Education – Page 23 – artdiamondblog.com

School Choice “Makes Parents and Students Happier with Their Schools”

Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for ‘Superman'” movie has brought renewed attention to the case for school choice. New York Times commentator Ross Douthat reasonably discusses that case:

(p. A21) Guggenheim’s movie, which follows five families through the brutal charter school lotteries that determine whether their kids will escape from public “dropout factories,” stirs an entirely justified outrage at the system’s unfairnesses and cruelties. This outrage needs to be supplemented, though, with a dose of realism about what education reformers can reasonably hope to accomplish, and what real choice and competition would ultimately involve.

With that in mind, I have a modest proposal: Copies of Frederick Hess’s recent National Affairs essay, “Does School Choice ‘Work’?” should be handed out at every “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” showing, as a sober-minded complement to Guggenheim’s cinematic call to arms.
. . .
A real marketplace in education, he suggests, probably wouldn’t fund schools directly at all. It would only fund students, tying a school’s budget to the number of children seeking to enroll. If there are 150 applicants for a charter school, they should all bring their funding with them — and take it away from the failing schools they’re trying to escape.
This is a radical idea, guaranteed to meet intense resistance from just about every educational interest group. But Hess makes a compelling case that it needs to be the school choice movement’s long-term goal, if reformers hope to do more than just tinker around the edges of the system.
In the shorter term, meanwhile, he suggests that school choice advocates need to make a case for greater competition that doesn’t depend on test scores alone. Maybe charter schools, merit pay and vouchers won’t instantly turn every American child into a test-acing dynamo. But if they “only” create a more cost-effective system that makes parents and students happier with their schools — well, that would be no small feat, and well worth fighting for.

For the full commentary, see:
ROSS DOUTHAT. “Grading School Choice.” The New York Times (Mon., October 11, 2010): A21.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated October 10, 2010.)

The Hess article is:
Hess, Frederick M. “Does School Choice “Work”?” National Affairs, Issue 5, FALL 2010.

“The Roiling World of Opera More Appealingly Straightforward than the Roiling World of Academe”

At left, Richard Gill as Harvard economist. At right, Richard “Gill as Frère Laurent, one of his numerous singing roles he preformed at the Met.” Source of part of caption, and of photos: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B19) Richard T. Gill, in all statistical probability the only Harvard economist to sing 86 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, died on Monday in Providence, R.I. He was 82.
. . .
Mr. Gill, a longtime Harvard faculty member who wrote many widely used economics textbooks, did not undertake serious vocal training (which he began as an anti-smoking regimen) until he was nearly 40. At the time, he had seen perhaps 10 operas and rarely listened to classical music.
. . .
In some respects, he later said, Mr. Gill found the roiling world of opera more appealingly straightforward than the roiling world of academe.
“Performing is a great reality test,” he told Newsweek in 1975. “There’s no tenure in it and the feedback is much less complicated than you get in academia. When you go out on that stage, you put your life on the line.”

For the full obituary, see:
MARGALIT FOX. “Richard T. Gill, Economist and Opera Singer, Dies at 82.” The New York Times (Thurs., October 28, 2010): B19.
(Note: ellipses added.)

If the Uncredentialed Succeed, It Must Be Luck

(p. 33) Newcomen and Calley had, in broad strokes, the design for a working engine. They had enjoyed some luck, though it was anything but dumb luck. This didn’t seem to convince the self-named (p. 34) experimental philosopher J. T. Desaguliers, a Huguenot refugee Like Papin, who became one of Isaac Newton’s assistants and (later) a priest in the Church of England. Desaguliers wrote, just before his death in 1744, that the two men had made their engine work, but “not being either philosophers to understand the reason, or mathematicians enough to calculate the powers and to proportion the parts, very luckily by accident found what they sought for.”

The notion of’ Newcomen’s scientific ignorance persists to this day. One of its expressions is the legend that the original engine was made to cycle automatically by the insight of a boy named Humphrey Potter, who built a mazelike network of catches and strings from the plug rod to open the valves and close them. It is almost as if a Dartmouth ironmonger simply had to have an inordinate amount of luck to succeed where so many had failed.
The discovery of the power of injected water was luck; understanding and exploiting it was anything but. Newcomen and CalIey replaced the accidental hole in the cylinder with an injection valve, and, ingeniously, attached it to the piston itself. When the piston reached the bottom of the cylinder, it automatically closed the injection valve and opened another valve, permitting the water to flow out.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Arne Duncan on “Waiting for Superman” and Teachers’ Unions

Arne Duncan. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 26) Have you seen the new film “Waiting for Superman,” a documentary opening this week that makes public education in this country seem totally dysfunctional?
I did. I think it’s going to help the country to understand the tremendous sense of urgency that I feel. We have parents who know their child is getting a subpar education. That is devastating to them and ultimately it’s devastating to our country.
The film blames teachers’ unions for the failure of public schools because the unions have made it almost impossible to fire lazy teachers. Are you against teachers’ unions?
Of course not. I’m a big fan of Randi’s.

Randi Weingarten, of the American Federation of Teachers? The film depicts her as a villain.
I think Randi is providing some courageous leadership and is actually taking some heat internally in the union because she said publicly that the union shouldn’t be protecting bad teachers.

For the full interview, see:
DEBORAH SOLOMON. “Questions for Arne Duncan; The School of Hard Drives.” The New York Times, Magazine Section (Sun., September 17, 2010): 26.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 16, 2010.)

Carbon Dioxide Increased After the Globe Warmed, Not Before

The passages quoted below are from an opinion piece by retired physicist Jack Kasher who was a colleague of mine at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

I was pleased to see that the Millard school district pulled Laurie David’s book, “The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming,” due to “a major factual error” in a chart that shows rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels dating back 650,000 years. The chart claims to show that global warming is caused by increases in carbon dioxide levels, but the facts show that this is not the case.

In May, I attended an international conference on global warming in Chicago, with 73 speakers from 23 countries. The book and its erroneous chart were discussed there. (Go online to http://www.heartland.org/events/2010Chicago/index.html and click on “proceedings” to see most of the talks and PowerPoint presentations.)
When the error is corrected, the chart will show that in every single case over this time span the Earth warmed up first, followed by a later increase in carbon dioxide. This is clear proof that in the past global warming was not caused by an increase in CO2. If anything, it is the other way around. In each instance, something other than CO2 caused the temperature increase, which then might have made the CO2 rise. This chart shows that past history actually contradicts David’s main assumption in her book — namely that man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming.

For the full commentary, see:

Dr. Jack Kasher. “Midlands Voices: Let’s include uncertainties in global-warming lessons.” Omaha World-Herald (Wednesday June 30, 2010): ??.

Defenders of Climategate Benefit from Global Warming Fears

(p. A15) Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world’s leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called “a nice, tidy story” of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.

Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, “nothing to see here.”
. . .
One of the panel’s four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)–the source of the Climategate emails–was established in Mr. Boulton’s school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.”
This purportedly independent review comes on the heels of two others–one by the University of East Anglia itself and the other by Penn State University, both completed in the spring, concerning its own employee, Prof. Michael Mann. Mr. Mann was one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed. These two reviews also saw no evil. For example, Penn State “determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community.”
Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources, that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant loss of funding.
It’s impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren’t looking.

For the full commentary, see
PATRICK J. MICHAELS. “The Climategate Whitewash Continues; Global warming alarmists claim vindication after last year’s data manipulation scandal. Don’t believe the ‘independent’ reviews..” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., JULY 12, 2010): A15.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated JULY 10, 2010.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

In the Age of Vacuum Tubes, 6th Grader’s Dad Showed Him How Transistors Work

Wozniak went on to invent the personal computer.
This example would probably fit with some of what Malcolm Gladwell claims in his bestseller Outliers.

(p. 15) I have to point out here that at no time did my dad make a big deal about my progress in electronics. He taught me stuff, sure, but he always acted as if it was just normal for me. By the sixth grade, I was really advanced in math and science, everyone knew it, and I’d been tested for IQ and they told us it was 200-plus. But my dad never acted like this was something he should push me along with. He pulled out a blackboard from time to time, a tiny little blackboard we had in our house on Edmonton Avenue, and when I asked, he would answer anything and make diagrams for it. I remember how he showed me what happened if you put a plus voltage into a transistor and got a minus voltage out the other end of the transistor. There must have been an inverter, a type of logic gate. And he even physically taught me how to make an AND gate and an OR gate out of parts he got–parts called diodes and resistors. And he showed me how they needed a transistor in between to amplify the signal and connect the output of one gate to the input of the other.

(p. 16) To this very moment, that is the way every single digital device on the planet works at its most basic level.
He took the time–a lot of time–to show me those few little things. They were little things to him, even though Fairchild and Texas Instruments had just developed the transistor only a decade earlier.
It’s amazing, really, to think that my dad taught me about transistors back when almost no one saw anything but vacuum tubes. So he was at the top of the state of the art, probably because his secret job put him in touch with such advanced technology. So I ended up being at the state of the art, too.
The way my dad taught me, though, was not to rote-memorize how parts are connected to form a gate, but to learn where the electrons flowed to make the gate do its job. To truly internalize and understand what is going on, not just read stuff off some blueprint or out of some book.
Those lessons he taught me still drive my intelligence and my methods for all the computer designs I do today.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

The reference to the Gladwell book is:
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008.

Wozniak’s Dad Taught Him the Power of Technology

(p. 12) . . . my dad taught me . . . a lot about electronics. Boy, do I owe a lot to him for this. He first started telling me things and explaining things about electronics when I was really, really young–before I was even four years old. This is before he had that top secret job at Lockheed, when he worked at Electronic Data Systems in the Los Angeles area. One of my first memories is his taking me to his workplace on a weekend and showing me a few electronic parts, putting them on a table with me so I got to play with them and look at them. I can still picture him standing there working on some kind of equipment. I don’t know if he was soldering or what, but I do remember him hooking something up to something else that looked like a little TV set. I now know it was an oscilloscope. And he told me he was trying to get something done, trying to get the picture on the screen with a line (it was a waveform) stable-looking so he could show his boss that his design worked.

And I remember sitting there and being so little, and thinking: Wow, what a great, great world he’s living in. I mean, that’s all I (p. 13) thought: Wow. For people who know how to do this stuff–how to take these little parts and make them work together to do something–well, these people must be the smartest people hi the world. That was really what went through my head, way back then.
Now, I was, of course, too young at that point to decide that I wanted to be an engineer. That came a few years later. I hadn’t even been exposed to science fiction or books about inventors yet, but just then, at that moment, I could see right before my eyes that whatever my dad was doing, whatever it was, it was important and good.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.
(Note: ellipses added.)

“Empower Parents to Choose the School that’s Best for Their Children”

The author of the commentary quoted below is an African-American Democratic State Senator in Pennsylvania, and is running for Governor in that state’s Democratic primary which will be held on May 18, 2010.

(p. A17) As an African-American legislator, I’ve seen children in inner-city schools trapped, and I’ve seen kids in rural areas with no choice but to stay in underperforming schools. Changing the status quo is a big reason why I’m running for governor.

My mom was also a public school teacher, so make no mistake, I know how hard they work. At the same time, schools must also be able to terminate, not just reassign, poor performing teachers. And when we empower parents to choose the school that’s best for their children, it serves as a constant audit of a school’s quality because parents are able to leave bad schools and enroll their children in better performing schools.
I hope that Pennsylvania receives a Race to the Top grant. But unless we’re willing to fundamentally change the system, the money’s impact will be minimal. Children in our state can’t wait any longer: Now is the time for school choice.

For the full commentary, see:
ANTHONY HARDY WILLIAMS. “Pennsylvania Kids Deserve School Choice; Bad public schools hurt poor and rural children the most.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., MAY 12, 2010): A17.

PowerPoint Useful for Graphs and for “Hypnotizing Chickens”

“A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim.” Source of caption and graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
. . .
(p. A8) Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
. . .
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

For the full story, see:
COREY ELISABETH BUMILLER. “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 27, 2010): A1 & A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 26, 2010.)

An interesting, but overdone critique of PowerPoint by an intelligent expert on graphics is:
Tufte, Edward R. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2003.