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President Obama wants to make it easier to dismiss teachers whose students aren't performing well on tests. But what about the parents? By the president's own account, his daughter's performance jumped when he and his wife made clear their expectations, evidently without a change of instructor:The president . . . went off script for a few moments, telling of a C grade that his 11-year-old daughter, Malia, brought home from school recently. It didn't meet the standards at the Obama home, he said, and Malia knew it.
More recently, he said, she came home with a score of 95.
"What was happening was, she had started wanting it more than us," he said.
And I wonder about negative incentives when positive ones have such questionable results; merit pay for test scores has been a disappointment, at least in Texas:
Maybe attrition plus the dread jobless recovery will come to the schools' rescue. From the Depression into the 1960s, the teaching corps, not only in major cities, were an elite, many of whom had aced competitive examinations (the best known, Lyndon Johnson, was an outstanding classroom teacher). Not all new recruits of the postwar boom could be expected to measure up, just as the nation was spoiled by the efficiency of the mid-century Post Office, but there was more to it than the drought of investment banking jobs. Discrimination in other professions made instruction one of the few alternatives for talented women. There was also more religious and racial bias in what remained of the private sector. Fortunately, Depression-era unemployment levels, racism, and sexism are unlikely to return. So how do we recruit and train teachers?For the $300 million spent on merit pay for teachers over the last three years, Texas was hoping for a big boost in student achievement.
But it didn't happen with the now-defunct program, according to experts hired by the state.
The Texas Educator Excellence Grant, or TEEG, plan did not produce the academic improvements that proponents - including Gov. Rick Perry - hoped for when the program was launched with much fanfare in 2006, a new report from the National Center on Performance Incentives said.
"There is no systematic evidence that TEEG had an impact on student achievement gains," said researchers for Texas A&M University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Missouri.
Since teacher education and certification programs don't seem to relate to progress in actual instruction (not unusual; bar exam results aren't correlated with future legal competence) Malcolm Gladwell has proposed the sink-or-swim system used in football and financial advising. You can't evaluate aptitude in advance, so let lots of people try and keep those who work out because of a mysterious interpersonal aptitude one researcher has named "withitness." (Who, I wonder, will re-teach the kids who experience withoutitness?)
But teaching isn't like pro sports, finance or the arts. The average struggling musician can take hope, like the aspiring athlete, from a few colleagues' superstar incomes. Not teachers. Even Frank McCourt never planned to be a best-selling author -- it was his method of teaching by storytelling that helped him become one.
And we need many more teachers than quarterbacks, investment advisors, or special forces commandos. According to the Census Bureau, in 2004 there were 3.1 million primary and middle school teachers and 772,000 secondary school teachers. In 2005 we had only 800,000 physicians, and 20 years before that only 500,000, according to one unofficial report. Education's problem isn't that people don't realize it's important. Most do. The problem is that it is so important, just as health care became a greater issue with the expansion of medicine.
So if the educational establishment is still not delivering, conventional incentives are disappointing, major salary increases unrealistic because of scale and state and local fiscal crises, and sifting battalions of aspirants for Gladwellian "withitness" is a non-starter, what's left?
Musical ability was once considered the domain of "withitness" too. Shinichi Suzuki showed it was possible to train teachers to bring out latent talent in large numbers of students. We should focus not on threatening teachers but on creating better ways to help them.
The greatest of the twentieth-century gurus, Peter Drucker, was also the one who best recognized the educational side of all enterprises. Zachary First, managing director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University replied to my query about one of his most brilliant insights, which I haven't yet found in print:
"Peter Drucker long consulted for ServiceMaster. He was both an advisor and friend to the company's Chairman and CEO, C. William Pollard. Drucker once suggested to Pollard that ServiceMaster's real business was not janitorial services or lawn care or pest control, but rather 'developing people.'"Maybe academia can in turn learn something from the crabgrass removal business. How to develop the people who are developing people -- that's the question.
(Photo: Gamma-Ray Productions/Flickr)
In flu season, what price prevention? That's a question the Philadelphia Inquirer is asking as religious and medical leaders discuss the ethics of the handshake. While there is medical debate about avoiding the gesture -- some doctors say a ban is only minimally effective, others carry hand sanitizer in bottles with them -- some people fear a moral contagion. One mother whose family had swine flu last summer called avoidance"extreme. . . . That's who we are as human beings. We do shake hands. We do hug each other. We do kiss our friends on the cheek. If we let go of all that, then what do we have left? We're just walking by each other as strangers."Philadelphians' concerns on such questions have deep historic roots. Handshaking was once a common form of greeting in Europe, then displaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by hat doffing and bowing, only to re-emerge as an allegedly English innovation. But it was the Quakers, first settlers of Philadelphia, whose founder George Fox promoted the gesture as a symbol of the equality of believers -- at a time when authorities considered refusing to doff a hat to magistrates something between heresy and treason. Philadelphia even has a handshake historian with a classics Ph.D.She still shakes hands, kisses cheeks, and refuses to use hand sanitizer, even though Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, where her husband is the rabbi, recently installed dispensers after a member made the request.
There's a sinister side of anti-handshake campaigns. Mussolini cited hygiene in officially banning the handshake in favor of the "Roman Salute," a gesture that has its own scholars. (Some historians think the Duce just wanted "excuse to avoid one form of human contact.") And Youtube hosts a virtual festival of conspiracy-theory handshake videos like this.
Despite hygienic reservations, the handshake, like the chair, is a Western custom that has made its way around the world. Influenza did not reverse the trend even after the 1918 pandemic, so it's not going to do so now. Some alternative gestures like elbow bumps make as much sense (outside their original cultural contexts) as rituals of safe blood brotherhood. In fact the small risk makes the clasp even more meaningful. So handshakes, perhaps followed by discreet private disinfection, are here for the duration.
(Photo: Flickr/star5112)
Who thought up the white-coat policy for doctors meeting with President Obama in the Rose Garden to advocate health care reform? Since when do physicians attend political gatherings in semi-ritual clinical garb? I haven't seen many caps, gowns, or hoods at higher education conferences. More importantly, why choose a custom that has itself been targeted for reform? Authorities in Scotland recently banned white coats from hospitals on the grounds that long sleeves can transmit MRSA and other infections. They substituted a new set of unforms, barred, incidentally, from street use Meanwhile, the AMA is still studying the question. This article in Slate notes other disadvantages of the symbolic attire, including inspiring enough fear to raise hypertension in some patients. Seven out of eight doctors don't wear them at work. Business suits are the dress code of Mayo Clinic doctors. (On the other hand, older patients seem to like the coats.)White coats may turn out on balance to be a bacteriological menace, a potent placebo, or both. But for an Administration that wants to break from conventional thinking, why go out of the way to proclaim tradition? The AMA declares judiciously:
Although your Reference Committee appreciates the intent of the [dress-code] resolution, the action requested ... may have unintended consequences, a concern raised by some speakers who testified.Whatever the AMA decides, the President seems to find symbolic theater irresistible, not necessarily to the advantage of his own causes. But at least he didn't follow suit, as George W. Bush did during a (non-medical) laboratory visit in 2007.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Waldo Jaquith
Was there ever really a generation gap? Recent obituaries of the retailing billionaire Donald Fisher make me wonder. Fisher apparently called his clothing and music store The Gap with reference to that unstoppable 1960s concept -- the name actually was suggested by his wife as an alternative to his original "Pants and Disks." Significantly, he was an outsider to the garment industry and retail; his real estate background prepared him for all-important skills of store location.As for that lower-case gap that inspired the stores, Fisher's career are reasons to reconsider the pop social science fixation on generational differences. First, in some ways contrasts within an age cohort may be greater than those between different age cohorts -- for example, in religious and political issues -- though the balance does change. Germans recognize a flakhelfer generation pressed into anti-aircraft and other combat service as teenagers in the later years of the Second World War, but apart from this military experience and ensuing controversies, what do Pope Benedict XVI and the novelist Günter Grass really have in common?
Second, age boundaries are fluid except when laws (like those conscripting the flakhelfer born in 1926 and 1927) create sharper breaks. Usually the balance of attitudes and values is a continuum over time, but is treated in discrete units. Compare the color spectrum. Culture and language lead children of each society to recognize a different set of colors according to psychological studies, even though humanity perceives the same wavelengths through essentially the same eyes and brains. Generational differences also can be arbitrary ways to slice what's really smooth.
Third, and the most relevant here, the culture of each "generation" is shaped by men and women somewhat older -- in the case of The Gap by a 41-year-old businessman whose 20 or so years' seniority over his customers did not impede his success. His own disappointment with the cut and fit of jeans in other stores was evidently shared by many younger people. Even the defining musical superstars of the 1960s and beyond weren't Baby Boomers themselves; John Lennon and Ringo Starr were born in 1940, Paul McCartney in 1942, George Harrison in 1943, and their legendary producer George Martin in 1926. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were both born in 1941. The leading orator of the Berkeley student revolt, Mario Savio, was vintage 1942, his German counterpart Rudi Dutschke, 1940. Even France's Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1945) doesn't strictly qualify; most definitions of the Boomer generation cited on the Web give 1946 as its beginning, reflecting the demographic bulge that is the name's original basis.Speaking of California protest, whatever your opinion of Ronald Reagan's policies, his recalled comeback to a student spokesman while governor of the state is still the best commentary I know on generation gaps, even though I haven't been able to confirm it so far in another source; it might be applied to the "Millennials" and the Internet, too. When the student expressed doubt that his generation could be understood by people who had not grown up with space satellites, rockets, and computers, he says he retorted: "You're absolutely right. We didn't have those things when we were your age. We invented them."
Photo Credit: Flickr User Eleanore H. and LittleMissCupcakeParis
If John Beck Sr.'s happiness depended on his success, he'd probably be miserable. Sales at his Branchburg hair salon are down for the fifth straight year, a trend that began when budget chains such as Supercuts, Fantastic Sams and Great Clips moved into town. To make matters worse, when the recession hit, even his most loyal clients started stretching out their hair appointments.The report also suggests that farming, forestry, and fishing are satisfying occupations despite their risks and low compensation.
But Beck, who runs DJ's Hair Studio with his wife and daughter, is anything but miserable. After spending most of his life working for other people, he's just happy to be his own boss.
"We're in control. A lot of decisions that are made, are made by me," said Beck, 69, who opened the salon in the mid-90s after retiring from a 40-year career at Johnson & Johnson. "We have a lot of very happy clients."
Of course these statistics have their limits. You could say that the difficulties of running most small businesses (or farms) means that the people who have stayed with them, or entered them, are self-selected for intrinsic enjoyment of what they are doing. And what's the satisfaction level of employees of small businesses versus large corporations in the same line of work?
But the study still underscores an important finding of epidemiology. It's not stress itself but the sense of control that determines what work is beneficial or injurious to health. For helping reduce levels of obesity, smoking, excess drinking, and heart disease, perceived control is a dimension of life that deserves more attention.Writing in the Wall Street Journal of a wave of suicides at France Télécom, a business school professor in Paris, Isaac Getz, calls for new organizational styles:
Treat people as modern pilots, not as soldiers of the old wars. Give people real control over their work, stop giving them orders about how to do their jobs, and their stress will go down. With it, absenteeism will drop, and stress's hidden costs will shrink, while employee engagement goes up. All this, of course, is hard to accomplish in a traditional command-and-control company that often pays a lip service to autonomy but preserves the hierarchical chain of command--but it is possible.France has a highly regarded medical care system. But there, as here, the most important determinants of health and disease occur during the time people spend outside physicians' offices and hospitals.
Friends of photography, and of French heritage, are mourning the death of Willy Ronis, most famous for his Nu Provençal, Gordes (1949). It's striking how many of the iconic images of France were created by immigrants or their children -- Ronis, Brassaï, André Kertesz -- just as the Hungarian-born cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond created the look of all-American classics like Easy Rider, The Deer Hunter, and Deliverance. An aspiring composer as a young man, Ronis came to photography through a mixture of accident -- taking over his ailing father's commercial studio -- and inspiration from an exhibition of art photographers' work. The Depression and the mass demonstrations of Paris let Ronis become a participant observer of Popular Front militance -- to his dismay when American publications started using his images in what he considered a hostile, conservative sense after the War.
Ronis was one of the last stars of humanism, the search for universal experience in moments of happiness and tragedy transcending race, religion, nationality, and social class -- a movement epitomized by the blockbuster international traveling exhibition that William Steichen organized for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, The Family of Man, to which Ronis contributed. (A kindred theatrical work, the Pulitzer prizewinning play, The Diary of Anne Frank, opened the same year on nearby Broadway.) Originally a Cold War bridge between East and West and a healing gesture following war and genocide, utopian humanism has survived the trends that scorned it, including the New Left and postmodernism. But we should temper our nostalgia; newer studies remind us that some Marxists and conservatives alike saw the exhibition as subtle propaganda for the other side. And Ronis himself was slow to see the evils of Stalinism, not resigning from the Communist Party of France until the 1960s.
The Times (London) obituary has a shocker of paragraph toward the end:
In 1999, in an important test case for the right of privacy in France, Ronis and [his agency] Rapho were heavily fined for his having taken 50 years earlier a photograph of a flower seller without her written consent. She had proudly displayed the image in her shop all that time until it was spotted by a zealous lawyer.
There's more about the case in a 2002 article in the Guardian; Ronis remained gentle, and a gentleman, about the case. But curiously -- considering the economic stakes in photography, and the implications of privacy legislation -- I found nothing about it in an electronic search of US law reviews. Some people would say that the French law, at least as I understand it from just two brief articles, is the true affirmation of humanism, the individual's freedom from unauthorized commercial exploitation of his or her image. But it's also an attack on a French national treasure, the heritage of candid street photography not only of Ronis but of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau. Consider another immortal Ronis image, a little boy bounding joyfully along the sidewalk, a baguette under his arm. What was the photographer supposed to do, get arrested following him home to get a parental signature? The law all but kills Ronis's definition of humanist photography as a difficult walk "toward a poetric representation of modest happiness." (See one of Ronis's last interviews, in French, here.) Probably for this reason, scores of his subjects ignored their "rights" and congratulated the photographer on the occasion of his valedictory retrospective show in Paris's Hôtel de Ville in 2005.
The Web era has dealt another blow to humanism, promoting a new aesthetic of vividly colored, electronically manipulated imagery and making 35mm black-and-white street photography look hopelessly grainy. Noting this trend on the photo-sharing site Flickr, the New York Times Magazine columnist Virginia Heffernan last year recounted a member's mischievous posting of a Cartier-Bresson classic of a bicyclist passing a spiral staircase, as his own, and the jeering response of members apparently ignorant of its provenance:
"When everything is blurred you cannot convey the motion of the bicyclist," one commenter carped. "Why is the staircase so 'soft'? Camera shake?" wrote another. "Gray, blurry, small, odd crop," someone concluded.
Nothing can bring back the humanist moment, but considering the alternatives, including some of the new online photography featured by Heffernan, it's looking better all the time.
(Photo: Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images)
Hats off to Daniel Brook for his series on Slate about the September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta. It's a gem of reporting legwork and historical insight, based on a visit to Atta's thesis supervisor in Hamburg and sharp observations in the ancient city of Aleppo, where Atta was misled by his upbringing to misunderstand its heritage:
With the crumbling legacy of European imperialism and American-backed dictatorship written into its Paris-meets-Houston cityscape, Cairo is one of the world's worst advertisements for East-West relations. With that city as his tragic starting place, Atta refused to comprehend historic Aleppo, a cosmopolitan trading city where Europeans and Arabs, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived side-by-side for centuries. He scorned diverse, mercantile Hamburg; he attacked polyglot New York. By allowing a discordant present to blot out a more hopeful past, Atta ensured further discord in the future.
Brook mentions but doesn't expand on the engineering background of the September 11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who selected the targets. As the official US report put it:
Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse,KSM applied his imagination,technical aptitude,and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes. These ideas included conventional car bombing,political assassination,aircraft bombing, hijacking, reservoir poisoning, and, ultimately, the use of aircraft as missiles guided by suicide operatives.
Generations of educators have assured us that that the study of science and engineering create international understanding across religious and ideological lines, promoting an international language that puts problem-solving ahead of dogma. And many scientists, engineers, and physicians around the world have indeed been outstanding ecumenical advocates.
But there's a dark side of technical knowledge. It's equally compatible with intolerance. Osama bin Laden, too, was educated not as a mullah but as a civil engineer. While many Iranian science professors are prominent in the resistance to the of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the brutal strongman appears to have an impressive technical background, even claiming on his blog that he had score 132 out of 400,000 engineering university applicants on a competitive examination. (Link via Wikipedia.) The world's second most wanted terrorist next to bin Laden is also no cleric but a physician, Ayman al Zawahiri. Well before September 11, 2001, the English historian Simon Sebag Montefiore noted the rise of medically trained tyrants, the Doctators, in the Spectator:
'Doctatorship' may be defined as the process by which a medical doctor, devoted to sacrificing himself to save lives, becomes a political dictator, devoted to sacrificing lives to save himself. 'Doctatorship' is a murky place where bedside manner meets state planner, where torture meets cure.
Whereas the Zawahiri and Atta families belong to the higher Egyptian intelligentsia, Ahmedinajad would be an obscure village artisan like his forebears if the passionately modernizing Shah had not promoted technical education for the masses, not only to promote growth but to weaken the hold of the religious conservatives.
The lesson is not that scientific and technical education are dangerous, but sadly that education alone has been overrated as a source of humane values.
For months, Germans have been stocking up on conventional incandescent light bulbs as the European Union (EU) phases in a ban on their manufacture and sale. There is open revolt even at the summit of nation's cultural establishment:
Many complain that the lights are just not bright enough and that they falsify colors. The Hamburger Kunsthalle, for example, recently made a bulk order for 600 incandescent light bulbs to make sure that it can keep illuminating the works it displays in the time-honored way.And it's become a mass movement, too:
The aesthetic issue is a powerful one. For Munich-based lighting designer Ingo Maurer, the CFL bulbs are ushering in a decrease in the quality of life. "We recommend protests against the ban, civil disobedience and the timely hoarding of lighting implements," Maurer told SPIEGEL. He also adds that he believes the ban might drive more people to use more candles, which are about as bad as you can get in terms of energy efficiency.
There are three problems with a legislative ban on anything in the absence of immediate harm. The first, as the German case shows, is that some people who might have increased their use of energy-saving bulbs, will protest limits on their choice by hoarding -- resulting in more energy spent producing bulbs that may outlive their purchasers. The second is that it removes an important incentive for the development of compact fluorescent lamps and light-emitting diodes that produce a more pleasing light, killing off the competition and reference standard. And the third is that it is an arbitrary and inconsistent way to promote energy saving; there's no limit to the wattage of new-style bulbs. The industry failed to learn from its founder, Thomas Edison, whose light bulb was designed to be not only more convenient than gas light, but more pleasant, according to Charles Bazerman's study.
Well-meaning Americans can be tone-deaf (or spectrum-blind) to culture, too. The U.S. counterpart to German incandescent aficionados are the people who have been stockpiling firearms and ammunition, like these preppies (Oregon-style), anticipating a crackdown by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. But there's a difference. The incandescent phaseout is law in Europe. It hardly matters that the Supreme Court clearly favors firearm rights and that between health care, Afghanistan, and the deficit, the Democrats won't be spending much political capital on gun control. Still, Barack Obama's remarks at a California fundraiser haven't helped: that economically discouraged Pennsylvanians "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" -- an oil spill on troubled waters.
Obamaphobes' panic buying is having its own revenge. Democraticunderground.com reports that even one Wisconsin ammunition manufacturer is warning its own customers:
Due to hoarding of ammunition, you consumers have managed to raise theWelcome to the state of New Hamster.
prices of ammunition and components 50 to 500 percent.
You didn't even need the Government to impose any taxes or bans.
You did it all yourself.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Shika Kaoin
Dan Akst wonders:
Why, given their horrific history during the 20th century, aren't Europeans more wary of the power of the state? After the horrors of WW I, the rise of European fascism, the Nazis, the Second World War, the protracted disaster of Communism etc., it would seem to me that something like paranoia would be the mildest sensible response toward government.I've often asked myself about this. For example, I studied in Germany in the late 1960s and had to register with the police like all other residents, including the Heidelberg students who had finished one of the most tumultuous years in the university's history by the time I arrived there in 1968. Yet questioning such police powers were not on even the student radicals' agenda.
Part of the answer might have been Lenin's famous remark that if German communists ever stormed the railroad stations, they would buy platform tickets first. But there's another explanation. The leftist critics of the European state have not wanted to demolish it but to retain its machinery for their own uses once they achieved power.
Another part is that while rich Europeans pay higher taxes than the US wealthy, that includes the right to use state services to the fullest, and not just in health care. No New York City private-school admissions neurosis (or $450/hour consultants), no private university tuition financing headaches. And the ineffable joy, unknown to our Interstates, of watching slower cars deferentially slink into the right-hand lane as your fast Audi overtakes them on the Autobahn at 200 km/hour (I've had a taste of this as a passenger -- with a State car and driver). You've paid your annual tax bill for that big engine and your heavy fuel tax. Enjoy!
On the other hand, most Americans didn't share Dwight Eisenhower's alarm about the Military- Industrial Complex, and the armed forces and military contracts have a much bigger role here than there. To Europeans, American aerospace giants are at least as State- subsidized as their own Airbus. Yes, we kept Western Europe under our nuclear and conventional umbrella during the Cold War. It's the "horrific history" of two wars and interwar militarism that Dan mentions that made outsourcing part of defense to the our State look like a good deal. Even Sept. 11 hardly changed this attitude; I remember arriving for a conference in Ulm on one of the first flights back, virtually silent on board, but there seemed no concern there, even though it was already known that terrorist cells in Germany were behind the attacks. Meanwhile, polls reveal that many Americans support the State's right to torture and condone maltreatment of other prisoners. "Paranoia toward the government?" Au contraire.
Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush talked about reducing government's role but changed little. And the American multi-tiered Federal - State - County - Local jurisdictions, with their frequent conflicts and correspondingly greater role for larger numbers of lawyers, means a greater rather than a small government presence. Wall Street in the bailout age has been clinging to the State for dear life, not to mention bonuses. (A deal's a deal, right?)
(Photos: Wikimedia Commons)
As Niall Ferguson defends his recent exercise in feline jollity, the outcry in some quarters recalls the European journalism of the interwar years, with which the Harvard historian of the twentieth century must be familiar. French newspaper writers could not resist gags based on the homophones Shah and chat, provoking minor diplomatic crises. In one of them, as Time Magazine reported in 1937, . . . the King of Kings was furious over "another French insult." Month ago L'Europe Nouvelle criticized the economic condition of Iran. The King of Kings demanded an apology, received one. A French columnist last week reopened the wound by rehearsing the incident under the punning headline // n'y avait pas la de quoi fouetter un Shah. This was a parody of the French phrase "There was nothing there with which to beat a cat," suggesting that the King of Kings had made a fuss about nothing. The poor pun was enough to make Reza Shah Pahlavi last week recall to Teheran his Minister to France. Mirza Abolghas-sem Nadjm "for an explanation," and withdraw his promise to lend Iranian art objects to the coming Paris International Exhibition which opens May 1.
Thanks to my brother, David Tenner, for calling my attention to the French-Iranian episode years ago.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Edward Tenner
