I wonder why this never happened to me.

Gary Jones, prefacing a post on eco-quarreling:

A woman that I'd been seeing once pushed me through a plate glass window in a rage due to my political views that Republicans were mean and Democrats were incompetent, or the reverse, I wasn't sure which.

Lawrence Kane's new book comes highly recommended by Dr. Helen

He has excellent thoughts on how to defuse potentially violent situations. Dr. Helen's interview with Kane is here.

The book: Little Black Book of Violence: What Every Young Man Needs to Know About Fighting.

Matthew Yglesias asks permission to opine

They were talking about this excellent story in the NY Times. It describes some grandiosely unethical habits of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Mr. Yglesias timidly describes the story as "pretty great." He needs a tag-line for his blog. How about this:

"Self-censorship and a soupcon of opinion"

His temporizing is yet another indication that we're a long way from achieving a post-racial society.

Glenn Loury as usual is lucid, entertaining, informative and on point.

"It's the economic uncertainty, stupid"

Jim Geraghty at NRO:

Did he believe that the healthcare reform and related tax proposals, the proposed cap and trade legislation and the consequent increase in energy costs, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the agitation for higher taxes on the wealthy, the proposal to increase corporate tax rates, the proposal to increase capital gains taxes, the trial floating of ideas such as a national VAT and removal of the earnings cap on FICA, the more robust regulatory bureaucracy . . . did he believe any of these uncertainties were depressing hiring?

He stated yes, without a doubt and proceeded to relay a conversation he had with a local chemical company regarding their 2010 capital expenditure budget. When asked what the company intended to invest in 2010, the response was ‘nothing,’ not due to a paucity of good opportunities, but because it was impossible for the company to calculate a rate of return given all the uncertainty over cost of labor, energy prices, regulatory mandates and the like.

It’s obvious to me that the Obama administration has no grasp on what their 'flavor of the day’ tax and regulatory proposals do to business decision making,

Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, are you listening? President Obama?

via Glenn

Social networking for sick people: PatientsLikeMe.com

[UPDATE: a formula stimulated by a friend's comment: social network + shared data = better patient outcomes.]

Wow.

If you or a loved one is dealing with a major (or minor) health problem, you really MUST check out PatientsLikeMe.com.

My first reaction to the website: brilliantly conceived and wonderfully implemented.

I've only taken a quick look at it, but the site lets anyone with a disease or medical problem find others going through exactly the same ordeal. You can share your personal story and your opinions of the drugs and treatments you're going through and see what others think of theirs.

The site also lets you look at aggregate data. For example you can see which medicines and treatments are most commonly prescribed for your condition.

And that seems to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Watch the Jamie Heywood's inspiring TED video:


Then check out the PatientsLikeMe.com website.

Del. Wade Kach asks Maryland A.G. Gansler to investigate BCPS conflict of interest on AIM project

Here's the latest on AIM ethics and conflict-of-interest from the East County Times:

Retired county public school teacher Delegate Wade Kach (R-5B) is in the process of asking Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler to look into possible conflicts of interest involving the Articulated Instruction Module (AIM) which was prepared for grades K-12. . . . One of Kach's concerns is that Dr. Barbara Dezmon, an assistant school superintendent and creator of the program, may be a recipient of royalties if AIM is purchased by other school systems in the future. "The person who developed this program is an employee of the Board of Education. The program should be the property of the Board, not an individual," Kach opined.

Thank you, Del. Kach.

Dr. Dezmon, Assistant to the Superintendent for Equity and Assurance, has been feeling the heat for months now. If she really believes in the AIM program for its own sake, she should do the right thing and sign over any AIM-related IP rights to Baltimore County.

Another issue: BCPS seems to be violating the open meetings law.

A third question came to mind when he learned that the meeting of the committee to review AIM, handpicked by Superintendent Hairston, was closed to the public. In addition, he was told by Cheryl Bost, TABCO president, who is not a member of the AIM committee, that she was escorted out of the room when she tried to listen in. "It appears that the open meetings law is not being followed," he noted.

Dr. Hairston's long-standing practice of secretive mushroom management* is fast becoming a major issue among BCPS parents. The inner workings of the Greenwood bureaucracy need a triple dose of sunlight. The Rx for BCPS: Transparency. Transparency. Transparency.

*Mushroom Management: When a company's staff [and other stakeholders] are treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark, covered with dung, and – when grown big enough – canned**.

**See, for example, AIM scapegoat and former BCPS Northwest Area Assistant Superintendent Bill Lawrence. Many BCPS teachers believe that Lawrence's transfer/demotion is Hairston's way of diverting AIM-related heat away from himself.

It's about freakin' time

The MSM starts to look closely at IPCC:

WASHINGTON – A steady drip of unsettling errors is exposing what scientists are calling "the weaker link" in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning series of international reports on global warming.

The flaws — and the erosion they've caused in public confidence — have some scientists calling for drastic changes in how future United Nations climate reports are done. A push for reform being published in Thursday's issue of a prestigious scientific journal comes on top of a growing clamor for the resignation of the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The work of the climate change panel, or IPCC, is often portrayed as one massive tome. But it really is four separate reports on different aspects of global warming, written months apart by distinct groups of scientists.

No errors have surfaced in the first and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible. So far, four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to translate what global warming might mean to daily lives around the world.

"A lot of stuff in there was just not very good," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the first report. "A chronic problem is that on the whole area of impacts, getting into the realm of social science, it is a softer science. The facts are not as good."

Kudos to Seth Borenstein and the AP.

via Walter Russell Mead:

AP Story Breaks US Media Wall of Denial on IPCC Mess; Al Gore Still Silent

Pachauri FAIL

Walter Russell Mead sums things up.

"Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Protection That Will Work"

A new book by David Schoenbrod et al. Based on these two blurbs from Amazon, it it might be worth a look:

"Our environmental laws badly need re-thinking. This book makes that case and then charts a course for action. A straightforward, comprehensive, and persuasive case for reform."--William D. Ruckelshaus, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1970-1973 and 1983-1985 (William D. Ruckelshaus )

"The authors remind us that a number of our environmental laws are not achieving their important goals. Breaking the Logjam documents the power of well-regulated markets to achieve significant improvements in air quality and challenges us to incorporate those lessons more broadly, hopefully provoking a valuable national discussion on these complex issues."-Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund

Spring training starts in 10 days!

To get in the spirit, here are some articles on strength training for baseball. I can't vouch for the quality, but some of them seem worth a look:

12 month baseball strength training program

Plyometric training

Forearm & rotator cuff exercises

Comprehensive baseball weight training

Seeing the Tea Party movement through the lens of guerrilla insurgency and "open source warfare"

John Robb thinks outside the box at Global Guerrillas.

The problem with Pell grants (and FAFSA, and Stafford loans, and ...)

Unintended consequences of course.

I know, because I'm knee deep in it these days.

Student aid programs created by the federal government have become bloated, complex nightmares that create all kinds perverse structural distortions in our educational system.

The government is hurting, not helping.

Pure wind: President Obama's unconvincing talk about jobs

When I hear Obama talk about jobs, his words remind me of a passage from one of George Orwell's essays:

political language ... designed ... to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Why is Obama so unconvincing on the topic of jobs? The Anchoress gives one of the reasons:

The president says he wants to create jobs, and to do that, he is surrounding himself with people who have never created them.

As evidence, she links to this chart from Investors Business Daily:


I don't know how accurate the chart is, but the message rings true.

As I've written before, politicians have little power to create jobs. But they can kill jobs very easily by creating uncertainty about what government will do next.

Rising AP failure rate reduces reliability of Newsweek's "top" high school ratings

Newsweek ranks the "top" high schools in the U.S. each year according a single criterion, the AP participation rate*:

Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by [WaPo edu-blogger] Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement, Intl. Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school . . . divided by the number of graduating seniors.

Newsweek's ranking don't consider the percentage of students who pass or fail the AP tests.

Because the failure rate is increasing (41.5% failed last year, up from 36.5% in 1999) Newsweek's rankings have become that much less reliable.

The single-criterion rating system has worked reasonably well so far. But at some point Newsweek will have to change it's formula to include pass/fail rates.


*It's actually called the Challenge Index, and it includes partipation in the AP and similar college-level tests.

Having hired Pachauri last year to run their new Climate Institute...

... you'd think Yale would have a better handle on their thermostat situation this year.

Last spring, Rajendra Pachauri was named head of Yale's new Climate and Energy Institute.

He has been under fire recently to the point where the head of Greenpeace UK is calling for his resignation as head of IPCC.

In a nutshell: Why teachers' unions kill merit pay

Megan McArdle* explains:

There is a reason that unions kill merit pay... [they] negotiate ironclad contracts to cover dozens, hundreds, or thousands of workers. Once they take effect, those contracts are rarely renegotiated, and they apply to every single worker no matter what the situation. So unions are always going to be looking for the simplest, least subjective metrics by which to measure their members. Furthermore, they will be looking for metrics which are not under the control of the other side. The school board cannot change how many years you have in service, or whether or not you have a degree. But it can change the curriculum, or the tests.

. . .metrics will not only tend towards simplicity and ease of measurement; they will also tend to reward mediocrity. Again, this is not an accident of history. A collective bargaining unit run by a "majority rules" system is always going to look for a system that rewards the median or modal worker, not the best.

A merit pay system can work in one of two ways. It can benchmark teachers against the average, and reward the people who achieve the most improvement. Or it can set some minimum standard and give a bonus to any teacher who bests that standard. (You could set three tiers, or what have you, but the concept is basically the same).
. . .

But compare either system to what now exists in our nation's schools. Every single teacher can stay on for years unless they do something direly wrong. . . They have a system that spreads benefits absolutely evenly among all their members.

. . . And of course, over time, teacher's unions select for the sort of people who prefer this arrangement to competitive merit pay for one reason or another. ...

Unions are set up to minimize frictions and maximize benefits for the bottom 55%. That's how they work everywhere--in schools, and out. That's how they have to work. No amount of cajoling, no number of white papers, is going to change that.

Megan is a pleasure to read and listen to [type "McArdle" in the search box to see a list of her appearances on bloggingheads.tv] . She consistently delivers clear insights on all sorts of real-world economic issues. When challenged, she backs her opinions with facts, examples and solid reasoning.

If she were a mean person, she could skewer most of her discussion/debate partners on Bloggingheads.tv. Instead she listens carefully to others and rebuts with respect and a beaming smile. Her opponents learn a few things, lose the debate, and go away feeling happy about the experience.

Update: More on education from Megan: national curriculum and vouchers.

What gets aligned in a "curriculum alignment"

This paper says three things get aligned:

1. Curriculum (what is taught)
   
2. Instruction (how it's taught)
   
3. Assessment (the what/how of testing)
   

An early reaction to a PDK curriculum audit in Arkansas

From B Kisida at Midd-Riffs. You really don't want to pre-judge consultants because some of them are very good. It's just hard to find the good ones.

via Joanne Jacobs

A skeptic's view of curriculum alignment

From SaveSeattleSchools:

the question you should be asking [about curriculum alignment] is this one:

"We've tried this before without success. How will it be different this time?"

There are four necessary supports for curricular alignment which [might NOT be] in place. The people who are responsible for curricular alignment do not have control over these elements, so they can't make them happen.

The "four supports" seem to be:

1. Resources for intervening with lagging (below grade level) students
2. Assurance that teachers know what they are supposed to be teaching (depends on effective professional development)
3. Identification of teachers who choose not to teach the curriculum (and getting them on board)
4. Assurance that college-prep classes will be available at all schools

There's an analogy in automotive wheel alignments. These don't do a car owner much good if there's no gas in the tank and no air in the tires.

One definition of "curriculum alignment"

From Howard Johnston at PrincipalPartnership.com:

Curriculum alignment means assuring that the material taught in the school matches the standards and assessments set by the state or district for specific grade levels. It is a way of "mapping" the curriculum onto the standards to be sure that the school is teaching the content that is expected. In states that use tests to assess student mastery, schools may also align their curriculum with the content of the test to assure that students have studied the required content before taking the tests.

Why do it?

Increasing demands for accountability mean that schools must document that they are achieving the objectives mandated by state standards. In some cases, districts must submit curriculum guides that show how the instruction at each grade level is linked to state, national or local standards. In others, students are expected to pass tests that are based on the standards.

Whatever the mechanism, standards are deeply imbedded in public opinion and state law. They are not going away any time soon. Communities are insisting on strong performance, and, in some regions, teacher and administrator compensation is based on how well students perform on mandated tests. Standards have become a very high stakes issue in public education.

Pension reform in Maryland: The first step in a marathon journey

Del. Bill Frank is planning to sponsor a much-needed bill to reform pensions for state employees and legislators in Maryland.

I am working on a bill that would bring some significant reform to the pension plan for the Maryland legislators, including me. . .

Mayor Sheila Dixon’s $85,000 annual pension is outrageous, as is the lifetime pension payments for retiring Baltimore County Council members, who receive full annual pensions of $54,000 adjusted for inflation for life after serving just 20 years in an essentially part-time position!. . .

[I propose to] convert this defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan, where legislators would be encouraged to fund their own 401(k) plans with a modest match from the State. In the end, this approach would save the State significant dollars.

This is a huge problem and it's about time someone took the lead on this in the Maryland General Assembly.

Kudos to Delegate Frank for getting it started.

Realistically though, most of the hard work is ahead of us.

Obama's SOTU: a huge contradiction & a collapsed soufflé

[UPDATE: Don't-Say-I-Didn't-Warn-You Department: The "answer to everything" link below delivers an oddly apt simulation of Washington DC as experienced by the average voter.]

Peggy Noonan spots the contradiction:

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place.

With her speechwriter's eye, she also picks up on subtle-but-telling indications that Obama has given up on the health care bill:

Waxing boring on the virtues of the [health care] bill was a rhetorical way to obscure the fact that it is dead. . . . The bill will now get lost in the mists and disappear. It is a collapsed soufflé in an unused kitchen in the back of an empty house.

For what it's worth, a poll on the non-partisan Open Congress website currently shows 78% of participants opposing the Senate version of the healthcare reform bill.

President Obama's first State of the Union address

Clive Crook of the Atlantic boils it down nicely :

[President Obama] conveyed almost no sense that the country was sending him a message and that he was paying attention.

"Standardization is the standard" at BCPS

That's what Superintendent Joe Hairston said on Tuesday. It struck me at the time as an oddball line from The Office. I'm having more and more moments like that when I listen to Dr. Hairston.

He made the comment at a BCPS school board meeting while he was singing the praises of the ISO 9000 program at BCPS.

I've been involved in a few corporate efforts similar to ISO 9000. There can be advantages for sure, but adopting such a program is no guarantee of success. It's a lot of work and there are plenty of pitfalls:

The standard is seen as especially prone to failure when a company is interested in certification before quality.^[7]

UPDATE: More thoughts on problems that can come with standardization. As Ken Robinson puts it, schools can kill creativity:



And there are situations where looking for a single standard means you are asking the wrong question. Malcolm Gladwell on What we can learn from spaghetti sauce:

"That's a nice College of Education you have there Dr. Lorion..."

"...it would be such a shame if ..."

When Dr. Raymond Lorion*, Dean of Towson U's College of Education, testified last night at the BCPS school board meeting, Joe Hairston talked at some length about the close relationship between BCPS and Lorion's school. He described how BCPS hires 500-600 teachers each year and is a major employer of Towson ed school grads (perhaps the largest). He described what a privilege it is for BCPS to be part of the relationship.

As Hairston was talking, I kept thinking that he was really reminding Dr. Lorion how dependent Towson is on BCPS. Sort of the way a racketeer reminds the owner of a "protected" business.

At another point Lorion was equivocating about whether his committee was making "summary comments" or "recommendations". Dr. Hairston then made it very clear who was the boss. He interrupted and said, "I'll make the recommendations." Dr. Lorion quickly agreed.

What does this mean to BCPS parents and teachers?

Just this: We cannot view Dr. Lorion as an independent, objective third party when it comes to AIM. He and his program are too dependent on BCPS for their bread and butter.


*Strange. I couldn't find even a basic profile of Dr. Lorion on Towson's website. The closest thing is this message from the dean. A quick Google search didn't turn one up either.

Dr. Raymond Lorion: "An 'A' in what sense?"

At last night's BCPS meeting, a school board member asked a question about "A" grades. Dr. Lorion's* response drew a derisive laugh from the audience when he replied, "An 'A' in what sense?"

His response underscored the confusing nature of the Articulated Instruction Module. AIM, you see, has a three-letter grading scale where "A" is the lowest grade, not the highest.

You can't make this stuff up.


*Dean of Towson University's College of Education

"when all Democrats are indispensable, every Democrat can be an extortionist"

George Will, writing about the health care bill in the WaPo:

So there have been serial purchases of 60th votes for health legislation. This squalid commerce (special benefits tailored for Florida's Medicare Advantage clients, for Louisiana and Nebraska, and for union members) did almost as much as the legislation itself to discredit the entire sorry business.

George has been full of energy lately. I think the Obama administration has invigorated him.

Advice for President Obama

You've had a rough week.

My suggestion: invite President Clinton to lunch and pick his brain on the fine points of triangulation. It's time for some mid-course corrections.

A question I've been meaning to ask a few politicians:

When you talk about working families, who are you leaving out?

Maryland congressmen will face voters next on Sept. 14, 2010

Just sayin.

Ask for your high school's "AP Grade Report"

Jay Matthews makes this suggestion on his Class Struggle blog in the WaPo.

Ever seen the Advanced Placement Grade Report for your high school? I thought not. Most people don’t know it exists. That is why I have so much pleasure going over the reports. It is like reading the principal’s e-mails, full of intriguing innuendo and secrets that parents and students aren’t supposed to know.

Except that parents and students should know this type of thing. Here's why:

The AP Grade Report allows the public to see which AP courses at a school produce the most high grades, and the most low grades, on AP exams. You can gauge the skill of the teachers and the nature of the students who take various AP subjects.

One wonders why the BCPS spends so much time on systems like AIM for communicating with parents, but keeps useful information like Advanced Placement Grade Reports hidden away in the "top secret" drawer.

Stewart Brand's new book

The book is highly recommended by a friend who has a nose for finding the best, most insightful books on whatever topic interests him at the moment. The title:

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

So far (three chapters in) it is excellent.

Excerpt from a 5-star review on Amazon (rated helpful by 48 of 48 people):

In these pages, Stewart Brand lays out a mind-blowing vision for the planet's salvation: migration to the cities, power generated by mini-nuclear reactors, healthier crops through genetic engineering.

This may well be the most important book I'll read this year. Certainly, it's the most aggressively optimistic book that's also closely reported --- Brand's a student who shows his work.

Also, the FT has a nice interview with Brand. I learned many new things about him: he served in the U.S. Army and also as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. And he has gear-head tendencies too. A well-rounded guy!

Whenever a form asks for your race, do what I do: write "Other"

I've been doing it for years now, and I hope you'll join me.

Yay to this, from Joanne Jacobs:

More students refuse to state race.

Boo, hiss to this:

The U.S. Department of Education wants school officials to “eyeball” students who decline to state and check a box for them, reports McClatchy. In order to identify racial/ethnic achievement gaps, “the agency is pressing schools to identify all students by race in 2010-11 or face penalties.”

The "eyeballing" business is just plain creepy. I wonder if any BCPS schools have done this.

Most institutions (schools, governments, businesses, ...) spend way to much energy analyzing problems through the lens of race. It's time to get serious about building a post-racial society.

The first step is refusing to state your race.

When high school graduation is contingent on passing a state test, is it "high stakes" or "low stakes"?

RightWingProf objects to people who use the term "high stakes test."

Low stakes testing?

Something has bothered me for a long time: the use (and implications) of the term, “high stakes testing.” For some reason, I only see this term used to describe some sort of standardized exam administered external to the class.

Do you note that this implies that the exams teachers give in class aren’t “high stakes”?

He continues:

Every time I read some educator who uses that term, the usage says he doesn’t care much about education.

I couldn't agree more.

In the comments, Joanne Jacobs made an important distinction:

The tests are high stakes [only] for the school, which may look bad or be placed on the “needs improvement” list.

The stakes need to be high for the kids, else a high school diploma carries little value. On the other hand if the stakes are high for the educrats and not for kids, then the educrats will juke the stats to make themselves look better. And students will get little out of the deal.

I think this is an important, underdiscussed topic. Related thoughts on this later, with a fresh angle.

Still more videos against AIM from the 1/19/10 BCPS budget meeting

SW Balto County BCPS parent vs. AIM: "If it isn't broken, don't fix it."



BCPS teacher vs. AIM: It "corrupts goodwill" and "makes us look like idiots"

More video of BCPS teachers & parents vs. AIM

Music teacher vs. AIM: It was dropped on us "like Pearl Harbor".



PTA parent vs. AIM: "If the parent does not read the report card or show up for conferences, they're not going to read 50 pages [of AIM forms]."

AIM: "It's [already] dead. Cost = $35 million"

A BCPS psychology teacher vs. AIM:

Teachers & parents oppose AIM at BCPS budget hearing

Attendees waved anti-AIM placards earlier tonight at Loch Raven High School.

At the general budget hearing, roughly 95% of the comments dealt with opposition to AIM. After two hours and dozens of speakers, no one had spoken up to support AIM.

"Stop the two-hour snow delays"

From Jay Matthews at the WaPo:

It isn't the fault of the superintendents who make these decisions. They have to do what the district lawyers and insurance experts tell them. But those people should rethink their systems, and see if we can't avoid so many interruptions in what is already a pretty short school day.

I hadn't realized that insurance people were part of the problem. It's not just lawyers and school administrators.

How to save money on college textbooks

Rent them from the Netflix of college text book rentals, at a website called Chegg.com.