Helsinki's 'mobility on demand' system and the travel-time landscape

I've got a lot on my plate so I'm just going to take a very quick pass at this. I may try to get back to it later.

There are a lot of good things in the proposal outlined in this Guardian article (via Marginal Revolution), but, as with most transportation articles, there is a bit that troubles me, both because these plans have a way of bringing out the inner ddulite in people and because generalizing from Helsinki is a tricky proposition.

I don't have time to dig into these questions in any depth but I did want to mention a way of thinking about the problems I find useful. For any geographic location and set of transportation options, you can overlay on the map something that looks a bit like a fitness landscape where instead of fitness the variable corresponding to each point on the map is the expected time to travel to that point from the origin.

For pedestrians, the landscape is more or less conical with irregularities caused by obstructions (highways, mountains, bodies of water). The sides of the cone slope up quite rapidly making all but relatively short trips prohibitive.

With automobiles, the slope becomes much more gradual but the landscape becomes much more rugged. A destination five miles away (actual, not driving, distance) can take longer to reach than one thirty miles away if the first has to be reached via surface streets and the second lies along a major highway. (I found numerous examples of this in LA using Google Maps.) Furthermore, the shape of this landscape changes dramatically with traffic levels.

The really rugged landscape comes with mass transit, particularly when you leave some of the more geographically compact cities in the Northeast. (According to Wikipedia "About one in every three users of mass transit in the United States and two-thirds of the nation's rail riders live in New York City and its suburbs." That level of use combined with a highly compact population makes for a unique transportation environment.) This is true for buses, trains and airplanes, but since most people who fly can also get access to cars and taxis, the effect is somewhat mitigated for high end travelers. For those who have to depend on buses and metro lines and who can't walk long distances, the differences can become startling.

I'm sure other people have been using this landscape approach but it doesn't seem to show up in many discussions of the topic. Personally, I find it a remarkably useful way to think about these problems, particularly when talking about food deserts and other areas where transportation and questions of inequality overlap.

Unions

From an econoblog:

You might wonder how the cross-country evidence shows a positive correlation whereas the cross-workplace evidence generally doesn't. Here's a theory. People will always want better pay and conditions. This is simply because they are human. If they can't achieve these through unions they will try to get them through the ballot box, in the form of legislation.

This is actually an odd finding, as I would normally prefer to ascribe the ecological data to the ecological fallacy and stop there.  But the discussion of mechanism is interesting, plausible, and might actually explain some odd paradoxes -- but it also explains other oddities like German productivity.

So why are unions so hated:

Which poses the question: if unions are good for productivity, why have bosses traditionally been opposed to them? The answer, I suspect, lies in this paper, which finds that unionization "is significantly associated with lower levels of total CEO compensation."

If this explanation is true, we have a classic principal agent problem.  If the pay of a CEO is related to breaking unions, one can imagine that they will try to do so even if it hurts the overall profitability of the company.  Classic misaligned incentives, really.

It's not that I see an immediate return to a pro-union environment, but it does point out that we might actually have a case where markets aren't necessarily going to maximize efficiency.  And that is worth keeping in mind during these discussions. 

I know there's a verb there somewhere

Or maybe a preposition.

I'm working on a couple of ed reform pieces, one on the recent charter school scandals and another going still deeper into the role of big money in the reform movement, picking up where my recent Monkey Cage piece (Vergara vs. California: Are the top 0.1% buying their version of education reform?) left off.

The following quote, from our old friend Jennifer Alexander, might work for both pieces, assuming I can figure out exactly what she's saying.

Jennifer Alexander, the chief executive officer of the pro-charter group, ConnCAN, said she welcomed an examination of how it oversees charter schools, prompted by the Jumoke and FUSE scandal.

"I think it is an important moment that signals a need to revisit and update Connecticut's charter law so that it keeps pace with best practices nationally, including clarity around areas of accountability and transparency -- but, I think, also flexibility and funding," she said.

The part about clarity around transparency is bad enough but what's really giving me trouble is the "flexibility and funding." I think she means "but also keeps pace with best practices including flexibility and funding." Given ConnCan's well-known positions, that would mean keeping up with the states that offer charters the most freedom and money. If that's what she means, it's an extraordinary response to the latest in a string of charter school scandals that appear to have cost taxpayers billions of dollars and denied quality education to some of the very kids who needed it most.

But she could mean 'clarity around flexibility and funding,' which would be a problem since I have no freaking clue what she means by 'clarity.' Unless anyone in the audience has any suggestions, I may just give up on this one.

As Bruce D. Baker of Rutgers can tell you, trying to follow a ConnCAN argument will not be good for your blood pressure.

Sometimes it really is just because "that's where they keep the money"

Joseph and I have been having a long running debate about the emphasis of many of my education posts. I tend to spend quite a bit of time discussing culture, both specific to the reform movement and in relation to the type of corporate culture associated with management consultants and MBA programs.

I tend to see this culture as a big and interesting part of the story. Joseph is more inclined to see it as a secondary factor and something of a distraction. He argues that when there unquestionably bad actors and egregious wrong-doing, that should be our focus.

This story by Jennifer Dixon (from the Detroit Free Press's exceptional series on corruption in the Michigan education system) would be a point for Joseph.

The Summit payments to the Witucki-Cancilliari companies added up. In 2008-09, for example, the schools paid Helicon and other companies nearly $1.8 million for management fees, janitorial and tutoring.

Over time, the revenue streams just kept multiplying.

When Summit North issued $26.6 million in bonds to refinance existing bonds, pay off leases and finance an ice rink, Helicon collected nearly $400,000 for “financial services,” while a construction company owned by Dino Cancilliari and his brother built the school ice rink for $3.2 million.

In 2008, Central Michigan raised questions about conflicts after the school’s outside auditors revealed Summit North had done several deals with companies tied to Dino Cancilliari and Witucki. Under pressure from CMU [the Summit schools’ authorizer, Central Michigan University], the schools replaced Helicon, its lawyers and auditor-accountant. Witucki died in 2009.

The schools’ boards allowed the Cancilliaris to remain at the schools, with Dino Cancilliari earning $200,000 a year as facilities director and Alison Cancilliari earning $250,000 as program director. But even as she was paid to run the schools, Alison Cancilliari worked off-site — at the offices of a textbook company the Cancilliaris founded.

In 2011, Summit hired Canyon Insulation of Corona, Calif., to oversee a $4-million construction project; the company was owned by Alison Cancilliari’s brother, Kenneth Sirls. And then an anonymous tipster complained to CMU about Sirls, saying Canyon didn’t build houses, let alone schools.

In response, CMU demanded hundreds of pages of records from the schools. The schools’ finance director, Brian Beaudrie, came forward with worksheets, invoices and other records. His brother, it turned out later, was the anonymous tipster, who also went to the FBI, which does not confirm or deny investigations. CMU said it also contacted the FBI. Beaudrie alleged that:

■ Alison Cancilliari and a Dino Cancilliari company received a cut of Helicon’s management fees from 2002-07 worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.

■ Helicon billed Summit hundreds of thousands of dollars for “benchmark tracking,” but did no work.

■ Summit reimbursed Helicon $20,000 to pay off a fired employee who had threatened to expose the company for financial improprieties. Alison Cancilliari said she couldn’t find any record of the payment.

■ Summit paid a school employee for two years while she worked at the Cancilliaris’ textbook company. Cancilliari said the woman worked there only part-time.

...

The new board at Summit has a much different opinion. It has countersued Alison Cancilliari, alleging she had an agreement with Helicon and Witucki to receive kickbacks totaling $3 million.

A new post up at You Do the Math pits George Pólya against the education reform movement

Or at least it presents the opening salvos.

Pólya was a humanist. That puts him at odds with the education reform movement.

I'm a bit out of my depth with discussing the finer philosophical points but hopefully my definitions are not too nonstandard.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to see how this figures in the larger education debate, we need to introduce the field of scientific management. This field is largely based on the idea that people can be treated like any other component in a complex system. The secret to optimal performance is simply to gather the right data, derive the proper metrics, then use these metrics to put the right components in the right roles and create optimal set of incentives.

The education reform movement with its emphasis on metrics, standardization, and scripted lessons is entirely derived from scientific management. Those scripted lessons in particular represent a complete rejection of Pólya's approach of "getting inside the students head." and personalizing the instruction. Not coincidentally, David Coleman, arguably the intellectual leader of the movement, started out as a management consultant.

Another area of sharp contrast between David Coleman and Pólya is Coleman's strong support of deliberate practice in mathematics education. Scientific management is heavily reliant on reductionist approaches and their are few pedagogical techniques more reductionist than deliberate practice. Pólya was wary of reductionist approaches to teaching. He saw drills as a sometimes necessary evil, but as a rule, breaking down problems for the student was a dangerous habit. For Pólya, the process of problem solving was about taking problems and examining them, restating them, generalizing them, simplifying them, comparing them to other problems, and, yes, breaking them down into sub-problems, but the important part of that process is deciding what to do. To break the problem down for the student is to defeat the purpose.

Many, if not most, of those horrible, multi-step math problems which have become associated with Common Core are not what Pólya would consider problems at all. The problem solving has all been done in the preparation of the lesson; all that's left for the student is the mechanics.

Watching a Variety editor pull back from the obvious on Netflix.

Over at Variety, Andrew Wallenstein has a smart analysis of Netflix’s hiring of Chelsea Handler. Unfortunately he can't quite bring himself to follow where his arguments lead.

From the beginning, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos has been abundantly clear that what Netflix values most is a piece of content’s ability to continue attracting eyeballs long after its premiere. That’s why there isn’t a single episode in its vault of original and library content that isn’t at least semi-serialized storytelling. That’s why Netflix doesn’t care about ratings–because Netflix doesn’t care when you watch something.

But the talk show represents the diametric opposite of the content Netflix has concentrated on to date. It is known to be the most perishable of TV formats. While cable has done some day-after syndication deals to repurpose broadcast late-night shows, there’s never been any kind of aftermarket for late-night content. The conventional wisdom is that no one wants to see monologue jokes about a headline from two days ago, or an interview with a celebrity tubthumping a movie that came out the previous weekend.

What little Netflix has also shared about its programming strategy is that its every decision is guided by data. Spending $100 million on two seasons of “House of Cards” sight unseen, as the mythology goes, was informed by information about Netflix’s viewing audience that indicated robust consumption on the streaming service of Kevin Spacey, David Fincher, and the BBC drama on which it was adapted.

Does that mean algorithms told Sarandos to pursue Handler, too? Fat chance. Not only is she not on Netflix, but no talk show of any kind is. That’s probably an oversimplification of Netflix data capabilities; this decision may have been more guided by what the data says is missing from the service than what’s there. But that’s not much to go on.

[This is where Wallenstein starts getting sucked back into the narrative. If we're talking about high level data -- demographic breakdowns, audience clusters, etc. -- then "what the data says is missing" makes a certain amount of sense. You find shows that are strong where you'd like to be stronger. The trouble, there's nothing special about that. ALL large companies do that kind of analysis. The famed "Netflix data capabilities" are supposedly based on detailed customer-level data which doesn't seem applicable here.]

So if talk shows are perishable and data didn’t work its magic, what gives here?

Well, there’s two different ways to view the Handler hire: as a deviation from a core strategy or the formation of a new strategy. Either way, the move begs explanation.

First, consider the possibility that Handler is just a detour. Fine, Netflix’s success has provided enough insulation in the event that taking a flier goes badly. But surely there’s a rationale for this particular flier.

The rationale might be more understandable if you consider Handler less as a programming strategy and more as a marketing decision.

Netflix wants to be known to its audience and the creative community as a revolutionary upending our traditional notions of what TV is. It’s a smart tactic, though the actuality of its revolution-iciousness is questionable. To date, that brand positioning has rested largely on its audacious decision to provide all the episodes of a series at once. But the novelty of that will wear thin in time (and Netflix knows it was far from the first to introduce that behavior).

Netflix might argue that its original programming slate is so daring that shows like “Orange is the New Black” also set it apart from the rest of the TV pack, but that’s a charitable assessment. As amazing a track record as the company has built for itself, Netflix isn’t really doing anything in original programming much different in tone or style than anything else on pay TV.

So Netflix has to do something to up the ante to earn its bona fides as a true innovator.  There’s no better way to do that than to take on what is inarguably TV’s hoariest, cliche-ridden format–the talk show–and put Netflix’s own distinctive stamp on it.

Stylistically, Handler isn’t really all that different than anyone else in the talk-show genre. But the very fact that she is a woman in a male-dominated genre sets her apart from the pack, which Netflix no doubt loves. What Netflix will also do is figure out one or two things to put a fresh spin on the genre and then trot out the show as the latest example of how capital-d different Netflix is from everyone else.

...

But maybe writing off Handler as a marketing-driven loss leader underestimates just what Netflix is doing here. The other possibility is that she represents an honest-to-god turning point for the streaming service. The long tail may have always been a short-term strategy. Perhaps the Netflix brain trust has a vision for a second gear for original programming that it has barely hinted at to date, but Handler is the first glimpse at where it’s all going to go.

At the end of the day, there’s one very simple metric for success that matters to Netflix: subscriber totals. And nowhere is it written that can only be increased with content that has equal drawing power whether it’s watched today or 10 years from now.

...

There’s a lot more to the Handler deal that makes little sense. Given Netflix’s increasing global footprint, Handler seems an odd choice for the type who would play as strongly in Brazil as she would in Peoria. And hoping quarterly specials in 2015 will be enough to keep her a hot commodity until a 2016 launch gives her an awful lot of time to see her career risk cooling down.

Regardless, it’s a mystery at this point as to whether Handler represents an outlier or a pivot for Netflix. And the truth may very well be that Netflix itself doesn’t know the answer but has a willingness to experiment and see what its famous data tells it to do next.

Just to summarize:

1. This was not a data-driven decision (at least not the kind Netflix has built so much of its reputation on);

2. It appears to be a horrible fit with the long-shelf-life streaming programs that Netflix specializes in (without actually owning);

3. Handler will probably be worthless in the overseas market where Netflix has got to establish itself if it wants to compete with HBO.

While most of Wallenstein's analysis is spot on, in the end, he goes badly off track. He more or less locks himself into the assumption that there has to be a good reason for this acquisition, a reason that fits in with a smart, forward-thinking plan for the company. He can't quite make the jump to the third option.

It is possible that Netflix, an at best moderately profitable company with skyhigh price-to-earnings ratios and questionable accounting practices, might be something like a Ponzi scheme with an exit strategy where the longer the top executives at Netflix can keep the balls in the air, the more money they make and, if they can keep this up long enough, there is a very good chance that a company with an  actual business model and deep pockets (either a tech company like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, or media players like Viacom) may come along and pay obscene amounts of money for the lot.

In order to keep this game going, Reed Hastings, Ted Sarandos and company would need to bill themselves as strategic thinkers playing for the long term (thus justifying those PE ratios), while in reality pursuing a string of flashy short-term tactics such as paying more for a limited rights window for an original series than their competitors would pay to own the show outright or picking up a high-profile cable personality even if her program is the worst fit imaginable for the company.

A bit more background on the Jack Kirby IP case

And on the way comic book IP works in general.

For the non-nerds in the audience, Thanos has been a major character in Marvel Comics for over forty years. Perhaps more important from a commercial standpoint, The character figures prominently in the Avengers movie franchise (he's the villain behind the villains). We could go back and forth over the exact numbers but it's safe to say that this particular piece of intellectual property plays a significant role in an enterprise that has pulled in billions of dollars of revenue.

All of which means you don't have to be a comic-book fan to have an interest in where these ideas come from.

Famed comic book writer and artist Jim Starlin tried several times to get his artwork and creations into the pages of Marvel before hitting a homerun with Thanos (the god-like alien being with a bloodlust for power and control over the universe). In 2002, Starlin told Jon B. Cooke where he got his inspiration for Thanos as part of an interview in his popular series Comic Book Artist (#2):

Kirby had done the ‘New Gods’…over at DC at the time. I came up with some things that were inspired by that. You’d think that Thanos was [initially] inspired by Darkseid, but that was not the case. In my first Thanos drawings, if he looked like anybody, it was Metron. I had all these different gods and things I wanted to do, which became Thanos and the Titans. Roy took one look at the guy in the Metron-like chair and said : “Beef him up! If you’re going to steal one of the New Gods, at least rip off Darkseid, the really good one!”

There are a few interesting takeaways from this.

The first is a reminder of just how much intellectual borrowing has always gone on in the comic book industry. As mentioned before, even the iconic Captain America had to be tweaked because the original version bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a character called the Shield.

This is also a reminder of just how long a shadow Jack Kirby cast over the comic book industry. Though the current lawsuit only affects those characters Kirby created or cocreated at Marvel, it is important to remember just how far his influence ran . For all the money that Kirby's work has brought into the industry over the years, it is quite possible that between operatic superheroes, bickering teams, romance comics and the rest, even more came from people imitating his innovations.

Finally, this doesn't reflect all that well on Roy Thomas who was one of the witnesses Marvel/Disney called in to argue that Kirby's heirs don't deserve a share of the rights their father helped create.

Spam

Spam has hit the double digits in spam posts/day.  I have re-enabled word verification, pending a better solution.  I apologize for the confusion.

"Are you sure I had a point A?" -- Ramesh Ponnuru's rhetorical misdirection

NOTE: THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT ABORTION, OBAMACARE, SCIENTOLOGY OR THE SUPREME COURT, BUT I'M PRETTY SURE THAT ANY COMMENTS WE GET WILL BE ON THOSE FOUR TOPICS SO I'M TAKING THE VERY UNUSUAL STEP OF SHUTTING DOWN THE COMMENT SECTION FOR THIS ONE POST.

We've previously discussed something I call the cigarettes and cocaine argument.

"We just don't have the money for you to keep smoking. Do you realize that between your smoking and my cocaine habit we're spending more than two thousand dollars a week? You're just going to have to give up cigarettes."

There's a related bit of rhetorical slight of hand where the speaker is asked about A and B. He replies "I would love to talk about A and B." He then launches into a side topic, continues until the audience has lost the thread, then says with a bright, confident smile, "As I said a moment ago, I would love to talk about B, and then a few moments later, "I'm glad I could answer your concerns about A and B."

Case in point, here's Ramesh Ponnuru on the recent Hobby Lobby ruling:

Experience should also inform our evaluation of one of the main arguments against the ruling: that it will bring forth lawsuit after lawsuit as Scientologist employers make religious objections to covering antidepressants, Jehovah's Witnesses balk at covering blood transfusions and so on.

That's the argument with which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg closed her dissent to the decision, along with the warning that ruling on these cases will require courts to judge "the relative merits of differing religious claims."...

[Stage business and patter]

Let's say an employer did seek an exemption -- under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that governed the Hobby Lobby decision -- to a regulation requiring him or her to cover blood transfusions. The key questions for a court would be: Does the employer have a sincere religious objection to facilitating a transfusion for someone else? Does the regulation serve a compelling interest? Does it impose a substantial burden on the employer's beliefs? And is there a way to serve that interest while imposing a lesser burden?

None of those inquiries, performed the same way Alito performs the inquiry in the Hobby Lobby decision, requires passing judgment on whether the religious belief is a sound or compelling one.

There may be a case filed here or there. But nothing in the past or present suggests there will be a flood of litigation about Scientologist health plans. The courts aren't going to be passing judgment on the wisdom of different religious teachings. And access to blood transfusions will be affected by this decision even less than access to contraception will be.

Notice something missing? We have a perfectly reasonable example arguing that it is unlikely that a business owned by a Jehovah's Witness is likely to prevent me from having medical coverage that includes blood transfusions. That seems reasonable in large part because, as far as I can tell, Jehovah's Witnesses don't seem to care all that much if a lapsed Presbyterian such as myself has a blood transfusion.

Is the situation roughly analogous with Scientology and psychiatry?

I'd have to say no.

(I live in LA an I drive by this place all the time.)

Do Scientologists have a sincere religious objection to facilitating psychiatric treatment for someone else?

Hell, yes.

Does it impose a substantial burden on the employer's beliefs?

Damn straight it does.

Ramesh Ponnuru is, of course, playing the very lucrative Brooksian game of presenting a palatable conservative face to the kind of people who read the New York Times or Bloomberg View (as does, in a sense, Bloomberg himself). If the discussion turns to LGBT discrimination or Scientology vs. psychiatry, Ponnuru may not be able to pull that off so he drops a handkerchief on the inconvenient part of the table when he hopes no one is looking.

Like I said, this isn't a post about abortion, Obamacare, Scientology or the Supreme Court. We can productively disagree about all of those things, but if we can't agree on the need for good honest arguments we won't get anywhere.

An IP post for the Fourth of July

As mentioned earlier, I've been planning to write some posts about the legal battle Jack Kirby's heirs have been trying to wage against Marvel/Disney in an effort to get a share of the billions of dollars their father's creations and co-creations have brought into the company.

I'd meant to get back to this sooner, but the ed reform beat has been  taking most of my time and I kept putting off the Kirby thread until recently when I found myself looking for a topic for the Fourth, and I realized that I couldn't do much better than the character Kirby created in 1940 with partner Joe Simon, Captain America.

The legal wrangling over Captain America was a bit of a departure from the conflict over the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, etc. The villain here appears to be Kirby's partner Joe Simon but, Kirby's standpoint, it's still a very familiar story/ From a well researched post by comics historian Daniel Best:

Joe Simon often wondered why Kirby sided with Marvel in 1966 and later.  At the time Kirby was working for Marvel and earning a decent living, Simon was freelancing and not offering Kirby any work.  Simon later stated that Goodman had approached Kirby and told him that he, Simon, was claiming Captain America as his own, which, in effect he was indeed doing.  Simon later said that nobody told Kirby that, as the co-author of the first books, Kirby would be entitled to half of the copyright and profits.  Tellingly Simon never explains if he attempted to contact Kirby directly to inform him of this fact or was relying on either Marvel or a third party to get the news over.  Marvel wasn’t about to hand Captain America over to anyone, let alone Joe Simon, so they wouldn’t be too keen to tell Kirby that it would benefit him if Simon won.  It’s hard to understand why Simon would make such a statement and be puzzling over it decades later.  A good guess would be that Goodman approached Kirby and showed him the court statements in which Joe Simon was claiming that he alone created Captain America.  From there it’d have not been that much trouble to ask Kirby to file his affidavit as to his involvement in the creation of the character.  It also helps explain why Kirby was reluctant to work with Simon when the pair were both at DC in the early 1970s, refusing to work with him after the one Sandman issue.  The Jack Kirby that Joe Simon knew in the 1940s and 1950s wasn’t the same Jack Kirby in the 1970s.  Still, now that Martin Goodman and Jack Kirby are gone, Joe Simon’s account of the creation of Captain America goes relatively unchallenged.

After everything was said and done it comes as no great surprise that Kirby was angry as he was towards the end.  Stan Lee, Martin Goodman, Joe Simon…they all took credit for his work.  Still, one character that Stan never took credit for, although the Marvel propaganda machine would try and attribute it to him, more than once (to the frustration and anger of Kirby) was Captain America.  In his 2010 deposition, as part of the Marvel vs Kirby court case Stan was asked about Captain America.  His response; “Captain America, for God's sake. He (Jack Kirby) and Joe Simon had created Captain America.”  Say what you want about Stan Lee, but Captain America was one character he was more than happy to state, for the official record, that Jack Kirby co-created and that he, Stan Lee, had no involvement with.

Tenure and watchdogs

[We've already discussed Belleville, NJ as an example of corruption among the educational entrepreneurs, here's the aftermath]

One very important aspect of tenure that doesn't get much attention is the way tenured faculty can provide checks on and oversight of administrators. Longtime teachers tend to feel pride and a strong sense of stewardship toward their schools. If you combine that reasonable protections against reprisals, you get a strong opposition to administrative abuses.

With that in mind, take a look at this post from popular education blogger, Jersey Jazzman and ask yourself how this would have played out without tenure.

To put it charitably, Belleville's schools have been very poorly managed. The district's budget is so bad that the state appointed a fiscal monitor this year to try to restore some financial sanity. Teachers and parents both told me that the schools lack contemporary textbooks, modern computers, and even the infrastructure necessary to administer the Common Core-aligned PARCC tests mandated by the state for next year.


Perhaps the worst decision the district made over the last few years was to install a state-of-the-art surveillance system in all of its buildings; yes, a "surveillance" system, not a security system. Every classroom in every building is wired for both video and sound -- including the teachers lounges!


That's right, my fellow teachers: in Belleville, a camera and microphone monitor every word uttered in the teachers break room!


But that's not all: all Belleville faculty, high school students, and middle school students must have special ID cards with them at all times. These ID's include "RF-tags," which are radio frequency devices similar to what you'd find in an EZ-Pass. They were originally used to track cattle: now, they track the positions of all staff and all students at all times.


That's right, my fellow teachers and parents: in Belleville, the movements of students and faculty are tracked at all times! Big Brother better not find out if you snuck off to the bathroom before the bell...


I asked several parents at the rally whether they were ever asked for their permission to require their children to have an RF-tag on them at all times; every one told me they were never asked. The teachers, it goes without saying, find the entire system insulting and degrading, to both themselves and their students. According to a union survey, more than half of the members of the BEA feel intimidated in the workplace, and three-quarters felt their participation in union activities would result in negative consequences.


Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised when I tell them about the resume of Belleville's superintendent, Helene Feldman: she cut her teeth -- surprise! -- at the NYCDOE, under reformy Joel Klein and reformy Chris Cerf (and those are a couple of guys who really know how to get teachers and parents on their side...). NYC is, of course, the training ground for the increasingly unpopular Paymon Rouhanifard in Camden and the spectacularly unpopular Cami Anderson in Newark.


Only a superintendent who served under Klein and Cerf would ever think teachers would take kindly to having their classrooms and lunch breaks and bathroom trips monitored.


The real kicker here, however, was the price: $2 million dollars. Just tonight, the state-appointed accountant who looked at Belleville's budget told the crowd at the board meeting that the district was $3.6 million in the red for next year -- and that's after having used up all of its budget surplus. How in the world does the Belleville BOE justify spending all that money on this obnoxious surveillance system when they can't even afford textbooks and computers for the schools?


When the system was booted up this past fall, the teachers union decided they'd had enough. It was bad enough the board wasted this money on invasive technology that wouldn't do anything to stop a Sandy Hook-like attacker. It was bad enough that teachers were now being watched constantly, as if they worked in a Soviet reeducation camp. But all of this had been implemented without the benefit of any negotiation, a clear violation of the collective bargaining rights of the BEA.


Mike Mignone, as president of the union, started speaking out. A 13-year veteran math teacher with a spotless record, beloved by his students and fellow teachers, Mignone wasn't going to just sit by and watch his members continue to be harassed and intimidated. He demanded that the board and the superintendent explain themselves: where did they get the funds for the surveillance system? Why was the time between the advertisement of the bid and the final decision less than two weeks? Why did the entire bidding process stink of nepotism?

After it obtained the job, Clarity also hired relatives of two key people at the school district, the brother of school board attorney Alfonse DeMeo, who approved the contract and first introduced Clarity to board members; and the son of Board of Education Trustee Joe Longo, who spearheaded the security upgrade. Longo insists he never asked for special treatment for his son and Kreeger denies that politics were involved in either hire. Kreeger also says he eventually terminated Longo's son because of public criticism, even though he was a model employee.

Mignone was making things very uncomfortable for the board and the superintendent by speaking out. He was putting a lot of people in difficult positions by calling for transparency and demanding that taxpayers get clear answers about how their money was being spent.


Guess what happened next?


As Mignone's lawyer puts it: in October, he found out; in November, he spoke out; in December, tenure charges were filed against him. Mignone, who had always had excellent reviews, suddenly found out he would be up on charges that included (get ready for this one) answering students' questions about the surveillance system. According to Mignone, his students asked him questions about whether they were being monitored; he took a few minutes out of class and gave them some honest answers. That, in this board's and this superintendent's minds, counts as a fireable offense.

If you don't believe me, ask Dilbert

[OK, technically it should be "go ask Alice" but I'm trying to cut back on obscure allusions.]

A while back, we had a popular post (thanks, Mike) on the business model of consulting firms like McKinsey.

This is, by no means, a matter of luck. Rather it reflects just how good McKinsey is at their core mission: winning over high-level executives and spinning compelling narratives for the press. As long as the C level executives like the consultants and the consultants make them look good, the executives will happily hand out shocking sums of money.

One of the challenges that management consultants often face is trying to sell a very expensive product or service to a company that is capable of providing something similar internally at a much lower cost. For this reason, firms like McKinsey are very good at driving a wedge between top level management and the rest of the company. If you can convince high level executives that the people two or three tiers below them are incompetent and/or untrustworthy, you can justify charging exorbitant fees for things could that which can be done cheaply and quickly in-house.

My explanation relied heavily on the consultants' ability to charm top-level executives. Scott Adams has another theory.

I cover some related points here. It's arguably a weaker post but I really like the title.

"How naïve I was."

If you follow the Common Core story closely, two disturbing conclusions keep coming to mind. One is that the whole process was rushed through without sufficient time for reflection or vetting. The other is that the people involved in the process who were actually qualified are realizing that their input wasn't that important.

Sue Pimentel is a lawyer and a lobbyist whose career has been largely funded by the Walton family and whose only relevant research qualification seems to be a forty-year-old B.S. in early childhood education. David Coleman, as mentioned many times before, is a former management consultant with no relevant qualifications at all.

Of course, a lack of degrees does not imply bad ideas any more than a strong resume implies good ones, but qualifications do imply a kind of vetting. If someone with no background is able to win people over with the quality of his or her ideas, that is a sign of a healthy system. If someone with no background forces his or her ideas through opaquely with the support of a handful of very rich supporters, that is a sign of a dysfunctional system.

From an interview in Psychology Today:

Dr. Louisa Moats, the nationally-renowned teacher, psychologist, researcher and author, [If you'd like more details on Moats' impressive resume click here -- MP] was one of the contributing writers of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The CCSS initiative is an attempt to deal with inconsistent academic expectations from state-to-state and an increasing number of inadequately prepared high school graduates by setting high, consistent standards for grades K-12 in English language arts and math. To date, forty-five states have adopted the standards. I recently had the opportunity to discuss the implementation of the CCSS with Dr. Moats.

Dr. Bertin:   What was your involvement in the development of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)?

Dr. Moats:   Marilyn Adams and I were the team of writers, recruited in 2009 by David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, who drafted the Foundational Reading Skills section of the CCSS and closely reviewed the whole ELA (English Language Arts) section for K-5. We drafted sections on Language and Writing Foundations that were not incorporated into the document as originally drafted. I am the author of the Reading Foundational Skills section of Appendix A.

Dr. Bertin:   What did you see as potential benefits of establishing the CCSS when you first became involved?

Dr. Moats:  I saw the confusing inconsistencies among states’ standards, the lowering of standards overall, and the poor results for our high school kids in international comparisons. I also believed that the solid consensus in reading intervention research could be reflected in standards and that we could use the CCSS to promote better instruction for kids at risk.

Dr. Bertin:  What has actually happened in its implementation?

Dr. Moats:  I never imagined when we were drafting standards in 2010 that major financial support would be funneled immediately into the development of standards-related tests. How naïve I was. The CCSS represent lofty aspirational goals for students aiming for four year, highly selective colleges. Realistically, at least half, if not the majority, of students are not going to meet those standards as written, although the students deserve to be well prepared for career and work through meaningful and rigorous education.

Our lofty standards are appropriate for the most academically able, but what are we going to do for the huge numbers of kids that are going to “fail” the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test?  We need to create a wide range of educational choices and pathways to high school graduation, employment, and citizenship. The Europeans got this right a long time ago.

If I could take all the money going to the testing companies and reinvest it, I’d focus on the teaching profession – recruitment, pay, work conditions, rigorous and on-going training. Many of our teachers are not qualified or prepared to teach the standards we have written. It doesn’t make sense to ask kids to achieve standards that their teachers have not achieved!


Dr. Bertin:   What differences might there be for younger students versus older students encountering it for the first time?

Dr. Moats:   What is good for older students (e.g., the emphasis on text complexity, comprehension of difficult text, written composition, use of internet resources) is not necessarily good for younger students who need to acquire the basic skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Novice readers (typically through grade 3) need a stronger emphasis on the foundational skills of reading, language, and writing than on the “higher level” academic activities that depend on those foundations, until they are fluent readers.

Our CCSS guidelines, conferences, publishers’ materials, and books have turned away from critical, research-based methodologies on how to develop the basic underlying skills of literacy. Systematic, cumulative skill development and code-emphasis instruction is getting short shrift all around, even though we have consensus reports from the 1920’s onward that show it is more effective than comprehension-focused instruction.

I’m listening, but I don’t hear the words “research based” as often as I did a decade ago – and when CCSS proponents use the words, they’re usually referring to the research showing that high school kids who can’t read complex text don’t do as well in college. Basic findings of reading and literacy research, information about individual differences in reading and language ability, and explicit teaching procedures are really being lost in this shuffle.

Dr. Bertin:  What benefits have you seen or heard about so far as the CCSS has been put in place, and what difficulties?

Dr. Moats:   The standards may drive the adoption or use of more challenging and complex texts for kids to read and a wider sampling of genres. If handled right, there could be a resurgence of meaty curriculum of the “core knowledge” variety. There may be more emphasis on purposeful, teacher-directed writing. But we were making great inroads into beginning reading assessment and instruction practices between 2000-2008 that now are being cast aside in favor of “reading aloud from complex text” – which is not the same as teaching kids how to read on their own, accurately and fluently.

Dr.  Bertin:  What has the impact been on classroom teachers?

Dr. Moats:  Classroom teachers are confused, lacking in training and skills to implement the standards, overstressed, and the victims of misinformed directives from administrators who are not well grounded in reading research.  I’m beginning to get messages from very frustrated educators who threw out what was working in favor of a new “CCSS aligned” program, and now find that they don’t have the tools to teach kids how to read and write. Teachers are told to use “grade level” texts, for example; if half the kids are below grade level by definition, what does the teacher do? She has to decide whether to teach “the standard” or teach the kids.

Dr. Bertin:  You’ve raised concerns elsewhere that CCSS represents a compromise that does not emphasize educational research.  How do the CCSS reflect, or fail to reflect, research in reading instruction?

Dr.  Moats:   The standards obscure the critical causal relationships among components, chiefly the foundational skills and the higher level skills of comprehension that depend on fluent, accurate reading.  Foundations should be first!  The categories of the standards obscure the interdependence of decoding, spelling, and knowledge of language. The standards contain no explicit information about foundational writing skills, which are hidden in sections other than “writing”, but which are critical for competence in composition.


The standards treat the foundational language, reading, and writing skills as if they should take minimal time to teach and as if they are relatively easy to teach and to learn. They are not. The standards call for raising the difficulty of text, but many students cannot read at or above grade level, and therefore may not receive enough practice at levels that will build their fluency gradually over time.

Dr. Bertin:  How about recommendations for writing?

Dr. Moats:   We need a foundational writing skills section in the CCSS, with a much more detailed progression. We should not be requiring 3rd graders to compose on the computer. Writing in response to reading is a valuable activity, but teachers need a lot of assistance knowing what to assign, how to support writing, and how to give corrective feedback that is constructive.  Very few know how to teach kids to write a sentence, for example.

Dr. Bertin:   In an article for the International Dyslexia Association, you wrote “raising standards and expectations, without sufficient attention to known cause and remedies for reading and academic failure, and without a substantial influx of new resources to educate and support teachers, is not likely to benefit students with mild, moderate, or severe learning difficulties.”   You also mention that 34% of the population as a whole is behind academically in fourth grade, and in high poverty areas 70-80% of students are at risk for reading failure.

How does the CCSS impact children who turn out to need additional academic supports for learning disabilities, ADHD or other educational concerns?

Dr. Moats:   I have not yet seen a well-informed policy directive that addresses the needs of these populations. There are absurd directives about “universal design for learning” and endless accommodations, like reading a test aloud, to kids with learning disabilities. Why would we want to do that? The test itself is inappropriate for many kids.

Dr. Bertin:   How does it relate to concerns you have about teacher training in general?


Dr. Moats:   What little time there is for professional development is being taken up by poorly designed workshops on teaching comprehension of difficult text or getting kids to compose arguments and essays. This will not be good for the kids who need a systematic, explicit form of instruction to reach basic levels of academic competence.

I’ve been around a long time, and this feels like 1987 all over again, with different words attached to the same problems. When will we ever learn?

Yes, this is work related...

I'm working on a post about the role of branding in public policy, specifically the Carmaggedon campaign (more on that soon) and a researcher I had contacted mentioned this clip from the Colbert Report. As expected, the satirist provided probably the best summary of the coverage.

The Colbert Report
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Gee, I wonder which views she wasn't showing sufficient respect for?

The following comes from the blog of education historian and reform gadfly Diane Ravitch.

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with the work of Amy Prime. (See here and here.)For the past ten years, she has taught second grade at Berg Elementary School in Newton, Iowa. she has written several articles about the problems and challenges of protecting children from the negative effects of test-centric reforms, some of which have been published in the local newspapers and reposted on this blog.

Last month she was called to a meeting with her principal, a human resources employee and the curriculum director. The meeting lasted about one minute. She was told that, although she is a highly proficient teacher with great grasp of content knowledge, she had not shown proper respect of others’ views. To “solve” this problem, they had decided to transfer her to a different school to teach 5th grade.

Understand that she is an early childhood educator who has taught either 1st or 2nd grade since 1998. Her masters is in Literacy Education and she is a reading specialist. Now she will be a 5th grade social studies teacher.

The official letter of transfer says that she was “chosen” for this position because of her command of the content knowledge and her demonstrated instructional competency. Her unusual strengths prepare her to be a successful fifth grade teacher of social studies.

Some of her colleagues have expressed their regret. They see this as a punitive transfer, intended to rebuke her for speaking out while others remained silent because they were afraid of the consequences.

Amy has been candid. she blogs for the state’s newspaper. She expresses her views at faculty meetings about developmentally inappropriate instruction and assessments. She has defended the freedom of teachers to voice their views and do their jobs professionally. She opted her own children out of state testing. She told her son’s kindergarten teacher that she didn’t want him taking part in weekly spelling tests.

In the wake of Vergara, the natural tendency is to think of this as a tenure story, both in the sense that it makes us wonder what would have happened without tenure and it reminds that there are a lot of ways an employer can punish people without actually firing them.

But, there's different, though related, side of the story. Prime has long been a sharp and effective critic of the education reform movement (click here to see her disembowel a badly written reading test). Movement reformers have an exceptionally intolerant attitude toward critics and skeptics. Much of the antagonism toward teachers can be traced back to professional educators' natural (and I would say healthy) skepticism toward pedagogical fads. This attitude has also made the movement vulnerable to charlatans and scam-artists (for example).

Perhaps the historians in the audience might have some examples, but I can't think of another case where a movement has risen so quickly and fallen so fast. The inability to address valid criticism undoubtedly help grease the skids.