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Can the Wisdom of the Crowd Pick a Good School Board?

Posted August 22, 2011 By Dave Thomer

Today, after months of speculation, Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission announced that Superintendent Arlene Ackerman would step down. Ackerman has been under fire for close to a year over a number of issues. Far from the least of those issues was a budget deficit for the upcoming school year of over $600 million. That deficit resulted in a wave of layoffs that affected some of my colleagues and has me looking over my shoulder, so I am by no means a disinterested party here. Now, in light of this deficit, the next bit of info may seem a bit shocking. In exchange for walking away from the three years remaining on her contract, Ackerman is receiving $905,000. The SRC is on the hook for about $500,000. The rest is coming from private donations, which is a whole different story.

Now you may be asking yourself why, during a budget crisis, would you pay someone almost a million dollars not to do any work. What’s scary is that this may be the most sensible decision the School Reform Commission has made on this issue. Because the SRC originally hired Ackerman with an exorbitant salary and set of perks, and because the SRC then extended her contract even after controversy started, the SRC was going to be giving Arlene Ackerman close to a million dollars or more over the next three years. The question is whether the schools would get more value for that money if they did have Ackerman’s services, or if they didn’t. Clearly, they decided that she was doing more arm than good. One can only wish they had that realization when they extended the contract, or when they signed it in the first place.

So, clearly, the SRC has neither covered itself in glory nor demonstrated great wisdom in this affair. This has some people wondering if the SRC is a good idea in the first place. The SRC replaced the old school board about a decade ago when the state came in to deliver added funding. The governor appoints three members and the mayor appoints two. So the citizens of Philadelphia have very little control over the commission, and a natural response is to want the people of the city to have more say. So there’s a small movement to replace the SRC with an elected school board.

I honestly don’t think there’s much chance of the current Pennsylvania legislature getting rid of the SRC, but if they did, I wonder if an elected school board would be the best replacement. There is a point of diminishing returns with elected offices. The more detailed the job, the harder it is for citizens to be informed enough about the job and the candidates to make an intelligent decision. In Philadelphia we have a set of positions called row offices – jobs like City Commissioner, Sheriff, and Register of Wills. I am a political junkie and it has taken me years to figure out exactly what each job does, let alone to figure out who has the best platform for the job. We elect judges, and I just skip those offices on the ballot because I do not have the legal expertise to know who is a good judge and who isn’t. Because fewer voters pay attention to these offices, party bosses tend to have more influence over who gets nominated and who wins. It’s not a pretty picture of electoral sausage-making. I don’t know if that’s the process I want to determine education policy.

On the other hand, lots of people in the community have a stake in the schools’ success. If schools can really integrate themselves with their communities, through the work of administrators, staff, and parents, it might create an informed enough electorate to make an elected board work. But there are a lot of necessary changes to our political and academic cultures between here and there.

Filed in Education
        

Captain America: The First Avenger (Review)

Posted August 21, 2011 By Dave Thomer

I made it out to see Captain America: The First Avenger last weekend. I enjoyed it. It was definitely a well-done origin movie, and while I haven’t seen Thor yet, it definitely seems like Marvel Studios has its formula down.

The most important thing that Marvel achieved with Iron Man and Captain America is to give the audience ample reason to like the title characters. If you like the character, you’ll want to follow his exploits in sequels, spinoffs, and the Avengers movie. Iron Man achieved this by letting Robert Downey, Jr. loose to make wisecracks and have a ton of fun being Robert Downey, Jr. Captain America does it by using just about every scene to establish what a good, decent, nice guy that Steve Rogers is.

At the beginning of the film, Steve Rogers is a complete physical basket case – he’s short, he’s scrawny, he’s sickly, he’s not particularly coordinated. The film demonstrates this by sticking Chris Evans’ head on a much smaller person through CGI. It looks a little odd, but you get over it, because even as a 98-pound weakling, Steve Rogers is a good guy. He’s trying to enlist in the Army in order to do his part during World War II. He gets himself beaten up by trying to hush someone heckling a newsreel. He ditches a double date to try, yet again, to enlist. He is, in short, the Hero Who Never Gives Up, and it’s easy to be on his side. Contrast that to the hatchet job that Green Lantern did in trying to introduce Hal Jordan.

Once Rogers’ character is established, the movie gets the action plot moving, and that’s competently done. Hugo Weaving does a nice job of portraying the Red Skull as a Nazi who’s decided to break away from the Reich and try to take over the world himself using advanced technology. As a result, the movie is a weird mix of a World War II era war movie and a science fiction action film. Since the filmmakers have tied this movie to the cosmology established in the other films, especially Thor, it’s easier to buy into than I expected.

I think that years from now, people are going to be writing books about the way Marvel has established a film universe. It could all come crashing down at some point, but right now they’re writing a new rulebook.

Filed in Culture and Media
        

Looking Forward to EduCon

Posted August 20, 2011 By Dave Thomer

One of my goals for this year is to move a little bit beyond my own classroom this year and get more involved in the larger education community. I’m fortunate that there’s one excellent resource for doing so right in my hometown: Educon, the annual conference held at the Science Leadership Academy. This year the event will run from January 27-29, 2012. Registration just opened, so I’ll be buying my ticket soon.

Why is EduCon valuable? I attended last year, and there were three major benefits:

It’s a great way to collect information about a lot of tools, techniques and resources that can help teachers make their classrooms a place where students can take chances and think deeply about important questions. I learned a lot about using storytelling tools, games, and document archives at last year’s con. I’m looking forward to following up on those threads and branching out into others.

It’s a good networking tool if you’re looking to use social networks to connect to the online education conversation. I didn’t really use Twitter before I attended the last EduCon, and now it helps me keep up with news, issues and techniques.

The SLA students and staff who volunteer at the conference have so much enthusiasm, and have built such a strong community, that I found that talking to them about how they learn and what they want to achieve was a major shot in the arm for my teaching enthusiasm.

So my calendar is already marked. Now I can spend the next four months making sure I have something interesting to say when I get there.

Filed in Education
        

On Curfews and Constitutions

Posted August 19, 2011 By Dave Thomer

As I write this Philadelphia is in its second weekend with a special curfew for teenagers. The curfew was instituted after the most recent spate of flash mob violence, and during the first weekend dozens of teenagers were arrested for violations. There were no major violent incidents, although one news report pointed out that almost all of the prior flash mobs had occurred earlier than the curfew anyway.

The curfews got national and even international news coverage, with the BBC and the Telegraph filing reports.

Not everyone is happy with the curfew. One editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer called it an “overreaction” and an unjust law because it punishes teenagers not for what they do, but for who they are. The curfew is clearly a blunt force instrument to try to prevent the large crowds that make riots possible from forming. As a temporary tool, it might be possible to justify its use, but only if we acknowledge that we are in the need for a temporary tool because we failed to establish a more lasting solution.

If I can analogize to my teaching experience – when there is such a breakdown of the classroom culture that I feel that I need to implement a blanket penalty in order to get things back on track, that might be the proper response at that moment. But the fact that I got to that moment means that I failed to create a classroom environment where the students respected each other and the classroom norms enough in the first place. The responsibility is on me to figure out what I need to do differently to engage the students and help them find the motivation to move forward. The same goes for the city and society at large. A curfew is, at best, a bandage. If we don’t change the structures that helped to create the problem, we’ll be forced to keep escalating the bandages until we’re a mummy – unable to move forward because of the restrictions we created in order to preserve us.

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

Police as Part of Community, Online and Off

Posted August 18, 2011 By Dave Thomer

Couple of stories that connect to the riots in England, flash mobs in Philadelphia, and the general topic of law and order in the 21st Century.

The New York Times reported on the transformation of Los Angeles’ police department. Former LA police chief Bill Bratton is now doing some consulting work for the British government, and the story goes into some detail about how he was able to change the reputation of LA’s police by improving operations through technology and building closer ties to the community in order to build trust and rapport.

CNN reports on how flash mobs – the “get together and break stuff and beat people up” kind rather than the “let’s perform an opera in the middle of the train station” kind – are not just a problem in big cities like Philadelphia, which seems to have become the national capital of criminal flash mobs. Social networks and mobile devices make it easy for crowds to develop even in smaller towns like Germantown, Maryland. So police forces are starting to realize that they need to reach out to virtual communities as well. It’ll be interesting to see how the police develop techniques to monitor and communicate with social networks – and how people develop techniques to elude them.

Filed in Special Order Speeches
        

Ed Milliband’s National Conversation Speech

Posted August 17, 2011 By Dave Thomer

Labour Party leader Ed Milliband gave a speech a couple of days ago about the English riots and how the government should respond. The full text is available on Labour’s website, and it’s worth a read.

Milliband’s major proposal is series of hearings or town hall meetings or some other form of “national conversation.” I don’t know enough about British politics to know whether such inquiries have more impact than special commissions in the US. I hope so, or I don’t understand why Milliband would put so much effort into having one established.

But what I think is interesting about the speech is the way he tries to link this crisis with other crises Britain has faced recently.

Children’s ideas of right and wrong don’t just come from their parents.

And we can’t honestly say the greed, selfishness and gross irresponsibility that shocked us all so deeply is confined to the looters or even to their parents.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen this kind of me-first, take what you can culture.
The bankers who took millions while destroying people’s savings: greedy, selfish, and immoral.

The MPs who fiddled their expenses: greedy, selfish, and immoral.

The people who hacked phones to get stories to make money for themselves: greedy, selfish and immoral.

People who talk about the sick behaviour of those without power, should talk equally about the sick behaviour of those with power.

Let’s not pretend that the crisis of values in our society is confined to a minority only at the bottom when we see the morality of millions of hardworking, decent people u nder siege from the top as well.

Let’s talk about what it does to our culture.

Too often we have sent a message from the top to the bottom of Britain’s society that says: anything goes, you are in it for yourself.

As long as you can get away with it, who cares?

We hear lots of talk now about role models for communities, but what role model has been provided by the elites of our society?

By linking riots with phone hacking and poor banking practices, he invites us to take a top-to-bottom look at our ethical fabric. Left unstated is the issue that, if greed, selfishness and immorality are rampant amongst the elite and the downtrodden, is there any way that society can punish those transgressions in an equal manner?

Filed in Public Policy
        

Riots or Repression: Is It Either/Or?

Posted August 16, 2011 By Dave Thomer

Antisocial behavior and society’s response to it is kind of my theme for the next few days, largely because I’ve been trying to reflect on the recent riots in England and the British government’s response. Via Matt Yglesias’ blog I found this commentary on Bloomberg by Edward Glaeser. Glaeser argues that large social forces like poverty or anger at the government are not the main reason that riots happen in democratic societies. Rather, the biggest ingredient is simply a large mass of people. The more people you have in an area, the harder it is for authorities to catch any one wrongdoer. So when a crowd gets large enough, like it did in Vancouver at the end of the Stanley Cup Finals, a small number of malcontents will use the larger crowd for cover and start acting out. Once this begins, other people will see an opportunity to act out without consequence and join in. At a certain point you reach a critical mass, lots of people get swept up in the passion, and you have a full scale riot that can only end with a massive deployment of forces to get the numbers back under control.

Toward the end of his article Glaeser points to how the New York police prevented any riots during the 2004 Republican National Convention – they staged mass arrests that got over 1000 people off the streets, and then let those people go. As Glaeser puts it:

But in the case of riots, it is awfully hard to actually prove wrongdoing and extremely important to clear the streets. Arresting widely and temporarily can be far more effective.

If you can’t prove wrongdoing and you’re just trying to clear the streets, it seems clear that you’re going to be arresting people who are doing nothing more than trying to make use of their right to assemble. Is that a price we should pay to avoid the chance of a riot? Benjamin Franklin’s quote about liberty and security starts running through my mind now, and I wonder what the appropriate balance point would be. My gut instinct is to say that I believe you should prepare for the worst, but not assume it. But those preparations may require some restrictions that we should find chafing in a democratic society.

Filed in Public Policy
        

The Value of Believing in Free Will

Posted August 15, 2011 By Dave Thomer

This post is discussing a bit of old news, but it may be relevant news in light of recent events. Over the weekend I came across this old post from Scientific American’s Bering in Mind blog. There are two parts to the post, and both are worth discussing. There’s a report on recent studies about how ideas can affect behavior, and a discussion of the “Would you kill Hitler as a child?” question. I’ll start with the former, even though the blog author leads off with the latter.

Bering cites two studies that indicate that when people have been primed to think about, or accept, the position of determinism, they are more likely to engage in less ethical behaviors. Here’s how Bering describes one of the studies.

In fact, a study published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that simply by exposing people to deterministic statements such as, “Like everything else in the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules” made them act more aggressively and selfishly compared to those who read statements endorsing the idea of free will, such as, “I demonstrate my free will every day when I make decisions” or those who simply read neutral statements, such as, “Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface.” Participants who’d been randomly assigned to the deterministic condition, for example, were less likely than those from the other two groups to give money to a homeless person, or to allow a classmate to use their cellular phone.

Now, it’s important to note that results like this do not provide evidence for or against determinism. You could say that the results happen because we do have free will, but when we think about the idea that we don’t, we give ourselves more leeway to be selfish. Or you could say that we do not have free will, and that somehow whatever part of our brain is activated when we think about determinism also causes an increase in selfish behaviors. The question is, what do we do with the results? Do we say that even if determinism is true, the results of acknowledging that truth are so negative that we should not do it? Or do we find some way to build up a buffer, to help introduce a counter-force that will lead people to less antisocial behavior?

The irony, of course, is that if human behavior is fully determined, the question of what we should do is irrelevant, because we are going to do what we are going to do. But our asking and pondering of the irrelevant question can not be prevented by our understanding of its irrelevance, because we are determined to do it. So we can really only hope that our deterministic process is leading us to a result that we find desirable. (Or maybe we can’t hope anything at all, if we are so determined.)

If determinism is false, then it seems like we need to find a way to emphasize responsibility even when discussing determinism. Stay away from talking about fate and maybe even the idea that everything happens for a reason. Point out that if what we do is determined by who we are and the circumstances that we find ourselves in, our brains and minds possess the structures that can produce beneficial choices. If who I am determines what I do, let me be the best me that I can. I’m not sure the idea hangs together coherently, but again, we’re trying to discuss the idea of determinism without losing sight of personal responsibility.

You can see the tension I’m talking about in Bering’s discussion of the question, “Would you kill Hitler as a child?” He says that he can’t help but feel that Hitler could have prevented the Holocaust; that regardless of social forces Hitler had the choice not to be so destructive. He didn’t make that choice, so he must be inherently evil, and therefore deserves to die. But if Hitler is essentially evil, then it was never possible for him to choose good. So his essence, or nature, is what determined his actions, and there was never any choice. If there was no choice, was there responsibility?

As for me, I wouldn’t do it. I can’t reliably predict the effect of Hitler’s death. If could see a fairly direct link between saving lives and killing someone, I could see the argument. But in a more nebulous situation, all I have to go by is my own ethical compass, which doesn’t support homicide.

Filed in Philosophy
        

Where’s the Beef in Analysis of Eagles-Phillies Feud?

Posted August 14, 2011 By Dave Thomer

Nothing bothers me more than reading something and not feeling like I’ve learned anything at the end. I just had that experience with Phil Sheridan’s latest column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. To set up: The Eagles and the Phillies are the two most popular professional sports teams in Philadelphia. Five years ago, no one would suggest that the Phillies were in the same class as the Eagles, in terms of results or popularity. Four division titles and one world championship for the Phillies later, the two teams are on a much more even footing. Scuttlebutt around town is that the Eagles’ management is not happy about this and that the Phillies’ management is not broken up about the Eagles’ unhappiness.

So this simmering tension somehow became a topic of discussion because Eagles president Joe Banner used the Boston Red Sox as an example of a baseball team that aggressively pursues excellence as opposed to the hometown team. So Sheridan tried to re-examine the apparent tension between the two teams and argue that it is a good thing because it motivates each team to try to one-up the other. It’s an interesting premise; I’m not sure I buy it, because I think both teams have ample internal pressure for success. But I could be persuaded by a good argument. Sheridan doesn’t come anywhere close to providing one.

Look at this passage:

To say this was an Eagles town at that point would be an understatement. They were the focus of most of the enthusiasm, passion, controversy, and criticism while the Phillies, a decade removed from their most recent postseason appearance, were struggling for a foothold.

They found it, and there’s little doubt the Eagles’ towering popularity was a motivating factor. Where a number of baseball teams settle for the fresh revenues provided by new ballparks, the Phillies seized their moment. As the Citizens Bank Park presses began printing millions of new dollars, the Phillies reinvested in their team.

The alternative was a return to irrelevance when the novelty of the new ballpark wore off. Ask the Pittsburgh Pirates, whose attendance in gorgeous PNC Park plummeted with the team’s winning percentage. In a market dominated by the Steelers, who have accomplished more than the Eagles in the same time frame, the bar is very high.

Look at that second paragraph. “There’s little doubt the Eagles’ towering popularity was a motivating factor” in the Phillies’ decision to increase their payroll and try to win more games? Why? Where’s the evidence? Where’s the quote from a Phillies official saying, “Yeah, we were thinking of keeping the payroll down, but we just couldn’t do it because those Eagles are so darned popular.” There is none.

In fact, there’s evidence for a competing theory right in the excerpt. Teams that don’t succeed suffer from lower attendance and lower revenues. That would be true if the Eagles were lousy or if they won six straight Super Bowls. The comparison to the Pirates looks like it’s evidence in support of Sheridan’s theory because Pittsburgh also has a successful NFL team, but he never does the work to make the information support his theory over competing theories.

OK, so the conclusion that the Phillies were motivated by the Eagles, and said motivation led to their championship, is dubious. What about the idea that the resentment is good for the Eagles? Look at this passage:

But if the Phillies’ rise in popularity, as measured by sellouts and merchandise sales and percentage of local media attention, has annoyed anyone over at NovaCare, and if that annoyance helped drive the Eagles’ aggressive approach to this offseason, how is that a bad thing?

If one thing caused a second thing, and if that second thing caused a third thing, then we should be happy because the third thing is a good thing. But there’s no evidence that the first thing caused the second, or that the second caused the third. So what was the point of the argument?
You may be wondering why I’m spending this much time analyzing a sports column. Well, given the amount of time people spending reading, thinking and arguing about sports, it’s one of the ways that we practice critical thinking without realizing we do it. If we don’t get in the habit of calling out sloppy thinking there, we probably won’t do it when it comes to other topics, either.

Filed in Culture and Media
        

Proving My Theory, Germans Love Board Games

Posted August 13, 2011 By Dave Thomer


Friends of ours recently introduced us to the board game Ticket to Ride, and we liked it so much we immediately bought a copy. In the game, players must gather resources in order to build train lines connecting various cities. The longer and more difficult to build your route is, the more points you accumulate. Each game takes about an hour, and there’s a good level of complexity and planning required. The game has been successful enough that there are numerous sequels and expansions, and I may pick up a copy of the Europe-based game to help my students visualize European geography.

In the course of looking up info about the game series, I found a Wikipedia entry for German-style board games. I had no idea that the nation had lent its name to an entire style of board games, but apparently they like themselves a lot of board games in Germany, with enough German-speaking board game critics available to award a prestigious prize called the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year). It’s interesting to read the Wikipedia entry explain what makes a German-style board game different than other board games, and it’s also interesting to realize that as much as I like to play board games, there are people who take them far more seriously than I do. This passage probably explains why I’ve had more success getting my family to play Ticket to Ride than I have with other games:

In contrast to games such as Risk or Monopoly, in which a close game can extend indefinitely, German-style games usually have a mechanism to stop the game within its stated playing time.

So if the German approach creates games I can play with my family without needing to take a week off from work, all I can say is, Danke.

Filed in Culture and Media
        
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