Pass the Popcorn: Night Falls

June 13, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Original movie title: “The Man Who Didn’t Know He Was Dead.”

(Due credit: I stole that gag from the “loading” page of an old The Critic webisode. I’d link if the creators had a page, but I can’t seem to find one.)

In addition to the new Hulk movie, M. Night Shyamalan’s comeback attempt, The Happening, opens today. As I promised in last week’s edition of Pass the Popcorn, here’s a retrospective of Night’s fall.

Before we get down to business, though, fascinating fact: did you know that Shyamalan was the lead author on the screenplay of Stuart Little? Well, that’s why God made IMDB. Come to think of it, how much difference is there, really, between writing lines for Haley Joel Osment and for a cute animated mouse?

On one level, Ang Lee (whose rise and fall we chronicled last week) and M. Night Shyamalan were two big 1990s filmmakers trying to do similar things: produce popular, mainstream movies that nonetheless had the higher ambitions of arthouse films. But other than that, you couldn’t ask for two more different filmmakers. Lee is all about emotional relationships. If you have a sibling, parent, or child whom you love but absolutely cannot even begin to understand – someone who is biologically your immediate neighbor but whose whole life is just totally alien to you – you’ll appreciate Lee’s achievement in Eat Drink Man Woman. Ditto Sense and Sensibility if you’ve ever been in love, The Ice Storm if you’ve been hurt by other people’s personal self-indulence, and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon if you’ve ever loved someone you couldn’t have – or had to deal with an angry teenage girl.

By contrast, Shyamalan’s films aren’t about relationships, except in the sense that they’re about man’s relationship to the universe. What ties all his movies together is that they take place in a universe that isn’t what it seems, and they’re about how we cope with the realities that lie behind the universe of appearance that makes up our ordinary lives.

His characters are mostly two-dimensional. That’s not a criticism – Aeschylus’s characters are two-dimensional, too, and for the same reason. Narratives about “man and the universe” necessarily reduce the “man” to a broadly representational figure. That’s the whole point. In the Oresteia, Orestes is the paradigmatic “man torn between conflicting duties” – in other words, Orestes is all of us. So naturally Orestes as a character isn’t developed much; that would only detract from the drama, by preventing us from identifying with Orestes. Ditto for most of Shyamalan’s work.

By this rubric, Lee is the Sophocles of the 1990s – his plots are only there to illustrate and develop the personal qualities of the characters. Raise your hand if you remember the plot of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. (Okay, all of you with your hands up, report for detox at once.) And The Ice Storm barely even had a plot. Whereas in Shyamalan, as in Aeschylus, instead of the plot only being there to illustrate the characters, the characters are only there for the sake of the plot. Quick, how many main characters from Shyamalan’s films can you name without looking them up?

(Who, then, is the Euripides of 1990s film – the cynic for whom both plot and character give way to lengthy chunks of hard-bitten dialogue that either proclaim, or else ignorantly illustrate, the meaninglessness of the human world and the absence of the gods from it? My vote: David Mamet.)

Shyamalan’s characters often don’t change at all. Of the three main characters in The Sixth Sense, all three remain the same people at the end of the movie they were at the beginning. They change only in that they start the movie ignorant of certain very important facts, and end it knowing those facts. The boy is terrified and disturbed at the beginning but calm and well adjusted at the end, not because he’s grown as a person, but because he had mistakenly thought the ghosts were a threat to him and now knows that they’re not. Similarly, the psychologist lets go of his anger at his wife, not because he’s grown as a person, but because he realizes that he’s dead. The mother’s attitude toward her son changes, not because she’s grown as a person, but because she finally sees proof that he’s really seeing ghosts and isn’t crazy. Their personalities are unchanged. Only their knowledge of the mysteries of their universe has changed.

Or consider that, as far as I can recall, the few really emotional scenes in Shyamalan’s films are all either confrontations or revelations – both of which can produce strong emotions without doing much to advance character development. The scene from The Sixth Sense that really stuck with me and haunted me, so to speak – it still does – is that harrowing moment where the mother realizes that her son’s doctor believes she’s abusing him. She boils over with furious indignation, as do we – until we remember that while she knows the true reason for the boy’s injuries, and we know it, he doesn’t – and from his perspective, abuse is the logical explanation for what he sees in front of him. We can’t help but hate him – hate him with a boiling passion – for doing the right thing.

(An interjection: I’ve heard some people criticize as vain Shyamalan’s inserting himself into each of his movies, Hitchcock-style. But look at where he inserts himself. In the first three movies, and above all in the first one, he appears as someone who makes us intensely uncomfortable: the doctor who mistakenly – but rationally, given the facts available to him – thinks one of the protagonists is abusing her son; the dark-skinned man who is singled out and pulled aside by the protagonist for a drug search; the reckless driver who killed the protagonist’s wife. And in the fourth movie he’s a lazy cynic. This is vanity?)

The Sixth Sense could have been just a shlocky thriller with a neato twist ending, but it’s something more. (Not something else instead of a shlocky thriller with a neato twist ending, but something else in addition to a shlocky thriller with a neato twist ending; it’s still that, of course.) It’s about what it’s like to encounter, and be changed by, things that you don’t understand and that the people around you don’t understand. The frustration, the isolation, the resentment, the anger – and finally the relief of coming to understand, and finding others who understand, what you’ve encountered. “I see dead people” is a proxy for “I have a mental illness” or “I didn’t kill that girl but everyone thinks I did” or “I’m a Montague and I’m in love with a Capulet”  or “I’m the only person in my family who does (or doesn’t) believe in the Bible” or any one of a thousand other strange, alienating things that happen to us in our very strange universe.

Likewise, Unbreakable – a gem of a movie if you have the patience for it – takes what could have been a comic-book-movie premise and turns it into a meditation on the metaphysics of duty and destiny. If you find yourself having been blessed in some very important way, is it mere arrogance to think that you’ve been chosen to recieve that blessing? Is that an insult to the others who presumably were not chosen, and who may be suffering (or, in this case, dead) because they lack what you have?  And do you have a duty to accept your chosenness if it doesn’t give you the life that you want? The deleted scenes to this movie are well worth watching; having seen them only once, I find it impossible to think about Unbreakable except in terms of how those scenes frame the story. One in particular, a conversation between the hero and the town priest immediately after the mass funeral for the train wreck victims, really expands the significance of the movie and should have been left in; this slow-paced movie could have stood to move faster anyway.

Then came Signs. Here, Shyamalan’s ambition to comment on man’s place in the universe becomes explicit. Rather than take a premise that could have stood on its own as an ordinary genre movie (e.g. man investigating ghosts discovers that he is one; pitiful man with broken life discovers he has superpowers) and then subtly imbuing it with greater philosophical significance, Shyamalan builds the plot directly around his philosophical reflections.

The key to the whole movie is the “miracle man” dialogue between our hero, the ex-priest – and by the way, one of the few really false notes in this movie is how it puts the hero in a priest’s collar but then carefully avoids calling him a priest, resorting to all sorts of ridiculous verbal gymnastics (“I’m not a reverend anymore.” Neither Protestants nor Catholics ever refer to a clergyman as “a reverend”). What was the point? Presumably to avoid establishing whether he was Catholic or Protestant, to allow the broadest possible audience to identify with him. But identifying him as a priest wouldn’t have established whether he was Catholic, since plenty of Protestant clergy are called priests, and in any event the unavoidable tone of falsehood this introduces to the movie does much more harm than . . .

Where was I? Oh, yes. The key to the whole movie is the “miracle man” dialogue between our hero, the ex-priest, and his brother about the concept of providence. Either all events are ordained to serve a cosmic plan – or else not. The point of the movie is that no empirical evidence can settle the question; the universe of the five senses, the universe as we experience it by living in it, equally vindicates the nihilist view and the theist one (provided, of course, that we’re talking about a real theism that robustly faces the problem of evil, not the watered down happy-talk theism that has sucked the life out of the oldline denominations in the past century . . . but I digress). And saying that it vindicates both is just another way of saying it vindicates neither. In other words, mere experience (or “evidence”) cannot by itself distinguish between a meaningless universe and a meaningful one. As a result, most people make their real choice between the two alternatives based on some combination of emotion, instinct, and inclination; Signs is the story of how one man came to change sides, and then change back.

Of course there is another way to judge between the two, namely by metaphysical reasoning – evaluating the universe not as we experience it with the five senses, but as it appears to our logic. Unforutnately, there’s no way to work this point into a movie, and Shyamalan was right not to try. Nonetheless, Signs always makes me think about this book, which is the one book anyone who wants to understand this subject should read. (Strict logicians who want the issues formulated the the technical style appropriate to a doctoral dissertation in philosophy should instead read this.)

Appropriately enough for a post about M. Night Shyamalan, the book begins with a ghost.

“In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.

“For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience . . . . What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.”

Signs contains more meditation on man’s place in the universe than Shyamalan’s previous films, but the absence of an independent story that could have carried the movie on its own balances that out. On the whole, it’s not better or worse than the previous movies, just different. But the greater ambition Shyamalan displayed in Signs was, if you’ll pardon me, a good sign. Greater things were around the corner.

And then it all started going wrong. First came The Village. I went into The Village as a Shyamalan fan and thus predisposed to enjoy the movie. And I think it was for that reason that I actually did enjoy it while I was watching it – not a lot, but enough. The performances are superb, and the scene where the male romantic lead confesses his feelings for the female romantic lead is especially powerful. However, as soon as the credits started rolling, all that faded away; superb performances are the most perishable part of any film experience. What lives most vividly in the memory is not the work of the actors but the work of the writer and director – and that was subpar in this movie.

The problem, I think, is laziness. There are just too many dumb moments, and dumb moments are always a symptom of a filmmaker who couldn’t be bothered to keep reworking things until they all fit together right. So Lee and Shyamalan both got self-indulgent, but where Lee fell off one side of the horse, working too hard on the wrong things, Shyamalan fell off the other side, not working hard enough. (Or that’s my theory, anyway.)

I’m told that The Village improves with repeat viewing. I can well believe it. Repeat viewing tends to increase the relative value of the actors’ performances and decrease the relative value of the writers’ and directors’ contribution, most especially regarding this movie’s greatest weakness: plot. If a movie improves on repeat viewing, that may rescue the performances and the movie as a whole from a negative verdict, but in general it shouldn’t rescue the director.

Then, as we all know, came Lady in the Water – about which the less said the better, not that that ever stopped anybody.

When I saw that Shyamalan was staging a comeback, I had cautious hopes. If we didn’t have a two-year-old to look after, I’m sure we’d have gone to see it. But check this out:

Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer

The Village: 43%

Lady in the Water: 24%

The Happening: 20%

Now, I know only too well – as readers of this blog will recall – that Rotten Tomatoes is not infallible. At the time of release it gave 100% to this flaming nuclear turd of a movie, although I see that with the passage of time a handful of critics who actually saw the movie rather than judging it by the name of the director have brought the average down to 96%.

But, to use this gag one last time, a rating below Lady in the Water is definitely not a good sign.

2 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Voices of School Choice

June 12, 2008

(Guest post by Dan Lips)

Just as Louisiana appears likely to become the newest state with a school voucher progarm, liberals on Capitol Hill are working to end school choice in the District of Columbia. 

As I explained in a post over at Heritage’s The Foundry, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton is working to kill the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship progarm, which is currently helping 1,900 low-income kids attend private school in the nation’s capital.  Today, the Washington Post goes after her effort in an editorial:

DEL. ELEANOR Holmes Norton‘s campaign against school vouchers in the District has hit a new low. While proclaiming a desire to protect children, she is seeking to eliminate a program that benefits them and that is valued by their parents. Her actions make it all the more urgent for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty to convince Congress that the educational interests of children are more important than party ideology. Failure to do so would imperil not just the 1,900 children in the scholarship program but the essence of school reform in the District.

To meet some of the families who would be harmed if Norton’s succeeds, visit Voices of School Choice, a new website where parents and students participating in the voucher progarm explain how scholarships are improving their lives. 

Leave a Comment » | politics, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by danlips

Ho, Hum, Yet Another New Voucher Program

June 12, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Yesterday the Louisiana Senate passed Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher program, 25-12. As soon as the governor signs, it will be the nation’s 24th school choice program. That makes three new programs and two expanded programs this year.

Not a lot of news coverage on this. But then, why would there be? It’s only news when school choice loses. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often.

UPDATE: It has to go back through the House before it goes to Jindal, since it was amended in the Senate, but no one seems to think there’ll be any problems there. The Senate vote was the real test.

1 Comment | journalism, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The Shape of Things to Come

June 11, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Recently I described how the primordial soup of a market system could transform education. A new article suggests that this is already well under way.

The article How Do We Transform Our Schools? in Education Next by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn has created a big buzz. Christensen and Horn have now released a coauthored a book on the same subject: how technology will fundamentally transform American K-12 education:

That schools have gotten little back from their investment in technology should come as no surprise. Virtually every organization does the same thing schools have done when implementing an innovation. An organization’s natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is the predictable course, the logical course—and the wrong course.

I had always thought of online learning as interesting, but ultimately only a niche activity. Christensen and Horn, however, maintain that filling niches is exactly how a disruptive technology like online learning advances:

The way to implement an innovation so that it will transform an organization is to implement it disruptively—not by using it to compete against the existing paradigm and serve existing customers, but to let it compete against “non-consumption,” where the alternative is nothing at all.

The essence of the argument is this: a disruptive technology starts off as something which is perceived to be of inferior quality to the dominant practice. It gains a foothold however by satisfying the needs of consumers who otherwise would have gone under served by the dominant technology.

Online learning seems to fit the bill. Distance learning for example is very popular in Alaska, where children might otherwise have to commute vast distances through dangerous weather to attend a traditional school. Homeschoolers have taken to online learning and the authors point out that only about a third of American high schools have Advanced Placement courses. Better, many school administrators are now reasoning, to adopt such courses online than not to offer them at all.

Christensen and Horn describe the progress of online learning to date as being broadly similar to past disruptive technologies. The key moment of transformation comes years after the disruptive technology has filled niches here and there. Through the normal course of incremental improvement, the disruptive technology becomes superior to the dominant technology, and displaces it. Projecting from the limited amount of data available, the authors project 50 percent of K-12 courses will be delivered online by 2019.

 Whoa, I know calculus!

Bill, forget the phone booth, I just downloaded our history report straight to my brain dude!!

Out with the old, and in with the new. In this case however, the “old” is the labor intensive method of teaching students which has gone more or less unchanged since before Socrates. Could we really be on the verge of transforming the basic method of content delivery?

When I first read this article, I was skeptical. It seemed to me that the authors had underestimated the political obstacles standing in the way of such a transformation even if online learning does become recognized as a superior form of learning, which to date, it has not.

And yet…

It isn’t that hard to imagine the day coming when online programs would improve to the point where they were of demonstrably better quality than the tried and only sometimes true methods. Innovators are working on computer based learning programs that will adapt to the individual learning styles of children. Such programs will present information in a variety of ways, figure out which way works best for the individual learner and adapt the presentation accordingly.

Enormous promise also resides in the area of personalized, self-paced learning. Both fast and slower learners often find themselves frustrated by the pace of a course which settles on a class average which doesn’t suit them.

Can you imagine some clever team designing an online course around, say, the work of Milton Friedman and coming up with something better than the average high-school or college economics class? It doesn’t sound implausible to me-I can’t remember the name of the graduate student who taught my Econ 101 course, but he wasn’t Milton Friedman. He didn’t adapt his presentation to my learning style either. Come to think of it, I don’t think he spoke English fluently.

Exactly how such a transformation would play out, none can say. This was one of the lessons of Chris Andersen’s excellent book The Long Tail.  Andersen convincingly made the case that the internet is fundamentally transforming society. The transformation is simply different and more subtle than expected during the height of the dot.com bubble. The change isn’t exactly subtle for newspapers and record labels, which are being pushed aside, or network television, which draws starkly smaller audiences for top programs today than 30 years ago despite a much larger population.

I’m inclined to think that education will remain primarily a social enterprise, but mixed models of classroom and online instruction are already underway. The nonsensical notion of teachers being a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on the stage” might actually make sense when the content comes primarily through technology.

Can technology deliver learning better and cheaper than today’s schools? NAEP shows that thirty four percent of American 4th graders can’t read. Somewhere close to that percentage of students drop out of high school, and many others graduate in need of remediation. The Colossus has feet of clay.

Politics will doubtlessly play an inhibiting role, but bet on the better mouse trap in the long run.

6 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The College Access Myth Marches On

June 11, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In the May 30 edition of NEA’s Education Insider, the union makes the following request: “As we approach the graduation season, we are asking NEA members to share stories of your students who would like to attend college but cannot because of the cost. Stories will be collected and used to bolster the case for action by policymakers.” (Hat tip to America’s last education labor reporter.)

Here we go again. A while back, Jay and I ran the numbers using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s NAEP Transcript Study and found that the number of graduating 12th graders whose academic transcripts and possession of basic skills made them eligible to apply to four-year colleges was very close to the number of students actually entering four-year colleges for the first time: 1.3 million. The difference between the two figures was only about 42,000. The rest of the 4 million or so college-entrance-aged persons consists of those who either 1) dropped out of high school, 2) didn’t take the academic coursework (four years of English, three years of math, etc.) that is generally necessary to attend a four-year college (we reviewed the entrance requirements at a selection of low-prestige four-year colleges to confirm this), or 3) did not possess even basic reading skills. In other words, the college-entrance-aged population consists almost entirely of people who either entered college or were not academically qualified to enter college. A subsequent study Jay did with Marcus Winters confirmed the finding.

Obviously there are some non-traditional-age students entering college, and some students can get into four-year colleges without possessing the qualifications that are generally necessary to do so. (For more discussion of the methodological issues, see you know where.) But even if we allow a (probably over-generous) 10% allowance for these and similar factors, that still leaves us with about 2.4 million people who can’t go to college because they’re not academically qualified, as compared with about 270,000 who are qualified to go to college but don’t go because of all other factors combined. Some of those 270,000 will be people who are qualified to go but don’t want to, or are prevented by some other, non-monetary factor. So the number who are qualified to go and would like to go and are kept out by no other barriers but money would be some subset of that 270,000.

In other words, if our goal is to increase college access, focusing on people who lack access because of money is an extremely inefficient way to do it. You’re going to find a lot more “low-hanging fruit” in a pool of 2.4 million than in a pool of less than 270,000 (by this over-generous estimate). And that’s even before you consider that improving the academic performance of the K-12 system would create many other benefits besides just increasing college access.

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Posted by Greg Forster

Can RTI Work? We Went To The Moon, Right?

June 10, 2008

(Guest post by Reid Lyon)

Jay’s analysis of Response to Instruction, also known as Response to Intervention (RTI), and the need for additional reforms to help ensure effectiveness is provocative and informative. I agree with a good deal of his analysis but feel the need to expand the discussion a bit.

First off, his piece offers a wake-up call to those who are prone to fall in love with magic bullets that will close the achievement gap and reduce referrals to special education. One of my dreams is to provide policymakers and educational leaders two free tattoos to be placed anywhere they want on their persons that read: (1) “Necessary but not sufficient,” and (2) “Great policy idea, but implementation is a bitch.” Jay’s points address both tattoos.

RTI is a noble and well researched concept. One of its major goals is to reduce referrals to special education by documenting that the student’s learning difficulties are not because of inadequate instruction in general education classrooms but because of a disability. Years ago, S. Allen Cohen provided us with a more interesting term for lousy teaching which he called “dyspedagogia” (I believe this was tongue in cheek). 

But the fact is most kids identified for special education and labeled as having a Learning Disability (LD) are not LD but achieve poorly because of “dyspedagogia”. In fact, our research over the past 20 years has taught us that scientifically based early reading intervention provided through a tiered approach to instruction can reduce the percentage of LD from upwards of 22% to between 2% and 10% in some states and LEAs. This is a very good thing given that LD referrals and placements constitute about 50% of all referrals to special education, and reading disabilities comprise about 80% of kids identified with LD. 

Those working on the development of RTI knew that classroom teachers and special educators are from different planets, with entirely different backgrounds in curriculum and instruction and entirely different professional languages. This makes collaboration and the provision of coherent and systematic instruction impossible. In essence, RTI was developed, in part, to underscore the need to develop a common assessment and instructional language between well intentioned teachers with different specializations so that instruction was not so fragmented, and so kids would not feel like ping-pong balls when receiving entirely different types of instruction on the same day from classroom teachers and special educators. There was no other alternative – typical colleges of education would not provide the professional development necessary to accomplish the level of shared training and collaboration skills  essential for effective and differentiated instruction. 

Related to this, RTI as a concept was also developed to take advantage of the converging research that prevention through early identification and intervention provides a more effective approach to reducing academic failure than hanging out waiting until the kid chucks his books through the window in the third or fourth grade. RTI procedures can differ across LEAs but they typically screen all students in kindergarten or early first grade to determine which students require enhanced instruction in the classroom or more intensive instruction in smaller groups, while still under the direction of the regular classroom teacher. If the kid demonstrates little academic (or behavioral) growth following more intense instruction, then special education becomes a possibility. It is critical to remember that being placed in special education is also a tiered process. The questions are: Does the student have a disability?  (RTI contributes to answering this question); and, if yes, does the student require special education? (RTI contributes to answering this question).

So we have two elements in RTI that we know can increase achievement (at least in reading): (1) collaboration/common language and (2) prevention is where it’s at. These elements are inseparable. But we know that these two elements cannot work the way they are supposed to unless the folks who run the system know all of the potential barriers to the implementation of RTI and ensure that essential conditions to support the initiative are in place. There are examples of districts implementing successful RTI initiatives that increase students’ reading achievement and reduce referrals to special education. There are other examples where the initiative has not resulted in changes in achievement or referral outcomes.

So what is going on?  It will be important to figure out what works in some districts and not others. Susan Hall has recently published a very user-friendly book that lays out what districts and schools did in implementing RTI in a way that resulted in substantial reductions in referrals and significant increases in reading achievement: A Principal’s Guide: Implementing Response to Intervention. I am not hawking this book, as there are others that lay out the conditions that are essential for implementing RTI and scaling it (see Dianne Haager et al. for specific evidence of effectiveness).

The bottom line is that effective implementers of RTI have had to do a tremendous amount of study and planning to ensure that the initiative actually makes a difference. Jay lays out some the barriers, including problems with implementing a program that actually takes funding away from your district or schools, and persuading educators to replace programs and procedures that they have used for some time.

But there are others as well. For example, how do you overcome the fact that intervention services in schools are often funded by separate entitlement programs, especially Title I and IDEA, that have specific eligibility criteria that make it difficult to co-mingle funds to support school-wide programs? How do you implement programs that have been typically isolated from general education? And how can school leaders and teachers avoid the mistakes that result in limited or no effectiveness, not to mention that the excitement for change and increased morale will be crushed?

If you did a factor analysis of all the crap that can derail the implementation of RTI, these are the most common errors:

–Focusing Too Many Resources on Administering and Collecting Assessment Data Rather Than Ensuring  that Staff Use the Data to Inform Instruction
-Viewing Purchased  Programs as Silver Bullets Rather Than Aides to Help Well Prepared Teachers Make Informed Instructional Decisions
-Confusing Awareness Training with Implementation Training
-Using Ineffective Practices to Train Teachers
-Underestimating the Magnitude of Change
-Taking on Too Many Grade Levels and Schools the First year
-Beginning the Implementation Without a Comprehensive Implementation Plan
-Failure to View the Implementation as a Systems-Wide Change

The good news is that districts and schools that have effective RTI programs in place know they can’t make the mistakes above and provide incentives that have trumped the traditional financial rewards that have potential for increasing referral rates.

I am sure that I have taken up too much space with details that may be of little interest to policymakers. But the details are what make RTI effective, and when RTI works, it really works. However, if you can’t deal with complexity, either-or concrete thinking, or have an allergic reaction to human and systems change, you might as well blow off trying to implement RTI.

Jay has done a service laying out the big picture issues. Implementing additional reforms to increase the probability that RTI can succeed is essential, as he has articulated. But the return on investment is only as good as understanding and addressing the amount of grunt work involved. It’s that “necessary but not sufficient” thing. I know this is self-evident, but we sure keep trying to do one without the other.

4 Comments | instructional reform, special ed | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

A Final Salute to a Great Teacher

June 9, 2008

(Guest post by Matthew Ladner)

Greg Patterson, a former state lawmaker and Arizona’s foremost political blogger, delivers a moving final tribute to the teacher who changed his life.

If you were fortunate enough to have a teacher like this, now would be a good time to let them know how much you appreciated their efforts on your behalf.

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Posted by matthewladner

Tell Them about the Whales

June 9, 2008

(Guest post by Jonathan Butcher)

It is possible to meet the requirements of the much-maligned, perennially debated, and frequently mau-maued federal No Child Left Behind Act. No really, it is—in fact, last spring third and fourth grade students at Ocean City Elementary School in Ocean City, Maryland accomplished this feat. Here, let me help you pick your chin up off the floor. 

The Washington Post reports this school is the first in the state apart from some special education centers to have every student proficient in reading and math. This news is cause for celebration, of course; however, if you read the Post‘s article to the very end, you are given an almost backhanded reminder in the last full paragraph that Ocean City Elementary has to keep this up until 2014, according to the law. Ouch–six more years. 

Back to celebrating, though. Two questions come to mind whenever I read about a school’s remarkable success: First, how did they do it, and, second, how could their approach be replicated elsewhere? The Post helps us answer the first question, as reporter Daniel de Vise says the school has an “unusually structured, relentless, and consistent” approach and a skilled and motivated principal, Irene Kordick. De Vise provides the principal’s inspiring story of how she immigrated to the U.S. from Germany and was passed along in the public education system until the fifth grade before she learned to read and write in English. Kordick was determined not to let that happen to anyone else, and the rest is history. 

As to my second question, if I had the answer or if I could put Ocean City Elementary’s method in a bottle and sell it, I would have a better haircut and wear more expensive shoes. Things being what they are, though, I have to refer to larger issues regarding the federal government’s involvement in public schools.

For starters, we taxpayers spend nearly $2 million educating whales. Specifically, for years our representatives in Washington have funded the “Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners” to the tune of $2 million or more (so I guess we fund “whalers,” not whales, or “exchanges with whalers,” whatever that is—for details check out this page on OMB’s web site; why this doesn’t have Greenpeace protesting on the Capitol steps I don’t know). In addition, OMB’s handy earmarks database shows, in nine pages of small type, mind you, that in committee deliberations in January everything from the Brooklyn Public Library to the Houston Zoo to the School Board of Broward County, Florida was on the dole. 

In searching this document, I didn’t find “Ocean City,” or better yet, “doing what Ocean City does” anywhere. I did find nearly $400,000 for jazz instruction in New York City and a similar amount for a parent training program in San Diego, though. Most of the programs listed on these nine pages of small type sound wholesome and like great ideas (“homework assistance,” “mentoring programs,” “after-school programs,” etc.), but I’ll ask the same question free market, small-government types have been asking for decades: why should Ocean City care about New York City’s jazz program? 

Now, I realize it is routine for right-of-center observers to bang the drum for fiscal responsibility in government—and I realize this drum is old and worn and some are tired of it. But considering the success of folks like me who dwell on this stuff, it makes me wonder if I shouldn’t be talking about it more (because it hasn’t worked so far) or if I should just pick another issue. 

The danger in suggesting that our government is spending money on pet projects instead of on spreading successful programs is that it is another way of saying, “Gee, if we’d only spend money on the right things maybe we could get something done around here….” So I won’t suggest this. Instead, I recommend we all move to Ocean City. Or New York City, if you like jazz. Because either one seems to be about as effective at getting government spending to produce more Ocean City Elementaries as my drum. 

Take every opportunity to praise exemplary students, schools, and school leadership. Spread the word about them. Celebrate them. But when somebody says, “Let’s take this same approach here! And here!” be ready for the question of “Why isn’t Washington doing more to help spread programs like this?” And then tell them about the whales. 

 

1 Comment | NCLB | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by JButcher

Walmart Shareholder Meeting

June 6, 2008

This morning I went to the Walmart shareholder meeting held in the University of Arkansas basketball stadium.  The theme was the new marketing slogan, “Save money.  Live better.”  They presented impressive evidence and compelling anecdotes of how Walmart saves money for families of modest means and, in doing so, improves people’s lives. 

The best example they provided was their $4 prescription drug program.  Lee Scott, the CEO, emphasized that policymakers have been trying to get more people to switch to cheaper generics for years.  But Walmart has been able to succeed where the government has failed, by bringing the price down.  How did they do that when the government hasn’t?  Walmart was able to squeeze the pharmaceutical companies in a way that the government won’t.  Just think of the Medicare Drug Benefit program that has been a near-total flop, failing to make drugs more available while costing taxpayers dearly. 

It struck me that if Walmart were a government program, designed to provide basic goods to low-income families at reduced prices, it would be lauded as a great success on the order of the New Deal or the Marshall Plan.  Books would be written about how it worked so well.  Conferences would be organized to sing its praises.  But because someone is actually making a profit while serving low-income families, somehow the whole thing is ruined.  It’s as if social progress can only be made if taxpayers lose money.

It’s not accurate to say that Walmart is only able to provide low prices because it underpays its workers, who are themselves often low-income.  In fact, Walmart pays its workers above the industry average and offers health benefits rarely found in retail.  The reality is that Walmart primarily reduces prices by squeezing its suppliers.  Remember the prescription drug companies?  Ironically, anti-Walmart activists are really pro-Procter & Gamble.  Their chant should be “Charge poor people more for shampoo so that Procter & Gamble thrives!”  I guess that wouldn’t be a very good chant at a rally (I’d make a bad activist), but you get my point. 

Of course, the other groups that get squeezed are the unions.  But even if you believed that unions provided significant benefits to workers, we should all recognize that it would have to come at the expense of low-income consumers.  There is no free lunch.  And keep in mind that Walmart workers already receive above-industry-average wages and health benefits, so the additional benefits of unionization are more dubious.  Furthermore, outside of North America Walmart workers are mostly unionized (as are the workers of all of their major competitors in those markets) and the company still thrives. 

I know.  People will hold this post up as an example of how I’m somehow in the employ of Walmart.  Just to set the facts straight — I’m an employee of the University of Arkansas and am primarily paid by the taxpayers of Arkansas.  I’ve never heard anyone suggest that my (or anyone else’s)  receipt of money from the government presents a conflict of interest that disqualifies them from evaluating government programs.  I’m as free to criticize Arkansas policies as to criticize Walmart.  (And I do have criticisms of Walmart.  For example, the produce is lousy and the stores in Florida, when I lived there, looked dingy.)

It’s true that my department received a $20 million gift from which I draw some income.  But that $20 million endowment was initiated by an anonymous foundation (not connected to the Waltons) with a $10 million gift that was then matched by the University’s matching grant program, which applied to all gifts that met certain criteria.  It’s true that the matching grant money originally came from the estate of Sam Walton, but he passed away in 1992 and neither the Waltons nor Walmart control those dollars.  So, my connection to Walmart exists, but it is tenuous.  They certainly have no ability to control what I say or do.

But even if I were a corporate executive at Walmart, the issue is whether my argument is true, not with whom do I have a financial connection.  Walmart executives could make an argument and be right.  The intellectually honest way to exchange ideas is to address the merits of other people’s ideas, not analyze their motives for articulating those ideas. 

My assessment of the evidence is that Walmart really does help people save money and live better.  If you disagree, rebut the evidence.

11 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Pass the Popcorn: Curse of the Hulk

June 6, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

“I’m Gumby, dammit!”

 

(Gen Y readers see here for explanation.)

With no Lost episodes until at least the fall – the network isn’t saying when it’s coming back; my guess is they put the whole show into “The Vault” and transported it forward in time, so who knows when it will reappear – the weekly Get Lost feature is going on summer break and we’re starting a new Friday distraction called Pass the Popcorn.

Before moving on to new business, I’d like to report that to my very great surprise, my 12,000 line epic poem on the virtues of Speed Racer generated no negative reaction whatsoever – because it turns out I’m the only person on earth who has seen the movie.

One week from today, Marvel will unveil the latest attempt to make an Incredible Hulk movie that doesn’t suck. As all geeks and fanboys know only too well, in 2003 the career of one of the greatest filmmakers of the 1990s, Ang Lee, shipwrecked on the rocky shoals of the big mean green machine.

“I agreed to make a Hulk movie? Oh, please . . . please, no!”

It’s worth contemplating the significance of Lee’s failure. Here was a man who was perfectly positioned to make a great movie out of the Hulk. After establishing himself with his intimate portrait of family and romantic relations, Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), he turned out two of the most noteworthy movies of the decade, each of which achieved serious commercial success while retaining the deep emotional sensibility of the arthouse: Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), in addition to his less widely noticed but still artistically important indictment of the sexual revolution, The Ice Storm (1997). His masterpiece, Sense and Sensibility, can make a fair bid to have been the best movie of the 1990s. Why should Emma Thompson get all the credit – sure she produced what is probably the best film script adaptation of a novel ever, but Ang Lee directed the darn thing.

Though the choice of an “arty” director to produce a Hulk movie seemed daring and risky at the time, and was thus interpreted in hindsight as a huge blunder, I don’t think that was the problem. Lee’s movies may have been “arty,” but not in an obscure way. They’re completely accessible to non-specialist viewers. Lee was always concerned to connect with a broad audience. And his gift for communicating the emotional lives of his characters should have served him very well in making a movie whose central plot device hinges on the emotional state of the main character. Moreover, with Crouching Tiger, Lee had already demonstrated a mastery of the art of fantastic narrative.

Alas, during the same period as his triumphs, he also produced Ride with the Devil (1999). It was dismissed at the time as a mere one-time stumble for an otherwise successful director, but perhaps it may now appear as a harbinger of trouble to come.

Lee’s downfall with the Hulk, I think, was his decision to experiment. His previous movies, though arty, were by and large not experimental. Yes, people flew in Crouching Tiger, but that was nothing new; Lee was building on a long tradition of visually fantastic martial arts movies. Lee and his team certainly advanced the technology of these movies in important ways – nobody had ever run up a wall quite that convincingly before – but they were building on an established genre of visual presentation.

But his critical and commercial success, combined with the big franchise he was handed, appears to have prompted the onset of hubris. Lee notriously decided that the visual presentation of his Hulk movie would be comic-style; that is, multiple views of the action would appear on the screen simultaneously, in rectangles vaguely reminiscent of comic book panels. This might have worked, if Lee had done it right; the TV show “24” has done great things with split-screen presentation – and without the benefit of the big movie-theater screen. But Lee was so busy with his panels that he forgot to use them for anything worth having them for. We got multiple views of things that didn’t reward multiple views – Dr. Banner fiddling with the switches on his big fancy science machines does not get any more interesting when you see it from different angles. And I think this fascination with form to the exclusion of content was the major reason the movie failed (though the weak script and other problems didn’t help).

“Just sit still, Mr. Norton, and this machine will painlessly remove your desire to appear in a Hulk movie.”

After his demolition at the hands of critics and audiences alike, Lee abandoned the mainstream and ran screaming back to the arthouse from whence he had come, producing (in 2005) a movie about gay cowboys – thus ensuring his restoration to the good graces of the Hollywood illuminati, and giving new life to a priceless gag about the obscurity of arthouse films from a 1998 episode of South Park.

“These are independent films.”

“You mean like ‘Independence Day’?”

“Naw dude, ‘independent films’ are those black and white hippie movies. They’re always about gay cowboys eating pudding.”

Now Marvel is trying again, and this time it’s not letting anyone else spoil the Hulk – this time Marvel is going to spoil the Hulk for itself. (If you want something done right . . .) Though it’s being distributed by Universal, the movie was produced entirely by Marvel’s new movie production unit Marvel Studios. Iron Man was the unit’s first major film project, and obviously it’s off to a great start both artistically and commercially. So naturally they decided their second project needed to be abysmally bad, to balance the cosmic scales.

No, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen the trailer, and that’s more than enough. Edward Norton certainly looks like he does a good enough job in the role. But take a look at the new “Hulk”:

I mean, there’s a lot more to a good summer movie than special effects – but if the special effects look lousy, then the whole time we’re sitting there watching, we’re going to be constantly thinking about the fact that we’re watching a special effects movie with lousy special effects. In other words, no amount of great story, witty dialogue, etc. is going to overcome the fact that people will be sitting there looking at the Hulk and thinking, “Man, that thing looks so much like a clay figurine, I keep expecting Pokey to wander onto the screen.”

And for the big finale, the claymation Hulk battles – another claymation Hulk! It’s better than having him fight a magic tornado, or whatever that was at the end of Lee’s movie. But still. Did you notice that the only weak part of the Iron Man movie is where the good Iron Man fights the bad Iron Man? What’s up at Marvel Studios – did they play too many games of Mortal Kombat and decide that every movie must end in a Mirror Match? (Come to think of it, the new Hulk doesn’t just look like Gumby on steroids; with that disproportionately tiny head, he looks like Gumby and Goro’s love child.)

“Get me outta this friggin’ movie!”

So what is it about the Hulk? Is he unfilmable? Cursed? Maybe it’s a problem, not an advantage, that his superpower is so bound up with psychology. In comics, it’s remarkably easy to shift the tone of the story; that’s one of the inherent advantages of the medium. So you can have a big fight scene immediately followed (or, more likely in the case of the Hulk, immediately preceded) by an intimate emotional scene. On screen, though, it’s harder to shift tone at such a rapid pace. The sound and the fury of the big fight scenes drown out everything around them. That may also explain why the TV Hulk wasn’t an embarrassment – TV can switch moods better than film (although still not as well as comics), and in those low-tech days there were fewer highly intense “effect” scenes and the ones they did have were less intense. For that matter, the Hulk himself wasn’t an “effect,” and that alone may have been the key.

Tune in next Friday for another look back at a talented filmmaker ruined by success: M. Night Shyamalan.

4 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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