Lee Camp offers a great breakdown of exactly how corporate advertisements are designed to manipulate people. Well done.

How ruthless networks of super rich ideologues killed choice and destroyed people\'s faith in politics by George Monbiot

The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.

I just created these with power point.

Since our current secretary of education can’t seem to understand the difference between proficiency and growth, allow me to describe the difference and the terms.

Proficiency means an individual has a minimum level of competence or understanding in a certain field. Growth means an increase in the chosen measurement of understanding and competence in a certain field. This is akin to getting kids to be able to tie their shoes. Proficiency means you have tied your shoes. Growth measures the increase in the number of kids who have learned to tie their shoes.

After a certain point however, growth can only go so far, regardless of the overall proficiency. A group of students can have 90% proficiency, and yet have oscillating, negligible, or even negative growth, because the other 10% of the underlying population of students are affected by other factors outside of the school system. Many of this subgroup move 2 or more times from age 8 to age 18. Many of this subgroup go through the ordeal of parental separation and divorce, step-mothers and step-fathers. Many of this subgroup have parents who are alcoholics. Many of this subgroup have parents with low-income, disjunctive work history.

Both of the concepts — proficiency and growth — are beset by how they are measured. Interpretation of data is always tied in to what the baseline is determined to be. Should this be the same for all students and districts? How does one create a scale of measurable baselines? What rubric should be used to measure the comprehension of the concepts? What specific language is chosen to convey the questions used to measure comprehension and understanding?

In these matters, proficiency measurement is completely dependent upon the measurements. Numbers reflect a various quantity of different interpretations. Was the said student good at narrowing down the 4 choices and guessing out of the remaining two possible answers? Was the said student good at reverse engineering, regardless of understanding? Is the student able to articulate or convey the concepts, or merely just able to click correct answers on an app, or select the correct bubble on a multiple choice test.

Education consists of engagement and discussion. The socialization aspects of learning are as equally as important as the learning or information itself. People can only understand information in the context of their environment, and for humans this means their fellow human beings. Tying in the individual understanding with the views of other people’s understanding is critical to the attainment of proficiency because most people only effectively learn when they get reinforcement and feedback from other human beings.

The measurement of growth is always going to be subject to too many biases to be reliable. Going from 40 percent ignorance to 60% ignorance results in a 50% increase of growth. Going from 95% to 96% however, is barely a 1% increase of growth. And in a common American population that has a churn of more than 10% (students who move in and out of various schools) the measurement of growth is inherently affected by incoming and outgoing student populations.

Hence a school that had 95% profiency could actually experience a negative growth merely because of the 10% churn.

Here's the 2002 album of Minus the Bear, "Highly Refined Pirates, 15 years ahead of their time :-)

One of their earlier songs.

And this song too. Perfect illustration of the versatility of this band. Minus the Bear. 9 albums and still going.

This song is cool too. What can I say. Another in a long effort to get to 1,000 posts.

Probably a close second to my favorite Minus the Bear song.

One of my favorite songs from this Seattle band.