Teacher Merit Pay

Should teachers be paid based on merit?

The common counter-argument I hear from teachers on pay-for-performance is that they shouldn’t be held responsible for the bad apples, or that this will do nothing more than encourage them to ‘teach-to-the-test’.

On the first note, so long as the performance is measured by relative achievement, i.e., improvement per student over the year compared to some baseline, rather than absolute achievement, then yes, a teacher should be held responsible for a bad apple. If someone comes in dumb and leaves dumber, that’s the teacher’s fault for not reaching the child.

On the second, I agree, this will encourage ‘teach-to-the-test’ however, what’s the alternative? Keep in mind, the status quote that’s being upheld as some sort of golden standard is seniority based pay and seniority based promotions. Why on earth does simply being alive longer mean you’re a better teacher? This system does not encourage experimentation or innovation but instead rewards compliance and not rocking the boat. We can do better for our kids.

So we’ll start ‘teaching-to-the-test’. At least then we’ll have a single standard we know we’re teaching to. We’ve shrunk and changed the problem – the test has become a verifiable, concrete goal we can measure performance on and teacher’s jobs are now not quite so fuzzy and arbitrary. This simply means that we need to keep up efforts to ensure that what we’re testing is realistic, practical and useful – things that should be a part of any education – and prepare our kids for jobs in the public and private sectors, academia and elsewhere.

Fructose? In MY Corn Syrup? It's more likely than you think.

Context courtesy of UrbanEconomist.


Gah, I hate it when my free market sensibilities and scientific
sensibilities go head to head. Fact is HFCS is vilified for
absolutely no good reason. But at the same time - if people don't
want it, they don't want it. I like how populist movements like this
do science - basically, they take advantage of the P < .05, and just
keep funding study after study until one of them, by pure chance,
shows HFCS is bad for you. Then we all decide "see! I knew it all
along!"

I *love* these fanciful streams of thought:
“Our bodies have been adapted over the years to metabolize sugar,
which is natural,” Mr. Royster says. “But the body doesn’t know what
to do with high-fructose corn syrup.”

Such a misunderstanding of evolution, especially when talking about an
omnivore who's 'body' adapted to withdraw calories from pretty much
anything it could put in its mouth that wasn't poisonous - and some
things that are. The 'body' is not this delicate system that requires
special care, it's a pretty ruggedized utilitarian machine that will
make due with anything it can.

And I'm all for giving both sides free say - but when one side is
presenting a huge mountain of scientific evidence, much of it coming
from folks who's biases usually lie elsewhere like the Center for
Science in the Public Interest (who believe me, if there were any
shred of evidence against HFCS they'd be on it), and the other side is
some guys facebook group who is simply "convinced diabetes has
something to do with HFCS", its laughable. This is magical thinking
people.

Healthcare Costs

We're not going to get the cost of healthcare down so long as we're on a populist witch hunt.

Don't get me wrong...

I think it's awesome that a sitting American president has won the Nobel Peace Prize. But...er, for what again, exactly?

The Sad Thing Is...

Now that Republicans have their talking points together, i.e., offer insurance across state lines, close the loophole that gives employers cheaper health care than employees tax-wise, I'm relatively certain we won't see these things in any sort of compromise bill.

Why? Because they're too conservative for Democrats? Nah. They aren't crazy ideas at all. Unfortunately, they won't see the light of day because there CAN'T be a compromise bill. Republicans haven't learned that elections have consequences, and they'd rather attempt to torpedo any bill, whether it has their stuff in it or not, than actually try and use their few votes to get these ideas in.

Sinner taxes

The "Soda tax" is rearing it's ugly, irrational head again. As is my role as the Skeptic, I offer no answers, only questions.

Correlation does not mean causation, we're always told, so correlative studies, such as the ones that show a link between soda consumption and obesity, are only hypothesis generating, not causation proving. How would you prove that soda consumption causes obesity? Well, you could either find people who don't drink soda and give them soda, or, alternatively, do what one of the studies cited in the above article did. Take soda away from some and see if they get thinner.

They didn't.

Yet, the argument for a soda tax continues? That's because it was never about the cause - correlation is all you need for intolerance and discrimination. Whether or not soda causes obesity, there's enough evidence out there to simply associate it with the obese, which is enough for most people to argue for taxing it.

Isn't it hate the sin, love the sinner? Yet when science shows that drinking soda is not, in fact, sinful, it becomes clear that we were pretty much always out to screw the sinner anyway. Every crisis needs a scapegoat, and our health care crisis is no different.

Father of the Green Revolution dies

On Saturday Norman Borlaug died. Mr. Borlaug was an agronomist who’s development of semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties are estimated to have saved the lives of at minimum 250 million, and as many as a billion people at risk of starvation. Although his accomplishments have hardly gone unnoticed (Norman is one of five people to have won the Noble Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal), his later years were marked with criticism by some who believe his methods of pesticides and genetically altered crops create dependency on monoculture crops and environmental degradation in poor countries.

Yet the father of the “Green Revolution” continued to be a dogged advocate for the use of science in agriculture into his 90s. His simple but persuasive argument against organic activists, who warned of the looming elimination of bio-diversity, was if we really want to promote bio-diversity the most important thing is to keep the most bio-diverse regions intact. That is to say, rainforests, the most bio-rich regions on earth, should not be deforested, yet with a growing population and an unchanging amount of farmland simple math tells us the only answer is to increase food production—which has the added convenience of bringing more food and more profits to those in the world who most need it.

However Borlaug’s arguments have done little to change the minds of those who believe the costs of using such technology in crop production outweigh the benefits. Indeed the man who went to Mexico’s desperately poor Yaqui Valley in 1944 to dig in the dirt and toll in a lab and who’s work would by 1950 double Mexico’s wheat production, a phenomenon that spread like wildfire to Pakistan, India and throughout Asia, has become a lightning rod for environmentalists.

To give Borlaug’s critics their due, we do need to be aware how genetic mutations and pesticides can alter an ecosystem, especially when incentive structures develop where agro-businesses can extract a profit from an unsustainable product. But more dangerous is the instinct to draw upon first world values to deal with the developing world’s problems. The growing environmental awareness of Americans and Europeans has created the opportunity for global progress on issues such as climate change and renewable energy—topics that have a profound impact on those in the poorest countries. Yet it is nothing short of a tragedy when such interests are taken as more important than they are. Quite simply, when the choice is as Norman Borlaug faced, between more single strain crops and more starving children dying in the sun, the moral calculus is unequivocally weighted towards the latter.

Norman Borlaugh saved the lives of millions of the world’s most needy. For that he will forever in my mind remain one of the greatest Americans of the 21st century.