Quick road to better teachers: Raise the pay

December 9, 2006

It’s just good economics to think that raising the pay of teachers will improve the overall ability of the teaching corps, knowing that higher pay attracts higher-qualified workers in other situations.

Now comes a study from Australia making the same point. Two researchers at the Australian National University’s Center for Economic Policy Research looked at changes in the quality of education over time, and concluded one change for the worse was pay for teachers and a resulting decline in quality of teachers. Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan write:

For an individual with the potential to earn a wage at the 90th percentile of the distribution, a non-teaching occupation looked much more attractive in the 2000s than it did in the 1980s. We believe that both the fall in average teacher pay, and the rise in pay differentials in non-teaching occupations are responsible for the decline in the academic aptitude of new teachers over the past two decades.

Is that a surprise? U.S. Education Sec. Bill Bennett used to tout his “$50,000 solution” to improve schools — get a good principal. That action generally would improve the support for teachers and improve things across the school. Today, the amounts are higher, and the need is greater after more than three decades of economic starvation of public schools.

Raising teacher pay is a good market solution to improve the achievement of students.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Andrew Leigh’s blog.

8 Comments | Economics, Education reform, Education spending, Public education, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Value of figuring out the truth: Life and death in Libya, the Tripoli Six

December 9, 2006

Remembering history so as not to repeat it has academic value, sure. In public policy, it can help change things for the better. And in some cases it can literally be life and death.

Six health care professionals — five nurses and a physician, all Bulgarians — are scheduled for execution shortly in Libya for a crime that would have been almost impossible for them to have committed. They were convicted of spreading HIV to patients. Health professionals are almost unanimous in pointing out that the timing of the onset of the disease indicates that the disease was transmitted before these people came to Libya, but government-operated facilities and government-paid health care workers.

More trouble for the ignorance-as-knowledge set: Evolutionary principles, applied, allow scientists to track the real origin of the infections, exonerating the convicted workers. In short, tracking the provenance of the viruses that infected the victims rules out almost all of the possibility that the accused health care workers could have played a role. Here is a link to a free .pdf paper which lays out the exculpatory science evidence, published by the eminent science journal Nature.

Will Libya’s government listen to the evidence? Nick Matzke, a research whiz at the National Center for Science Education, has a post at Panda’s Thumb laying out most of the facts, and providing links to high quality information sources. Health professionals worldwide urge Libya’s courts to legally exonerate and free the accused.

You can help. Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority lays out actions you can take to urge Libya to free the health workers.

Please write today.

More information:

Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Current History, Justice, Law, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Unapologetic Prager blunders on

December 8, 2006

Dennis Prager, please call George Santayana!

Invoking the name of George Washington, who, Prager says, brought his own Bible to be sworn in to office, Dennis Prager refuses to retreat from his errors of history, and insists that Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison should be prevented from bringing his own scripture to Ellison’s swearing-in.

Prager is simply wrong on the history, both the tradition and the law. He claims there is some grand tradition of Members of Congress swearing on a Bible. That is not so. When corrected, he claims it is important anyway. When it is pointed out that what he wants is illegal, Prager claims cultural imperative as the reason to vitiate the First Amendment.

It would be a teapot tempest, except for Prager’s breaking the teapot — he has real newspapers carrying his column, and he keeps insisting on being wrong about history, he insists on bogus history.

Flunk him, let him advance to the 9th grade when he can master the material and pass the test, without a tantrum.

Other commentary:

Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bogus history, Patriotism | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Pearl Harbor, 65 years ago today

December 7, 2006

1941 AP file photo, small boat rescues victims from U.S.S. West Virginia

Associated Press 1941 file photo of a small boat assisting in rescue of Pearl Harbor attack victims, near the U.S.S. West Virginia, as the ship burns.

Today is the 65th anniversary of Japan’s attack on the U.S.’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Our local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, has a front-page story on survivors of the attack, who have met every five years in reunion at Pearl Harbor. Today will be their last official reunion. The 18-year-olds who suffered the attack, many on their first trips away from home, are in their 80s now. Age makes future reunions impractical.

From the article:

“We’re like the dodo bird. We’re almost extinct,” said Middlesworth, now an 83-year-old retiree from Upland, Calif., but then – on Dec. 7, 1941 – an 18-year-old Marine on the USS San Francisco.

Nearly 500 survivors from across the nation were expected to make the trip to Hawaii, bringing with them 1,300 family members, numerous wheelchairs and too many haunting memories.

Memories of a shocking, two-hour aerial raid that destroyed or heavily damaged 21 ships and 320 aircraft, that killed 2,390 people and wounded 1,178 others, that plunged the United States into World War II and set in motion the events that led to atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“I suspect not many people have thought about this, but we’re witnessing history,” said Daniel Martinez, chief historian at the USS Arizona Memorial. “We are seeing the passing of a generation.”

Another article notes the work of retired history professor Ron Marcello from the University of North Texas, in Denton, in creating oral histories from more than 350 of the survivors. This is the sort of project that high school history students could do well, and from which they would learn, and from which the nation would benefit. If you have World War II veterans in your town, encourage the high school history classes to go interview the people. This opportunity will not be available forever.

There is much to be learned, Dr. Marcello said:

Dr. Marcello said that in doing the World War II history project, he learned several common themes among soldiers.

“When they get into battle, they don’t do it because of patriotism, love of country or any of that. It’s about survival, doing your job and not letting down your comrades,” he said. “I heard that over and over.”

Another theme among soldiers is the progression of their fear.

“When they first got into combat, their first thought is ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’ The next thought is ‘It might happen to me,’ and the last thought is ‘I’m living on borrowed time. I hope this is over soon,’ ” Dr. Marcello said.

Dr. Marcello said the collection started in the early 1960s. He took charge of it in 1968. Since Dr. Marcello has retired, Todd Moye has taken over as the director.

Other sources:

While this is not one of the usual dates listed by Congress, you may fly your U.S. flag today.

7 Comments | Current History, History, Lesson plans, War, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

To the Carnivals!

December 6, 2006

Carnival of the Liberals! (at Neural Gourmet)

Carnival of Education #96! (at History is Elementary, which is a blog you probably should be reading)

History Carnival! (at Barista)

(Can any of them really be carnivals without a bearded lady, or the human frog boy?)

Leave a Comment » | Education, Education blogs, History, History blogs, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Nominate a history book

December 4, 2006

Remember to nominate your favorite history books for the list of all-time great history books. You can do it most easily here, at the original post.

1 Comment | Books, Capturing history, Current History, History | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Hoax quiz on patriotism

December 3, 2006

At least I hope this quiz creator wasn’t serious.

Your ‘Do You Want the Terrorists to Win’ Score: 100%

 

You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, “blame America first”-crowd traitor. You are in league with evil-doers who hate our freedoms. By all counts you are a liberal, and as such clearly desire the terrorists to succeed and impose their harsh theocratic restrictions on us all. You are fit to be hung for treason! Luckily George Bush is tapping your internet connection and is now aware of your thought-crime. Have a nice day…. in Guantanamo!

Do You Want the Terrorists to Win?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

 

You, too, can score with the terrorists on this quiz if you pick the rational answer, or if you pick the answer most like any patriotic, Bill-of-Rights-loving citizen. If you follow the Scout Oath and Scout Law, you have a better chance of siding with the terrorists, too.

I scored 100% with the terrorists. Recall, I was Orrin Hatch’s press guy, and a Reagan administration appointee (Schedule C, but still . . .); I’m a flag-waving former Boy Scout and current Boy Scout leader. I scored with P. Z. Myers, John Wilkins (98% only? This guy is close to being a Brown Shirt!), John Lynch (94%! Oh, but he’s in Arizona, and probably trying to fit in), and Mike the Mad Biologist (note the copy of Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” War Bond painting there — and remember that Norman Rockwell was the art director for the Boy Scouts for some time, and their favorite artist for decades, featured at the National Scouting Museum in Irving, Texas).

Does this really pass as political discussion these days? Most people tire of such histrionics in political discussion, I believe. To the extent that this quiz reflects genuine views of current supporters of the current administration, it shows how and why the Democrats won so many seats in the recent election.

Oh, and it should be “hanged for treason.” But what’s grammar to a silly, raving ideologue?

4 Comments | Boy Scouts of America, Dissent, Patriotism, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Millard Fillmore hospital to close, perhaps

December 3, 2006

Millard Fillmore

Being named after the last Whig president this nation ever had doesn’t carry much water with a government cost-cutting commission in New York. The commission recommendd that Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo be closed, according to the Buffalo News.

Millard Fillmore counted Buffalo as his base of operations. The hospital was named after Fillmore in 1923, though the hospital dates back to facilities that first opened in 1872. Declining population in Buffalo has made traffic easier, the newspapers note, but also made it necessary to consolidate some public facilities.

Population declines in some places are temporary, like  recent now-reversed declines in Dallas and Houston. Other declines may be permanent, like some of those in west Texas. Into which category does Buffalo’s decline fall?

While one namesake of Fillmore closes, at the other end of New York, Moravia’s Cayuga-Owasco Lakes Historical Society has a gift from Nucor Steel which will allow the Society to construct a 25-by-40-foot building to house Fillmore memorabilia, according to the Auburn (New York) Citizen. Buffalo was the haunt of the adult Fillmore, but the nation’s 13th president was born in Moravia in 1800.

If I am not careful, this blog could become for Millard Fillmore what the old Salt Flat News was for that part of Utah and Nevada that includes the famous Bonneville Salt Flats. The area’s largest city is Wendover, a city that straddles the Utah-Nevada border. It is famous for long, lonely drives. And the slogan for the Salt Flat News which flourished in Salt Lake City during the 1970s was, “The only newspaper in the world that gives a damn what happens on the Salt Flats.”

Leave a Comment » | History, Millard Fillmore | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Dennis Prager’s bogus history

December 3, 2006

Conservative, sometimes-rational commentator Dennis Prager is in a dudgeon because someone suggested that our first Muslim Member of Congress might take his oath of office on the Qur’an, rather than a Bible. Prager’s irrational rant demands that Congressmen Keith Ellison of Minnesota be stripped of his religious freedom (really — go see). He claims, using bogus history, that swearing without a Bible would be a first. That’s dead wrong.

Minnesota State Rep. Keith Ellison at Macalester College

Then-State Rep. Keith Ellison speaks at a Macalester College seminar on environmental justice and human rights, in February 2006. On November 7, Ellison was elected to represent Minnesota in the U.S. Congress, the first Muslim to be elected. Photo from Macalester College, American Studies Department.

Prager claims in his bio to have done graduate study. Would it be too much to expect him to understand the U.S. Constitution?

First, the U.S. Constitution prevents anyone from requiring any official elected to federal, state or local office, from having to take any oath on any religious book. Really. It’s in Article VI: Read the rest of this entry »

14 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Current History, First Amendment, Freedom - Political, Religious Freedom, U.S. Constitution | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Tools for teachers: Make your own Google map

December 3, 2006

Almost inevitably I want a map different from those provided by the text and all my ancillary and auxilliary sources. It’s maddening for a non-cartographer. So, I can see uses for custom map-making tools.

You can figure out what to do with this, if you have a computer and access to project it to a class — or if you send your class out on the ‘net to work: Maplib.

Tip of the old scrub brush to If:book. Be sure to check there for examples.

Leave a Comment » | Education, Geography - Physical, Maps, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Death of books, and history on video

December 3, 2006

In the Eisenhower administration some wise person noted that through history, libraries have been essential to civilization. In that wisdom-tinged era, the federal government started a program to establish in every county in the U.S. a library which would contain practical information on farming, industry, health care, and government and philosophy, so that in the event a nuclear exchange wiped out great libraries in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Los Angeles, among other places, the knowledge and wisdom needed to rebuild America would be available to people easily, locally.

It was a good idea, I think, but chiefly because of the side effect of putting good information close to people, even without nuclear destruction. I wonder whether we have strayed.

Today, libraries abandon books in favor of electronic media, film and on-line applications at a prodigious rate. Million-book libraries, once the hallmark of a good university, now represent dated data and a backwater center of scholarship, to many.

Libraries missed the first video wave. Thinking they were about books and not television presentation of information, libraries missed the opportunity to attract customers for videos. Instead, here in the U.S. a company named Blockbuster did badly (by my estimation) the promulgation and protection of culture, for profit, that libraries should have done for free. Determined not to miss the next evolution or revolution in media, libraries now plan to adopt new media when possible, and store information in new electronic formats.

In the U.S., college libraries turn to coffee bars and advanced internet access to attract students to . . . where the stacks used to be. (audio story from NPR’s Saturday Edition)

In the Netherlands, libraries plan to archive local video productions and photographs, and to digitize the data to make it more widely available. Plans are to spend 173 million euro (more than $230 million U.S. at today’s exchange rate), to archive 285,000 hours of film, video and radio recordings, and nearly 3 million photos.

Will civilization survive?

Tip of the old scrub brush to If:book, from the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Leave a Comment » | Books, History, Libraries, Public libraries, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Anti-fundamentalist Christian ire gone awry

December 2, 2006

Update: The speech took place as scheduled; 125 people attended, the lecture was great, the questions were fine — you can listen and read for yourself [from Language Log]:

Anyway, whether that’s right or not, I do know this: the lucky people who live in the Boston area (I regret that I now do not) have a chance to hear Everett in person on Friday, because despite the hate campaign he still plans to get in that taxi at Logan Airport and take it to MIT’s Building 46. His lecture is called “Culture and Grammar in Pirahã”, and it’s on Friday, December 1, from noon to 1:30 p.m., in room 46-3310 at MIT (that is, Room 3310 of building 46; MIT people do have a system of number names, and they use them to name buildings). Language Log readers in New England who get there early enough to find a seat can check out what Everett actually says, rather than what his enemies say he says, and then make up their own minds.

[Update: Dan Everett’s talk did place as scheduled on December 1; it was not boycotted by the linguists in the area; about 125 people showed up, in fact; and a good, spirited discussion followed in the question period. You can actually listen to it, and look at the handout, thanks to Ted Gibson’s lab: handout in PDF form here, and audio for Windows Media Player here.]

ORIGINAL POST:  WordPress has some wonderful features that carry to one ideas from realms one would not otherwise visit. And so it was that I found this post at Language Log, about a Bush-style “pre-emptive strike” on the scholarship of a linguist, condemned for a pro-Christian bias that does not exist, according to the blogger.

An unnamed scholar was ranting in e-mail about the work of linguist Daniel Everett of Illinois State University, who was scheduled to give a lecture on his work on the language of the Amazonian tribe Pirahã, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), on December 1. The e-mailer threatened at least a protest of the lecture.

I have not found any indication either that there was a protest at the lecture, or that it went on as planned. Does anyone know?

The MIT listing for the lecture:

Brain and Cognitive Science

December 1, 2006
12:00p.m. – 1:30p.m.
Building 46, Room 3310

Culture and Grammar in Piraha

Dan Everett
Illinois State University / University of Manchester Abstract:
This talk considers the on-going research into the relationship between culture and grammar in Piraha, an Amazonian language isolate. As background, it surveys a number of unusual linguistic and cultural phenomena in Piraha, e.g. the absence of numerals, number, and counting, the absence of myths, the lack of quantifiers (and quantification), then summarizes the analysis of Everett (2005) which accounts for these facts in terms of a cultural value of ‘immediacy of experience’. The talk then turns to focus on how culture constrains segmental phonology in Piraha.

Leave a Comment » | Brain learning, Civil Rights, Dissent, Research | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Teachers reviled world around, still

December 2, 2006

Teachers in the U.S. do not get the respect they deserve, especially middle school and elementary school teachers. It’s an age old problem — Shakespeare wrote of a man being executed by a coup d’etat for knowing how to read and teaching young boys to read.

It’s still true, sadly — see Ed Brayton’s remarks at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The Taliban in Afghanistan are literally drawing and quartering teachers.

Teachers are revolutionaries, breakers of slavery’s chains, fighters for freedom. It shouldn’t be a fight to the death. Ignorance has long knives, and uses them. As Shakespeare noted, “Small things make base men proud.” (Henry VI, Part 2, act IV, scene 1)

1 Comment | Civil Rights, Current History, Education, Freedom - Political | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

“Man dancing”: Checking the facts

December 2, 2006

If you haven’t seen it, you may be in a minority that includes mostly people without internet access.

The story behind it is rather innocent and charming. Matt Harding, a young American computer programmer working in Australia, decided to spend a year touring the world. Somewhere along the line he got the idea to shoot video of himself dancing in various places. He posted in on YouTube. A chewing gum company saw the thing, and for reasons known only to public relations freaks and geniuses, called Matt to do it again, with better production quality, for a bit of publicity. So there are two videos of Matt Harding dancing, in exotic and interesting places.

Especially if this is new to you, you’re skeptical. Good. Kempton’s Blog was similarly skeptical, and did some research on the video, and on Matt.

Is there a lesson plan in here for history and other social studies? I think so. This can go directly to the issue of how we know what we know, and what are primary and secondary sources for history, as tested in Texas’s Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS).

There are several ways to use these videos, when I sit down to think about them for a moment, listed below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Brain learning, Classroom technology, Current History, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History video sources, Lesson plans, TAKS, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Education reform still high priority in California

December 1, 2006

The California Majority Report cites a bipartison poll that shows California voters regard education issues as very important. By large majorities, voters say dropouts and overall education quality are key problems, and voters support more spending to work on the problems.

The poll, by Democratic pollster Evans/McDonough and Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, finds that California voters “are looking for comprehensive changes to the public education system and they support a reform approach combining more funding with tighter financial accountability, including more accessible information.”

Among the poll’s findings:
• By a 60-37 percent margin, voters agree that “additional state funding would lead to better educated students in California”;
• 85 percent believe there are too many students in California leaving school without enough education to make it in today’s economy;
• Nearly 80 percent want either a “complete dismantling and redesign of our public education system” (27%) or “comprehensive reforms that make significant changes to the system” (52%); and
• 84 percent believe “every public school should have the materials and teachers needed to implement standards-based education even if it means increasing education funding”.

1 Comment | Education reform, Education spending, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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