Still Hating America.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
almost everyone who voted for Bush in 2000 supported the Iraq war, and so did a high percentage of the people that voted for Gore. Does that mean you agree the war made sense?

I regret that both issues have become polarized along political grounds, although that this happened in the case of the Iraq War was not exactly an accident, as you may recall.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
You are subtle. I take it your point was to show by example that when it comes to science the lay person (here you in the guise of poster trying to be smart assed) is too poorly educated to understand what he is talking about so he has to take the word of his choosen clergy, the scientists.

I think I get your point and agree - we ought to look more at clear, unmanipulable evidence as to what is going on, and not base our assessment on ideological positions.

For example, I have always gotten comfort that Bush knew how to handle the economy because of the stock market performance during his term.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
That link was wrong -- try this one. The post has not been updated to refer to studies suggesting that teachers unions generally improve student performance (!).

Well that is the last time I ever check out a link you post. Why did you think this post had any credibility (or think it was it was something people should look at, or that it in any way supported the assertion that Unions help schools) before it contained any actual evidence? What possible value could this link have without the supporting evidence? Why waste anyone's time with it? I keep thinking that at some point you might link to something that is credible, relevant or at least partially coherent. You are like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Not only was it a Blog, but a Blog whose posters are less analytical and rational than most idiots who usually post to Blogs. However, I did like Kleimans summary of the general content of Blogs:

"all of us have been respectful of the rules of blogging. That is, we have refrained from offering any actual evidence (as opposed to raw assertion, plausible argument and anecdote) for our respective positions.

Now I know why you hang out in the Blogosphere so much Ty. You don't like actual evidence and plausible arguments; you just like anecdotes, raw assertions and emotional diatribes.

Here is the actual Blog posting Ty linked to (Ty - What section of all this crap did you actually think would benefit a rational discussion about education reform?)


February 25, 2007
Firing teachers: the evidence
Posted by Mark Kleiman
In the discussion among Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Mickey Kaus, and me over the importance (vel non) of making it easier for principals to fire teachers, all of us have been respectful of the rules of blogging. That is, we have refrained from offering any actual evidence (as opposed to raw assertion, plausible argument and anecdote) for our respective positions. But a reader who is a teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, reminds me that the experiment has been done: in most of the anti-union south, teachers have little or no protection against arbitrary dismissal.

I am a teacher in a very large school district in metro Atlanta where the superintendent and school board threaten any teacher that tries to move out of her obedient servile position under their feet. We have formed a teachers' group, The Teachers' Alliance of Gwinnett, just to have a seat at the table. It is non-union, but still teachers are being harrassed if they are suspected of being part of the group.

I have worked in the public school system in Georgia for 15 years and do plan to leave now. Still, in the South, teachers have no protection already. Our principals are political appointees and yes-men.


Ignore the rhetoric for the moment and concentrate on the fact: The tyranny of the teachers' unions is not universal! There are places where it's as easy for a principal to fire a bad teacher (or, of course, a good one) as it is for a Wal-Mart manager to dump a union organizer.

No coddling teachers: that must be the reason the South leads the country in educational attainment, and in particular why Georgia's students so outperform students from union-ridden Massachusetts and New York.

Oh, wait ....

Footnote I don't have any problem saying that I would prefer a solution that wouldn't terminally piss off the teachers' unions, because the unions help Democrats win elections and I like it when Democrats win elections. That doesn't mean I'm not willing to support programs the unions dislike if they're necessary to the program of improving public education; only that, other things equal, I'd rather find a modus vivendi than start a civil war.

How about Mickey? Will he 'fess up to the fact that, like Bill Bennett, he'd much rather smash the unions than improve the schools? And that he demands that Democratic candidates diss the unions for the same reason I demand that Republican candidates diss the TV preachers: because it's a good way to break up what could otherwise be a winning electoral coalition?

Once he's done that, he can start thinking about why, in the face of the past six years, he still wants Democrats to lose elections, even if he doesn't really want Republicans to win them.

Update In case it wasn't entirely clear: the chain of reasoning "Massachusetts has teachers' unions, and its students score better than students from Georgia, which mostly doesn't" is snark, not social science. Too much else is different.

I checked with my colleague Meredith Phillips, who reports that to her knowledge (and Meredith sees all, knows all) the right sort of statistical study, controlling for the relevant background variables, has never been done. That seems odd.

Second Update Tom Sgouros of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter writes:

It might seem odd that there has been no study done, but that's really because there have been many. I can't vouch for your friend's standards, but it's wrong to say that this research hasn't been done, where researchers tried to control for other effects.
Eberts and Stone (1988) were the first of the decent studies I found,
where they tried to control for other variables, but there's also
Milkman (1998) and Argys and Rees (1995). There are a bunch of bad
studies, too, that include comparisons of entire states. These show
high union performance, but they're ridiculous.

The decent studies show that the average performance of students is
pretty clearly improved by unions. There are equivocal, or slightly
negative effects at the top and bottom of the student achievement
scales, but the overall positive effect is repeatable, significant and
measurable, even after controlling for everything education researchers know how to control for.

You can find citations to the studies I mention, and a bit more detail
in an annotated bibliography I put together for a Rhode Island teacher union last year.


I've passed Sgouros's study along to Meredith Phillips for review.

If anyone who believes — as I'm inclined to — that the difficulty of getting rid of bad teachers is a contributor to poor school performance has any actual evidence for that view, I'd be happy to share it.

As long as we're trying for social science, as opposed to snark, let's note that "unionization" probably isn't the right independent variable; what we want is some measure of the difficulty of firing a teacher, which might be measured in hours of effort by the principal or months of elaspsed time between the beginning and the end of the firing process.

In a quick conversation today, Meredith suggested that a convincing study would have to look at districts where the independent variable had changed for some exogenous reason; otherwise you'd be left with the suspicion that easy-fire districts and hard-fire districts varied on some unmeasured dimension that also correlated with school performance. For example, if districts where the teachers hate the principals, and vice versa, tend to evolve union contracts or administrative procedures to protect teachers from arbitrary firing, and if such districts also tend to have badly-performing schools, then protections will turn out to correlate with poor performance, even if there is no actual causal link.

All this illustrates an under-appreciated point: good policy-relevant social science is really, really hard, and ought to be left to really, really smart people such as Meredith. That's why I mostly confine myself to policy analysis and snark, which are much easier.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
This is a good idea -- we should ask some qualified "judges" to speak about the risks and causes of global warming.


Who would we appoint to this task, though? I would suggest we appoint an international panel of climate scientists.


Alternately, we could ask Michael Crichton what he thinks. I mean, Jurassic Park was pretty science-y, so he could have a voice worth hearing.

I don't know, how about a group of people that have made a least one accurate prediction before. How many tiimes do these idiots have to cry wolf before you realize they are full of it?

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
You are subtle. I take it your point was to show by example that when it comes to science the lay person (here you in the guise of poster trying to be smart assed) is too poorly educated to understand what he is talking about so he has to take the word of his choosen clergy, the scientists.

My point was this- is it true that Greenland was farmland 1000 years ago? do hurricaines come in 75 year cycles at the Gulf coast? You can't even read my plea without taking a biased approached to answering, albeit one that is uninformed and idiotic on its face, but still

No, just asking who you would propose as the judges.

I assume you want to be on the panel, as only you have sufficient knowledge or expertise to ask the questions you pose in the second paragraph.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Spanky
Well that is the last time I ever check out a link you post. Why did you think this post had any credibility (or think it was it was something people should look at, or that it in any way supported the assertion that Unions help schools) before it contained any actual evidence? What possible value could this link have without the supporting evidence? Why waste anyone's time with it? I keep thinking that at some point you might link to something that is credible, relevant or at least partially coherent. You are like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Not only was it a Blog, but a Blog whose posters are less analytical and rational than most idiots who usually post to Blogs. However, I did like Kleimans summary of the general content of Blogs:

"all of us have been respectful of the rules of blogging. That is, we have refrained from offering any actual evidence (as opposed to raw assertion, plausible argument and anecdote) for our respective positions.

Now I know why you hang out in the Blogosphere so much Ty. You don't like actual evidence and plausible arguments; you just like anecdotes, raw assertions and emotional diatribes.

Here is the actual Blog posting Ty linked to (Ty - What section of all this crap did you actually think would benefit a rational discussion about education reform?)


February 25, 2007
Firing teachers: the evidence
Posted by Mark Kleiman
In the discussion among Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Mickey Kaus, and me over the importance (vel non) of making it easier for principals to fire teachers, all of us have been respectful of the rules of blogging. That is, we have refrained from offering any actual evidence (as opposed to raw assertion, plausible argument and anecdote) for our respective positions. But a reader who is a teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, reminds me that the experiment has been done: in most of the anti-union south, teachers have little or no protection against arbitrary dismissal.

I am a teacher in a very large school district in metro Atlanta where the superintendent and school board threaten any teacher that tries to move out of her obedient servile position under their feet. We have formed a teachers' group, The Teachers' Alliance of Gwinnett, just to have a seat at the table. It is non-union, but still teachers are being harrassed if they are suspected of being part of the group.

I have worked in the public school system in Georgia for 15 years and do plan to leave now. Still, in the South, teachers have no protection already. Our principals are political appointees and yes-men.


Ignore the rhetoric for the moment and concentrate on the fact: The tyranny of the teachers' unions is not universal! There are places where it's as easy for a principal to fire a bad teacher (or, of course, a good one) as it is for a Wal-Mart manager to dump a union organizer.

No coddling teachers: that must be the reason the South leads the country in educational attainment, and in particular why Georgia's students so outperform students from union-ridden Massachusetts and New York.

Oh, wait ....

Footnote I don't have any problem saying that I would prefer a solution that wouldn't terminally piss off the teachers' unions, because the unions help Democrats win elections and I like it when Democrats win elections. That doesn't mean I'm not willing to support programs the unions dislike if they're necessary to the program of improving public education; only that, other things equal, I'd rather find a modus vivendi than start a civil war.

How about Mickey? Will he 'fess up to the fact that, like Bill Bennett, he'd much rather smash the unions than improve the schools? And that he demands that Democratic candidates diss the unions for the same reason I demand that Republican candidates diss the TV preachers: because it's a good way to break up what could otherwise be a winning electoral coalition?

Once he's done that, he can start thinking about why, in the face of the past six years, he still wants Democrats to lose elections, even if he doesn't really want Republicans to win them.

Update In case it wasn't entirely clear: the chain of reasoning "Massachusetts has teachers' unions, and its students score better than students from Georgia, which mostly doesn't" is snark, not social science. Too much else is different.

I checked with my colleague Meredith Phillips, who reports that to her knowledge (and Meredith sees all, knows all) the right sort of statistical study, controlling for the relevant background variables, has never been done. That seems odd.

Second Update Tom Sgouros of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter writes:

It might seem odd that there has been no study done, but that's really because there have been many. I can't vouch for your friend's standards, but it's wrong to say that this research hasn't been done, where researchers tried to control for other effects.
Eberts and Stone (1988) were the first of the decent studies I found,
where they tried to control for other variables, but there's also
Milkman (1998) and Argys and Rees (1995). There are a bunch of bad
studies, too, that include comparisons of entire states. These show
high union performance, but they're ridiculous.

The decent studies show that the average performance of students is
pretty clearly improved by unions. There are equivocal, or slightly
negative effects at the top and bottom of the student achievement
scales, but the overall positive effect is repeatable, significant and
measurable, even after controlling for everything education researchers know how to control for.

You can find citations to the studies I mention, and a bit more detail
in an annotated bibliography I put together for a Rhode Island teacher union last year.


I've passed Sgouros's study along to Meredith Phillips for review.

If anyone who believes — as I'm inclined to — that the difficulty of getting rid of bad teachers is a contributor to poor school performance has any actual evidence for that view, I'd be happy to share it.

As long as we're trying for social science, as opposed to snark, let's note that "unionization" probably isn't the right independent variable; what we want is some measure of the difficulty of firing a teacher, which might be measured in hours of effort by the principal or months of elaspsed time between the beginning and the end of the firing process.

In a quick conversation today, Meredith suggested that a convincing study would have to look at districts where the independent variable had changed for some exogenous reason; otherwise you'd be left with the suspicion that easy-fire districts and hard-fire districts varied on some unmeasured dimension that also correlated with school performance. For example, if districts where the teachers hate the principals, and vice versa, tend to evolve union contracts or administrative procedures to protect teachers from arbitrary firing, and if such districts also tend to have badly-performing schools, then protections will turn out to correlate with poor performance, even if there is no actual causal link.

All this illustrates an under-appreciated point: good policy-relevant social science is really, really hard, and ought to be left to really, really smart people such as Meredith. That's why I mostly confine myself to policy analysis and snark, which are much easier.

in his defense, remember, Ty is the product of public schools in a heavily unionized city.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
Well that is the last time I ever check out a link you post. Why did you think this post had any credibility (or think it was it was something people should look at, or that it in any way supported the assertion that Unions help schools) before it contained any actual evidence? What possible value could this link have without the supporting evidence? Why waste anyone's time with it? I keep thinking that at some point you might link to something that is credible, relevant or at least partially coherent. You are like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Not only was it a Blog, but a Blog whose posters are less analytical and rational than most idiots who usually post to Blogs. However, I did like Kleimans summary of the general content of Blogs:

"all of us have been respectful of the rules of blogging. That is, we have refrained from offering any actual evidence (as opposed to raw assertion, plausible argument and anecdote) for our respective positions.

Now I know why you hang out in the Blogosphere so much Ty. You don't like actual evidence and plausible arguments; you just like anecdotes, raw assertions and emotional diatribes.

Here is the actual Blog posting Ty linked to (Ty - What section of all this crap did you actually think would benefit a rational discussion about education reform?)


February 25, 2007
Firing teachers: the evidence
Posted by Mark Kleiman
In the discussion among Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Mickey Kaus, and me over the importance (vel non) of making it easier for principals to fire teachers, all of us have been respectful of the rules of blogging. That is, we have refrained from offering any actual evidence (as opposed to raw assertion, plausible argument and anecdote) for our respective positions. But a reader who is a teacher in Gwinnett County, Georgia, reminds me that the experiment has been done: in most of the anti-union south, teachers have little or no protection against arbitrary dismissal.

I am a teacher in a very large school district in metro Atlanta where the superintendent and school board threaten any teacher that tries to move out of her obedient servile position under their feet. We have formed a teachers' group, The Teachers' Alliance of Gwinnett, just to have a seat at the table. It is non-union, but still teachers are being harrassed if they are suspected of being part of the group.

I have worked in the public school system in Georgia for 15 years and do plan to leave now. Still, in the South, teachers have no protection already. Our principals are political appointees and yes-men.


Ignore the rhetoric for the moment and concentrate on the fact: The tyranny of the teachers' unions is not universal! There are places where it's as easy for a principal to fire a bad teacher (or, of course, a good one) as it is for a Wal-Mart manager to dump a union organizer.

No coddling teachers: that must be the reason the South leads the country in educational attainment, and in particular why Georgia's students so outperform students from union-ridden Massachusetts and New York.

Oh, wait ....

Footnote I don't have any problem saying that I would prefer a solution that wouldn't terminally piss off the teachers' unions, because the unions help Democrats win elections and I like it when Democrats win elections. That doesn't mean I'm not willing to support programs the unions dislike if they're necessary to the program of improving public education; only that, other things equal, I'd rather find a modus vivendi than start a civil war.

How about Mickey? Will he 'fess up to the fact that, like Bill Bennett, he'd much rather smash the unions than improve the schools? And that he demands that Democratic candidates diss the unions for the same reason I demand that Republican candidates diss the TV preachers: because it's a good way to break up what could otherwise be a winning electoral coalition?

Once he's done that, he can start thinking about why, in the face of the past six years, he still wants Democrats to lose elections, even if he doesn't really want Republicans to win them.

Update In case it wasn't entirely clear: the chain of reasoning "Massachusetts has teachers' unions, and its students score better than students from Georgia, which mostly doesn't" is snark, not social science. Too much else is different.

I checked with my colleague Meredith Phillips, who reports that to her knowledge (and Meredith sees all, knows all) the right sort of statistical study, controlling for the relevant background variables, has never been done. That seems odd.

Second Update Tom Sgouros of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter writes:

It might seem odd that there has been no study done, but that's really because there have been many. I can't vouch for your friend's standards, but it's wrong to say that this research hasn't been done, where researchers tried to control for other effects.
Eberts and Stone (1988) were the first of the decent studies I found,
where they tried to control for other variables, but there's also
Milkman (1998) and Argys and Rees (1995). There are a bunch of bad
studies, too, that include comparisons of entire states. These show
high union performance, but they're ridiculous.

The decent studies show that the average performance of students is
pretty clearly improved by unions. There are equivocal, or slightly
negative effects at the top and bottom of the student achievement
scales, but the overall positive effect is repeatable, significant and
measurable, even after controlling for everything education researchers know how to control for.

You can find citations to the studies I mention, and a bit more detail
in an annotated bibliography I put together for a Rhode Island teacher union last year.


I've passed Sgouros's study along to Meredith Phillips for review.

If anyone who believes — as I'm inclined to — that the difficulty of getting rid of bad teachers is a contributor to poor school performance has any actual evidence for that view, I'd be happy to share it.

As long as we're trying for social science, as opposed to snark, let's note that "unionization" probably isn't the right independent variable; what we want is some measure of the difficulty of firing a teacher, which might be measured in hours of effort by the principal or months of elaspsed time between the beginning and the end of the firing process.

In a quick conversation today, Meredith suggested that a convincing study would have to look at districts where the independent variable had changed for some exogenous reason; otherwise you'd be left with the suspicion that easy-fire districts and hard-fire districts varied on some unmeasured dimension that also correlated with school performance. For example, if districts where the teachers hate the principals, and vice versa, tend to evolve union contracts or administrative procedures to protect teachers from arbitrary firing, and if such districts also tend to have badly-performing schools, then protections will turn out to correlate with poor performance, even if there is no actual causal link.

All this illustrates an under-appreciated point: good policy-relevant social science is really, really hard, and ought to be left to really, really smart people such as Meredith. That's why I mostly confine myself to policy analysis and snark, which are much easier.

First you complain that I linked to a blog post, and then you regurgitate the entire post here (presumably thinking that there were a whole host of board regulars who, like yourself, become addled by working those link thingies that keep cropping up in hypertext documents). Were you dropped on your head a lot as an infant?

The poster, Mark Kleiman, is a professor of public policy at UCLA. Which is to say that his credentials to say shit about educational policy are substantially greater than yours. Slagging what he says simply because he's published it on a blog instead of printing it on paper is just dumb. (Congratulations: You walked into that one.) Compared to your ouevre here on this particular subject, his post compares favorably.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
in his defense, remember, Ty is the product of public schools in a heavily unionized city.

Have you been paying attention to where I said I went to school? Who are you, Not Me?

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Spanky
I don't know, how about a group of people that have made a least one accurate prediction before. How many tiimes do these idiots have to cry wolf before you realize they are full of it?

Let me just be clear: Are you in the "global warming is a myth" camp?

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
First you complain that I linked to a blog post, and then you regurgitate the entire post here (presumably thinking that there were a whole host of board regulars who, like yourself, become addled by working those link thingies that keep cropping up in hypertext documents). Were you dropped on your head a lot as an infant?

The poster, Mark Kleiman, is a professor of public policy at UCLA. Which is to say that his credentials to say shit about educational policy are substantially greater than yours. Slagging what he says simply because he's published it on a blog instead of printing it on paper is just dumb. (Congratulations: You walked into that one.) Compared to your ouevre here on this particular subject, his post compares favorably.

He didn't use any cartoons, so Spanky couldn't follow it.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Spanky
I don't know, how about a group of people that have made a least one accurate prediction before. How many tiimes do these idiots have to cry wolf before you realize they are full of it?

Which idiots? The problem is that there are a lot of people saying a lot of things. Some are more histeronic than others.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Spanky
I don't know, how about a group of people that have made a least one accurate prediction before. How many tiimes do these idiots have to cry wolf before you realize they are full of it?

Before the UN, or just in a State of the Union address?

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Slave's post had nothing to do with the burden of proof -- it was a facile attempt at rebuttal.

Exactly: you were the one who brought up the burden of proof. You said that you had hoped that Slave might say something that could let us stop worrying abougt Global Warming. I don't need Slave to say anything to stop me from worrying, why should you?

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Actually, Slave was more interested in establishing that Gore is a hypocrite, which is fine as far as it goes, which is nowhere if what you care about is whether the climate is changing.

All Slave was doing was establishing Gore is a hyprocite. Was there some rule somewhere that I should know about that in the same post of establishing Gore is a hypocite that one also needs to present evidence that Global warming is not occuring. However the fact that Gore, by his actions in his personal life, has established that he does not seem too worried about Global Warming. His lack of worry in itself should add to anyone's sckepticsim of the validity of the claims he makes in his film.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
You said before that you were going to wait to make up your mind until sea levels were actually rising. So I pointed you to sources saying that sea levels have been rising. I can lead you to water, but I can't make you drink, even if it keeps rising.

You posted actual indisputable evidence that sea levels are concisely and permanently rising? I don't recall that. The ocean has not gotten any closer to my parents beach house in the last forty years (this is the same house that one that my professor in college told me would be underwater by the year 2000, and the same house my terminally naive parents held a symposium on global warming at in 2000 where everyone at the symposium agreed that the house would be definitely flooded by 2010.) When I had the temerity to question that conclusion (And brought up what my professor said in the 80s about that exact house), I was condescendingly told that I wouldn't be so skeptical in 2010. Do you want to bet a thousand bucks that by 2010 the tide will still never have made it to the house?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Which idiots? The problem is that there are a lot of people saying a lot of things. Some are more histeronic than others.

Ty says that Isiah said Larry Bird would be seen as ordinary if he were black. So we know we can't believe Ty. So far i haven't caught Spanky in any lies.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Ty says that Isiah said Larry Bird would be seen as ordinary if he were black.

You are so full of shit. Did I annoy you by comparing you to Not Me?

You and Spanky both seem to have a penchant for disregarding news stories when they're inconvenient for your team.