The Gates Foundation Engages Its Critics 216
sam_handelman writes "The Gates Foundation responded to the critiques of its policies (previously discussed here) by inviting its critics at Education Week Teacher to a dialog on its own site. Edweek blogger Anthony Cody answered the challenge. The two sides negotiated a five-part series of post and counterpost, which can be viewed on both sites. Previous exchanges include Cody's question, Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?, and an answer from the Gates Foundation's Global Press Secretary, Chris Williams, Poverty Does Matter — But It Is Not Destiny. The final round of the dialog has begun, and is available for comment on the Gates Foundation's own blog. Slashdot readers may not know about Gates' sponsorship of specific edutech industry partners, such as Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation, and Pearson Education. Cody poses tough questions, including, 'Can the Gates Foundation reconsider and reexamine its own underlying assumptions, and change its agenda in response to the consequences we are seeing?' According to the agreement, the Gates Foundation will answer in the coming week, concluding the series."
Index of Posts and Responses (Score:5, Informative)
Yeesh, what an IA mess. Duplicate blog posts and comment threads across multiple blogs, duplicate author names on blog posts... and if there's an index to the entire discussion, I couldn't find it. So I made my own.
Here are all the posts and responses thus far:
1:
Anthony Cody: How Do We Build the Teaching Profession?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/07/dialogue_with_the_gates_founda.html [edweek.org]
July 23, 2012
Ivrin Scott responds for the Gates Foundation: How Do We Build the Teaching Profession?
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/07/A-Response-to--How-Do-We-Build-the-Teaching-Profession [impatientoptimists.org]
July 30, 2012
2:
Vicki Phillips writes for the Gates Foundation: How Do We Consider Evidence of Student Learning in Teacher Evaluation?
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/How-Do-We-Consider-Evidence-of-Student-Learning-in-Teacher-Evaluation [impatientoptimists.org]
August 7, 2012
Anthony Cody responds: How do we Consider Evidence of Learning in Teacher Evaluations?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/responding_to_the_gates_founda.html [edweek.org]
August 8, 2012
3:
Anthony Cody posts: Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/can_schools_defeat.html [edweek.org]
August 13, 2012
Chris Williams responds for the Gates Foundation: Poverty Does Matter--But It Is Not Destiny
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/Poverty-Does-MatterBut-It-Is-Not-Destiny [impatientoptimists.org]
August 20, 2012
4
Irvin Scott for the Gates Foundation: K-12 Education: An Opportunity Catalyst
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/K12-Education-An-Opportunity-Catalyst [impatientoptimists.org]
August 28, 2012
Anthony Cody responds: What is the Purpose of K-12 Education?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/Gates_Foundation_Dialogue.html [edweek.org]
August 29, 2012
5:
Anthony Cody asks: What Happens When Profits Drive Reform?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/09/the_dialogue_with_the_gates_fo.html [edweek.org]
September 03, 2012
Gates response to come.
Cody claims teacher performance doesn't correlate (Score:4, Interesting)
Cody claims teacher performance doesn't correlate with student achievement. I believe him. I don't agree with his assertions that schools are underfunded and couldn't educate poor students even with more funding.
There is even less correlation between cost per student and student performance than between teacher and student performance.http://www.npri.org/blog/does-more-spending-increase-student-performance [npri.org]http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/05/24/us-usa-education-spending-idUSN2438214220070524 [reuters.com]http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2012/03/02/opinion/doc4f51a55f28207547363660.txt [delcotimes.com]http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Little-correlation-found-between-per-pupil-823833.php [ctpost.com]
It is common for urban poor school districts to cost much more per student than the surrounding suburbs. Look at Kansas City or Washington DC for stark examples.
Seriously, spending more than $10,000 per year per student is a travesty. A class with 30 students should not cost $300,000 and the money is not going to the teacher!
I agree, end the war on drugs and greatly reduce parent incarceration rates.
I agree, find employment for everybody that raises them above poverty.
I agree, support family planning, pre-natal care, nutrition, and free pre-school or head start.
But, it isn't poverty exactly or school financial resources that predict student performance. It's culture. There is an urban poor culture that doesn't exist among poor rural students, and the outcomes differ. How can we change the culture that devalues education? How can we change the violence and street power culture? How can we convince people not to have children that are later neglected and abused?
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The real issue is that poverty reflects the values of those subcultures that reject education and work.
Re:Cody claims teacher performance doesn't correla (Score:4, Interesting)
With that in mind, my own feelings about this follow fairly closely with Bill Cosby. It is certainly a cultural problem more than an economic problem, and it wasn't always this way. There is a stark difference between black culture at the turn of the 20th century and the turn of the 21st century, and the difference has proven to be a great disadvantage. Some of it has institutional roots, but as both I and Bill Cosby believe, that is no excuse for what blacks are doing to themselves.
We cannot legislate this problem away, and there is good reason to believe that every time we try we just prolong the condition. The inner cities need strong inspirational leaders that accept no excuses. Things can't get better until people start being better.
It's just true of humans in general (Score:2)
You cannot help someone until they decide to help themselves. You can't "make" an addict stop being an addict. They have to make the decision they want to fight their addiction, only then can you help them. We can't "make" Iraq a Democracy, the people have to decide for themselves they want to do it and only then can they be helped.
Same deal with kids in school. Teachers can't force them to achieve. They can help them achieve, but only if the kid is willing to work towards it. If there's a culture of stupid
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We are not an aristocratic society where the son of a rich man automatically is entitled to all he wants.
We are now. Our rich aristocrats set up family trusts and similar mechanisms to protect their children that the rest of the country has no access to to ensure exactly that. For example, only poor and middle-class people pay estate taxes and circulate their money back toward the public upon death if they've accumulated a moderate amount of it. Get a lot of money together and you can afford to start avoiding that with a trust, start moving assets off-shore to avoid paying taxes, and shift income away from
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Michael Jordan is not rich on the scale Bill Gates is. He's also not the CEO of a company that's been convicted of illegal tactics all around the world. Athletes, musicians, and people like your other examples are a bit rich and earned it. To become massively rich on the sort of world's richest man scale takes shady tactics. The appropriate rich people pile to sort Gates with is next to people like the trading firm CEOs who paid themselves massively while defrauding their customers.
You should learn how
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Just a heads up. The cost of school infrastructure is built into the cost of teaching. That land, those building and the recreation facilities. In urban areas, that land could be a high rise apartment structure, often several high rise apartment structures and is priced into the cost of teaching at that location. Next due to local government school administrations, the cost of school administration is repeated again and again and again, easy fix go from local government school administration to state gover
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But, it isn't poverty exactly or school financial resources that predict student performance. It's culture.
I heard someone who was trying to change organizational culture and values talk about this. As he explained, you can't really change this kind of thing directly. For instance you can't tell people, "you should value education" - you can't force them directly to do that. It doesn't work well if you try.
What he argued was that you have to change the structures. In this case, I'd say it's that you need to find them a job so the they don't have time to hang out on the street, don't start drinking and fighting t
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Re:As Steve Jobs might conclude (Score:4, Interesting)
Stripped of the invective, AC is 100% correct - did you actually READ any of the articles above?
In either story?
The fact that the Gates Foundation can do more-or-less whatever it wants (Karl Rove is an even more egregious example [wonkette.com]) and deduct that from their taxes is a minor problem. The real problem is that they're using their combination of leveraged money and free P.R. from fools like you to take over vast quantities of [b]our tax dollars[/b] and redirect that money into their coffers and the coffers of their allies like Pearson Education, Murdoch, etc.
Re:As Steve Jobs might conclude (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of the reforms the Gates Foundation has brought about in public education are actually bad. The "Criticism" section in that Wikipedia article doesn't begin to describe it. The best explanation you can easily get is by doing a Google or Wikipedia search for "Diane Ravitch" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ravitch [wikipedia.org] and her longest explanation I know of, outside of her books, is her New York Review of Books article.
She refers to Gates as a member of the "billionaire boys club" that is "reforming" education according to some fads that they picked up, which aren't supported by scientific evidence. Ravitch was an assistant secretary of education under GHW Bush and Bill Clinton. She started out believing in charter schools, free market incentives, high-stakes testing, and all the other neocon reforms. But she said that when the data came out, it didn't support those reforms.
The one factor that is most strongly associated with student achievement, according to Ravitch, is family income. So when you reward teachers for raising student test scores, you're mostly rewarding them for having high-income students, and when you fire them for missing the test targets, you're firing them for teaching in poverty schools.
The Gates education reforms depend heavily on high-stakes testing. But according to repeated analyses, the tests they use today to fire "underperforming" teachers are statistically invalid. There was a debate over that in Science magazine last year, in which the author who was defending the tests admitted that they weren't valid, and his argument was that we should continue to use them and try to improve them.
New York City gave all its math and English teachers rankings based on their students' scores in a standardized test (which wasn't scientifically validated), and education commissioner Joel Klein made the results for individual teachers public, despite the risk of unfairly shaming teachers. One fundamental problem is that they don't have enough statistical power to evaluate individual teachers. A science teacher did a standard statistical analysis, and he found out that they had an essentially random distribution. He made the point that every teacher knows that beginning teachers improve a lot from their first to second year (conversely, most teachers agree that they had a lot of trouble in their first year). But yet, when you compare the scores of the teachers in their first year to the same teachers in their second year, the correlation was random. According to these tests, teachers don't improve with experience. It doesn't make sense. And yet, NYC is firing teachers on the basis of these tests.
Financial incentives and bonuses for teachers have been tested in randomized, controlled studies -- and they don't work. Students don't perform any better when their teachers get bonuses for higher test scores. OTOH, it's hard to be a dedicated teacher if you don't know whether you'll have a job in 10 years, your pay is going down because NCLB has destroyed your union, and politicians like Joel Klein attack you, call you incompetent, and humiliate you.
If you needed proof that these reforms aren't working, look at Michelle Rhee's experience in the Washington DC schools system. Her followers were touting her as a genius who was tough on students, got rid of incompetent teachers and principals, and rewarded the master teachers and principals who raised the test scores with generous financial bonuses. They it turned out that the teachers and principles were raising their tests scores by cheating, which was picked up by the internal verification procedures in the tests -- and Rhee knew about it. There have been cheating scandals in high-stakes testing schools around the country. When you fire teachers who don't raise test scores, what do you expect them to do?
Bill Gates and the other "reformers" have turned teaching from a comfortable, respected job where people were paid well but not extravagantly, and motivated by
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If, as you say, the teachers are not correlated with student results, we'd might as well have cheaper teachers and get the same results.
Re:As Steve Jobs might conclude (Score:5, Informative)
Teachers' ability is correlated with student results. The tests that they use to measure teachers' ability is not correlated with student results. The same teachers rank in the top 10% one year, and the bottom 10% the next year. Obviously the tests aren't measuring the teachers' ability.
The effect of student poverty is far greater than the effect of teachers' ability. The test scores are primarily measuring student poverty, according to Ravitch.
Teachers' ability is correlated with experience. Teachers who have been teaching for 20 years can get better results than charter-school teachers who are on the job for 3 years and quit, as many of them do. If you want teachers to stay on the job for 20 or 30 years, you have to pay them enough to raise a family and send their own kids to college.
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The effect of student poverty is far greater than the effect of teachers' ability.
Maybe that's a good argument as any for raising taxes and redistributing wealth to some degree. It's better for society overall?
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There are studies that show that even the rich are better off in egalitarian societies than in unequal societies.
For example, their health is better.
That's why, in rational countries, even the rich support progressive taxes.
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Just as long as they don't blow it on scotch, cocaine, escorts and ranches the way George W. Bush did.
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Two flaws in your premise. The first is that NYC is firing teachers based of statistically irrelevant results. The truth is that they've finally got an excuse to finally fire misdemeanor level bad teachers. Felonies were, until this, the only way to get rid of a teacher, short of the completely unfair harass until they quit approach.
The second is that you have proposed no measurable way to determine if the students have learned anything. Standardized tests are bad, in the same way democracies are bad. There
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The problem with standardized tests is when they start being the tail that wags the dog. The same is true for any assessment. They are a good way to test education systems, provided the system does not focus on standardized tests. "Teaching the test" is a real danger. Teachers shouldn't care how their students perform on standardized tests, nor should students. It's bad science to care how your results turn out.
A second-order criticism is that they tend to encourage a narrow focus. It's "unfair" to test a w
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Teachers shouldn't care how their students perform on standardized tests, nor should students. It's bad science to care how your results turn out.
Teaching aren't doing science. They are not trying to find the best way to teach, they are trying to educate the children*. They should care about the result, about how well educated the children become. If we had some way to perfectly asses how well the children were educated, it would be fine for the teachers to care about that. The problem is that the tests we have don't do that.
*Part of any job is to figure out how best to do it, but it is not the job itself. If I am paid to build houses, it is smart
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The evaluation, however, is science. It's being used to, presumably, measure something. If it's being done faultily, then it needs to be corrected.
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The second is that you have proposed no measurable way to determine if the students have learned anything. Standardized tests are bad, in the same way democracies are bad. There just hasn't been any better way demonstrated. I'd love to ditch the stress of standardized testing. However, I've got nothing else to measure, in any objective way, student learning. Essays? Standardized tests that measure vocabulary (parental income) and attention span. Orals? Not at all objective. Give me something to use.
Please be aware that this is mostly a US-only problem and has been solved better in other education systems. The solution is pretty simple: Measure individual learning progress, not knowledge relative to other classmates.
Example:
Suppose we have two kids entering school, the class has a really passionate and able teacher. Their performance (let's say their reading ability) gets measured. The average in the class is 100%. Now, the low income kid really only starts with a performance level of say 50%, whil
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These "reforms" fail because they are running into the same problem that all central planners run into. There is no objective way to assign value. It's impossible. Value is completely subjective and is based on human choice. There is no way to create a test, flow chart, matrix, or anything else to figure out if a teacher is doing a good job with a particular student.
It's would be like having a board whose job it is to determine where you should have dinner and how much you should pay and how much tip the se
Re:As Steve Jobs might conclude (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes central planning works, sometimes it doesn't.
In medicine, doctors use a lot of drugs, but don't know whether they work, or whether they're actually harmful. The best way to find out is with a randomized, controlled trial. For the most part, these trials are funded by government agencies. They collect the best experts in the country (or the world), figure out how to design and run the trial, and do it. In other words, they create a central authority to collect all the evidence and report their recommendations. They found out that a lot of drugs were actually killing more people than they were helping. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoetin_alfa [wikipedia.org]
Then after they find out that the drug is killing people, there are still a lot of doctors who just want to continue using it, either out of habit, or because they make a lot of money out of it, or because they really believe in it. If you want to stop doctors from prescribing drugs that kill people, the first thing to do is to have a central authority, like a medical association or government agency, recommend against it. When you leave it to doctors to decide by themselves, you're more likely to die. When you leave it to patients to choose for themselves, they really don't know what they're doing. There have been good studies of this. Most patients can't make good medical decisions. Those who do know how to make decisions follow the recommendations of the central authority.
I'm using medicine as an example because I know more about medicine than education, and because in medicine, where peoples' lives are at stake and they have lots of money, they do very rigorous studies.
There are good central authorities and bad central authorities. If you have a central authority that makes their decisions on the basis of the scientific evidence, they can do a good job. If you have a central authority that ignores the scientific evidence and follows the politics, as the Obama and GWB administration did with Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, and firing teachers on the basis of test results, they're going to do a bad job (as they did).
There's no simple way to make policy. You can't just say, "Central authorities are good" or "Central authorities are bad." It depends on whether the central authority is independent enough from politics to collect the best-informed experts and follow their advice.
A lot of big science came from central authorities and probably wouldn't have been possible without a central authority. The Manhattan Project and NASA were highly centralized.
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Let's take your drug idea. Here are a list of questions no central authority can answer:
Is the rigor that is applied today is too strict or not strict enough?
What is the optimal amount of rigor to benefit the most people?
What conditions can be permitted to try riskier drugs with possible benefits?
Is it more beneficial to have a long life or shorter more active one?
The problem is all of the answer to these questions depend on the individual. All things in life have risks and rewards and costs and benefits as
Re:As Steve Jobs might conclude (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's take your drug idea. Here are a list of questions no central authority can answer:
Is the rigor that is applied today is too strict or not strict enough?
What is the optimal amount of rigor to benefit the most people?
What conditions can be permitted to try riskier drugs with possible benefits?
Is it more beneficial to have a long life or shorter more active one?
The problem is all of the answer to these questions depend on the individual.
If you read the New England Journal of Medicine (which you could call a central authority), you'd see lots of articles answering those very questions. Some of the authors that you can find with a Google search are Marcia Angell and Jeffrey Avorn. For many years, the FDA was under a lot of pressure to approve medical devices. Then they wound up with a few well-publicized disasters, like heart pacemakers where the electric leads got damaged and patients died. Now they're making specific changes in the standards they use for premarket testing. They approved drugs that produced improvements in secondary outcomes (like raising hemoglobin levels), but didn't improve primary outcomes (like death). They found out that more people died with the drug than without it, so the FDA went back to approving drugs based on primary outcomes like death.
Science can only find out how a treatment works on a population level, not on an individual level. If they randomize 100 people to a drug, and 30 of them die, and 100 people to a placebo, and 10 of them die, I wouldn't want to take that drug under those circumstances.
You may have a doctor who thinks he's smarter than everybody else in the world, and he believes that he can tell that the drug will work for you. You may have a gypsy fortune teller who believes that the drug will work for you. Go ahead and use it if you insist. The FDA won't stop you.
Most people would play by the numbers. And the only place to get those numbers is from a central authority.
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Actually I would not consider any medical journal a central planner. Your use of authority is confusing matters because it has several meanings. One is that of government which is coercion and the other is a powerful influence which is voluntary.
I think medical journals are an excellent example of how free people can work together. They peer review studies and keep attempting to refine knowledge. The FDA is the central planner in the US. It decides what drugs you are and are not allowed to sell. This is whe
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The Greeks had an idea of a golden age in which everybody followed the law voluntarily.
Then you find some doctors or drug company promoting a drug that does a lot of damage, like phen-fen, the diet drug. Patients are desperate to lose weight, doctors assure them it's safe. The drug companies hear about patients getting heart failure, but they convince themselves that their drug wasn't responsible.
Then the patients wind up with heart failure and 3 to 5 years to live. Those patients don't say, "I'm glad the g
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Let's go back to my original post about central planning. You cannot have central planners determine a one size fits all risk/reward level. So whatever they pick is going to be wrong.
In your case you prefer the FDA be ultra conservative and not allow any drugs with any harmful effects. That is an emotional and not a logical answer. You fail to acknowledge that by being so risk adverse you are sentencing many people to die because they cannot try potentially life saving drugs because you seem it too risky. I
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IMHO here is the way it should work.
The pharmaceutical company should have the following responsibility. They should list the masses of the compounds that are in a drug with a certain percent error. If they sell a drug that falls out of that specification they should be held liable.
The effects of drugs and chemicals on people varies way too much to hold them responsible for effects. Heck some people can't tolerate sugar or peanuts.
The FDA would still have an important role testing drugs and drug combination
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I think you are intentionally missing the point. Specialization is very important. The question is who gets to determine if a risk is acceptable? You think that people are so dumb that other people get to use force to prevent them from doing things that can harm them. Even if that means sentencing them to a painful death. It's for their own good after all.
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Sounds like Accutane, which was used to treat acne. It is not correct to say that it had no side effects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accutane [wikipedia.org] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000532/ [nih.gov]
It's still around but it's harder to get than Oxycontin -- and for good reason.
Accutane was a godsend to editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal, who made a good living arguing that personal responsibility and the free market should prevail over an incompetent, bureaucratic government agency.
They earned their
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For the most part, these trials are funded by government agencies.
Just because the government throws around the most money, that does not justify it doing so. Your argument is circular.
Since you have decided that the amount of money the government throws around is the important measure, how about the United States take over the education systems of the entire world? After all it spends more per student than any other country.
Do you think that other countries would go for that?
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No. You don't necessarily have to spend a lot of money. The important thing is following the scientific evidence.
Given the results of our education system, I don't think too many other countries would be interested. We're already a laughingstock for creationism.
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You are wrong again. The important thing to YOU (and me as well) is to follow the scientific evidence. But there are people to whom this isn't important at all. Take herbal and eastern medicines. Some people value what they see as thousands of years of tradition more than scientific evidence. It's not your life. And if you attempt to force them to live by your standards don't expect them to be happy.
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But, there is a flip side to this coin. Too many teachers' unions are focused on protecting those with seniority who have been burned out and have no business being in a classroom, much less drawing a salary to do so. Thanks to union protections, teachers that have ceased to function can draw a salary for months and months while an insane process moves slowly forward. Also, too many unions create and promote barriers to entry into the profession for those without education degrees, even though there is some
We need more trades based teaching with non degree (Score:2)
We need more trades based teaching with non degree based classes and non degree teachers who have skills in the area they are teaching.
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I once researched some of the literature on science teaching. Science teachers have to know both the subject and the methods of teaching. (There are a lot of articles in Science magazine about this.)
You may know a lot about the subject, but if you don't know how to teach it to students at different levels, you'll fail. For example, I was surprised to see in the science teaching guidelines that middle-school students can't usually understand the concept of molecules. You can teach them to memorize facts and
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He made the point that every teacher knows that beginning teachers improve a lot from their first to second year (conversely, most teachers agree that they had a lot of trouble in their first year).
How do we know that teachers become better teachers? We know that they feel that, but do we know that the children learn more? One of Mazurs points about peer instruction [youtube.com]* is that most of what we think matters in learning simply doesn't. If you design a test of understanding**, it turns out the the gain is remarkably constant over a wide range of teachers and schools, regardless of teacher experience and teacher evaluation by the students, even if the teachers think differently.
Not that I necessarily dis
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If you compare black families and white families who have the same good jobs, in organizations that make an effort to eliminate discrimination (like IBM or the military), they have equally successful kids.
The main difference between black families and white families is that more black families are poor.
Do you think slavery had anything to do with that?
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Many black parents are interested in their kids, but can't spend the time with them they would like, because they're overwhelmed with making a living, or just surviving.
That's because they started out in slavery, and even for 100 years after slavery ended, they had discrimination that was almost as bad as slavery. Not being allowed to vote is pretty serious discrimination. The Republicans are still trying to stop blacks from voting.
The reason you're a racist is that you don't understand that.
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In 1964, the racists who were trying to stop blacks from voting were Democrats.
In 2012, the racists who are trying to stop blacks from voting are Republicans.
That was the Republican "Southern strategy." As soon as the Democrats started distancing themselves from the southern racists, the Republicans were happy to move in.
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F-you. Comments like these are so, so easy from arm-chair quarterbacks who look at the world through a pin-hole lens.
It's fools like you who fail to realise that everything is in perfect focus thanks to my pin-hole vision. If we could just get everyone to see everything through pin-holes, then everything would always be perfectly clear!
Re:As Steve Jobs might conclude (Score:4, Insightful)
OF COURSE their corporate investments are larger than their givings. this is how foundations without a steady stream of new income work.
they do their charitable work using their investment incomes.
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You sound like you've got a stick the size of a flag pole up your ass.
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Gates is a good guy when it comes to charity. What the hell have you done? Posted nasty comments on Slashdot?
Gates deserves much more credit than that greedy turtle-necked scumbag Steve Jobs.
Re:Isn't Gates a big lib? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Isn't Gates a big lib? (Score:4, Funny)
Did I read that wrong or did you just day that you became a conservative because you were tired of liberals telling you you were smart? If so, you're still not doing any of your own thinking.
Think what might have happened if they had told him he was dumb.
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Think what might have happened if they had told him he was dumb.
I would be honored for a liberal to call me dumb.
Consider yourself honored then.
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He comes off as more mentally ill/paranoid than dumb, which is a shame. Most people in good mental health don't spout off paranoid fantasies vilifying people who simply have different politics, and that goes for people at any point of the spectrum.
And just to preempt the obvious, no, saying someone is likely mentally ill is in no way villifying them, it just means they should get some help.
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True Socialism is people standing around with their hands out demanding products and services made possible by the minority of people who actually contribute to society. True socialism rests on the belief that everyone is equal and that is not true. If you were a microchip design engineer would you be happy making the same amount of money as the person bagging your groceries? Communism is not even worth talking about since it has never been truly tried outside of a few communes in the 60's. Economic systems
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True Socialism is people standing around with their hands out demanding products and services made possible by the minority of people who actually contribute to society
Yup, that's certainly the message I took away from 'the workers should control the means of production'. Wait, what?
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The problem with workers owning the means of of production requires that the "workers" to all contribute equally to the success of the enterprise. Some work harder and contribute much more than some so how do you reconcile this discrepancy. Like I said before it is a fallacy that all people are equal when it comes to contributing to society and all the political correctness in the world will not change that fact.
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Actually, true socialism is the economy of every first world nation on earth. Laissez-faire is a myth and just as impractical as communism. If you want a true free market go to Somalia or some other third world shit hole. You damn well won't find any Howard Roarks or Henry Reardens.
No one with the kind of wealth Gates has amassed is required to give 1 single penny back but a lot of them do it anyway.
Actually, everyone with the amount of wealth Gates has amassed is required to give massive amounts back in the form of taxes. Unless they hide their money in a 'charitable' organization that allows it to be used for investments t
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There are more tax shelters capable of reducing someones tax liabilities that are just as good or even better than using philanthropic donations. And if you are hung up on rich people or corporations avoiding taxes you should save your ire for the tax code instead of those who use it legally. Also keep in mind that the US corporate tax rate is the second highest in the world after Japan. Countries like China use this to offer lower tax rates to entice foreign corporations to do business with them. Just as t
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Hay, at least the BBC makes a token effort to hide the fact that it is insulting your intelligence.
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Sometimes it's best to just stay on the meds.
Re:Isn't Gates a big lib? (Score:5, Interesting)
The debt has increased approximately $5.4 trillion since President Obama took office on January 20, 2009.
And none of it was because of the wars, tax cuts, etc., starting before that date.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/06/07/238653/animation-tax-cuts-deficit-debt/ [thinkprogress.org] (watch animation)
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/cbppdebtchart.jpg [thinkprogress.org] (static display of same plot)
http://crooksandliars.com/files/vfs/2011/06/cbpp_deficit_factors_2011.jpg [crooksandliars.com]
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/govt-spending-per-capita.jpg [thinkprogress.org]
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/assets_c/2011/07/24editorial_graph2-popup-thumb-560x622-58477.gif [theatlantic.com]
http://crooksandliars.com/files/vfs/2012/02/wsj_deficit_obama_2013.png [crooksandliars.com]
So, before you talk about how shockingly the debt has risen in the past four years, tell us about the prior four years, and the policies from 2001-2008 that are still costing us out the wazoo.
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Welcome to the exponential function. Debt doubles roughly every 8 years or so.
Re:Isn't Gates a big lib? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is Obama's economy, his policies, his executive orders, his parties control of the senate and house - for two years a supermajority.
You mean his supermajority for four months?
http://washingtonindependent.com/74033/the-four-month-supermajority [washington...endent.com]
The Four-Month Supermajority
By David Weigel
Friday, January 15, 2010 at 9:03 am
In the final stretch of the Massachusetts special election for Senate, Republican candidate Scott Brown has focused on “restoring balance” to Washington. He’ll be the “41st vote” to filibuster legislation; the Democrats’ hold on 60 votes has let liberals run the country into the ground. “That’s not what the founders intended,” he said Monday during the final debate.
The irony is that if Democrats lose the seat, they will have had a working 60-seat majority for all of four months — much of which was spent with the Senate in recess. They opened the Congress in January with 58 votes, counting the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), not counting Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), whose razor-thin victory was held up by lawsuits from former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). On April 28, 2009, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) switched to the Democratic Party, bringing the Democrats to 59 votes without Franken. When Franken was finally sworn in on into the Senate on July 7, 2009, the badly ailing Kennedy was unable to vote and break filibusters
Re:Isn't Gates a big lib? (Score:5, Funny)
You mean his supermajority for four months?
Shouldn't four months be long enough to fix eight years of fucking things up?
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You have to subtract the blue dog Democrats, who are just as bad as Republicans.
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You have to subtract the blue dog Democrats, who are just as bad as Republicans.
They *are* Republicans, for all practical purposes.
And Democrats helped with a lot of the 2001-2008 that's got us in such a jam.
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Well, most of the Democrats are Republicans, for all practical purposes.
Except for Joe Lieberman, he's an independent.
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I'd say the filibuster-proof supermajority lasted only 5 weeks in effect. From the time Franken was sworn in until the death of Sen. Kennedy was 7 weeks, but the Senate was only in session for five of those weeks. Oh - and that "supermajority" exists ONLY if you count two Independents as being Democrats, which they weren't.
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The foundation of civilised society is voluntary action and compassion. Capitalism and charity are two sides of that coin. One cannot succeed without the other.
Re:charity (Score:5, Insightful)
Economics scientifically proven!?! HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA that's a knee slapper!
Re:charity (Score:5, Insightful)
Not say, a proven scientific theory with decades of incredibly complex research to back it up as a model of how wealth flows and is generated.
A theory on how wealth flows - interesting. It's an interesting theory - wealth flows up - the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The rich fuck the poor and middle class to get richer. The rich got rich by lieing and cheating. Hard work? Everyone works hard! To get rich you have to fuck thy neighbor - up the ass.
Is Capitalism evil? Yes. Is it the worst system on Earth? No.
It's the best economic system we bald apes have. Which is fucking pathetic. After all these centuries, Capitalism is the best we can come up with?
We humans are stupid.
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What do you define as rich? 150k? what about the guy that makes 149k?
My definition would focus not on a specific number: I'd consider somebody rich if: (1) They pay for a full-time household staff-person, such as a housekeeper or nanny, (2) They can buy everything they want to comfortably stock at least 2 homes without the slightest bit of difficulty, or (3) They could choose to not work at all and have enough from their investments to live comfortably and end up with more than they started with.
Give me one bad thing about capitalism without going into some political rant. Pick a point, lets discuss.
Consider a really smart kid who was born into a dirt poor family, call her Jane.
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I'd consider somebody rich if: (1) They pay for a full-time household staff-person, such as a housekeeper or nanny
There are plenty of examples of families living about 1900 who lived in absolute squalor, yet employed someone full time, who lived with them. By absolute squalor, I mean 1 room for the entire family, no running water, etc. I learnt about this through a radio programme which concerned crime - one of these maids was accused (and convicted) of theft. Originally sentenced to death, her sentenc
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Not to take away your point but I think You're talking about aprox. 1800. This was the peak of capitalism, when owning a one room home was enough to make you one of the 1% (actually higher then that) and relatively rich. As you pointed out, the average person could be executed for the smallest infraction and the well off actually used to go on about how hanging was too lenient. That is capitalism at its unregulated finest.
You're measuring wealth from the wrong end... (Score:2)
It's not about if someone making $149k, $150k or $151k can be considered rich.
Try instead to figure out who's standard of living is poor and how much are they making. Keep in mind that there are many levels below simply "poor".
Then you look above that until you get to an acceptable standard of living.
Then above that you'll find the "Doing OK" crowd.
Then the "Well off" ones.
Then the rich.
Then the very rich.
Then the super rich.
Or... you can take a shortcut and just look at the minimum wage. [wolframalpha.com]
I'm guessing that w
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What do you define as rich? 150k? what about the guy that makes 149k?
If you're talking about how much someone earns, they're almost certainly not rich. The problem with capitalism is in the name: it's all about the amount of capital that you control. In a capitalist society, you can gain income from two sources: from performing valuable work and from simply controlling capital. Worse, the income that you can gain from performing work is largely capped (there's only a finite amount of work you can do), whereas the income from controlling capital can grow as fast as you ac
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Just like anything in real life, a destructive minority can cause damage faster than the creative majority can fix things.
I just spent 5 years making this awesome painting... then someone comes by and sets it on fire. The amount of effort to ruin is much less than to build.
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I'm just going to let your comment go, and thank you for giving me an opportunity to expand on my comment without a self-reply, you ignorant twit.
It's easier to get treatment for an impacted molar or abdominal abscess in Tijuana than it is 12 miles north in San Diego, if you don't have coverage.
The AMA rate-limits the acceptance of doctors to preserve their premium position in society, regardless of merit. Implied in this is that some must suffer a lack of care to keep the price up. This is not capitali
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Under capitalism, people who can afford it pay about $10,000 per capita per year to insurance companies for health care (depending on the year you measure).
Under socialism, people pay about $5,000 per capita in taxes for health care of the same (and sometimes better) quality. http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1 [openmedicine.ca]
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Uh oh, 19% of $40,000 is not $2,200, it's $7,600. That gives you $22,400 as the final take away, only $700 more than the first example you gave.
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So where is the magic land that actually has a capitalistic system?
Or is capitalism just impossible?
Re:charity (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Communism, its an ideology that isn't practiced in reality anywhere. Mainly because the pure forms of both are unworkable and inhumane.
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Like Communism, its an ideology that isn't practiced in reality anywhere. Mainly because the pure forms of both are unworkable and inhumane.
This. Precisely.
Re:charity (Score:5, Insightful)
So where is the magic land that actually has a capitalistic system?
Or is capitalism just impossible?
Capitalism isn't strictly impossible, any more than jumping off a building is impossible. However, like jumping, it is inherently self-contradictory; it can't be sustained infinitely, and the results when the system crashes aren't pretty.
Unfettered capitalism appears indistinguishable from feudalism: every initially free market rapidly devolves into one or two winners who become the equivalent of landlords. They own the land/property, everyone else becomes a serf who works and pays rent to the property-holder. This feudal situation with "late stage capitalism" of course ends up looking nothing like the early-stage "free market", but therein lies the self-contradiction. Then eventually the landlords overreach and you get a revolution or a disruptive technology, philosophy or outside invader, and this temporarily resets the game pieces. We see this happening in rapid acceleration in the intellectual property landscape in computing, but it looks much like the same forces that have been at work for thousands of years. Marx spotted this pattern but I think he was a bit off in his prescriptions on how to fix it; replacing capital with compulsion by force seems to do bad things for everyone involved.
It would be nice if there were more intellectual alternatives to the Austrian School than Marxism. I tend towards E F Schumacher, who isn't easy to pigeonhole as "left" or "right".
Re:charity (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at what Adam Smith wrote about a Free Market, his theoretical perfect form of "Free" included everybody having full knowledge of the situation when buying or selling. That's a condition that can only be met if someone (like a government) compels full disclosure. Trade Secrets are anti-free market by that definition, as are all sorts of other things like ultra high speed stock trading. As it stands today, most people who claim to be Capitalists think Smith meant 'Free' as in Government keeps out of their way and lets them take advantage of any disparity in knowledge as much as they possibly can, even though that's the exact opposite of what Smith described. So of course, Capitalism is impossible, in the same way as Democracy is impossible if most of the people claiming to want it think it means noble families rule by inherited right, or Anarchy is impossible if most of the people calling themselves Anarchists think it means the police have the right to detain people indefinitely without charges, or similar distortions of what people meant when they coined the words.
Beyond that, people very soon after Smith published 'The Wealth of nations' were pointing out that, if you can't get a quite perfect free market, but only get pretty close, Smith hadn't proved that that meant you got petty close to the 'Greatest Good for the Greatest Number' or any sort of 'best economic system' in any particular way. Smith's theories left the possibility that 'close to perfectly free' would make a really lousy society and make the vast majority of people miserable. (Sort of like 99% of a perfect vacation flight to Hawaii could mean in the end you had to jump out of the plane 12 miles out to sea and swim for shore with no life vest). So capitalism may be just impossible in another sense unless you can prove that the particular areas where the market is less than perfectly free, even if they seem trivial, don't have a vast negative impact.
Where is this? (Score:3)
You can't buy what you want without government permission, corporations can't sell what they want without government permission, and they can't even *speak* about their products without government permission.
Yessir, that's one "free" market.
The ones I'm familiar with are Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Perhaps you could enlighten me on the one you're describing.
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The "free" market where nothing can happen without government approval being described here is the US. Our Federal Trade Commission regulates what can and can't be sold, and heavily regulates advertising [ftc.gov] too. We also have money exchanges being monitored by the Internal Revenue Service to make sure it's being taxed fully, which helps prevent transactions that aren't regulated by the FTC from happening. Also, the minute you want to pay people to work for you, compliance with a giant list of Social Security
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That must be why we live in the biggest money laundry in the world. Over a trillion dollars gets laundered through the US financial system every year, half of it from drugs the rest from tax cheats, frauds, gun running, etc. They're not doing their monitoring very well.
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The "free" market where nothing can happen without government approval being described here is the US.
All of your examples are far from supportive of your position, and indeed are not even anti-capitalistic. You seem to be confusing the notion of "capitalism" with "anarchy", and you seem to be seeking the latter. (Look to Somalia if you need a quick anarchy hit, their system is fully up and running).
All the rules that you cite are ones that every business in the USA must follow, except for some common-sense exceptions. So those rules cannot be anti-capitalistic, because EVERY business must follow them un
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As the simplest example, deposit over $10,000 into a business bank account in the US and the IRS will come looking for that company one day. Just went through that recently.
The monitoring works fine. If you're money laundering, you trigger the monitors but then generate a convincing pile of accounting paperwork that make the transactions look legitimate and free of taxation. The same complexity that makes a small company overwhelmed with regulation turns into a giant set of places to hide things for a cr
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People think they are sticking it to the man when they get all these big regulations passed but all they are doing is the bidding of the evil corporations they claim to be against.
Re:charity (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it is what the "free market" leads to. The free market says the most efficient players will do the best and it is always more efficient to pay the government for regulations then to innovate and create a better product.
You just have to look at the amount of money being spent by "free enterprise" on the current American election with the most successful players spending money on both sides as whoever wins is a win for the capitalist.
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The free market leads to that when enough people support making it an unfree market.
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they can't even *speak* about their products without government permission
And it is a VERY good thing that advertisement of medical products is illegal in my countries (yes, more than one): this way no money is wasted on advertisement, that needs to be repaid in the sale price of the product.
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Because what's more wasteful than communication?
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In a pure capitalist society without government regulations you can trade a starving man a bowl of soup for their kidney and in the process of harvesting their kidney you're going to leave a wound.
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Subject line has no Enough college.