Education; the Alamo; Afghanistan

View 714 Friday, February 24, 2012

Dr. Pournelle —

A reminder of this day in history:

Written 24 February 1836, Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo)

“To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World:

Fellow citizens & compatriots—I am besieged, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna—I have sustained a continual Bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken—I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch—The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country—Victory or Death.

William Barret Travis

Lt. Col. comdt

P.S. The Lord is on our side—When the enemy appeared in sight we had not three bushels of corn—We have since found in deserted houses 80 or 90 bushels & got into the walls 20 or 30 head of Beeves.

Travis”

It still gives me chills to read it.

Pieter

Thermopylae had its messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none.

Bill Gates has an education article “Shaming teachers is wrong solution for school performance” that’s worth your attention. The Gates Foundation has found that in most schools, if you eliminate the worst 10% of the teachers – don’t bother to replace them, just get them out of there – you greatly improve the efficiency and performance of the school. They don’t go into details, but speculation is easy. Good teachers who break their hearts trying cannot be much encouraged when they see they are evaluated and paid exactly the same as time-servers and incompetents and frauds none of whom can be fired. None of this is in the article, which is in reaction to publishing the “performance” statistics of individual teachers, and is a powerful critique of the evaluation methods in use today.

Gates says that good teaching is a missionary activity. He’s probably tight, too. As for the current situation:

I am a strong proponent of measuring teachers’ effectiveness, and my foundation works with many schools to help make sure that such evaluations improve the overall quality of teaching. But publicly ranking teachers by name will not help them get better at their jobs or improve student learning. On the contrary, it will make it a lot harder to implement teacher evaluation systems that work.

In most public schools today, teachers are simply rated “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” and evaluations consist of having the principal observe a class for a few minutes a couple of times each year. Because we are just beginning to understand what makes a teacher effective, the vast majority of teachers are rated “satisfactory.” Few get specific feedback or training to help them improve.

The rest of the essay is worth reading.

The problem is the unions which exist to protect incompetent teachers. The unions will oppose any form of teacher performance evaluation, and insist on seniority and credentialism as the only measures for teacher evaluation. That is clearly wrong.

One should always take Gates seriously, and I agree that publishing teacher evaluation scores is probably not a good idea; but I fear that his views will be used by the unions and “professional teacher associations” as an argument for doing nothing, changing nothing, and studying the problem while our public schools fail, and expensive private schools solidify the class distinctions in America so that only the rich get a good education.

It’s happening now. In many places the primary family goal is to get the kids out of the public schools. Into Catholic schools, private schools, Lutheran schools – anywhere but in the public schools. Of course in Los Angeles that’s particularly important. It happens that I live quite close to one of the best public grade school in LAUSD. It was almost wrecked some years ago in the bussing era, but it has recovered and people now buy houses in my neighborhood in order to make their children eligible. That’s shameful.

Afghanistan is exploding because prisoners were sending notes to each other in copies of the Koran, and the guards burned the books.

The only thing that has ever united the Afghan tribes has been the presence of armed foreigners on their soil. So has it been since Alexander the Great, and so is it now.

I’m still recovering from what officially isn’t flu but certainly lays you out like flu. Actually I had pneumonia once and this has taken longer to clear up. I haven’t had much energy, and what little I have has gone into errands and household maintenance. Apologies. I’m dancing as fast as I can.

While I was clearing some stuff out I came across a copy of our 1980 technology novel OATH OF FEALTY, and began to read. I got trapped. It’s a very good story and a lot more complex than it looks at first. It was written on an S-100 system with Electric Pencil, long before the computer revolution took off, so one would expect it to be primitive, but it’s not. It doesn’t of course have the Internet, but there’s something about as good; and our projections of some of the consequences of advances in computers were pretty good. We missed some of the implications of wireless so sometimes characters have to plug into a wired network, but we even had some wireless advances. It really holds up well. If you haven’t read Oath of Fealty, the paperback edition is available, and there’s a Kindle edition. It was a best seller in its time, and it’s still very readable.