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editor
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 Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2009 11:13 am Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
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Annals of Education
Most likely to succeed
Malcolm Gladwell
Dec. 15/08
| Quote: | One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.
It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. (emphasis added) Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers. ...
Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. “So let’s see,” he began, standing up at the blackboard. “Special right triangles. We’re going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas.” He drew two triangles. “Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.” He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who’d evidently missed a few classes. “See what you can remember, Ben,” the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: “I’m going to give you a way to get to it.” He made a quick suggestion: “How about that?” Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. “That’s all right!” He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.
“In a group like this, the standard m.o. would be: he’s at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he’s doing and who doesn’t know,” Pianta said. “But he’s giving individualized feedback. He’s off the charts on feedback.” Pianta and his team watched in awe. (-- pgs. 37-40) |
Yes, and merit pay for good teachers; termination for the others!
The New York Times Magazine
Can good teaching be learned?
There are more than three million teachers in the United States, and Doug Lemov is trying to prove that he can teach them to be better.
By Elizabeth Green
March 7/10
| Quote: | ... Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. "If we don't change the (teaching) personnel," he said, "all we're doing is changing the chairs."
The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls "a different caliber of person" into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests - and firing those who don't measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city's best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. "Merit pay," a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration's education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called The Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students' academic performance.
Incentives are intuitively appealing: if a teacher could make real money, maybe more people would choose teaching over finance or engineering or law, expanding the labor pool. And no one wants incompetent teachers in the classroom. ...
By figuring out what makes the great teachers great, and passing that on to the mass of teachers in the middle, he (Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist who studies education) said, "we could ensure that the average classroom tomorrow was seeing the types of gains that the top quarter of our classrooms see today." He has made a guess about the effect that change would have. "We could close the gap between the United States and Japan on those international tests within two years."
Kane is serious about finding the answers. He took a leave from Harvard in 2008 to work on a $335 million Gates Foundation project that will identify and support effective teaching practices. ... (-- pgs. 32-46) |
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| Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2009 8:45 am Post subject: |
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Improving the Social Security Disability Decision Process
Committee on Improving the Disability Decision Process: SSA's Listing of Impairments and Agency Access to Medical Expertise Board on Military and Veterans Health
John D. Stobo, Michael McGeary and David K. Barnes, Editors
Institute of Medicine of the National Academies
Paperback
| Quote: | The Social Security Administration (SSA) asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to study its medical procedures and criteria for determining disability and to make recommendations for improving the timeliness and accuracy of its disability decisions. SSA asked the IOM to help in two broad areas, broken down in to 10 specific tasks (footnote omitted).
First, SSA asked IOM to recommend ways to improve the use of medical expertise in the disability determination process, including how medical expertise can best be provided to support case adjudication by the 54 Disability Determination Services (the state agencies that make the initial disability determinations for SSA, called DDSs) and in appeals hearings held by SSA at 144 hearings offices around the country, as well as advise on the organization and qualifications of supporting medical experts. ...
Under the Social Security Act, an individual is considered to be "disabled" for Social Security purposes if he or she is unable "to engage in any substantial gainful activity by reason of any medically determinable physical or mental impairment which can be expected to result in death or which has lasted or cab eb expect to last for a continuous period of not less than 12 months." Further, "[a]n individual shall be determined to be under a disability only if his physical or mental impairment or impairments are such severity that he is not only unable tyo do his previous work but cannot, considering his age, education, and work experience, engage in any other kind of substantial gainful work which exists in the national economy...." (From the Summary, pgs. 1-3) |
| Quote: | ... The nine examples of Listing-level impairments that the Social Security Administration (SSA)) originally provided to guide decision making included the loss of vision, hearing, or speech; loss of use of two limbs, progressive diseases such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and heart and lung conditions that have resulted in major loss of physical function; terminal cancers; and neurological or mental impairments requiring institutionalization or constant supervision.
Subsequently, the concept of disability has changed in recognition that disability, as distinct from impairment, is not just inherent in the individual and his or her medical condition but is the result of the interaction between the person with impairments and features of the socioeconomic environment in which the person lives, such as the presence or lack or accessible transportation and practical workplace accommodations. Under this concept, two people with the same impairment might have quite different degrees of work disability. For example, a person with an injury that permanently limits use of an arm, who is 55 years old, has limited education and has a work history of manual labor, would be very disabled, while a person with the same impairment with a law degree may not be disabled at all. Similarly, two people with impairments of quite different severity might be equally disabled from working. (emphasis added) (From Chapter 2, Evolving Concepts of Disability, pgs. 18-19) |
| Quote: | | In addition to long claim-processing time, there has been an overall upward trend in disability claim filings since 1989 and a corresponding increase in case backlogs. At the DDS initial claim level, case backlogs that totaled less than 300,000 in the late 1980s were nearly 625,000 by 2004. At the ALJ hearing level, the increase has been even more dramatic - from less than 200,000 to more than 700,000. By the end of FY 2006, the initial backlog had fallen by 11 percent to 555,000 but the queue for ALJ hearings had grown by 13 percent to 715,000. (footnotes and citations omitted) (From Claim-Processing Time, p. 58) |
| Quote: | All DDSs throughout the country operate under the same federal procedures for making disability decisions for SSA, yet there is considerable variation among states in decision outcomes. In 2004, the percentage of initial claims allowed by individual state DDSs varied widely, from around 25 percent in low-allowance-rate states such as Tennessee and Mississippi to more than 50 percent in high-allowance-rate states such as Hawaii, New Jersey, and New Hampshire. There is also wide variation in the bases for allowances. (emphasis added) In 2003, initial claims were allowed based on meeting the Listings in less than 35 percent of the initial favorable decisions in New York, Vermont, and Minnesota. But the same basis was used for allowance in more than 55 percent of the initial favorable decisions in Illinois, South Dakota, Indiana, and Oklahoma. In North Dakota, the figure was 65 percent. States like Indiana and Washington found imnpairments equivalent to the Listings in only 2-3 percent of the allowances. In contrast, Vermont found impairments equivalent to the Listings in more than 21 percent of its allowances.
The percentage of allowances based on the Listings varies less across states in some conditions than in others. The percentage of allowances made for malignant neoplastic disease ranges between 85 and 98 percent across DDSs. The range is much wider for mental disorders. The percentage of allowances for mental disorders based on the Listings varies between 36 and 86 percent.
Variability in decision-making not limited to allowances. ...
There are also significant state-to-state variations in procedures and administrative arrangements. (emphasis added) ...
ALJs, who decide disability appeals throughout the country, also operate under the same federal rules in making disability decisions. However, data about hearing decision outcomes on a state-by-state basis show considerable variation in outcomes. ...
A claimant cannot be awarded disability benefits unless there is a medical basis for his or her impairment. Therefore, SSA relies heavily on medical expertise for claims adjudication. However, not all DDSs or regional appeals offices have access to a full range of medical expertise. ...
At the field office level, states do not have formal or systematic quality assurance procedures for evaluation of medical information collected on applications for disability. ...
As summarized by the Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB, 2006:7-8):
Over the years policy makers and administrators have identified many factors, in addition to the inherent subjectivity of the statutory definition of disability, that may affect the consistency of disability decision making. ... (From Variability in Decision Making, pgs. 58- 61) |
| Quote: | External Input Affecting the Listings
No matter how reliable and valide the Listings may be at any given moment, they are constantly affected by external developments. These include changes in disease patterns, advances in scientific knowledge and medical practice, advances in assistive technologies, and changes in the workplace affecting workers in terms of job requirements and potential sources of injury.
The most common devices that government agencies use to ensure that evidence-based regulations are kept current are:
. feedback from the regulatory process
. staff research
. external advisory committees
SSA has expanded regulatory feedback in recent years by sponsoring policy conferences and using advanced notices of proposed rulemaking (ANPRAMs). At policy conferences, medical specialists present the latest research and medical practices and interact with beneficiaries, advocates, and SSA disability officials. ANPRMs solicit suggestions from all interested parties on how the Listings should be revised. The committee supports these efforts to incorporate more public and professional input into the Listings revisions process.
The Office of Medical Policy, the staff component of the SSA Office of Disability Programs, is responsible for maintaining the Listings. Currently, the Office of Medical Policy has seven medical officers, who are charged with keeping abreast of the medical literature, such as the results of clinical trials, research on outcomes, and practice guidlines. Five are physicians with expertise in psychiatry, physical medicine and rehabilitation, neurology, and pediatrics. In addition, there is a speech and language pathologist and a psychologist. This office is small and does not have experts in all the major specialties (although it can draw on the advice of specialists in the federal DDS), so its ability to supply the necessary medical expertise to the Listings revision process is limited.
RECOMMENDATION 4. SSA should ensure that its Office of Medical Policy has the expertise relevant to the full range of listed impairments and has the resources to stay knowledgeable concerning new developments in medicine and rehabilitation, for example, by conducting systematic literature review on a periodic basis. (-- pgs. 102-103) |
| Quote: | Unfortunately, appropriate and necessary medical care and treatment for serious disorders is not readily availble to everyone. For individuals who do not receive treatment, thse listings may not apply. As SSA notes in the preface to the cardiovascular listings, "If you do not receive treatment, you cannot show an impairment that meets the criteria of most of these listings."
Variable access to quality health care services throughout the country is an unfortunate fact, but is beyond the capacity of SSA to remedy. Observation of a patient's response to medical treatment is a standard medical pracctice and legitimate way for SSA to evaluate impairment severity in its rules. The fact that all applicants may not be able to document impairment severity this way does not make it any less valuable as a method to assess impairment severity in those who can, especially given that the Listings are only a screening to identify obvious allowances.
Ideally, individuals applying for disability benefits would be evaluated and receive the medical, vocational rehabilitation, and employment services that would enable them to resume working gainfully. Instead, in the current system, many individuals with remediable work limitations are not eligible for medical care or vocational rehabilitation until after they have completed the process of qualifying for cash benefits. At that point, they may become eligible for Medicaid if they are SSI recipients (unless they have already qualified under other criteria, such as those for the Children with Special Health Care Needs program). SSDI beneficiaries must wait for two years to be eligible for Medicare. Only then may these individuals be able to obtain the medical care they need.
This requirement obviously disadvantages poor people and others without adequate health care coverage, but any unfairness is the result of the social and political system that created these inequities, not SSA's Listings, which is meant to be the most efficient method available for easily identifying obvious allowance cases. (emphasis added) (From Adaptability of the Listings, pgs. 105-106) |
| Quote: | Estimated Average Monthly Social Security Benefits Payable in January 2008:
Disabled Worker, Spouse and One or More Children $1,690
All Disabled Workers $1,004
(From Social Security Online, Questions, available Oct. 14/08) |
More about U.S. Social Security:
Disability Income Insurance:
The Unique Risk
Hardcover
By former Paul Revere Corporation president Charles E. Soule
| Quote: | SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY PROGRAM
With the passage of the 1956 legislation that first added disability income benefits to the Social Security program came marked changes upon the private insurance sector. Similar to the intent of the initial Social Security retirement and old-age legislation, Social Security disability benefits were intended to be only a "floor of coverage." As the years passed, this proved not to be the case as far as Social Security disability benefits were concerned. The initial 1956 legislation provided disability coverage for only those disabilities that occurred over age 50, lasted more than 12 months, and were expected to be total and permanent. The level of benefits was modest, and individual insurers of disability income essentially ignored potential benefits from this source in their underwriting limits. Then in teh 1960s, the program was expanded to cover all Social Security covered workers, regardless of age, and the period at which benefits could become payable was reduced from one year to six months. Later on in the 1960s and continuing at a more rapid rate throughout the 1970s, Congress passed a series of bills that increased the level of benefit payments under the Social Security program, including disability income. With such an expansion of government benefits, it was no longer possible for private insurers to ignore the potential benefit payments from Social Security disability because of the dangers of overinsurance. (Chapter 20, Governmental Disability Programs, p. 183) |
| Quote: | ENVIRONMENT
Economic Climate
The economic climate in which we operate and the level of unemployment will continue to have a direct impact upon disability income results. Will double-digit inflation prove to be an acceptable norm in our economy? If this proves to be the case, ti will have a direct effect on expense rates, product design, and the general stability of in-force business. Inflationary periods tend to to increase lapses and policy makeovers, since the contract fails to cover the insurer's income needs after a short period of time. We will continue to experience periodic recessions, some steeper than others, with generally the same effect on our business as in the past. Morbidity will increase during recessionary periods, and the steeper the recession, the higher the morbidity. A true economic depression will have financial consequences similar to those of the 1930s depression. The volatility of disability experience is so directly tied to the economy and unemployment that adverse financial consequences cannot be avoided. (emphasis added) The successful disability manager is the one who can significantly blunt such adverse effects. (From Chapter 22, Disability Income Future, p. 199) |
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| Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 2:43 pm Post subject: |
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COUNTRY LIFE
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Interview of the Week
A scholar's lair
50, Plantation Road, Oxford. The former home of Sir Howard and Lady Colvin
Just before its collections and contents were sold off, Richard Hewlings had a last glimpse of the house this great architectural scholar designed for himself
Oct. 22/08
| Quote: | Sir Howard Colvin, doyen of the profession of architectural history, was a small man. He had microscopic handwriting and he cultivated alpines. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that, from 1970 to his death in 2007, he lived in the tiniest street in Oxford, down which a car can only just be squeezed from off the Woodstock Road.
In 1948, he had obtained a senior research fellowship in history at St. John's, the first non-Oxonian to be elected a Fellow there. Sir Howard (he was knighted in 1996) was to remain at St John's for the rest of his life, as Librarian (1950-84), Tutor (1953-78), and Emeritus Fellow (1987-2007). Plantation Road is so close to St John's that, after Lady Colvin's death in 2003, he could walk there every day for lunch. (-- p. 60) |
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| Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2009 10:23 am Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
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The Man in the Rockefeller Suit
By snatching his seven-year-old daughter from her mother’s custody, after a bitter divorce, the man calling himself Clark Rockefeller blew the lid off a lifelong con game which had culminated with his posing as a scion of the famous dynasty. The 47-year-old impostor charmed his way into exclusive communities, clubs, and financial institutions—marrying a Harvard M.B.A.; working at Kidder, Peabody; and showing off an extraordinary art collection—until his arrest brought him face-to-face with his past and with questions regarding skeletal remains dug up in a California backyard..
January, 2009
| Quote: | Their apartment, at 55th Street and Sixth Avenue, was a showcase for their art. Furnishings were minimal, and Clark’s dog was given free rein. “We celebrated our first art purchase, a large painting by Rothko, on a cold, wet New York afternoon,” Sandra wrote in Artnews. “Our dealer and a Rothko expert had just arrived at our apartment when Yates, our 85-pound Gordon setter, returned from his walk, jumped on his usual spot on the sofa, and shook his head. A four-inch-long swath of saliva emerged from his mouth.” Naturally, it landed on the Rothko, and the art expert carefully wiped it off with a paper towel. Sandra wrote that the incident was evidence of her husband’s insistence that fine art and purebred dogs could live together harmoniously, despite their “slight incompatibilities.” …
As her position with McKinsey grew, Sandra was away from her husband more and more, which left him with plenty of time to walk Yates in Central Park, where he would later say, “my dog was very much in love with Amelia, Henry Kissinger’s dog.” Broadway producer Jeffrey Richards crossed paths with Rockefeller while walking his dog through the park one day. …
Sharlene Spingler, a writer and P.R. executive, met Rockefeller while walking her Shar-Pei and English setter in Tudor City, and soon they began walking their dogs together. … She introduced him to her friends and took him to the private clubs to which she belonged, and to which he would soon belong as well. …
“You’re walking your dog with a Rockefeller? Wow!” the noted New York-based artist William Quigley, whose work is collected by politicians, entertainers …., asked a friend one day. Not only is he a Rockefeller, the friend replied, but he loves your work. …
… neither Rockefeller nor the Whitney Museum ever bought a Quigley painting from Gagosian. Rockefeller did acquire three Quigley works, though: he bought one from the artist, got one as a gift, and picked up a third at an estate sale for a nominal sum.
None of Rockefellers new friends, who included a respected Park Avenue physician and a top Japanese female executive at Moody’s Investors Service, probed too deeply into the stories he told them. They were all too content to bask in his glow. … (-- pgs. 129-130) |
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| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 10:09 am Post subject: |
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From Hedge Fund Gamblers:
The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
Risk Mismanagement
Were the measures used to evaluate Wall Street trades flawed? Or was the mistake ignoring them?
By Joe Nocera
Jan. 4/09
| Quote: | As we approached his car, he (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the best-selling author of The Black Swan) began talking about his own performance in 2008. Although he is no longer a full-time trader, he remains a principal in a hedge fund he helped found, Black Swan Protection Protocol. His fund makes trades that either gain or lose small amounts of money in normal times but can make oversize gains when a black swan appears. Taleb likes to say that, as a trader, he has made money only three times in his life — in the crash of 1987, during the dot-com bust more than a decade later and now. But all three times he has made a killing. With the world crashing around it, his fund was up 65 to 115 percent for the year. Taleb chuckled. “They wouldn’t listen to me,” he said finally. “So I decided, to hell with them, I’ll take their money instead.” ...
... There was so much schadenfreude associated with L.T.C.M. — it had Nobel Prize winners among its partners! — that it was easy for the rest of Wall Street to view its fall as an example of comeuppance. And for a hedge fund that promoted the ingeniousness of its risk measures, it took far greater risks than it ever acknowledged.
For these reasons, other firms took to rationalizing away the fall of L.T.C.M.; they viewed it as a human failure rather than a failure of risk modeling. The collapse only amplified the feeling on Wall Street that firms needed to be able to understand their risks for the entire firm. Only VaR could do that. And finally, there was a belief among some, especially after the crisis abated, that the events that brought down L.T.C.M. were one in a million. We would never see anything like that again in our lifetime.
So instead of diminishing in importance, VaR become a more important part of the financial scene. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, worried about the amount of risk that derivatives posed to the system, mandated that financial firms would have to disclose that risk to investors, and VaR became the de facto measure. If the VaR number increased from year to year in a company’s annual report, it meant the firm was taking more risk. Rather than doing anything to limit the growth of derivatives, the agency concluded that disclosure, via VaR, was sufficient.
That, in turn, meant that even firms that had resisted VaR now succumbed. It meant that chief executives of big banks and investment firms had to have at least a passing familiarity with VaR. It meant that traders all had to understand the VaR consequences of making a big bet or of changing their portfolios. Some firms continued to use VaR as a tool while adding other tools as well, like “stress” or “scenario” tests, to see where the weak links in the portfolio were or what might happen if the market dropped drastically. But others viewed VaR as the primary measure they had to concern themselves with. ...
And yet, instead of dismissing VaR as worthless, most of the experts I talked to defended it. The issue, it seemed to me, was less what VaR did and did not do, but how you thought about it. Taleb says that because VaR didn’t measure the 1 percent, it was worse than useless — it was downright harmful. But most of the risk experts said there was a great deal to be said for being able to manage risk 99 percent of the time, however imperfectly, even though it meant you couldn’t account for the last 1 percent.
“If you say that all risk is unknowable,” Gregg Berman said, “you don’t have the basis of any sort of a bet or a trade. You cannot buy and sell anything unless you have some idea of the expectation of how it will move.” In other words, if you spend all your time thinking about black swans, you’ll be so risk averse you’ll never do a trade. Brown put it this way: “NT” — that is how he refers to Nassim Nicholas Taleb — “says that 1 percent will dominate your outcomes. I think the other 99 percent does matter. There are things you can do to control your risk. To not use VaR is to say that I won’t care about the 99 percent, in which case you won’t have a business. That is true even though you know the fate of the firm is going to be determined by some huge event. When you think about disasters, all you can rely on is the disasters of the past. And yet you know that it will be different in the future. How do you plan for that?” ... (-- pgs. 31-50) |
| Quote: | The Black Swan
The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Hardcover
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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| Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 2:13 pm Post subject: |
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The New York Times Magazine
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Two-tier Teacher Contract, The
8th Annual Year in Ideas
By Paul Tough
Dec. 14/08
| Quote: | One of the big debates in education today is over teacher quality: how do you reward successful teachers, get rid of unsuccessful ones and attract more high-performing applicants? Michelle Rhee, the young, controversial new chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, thinks she has the answer.
Last July, Rhee presented the membership of the city’s teachers’ union with a proposal for a new and very different contract. The basic deal: surrender some job security in exchange for the potential to earn a much higher salary. Under the proposed contract, each Washington teacher would choose between two alternatives. The red tier, the more cautious option, would require teachers to give up a few seniority protections in exchange for a considerable pay increase. Teachers choosing the riskier green tier would lose even more tenure and seniority rights. They would spend the first year of the new contract on probation, at the end of which they could be fired. But if they were good enough to survive, they would receive huge raises, before long earning as much as $131,000 a year in salary and performance bonuses, more than twice the average salary for an American public-school teacher.
Rhee’s proposal is based on recent research that suggests that teacher quality has a huge impact on the success of students, especially poor and minority students who lag behind their peers academically. And yet in most school systems, teacher pay is tied only to length of tenure and the accumulation of professional credentials, neither of which has much correlation with student success. (The Washington union’s leadership, so far, has declined to put the new contract to a vote.)
Rhee isn’t the only administrator experimenting this year with the idea of elevated teacher pay. Zeke M. Vanderhoek, the founding principal of the Equity Project Charter School, opening next fall in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, says he wants to attract “highly qualified individuals” to teach at his school. To be hired, according to the school’s Web site, you need to be able to prove you have “expert subject-area knowledge,” present a “portfolio of achievement of past students” and score above 90 percent on the verbal section of a graduate-school entrance test. In exchange, every teacher gets a starting salary of $125,000, plus an initial annual bonus of up to $25,000: high pay for high expectations. |
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| Posted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 3:16 pm Post subject: |
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The New York Times Magazine
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Judgment Day
Student ratings are becoming an influential factor in academic promotions. Will professors fight back?
By Mark Oppenheimer
Sept. 21/08
| Quote: | Annemarie Bean, who goes by Anna and is a distant, poorer cousin of the family that owns the L.L. Bean clothing business, is the kind of professor who draws students to small New England liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan. She is funny, enthusiastic, devoted to her students and passionate about what she teaches. Her subject areas are offbeat and slightly avant-garde, the kind of stuff that students, and their ostensibly liberal faculties, are said to find thrilling: African-American theater, the history of minstrelsy, “whiteness studies” — essentially, the intersection of race and theatrical performance in modern America. Beyond her subject matter and top-notch education, including a Ph.D. from New York University’s acclaimed performance-studies department, she just seems like a good fit for Wesleyan. She is an alumna of the college, class of ’88; she is informal in her manner, tall and limber like a dancer, bright-eyed, the opposite of stuffy, eminently approachable; and she suggested lunch at It’s Only Natural, the pride of Middletown, Conn., a regional mecca for vegetarian, vegan and macrobiotic dining. (Nothing says “Wesleyan” like lunch at It’s Only Natural, where you eat bulgur wheat beneath paintings by local artists.) Bean knows that she belongs at Wesleyan, which is why she’s especially sad that her students fired her.
They did not actually give her the pink slip, of course, and for that matter Bean did not receive a pink slip. A visiting professor on a one-year contract with the African-American studies department, Bean was fired by not being rehired. Before her first year of teaching, she received a letter from Renee Romano, her department chairwoman, saying that she would be recommended for a second year if she met certain benchmarks in her students’ evaluations of her. Specifically, for the fall 2007 term her teaching and the overall quality of the course had to be “rated in the top two categories (Outstanding and Good) by at least 85 percent of the students in both your courses.” When, at the end of the semester last December, she got only 76 percent in one of her classes and 73 percent in the other, she knew her job was in jeopardy. In January, she asked Romano if she should begin looking for another job. She heard nothing until mid-March, when the dean, Donald Moon, still wavering, asked her to write a self-evaluation.
Finally, Bean says, Gayle Pemberton, the new chairwoman of African-American studies, told her she was out of a job — partly because, Pemberton said, Bean had not received high-enough marks in the category of “student effort,” a category unmentioned in Romano’s letter. According to Pemberton, not enough students had marked “strenuous” to describe their own effort in Bean’s class. Put another way, Bean was being punished for her students’ admitted laziness. When Bean asked Dean Moon what had happened, he referred back to the original criteria of quality of the course and quality of the teaching. Neither Moon nor Pemberton, who has since retired from Wesleyan, would speak on the record about Bean’s case. A university spokesman, citing Wesleyan’s policy of keeping personnel matters confidential, would say only that Bean’s description of her contract “is not accurate.” But Bean maintains that her students — about three-quarters of whom, after all, rated her class and teaching “good” or “outstanding” — gave the administration sufficient reason to end her time at Wesleyan. (-- pgs. 28-29) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Mar 08, 2009 1:18 pm Post subject: |
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Global Warming
A Very Short Introduction
Paperback
By Mark Maslin
| Quote: | | In 1542, Francisco de Orellana led the first European voyage down the Amazon River. During this intrepid voyage the expedition met a lot of resistance from the local Indians; in one particular tribe the women warriors were so fierce that they drove their male warriors in front of them with spears. Thus the river was named after the famous women warriors of the Greek myths, the Amazons. This makes Francisco de Orellana one of the unluckiest explorers of that age, as normally the river would have been named after him. This voyage also inspired our almost mystical wonder about the greatest river and the largest area of rainforest in the world, something we still feel today. (-- pgs. 118-119) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 2:44 pm Post subject: |
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National Geographic Adventure
Magazine Subscription
Man in Motion
A former climber leads the bionic revolution one step at a time.
By Ryan Bradley
August, 2008
| Quote: | The ankle of the future sits on a table in the basement of MIT's Media Lab. Beside it is a body harness, trailing wires, with a pair of robotic legs attached. Dr. Hugh Her, 43, associate professor and director of the biomechatronics group, is hurriedly fastening a second ankle to his own leg. He's a busy man. In addition to writing grant proposals, delivering lectures, and heading over a dozen research projects in various stages of completion, Herr is preparing to testify as an expert witness before the International Olympic Committee (IOC). South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius - a double-amputee who runs on carbon fiber legs - is seeking permission to try out for his nation's team.
"It's crazy," Herr says. "The IOC has rushed to ban him, and he hasn't even qualified yet." Advancements like Herr's ankle have the IOC concerned that technology will give amputees an unfair advantage. It's a question Herr takes personally. He was once a competitve young athlete himself.
At age 17, Herr was one of the most promising climbers in North America. But after an ill-fated expedition on New Hampshire's Mount Washington, his frostbitten legs were amputated below the knees. He continued climbing, constantly tinkering with his prostheses. "I wasn't happy with the performance level," he says, "so I set out to change it myself." Herr went on to receive advanced degrees in engineering and mathematics and now finds himself on the cutting edge of biomechatronics. "We're in the golden age of prosthetic design," he says, tanks to increased government funding for ways to improve the lives of wounded Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.
A year after Herr's accident on Mount Washington, he told an interviewer that "in the future people will be less afraid of losing something. With technology, they'll just come back and be better, stronger, faster." For Herr, Pistorius (who won his appeal to qualify), and countless other "disabled" people, that future is now. (-- p. 18) |
More on robotics in our all-time favorite science doumentary:
Me & Isaac Newton
DVD
Directed by British filmmaker Michael Apted
Featuring *1988 Nobel laureate Gertrude Elion, who reminiscences none too fondly about her humble beginnings as a pickle-tester, the best job on offer to women chemists as recently as the 1940s.
| Quote: | | * Gertrude Elion patented the leukemia-fighting drug 6-mercaptopurine in 1954 and has made a number of significant contributions to the medical field. Dr. Gertrude Elion’s research led to the development of Imuran, a drug that aids the body in accepting transplanted organs, and Zovirax, a drug used to fight herpes. |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 1:34 pm Post subject: |
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The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
The End of the End of the Revolution
Castro's Cuba is turning 50. It's been dying for years. What can Obama - or anyone else - do to help bring the island into the 21st century?
By Roger Cohen
Dec. 7/08
| Quote: | ... Looking out on the ocean, I searched in vain for a single boat.
It was not always so, 90 miles off the coast of Florida. In 1859, Richard Henry Dana Jr., an American lawyer whose “To Cuba and Back” became a classic, sailed into Havana. He later wrote: “What a world of shipping! The masts make a belt of dense forest along the edge of the city, all the ships lying head into the street, like horses at their mangers.” Over the ensuing century, Cuba became the winter playground of Americans, a place to gamble, rumba, smoke puros and sip mojitos, the land of every vice and any trade. Havana bars advertised “Hangover Breakfasts.” They were much in demand. The mafia loved the island, the largest in the Caribbean; so did the American businessmen who controlled swathes of the sugar industry and much else.
Then, a half-century ago, on Jan. 1, 1959, Fidel Castro brought down the curtain on Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. America’s cavorting-cum-commerce ceased. Miami became Cuba’s second city as, over the years, hundreds of thousands fled communist rule. ...
... A repressive society long under a single ruler — the ailing 82-year-old Fidel still holds Cubans in his thrall even if he formally handed the presidency to his younger brother, Raúl, in 2006 — develops a secret lexicon of survival.
Through a labyrinth of rations, regulations, two currencies and four markets (peso, hard currency, agro and black), people make their way. Stress is rare but depression rampant in an inertia-stricken economy. Truth is layered. Look up and you see the Habana Libre, the towering hotel where Fidel briefly had his headquarters after the revolution: it began life as the Hilton. The seafront Riviera hotel, now so communist-drab it seems to reek of cabbage, once housed the rakish casino of the mobster Meyer Lansky. ...
One official stop was with Elena Álvarez, who was 15 when Fidel’s revolution came and now, at 65, works as a top official at the Ministry of Economics. She tried to make sense for me of the voodoo economics I’d seen.
Here’s what she wanted me to grasp. Cuba, at the time of the revolution, was “one of the most unjust, unequal and exploited societies on earth.” Illiteracy was running up to 40 percent, a quarter of the best land was in U.S. hands, a corrupt bourgeoisie lorded it over everyone else. Fidel’s initial objective was a more-just society, but U.S. pressure radicalized his revolution and pushed it toward all-out socialism within the Soviet camp.
Álvarez reeled off some numbers. There were 6,000 doctors in Cuba at the time of the revolution; there are now close to 80,000 for a population of 11.3 million, one of the highest per-capita rates in the world. The U.S. embargo has cost Cuba about $200 billion in real terms. When the Berlin Wall crumbled, 80 percent of Cuba’s international trade was with Soviet-bloc countries. About 98 percent of oil came from them. Back to the Communist bloc states, at inflated prices, went Cuba’s sugar and rum.
“We’ve had to reinsert ourselves in the global economy twice in 30 years, once in 1960 and again in 1990,” Álvarez said.
O.K., I said, that shows some resilience, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, why didn’t Cuba do what Moscow’s other satellites did: take down totalitarianism, become a market economy and set people free? The real totalitarianism, she countered, was Batista’s. Cuba now has different values. Despite scarcities, attributable in large part to the embargo, it’s a society that wants to protect everyone. The rationing system guarantees that all citizens have a minimum. Everyone gets low-cost food at work. Free health care and education mean a $20 monthly salary is the wrong way to view the quality of Cuban life. Going to a market economy in 1990 would have meant wholesale factory closures, as in East Germany, and 35 percent unemployment. “We decided we had to protect our workers,” Álvarez said. “We have another philosophy.”
That “philosophy” has produced results. According to the World Health Organization, life expectancy for men and women in Cuba is 76 and 80 years, respectively, on par with the U.S. The comparative figures in Haiti are 59 and 63, and in the Dominican Republic they are 66 and 74. The probability of dying before the age of 5 is 7 per 1,000 live births in Cuba — nearly as good as the U.S. figure — compared with 80 per 1,000 live births in Haiti and 29 in the Dominican Republic. Illiteracy has been eliminated. United Nations statistics show 93.7 percent of Cuban children complete high school, far more than in the United States or elsewhere in the Caribbean. (emphasis added)
That raises the question: Why educate people so well and then deny them access to the Internet, travel and the opportunity to apply their skills? Why give them a great education and no life? Why not at least offer a Chinese or Vietnamese model, with a market economy under one-party rule?
Álvarez said there was some “space for the market.” She insisted, “We are not fundamentalist.” But the bottom line, of course, is that the authorities are scared: opening the door to capitalism on an island 90 miles from Florida is very different from doing that in Asia. (-- pgs. 44-51) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 10:05 am Post subject: |
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Lucy's Eyes and Margaret's Dragon
The Lives of the Virgin Saints
Hardcover
By Giselle Potter
| Quote: | These are the stories of brave women who fought to follow their hearts. Their devotion to virginity may oppose our modern notion about powerful women, but in the world they inhabited, taking a vow of chastity was not a passive act; it was a rebellion against the conventions and men that ruled them. These early saints were not swayed from their ideals or turned away from their goals, even under the threat of violence. They met their fierce punishment with smiling grace rather than fear.
Miraculous events helped the virgins through their battles. They became unmovable, fireproof, and airborne. They lost eyes, breasts, and beauty, and then regained them. Saint Margaret emerged from a dragon's belly unharmed, and Saint Agnes grew long hair to defend her modesty as she was led naked through the streets to a brothel. During their lives such miracles caused these women to be condemned as witches and heretics; after their deaths, the miracles led to their canonization as saints.
Many texts question the existence of some of these women, but whether they are mythical characters or heroines of history, they still have admirers around the world. Girls wear wreaths of candles on Saint Lucy's day, and eat hard-boiled eggs on the eve of Saint Agnes's feast day so they may dream of future suitors.
These virgin saints are examples of strength and courage for all women. We may take comfort in the thought that they may be watching over us, protecting us from illness, bad eyesight, difficult childbirth, fire, or cumbersome husbands. (From the Introduction) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 2:28 pm Post subject: |
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Brendan Behan's New York
Hardcover
By Brendan Behan
with drawings by Paul Hogarth
| Quote: | A Broadway author - I am proud to call myself one - always waits, on the first night of his play, either in 'Sardi's' or 'Downey's', and his press agent goes out to get the six newspapers, which are called the Six Butchers of Broadway'.
Now if you get six out of six good reviews, you could ask the President of the United States to sell you the White House, though I don't think this has ever happened. If you get five good reviews, you are doing fairly well and you have to start worrying about 480, Lexington Avenue, which is the home of the income tax. It is not a bad kind of worry though in its own way, if you have got to have worries, and I suppose everyone has to have them. If you have four, you can afford to give a party, or at least you can afford to attend the party which is usually given for you.
If you get three good reviews, it's time like to go home to bed, but if you only get two, you stay there the whole of the following day and don't go out until after dark. If you get one good review, you just make an air reservation very quickly to get back to where you came from, but if you get six bad reviews, you take a sleeping pill. You might even take an overdose! (From What are they at round Broadway and the bars?, pgs. 45-46) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed May 27, 2009 11:59 am Post subject: |
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A New York Life
Of Friends and Others
Hardcover
By the simply poisonous Brendan Gill
More others than friends, we'll wager ...
| Quote: | Brendan enjoyed my taking him to the Coffee House, a small private club occupying rooms on the upper floors of a shabby pre-Civil War brownstone building on West Forty-fifth Street. The club set an excellent table, and Brendan was especially drawn to their steaks, which he washed down with glass after glass of beer and whisky. Young as he was, he had lost most of his teeth and he would continuously put off getting false ones because, he claimed, dentists in Dublin were so incompetent and dentists in New York were so expensive. He had but one tooth left in the front of his mouth and he would use it as a sort of combination hook and auger, snagging a large slice of steak with it, sinking the tooth well down into the steak, and then worrying it with his bare gums into small, edible portions. It was not an agreeable sight, but one shared his pleasure in a feat that appeared at first glance impossible to accomplish. ... (-- p. 136)
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 11:48 am Post subject: |
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Shingwauk's Vision
A History of Native Residential Schools
Paperback
By J.R. Miller
| Quote: | The French effort in the 17th c. failed for reasons that would become depressingly familiar to generations of assimilators from the early nineteenth century onward. First and foremost was parental resistance to separation from their children, an attitude that the French thought was unusually strong among the Indians of North America because of their excessive love of offsping. As the Récollet Gabriel Sagard noted, 'they love their children dearly,' even though 'they are for the most part very naughty children, paying little respect and hardly more obedience.' To a European Christian it seemed that 'unhappily in these lands the young have no respect for the old, nor are children obedient to their parents, and moreover there is punishment for any fault. ' And Nicholas Denys agreed, contending that Indian 'children are not obstinate, since they give them everything they ask for, without ever letting them cry for that which they want. The greatest persons give way to the little ones. The father and the mother draw the morsel from the mouth if the child asks for it. They love their children greatly. (For their part, Indians regarded French mothers as 'porcupines' because of their stern attitudes towards the young and to child-rearing.) In fact, Europeans usually failed to note that, among Indians, discipline was applied to children, although it was administered in ways unfamiliar to the intruders. Usually, discipline and social control were exercised through praise, ridicule, rewards, and privilege - a subtlety that the Europeans missed. In any event, the Europeans' censoriousness about Indian children, and their proclivity to employ corporal punishment for disciplinary purposes, made it very difficult to secure children ... Indian children were also repelled by the competitive pedagogical techniques that the missionaires, especially the Jesuits, employed. The use of prizes, examinations, and public exercises to create competition and bring about higher levels of achievement was utterly foreign to Indian ways, including the indigenous peoples' methods of educating their young. ...
What made the alien nature of European schooling harder to accept was the fact that indigenous peoples were unimpressed by the newcomers and their strange ways. few among the Native peoples in the 17th and 18th c.s could see much reason to want to become like these bizarre strangers. After initial awe at Europeans' technological superiority had ebbed, North American Indians were usually not impressed by the intruders. By and large they regarded the French as ugly, feeble and ill-prepared to fluorish in the North American environment. Many of their ways, especially the outlandish practices and customs of the celibate clergy, were so weird as to convince Indians that there was an unbridgeable gulf between them and the intruders. (From PART ONE Establishing the Residential School System, pg. 55-57) (footnotes omitted) |
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| Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 1:34 pm Post subject: |
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A Long Stone's Throw
Hardcover
By Alphie McCourt
| Quote: | Our cousin joined the Irish Army and was issued two pairs of boots and two pairs of shoes only to desert this neutral peacetime Army and go to England where he joined the British Army. When the British Army presented him with two pairs of boots and two pairs of shoes, he changed his mind, deserted again and returned to Limerick. A rich man now, he was proud owner of four pairs of boots and four pairs of shoes.
Our cousin of the boots and shoes had little or no education and not much in the way of opportunity. I'm more than fortunate. I will soon move on to the Christian Brothers Primary School on Sexton Street. Ten times the size of Henry Street School, "The Brothers" has a secondary school attached. I am in the great world of school, the first of my family to go to The Brothers. Admission is based on a written entrance examination. I know that I did well on the examination. I also know that my brothers would have done as well or better. If so, why had they not been admitted? (-- p. 87) |
What's so great about a school run by the Christian Brothers?
Angelas Ashes
Paperback
By Pulitizer-Prize winner Frank McCourt
| Quote: | | We go to school through lanes and back streets so that we won't meet the respectable boys who go to the Christian Brothers' School or the rich ones who go to the Jesuit school, Crescent College. The Christian Brothers' boys wear tweed jackets, warm woolen sweaters, shirts, ties and shiny new boots. We know they're the ones who will get jobs in the civil service and help the people who run the world. The Crescent College boys wear blazers and school scarves tossed around their necks and over their shoulders to show they're cock o' the walk. They have long hair which falls across their foreheads and over their eyes so that they can toss their quiffs like Englishmen. We know they're the ones who will go to university, take over the family business, run the government, run the world. We'll be the messenger boys on bicycles who deliver their groceries or we'll go to England to work on the building sites. Our sisters will mind their children and scrub their floors unless they go off to England, too. We know that. We're ashamed of the way we look and if boys from the rich schools pass remarks we'll get into a fight and wind up with bloody noses or torn clothes. Our masters will have no patience with us and our fights because their sons go to the rich schools and, Ye have no right to raise your hands to a better class of people so ye don't. (-- pgs. 272-273) |
Were no efforts made by the elder McCourts toward entry?
| Quote: | ... Mam tells me give my face and hands a good wash, we're going to the Christian Brothers. I tell her I don't want to go, I want to work, I want to be a man. She tells me stop the whining, I'm going to secondary school and we'll all manage somehow. I'm going to school if she has to scrub floors and she'll practise on my face.
She knocks on the door at the Christian Brothers and says she wants to see the superior, Brother Murray. He comes to the door, looks at my mother and me and says, What?
Mam says, This is my son, Frank. Mr. O'Halloran at Leamy's says he's bright and would there be any chance of getting him in here for secondary school?
We don't have room for him, says Brother Murray and closes the door in our faces.
Mam turns away from the door and it's a long silent walk home. She takes off her coat, makes tea, sits by the fire. Listen to me, she says. Are you listening?
I am.
That's the second time a door was slammed in your face by the Church.
Is it? I don't remember.
Stephen Carey told you and your father you couldn't be an altar boy and closed the door in your face. Do you remember that?
I do.
And now Brother Murray slams the door in your face.
I don't mind. I want to get a job.
Her face tightens and she's angry. You are never to let anybody slam the door in your face again. Do you hear me?
She starts to cry by the fire, Oh, God, I didn't bring ye into the world to be a family of messenger boys. ....
Mr. O'Halloran tells the class it's a disgrace that boys like McCourt, Clarke, Kennedy, have to hew wood and draw water. He is disgusted by this free and independent Ireland that keeps a class system foisted on us by the English, that we are throwing our talented children on the dungheap. (-- pgs. 289-290) |
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