2%? incredible. I am losing touch with reality more and more every day.

I did some post on the bonuses just at GS and discovered that they were paid quarterly before, during and after the crisis/bail-out. And during that four year period GS fired thousands upon thousands of employees with some explanation about down-sizing due to the financial crisis.

And what the frick are the dems doing at AEI which is only a front for distributing repub propaganda?

Bob Somerby over at The Daily Howler does some great analysis of education issues mixed in with his posts on other issues. I really don't have time to try and summerize the many articles I've read but if you're interested check it out.

I did do a quick search of the archives and found one of his better posts as a teaser for you.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh100410.shtml

Friedman had a column on education in yesterday's NY Times. Like a lot of people he cites the good results in Finland, but focuses on the high standards in hiring the teachers: "If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes." But even a casual glance at Finland shows another big difference from our system - smaller class size.

How does its approach differ from other European countries? For one thing, students stay in the same school from the age of seven through to 16. They are not sorted into different groups or schools. Rather, students of different abilities and ages learn together, allowing high-achieving students to serve as positive models for less advanced classmates. Our education system is not characterised by tracking and streaming. Efforts are made to provide instruction for different learners according to their skills and interests. We believe that personal and encouraging feedback is an integral part of effective learning.

In the 1990s, the Finnish system began to put more emphasis on individuality and freedom of choice. Schools got more freedom to include optional subjects in their curricula. Consequently, schools started to develop school-based syllabuses in collaboration with teachers, parents, and other stakeholders. The students' own interests and choices are taken into account at school when selecting content, teaching, and assessment methods. Textbooks and other learning materials encourage individualised learning.

We believe that small class sizes are a prerequisite for effective learning. In Finland, the average class size for Finnish, mathematics, and science is 19 to 20 students. Smaller group sizes make it easier to ensure a peaceful work environment.

Replacing some teachers is cheap and serves to weaken the unions. Charter schools do the same and are profitable (for someone). But hiring more teachers to reduce class size everywhere would actually cost money.

Should we be pushing more money toward education?  Yes.  Have the Obama administration twice pushed emergency federal dollars to the schools in order to keep teachers in the classroom? Yes.  Is more money needed? Yes. But thanks to the past election we can probably bet we won't see it.  Thank you voters.

Now lets look at what Arne was saying:

So, what do I mean when I talk about transformational productivity reforms that can also boost student outcomes? Our K-12 system largely still adheres to the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education. A century ago, maybe it made sense to adopt seat-time requirements for graduation and pay teachers based on their educational credentials and seniority. Educators were right to fear the large class sizes that prevailed in many schools.

But the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century. Today, our schools must prepare all students for college and careers--and do far more to personalize instruction and employ the smart use of technology. Teachers cannot be interchangeable widgets. Yet the legacy of the factory model of schooling is that tens of billions of dollars are tied up in unproductive use of time and technology, in underused school buildings, in antiquated compensation systems, and in inefficient school finance systems.

Rethinking policies around seat-time requirements, class size, compensating teachers based on their educational credentials, the use of technology in the classroom, inequitable school financing, the over placement of students in special education—almost all of these potentially transformative productivity gains are primarily state and local issues that have to be grappled with.

These are tough issues. Rethinking the status quo, by definition, can be unsettling. But I know that these discussions will be taking place in the coming year in schools, in districts, in union headquarters, in statehouses, and the governor's mansion. The alternative is to simply end up doing less with less. That is fundamentally unacceptable.

So I guess using the logic of this blog, since he said doing less with less is fundamentally unacceptable to this particular group of people than we should believe that doing less with less is acceptable.  Of course none of us want to do that. 

Unfortunately in this country, there is a little the federal government can do. In fact there is little state legislators can do as the power is in school district by school district.  As someone who is involved in working with community programs that seek to increase the effeciency and effectiveness of providing services to families in poverty, the simple fact we have to cut a deal with each district is hugely time consuming.  If the superintendent is "too busy" to rethink how the schools can collaborate with the nonprofits in the community then the families in that district are out of luck.

So not only does most of the funding comes from non-federal dollars, there is a basic roadblock thrown up to do anything innovative on a national level.  The fact is the fundamental models that are set up for funding schools is on state and local levels.  The reality as Arne points out is that they will have to do more with less, especially in these days when the people in all their glory don't want to be taxed. 

So how do we deal with this?  Arne is providing a framework of approach.  One of these things is looking at performance based bonuses.  Since there isn't any causal link between an advance degree and student performance, he suggests maybe bonuses should be based on something else.  He does not suggest that bonues be thrown out altogether.  I should repeat that, but I won't. Just like bonues on wall street, the bonues in the public sector of education should be based on performance.

Now how we measure performance, and by extension success, is whole another topic. 

And let me say that I intensely concerned about the push for charter schools.  There are a number of charter schools that provide an excellent model of how schools can work with the community and do wonders.  But it has been co-opted by the wealthy interests to push model that sucks energy and resources from the public schools. 

Now some more words from Arne

I anticipate that a number of districts may be asked next year to weigh targeted class size increases against the loss of music, arts, and after-school programming. Those tough choices are local decisions. But it important that districts maintain a diverse and rich curriculum--and that they preserve the opportunities that make school exciting, fun, and engage young people in coming to school every day.

Many high-performing education systems, especially in Asia, have substantially larger classes than the United States. According to OECD data, secondary school classes in South Korea average about 36 students. In Japan, it's 33 students per class. In the U.S., it's 25 students per class. In fact, teachers in Asia sometimes request larger class sizes because they think a broad distribution of students and skill levels can accelerate learning.

We have to learn from high-performing school systems in other nations, including how to elevate the teaching profession and better support our neediest schools.

The United States currently spends more per student than almost any nation in the world on education. Yet we are only one of three OECD nations—along with Turkey and Israel--that do not devote at least as much resources or more resources to schools with the greatest socioeconomic challenges. We must question our priorities and strategies if we are serious about closing achievement gaps.

Again I have to ask: because of who he is speaking to, should we assume that the way to go is the opposite of maintaining "a diverse and rich curriculum--and that they preserve the opportunities that make school exciting, fun, and engage young people in coming to school every day"?  Should we wag our finger in digust at Arne for suggesting that we devote more resources schools with greatest socioeconomic challenges? 

The education of our children is too important to twist it to fit some desired narrative against the current administration.

Interesting article about how and how early poor children begin to fall behind wealthier children. By age three there is already a significant difference. Also some information about type and amount of effort it takes for schools to make up that achievement gap

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html?pagewanted=2&_r=...

There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.

Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child’s language development and each parent’s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.

What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.

Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.