Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Bill Gates Rant!!!







I haven't posted a good rant in a while, and the end of the year seems to be a good time to get one in. I have to say that I hope that people will read this one though, because I think that it gets to the heart of a few important issues in education - plus, I actually did my research : )

Recently Newsweek's online magazine ran an interview with Bill Gates and Randi Weingarten with the title "Fixing Our Nation's Schools" (you can read the whole thing here). For those of you who don't know, Randi Weingarten is the outspoken and controversial president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Bill Gates is Bill Gates.

These are two people for whom I have a great deal of respect, and who have spent a lot of time, energy, and, in Bill Gates's case, money dealing with our ailing school system. Both of them are intelligent, committed and persuasive, and they are both appallingly wrong.

Ms. Weingarten's particular wrongness is, rather famously, the unwillingness to accept the idea of using test scores in teachers' evaluations. Basically, she is the most public symbol of the inability of schools to get rid of "lemon" teachers, and she is totally wrong in this respect, but for some interesting reasons.



I really want to do a rant at some point about Ms. Weingarten and the misunderstood wrongness of the teachers unions. But it's going to have to wait because my beef right now is with Bill Gates - or actually with the countless people who are now making the same false statements that he makes in this article.

Bill Gates, through his great fortune and a rather surprisingly strong showing of public spiritedness, has put himself front and center on the issue of education reform. Again, I have enormous respect for what he has accomplished. I especially admire his desire to give not only some of his vast wealth, but also some of his admittedly great intelligence and experience. Unfortunately, in this case, he is wrong wrong wrong.




In the Newsweek article, Mr. Gates makes the argument that the problems with the schools are not primarily financial. He argues that what is needed is not more money, but a better use of resources. His suggestions include researching the best teaching methods from around the world, improving teacher training, and (in opposition to Ms. Weingarten), instituting a merit based performance system in which teachers are rewarded or fired based, at least partly, on measurable results.

What Gates is suggesting is that the solution is not more money, but more smarts. It is the same argument used by many politicians and pundits when they want to talk about fixing huge problems without using the forbidden words "increase taxes". (To his credit, Bill Gates doesn't actually use the egregious phrase "throwing money at the problem" - in English class we teach students about loaded words, and this is one of the most common examples in these absurd days - If your children are starving and you want to feed them, is this "throwing money at the problem"?)


The problem with Gates's argument is that he in almost entirely right. We should do all of those things. We should have done them fifty years ago, but the sooner the better.


Where he, and so many others, err these days is in the assertion that the problem is not primarily financial. The inconvenient, but inescapable reality is that the problem is primarily financial in two overwhelmingly important ways.

First, as I have brought up in this blog before, the amount of time that our students actually spend in school is shamefully small compared to the rest of the world. I don't want to get into too much detail about this here since I have before, and to his credit Gates does make this point. But it is a huge issue, and we are doomed without addressing it. Malcolm Gladwell makes the same point in his terrific book Outliers, and it is one of the big ugly elephants in the room of current American policy. Again, without going into too much detail, suffice to say that every extra day of education is insanely expensive.

Before getting to the next, and more insidious, aspect of Gates's argument, I want to make a point here. When talking about the expense of a longer school year, please don't think that this is only due to teacher's salaries. What I mean is, that if the powers that be told us educators, "You need to teach for an extra month each year, and we're not going to pay you any more," I would be upset about this - who wouldn't be? - but I would do it, and I would guess, so would most teachers in the long run.

Of course this isn't what would happen - they would end up paying teachers more - but my point is that this is only a part of the enormous expense. There are also insurance, maintenance, administrative costs, busing, etc. that make increasing school time a daunting task.

But this brings me to the main point of this rant and to the heart of the wrongness of so much of our national debate on this issue. Namely, that when Bill Gates and others claim that a simple increase of spending is not the answer to our problems, there is the spoken or unspoken implication that what this means is an increase in each teacher's salary. While I would love more money (again - who wouldn't?) Gates is correct that this is not what is needed.

What is needed - desperately and critically - is more teachers. Or, more precisely, smaller class sizes, which are facilitated by having more teachers in a school. And this is a profoundly financial issue.

Gates makes the astonishingly misleading argument that we spend more money per pupil than anyone else in the world - including countries like China and Finland that are currently eating our lunch in terms of education. And this is true, but it is meaningless because their class sizes are half as large as ours at most!!!!!!

Here is the unsexy but irrefutable research from the Department of education:

The US Department of Education recently looked at the achievement levels of students in 2,561 schools across the nation, as measured by their performance on the national NAEP exams. The sample included at least 50 schools in each state, including those from large and small, urban and rural, affluent and poor areas. After controlling for student background, the only objective factor that was found to be correlated with higher student success as measured by test scores was class size –not school size, not teacher qualifications, nor any other variable that the researchers could identify.


You can see the full study here if you've got some time.

That's it - smaller classes. Why is this? Just for the obvious reasons: they are easier to manage, students get more attention, and everybody has a better educational experience. There is nothing exciting about this, but it is absolutely critical.


As I said, I did my research, and here are the statistics for classes in Finland in education - they are about half as big as ours. (Class sizes for China have traditionally been larger than Finland's, but they have been shrinking as China has become wealthier, and there are strong cultural factors in china that, unfortunately, would be almost impossible to replicate in the United States, such as a strong family focus on education.)



So there you have it: more days and smaller classes. A lot more money.



Does this mean that good teaching doesn't matter? No, it just means that, on a large scale statistical level, there is simply nothing else besides these two issues that can be quantified. And as Mary Kennedy and many others have noted, although we know what good teaching looks like, we still have very little idea of how to make it happen with any regularity.

Again, I am totally behind Gates on many issues: discover the best teaching practices, teach them to new (and veteran) teachers, and reward or punish them based on measurable data.



But, as a country, are we serious about educational reform?



Then what we need are more teachers (and the space to put them in) to create smaller classes. This is the only thing besides time that has been proven to make a measurable difference, and it is indeed primarily a financial issue. In fact, it is incredibly expensive. But that is the issue, and unless someone is addressing it, they are not truly acknowledging reality, no matter how successful they may be in business.


Hope you all had a great 2010!!!

Peace & Love,



Patrick





Sunday, December 26, 2010

Christmas Day!!!

It was a little hard to capture the sheer craziness of our Christmas this year. This picture makes it all look so modest, so you'll just have to trust us that it was an embarrassment of presents. We had Amy and Jamie and Felix and Kathi and Annie here along with Julie and Thor and Scarlett. Poor Felix and Scarlett were a little hesitant about the whole thing, but Finn and Jack tore into their presents with crazed gusto. Just when things were starting to die down a little bit, Bell and Steve showed up with more excellent gifts.



This was around the time Thor went home to bed (he had to drive all the way back to Orange County on Christmas Eve to get Julie's present) and poor Ms. Scarlett said, "No more, Momma. Upstairs."

Patrick and I were surprised that the boys went to bed so easily on Christmas Eve night. We were not as surprised when we woke up at 2:30 in the morning to hear rustling sounds from downstairs accompanied by "tee-hees". Here are Finn and Jack modeling the teddy bear and snake that they found in their stockings.

Here are the lovely Campbell, Gambel girls. We truly missed Mike and Molly and Petur and Great Peepa Hank this year, but we still managed to have a pretty festive soiree.

Scarlett got a super cool pink horse costume.

Finn and Jack got scooters. Finn's makes sparks. Watch out!

More presents!

The beloved pink horse costume.

Jack loves his new teddy bear. The boys loved their sparking scooters and robotic bugs and other fun presents, but I still think their favorite gifts were the pillow pets and other stuffed animals. I wish we had some better pictures of Felix from Christmas morning because he was quite a sight to be seen. He got a top hat and a shiny red cape for Christmas, along with an awesome kitchen set, which he likes very, very much. Nice work, Santa!

After the crazy present opening frenzy, we had a little energy to work off so we took advantage of the one nice day inbetween all of our rain and we took the boys for a Christmas swim. This is Jack doing his "I'm so happy to see Finn" dance.

And this is Finn the fish, doing what he likes to do best - swim! Merry Christmas everyone!

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Sun!!!

I missed that big ball of flaming gas!!!

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Aleatoric Tuesday!!!

Once again it's Aleatoric Tuesday at the Dore Family Blog!!!

Aleatoric comes from the Latin word "Alea" which means dice. It is most widely known from the work of Julius Caesar, who, being a great puzzle master, initiated the first RubikCon (TM). In those days of course, many of the familiar colors had not yet been invented, so the cubes were mainly just black and white, like dice, hence the term.

And so each Tuesday we honor the great Latins with some random stuff, such as a cool dress:



Some deep thoughts from Bob:


The last words of Blockbuster Video:


The email inbox of Elizabeth Bennet (for Amy):



And finally, David Bowie being attacked by weasels:



Have a great Tuesday everyone!!!!


Saturday, December 18, 2010

T'is the season...

...for a little clowning around. Finn had a performance last week for all of his great after school classes, including his circus class. We were so proud of him! Finn was the only kid who had to do everything. He did some Zumba dancing, and a couple of skits for his theater arts class. He had lots of great artwork to show us hanging up on the walls and then he did a pretty complex routine of juggling, hula hooping and baton twirling. Go Finn! (He had to dress like a clown all day, btw. His hair started out as a mohawk in the morning, but after his Zumba hat, it just looked a little wild.)
Finn and Jack's sweet friend Luis who lives in our complex and has also been in Finn's class the last couple of years. He's a really cool kid.

Another pretty cool kid. Jack got a little restless during the performance, but he was pretty excited to see Finn doing all those tricks. He yelled out, "Momma, Finn is GOOD."


And he was right, Finn did a great job. This is him balancing the baton on his head, he also hula hooped with his neck and did a great job doing clown faces whenever he messed up. He brought the house down during his theater performance. He was doing a skit with another little boy where Finn had to try to convince the other kid to help him with his homework and the other kid had to come up with good reasons not to help him. Finally, Finn said, "If you help me, I'll give you $10,000 bucks!" The whole audience burst out laughing and a bunch of people yelled out, "I'll help you!"

Jack had his first ever "preformance" last week, as well. It's a little hard to tell in this photo, but just in case you're wondering, Jack is wearing his pajamas and the other kids are wearing fancy dress clothes. Apparently a memo went around suggesting that the kids wear their "Sunday best". Since it was pajama day at school and we didn't get the memo, they really did get Jack's Sunday best. Luckily, he didn't seem to notice and he took his spot front and center with great enthusiasm.

The kids did a pretty impressive performance for a bunch of little guys. The lights on them were very bright and I think they were a little overwhelmed - you can see how serious they looked trying to concentrate and get it all right. Finn was sitting on the floor right in front of Jack's place on the stage. Every once in a while, Jack would look down and see Finn and burst into a big smile, but most of the time, he looked very serious and focused.

Here, the kids are performing jingle bells in sign language! It was really cool to see all those wiggly noisy kids silently performing Jingle Bells. They performed the more traditional raucous version of Jingle Bells after the silent one. We have a great video of their last song, but unfortunately it is too big to post. It was Jack's turn to bring the house down on that one, though. His teacher announced that they would be singing "Deck the Halls" (of Ribet Academy) and Jack yelled out "I LOVE this one." Everyone laughed and the kids belted out the song. It was a great ending to a fun evening.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Strikes & Gutters!!!




It's been a mixed bag of news so far today. On the downside, we woke up to hear that Dad & Molly wouldn't make it down for Christmas because Dad is feeling sick : (

We were soooo bummed about this, but hope you feel better soon Dad (and Molly, if you're feeling bad too)!!!!!

On the plus side, it's great to have my old pal Eric in town!! Hope to see a lot of that guy : )

Also, I just found out that our congressman Xavier Becerra voted against the tax bill!!! I'm very proud of him, but I also feel a little responsible since I called him 5 or 6 times : )

And to top it off, one of my students just got accepted to U.C. Santa Barbara (and is still waiting to hear from Berklee & Stanford)!!!

So, strikes and gutters. But I hope that you're all doing great heading into the Christmas week!!!!

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Friday, December 10, 2010

Bernie Sanders!!!

The Bernie Sanders filibuster going on now is one of the greatest things I've ever seen!! Watch it live here:


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/10/bernie-sanders-filibuster_n_795087.html

Go Bernie!!!

Thursday, December 9, 2010

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

I get a little wacky this time of year. I always think I'm going to be grumpy about it, but then it gets all crisp and bright out, Christmas songs start playing, the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg and pine scent the air and I buckle. Patrick didn't want to buy our Christmas tree this past weekend, but the boys and I made puppy dog eyes at him until he caved too.

One of my favorite parts of Christmas is getting out the Christmas ornaments. I love that they all have stories. Hello old friends! This pirate ship is actually pretty new. Finn loves anything to do with the ocean, so last year I bought some fun ocean ornaments, including this pirate ship.

This guy is my FAVORITE!!! In our teeny-tiny apartment, we only had room for a small table top tree and this guy was our tree topper. Christmas tree up the buns!

The polar bear and the salt dough peach Mom made for her last Christmas here. Love you mom! Miss you!

One of the tags Kathi and Petur gave us many years ago. Hi guys!

Another one of Finn's sea friends.

Some of our other salt dough ornaments. For some reason the pictures I took of the boys' handmade ornaments didn't come out, boo! Trust me, though, we have many funny ramshackle ornaments with sweet pictures of the guys on them.


Finn had his Christmas performance this morning. The other moms all ooohed and awwwed when he walked in. He dressed himself and I have to say, he did look pretty sharp.


Finn, Hana and Farrah, cutie pies!

It's a good thing Finn looked so dang cute, because he was a little wonky in the performance, as you can see in the video below. His friend Hana was a star, though. She led the whole group and then did a little swing dance with one of the boys in the group. it was pretty adorable.

He may have been a little off, but he had a great time! I was so glad I got to see him. Go Finn!



Tuesday, December 7, 2010

As Usual!!!

Once again it's Video Tuesday on the Dore Family Blog!!!

Here's a Scottish lunatic named Danny MacAskill taking a journey from Edinburgh back to his hometown Dunvegan, in the Isle of Skye. Pretty cool!!



Here's a good one for Christmas:




And D is for Daftpunk (beat you Eric!!):



Have a great day everyone!!!

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Calling Mr. Kucinich...

Well, a political part of me just died.

Today, Obamba indicated that he would allow the extension of the Bush tax cuts in return for some concessions from the Republicans - probably an extension of unemployment benefits.

I've always felt that taxes and corporate regulation are what the political game is really all about, and the game just ended for now. Of course it will start up again in three or four years with new players and new terminology, but for 2012...

3rd party.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Egg!!!












Butterfly egg: