Words by Woods

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

As an extension of earlier reports that Global Warming Alarmism causes mental illness, now the Telegraph reports that it causes murder and suicide.  Three more bodies, including a child, added to Al Gore’s death toll in his path to kill more people than Rachel Carson.

The National Center for Policy Analysis reviews how Massachusetts’ universal coverage presages the price controls that will be implemented by ObamaCare.  However, there is another important lesson related to unintended consequences.  Massachusett’s policy is a consequence of presidential prospect Mitt Romney in action. Romney might be a brillant VC, but he fails to understand the fundamental difference between business and government policy, which facilitated the development of this corrupt program.  Romney should not be considered a viable presidential candidate until he can articulate the lessons learned from his failure, as in the consequences of following unprincipled pragmatic solutions to public problems.

David S. Broder observes that the defeat of HillaryCare was largely responsible for the Republican take over of Congress in 1994.  If this is true and both event reoccur this year (defeat of the health care proposals and Democratic loss of the House), does that mean that Dem leaders will learn the lesson and never attempt such broad nationalization of health care policy?  Not that the results of incrementalism would be substantially different to the quality of health care.

DailyFinance reports that some Chinese military leaders have suggested that China use its US bond holdings as a weapon to punish America over Taiwan.  Let me get this straight…they plan to sell the bond holdings at step discounts in order to briefly reduce the cost for investors to US bonds.  Next, are they going to threaten to burn bales of their dollar holdings?

As the US Dept of Education does not understand feedback as it forbids comments on its YouTube videos, I have to comment on its “Harvard School of Excellence–A Turnaround Model in Chicago” vid here.  The turnaround model has four implemenation steps:  1) Replace the Principal, 2) Replace Most Teachers, 3) Revamp the Curriculum, and 4) Renew the Culture.  What do these things have in common?  Student failure is rooted in public administration of schools, which is why around the world public schools require reform, but there are no calls for reforming private schools.

According to Leonard Peikoff, via Peikoff Facebook Fanpage, “Philosophy is a human need as real as the need of food. It is a need of the mind, without which man cannot obtain his food or anything else his life requires. To satisfy this need, one must recognize that philosophy is a system of ideas. By its nature as an integrating science, it cannot be a grab bag of isolated issues. All philosophic questions are interrelated.”

Via Ayn Rand Facebook Fanpage, Ayn Rand wrote, “The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash–that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.”

In light of President Obama’s recent State of the Union Address, I decided to revisit the first State of the Union Address from President George Washington.

By my reading, President Washington’s address was less than 9 minutes long.  While it has become a modern convenience that the presidential budget address and state of the union address be combined, the first state of the union focuses on the highest priorities and lacks the laundry list of spending initiatives that we see on TV.

My favorite part of President Washington’s address expounded upon the importance of knowledge and education as a foundation for our experiment in free government:

Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impressions so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours it is proportionably essential.

To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways – by convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people, and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burdens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of society; to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness – cherishing the first, avoiding the last – and uniting a speedy but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the laws.

Today, when we gaze into the maul of the federal Leviathan, we should understand that it is the failure of our education system that has accelerated our decay by lobotomizing the citizenry.

While the full text of President Washington’s address is available on-line, I have created a video with a reading of that speech.

In an analysis of a performance plateau by4th graders in math, according to results released by the Institute of Eduction Sciences in the Nation’s Report Card, Lisa Guernsey of the Early Ed Watch Blog notes:

“In short, if we want to improve students’ proficiency in math, we have to improve teachers’ proficiency too. That may be the best way to start bending that score curve upward again.”

To improve teachers’ proficiency in math, we would first need to measure it by testing the teachers.  This would facilitate correlating gaps in specific teacher proficiency with their students’ performance, and to individualize remediation for deficient teachers.

Teachers who are actively interested in increasing student achievement should champion rigorous and systematic evaluation of their peers.

Update: Reconsidering this entry, the following additional point came to me.  Such teacher evaluations should include non-graded survey questions about instructional methodology.  I suspect that answers by teachers on method, which are correct according to orthodoxy, may correlate failed process with failed outcomes at the granular level of the teacher-student relationship.