This is how pathetic the San Francisco newspaper called the "chronicle" really is. We call it the "comical" and this is why.

The corrupt weak mayor "looks" to help "families". Looking at a problem through the minuscule lens of families says nothing about out of town finance firms buying apartment buildings, kicking all the tenants out and then reselling the property... Or selling all the apartments as condominiums.

Glad to know the mayor is looking though. Where has his ass been the last 3 years? But oh boy oh boy the mayor is now looking. It's a good thing that he cares about families.

And look at the smaller headline on the left. "Hurdles are expected" in a race for office in the US Senate. Well no shit Mr. journalist puppy. Don't you have something more insightful and thought provoking then the obvious. I suppose this article will be replete with all of the best non-partisan personalities and choice quotes explaining the headline. There is nothing better than a newspaper article with 8 quotes from 3 political operatives and rhetorical questions spliced in between. Yummmmmy. Will Kamila Harris become a closet lunatic and begin babbling communist jargon at the next public event? Let's get a quote from this lawyer who works for a lobbying group in Sacramento.

Fucking stupid. Such a shame that our world class city has such a pathetic newspaper.

I'm quoting myself, but so fucking what :-) :-) This sums up the Bill Gates paradigm versus education reality in a pith.

The issue is who controls our schools and the curriculum and the teachers who disperse the curriculum. Do you want over-worked inexperienced teachers using a script and pre-printed materials who turnover within 5 years? Do you want parent and community involvement or a prinicipal who is just a manager in a multi-state corporate firm with a CEO who doesn't live in the district? Do you want a firm that will cut costs to the bone at the expense of the service called education once they have a local monopoly? Wake the fuck up.

This is not about creativity or about allowing different ways to solve problems. You are missing the point.

LET ME STRESS THAT LAST POINT ... just in case you didn't get it.

This is not about creativity or about allowing different ways to solve problems. You are missing the point.

I know. I know. Please forgive me, but I'm a veteran teacher, and a methodical guitarist. So I believe in magic of three.

This is not about creativity or about allowing different ways to solve problems. You are missing the point.

bob
so people aren't stupid and try creative ways to work around these problems so we need to dig deeper than this to validate such claims

ScentOfViolets

 You want to know how hard teaching really is, how difficult it is to improve on the basic model? Thing about the strong AI problem. People will generally agree that we have it when it is able to sit in a classroom and take instruction the way we expect human students to take instruction.



bob.
sort of a nonsequitor and strong ai thing is less relevant than you think or at least you've not described a good connection. i'm talking about learning about basic methodological things like matching pairs. that's not a charter school thing, that's an ed policy thing: see for instance how similar problems emerge in talking about pre k programs



ginardo napoli

 bob, you are speak roving ambiguous parables... matching pairs versus ai thing versus ed policy thing? Creative ways to work around problems? What problems are you referring to? And what are we digging into when you say "dig deeper" ? Huhn?
These are amorphous platitudes. It's convoluted man. What is the point you are trying to make?



bob

 i'm not the person who brought in the random strong ai example. matching pairs and stuff like that are not platitudes, they are social scientific methods to try and reduce conflicting factors and i was just saying you need to actually look at those methods before saying it's pointless.


ginardo napoli
Whatever bob. You are speaking in symbols. You spoke of digging deeper without actually digging deeper. Describe. Use specifics. Elaborate. Use details and vivid palpable examples. You didn't do that.

The issue is not about allowing creativity and using scientific methods to reduce conflicting factors. And I never said anything about something being "pointless". The issue is who controls our schools and the curriculum and the teachers who disperse the curriculum. Do you want over-worked inexperienced teachers using a script and pre-printed materials who turnover within 5 years? Do you want parent and community involvement or a prinicipal who is just a manager in multi-state firm with a CEO who doesn't live in the district? Do you want a firm that will cut costs to the bone at the expense of the service called education once they have a local monopoly? Wake the fuck up.

This is not about creativity or about allowing different ways to solve problems. You are missing the point, and yet you are the one talking about "saying it's pointless" ?????

A recent Forbes article called "The Unappreciated Success of Charter Schools", largely quoted a study from Mathematica

[SOURCE: Forbes | Adam Ozimek  | 11 January 2015]

Blogger Kevin Drum at MotherJones.com blogged about this on Monday, 12 January 2015. Here is the link to the blog post and commentary.

My feelings? Glad you asked. :-) :-)

First of all, that study by Mathematica of 36 Charter schools across 15 States is a very small sample size, highly subject to bias and extreme events (for example: 34 plumbers + Bill Gates and Donald Trump). Also: Was it random? Did they stratify the population by characteristics to ensure a representative sample? I am not sure, but regardless, even still the Forbes article quoted the following summary from the authors of the Mathematica study:

This paper presents findings from the first national randomized study of the impacts of charter schools on student achievement, which included 36 charter middle schools across 15 states. The paper compares students who applied and were admitted to these schools through randomized admissions lotteries with students who applied and were not admitted. It finds that, on average, charter middle schools in the study were neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement. However, impacts varied significantly across schools and students, with positive impacts for more disadvantaged schools and students and negative impacts for the more advantaged.

Notice the bold part. Bingo.

But then notice the italicized extra part that was added to "soften" the reality of the bolded part. Really? the study says that "impacts varied significantly" across the data from this small sample size that might not be representative. Go figure? ... but yet there somehow were still "positive" and "negative" aspects? Huhn?

Positive? Negative? Yea the smart kids get dumbed down, and when you get a school with a few more high-end kids more than would have been in the public school system, of course it's a benefit. But is this due to the teaching and curriculum paradigm of the charter's or just by the pure obvious sociology.

You can't look at this purely by numbers. You have to get to know the day by day, week by week realities of what these institutions are actually doing to our children.

Furthermore....

The data collected in all of these studies is not based on the same population of kids. You have to apply to most charter schools, and they get to reject or expel students. Public schools have to accept every student who registers, and you can't find reasons to expel students who are not applying themselves. So Charter schools are serving motivated students who choose to apply themselves. Even so, they still are not any better than Public schools, who do rather well despite the horrific realities of the student population and budget cuts.

But let me quote from some other folks. First, from Chad Brick;

I am not sure if any convincing evidence for or against charter school performance exists - or even could exist. Even the randomized lottery studies have a fatal flaw:

1: Some students enter the lottery

2: Some of the students win the lottery, some lose

3: Some hyper-motivated parents find a way to get around #2

4: The lottery winners go to school with other lottery winners (and the cheaters), the lottery losers go to school with those that never entered the lottery and other lottery losers.

Even if you ignore point number three, the fourth point creates a major issue - it is NOT RANDOM. The children who entered the lottery are not the same as the children who did not. Therefore, any difference between the charter and the public school might be due to the lottery winners and losers have a different set of classmates rather than a different set of teachers. The only way around this would be force all eligible students to enter the lottery, and to my knowledge this has never been done and is entirely impractical.

Second, from skeptonomist:

When parents put their kids into charters by volunteering or the selection is made otherwise in non-random ways, and when the charter system is allowed to throw kids (or teachers) back into the public system if they don't perform, then comparison is invalid. Charter systems may have access to low-cost teachers that public systems don't. I doubt if all the systems in the metastudy really met the criteria for a valid test. Those who set up such systems, whether they are private or public, have motivation and usually some power to impose selectivity. Public systems have little power to oppose this selectivity.

The truth is that the vast majority of the charter schools are put into existence and funded by ideological non-profits so that they can suck up students from nearby public schools and bring about the demolition of the public school system. Leave-No-Child-Behind was the first pillar in this long term plan. It created a plethora of insane ways to label schools as "failing" or "lacking-improvement" and then kicked in a clause in the law that enable a charter school to petition in the district. It was the camel's nose under the tent. Sucking up funds from the local schools who have extra cost overloads and cannot compete with the cost structures of the non-profit grant subsidized charters, who often would operate at a loss otherwise.

Teacher turnover and moral in charter schools is often terrible. Many teachers are youthful recruits for Teach for America who are inexperienced and are given a "canned" curriculum to follow. Need I say that charter schools do not have unions.

This is the biggest Union-busting scheme in American History, and it really sucks to read people like Kevin Drum at an outlet like Mother Jones (of all places) is not even mentioning it, while at the same time giving lip service to the charter school movements false achievements of serving the "colored" population better. (Despite being a completely different population -- readabove.)

If you are clueless or need more info, a good start in your education is Diane Ravitch. Go to her blog http://dianeravitch.net/ .

Then go read her book "Reign of Error" and begin to become horrified by the truth of the charter school movement.

I almost have 1,000 posts (880). So this is a stupid post to get closer to 1,000.

When I was younger (2001 - 2003) I had this goal of reaching 1,000 posts in my mind.

Thomas Edison somehow can't figure out how to power the light bulb, because he didn't drink ... "Red Bull" .... OH MY FUCKING GOD.

In twitter speak that is "OMFG" by the way.

This is so ridiculous in numerous ways. First of all, Thomas Edison really was not the FIRST. Second of all, ALMOST EVERY SINGLE SCIENTIFIC EVENT really is a whole of individual efforts collectively coinciding at the same time.

Read this : Who invented the Light bulb

Okay. Now how simplistic and stupid is the "Thomas Edison invented the light bulb" story. American historiography is bullshit, with self-indulgent and bloviating tendencies ... because we are an insecure culture. We don't have 1,000 years of being in the same place like Europeans, Africans, and Asians do.

One thousand years ago was 1,014. The battle of Hastings and the Magna Carta had not yet happened. The Chinese had not yet burned down their huge navy and were sending ships and commerce between East Africa and Peru. At least this is the current theory: ever notice how Peruvians look unique in their asian features, and why Peru -- isolated from rest of South America -- is also a unique blend. The carvings in the earth, might well have been Chinese characters for all we know. The beings with the ships who brought incredible goods and knowledge.

And now there are archaeologists who think (with good evidence) that copper mines in Canada were responsible for the Bronze Age throughout Eurasia (Western Europe to Russia and South to Northern Africa and the Mediterranean) -- brought by the Nords and Swedes and Fins and large water carrying vessels.

Things are more complex and non-individualistic in the macrocosm.

Less is More

Less is more
More or less
They say it's the best
when you detest the more
because it has too much zest
and doth bequest
your attention
all of the time
all of your mind
like a tourniquet or bind
you lose the seeking for the find
and go blind
but life is really about moderation
easing back and doing less
because less is more
just like a dirty whore
or a drug addict
feeling better even though the story never ends
because
the story never really ends
you just use different words to think life has changed
but life never changes
except
that you evolve
or devolve
going up or
going down
slowing down
finding the solution or the satisfaction
wherever happiness resides.

Damn it's windy today. The temperature is 52 in the sun, but the wind makes it feel 10 degrees cooler. It's gonna drop into the 30's tonight, and maybe into the upper 20's.

How fast is the wind?

Damn. 43 kilometers per hour (26 mph) !!!!!

Liberal: "the ability to feel that all humanity is repairable and that positive forward-thinking solutions can be obtained despite the competitive environment which inherently besets the species. In the past, liberal actually meant to continue the status quo, or be persistent with the mainstream opinion, but nowadays, liberal means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The Liberal Democrats of the 1880's are nothing at all when compared to the self same words used for the 1980's and the 2010's."

Conservative : "the notion that nothing matters except the self and the belief that all things encountered really matter only insofar as they affect the paradigm that one has decided to be called Conservatism. In the past, conservative meant to be desiring or maintaining the consistency of traditions or laws of the past; but in the modern era, this term has been perverted and now is used to defend actions and beliefs that are exceptionally revolutionary and incendiary in rhetoric as well as philosophical origin."