Month: December 2010

by Patrick Appel

Joel Wing sizes up the new government:

Overall, Maliki’s new ruling coalition is a mixed bag. Unlike his 2006 government, Allawi, Sunni, and nationalist parties, will have a much larger role this time around. At the same time, there are so many entities involved that they had to create new positions just to satisfy all of them. The major blocs also come with competing agendas over Iraq’s major issues such as oil, federalism, security, and the disputed territories. That will mean the new government will act much like the last one with deadlock, indecision, and procrastination on the problems that beset the country. That may also allow the premier to continue to consolidate his hold on power as he did last time. The near future in Iraq, may look a lot like the recent past.

by Conor Friedersdorf

In The New Republic, Paul Kennedy asks that question:

Where on earth is the United States headed? Has it lost its way? Is the Obama effect, which initially promised to halt the souring of its global image, over? More seriously, is it in some sort of terminal decline? Has it joined the long historical list of number one powers that rose to the top, and then, as Rudyard Kipling outlined it, just slowly fell downhill: “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / At one with Nineveh and Tyre”? Has it met its match in Afghanistan? And has its obsession with the ill-defined war on terrorism obscured attention to the steady, and really much more serious, rise of China to the center of the world’s stage? Will the dollar fall and fall, like the pound sterling from the 1940s to the 1970s?

It is easy to say “yes” to all those questions, and there are many in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and in the United States itself, who do so. But there is another way to think about America’s current position in today’s mightily complicated world, and it goes like this: All that is happening, really, is that the United States is slowly and naturally losing its abnormal status in the international system and returning to being one of the most prominent players in the small club of great powers. Things are not going badly wrong, and it is not as if America as becoming a flawed and impotent giant. Instead, things are just coming back to normal.

Interestingly, the author doesn't include in his harbingers of American decline many of the factors that I worry about most. Are we ceding so much liberty in order to vanquish terrorism and drugs that we'll wind up irrevocably worse off for having launched those wars? Are we now a nation where the executive branch can order torture and extra-judicial assasinations with impunity? Is entitlement spending going to bankrupt us? Are we in danger of becoming a permanent imperial power? Does the power of public employee unions make it impossible for federal, state and local agencies to operate efficiently? Is federalism dead? Are we prepared, as best as a nation can be, for a panemic disease?

Despite these worries, and others, I remain cautiously optimistic that the United States can flourish in coming years. But when I realize how far removed some of my concerns are from mainstream political discourse I can't help but feel a bit more glum.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Reihan weighs in:

I do wish that someone would connect the dots and make the obvious yet important point that Rick Hess has been making for ages: shrinking class sizes over the last forty years has diluted the teacher talent pool. Had we stayed at the teacher-student ratios of the 1970s, we'd have 2.2 million public school teachers rather than 3.2 million. Know what else happened over the last 40 years? Labor market discrimination against women and African Americans declined, giving talented female and African American workers who had once gravitated to the teaching profession other options. Allowing effective teachers to take on larger classes in exchange for more pay could have a powerful positive effect. With the same compensation bill, we could pay far higher salaries.

Below the fold, a long note from a reader:

The real cost of teacher tenure is that it makes our public schools unmanageable.  I don't think that aspect of tenure has been adequately examined.  The category of "bad" teachers has to be expanded to include more than just those who are incompetent or cruel to children; it has to include those who refuse to be team players, who insist on their independence and autonomy, who prevent school administrators from implementing improvements and reforms because they disagree with them or would be personally inconvenienced by them.  Such teachers truly have nothing to fear, no reason to budge from their positions and try something new that their "bosses" propose.  Tenured teachers who are decent and competent have no bosses; they do as they wish.  As long as they manage their classrooms properly and prepare good lessons, they have the freedom and right to challenge, repudiate, and sabotage any administrative directive that might come down the pipeline–even "directives" that are the result of collaboration between teachers and administration.  This is the reality of teacher tenure; this is a principle reason why public school reform is so tortuously slow and incremental.

I've been an educator for 30 years–25 years in the classroom.  For all of that time I've been a passionate advocate of school reform, and have worked myself to death trying to improve my school.  I have very little to show for my efforts; the public high school where I have loyally taught and struggled for the past twenty-three years is only marginally better than it was when I first surfaced as a teacher advocate of reform.  There are of course many reasons for this failure (including, most assuredly, my own immaturity, narrow-mindedness, lack of charisma, etc.) but I believe the chief obstacle is a teacher culture that is ferociously self-defensive and combative, that has an enormous and legally justified sense of its rights and entitlements, that will not improve itself because it simply doesn't have to.

After five years in administration, my dreams of reform have come down to this:  that someday I may be given the power to fire a "good" teacher.  I know exactly how pathetic that sounds.  Nevertheless, I dream of someday being able to say to a teacher something along these lines:  "Susan, you are a great teacher; I love to see the way you interact with students, and you are pedagogically as sound as anyone on the staff.  But you have to stop mocking and opposing our school's efforts to implement XXX (fill in whatever:  standards-based grading, block scheduling, project-based learning, professional learning communities, data-driven decision-making, etc. etc. etc.).  This is the direction our school has decided to take; we've made the research and the rationale for going in that direction clear.  You must support us, you must do your best in this regard, and cease your outright opposition to what we're attempting to do.  If you don't, I'm not going to be able to renew your contract next year."  

For what it's worth, this is the sort of teacher I'd do everything in my power not to fire if I were a principal. Maybe the reader is right, and I am wrong. But one goal of mine as a principal would be to minimize the amount of time that good teachers had to spend in meetings and changing up what's working to meet school wide directives. Again, perhaps I'd think differently about this if I knew more!

by Conor Friedersdorf

James Joyner debunks its latest iteration.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I work in the web department for a large university, doing work for people who usually have no idea what I've done for them. As in the locksmith case, what matters is not how skilled I am or how much effort I've exerted, but how difficult the customer thinks my task is. Just this morning, I met with a customer whose new site I am building. I showed her some screenshots of a site that, altogether, took me only a few hours to build. But because she thought it took me much longer to do it, she was much more pleased with my work than she had any right to be.

Think about it. Aside from other locksmiths, how many people can watch a locksmith in action and know if he is doing a good job? People use cues to figure it out. For things like lock-picking and web design – services that most customers need infrequently or they'd figure it out themselves – people don't see it enough to know how it works, so they figure if it looks hard, it is hard.

So, in terms of customer satisfaction and demonstrating value, the key is to make things look harder than they actually are. 

by Conor Friederdsorf

One thing that would improve all human relationships is if everyone understood that when someone else says or does or fails to do something, they have their own reasons, shaped by their distinct approach to life. When they do x, it doesn't necessarily mean or imply the same thing as it would if you did x.

Sena, Thailand, 3.30 pm

by Conor Friedersdorf

Bad news from Pro Publica:

The White House is preparing an Executive Order on indefinite detention that will provide periodic reviews of evidence against dozens of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, according to several administration officials. The draft order, a version of which was first considered nearly 18 months ago, is expected to be signed by President Obama early in the New Year. The order allows for the possibility that detainees from countries like Yemen might be released if circumstances there change.

But the order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.

A broken campaign promise is the least of it.

Says Doug Mataconis:

Ruling by Executive Decree is not compatible with life in a democratic republic, and the failure of Congress to act here has been unconscionable.

Jazz Shaw:

Going through the details of this plan, a shorter translation might be, “We still oppose the policies of George W. Bush regarding indefinite detention without trial for any suspect, so we’re going to handle every aspect of the situation differently unless we can’t.”

Max Read:

On the plus side, now that we've abandoned even the pretense of a commitment to universal civil rights, no one will ever die in a terrorist attack.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I used to teach and this mantra( Fire bad teachers) I have heard for years as the panacea to solve all education woes. The difficulty is in identifying which teachers are the worst in an environment with thousands of demands (each student, parent, administrator…has a different opinion as to what is a good teacher!!).  I have also wondered why corporate America doesn't embrace this philosophy as well, why are there not bottom blows to companies every year to eliminate those under-performing people, surely they could benefit from the same policies!!  And how many times have you seen completely incompetent people rise to the very top of organizations!! 

I dissent.

The very worst teachers are the ones who assault students, regularly show up late, or are consistently labeled underperforming by administrators, peers, and students alike. As it stands, even these teachers cannot be easily fired. In corporate America, there are a lot of companies that fire the worst performers. Jack Welch famously ranked every employee at GE annually and fired the bottom 10 percent. It's true that empirically determining teacher performance is a thorny question. I'd answer it by giving principals wide discretion. Even if they treat a teacher unfairly, they only control a single school. There are lots of schools. (Test scores strike me as an imprudent method of evaluation.)

Almost every industry in America rates the performance of its employees in imperfect ways. Under the status quo, government employees are afforded more job security than almost anyone else. It's no wonder that managers in government face an almost impossible task when trying to improve the organizations they run. If a reform improves our public school system but results in some teachers being unfairly fired as collateral damage that is a tradeoff we should be willing to make. Right? And the other aspect of reform I suggested – paying good teachers more – ought to compensate for the decrease in job security.

Another reader writes:

It is incredible to me that he, like so many do, suggests that the only resolution to badly performing teachers is to get rid of them. Other professionals are not treated this way. Corporations spend enormous amounts on training (for all of their staff) and performance improvement programs (for under-performers), because it is more efficient than firing and hiring. If you fire and hire, you're quite likely to end up with someone just as under-performing as the person you just let go. Why is it better to do it differently for teachers, apart from the opportunity for self-righteous grand-standing against unions?

My experience of the private sector is that poor performers are fired rather than retrained. And it is uncontestable that if we look at the contract provisions that restrict principal decisionmaking, public employees are exceptional in being more difficult to fire than their private sector and non-union counterparts.

I'd say this to the readers who disagree with me. Imagine that you are hiring a babysitter to watch your children for a few hours each afternoon, or a tutor to help them with homework, or even someone to teach you guitar or French. (Beautiful language! Very useful to know if you're traveling in Africa.) I'd be right if I told you, "There isn't any way to accurately gauge the performance of a babysitter. A tutor might not have helped your kid pass their math test, but perhaps it's the fault of the child. As for your French teacher, I know she made a pass at you, but if you gave her a written warning she might not do it again."

In these examples, surely you see how burdensome restrictions about who you could hire, and whether you could fire them, would make it radically more difficult for you to settle upon the right person for the job?

by Patrick Appel

DADT repeal has been signed:

The video begins mid-speech. Here's some important context:

Obama told the emotional story of Lloyd Corwin, a member of Patton's third army who was injured during the Battle of the Bulge. Corwin tumbled 40 feet down the slope of an icy ravine and was left to die. But one soldier scaled down the icy slope and risked his own life amidst the gunfire all in an attempt to save his friend.

That man was Andy Lee, and four decades after the war, he admitted to Corwin that he was gay. Corwin didn't find that revelation important, Obama said.