Weekend Open Thread
I hope you’re enjoying your nice spring weekend, now that our taste of summer has gone. Who can keep up with this weather? So now it’s time for a weekend open thread. Come and play!
I think you already knew that Glenn Beck was a big phony. He can care less about the people who adore him or the trouble he is causing:
With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: “I could give a flying crap about the political process.” Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. “We’re an entertainment company,” Beck says. He has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth. He gets $13 million a year from print (books plus the ten-issue-a-year magazine Fusion). Radio brings in $10 million. Digital (including a newsletter, the ad-supported Glennbeck.com and merchandise) pulls in $4 million. Speaking and events are good for $3 million and television for $2 million.
It’s all about the benjamins.
Also from the not a big surprise files – children on vouchers don’t perform better academically than their peers in the public school system.
About halfway into a five-year evaluation of Milwaukee’s 20-year-old school voucher program, new data shows that groups of low-income students in the city who use public vouchers to attend private schools are still scoring about the same academically as their peers in Milwaukee Public Schools.
The new results come from a series of reports released Wednesday by researchers working under the umbrella of the School Choice Demonstration Project, a national research organization that randomly selected 800 kids in the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program in the 2005-’06 school year and matched them to 800 peers in MPS, with the goal of following them through the 2011-’12 school year.
Private schools have not found some magic bullet on how to educate kids. If you’re allowed to leave out the behavior problems and learning disabled, you get better results. I think we’ll really only get somewhere in improving education if we start seeing the world as it is, and not how we wish it to be.
Tags: Open Thread
57% of probable voters say that you economy will be very important to their vote. I wonder how Michael Castle will explain his vote against the economic recovery.
Morning folks here a little humor for today
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/11/sarah-palin-network-video_n_533094.html
Here we are, UI, back at the “half-full, half-empty” debate on school choice. Among things that bother me about this report of the study (Which may or may not reflect problems in the study, itself) are that it says the study “randomly selected 800 kids in the Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program in the 2005-’06 school year and matched them to 800 peers in MPS” and then goes on to say “Wolf said that about 18% of kids in MPS are classified as special needs while only 3% of voucher-school children are officially classified as such. In parent surveys his team collected, Wolf said that 10% of voucher-school parents responded that their children required special-education services.”
If the populations are “matched”, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that they’d be ‘matched’ for special education status? At the very least? And if they are, then this whole discussion of the varying populations of special ed students is a complete red-herring. That’s quite apart from the fact that this paragraph says, essentially, “of the families that chose the voucher program as their option, 7% felt their children’s learning challenges had been inaccurately identified/insufficiently addressed by the school system.”
This sentence, here, “voucher schools are responding to a more rigorous set of accountability measures that have been written into state law.” means, “they have to teach to the test, too.” Reassuring as that may be to the politicians enshrining these tests as law, it probably hasn’t improved the ability of voucher schools to serve as laboratories for alternate approaches.
You have to look at school testing and “accountability” measures this way. You’re enrolled in a Conservatory that produces great violinists. You study and rehearse, and become a young, but great, violinist. And two weeks before your graduation state mandated tests show up that require every school to get a certain number of passing grades on a final about growing rutabagas. The violinists & music theory teachers cancel all rehearsals and sit everyone down with ‘The Dummy’s Guide to Obscure Brassicas’ but, understandably, the school scores less well than the school down the street, with its rutabaga curriculum.
Guess who cancels one practice a week in the next semester, so the Rutabaga Specialist can try to keep everyone current?
Finally, there’s this tidbit. “Mobility does not have a positive impact on student achievement, Andrekopoulos said.” Now, that’s the data I would like to see, particularly before it’s dragged into a plan to increasingly standardize the curriculum. As a chemist, UI, you know that there are a number of ways to get “solutions” to match in concentration. You can measure them and adjust the contents of solvents and solids, with a lot of fiddly business. You can (in many cases) partially evaporate the more dilute one. Or, if you’re in a hurry, you can dump them all together and stir them up, and then split them back into two bottles.
That last choice gives you a perfect outcome, if all you need is matching bottles. I understand, however, it’s seldom helpful in an analysis of why they were different in the first place. 😉
Rejoice Democrats! Gingrich, Romney, Paul or Palin is going to be the GOP nominee. It is the complete Foxnewsification of the second biggest political party in America.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
BTW the nuts are ordered above from most likely to least likely to win the nomination.
I think Palin is the odds on favorite, if she runs. Not convinced she will.
That’s why I have her fourth. Smart people (or n her case people with smart advisors) know to sit out 2012.
Great follow up today at 538 about how the GOP will not pick Newt.