Election 2010: Teabaggin' the Ds & Rs

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

this offends me and I'd like it deleted. Club is becoming the pb mod as of 1/1 correct?

And you think Club has so little integrity? For shame.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

this offends me and I'd like it deleted. Club is becoming the pb mod as of 1/1 correct?

You're really turning up the satire for Xmas! Nicely done!

[Ty@50]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

You're really turning up the satire for Xmas! Nicely done!

Remember granny always told us "you'll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar?"

[sgtclub]

This is hilarious:

MOSCOW – Russia's lower house of parliament gave preliminary approval Friday to a U.S.-Russian arms treaty, but decided to delay the final vote until next month.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Michael O'Hare:

Sharon Otterman reviews the failing, flailing efforts of New York City to improve teaching the easy way. The story, and the management it describes, is all about trying to get quality by incentives and personnel, in particular, sorting teachers into good, bad, and indifferent bins by observing student test score changes over a year. Presumably, those in the good bin get more pay, or something, and we fire the bad ones. The implicit model is that teaching is an irremediable trait among bad teachers, and purely a matter of incentives and motivation among all the others, and a positional arms race is just the ticket to make teachers really want to do a good job, right?

There’s so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start, even though test score increases is among the useful information that should be collected and analyzed, mostly to direct attention to teacher practice that seems to work and would reward analysis and discussion. But attributing outcomes to the teacher is nuts, as Deming demonstrated years ago. First, the instrument is very noisy; the article begins with some anecdotes of teachers omitted from the system, teachers scored in years when they didn’t teach, and teachers given the wrong scores. Second, stuff happens; every teacher knows that a class takes on a personality early in the year on the basis of unobserved or random events, or just the luck of the draw in student selection, that seems to be refractory to what a teacher does. Some years have lots of snow days, some years there’s a shooting in the school, and on and on. So the teacher effect is going to pick up correlations, spurious and real, with all the variables that are not observed.

Finally other stuff happens: Deming – brilliant, tough-minded, and humane - demonstrated that if you reward individual workers for performance, you are going to be rewarding random variation a lot of the time, with poisonous effects. Right away, when the top salesman among twenty gets a trip to Hawaii with his wife, the response of the other nineteen is not to emulate him (and how could they, if they don’t see what he does, which is the case for teachers in spades), but to be pissed off and jealous, which is, like, really great for collaborative enterprise. Next year, regression toward the mean sets in and he is only number five, or ten, so he looks like a slacker, coasting on his laurels. Even his wife starts giving him the fisheye; don’t be surprised if his lunch martini count starts to go up.

It is a universal, desperate, desire of lazy or badly trained managers to find a mechanistic device you can wind up like a clockwork, loose upon the organization, and go play golf. Like testing and firing to get people to do good work. Please, Lord, show me the way to manage without any actual heavy lifting! But many desires, no matter how desperately we cleave to them, are not fated to be fulfilled, and this is one. Teaching, like any complex production process, will get better when teachers watch each other work and talk about what they are doing, why, and how it works; what to watch is usefully indicated by statistical QA methods. Period. It was true in Smith’s pin factory, it was true in the opera staging master class at the New England Conservatory I sat in on back in the day, it is true in Toyota and, finally, GM factories, and it’s true in schools. Deming was right, but as long as we’re afraid to admit it (one of his 14 principles is, ironically, “Drive out fear”) we will continue to leave value on the table, absurdly and tragically.

[Penske 2.0]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Michael O'Hare:

sounds like a typical apologist for the teachers' unions. Did Randi Weingarten have a hand in that piece?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Penske 2.0

sounds like a typical apologist for the teachers' unions. Did Randi Weingarten have a hand in that piece?

so the New York city school system would reward 1 teacher as best? for once I agree with Ty's blogger. rewarding 1 of the probable 1000s of teachers is insane.

or did the blogger mischaracterize and attempt to confuse, or perhaps is simply confused?

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

so the New York city school system would reward 1 teacher as best? for once I agree with Ty's blogger. rewarding 1 of the probable 1000s of teachers is insane.

or did the blogger mischaracterize and attempt to confuse, or perhaps is simply confused?

A good friend was S.C. Teacher of the Year. She got to drive a BMW Z3 for a year, and Strom Thurmond got to stare at her tits when she shook his hand. She went on to get a Ph.D. in teacher education. Now she's no longer in education.

Think of all the non-relatives you know who make $60,000/year. Now think of how many of them to whom you'd entrust your child. The intersection of those two sets is "teacher," and we're doing pretty fucking good with what we have, considering the very low quality of some of the raw materials -- about the same number of people graduate H.S. capable of reading as every previous year. The nations that perennially beat us in math/science assessments are ones that leave their crack babies chained to rocks.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

so the New York city school system would reward 1 teacher as best? for once I agree with Ty's blogger. rewarding 1 of the probable 1000s of teachers is insane.

or did the blogger mischaracterize and attempt to confuse, or perhaps is simply confused?

The blogger didn't have to try very hard, apparently.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Wonderful review of George W. Bush's new book. Thus:

Each new person is introduced with a single sentence, noting one or more of the following: 1) Texan origins; 2) college athletic achievements; 3) military service; 4) deep religious faith. The sentence ends with three personal characteristics: ‘honest, ethical and forthright’; ‘a brilliant mind, disarming modesty and a buoyant spirit’; ‘a statesman, a savvy lawyer and a magnet for talented people’; ‘smart, thoughtful, energetic’ (that’s Condi); ‘knowledgeable, articulate and confident’ (that’s Rummy); ‘a wise, principled, humane man’ (Clarence Thomas); and so on. Then the person does whatever Bush tells him to do.

eta: Check that. The portions of the review that actually deal with the book are great. I could leave the rest.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Michael O'Hare:

Interesting how he assumed a Glengarry Glen Ross structure. Why not a structure where everybody gets a performance based bonus and it's all just a matter of degree? Only the laggards at the bottom get fired.

In my own little experience, I found offering everyone bonuses improved morale immensely and fattened the bottom line.

Give a man a job and you'll get all he needs to do not to get fired. Give a guy equity, or a bonus, and you'll get More. There is no arguing against this fact.

[LessinSF]

Whomever is advising Obama should be fired - http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/shu...urn=nfl-300632

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Interesting how he assumed a Glengarry Glen Ross structure. Why not a structure where everybody gets a performance based bonus and it's all just a matter of degree? Only the laggards at the bottom get fired.

In my own little experience, I found offering everyone bonuses improved morale immensely and fattened the bottom line.

Give a man a job and you'll get all he needs to do not to get fired. Give a guy equity, or a bonus, and you'll get More. There is no arguing against this fact.

I don't think he "assumes" that structure. He says:

Finally other stuff happens: Deming – brilliant, tough-minded, and humane - demonstrated that if you reward individual workers for performance, you are going to be rewarding random variation a lot of the time, with poisonous effects.

Surely there is a good way to do positive reinforcement. Teachers of the Year may not be it.

[Gattigap]

Originally Posted by LessinSF

Whomever is advising Obama should be fired - http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/shu...urn=nfl-300632

I'm amused that the pic they chose to run with that story is Obama playing with Bo and holding a football.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I don't think he "assumes" that structure. He says:



Surely there is a good way to do positive reinforcement. Teachers of the Year may not be it.

I just referenced it. Everybody's eligible for a bonus. Nobody's bitter but the guy at the bottom, who probably ought to be.