Safety of Energy Sources

Here is an interesting discussion of deaths per terra watt-hour of electricity generated. I have always been surprised that coal plants generate more radioactivity in the surrounding community than nuclear plants do.

I won't vouch for the numbers being perfect, nor do I think that these rates include the risk of massive failures (like a nuclear plant blowing up). On the other hand, the otherwise fairly safe Hydro has a disaster with 170,000 deaths included in it.

This comparison does seem to put the relative level of risk in perspective. Certainly, there is no risk free alternative to power generation and we should really be focused on what non-fossil fuel options we might have.

20 each?

Cory Doctorow's post (via DeLong) on the New York Times' new paywall has me thinking:

New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy? - Boing Boing: lots of people are going to greet the NYT paywall with eye-rolling and frustration: You stupid piece of technology, what do you mean I've seen 20 stories this month? This is exactly the wrong frame of mind to be in when confronted with a signup page (the correct frame of mind to be in on that page is, Huh, wow, I got tons of value from the Times this month. Of course I'm going to sign up!)

Which means that lots of people will take countermeasures to beat the #nytpaywall. The easiest of these, of course, will be to turn off cookies so that the Times's site has no way to know how many pages you've seen this month

Of course, the NYT might respond by planting secret permacookies, using Flash cookies, browser detection, third-party beacons, or secret ex-Soviet vat-grown remote-sensing psychics. At the very minimum, the FTC will probably be unamused to learn that the Grey Lady is actively exploiting browser vulnerabilities (or, as the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse statute puts it, "exceeding authorized access" on a remote system -- which carries a 20 year prison sentence, incidentally)

I'm running a dual boot operating system (Windows and Linux). Barring Doctorow's recently decanted telepaths, I assume that puts me up to forty a month which is about four times what I expect my monthly demand to be.

A nice post on Education Reform

There is a nice post in the Daily Kos talking about education reform. The whole piece is worth noting but this point seems especially apt:

Those advocating the end of seniority-based retention practices in favor of "performance" based on student test scores have to concede that districts, which must stretch dollars these days like never before, will be tempted to staff their classes in such a way to protect their younger (and, it must be noted, markedly cheaper) staff members.

I will never forget in my third year on the job drawing a Freshman Geography class that felt, on bad days, like a training session for America's Most Wanted. When I half-jokingly teased a counselor about how I managed to draw every wild-eyed boy in the freshman class, she smiled and told me, "But, Steve, we all know how good you are with difficult students."

At the time, I took it for the backhanded compliment that it was. In this brave new world being promoted by the GOP (and an alarming number of Democrats), it would be my ticket to lower pay. Worse yet, it could be my ticket out of the profession.

The worry here is that, in the short term, this approach will save a lot of money. Having a lot of inexpensive and enthusiastic junior teachers will do wonders for budgets (at a time when tax cuts are a priority). While teachers will recognize what is happening, in an environment with unemployment hovering around 10% (and basic things like Health Insurance depending on employment) it is likely that schools will not suffer in the short term. In the long term, the new world of teaching will require much higher pay for equally qualified teachers as we know have to compensate the teachers for the fear and uncertainty in such a system.

Not to mention to concern that class assignments could be used to protect liked but less capable teachers. Do we have a solid plan for preventing this from happening?

Sunday Morning Funnies

Weekend Gaming -- the heated chess/checkers debate

Andrew Gelman joined in the Chess/Checkers debate and added Go to the mix (which was outside of the scope of the original post but is certainly relevant to the discussion). There have been around two dozen comments so far (and Gelman always has unusually thoughtful discussion threads). Definitely worth a look.

Tenure and the end of mandatory retirement (Canada edition)

Frances Woolley has a nice post about the intersection between tenure and the lack of a mandatory retirement age in Canada. It is a different case than the debate in Canada. The background is that salary scales and tenure agreements (at Canadian Universities) were negotiated when there was a mandatory retirement age of 65. The removal of mandatory retirement was a windfall for professors who were already employed as they work under a salary scale designed for workers who would leave at 65.

In practical terms this can have a fairly important impact on budgets as it adds additional years of salary at the highest levels (often 2.5 x starting salary in a Canadian University). Frances has a nice chart here. The short term implications are stark:

Such a pay structure can be profitable as long as the pay structure is similar to the one shown in the diagram above, where the high costs of paying workers between 45 and 65 are counter-balanced by the low cost of paying workers between 25 and 45. But if the terms of the employment arrangement were changed so that workers stayed on until 75, the firm's pay structure would no longer be profitable: the costs of paying experienced workers more would exceed the gains from underpaying junior workers.

I think that there is an important balance between job security and balancing out employment contracts. In this case, due to regulatory changes, I think it would make a lot more sense if tenure elapsed at the traditional retirement age. In this case we have the reverse of what is happening in the United States for teachers -- the employment contract changed in mid-stream. I think it is consistent to argue, in both cases, that a change of contract terms should not result in a windfall for either party unless the change was by mutual consent.

Not all that broken up about the paywall

[I'm working an a post on the Florida education bill but I'm taking my time. The truth here is so ugly that even the slightest over-reaction would be going too far. In the meantime, here's something light and snarky for your Friday afternoon.]

As you've probably heard, there's a paywall going up around America's most over-rated newspaper (I'd put the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times and maybe a half-dozen other papers above it). The limit for free articles is twenty a month though you can still apparently follow blog links after you've run through those so you should still be able to keep up with most of what you're reading now (almost all of which is probably summarized by bloggers like Thoma and DeLong anyway).

As far as I can tell, the big loss will be those articles that catch your eye while you're browsing the site and most of those tend to read like this piece on the spectacular failure of Mars Needs Moms (a bomb that may leave a nine-figure crater).

The explain-the-fiasco story is one of the annoying perennials of entertainment journalism (the object is to explain why a show tanked without addressing the fact that it stank) and even by the low, low standards of the genre, this article by Brooks Barnes leaves much to be desired, consisting of widely-available facts, conventional wisdom and analysis like this:

It is quite rare for a Disney release to flop as badly as “Mars Needs Moms,” which is based on an illustrated book by Berkeley Breathed, best known for the comic strip “Bloom County.” Part of the problem may have been the story. What child wants to see a movie about his mom being taken away from him? But studio executives also pointed to the style of animation as a culprit.

Do the names Bambi and Dumbo not ring any bells whatsoever? Does Barnes not know that early Disney features (Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi) expertly played expertly on children's fear of being separated from their parents? Or that this template remains popular to this day (Finding Nemo)? More importantly, does this strike you as an insight you'd pay $15 a month for?

If you're in the mood for more fun at the gray lady's expense, check out this amusing bit of mockery from Wonkette.

I'm heading out the door but before I go...

Make sure to check out this post by Andrew Gelman. It's relevant to a number of big but underdiscussed issues in the education reform debate.

New Education Bill

Okay, there was a new law passed today in Florida:

School teachers would lose tenure and see future pay raises based on student performance under a politically charged package of education changes the Florida House sent to Gov. Rick Scott Wednesday on a straight party-line vote.

The new bill:

The legislation will establish a statewide teacher evaluation and merit pay system in 2014 and do away with tenure for new teachers hired after July 1 this year. It also chips away at teachers' due process and collective bargaining rights.

Among the amendments proposed and rejected as poison pills:

Requiring superintendents to offer a written explanation for denying a teacher's contract renewal, if test scores and evaluations make the teacher eligible for the renewal.

In the new system contracts need to be renewed annually. I am unclear how not offering an explanation for failure to renew (for teachers that test well) is an unreasonable requirement. After all, if we trust these test-based metrics than it should be perfectly reasonable to explain why a high performing teacher is being let go (e.g. drop in student enrollment at their school). If we do not trust these metrics to give an unbiased picture of how is an effective teacher then why are we tying pay so closely to these metrics?

It just seems to be inconsistent.

It is also unclear where any money for merit raises might come from in a state focused on tax cuts. Overall, I am underwhelmed.

Mark: Any thoughts?

Cloning Jaime Escalante -- a thought experiment

One of the fundamental tenets of the reform movement is the belief that we could fix all of our schools problems if, through big bonuses and wholesale firings, we could replace all of the lazy and incompetent teachers with great ones. Counterarguments generally point out that our metrics for identifying good teachers were unreliable and that, even with high-quality metrics, trying to restaff a major industry so that, say, 80% of the new recruits were in what had been the top 10% is simply not practical.

But what if we moved past those arguments altogether? What if we could create perfect duplicates of any teacher we want and place them in a million classrooms? Surely that would do it, but who should we pick?

How about Jaime Escalante, the teacher immortalized in the movie Stand and Deliver? Escalante was beyond question a spectacular teacher and he managed to build one of the country's most successful math programs in a very troubled urban school, Garfield High. By the end of his time at the school, he was teaching huge calculus sections (for HS) and producing better than a 90% pass rate on the AP exam. Only four schools in the country had more students passing the test.

So what would happen if you could clone "the best teacher in America" (as reporter Jay Matthews called him) and have him teach your AP calculus class? We can never be sure but I suspect that it would go something like this:

In 1991, he packed up his bag of tricks and quit Garfield, saying he was fed up with faculty politics and petty jealousies.

He headed to Hiram Johnson High with the intention of testing his methods in a new environment.

But in seven years there, he never had more than about 14 calculus students a year and a 75% pass rate, a record he blamed on administrative turnover and cultural differences.

Jaime Escalante was a great teacher, but to achieve those amazing results at Garfield he had to be in the right place at the right time. He needed a compatible and supportive administrator and, more importantly, a unique and powerful bond with the student body and the community. Compatibility and rapport are difficult to measure and next to impossible to predict but they are often the difference between adequate and astounding results.

Krugman joins the nuclear debate

I'm not sure this is the best time to be having this debate (a once in a millennium disaster tends to interfere with the ability to accurately evaluate risks), but Paul Krugman has a good post on the subject:

As Nordhaus’s RA, I spent the summer of 1973 on this project: my days were spent in the geology library, reading Bureau of Mines circulars on the engineering and costs of alternative energy sources, my nights at the computer center drinking vending machine coffee. (These were still the days of big mainframes and punchcards; you handed a deck of cards to the high priests behind the glass wall, then an hour later you got back a huge stack of hexadecimal garbage because you made an error on one of your cards.)

In short, I was in heaven.

Nordhaus’s paper was wonderful. (Sorry, for technical reasons I can’t put up a full version from my current undisclosed location.) But as it turned out, it was much too optimistic. Not his fault or mine: it was those Bureau of Mines circulars.

What was wrong with those circulars? They were much too optimistic about the costs of alternative energy sources, especially alternatives to oil. Basically, the engineers were understating the difficulties involved. Later Marty Weitzman would formulate a law on this: the cost of alternatives to crude oil is 40% above the current price — whatever the current price is.

And hence my skeptical reaction to the new study about the costs of running an all-renewable economy.

To be fair, we probably have much more solid ideas about the cost of wind and solar power than we did about shale oil and coal liquefaction back in 1973: wind is already a widely used technology, and concentrated solar power — probably the main way we’ll use the sun — is pretty well understood too. But there will be surprises, not all of them positive.

None of this is meant to disparage the work, or the need to use much more renewables than we are using now.

More Glaeserian causality

We all occasionally make too much of anecdotes and jump too quickly from correlation to causality, but with Edward Glaeser, this sort of thing is starting to become a habit.

From the New York Times:

Vast public infrastructure projects, like high-speed rail, helped create Spain’s current fiscal morass and did little to revitalize Japan during its lost decade.

Of course, given the magnitude of the demographic and economic forces acting on Japan, it's difficult to say exactly what effect high-speed rail had.

As for Spain, do we really have reason to believe massive spending on public works helped cause the crisis? Here's Paul Krugman's answer:

On the eve of the crisis, Spain was running a budget surplus; its debts, as you can see in the figure above, were low relative to GDP.

So what happened? Spain is an object lesson in the problems of having monetary union without fiscal and labor market integration. First, there was a huge boom in Spain, largely driven by a housing bubble — and financed by capital outflows from Germany. This boom pulled up Spanish wages. Then the bubble burst, leaving Spanish labor overpriced relative to Germany and France, and precipitating a surge in unemployment. It also led to large Spanish budget deficits, mainly because of collapsing revenue but also due to efforts to limit the rise in unemployment.

Wouldn't Glaeser's argument imply that Spain was spending too much and wouldn't that, in turn, show up in the debt to GDP numbers?

If you want to understand what's wrong with American education...

You need to follow stories like this.

The Annotated "Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie"

As promised, here are some comments (in brackets) on Michael Winerip's NYT article on the city's teacher evaluation process.

Last year, when Ms. Isaacson was on maternity leave, she came in one full day a week for the entire school year for no pay and taught a peer leadership class.

...

[One thing that Winerip fails to emphasize (though I suspect he is aware of it) is how common stories like this are. Education journalists often portray ordinary excellence as something exceptional. This is partly due to journalistic laziness -- it's easier to describe something as exceptional than to find something that actually is exceptional -- and partly due to the appeal of standard narratives, in this case the Madonna/whore portrayal of teachers (I would used a non-gender specific analogy but I couldn't come up with one that fit as well.)]

The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools.

...

[Everything in this article inclines me to believe that Ms. Isaacson is a good teacher but we need to note that this is a fairly easy gig compared to other urban schools, particularly for someone with her background. Students at places like the Lab School tend to be more respectful and attentive toward academically successful people like Ms. Isaacson. In many schools, this can actually make students initially distrustful.]

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

[One of the fallacies that follow from this Madonna/whore narrative is the idea that, since you have such a clearly bi-modal distribution, any metric that's correlated with teaching quality should be able to winnow the good from the bad. In reality you have a normal distribution with noisy data and a metric that doesn't correlate that well. The result, unsurprisingly, is a large number of teachers apparently misclassified. What is surprising is that more people didn't foresee this fairly obvious outcome.]

This may seem disconnected from reality, but it has real ramifications. Because of her 7th percentile, Ms. Isaacson was told in February that it was virtually certain that she would not be getting tenure this year. “My principal said that given the opportunity, she would advocate for me,” Ms. Isaacson said. “But she said don’t get your hopes up, with a 7th percentile, there wasn’t much she could do.”

That’s not the only problem Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile has caused. If the mayor and governor have their way, and layoffs are no longer based on seniority but instead are based on the city’s formulas that scientifically identify good teachers, Ms. Isaacson is pretty sure she’d be cooked.

[Well, as long as it's scientific.]

She may leave anyway. She is 33 and had a successful career in advertising and finance before taking the teaching job, at half the pay.

...
[This isn't unusual. I doubled my salary when I went from teaching to a corporate job. Plus I worked fewer hours and they gave us free candy, coffee and the occasional golfing trip.]
...

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.

The process appears transparent, but it is clear as mud, even for smart lay people like teachers, principals and — I hesitate to say this — journalists.

[There are two things about this that trouble me: the first is that Winerip doesn't seem to understand fairly simple linear regression; the second is that he doesn't seem to realize that the formula given here is actually far too simple to do the job.]


Ms. Isaacson may have two Ivy League degrees, but she is lost. “I find this impossible to understand,” she said.

In plain English, Ms. Isaacson’s best guess about what the department is trying to tell her is: Even though 65 of her 66 students scored proficient on the state test, more of her 3s should have been 4s.

But that is only a guess.

[At the risk of being harsh, grading on a curve should not be that difficult a concept.]

Moreover, as the city indicates on the data reports, there is a large margin of error. So Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile could actually be as low as zero or as high as the 52nd percentile — a score that could have earned her tenure.

[Once again, many people saw this coming. Joel Klein and company chose to push forward with the plan, even in the face of results like these. Klein has built a career largely on calls for greater accountability and has done very well for himself in no small part because he hasn't been held accountable for his own record.]

I've left quite a bit out so you should definitely read the whole thing. It's an interesting story but if anything here surprises you, you haven't been paying attention.

"Jefferson is spinning in his grave"

There's nothing remarkable about this quote until you see why the speaker thought Jefferson would be offended.