Harry

Well, that was depressing. My fellow Wisconsinites managed to replace the best Senator in the US senate with a ninny — I’d have been happy to have the Dems lose control of the Senate in return for keeping Feingold, personally. By contrast, at least the voters in Racine had the sense to retain our best State Assemblyperson in the face of a massive Republican effort to defeat him.

But, in the light of Daniel’s post below, I’m very curious what the the opponents of his argument (and there are many) are thinking about Florida. Cheers to the Democrats and their voters for throwing the race to Rubio! Well done, chaps! Update: when I checked the numbers Rubio was still polling slightly under 50%, but now I see he got just over 50%, so maybe it wasn’t thrown.

(Preface: if you, sensibly enough, want to avoid my rambling and get straight to the point, just go and read Richard Rothstein on the Rhee/Klein manifesto now. Update: a nice related post, which will now be followed by interesting discussion, at Laura’s).

I’ve managed to resist seeing Waiting For Superman so far. The trailers promise me that I won’t like it much. My wife gets a free showing on Wednesday, so she can report to me. Ironically, the book on which it is apparently based, Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes, is really not at all bad. It is true that, as a friend of mine said, “He has drunk the Kool-Aid”. But unlike many Kool-Aid drinkers (and there are a lot of them, I gather), he displays pretty clearly all the evidence you need in order to judge its toxicity. His account of the social science around low-end academic achievement is pretty careful, and entirely readable, and the narrative is well paced, and the story informative. For Tough, urban school districts need more Promise Academies and KIPP schools. I tend to be in the, “lets try it and see if it works” camp myself, though with an emphasis on actually trying to figure out whether it really does work. More than any academic study I have seen, Tough’s book makes me sceptical. He makes clear that Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, became obsessed with driving up test scores. Remember “test scores” means “math and reading test scores”. From a low base it is not that difficult to drive them up — simply restrict your attention to driving them up and allow math and reading to be the more or less exclusive focus of the curriculum. This is what he did, with modest effects on reading scores (which are harder to manipulate by teaching to the test) and greater effects on math scores. It really may be that for these kids improving their math skills somewhat and their reading skills slightly is the best thing for them (though, whereas there is a correlation between test scores and later success, we don’t have any evidance that improving children’s test scores improves later outcomes, and we have lots of evidence that these bumps in test scores from grade-specific interventions typically fade pretty quickly). Maybe, maybe not. Whether any child in that school actually learned more, or anything more useful, as a result of this, we have no way of knowing.

Back to the movie.

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Regular commenter Tom Hurka expressed complete dismay a couple of years ago when I told him that I hadn’t seen any live music for 16 years or so (the last concert being Pentangle at the late lamented Palms in Davis CA). I did nothing to correct this omission at the time. But in February one of my undergraduate students invited me to go see her and her dad perform together at a local coffee shop: the kids (who know her a little as a babysitter) were riveted, so much so that the girls wouldn’t leave, and forced me to come back and pick them up an hour after we’d had to leave with the little horror (quite understandably, as you can tell from listening to her here — our horror was singing Jolene, with most of the lyrics gleaned from a single hearing, for months afterward, and her version of “Bad Romance” inspired our 13 year old to start playing Lady GaGa songs on the ukulele at her school talent shows). This experience prompted my wife to say we should go to live music sometimes which, indeed, we have started doing (our first outing, oddly enough, being to see Neil Young, supported by Bert Jansch who, therefore, constituted the bookends to our long drought of live music, and there’s no-one I’d sooner play that role).

So we went to see Suzanne Vega last night, with a couple of friends. I had completely forgotten that I once owned her first two albums (when they were actual records), and was therefore surprised to find that I knew about half the songs she sang, rather than just the three hits I had in my head. The venue was what I think they call “intimate” — in other words, she can’t have made much money from it (I reckon there were around 300 people in a 500 capacity theater, with tickets selling at $30 each, and she is touring with a sound mixer, a bassist, a guitarist and someone else). Anyway, she was great — her voice still pure, her songs good enough to please my wife and our friends, none of whom had as much prior interest as I did, and, most surprisingly, her stage persona quite at odds with the tenor of her songs. While the songs are reserved, reflective and not really cheerful for the most part, she is, herself, funny, self-deprecating but confident, and relaxed. After listening to a somewhat harrowing song the audience would burst out laughing at her stories and jokes.

She was promoting a series of retrospective albums that started coming out a few months ago. The second is released tomorrow, but, looking for it, I saw that the mp3 version of Close-Up, Vol 2, People and Places (Deluxe Edition) is for sale for only $3.99, today and tomorrow only. Worth it, if you have fond memories of her. UPDATE: I found a plausible explanation of the economics of the tour and album here.

For those of us of a certain age, Sunday afternoons were spent watching old films on telly (where on earth were our parents, I wonder?). The best films starred Jack Hawkins or George Formby, but for me the most keenly anticipated were Norman Wisdom’s films. It was only for Wisdom that I noted the time in the Radio Times to be sure to see the whole thing. Looking back, I imagine they all had the same plot, and the same jokes, and the same pratfalls. But who cared? They were all funny, all innocent, all brilliant. Sorry to see him go. But glad that the DVD revolution means I can watch whenever I want. Guardian obit here. Clips, wonderfully arranged, here. Brian Logan’s appreciation.

I’ve been enjoying Duckworth Lewis Method (UK) with the kids for months now. To be honest I had never even heard of Pugwash before, and The Divine Comedy was just a name on a bunch of posters, not a band/person I knew anything about, so it took me a while to get hold of the album. But it is fabulous, full of catchy tunes, melancholic reflection on the game, and sometimes wry humour. For a while my youngest knew the whole of “Meeting Mr Miandad” by heart. My favourite is “Mason on the Boundary”, which somehow makes me think of the last time I was at the Parks (with Swift and my dad), when I caught glimpse of an elderly man in an MCC tie, whose name tag revealed him to be the godfather of a childhood friend, someone whose exploits around the commonwealth were the stuff of legend in said friend’s family. Almost certainly most of it working for her majesty, if you know what I mean. I didn’t say “hi”. There’s even an indirect tribute to CLR James (in “The Age of Revolution”). That the two best books about cricket are by North American marxists is just about ok; that the best songs are by two Irishmen is odd.

Anyway, my eldest daughter, the only one who has watched a lot of cricket, and who was for a while a fan of a certain leg spinner, laughed out loud when she got to the end of “Jiggery Pokery” for the first time. A whole song about a single ball? Gatting must be mortified. And now, with the approval of Mr Duckworth and Mr Lewis, a 14 year old girl called Claire has made an animated video for it.

And here, though you have to wait a bit (30 seconds in), is the ball in question:

Over at In Socrates’ Wake (a blog about teaching in philosophy, to which I’ve recently started contributing) we’ve been running a seminar on Martha Nussbaum’s new book Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (UK ). I’ll write a more substantial review here shortly, but it’s well worth reading my ISW colleagues’ takes on it (and the book itself, which I recommend highly — on the back cover no less). Here are the posts so far, in chronological order: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

Michael Cholbi at In Socrates’ Wake is looking for input on a survey on the relative advantages and disadvantages of the semester and quarter systems. His institution is considering a switch from quarters to semesters. If you have experience of both, please fill it in.

Open thread.

Education Next is celebrating its tenth birthday with a poll to uncover which are the most important education books of the decade. The short list of 40 titles is curious (and what is curiouser, given EN’s political leanings, is that Linda Darling-Hammond’s and Diane Ravitch’s books are currently way ahead of the pack). Several, but I’ll only single out Karen Chenoweth’s It’s Being Done, and Jay Mathews’ Work Hard, Be Nice, really have no business on any such list at all. Others (like David Cohen and Susan Moffitt’s outstanding book The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools?) belong but are not being voted for, presumably because they are too new to have actually been read by the readership, whereas others still (like Goldin and Katz’s equally brilliant The Race between Education and Technology) are faring badly because they do not have a colon in the title. (So, go vote for them, now, they’re both great).

The striking thing is that several key books, some of which must be contenders, are missing. Regular readers will be able to guess the three absentees which top my list, and which would have competed only with The Ordeal of Equality for my permitted three votes if they’d been there. But to ensure there’s no mystery, here they are:

1. Richard Rothstein, Class And Schools: Using Social, Economic, And Educational Reform To Close The Black-white Achievement Gap must have outsold all but two or three of the books on the list, and has more google scholar citations than any of the ten books on the short list that I looked up (it’s discussed here (which should explain why It’s Being Done doesn’t belong on the list) and here)

2. Again Richard Rothstein, this time with Tamara Wilder and Rebecca Jacobson, Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (discussed here)

Ravitch’s likely winning entry draws on very heavily on both of the above books, so, really, they must be important if hers is.

3. CT favourite, Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (discussed here and lauded here).

Perhaps it was the curse of a positive Brighouse mention on CT that sunk them (but then why is The Global Achievement Gap on the list?). Feel free to recommend other absentees from the list in comments.

At a meeting of teacher’s union chapter leaders I attended recently to talk about Race to the Top, I was struck by two things: one was how open they were in private about the fact that current ways of evaluating teachers are appallingly bad; the other was how hungry they were for a clearer understanding of how evaluation of teachers using test scores (one of the things States were strongly encouraged to include in their Race applications) would work. I gave my modest attempt to explain how it would work and why it was a bad idea. Now, fortunately, they can discard my critique, and get the real thing. Authors including Richard Rothstein, Helen Ladd, Diane Ravitch, and several eminent psychometricians (including Richard Shavelson, Ed Haertel and Lorrie Shepard) have made an unanswerable (but, as the authors certainly know, eminently ignorable) case against using test scores, even value added modeling methods, to evaluate teachers (here). Here’s the executive summary:

Every classroom should have a well-educated, professional teacher, and school systems should recruit, prepare, and retain teachers who are qualified to do the job. Yet in practice, American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers. Many policy makers have recently come to believe that this failure can be remedied by calculating the improvement in students’ scores on standardized tests in mathematics and reading, and then relying heavily on these calculations to evaluate, reward, and remove the teachers of these tested students.

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Bob Harris’s 40th anniversary show, here for a few more days. Extraordinary story about David Jacobs and his mum.

Forum Futures 2010 just went online. It contains summaries/write ups of the presentations made at last year’s meeting of the Forum on the Future of Higher Education. My own contribution, on ethical leadership in higher education, which will contain no surprises for people who have been reading what I’ve been saying about higher ed issues over the past year or two, is here. More interesting are this contribution on a remarkable technology for improving learning outcomes in math science and stats classes, and this piece by Sandy Baum on fairness in college admissions (which is a partner to my own contribution).

I see, with great sadness, that Brian O’Shaughnessy has died, aged 84. (obit here). Brian was my teacher at Bedford College and then at Kings College when our department merged with theirs. We had a brief correspondence a year or so ago, after I mentioned him in a CT thread and Swift send me an email saying that he grew up next door to him. In my first email to him I mentioned something that I’d assumed he had forgotten, and which I’ll tell now.

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I’m sure I first heard Joan Rivers the same way I did Bob Newhart and Woody Allen, on Frank Muir Goes Into… but she never entered my consciousness really till I moved to LA in the mid-80s and started seeing her on daytime TV. I found her captivating — the only thing on TV worth watching a lot of the time. Rude, self-deprecating, very funny, and very clever. So when Swift and I wandered past a theater showing her new movie last night we decided, whimsically, to go in after dinner.

I’d recommend it to just about anybody over 21. It certainly deserves to be seen by a wider audience than the scattering of old Jewish women and two middle-aged Englishmen who saw it in our theater. At first, Rivers simply appears to be a grotesque — right from the opening shot, through the introduction to her diminished life, whining about her lack of success and how it sucks being old. But slowly, gradually, the film humanizes her, never refraining from showing the warts. It is also very funny (not least because she is very funny).

Googling her afterwards I found this delightful profile from which comes this plausible, but odd, story:

As we wait for it to start, she tells me a story about Prince Charles, with whom she has been friends for several years. (“Not inner circle,” she says. “Outer-inner circle.”) HRH sends her a Christmas gift every year, which, more than once, has been two very fancy teacups. “One year,” she says, “I took a picture under my Christmas tree with the teacups and wrote, ‘How could you send me two teacups when I’m alone?’ Another time I wrote, ‘I’m enjoying tea with my best friend!’ and I sent a picture of me in a cemetery. And he never acknowledges it! He never says to me when I see him”—doing his accent perfectly—“ ‘Ohhhh, funny funny funny!’ So this year I thought, I’m just going to write him a nice thank-you note. And the other day our mutual friend calls and says, ‘Just spoke to Charles! He said, “I can’t wait to see Joan’s note this year!” ’ ”