center of Gayl's original complaint was what he saw as the mishandling of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle, a replacement for thin-skinned Humvees that proved dangerously vulnerable to improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. In the early days of the Iraq war, those homemade bombers quickly became the leading killer of U.S. and coalition forces.
An urgent call for the MRAPs was signed off on in February 2005, around the time when deaths from the roadside bombs were spiking. But it took more than 16 months for the Marine Corps to actually begin the process of buying and fielding the new equipment.
When the Marine Corps officials in charge of buying equipment didn't seem to be acting fast enough, Gayl made his case for better equipment through reports.
Gayl's complaints reached Capitol Hill staffers, eventually leading to congressional inquiries and an inspector general investigation of the matter. In 2007, he filed for formal whistle-blower protection.
Since that time, Gayl said, he has faced reprisals. He said he has been removed from dealing with critical technology matters, like MRAPs, and that there was an investigation into information he provided to Congress. Gayl has held on to his job, but his work situation has gone from bad to worse, he says.
Most recently, the Marine Corps denied him what would normally be a routine request -- permission to attend a prestigious graduate studies program. He was also stripped of his formal responsibilities as the Marine Corps science and technology adviser, the job he was hired to do in 2002, after retiring from active duty with the service...
Sharon Weinberger
AOL News
May 24, 2010
Several years ago, Franz Gayl began began pushing the Marine Corps to field urgently needed protective equipment to troops in Iraq. He thought he was just doing his job.
Instead, Gayl, a civilian scientist employed by the Marine Corps, says he has been stripped of his professional responsibilities, denied educational opportunities typically available to federal workers and subjected to a criminal probe he says was instigated as part of the professional retaliation against him.
Franz Gayl / AP
Franz Gayl is pictured in 2006, when he was a civilian science adviser in Iraq.
Tom Devine, the legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, a Washington-based organization that represents federal whistle-blowers, including Gayl, says that despite legislation that is supposed to prevent retaliation, in reality, people like Gayl face a "Kafkaesque nightmare."
At the center of Gayl's original complaint was what he saw as the mishandling of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle, a replacement for thin-skinned Humvees that proved dangerously vulnerable to improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. In the early days of the Iraq war, those homemade bombers quickly became the leading killer of U.S. and coalition forces.
An urgent call for the MRAPs was signed off on in February 2005, around the time when deaths from the roadside bombs were spiking. But it took more than 16 months for the Marine Corps to actually begin the process of buying and fielding the new equipment.
When the Marine Corps officials in charge of buying equipment didn't seem to be acting fast enough, Gayl made his case for better equipment through reports.
Gayl's complaints reached Capitol Hill staffers, eventually leading to congressional inquiries and an inspector general investigation of the matter. In 2007, he filed for formal whistle-blower protection.
Since that time, Gayl said, he has faced reprisals. He said he has been removed from dealing with critical technology matters, like MRAPs, and that there was an investigation into information he provided to Congress. Gayl has held on to his job, but his work situation has gone from bad to worse, he says.
Most recently, the Marine Corps denied him what would normally be a routine request -- permission to attend a prestigious graduate studies program. He was also stripped of his formal responsibilities as the Marine Corps science and technology adviser, the job he was hired to do in 2002, after retiring from active duty with the service...
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Lazy or incompetent? As long as you're a teacher, it's okay
“Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,” I asked Mulgrew. “Should you be able to fire him?”
“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded.
The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand
By STEVEN BRILL
May 17, 2010
MICHAEL MULGREW is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.
Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. “Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,” I asked Mulgrew. “Should you be able to fire him?”
“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded. “And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that.” Then he grinned, adding: “I know where you’re going, but you don’t understand. Teachers are just different.” ...
[This is a 9-page article about Race to the Top.]
“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded.
The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand
By STEVEN BRILL
May 17, 2010
MICHAEL MULGREW is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.
Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. “Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,” I asked Mulgrew. “Should you be able to fire him?”
“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded. “And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that.” Then he grinned, adding: “I know where you’re going, but you don’t understand. Teachers are just different.” ...
[This is a 9-page article about Race to the Top.]
Friday, May 21, 2010
With 5,000 lawyers in San Diego, why couldn't they provide a decent alternative in the contest for Judge DeAnn Salcido's seat?
I'm going to write in Sandra Berry's name on my ballot for DeAnn Salcido's seat. But it's pathetic that with roughly 5,000 lawyers in San Diego, we can't seem to fill all the judicial positions with qualified individuals:
Office 27:
Harold Coleman Jr: Unable to Evaluate
Judge DeAnn Salcido: Lacking Qualifications
Judge rated unqualified in local bar evaluation
By Greg Moran
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
May 14, 2010
RATINGS FROM THE BAR
Office 14:
Craig Candelore: Lacking Qualifications
Judge Lantz Lewis: Well Qualified.
Office 20:
Stephen Clark: Well Qualified
Jim Miller Jr: Lacking Qualifications
Richard Monroy: Well Qualified
Office 21:
Bill Trask: Lacking Qualifications
Judge Robert Longstreth: Well Qualified
Office 27:
Harold Coleman Jr: Unable to Evaluate
Judge DeAnn Salcido: Lacking Qualifications
Office 34:
Larry “Jake” Kincaid: Lacking Qualifications
Judge Joel Wohlfeil: Well Qualified.
Superior Court Judge DeAnn Salcido, facing an election challenge and under heavy criticism from her colleagues after she filed a legal action against the court a week ago, received the lowest possible rating in the local bar association’s evaluation of candidates.
Salcido was found to be “lacking qualifications” by the San Diego County Bar Association, which evaluates candidates for judicial seats each election. The bar says the evaluations are done as a public service to assist voters.
The process is supposed to be confidential and uses surveys distributed to judges and lawyers. A bar committee also interviews candidates and does other research before making its decision.
Salcido said that while she would have liked a higher rating, the low evaluation did not surprise her because she has ruffled feathers of lawyers and judges.
“I view it as the natural result of the county bar association asking only attorneys and judges of their view of me, and not the general public,” she said.
Last week Salcido took the unusual step of asking the 4th District Court of Appeal to issue an order commanding judges to impose certain probation conditions on misdemeanor domestic violence cases. She contended many judges were not following what she believes state law requires, and that when she stood up for that position, she was harassed by her supervising judge in El Cajon.
Salcido said thatshe was not willing to go along with plea bargains that were fashioned to avoid some probation conditions, and that this has angered her colleagues and defense lawyers.
The appeals court rejected the move on Tuesday, but Salcido said her stance long ago earned the enmity of her peers. Bar officials said Salcido was informed of her rating about a week before she requested the order from the appellate court.
The bar does not give specific reasons behind the ratings. But Salcido said she was told that lawyers thought her use of humor in court was inappropriate, and that she was considered “not professional enough.”
It is unusual but not unprecedented for the bar to rate as sitting judge an unqualified, said Patrick Hosey, the president of the bar association.
Salcido’s opponent, Harold Coleman Jr., was given a rating of unable to evaluate.
That is a neutral rating, and means the bar committee doing the analysis did not have sufficient information on the candidate to “fairly and adequately evaluate” a candidate’s ability to be a judge.
Coleman, an arbitrator and lawyer, is one of four candidates who is endorsed by Bettercourtsnow, an organization founded by a now-deceased religious leader that is supported by conservative legal and religious groups. All four are running against sitting judges.
The three other candidates who are endorsed by the group — William Trask, Craig Candelore and Larry “Jake” Kincaid — all received rating of “lacking qualifications.”...
Berry says she will not run
San Diego Union Tribune
Greg Moran
May 20, 2010
Former Superior Court Commissioner Sandra Berry said Thursday morning she will not be running as a write-in candidate for Superior Court Judge DeAnn Salcido's seat.
Berry was drafted by lawyers and others to run in the race, and earlier this week she took out nominating papers and collected the requisite number of signatures to qualify.
But she said that she decided time was too short to mount an effective campaign.
"It's just too late," she said. "I think it's just too hard to win without my name on the ballot."
Absentee voting has already begun, she noted, putting her even further behind the curve.
Her decision not to enter the race means that Salcido and challenger Harold Coleman Jr. will square off for the race.
Lawyers unhappy with those candidates had approached Berry, and there was already word spreading on social networks and e-mail chains throughout the legal community urging support for her.
Judge, husband accused of fraud
Injured woman sues, questions transactions
By Greg Moran
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
June 9, 2007
Superior Court Judge DeAnn Salcido and her husband are being sued for fraud for allegedly selling real estate assets to shield themselves from paying a woman who was badly injured while on a motorcycle ride with the judge's husband in 2004.
In a lawsuit filed May 24, lawyers for the injured woman, Stacy Hardesty, said the judge and her husband, Edward, have sold two properties – one for $1.2 million – taken on debt and transferred assets in an effort to avoid paying Hardesty.
DeAnn Salcido filed for divorce in January. That came after an incident in which she said her husband grabbed her roughly, leading her to obtain a restraining order.
The lawsuit contends that the divorce is an attempt to protect her share of their community property from any judgment against Edward Salcido.
DeAnn Salcido, who hears family law and other cases in El Cajon Superior Court, declined to comment on the lawsuit and referred all questions to her lawyer, Ken Medel...
Office 27:
Harold Coleman Jr: Unable to Evaluate
Judge DeAnn Salcido: Lacking Qualifications
Judge rated unqualified in local bar evaluation
By Greg Moran
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
May 14, 2010
RATINGS FROM THE BAR
Office 14:
Craig Candelore: Lacking Qualifications
Judge Lantz Lewis: Well Qualified.
Office 20:
Stephen Clark: Well Qualified
Jim Miller Jr: Lacking Qualifications
Richard Monroy: Well Qualified
Office 21:
Bill Trask: Lacking Qualifications
Judge Robert Longstreth: Well Qualified
Office 27:
Harold Coleman Jr: Unable to Evaluate
Judge DeAnn Salcido: Lacking Qualifications
Office 34:
Larry “Jake” Kincaid: Lacking Qualifications
Judge Joel Wohlfeil: Well Qualified.
Superior Court Judge DeAnn Salcido, facing an election challenge and under heavy criticism from her colleagues after she filed a legal action against the court a week ago, received the lowest possible rating in the local bar association’s evaluation of candidates.
Salcido was found to be “lacking qualifications” by the San Diego County Bar Association, which evaluates candidates for judicial seats each election. The bar says the evaluations are done as a public service to assist voters.
The process is supposed to be confidential and uses surveys distributed to judges and lawyers. A bar committee also interviews candidates and does other research before making its decision.
Salcido said that while she would have liked a higher rating, the low evaluation did not surprise her because she has ruffled feathers of lawyers and judges.
“I view it as the natural result of the county bar association asking only attorneys and judges of their view of me, and not the general public,” she said.
Last week Salcido took the unusual step of asking the 4th District Court of Appeal to issue an order commanding judges to impose certain probation conditions on misdemeanor domestic violence cases. She contended many judges were not following what she believes state law requires, and that when she stood up for that position, she was harassed by her supervising judge in El Cajon.
Salcido said thatshe was not willing to go along with plea bargains that were fashioned to avoid some probation conditions, and that this has angered her colleagues and defense lawyers.
The appeals court rejected the move on Tuesday, but Salcido said her stance long ago earned the enmity of her peers. Bar officials said Salcido was informed of her rating about a week before she requested the order from the appellate court.
The bar does not give specific reasons behind the ratings. But Salcido said she was told that lawyers thought her use of humor in court was inappropriate, and that she was considered “not professional enough.”
It is unusual but not unprecedented for the bar to rate as sitting judge an unqualified, said Patrick Hosey, the president of the bar association.
Salcido’s opponent, Harold Coleman Jr., was given a rating of unable to evaluate.
That is a neutral rating, and means the bar committee doing the analysis did not have sufficient information on the candidate to “fairly and adequately evaluate” a candidate’s ability to be a judge.
Coleman, an arbitrator and lawyer, is one of four candidates who is endorsed by Bettercourtsnow, an organization founded by a now-deceased religious leader that is supported by conservative legal and religious groups. All four are running against sitting judges.
The three other candidates who are endorsed by the group — William Trask, Craig Candelore and Larry “Jake” Kincaid — all received rating of “lacking qualifications.”...
Berry says she will not run
San Diego Union Tribune
Greg Moran
May 20, 2010
Former Superior Court Commissioner Sandra Berry said Thursday morning she will not be running as a write-in candidate for Superior Court Judge DeAnn Salcido's seat.
Berry was drafted by lawyers and others to run in the race, and earlier this week she took out nominating papers and collected the requisite number of signatures to qualify.
But she said that she decided time was too short to mount an effective campaign.
"It's just too late," she said. "I think it's just too hard to win without my name on the ballot."
Absentee voting has already begun, she noted, putting her even further behind the curve.
Her decision not to enter the race means that Salcido and challenger Harold Coleman Jr. will square off for the race.
Lawyers unhappy with those candidates had approached Berry, and there was already word spreading on social networks and e-mail chains throughout the legal community urging support for her.
Judge, husband accused of fraud
Injured woman sues, questions transactions
By Greg Moran
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
June 9, 2007
Superior Court Judge DeAnn Salcido and her husband are being sued for fraud for allegedly selling real estate assets to shield themselves from paying a woman who was badly injured while on a motorcycle ride with the judge's husband in 2004.
In a lawsuit filed May 24, lawyers for the injured woman, Stacy Hardesty, said the judge and her husband, Edward, have sold two properties – one for $1.2 million – taken on debt and transferred assets in an effort to avoid paying Hardesty.
DeAnn Salcido filed for divorce in January. That came after an incident in which she said her husband grabbed her roughly, leading her to obtain a restraining order.
The lawsuit contends that the divorce is an attempt to protect her share of their community property from any judgment against Edward Salcido.
DeAnn Salcido, who hears family law and other cases in El Cajon Superior Court, declined to comment on the lawsuit and referred all questions to her lawyer, Ken Medel...
Friday, April 30, 2010
Is Teacher Tenure Still Necessary?
Is Teacher Tenure Still Necessary?
by Alan Greenblatt
NPR
April 29, 2010
Tenure is under attack. The century-old system of protecting experienced teachers from arbitrary dismissal — long viewed as sacred — has triggered hot political debates in several states.
"Teacher effectiveness" has emerged as the biggest buzz phrase in education policy circles. Because teachers have such potential for affecting the quality of children's education, some people are starting to argue that it must become easier to get bad teachers out of the classroom.
"There seems to be a lot of drive to do away with tenure," says Sandy Kress, who helped write federal and state education laws as an adviser to George W. Bush and other policymakers. "Tenure has proved to be just a horrible barrier to getting rid of that small percentage of teachers who are just not effective."
Action All Over
This is not merely an academic debate. A bill in Colorado that would change tenure rules and tie them to student performance passed out of a Senate committee last week and has the support of Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter. A Florida bill to abolish tenure was vetoed this month by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, but a similar bill is pending in Louisiana...
Less than 1% fired
Firing teachers is hard. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have each fired fewer than 1 out of 1,000 of their tenured teachers in recent years. Those numbers are not unusual.
Administrators complain that the process is too draining. Reviews of dismissal cases can take years to make their way through the system, costing tens of thousands of dollars each.
Teachers say that administrators are themselves at fault for performing perfunctory, "drive-by" evaluations. One study of selected districts in four states found that 99 percent of teachers receive "satisfactory" ratings.
Sometimes, bad publicity can curb the worst abuses on either side. The Los Angeles Times found last December that L.A. schools deny tenure to fewer than 2 percent of probationary hires, with evaluations often amounting to nothing more than a single, pre-announced classroom visit lasting 30 minutes or less.
Following the report, Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines pledged greater scrutiny. In February, the district announced it would fire more than 110 nontenured teachers for performance -— three times the annual rate in recent years...
by Alan Greenblatt
NPR
April 29, 2010
Tenure is under attack. The century-old system of protecting experienced teachers from arbitrary dismissal — long viewed as sacred — has triggered hot political debates in several states.
"Teacher effectiveness" has emerged as the biggest buzz phrase in education policy circles. Because teachers have such potential for affecting the quality of children's education, some people are starting to argue that it must become easier to get bad teachers out of the classroom.
"There seems to be a lot of drive to do away with tenure," says Sandy Kress, who helped write federal and state education laws as an adviser to George W. Bush and other policymakers. "Tenure has proved to be just a horrible barrier to getting rid of that small percentage of teachers who are just not effective."
Action All Over
This is not merely an academic debate. A bill in Colorado that would change tenure rules and tie them to student performance passed out of a Senate committee last week and has the support of Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter. A Florida bill to abolish tenure was vetoed this month by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, but a similar bill is pending in Louisiana...
Less than 1% fired
Firing teachers is hard. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have each fired fewer than 1 out of 1,000 of their tenured teachers in recent years. Those numbers are not unusual.
Administrators complain that the process is too draining. Reviews of dismissal cases can take years to make their way through the system, costing tens of thousands of dollars each.
Teachers say that administrators are themselves at fault for performing perfunctory, "drive-by" evaluations. One study of selected districts in four states found that 99 percent of teachers receive "satisfactory" ratings.
Sometimes, bad publicity can curb the worst abuses on either side. The Los Angeles Times found last December that L.A. schools deny tenure to fewer than 2 percent of probationary hires, with evaluations often amounting to nothing more than a single, pre-announced classroom visit lasting 30 minutes or less.
Following the report, Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines pledged greater scrutiny. In February, the district announced it would fire more than 110 nontenured teachers for performance -— three times the annual rate in recent years...
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
New Book says we need to get rid of the bottom 5% of teachers
April 27, 2010
Book Argues for How to Improve the Teaching Corps
One of the bolder ideas is to 'deselect' the field's bottom 5 to 10 percent.
By Debra Viadero
Education Week
A new book stitches together ideas—some of which may be controversial—for building an improved corps of teachers from the time they start their professional training until they retire.
“Research clearly shows that teacher quality is the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement,” write Dan Goldhaber and Jane Hannaway, the editors of Creating a New Teaching Profession, which is being published this month by the Urban Institute, a research organization based in Washington.
Yet, they add, “the myriad systems that govern the quality of teachers today are too often disconnected, incoherent, and out of step with the market mechanisms that govern the broader labor market.”
Among the bolder of the book’s suggestions is a call from Stanford University economist Eric A. Hanushek for systematically “deselecting” the least-effective teachers. He calculates that shedding the bottom 5 percent to 10 percent of teachers could, over 20 years, boost American students’ scores on international math tests to the level of their Canadian counterparts and raise the United States’ economic output by $200 billion.
“Relatively modest changes in the bottom end of the distribution have enormous implications for the nation,” Mr. Hanushek concludes...
One reason the teaching profession may be ailing in the United States, experts argue, is that it’s attracting less academically able students than it once did.
In his chapter, for instance, New York University researcher Sean P. Corcoran notes that the percentage of new female teachers drawn from the top tenth of their high school graduating classes shrank from 20 percent in 1964 to slightly more than 11 percent in 2000 as women began to follow other career paths that were once dominated by men. More than a third of new female teachers, on the other hand, came out of the bottom third of their high school classes in 2000—and that proportion hasn’t changed much since the 1960s.
In comparison, some countries that typically score high on international assessments draw teachers from the upper end of the academic-achievement spectrum, according to Mr. Goldhaber. He says that’s in part because, under the more centralized teacher-preparation systems in those countries, the number of entrants is often tightly regulated and there are fewer teacher-training institutions...
Book Argues for How to Improve the Teaching Corps
One of the bolder ideas is to 'deselect' the field's bottom 5 to 10 percent.
By Debra Viadero
Education Week
A new book stitches together ideas—some of which may be controversial—for building an improved corps of teachers from the time they start their professional training until they retire.
“Research clearly shows that teacher quality is the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement,” write Dan Goldhaber and Jane Hannaway, the editors of Creating a New Teaching Profession, which is being published this month by the Urban Institute, a research organization based in Washington.
Yet, they add, “the myriad systems that govern the quality of teachers today are too often disconnected, incoherent, and out of step with the market mechanisms that govern the broader labor market.”
Among the bolder of the book’s suggestions is a call from Stanford University economist Eric A. Hanushek for systematically “deselecting” the least-effective teachers. He calculates that shedding the bottom 5 percent to 10 percent of teachers could, over 20 years, boost American students’ scores on international math tests to the level of their Canadian counterparts and raise the United States’ economic output by $200 billion.
“Relatively modest changes in the bottom end of the distribution have enormous implications for the nation,” Mr. Hanushek concludes...
One reason the teaching profession may be ailing in the United States, experts argue, is that it’s attracting less academically able students than it once did.
In his chapter, for instance, New York University researcher Sean P. Corcoran notes that the percentage of new female teachers drawn from the top tenth of their high school graduating classes shrank from 20 percent in 1964 to slightly more than 11 percent in 2000 as women began to follow other career paths that were once dominated by men. More than a third of new female teachers, on the other hand, came out of the bottom third of their high school classes in 2000—and that proportion hasn’t changed much since the 1960s.
In comparison, some countries that typically score high on international assessments draw teachers from the upper end of the academic-achievement spectrum, according to Mr. Goldhaber. He says that’s in part because, under the more centralized teacher-preparation systems in those countries, the number of entrants is often tightly regulated and there are fewer teacher-training institutions...
Friday, April 16, 2010
Paul Broun: The new stupidest member of Congress
Apr 15, 2010
Paul Broun: The new stupidest member of Congress
Picking Washington's dumbest is an old American parlor game. Today's winner is a census protester from Georgia
By Joe Conason
Salon.com
Selecting the stupidest member of Congress and/or the Senate has confounded Americans for decades if not centuries. With so many painful choices and such continuous competition, the task may simply be impossible, but that has never discouraged appalled observers from trying. Nominees for the dumbest member sometimes have been included in lists of the "worst" or "most corrupt" members, traditional compilation games played in venues from Rolling Stone to CREW to the lamented Radar magazine -- which presciently placed Sen. Jim Bunning at the top of its list in 2006, perhaps realizing that he might one day qualify as the worst and dumbest simultaneously. A couple of years ago, Esquire declared of Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, that "his list of idiot declarations is probably the longest in Washington," and pleaded with Iowa voters to relieve us of him. (They didn't.) The game is so irresistible that even the Brits can't keep from playing occasionally.
Now the current vogue for "constitutional" posturing has elicited fresh stupidity from a number of Republicans, notably Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., a very popular contender who sometimes seems to believe that anything not specifically mentioned in the Constitution itself is prohibited. (Which would leave her without very much to do as a member of Congress, although that paradox probably hasn't occurred to her yet.)
Today, however, Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., is challenging Bachmann's primacy with a public boast that he purposely returned his family's federal census form without filling out all of the questions. You see, Broun feels that any inquiry beyond the constitutional requirement to "enumerate" the number of persons living in his household is, per se, "unconstitutional." He too has failed to notice that the Constitution empowers Congress to pass legislation in the public interest -- and that, in any case, he is not empowered by the Constitution to determine for himself what is or is not constitutional...
Paul Broun: The new stupidest member of Congress
Picking Washington's dumbest is an old American parlor game. Today's winner is a census protester from Georgia
By Joe Conason
Salon.com
Selecting the stupidest member of Congress and/or the Senate has confounded Americans for decades if not centuries. With so many painful choices and such continuous competition, the task may simply be impossible, but that has never discouraged appalled observers from trying. Nominees for the dumbest member sometimes have been included in lists of the "worst" or "most corrupt" members, traditional compilation games played in venues from Rolling Stone to CREW to the lamented Radar magazine -- which presciently placed Sen. Jim Bunning at the top of its list in 2006, perhaps realizing that he might one day qualify as the worst and dumbest simultaneously. A couple of years ago, Esquire declared of Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, that "his list of idiot declarations is probably the longest in Washington," and pleaded with Iowa voters to relieve us of him. (They didn't.) The game is so irresistible that even the Brits can't keep from playing occasionally.
Now the current vogue for "constitutional" posturing has elicited fresh stupidity from a number of Republicans, notably Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., a very popular contender who sometimes seems to believe that anything not specifically mentioned in the Constitution itself is prohibited. (Which would leave her without very much to do as a member of Congress, although that paradox probably hasn't occurred to her yet.)
Today, however, Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., is challenging Bachmann's primacy with a public boast that he purposely returned his family's federal census form without filling out all of the questions. You see, Broun feels that any inquiry beyond the constitutional requirement to "enumerate" the number of persons living in his household is, per se, "unconstitutional." He too has failed to notice that the Constitution empowers Congress to pass legislation in the public interest -- and that, in any case, he is not empowered by the Constitution to determine for himself what is or is not constitutional...
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Mine blast: Coal Boss Don Blankenship got $33 million but ignored safety in West Virgina mine where 25 killed
My question: were these workers represented by a union? It seems not. This is exactly the kind of work that cries out for unionization.
Coal Boss Don Blankenship Cast as Cavalier About Worker Safety in Lawsuits
Investors Also Critical of Massey CEO's 'Extravagant' Pay, Perks
By MATTHEW MOSK and ASA ESLOCKER
Apr. 8, 2010
As more details continue to surface about the checkered safety record of the Massey Energy coal mine where 25 workers perished Monday, the lavish lifestyle and allegedly cavalier attitude of the company's controversial chief executive, as described in lawsuits and corporate documents, are now coming under intensifying scrutiny.
Coal Boss Don Blankenship: If you take photos, "you're liable to get shot."
One miner who worked in Massey mines most of his 25-year career said working for CEO Don Blankenship was "like living under a hammer. It's all about the bottom line, we all know that." The miner, who would only agree to speak with an ABC News reporter if his name was not used, said Blankenship believes in "stretching the men to the limit … they want every ounce out of the men that they can get."
The public record describing Blankenship's bottom-line approach is long, much of it laid out in a series of investor lawsuits filed against Blankenship and his company, and in SEC documents submitted by a Wall Street investment house that made a failed bid to take control of Massey Energy four years ago. In these records, Blankenship was repeatedly criticized for both his approach to safety, and for what one investor called his "extravagant" package of pay and perks.
In just one year – 2005 -- Blankenship was paid $33.7 million in compensation, according to a 2008 lawsuit...
In Mine Safety, a Meek Watchdog
By MICHAEL COOPER, GARDINER HARRIS and ERIC LIPTON
New York Times
April 10, 2010
The Mine Safety and Health Administration was created almost 35 years ago, after deadly explosions at a Kentucky mine, with a mission to conduct more inspections of the nation’s mines and enforce safety standards more strictly. It was strengthened four years ago, after more disasters.
But it remains fundamentally weak in several areas, and it does not always use the powers it has.
The agency can seek to close mines that it deems unsafe and to close repeat offenders, but it rarely does so. The fines it levies are relatively small, and many go uncollected for years. It lacks subpoena power, a basic investigatory tool. Its investigators are not technically law enforcement officers, like those at other agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.
And its criminal sanctions are weak, a result of compromises over the 1977 Mine Act that created the agency. Falsifying records is a felony, for example, while deliberate violations of safety standards that may lead to deaths are misdemeanors...
West Virginia disaster: Will Congress take on coal mining companies?
Mining companies have been slow to adopt new safety requirements. Critics say the West Virginia disaster shows that Congress needs to step in. The industry says it needs clearer guidance.
By Mark Guarino, Staff writer
Christian Science Monitor
April 7, 2010
Chicago
The deaths of 25 coal miners in West Virginia Monday in what is considered the worst mining accident in a quarter century is raising questions about whether a congressional overhaul of mine safety four years ago went far enough.
The Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act, passed in 2006 in response to a disaster in Sago, W.V., that killed 13 miners, was intended to improve miner safety by mandating the installation of preventive and emergency technologies.
But Massey Energy Company, the company that owns the Upper Big Branch South Mine in Whitesville, W.V., where Monday’s accident happened, has been leveled numerous fines for environmental and safety violations in recent years.
Moreover, only 14 percent of mines have complied with MINER Act requirements to install improved communications systems.
This suggests that the MINER Act is not thorough enough in leveling consequences for mining companies or for establishing a timeline for coming to compliance, say several experts. The result is that the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) – the federal agency charged with monitoring coal companies and making them comply with safety standards – essentially has its hands tied.
“The record of [the Massey mine] is problematic, and it may be the [MINER Act] needs an additional amendment...
No signs of life heard in West Virginia mine
Jon Hurdle
Reuters
Wed Apr 7, 2010
MONTCOAL, West Virginia (Reuters) - Drills broke through into a stricken West Virginia mine early on Wednesday but rescuers detected no sign of the four miners missing since an explosion killed 25 people in a major U.S. mine disaster.
The rescue teams banged on pipes at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, but heard no response from the men, Governor Joe Manchin told reporters.
Hopes were dimming that the men would be found alive after Monday's blast, the largest U.S. mine accident since 1984.
...Questions have been raised by experts and observers about Massey's safety record and the laws governing the mining industry. Mining has always been dangerous, but 2009 was the safest ever for U.S. miners, with 34 deaths, according to federal data, 18 fewer than 2008.
Massey's accident rate fell to an all-time low in 2009, the sixth consecutive year its safety record was stronger than the industry average, the company said on its website.
But Upper Big Branch Mine has had three fatalities since 1998 and has a worse-than-average injury rate over the last 10 years, according to federal records. Ellen Smith, editor of Mine Safety and Health News, said the mine has been repeatedly cited for safety violations.
Coal Boss Don Blankenship Cast as Cavalier About Worker Safety in Lawsuits
Investors Also Critical of Massey CEO's 'Extravagant' Pay, Perks
By MATTHEW MOSK and ASA ESLOCKER
Apr. 8, 2010
As more details continue to surface about the checkered safety record of the Massey Energy coal mine where 25 workers perished Monday, the lavish lifestyle and allegedly cavalier attitude of the company's controversial chief executive, as described in lawsuits and corporate documents, are now coming under intensifying scrutiny.
Coal Boss Don Blankenship: If you take photos, "you're liable to get shot."
One miner who worked in Massey mines most of his 25-year career said working for CEO Don Blankenship was "like living under a hammer. It's all about the bottom line, we all know that." The miner, who would only agree to speak with an ABC News reporter if his name was not used, said Blankenship believes in "stretching the men to the limit … they want every ounce out of the men that they can get."
The public record describing Blankenship's bottom-line approach is long, much of it laid out in a series of investor lawsuits filed against Blankenship and his company, and in SEC documents submitted by a Wall Street investment house that made a failed bid to take control of Massey Energy four years ago. In these records, Blankenship was repeatedly criticized for both his approach to safety, and for what one investor called his "extravagant" package of pay and perks.
In just one year – 2005 -- Blankenship was paid $33.7 million in compensation, according to a 2008 lawsuit...
In Mine Safety, a Meek Watchdog
By MICHAEL COOPER, GARDINER HARRIS and ERIC LIPTON
New York Times
April 10, 2010
The Mine Safety and Health Administration was created almost 35 years ago, after deadly explosions at a Kentucky mine, with a mission to conduct more inspections of the nation’s mines and enforce safety standards more strictly. It was strengthened four years ago, after more disasters.
But it remains fundamentally weak in several areas, and it does not always use the powers it has.
The agency can seek to close mines that it deems unsafe and to close repeat offenders, but it rarely does so. The fines it levies are relatively small, and many go uncollected for years. It lacks subpoena power, a basic investigatory tool. Its investigators are not technically law enforcement officers, like those at other agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.
And its criminal sanctions are weak, a result of compromises over the 1977 Mine Act that created the agency. Falsifying records is a felony, for example, while deliberate violations of safety standards that may lead to deaths are misdemeanors...
West Virginia disaster: Will Congress take on coal mining companies?
Mining companies have been slow to adopt new safety requirements. Critics say the West Virginia disaster shows that Congress needs to step in. The industry says it needs clearer guidance.
By Mark Guarino, Staff writer
Christian Science Monitor
April 7, 2010
Chicago
The deaths of 25 coal miners in West Virginia Monday in what is considered the worst mining accident in a quarter century is raising questions about whether a congressional overhaul of mine safety four years ago went far enough.
The Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act, passed in 2006 in response to a disaster in Sago, W.V., that killed 13 miners, was intended to improve miner safety by mandating the installation of preventive and emergency technologies.
But Massey Energy Company, the company that owns the Upper Big Branch South Mine in Whitesville, W.V., where Monday’s accident happened, has been leveled numerous fines for environmental and safety violations in recent years.
Moreover, only 14 percent of mines have complied with MINER Act requirements to install improved communications systems.
This suggests that the MINER Act is not thorough enough in leveling consequences for mining companies or for establishing a timeline for coming to compliance, say several experts. The result is that the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) – the federal agency charged with monitoring coal companies and making them comply with safety standards – essentially has its hands tied.
“The record of [the Massey mine] is problematic, and it may be the [MINER Act] needs an additional amendment...
No signs of life heard in West Virginia mine
Jon Hurdle
Reuters
Wed Apr 7, 2010
MONTCOAL, West Virginia (Reuters) - Drills broke through into a stricken West Virginia mine early on Wednesday but rescuers detected no sign of the four miners missing since an explosion killed 25 people in a major U.S. mine disaster.
The rescue teams banged on pipes at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, but heard no response from the men, Governor Joe Manchin told reporters.
Hopes were dimming that the men would be found alive after Monday's blast, the largest U.S. mine accident since 1984.
...Questions have been raised by experts and observers about Massey's safety record and the laws governing the mining industry. Mining has always been dangerous, but 2009 was the safest ever for U.S. miners, with 34 deaths, according to federal data, 18 fewer than 2008.
Massey's accident rate fell to an all-time low in 2009, the sixth consecutive year its safety record was stronger than the industry average, the company said on its website.
But Upper Big Branch Mine has had three fatalities since 1998 and has a worse-than-average injury rate over the last 10 years, according to federal records. Ellen Smith, editor of Mine Safety and Health News, said the mine has been repeatedly cited for safety violations.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Bankers Without a Clue
Paul KrugmanBankers Without a Clue
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
January 14, 2010
The official Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — the group that aims to hold a modern version of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, whose investigations set the stage for New Deal bank regulation — began taking testimony on Wednesday. In its first panel, the commission grilled four major financial-industry honchos. What did we learn?
Well, if you were hoping for a Perry Mason moment — a scene in which the witness blurts out: “Yes! I admit it! I did it! And I’m glad!” — the hearing was disappointing. What you got, instead, was witnesses blurting out: “Yes! I admit it! I’m clueless!”
O.K., not in so many words. But the bankers’ testimony showed a stunning failure, even now, to grasp the nature and extent of the current crisis. And that’s important: It tells us that as Congress and the administration try to reform the financial system, they should ignore advice coming from the supposed wise men of Wall Street, who have no wisdom to offer.
Consider what has happened so far: The U.S. economy is still grappling with the consequences of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; trillions of dollars of potential income have been lost; the lives of millions have been damaged, in some cases irreparably, by mass unemployment; millions more have seen their savings wiped out; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, will lose essential health care because of the combination of job losses and draconian cutbacks by cash-strapped state governments.
And this disaster was entirely self-inflicted. This isn’t like the stagflation of the 1970s, which had a lot to do with soaring oil prices, which were, in turn, the result of political instability in the Middle East. This time we’re in trouble entirely thanks to the dysfunctional nature of our own financial system. Everyone understands this — everyone, it seems, except the financiers themselves.
There were two moments in Wednesday’s hearing that stood out. One was when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase declared that a financial crisis is something that “happens every five to seven years. We shouldn’t be surprised.” In short, stuff happens, and that’s just part of life.
But the truth is that the United States managed to avoid major financial crises for half a century after the Pecora hearings were held and Congress enacted major banking reforms. It was only after we forgot those lessons, and dismantled effective regulation, that our financial system went back to being dangerously unstable...
Monday, July 30, 2007
Schools don't fire incompetent teachers because they don't have competent teachers to replace them with
It's a myth that schools want to fire incompetent teachers.
Who would replace them?
Or maybe the problem is that administrators are too lazy to document incompetency. Or could it be that principals just don't know who to start with? There's quite a bit of incompetency going around, and not just in the teaching profession.
Susan Ohanian notes that "...the main targets of firing and harrassment are the outspoken teachers who want to change the system, or who criticize the boss, NOT the lazy, incompetent teachers, who are portrayed as the chief beneficiaries of tenure."*
Susan is right.
Administrators (and teachers) who are unsure of their own abilities often react with hostility and aggression when a colleague starts talking about how things could be improved.
*http://www.susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.html?id=7368
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