Chris Brooke provides some anecdotal evidence that the Atkins diet may not be all it is cracked up to be. Pollard is not much thinner than before the diet and looks… well, considerably less cheerful. Or maybe, as Chris hints in a comment, this testimony followed his incredibly disappointing evening at a local restaraunt.
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Harry
A couple of weeks ago the DfES released its annual school league tables (don’t switch off, American readers, this matters to you). The tables have a new component: a ‘value added’ score, which is supposed to show not how well the children performed but how well the school taught them. The presentation of the league tables in the papers I saw stayed with the ‘raw score’ ranking, but included information about the ‘value-added’: presumably some papers did it the other way round.
The ‘value-added’ score is represented by a single number. This, in itself, makes it difficult to understand. The statisticians have devised a way of weighting vocational and academic achievements against each other, and any such weighting is going to be subject to dispute. The use of a single number also masks within-school inequalities: a school with a lousy Maths department can still get a good score if it has an excellent English department. But for an individual parent choosing a school this difference might matter a great deal: my own daughter’s writing and reading skills will develop fine if she is taught English by gibbons; her math and science skills need teaching by a good teacher.
There are also more technical reasons for being skeptical about the scores. Harvey Goldstein of the Institute of Education, the world’s expert on value-added evaluation of schools, has finally posted his commentary on the new tables, and it is (like all his commentaries) essential reading. The central problem, as I read it, is the issue of pupil mobility — we know that the extent of pupil mobility affects learning, but we don’t know how much, and furthermore we have no way of evaluating the extent to which schools themselves are responsible for pupil mobility. The DfES tables simply ignore the problem.
Why does this matter for Americans?
About 43 minutes into the end-of-year Mike Harding show, he plays Roaring Jelly’s ‘Valerie Wilkins’. Great, but not their best — BedBug, Babylon, and Christmas In Australia are all superior. I saw them once, and taped their last ever session (with Stuart Hall of all people) off Radio 2 sometime in the 80’s and STUPIDLY taped an episode of My Music over it several years later. My mother sold both my Roaring Jelly records which I never managed to put on tape, and anyway I now have no way to play vinyl. How does one lobby to get a CD of their work brought out?
I see from the BBC that the Charities Bill is really going to force private schools to prove that they are charities in order to claim charitable status. I had heard about this before, but never imagined it would get this far. The story says that:
bq. The Charities Bill says schools charging fees will have to demonstrate how their activities help the public. The Independent Schools Council (ISC) said its members saved the tax payer £2bn a year in education costs. Independent watchdog the Charity Commission will decide on the parameters of the term “public benefit”.
Good for New Labour….
I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me, but here goes. It’s teaching evaluation season again. Students fill out forms at the end of class rating their teachers on a range of qualities, and we carefully tot up the numbers (or rather, some computer does). I think this is nice for the students, and, so that I get something useful out of it, I ask them specifically to comment on issues concerning teaching style and topics in the course (I had one topic in my contemporary moral issues course this term that I definitely thought didn’t work, and was interested to see if they agreed). My department prides itself on maintaining reasonable teaching standards, and we take the evaluations pretty seriously when it comes to merit raises. I should preface these negative comments by saying there is no sour grapes here: my evaluations tend to be good, in fact better than I think I deserve and better than any other mechanism of evaluation would produce for me. Here are some observations.
Bill Gardner has another, more lengthy, post on Michael Marmot’s The Status Syndrome. He quickly reviews the evidence for Marmot’s thesis that there is a social gradient in health. Marmot is pretty persuasive (to Bill and me anyway) that the social gradient in health is not explicable by appeal to the idea that healthier people move socially upward. What is more conjectural is Marmot’s claim that the explanation lies in the fact that people who find themselves lower down the social scale have less ‘autonomy’. Bill explores what autonomy might mean in this context.
I’m again disallowing comments, in an authoritarian manner, to force you to discuss it at Bill’s blog.
The latest issue of Education Next has three interesting articles on teacher pay in the US. All three articles attack the uniform salary schedule that is standard in union contracts. Teachers are normally compensated according to three indicators: years of service, numbers of university credits earned, and the welath of their district’s tax base. This means teachers who are better, or in shortage subjects, or work in schools for which it is more difficult to recruit teachers, are not paid more. Gym teachers get paid the same as Math teachers, despite the fact that it is much more difficult to recruit qualified Math teachers; inner citiy teachers get paid less than suburban teahcers even though it is more difficult to recruit to inner city schools.
Al three articles suggest alternatives to the current arrangements, and the first, by Brad Jupp, a Denver union leader, describes the real alternative they have established in Denver. He reports the interesting finding that his own members strongly supported merit pay:
bq. Though Denver had a typical salary schedule (see Figure 1) our data overthrow many of the preconceived notions held by teacher unions, school administrators, policy leaders, and opinion makers about how teachers perceive compensation systems. Since 1998 our union has asked its members what they thought about incentives for “teaching at schools with the highest percentage of high-need students.” By 2003, when the last available survey was conducted, the number of people favoring these incentives had reached 89 percent. The percentage of teachers who favor incentives for “teaching in content areas of short supply” is only slightly less, at 82 percent.
So, to put my cards on the table, I’m completely in favour of paying Math teachers more than Gym teachers, and English teachers more than Guidance Counsellors (not only because I’m married to one, either). I’m also strongly in favour of paying inner city schoolteachers more than suburban teachers. But I am very sceptical, not on principled but on practical grounds, of proposals for paying better teachers more than worse teachers. Here’s why:
A while ago Chris reported that Michael Marmot was the star of one of the Priority in Practice conferences that Jo Wolff has been organizing. Marmot’s book The Status Syndrome has now been out for a few months, and lives up to Chris’s billing: even for those who were aware of the Whitehall studies and have been thinking through their significance for how to think both about egalitarianism in theory and social policy in practice will find it a very valuable read. Bill Gardner, who guested here in the week before the election, has an initial post reviewing the book at his excellent Maternal and Child Health site, and promises more. A taste:
bq. Marmot’s fundamental empirical finding is that there is a social gradient in health, that is, when you group people according to their places in social hierarchies, you find better health and greater longevity in each successively higher class. His classic work studied the British civil service. He placed civil servants into four grades: administrators who set policy, executives who carry it out, clerical staff, and support personnel. There was a four-fold greater mortality rate from ages 40-64 for support personnel versus administrators. This was a large effect, and much larger than the difference in mortality rates related to conventional measures of social class. Why should the gradient in mortality be larger within one organization than within society as a whole? In Marmot’s view, the British civil service organization chart allowed him to measure individuals’ control over their own lives and their subjection to the control of others more precisely than conventional measures of social-economic status.
bq. Marmot argues that the principal explanation for the status syndrome is not relative income, not higher rates of health-risk behaviors among the lower classes, and not status-related differences in genes. Income, heath-related behavior, and genes are all important determinants of health, but their effects are largely independent of the effect of your place in the social hierarchy and only partially explain the social gradient. What matters is autonomy:
bq. for people above a certain material threshold of well-being, another sort of well-being is central. Autonomy – how much control you have over your life – and the opportunities you have for full social engagement and participation are crucial for health, well-being, and longevity. It is inequality in these that plays a big part in the social gradient in health. Degrees in control and participation underlie the status syndrome.
Laura’s been running a three part review of Mary Ebersatdt’s Home Alone America. Eberstadt’s argument is that women entering the workforce has done untold damage to America’s children. Laura doesn’t exactly savage the book, and hasn’t even persuaded me not to read it, but the review is very interesting, and so are the discussions (now that she has her own comments section). Go there and discuss.
The National Council of Churches has issued a nice statement on the refusal of NBC and CBS to air the bizarrely controversial advertisement by the United Church of Christ.
bq. Advocacy advertising abounds on TV: agribusinesses, drug manufacturers, gambling casinos, oil companies, even some government agencies regularly expose viewers to messages advocating their products and programs, in the interest of shaping public attitudes and building support for their points of view.
bq. Are only the ideas and attitudes of faith groups now off limits? Constitutional guarantees of religious liberty and freedom of speech, not to mention common fairness, beg for leadership by the FCC to assure that America’s faith community has full and equal access to the nation’s airwaves, to deliver positive messages that seek to build and enrich the quality of life.
If you watch evening network TV you may well, I suppose, think that such an ad would be completely out of place — there are no grisly murders, no-one has sex with someone they don’t know, there is no irrational anger, and the bouncers do not physically assault the people they turn away. Even the humiliation of the rejected congregants is mild compared with that heaped on numerous participants in reality shows. I suppose that is what makes the ad so controversial. Or perhaps it is part of a conspiracy to improve UCC’s visibility. If you want to help pile on to the networks, UCC has some suggestions here. Oh, and if you’re not American, and don’t live in the States, please watch the ad; it’ll cheer you up.
Thanks to the comments of CTers my Christmas Cake worked out pretty well; it would have been perfect if I hadn’t taken it into my head to go to the Urgent Care center to have my pneumonia diagnosed during the baking time. I assumed the visit would take less than the 3 hours my cake still had to go, but I was wrong because for the first hour everybody seemed to be watching the Badger game on TV instead of working. My wife let it bake the full 4 hours; whereas I would probably have taken it out after 3 1/2. Oh well.
So, it being Thanksgiving, I decided to make my own mincemeat for a mince pie to take to the Analytical Marxist’s house (our usual Thanksgiving destination). According to the Joy of Cooking mince pie used to be as pervasive at Thanksgiving as the utterly revolting Pumpkin Pie now is, so I feel it is my duty to reclaim the tradition. I looked at 3 different recipes on the internet, two from Rose Elliot, and the ingredients list on my jar of Tesco’s Finest mincemeat and came up with the following recipe. It is very boozy indeed, as you’ll tell and, if I say so myself, surprisingly good. It is also more-or-less fat free (the AM cannot have fat except for olive and walnut oils, so I am going to risk all and see if I can make a small pie with walnut oil as shortening; and make a larger one with proper pastry and a large amount of butter to fatten up the mince). The recipe below made a enough mincemeat for a small pie, a large pie, and a bunch of individual pies I shall be offering to my political philosophy class after they have done their evaluations (so don’t tell them).
Alabama’s Amendment 2 is due for a recount on November 29th, because the vote was so close, but most commentators apparently expect it to be defeated. For those who weren’t paying attention, Amendment 2 would revoke the post-Brown constitutional amendment passed to mandate segregated education, impose a poll tax, and, most cruelly, specify that Alabama’s children have no right to a state funded education. Of course, revoking it would not guarantee a right to a state-funded education, but a central, and spurious, argument in the campaign against Amendment 2 was that revoking it would provoke lawsuits claiming that the state’s unequal provision of education was unconstitutional. Leading the charge against the Amendment: the Christian coalition. Russell Arben Fox has a lengthy and excellent discussion of the case and its implications. Although myself an atheist, I have found Russell’s post-election thoughts very helpful. His thesis, which I share, is that progressives would do better to relate to evangelicals and their ilk in new and different ways. The Amendment 2 story is good ammunition for those who disagree with us. Is there an upside? I can’t think of one, though it is notable, that, again, Governer Bob Riley is more-or-less on the side of human decency.
(I’ve turned off comments because you should be discussing this at Russell’s place).
The election, kid’s birthday party, and work in general, have delayed my Christmas Cake making to the coming weekend. Still, I’m now on track for Saturday morning. Making Christmas Cake generates several challenges. The first is the absence of edible glace cherries (which tend to be way too sweet here, if you can manage to find them) and appropriate chopped peel (can’t get the Whitworth’s kind, just candied muck). I overcame these problems last year rather well, by substituting dried cherries and dried strawberries. Expensive, but worth it. The second is keeping it moist enough. I’ve finally acknowledged that our oven overcooks everything, so am just doing everything at 50 degrees lower, and a bit longer — hope it will work. I’m also going to add more butter than my recipe says (I use Katie Stewart’s from the 1975 edition of the Times Calendar Cookery Book). But the unsolved problem is how to get it boozy enough. She demands just two tablespoons of brandy, which is nowhere near enough for a 3lb cake; so I have been doubling it the past couple of years, as well as sprinkling it over the cake sporadically in the weeks before Christmas. Still not enough. Should I be soaking the fruit in brandy beforehand? Should I be using even more brandy? Does anyone have experience of adding Port? While I am in my non-cake eating life all-but-a-teetotaller, I like boozy cake, but am constrained by the fact that I don’t want it to be so boozy that my kids will reject it. Advice? (And if anyone can tell me an easy way of getting edible glace cherries and Whitworth mixed peel in the Midwest that’d be great too).
Update: here’s the recipe (as modified by me from Katie Stewart):
This is old news for many, but some may have missed it in the blanket election coverage. Target has decided not to allow the Sally Army to collect outside its doors this winter. I have no particular affection for the Salvation Army, but I shop with my kids a lot, and I like them to see people colecting for charity in the midst of the commercial horrors of Christmas. Since I raise them in an atheist household I also believe that I have an obligation to ensure that they are exposed to a wide range of non-atheist viewpoints and practices, and welcome them seeing positive images of religious life. I also resent the power that large corporations like Target have over the public space. Some critics of this decision suggest lobbying Target to include the SA among its charitable partners; I don’t, because I see no reason to filter individual charity through corporate entities. Instead, I fired off an email, expressing disappointment, to Guest.Relations@target.com. I invite you to do the same, and perhaps to encourage others. The text of my email is below the fold: please modify according to your situation.
Nothing on the election or the war from me. Instead, a mention of one of my favourite radio comedies, Men From the Ministry. My younger daughter gave a CD with numerous episodes to my elder daughter for her 8th birthday; the look on the elder’s face was one of unalloyed joy when she realised what it was. UK readers of a certain age know what I’m talking about. But the Finnish readers, lucky things, know what I am talking about regardless of their age. Extraordinary. The rest of you, if you have 30 minutes to spare, can learn why you should envy the Finns by clicking here. Only in English, not Finnish. Sorry.
For those of you who think your tastes are more sophisticated, Radio 4 is running a 4-part life of Peter Cook, the funniest Englishman who ever lived, presented by Michael Palin, who now, sadly, has one competitor fewer for the title of the nicest Englishman alive. The first part will be available till Friday. If your candidate loses tomorrow, it’ll cheer you up. If you don’t know before Friday, listen anyway.