Rhee Resignation

October 13, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Robert Enlow, Greg, Virginia Walden Ford,  Lance Izumi, Lisa Snell and I weigh in on the Rhee resignation in School Reform News.

UPDATE:

The Cool Kids put on a brave face in the New York Times.

Rotherham wisely notes that if Gray is going to kill reform, he will do it later in a series of pillow-smotherings rather than in some obvious fashion.

WaPo columnist McCartney on the Rhee aftermath.

Finally, the WaPo produced this sobering “Man on the Street” reaction video showing DC residents having far more sympathy with ineffective teachers than the students in the schools.

4 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Donovan and Mills for Al Copeland Humanitarians of the Year

October 6, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

It’s taken me a week to think of it, but I have come up with what I believe is the ultimate nominee for the Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year award this year. Or rather, two nominees.

Yes, the most interesting man in the world is . . . very interesting! I love the ads, but does he really represent the spirit of “The Al”? He certainly has done a lot of things – but what has he actually accomplished?

I propose that the true spirit of “The Al” is what you find inside . . . diapers.

Marion Donovan and Victor Mills’ diapers, to be exact.

Just spend a moment thinking about what life was like during the endless centuries when a diaper was nothing but a piece of cloth – one you had to wash and reuse, because manufactured goods couldn’t yet be made cheap enough for disposability. Contemplate, for a moment (but no longer than that!) how many diapers were changed from the first human beings technologically sophisticated enough to make clothing down through the middle of the twentieth century – and what was involved in changing each and every one of those diapers.

When Martin Luther wanted to illustrate the point that joyfully worshipping God was not a special activity that you did by going to church or performing other “religious works,” but something that had to infuse every single solitary human activity, even the most unpleasant, he was shrewd to choose diaper changing as an example:

Now observe that when … our natural reason … takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labour at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself? O you poor, wretched fellow, have you taken a wife? Fie, fie upon such wretchedness and bitterness! It is better to remain free and lead a peaceful. carefree life; I will become a priest or a nun and compel my children to do likewise.”

He went on to focus on diaper-changing as the representative activity encompassing all these unpleasant duties. Luther knew that by sticking up for the honor of the married estate, he was sticking up for getting poop on your hands. Daily.

But having a family doesn’t mean daily poop-scrubbing anymore.

Born in 1917, Donovan spent much of her childhood hanging around the Ft. Wayne factory run by her father and uncle. They were inventors in their own right – having invented, among other things, an industrial lathe for making automotive gears and gun barrels – and she absorbed their entrepreneurial spirit.

Her first invention was a waterproof diaper cover, made out of a shower curtain, to contain the small leaks that were endemic to diapers in the pre-Donovan era. Rubber baby pants were already on the market, but they weren’t widely used because they caused diaper rash and pinched the skin. The plastic “changing pads” we use today are a distant descendant of Donovan’s innovation.

For good measure, she put snaps on her diaper cover instead of using safety pins, which at the time were the universal fastening technology in the diaper sector. Today we use velcro, but the original quantum leap away from the use of dangerous and labor-intensive pins was Donovan’s.

None of the big manufacturers would even consider marketing her invention, so she went into business for herself. Her product was an overnight success, debuting at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949. After two years she sold it to one of those super-smart manufacturing companies that had been too dumb to give her the time of day back when it would have counted.

Like any good entrepreneur, she didn’t rest on her laurels but plowed her success into the next innovaiton – this time, disposable diapers. The challenge was significant; she needed to make the interior out of paper (so it would be cheap enough to manufacture in large numbers) but make it durable and absorbant.

She produced what she thought was a workable solution, but once again she couldn’t get the manufacturers interested. They were already working on the same idea – and Victor Mills, a chemical engineer at Proctor & Gamble, had a better solution than hers. (Those are the breaks! “The Al” celebrates the tough life of entrepreneurial struggle.)

 In 1956, P&G had acquired a new paper pulp plant, and it asked Mills and his team what they could do with it. Lots of companies were working on disposable diapers, but nobody had solved the problem yet. Mills, a grandfather at the time, had a pretty strongly vested interest in coming up with a solution. And the new plant yeilded just enough durability and absorbancy to solve the problem. Using his grandchild to test the prototypes, Mills developed the disposable diaper that ultimately became Pampers in 1961.

Well earned

So if you have kids, thank Donovan and Mills for their contribution to your well-being – and vote for them for Al Copeland Humanitarians of the Year.

HT Thomas Frey, Women Inventers and Chemical Engineering World for images, Famous Women Inventors and Jon Marmor for info

7 Comments | Al Copeland Humanitarian Award | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Slam Dunk by Jonah Goldberg

September 28, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jonah Goldberg lets fly today on NRO with an absolute slam dunk:

And yet when you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask “Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?” After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.

Largely because of the Iraq war,  Katrina and Bush’s unpopularity,  a host of liberal intellectuals pronounced conservatism to be dead. The decrepit state of American education is a far more sweeping, profound and lasting indictment of the very heart of liberalism and yet the response from everyone is “Let’s give these guys another try!”

HT Jeff Reed @ FEC

6 Comments | money myth, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

You Heard It Here First!

September 22, 2010

“Why Hitler Lost the War”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Reviewing Oprah’s segment on Waiting for Superman, Jay Matt [oops] just announced that the war of ideas is over and the unions have lost.

Hmm, where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, that’s right – I’ve been saying it for a year and a half.

Permission to come aboard, granted!

The unions are primed for a major defeat. If you listen carefully, you can actually hear the voice-over from Mortal Kombat crying out “FINISH HIM!”

What the movement needs now is a fearless, dynamic organizational leader with a smart plan to get a truly universal voucher program (no more watering it down) enacted in a state in the next, say, three years, and who’s determined to spend the next three years doing nothing but putting that plan into action. There are states where that can happen. But it won’t happen unless somebody picks up the ball.

Or am I just waiting for Superman?

3 Comments | charter schools, journalism, money myth, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

It Took So Long Because They Were Learning It in the Wrong Style

September 7, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I had to laugh when I saw this New York Times story. They’ve discovered that the existence of multiple “learning styles” has no sound basis in empirical evidence:

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Wow, those daring journalists at the Times and scientists at Psychological Science in the Public Interest aren’t afraid to buck the conventional wisdom!

Imagine how daring they’d have been if they’d been reading Education Next . . . in 2004?

(Admittedly, the Ed Next article is framed in terms of “multiple intelligences” rather than “learning styles,” but when you come right down to it, “multiple intelligences” was just the fashionable early-aughts buzzword for the same cluster of fallacies that goes by “learning styles.”)

HT Joanne Jacobs

2 Comments | instructional reform, journalism | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Politics and Schools, Part MCCXXIII

September 1, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Neal notes the connection between Arne Duncan’s now-infamous embrace of Al Sharpton and the president’s continuing his new tradition of broadcasting a back-to-school message to America’s classrooms, coming up later this month.

Duncan didn’t just embrace Sharpton in his personal role as a citizen. He mobilized the U.S. Department of Education to support Sharpton by encouraging employees to attend Sharpton’s anti-Glenn-Beck rally.

Whatever you think of Glenn Beck, Sharpton cut his teeth as a professional purveyor of incitement to murder. During the Crown Heights race riots, with blood running in the streets, he said, “if the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” He had to tone it back after the Freddy’s Fashion Mart murders, when people began making connections between Sharpton and the killings that kept following in his wake. But tone it back was all he did; he’s never repented.

Duncan spoke at Sharpton’s rally and urged his employees to attend.

A department spokesperson lamely tried to evade responsibility by saying “This was a back-to-school event.” Really? Here’s a sample of Al Sharpton’s back-to-school message for America’s youth, courtesy of the Washington Examiner:

[Conservatives] think we showed up [to vote for Barack Obama] in 2008 and that we won’t show up again. But we know how to sucker-punch, and we’re coming out again in 2010!

…and do your homework!

This is obviously intimately connected with the presdient’s decision to make it an annual tradition to use America’s government school monopoly to broadcast a message to the nation’s children. Other presidents have done so before, though none has made it an annual tradition. But it was equally wrong whoever did it, and this Duncan/Sharpton rally shows why.

Neal is trying too hard when he strains to describe Obama’s message to students as “politically charged material.” Joanne Jacobs rightly notes, “Last year’s speech raised a lot of fuss, culminating in a big fizzle as Obama told students to work hard in school.” No doubt this year the president will be equally anodyne.

[Update: Neal points out below that it was the accompanying materials sent to schools, not Obama’s message itself, that he described as “politically charged.” Fair enough! I read his post too quickly. Yet it’s worth noting that even those accompanying materials were focused on anointing Obama as a role model rather than pushing an overtly political agenda.]

The connection is rather that politics can’t be hermetically sealed. The president does have some role to play as the representative of the entire nation. But he is never just that; he is also a politician with an agenda. He will always stand for things that many Americans oppose; that’s just the nature of political life. And this president in particular seems to have more of a tendency than most presidents of associating himself with criminals and race-haters.

It doesn’t matter what Obama says. In fact, the less political his message, the worse it is. If Obama’s message really were “politically charged material,” many students would recognize it as such. The more anodyne he is, the more he gets what he really wants – to be anointed as a role model. With all that entails.

It’s wrong enough to have a government monopoly on schooling. To have the government monopoly anoint the president as a role model for our children is a hundred times more wrong. It would be wrong even if the president were relatively uncontroversial, because no president can avoid having many associations to which many parents will reasonably object. With this president – well, words just fail.

4 Comments | civic values | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

National Standards Metastasize

August 13, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Below, Sandra Stotsky observes that the new national standards demand a reduction in the amount of literature taught in K-12 in order to facilitate more reading of nonfiction.

Stotsky makes a strong case that this demand is equally unnecessary (since schools have already pushed out literature in favor of nonfiction), unjustified (since there are no grounds for the view, being adopted in the name of national standards, that assigning more nonfiction in K-12 English classes will help prepare students to read college textbooks in math, economics, physics, psychology, etc.) and disastrous for real education (because literary and imaginative education is as essential to decent human life as it is neglected by the government school monopoly).

But let’s not overlook a more fundamental point: when we decided to have national standards, nobody told us that it would mean forcing schools to assign less literature. But that’s what’s happening.

Why? Friedrich Hayek outlines it in The Road to Serfdom. Even a small amount of government planning must – must – inevitably either metastasize both quantitatively and qualitatively, or else fail to accomplish its purpose.

Government planning, however small, must metastasize quantitatively. Government gets our consent to plan A. But if A must be planned, that requires control of B. And that requires control of C…

It must also metastasize qualitatively. For government to plan A, government must determine the scheme of values that governs A. This requires not only a mandatory, government-imposed view of the value of A; it requires a mandatory, government-imposed view of the value of everything. In order to plan A you must determine where A stands relative to everything else, and that means government controls not just your view of A but your view of everything.

To the extent that we prevent planning from metastasizing, it fails. To the extent that metastasizes, it succeeds – and we lose our freedom.

Image HT Ukuleleman

3 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Oh, Those Poor, Powerless School Boards

August 12, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Mike Petrilli draws attention to this Washington Post column by Laura Berthiaume of the Montgomery County, Md. school board. Mike seems be taking Berthiaume’s claims pretty seriously. I’m not sure why.

Berthiaume is responding to the Post‘s complaints that school boards bend to the wishes of the unions, because the unions have disproportionate power in school board elections.

She begins by acknowledging that the Post is basically right:

It is true that all current board members have gotten their seats with some level of union blessing.

Well, give her this at least: she’s not doing this the easy way. Beating your opponent at chess by knocking down your own king as your opening move is a tough challenge!

She writes:

In the balance of power between the board of education and the bureaucracy, the superintendent and his staff hold all the cards.

That’s a mighty strong claim, considering that, on paper, the superintendent works for the school board. So how does she justify it?

They outwit, outlast and outplay.

Well, forgive me for asking, but: whose fault is that?

Berthiaume elaborates:

When the union felt threatened by an impending state action more tightly linking teacher evaluations to student performance, an “agreement” between MCPS and the unions was announced in The Post on April 21 — and all but one board member found out about it that same morning, in the newspaper.

Well, OK, that was a nasty thing for the superintendent to do. And to hold him accountable you did what?

In my experience, the board actually has little to no impact on union contract negotiations: The superintendent and his staff negotiate the contracts.

And the superintendent is supposed to be held accountable for looking out for the district’s interests in these negotiations by whom?

Even if there ever were actual board opposition, it would be met with a fierce, resolute wall of angry staff.

And the staff work for whom?

Just what does Berthiaume think the voters of Montgomery County put her in office to do? Just what does she think the taxpayers of Montgomery County are paying her for? To rubber stamp whatever the superintendent and his staff do?

If they’re just there to look good, why don’t they put their pictures on the ballots so we can judge for ourselves which candidates are best qualified to fulfill the expectations of the office?

Look, I understand the obstacles to reform are humongous. But if God puts you in a position of responsibility (and really, he’s put all of us in some kind of position of responsibility) then it’s your duty to fight for the right as smartly and as spiritedly as you can, get whatever you can get, and go home at the end of the day satisfied that whatever else others may have done, you fought the good fight.

And if you really think your ability to accomplish anything is zero – well, shame on you for wasting the talent God gave you by spending your time on something you admit is useless!

Update: Just to be clear, Berthiaume is right that the Post shouldn’t go easy on the superintendent and lay all the blame on the board. But she should quit going so easy on herself and laying all the blame on the superintendent!

2 Comments | politics, teacher union | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Arguing the Merits

August 11, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Last week I noted that Fordham had offered up the Gadfly as a platform for an argument, made by guest columnist Eugenia Kemble, that the next logical step after establishing national standards is a single national curriculum.

Well, my post has drawn a sharp response from Kemble. Of course, she disagrees with me on the substance (the merits of a national curriculum and the badness of teachers’ unions) but that goes without saying. More interestingly, she accuses me of not addressing her argument on the merits, but only being concerned with the significance of her piece having appeared in the Gadfly. The indictment has two counts. First, she accuses me of not offering an argument for my position that “common” standards adopted by the states are really “federal” standards (i.e. controlled by the federal government.) Second, she accuses me of practicing “guilt by association” by insinuating that if Checker publishes a union piece, he must embrace the entire union agenda.

To the second count I plead not guilty. I didn’t insinuate that Checker agrees with the unions about everything. I insinuated that his position in favor of national standards was having the effect – whether intended or not – of advancing the unions’ agenda in one respect. And that the appearance of Kemble’s piece in the Gadfly clearly demonstrates that those of us who have been saying this all along were right. And I stand by that insinuation.

But to the first count I plead guilty as sin. I did not address the merits of Kemble’s claim that it is possible – not just in some hypothetical cloudcoocooland but in the real world, right now, in the actual political climate as it stands now and under all the other conditions that currently prevail – to have “common” standards nationwide (thus “national” standards) that are not controlled by the federal government. On the merits of this claim I said nothing at all.

Here are some other claims whose merits I have never addressed:

  • The existence of the tooth fairy
  • The medical effectiveness of aromatherapy
  • The flatness of the earth (oh, wait)

Even Checker admits that national standards have been “entangled in a competition for federal money,” that it’s bad that “that same federal money [is] paying for development of new assessment systems to accompany the standards,” and that “it would have been lots better if President Obama had never hinted at harnessing national standards to future Title I funding.”

As Matt aptly put it: other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

But never mind. My real point was to highlight the fact that Checker has spent weeks calling us “paranoid” because we thought national standards would become the first step toward greater national control of schools, especially by unions; then offered up the Gadfly to a union blogger as a platform to argue that national standards should become the first step toward greater national control of schools.

3 Comments | instructional reform, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

A Little Context for OFA’s Sob Story

August 10, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The latest item making the rounds is an e-mail from Organizing for America, the old Obama campaign appendage now grafted into the DNC. A teacher from Ambler, Pa. pleads that if we don’t shovel a huge chunk of money into the EduJobs rathole, it’s theoretically possible that someone “like me” could potentially lose a job.

With that special blend of entitlement mentality and self-righteousness only the blob has mastered, she solemnly intones:

I’m not a special interest. I’m a teacher.

(Portentious boldface in original.)

Jim Geraghty would like you to be aware of the numbers featured above – this teacher’s school district, Wissahickon, has an average salary almost half again as high as the state average salary. And that’s before we look at benefits, which are much richer for teachers than in the private sector. Geraghty remarks:

When the local board of education spends money at a rate that the local tax base cannot afford, those teachers who refuse to adjust their salaries to reality do start to look like a special interest.

Mike Petrilli hammers the point home:

Your job could easily be saved if your union leaders were willing to accept some modest concessions. (Even a salary freeze might do the trick.)  But when teachers demand job protections, generous benefits, and salary increases in the midst of a recession…well, that’s expecting special treatment, indeed.

Not to mention JPGB’s own Matt Ladner, commenting on the instantly-famous chart comparing private sector job destruction in the current crisis to government job protection:

The yellow line just put another $10 billion on the credit card of the red line. Let them eat cake!

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for these people.

3 Comments | money myth, politics, teacher pay, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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