Uncooperative Crickets

The Conservation of Anger

I am not thrilled with President Obama's proposal for teacher merit pay. The basic idea is that teachers would get paid more if their students achieved more. I find this very problematic for a couple of reasons:

1. It is very difficult to get an accurate read on "student achievement." The easy way out is a multiple choice test, but they rarely measure things that are actually important (I would much rather have a bunch of citizens be able to solve problems and judge the relative merits of arguments than to recall facts like "The French and Indian War started in 1754"). President Obama wants to develop a state-of-the-art assessment system, but I think that we are a long way off from any sort of cost-effective, large scale measure.
   
2. Even if we could accurately measure student assessment, this would not be a good idea. Almost all of the research in motivational psychology says that if you want better teachers, do not have them focus on rewards. The summary phrase Alfie Kohn uses is something like "You want people concentrating on what they are doing rather than how they are doing." Many of you have probably experienced this when your boss hovers over your work station - most people find it more difficult to do good work in this case than if the boss weren't there. Teacher merit pay would have teachers focus on the how rather than the what, and the research says that they will take fewer risks and be less creative teachers. I would also imagine that there would be a lot more "teaching to the test."
   

If President Obama really wanted to increase student learning, he would consider ideas like year-round schooling. There is getting to be a decent amount of evidence that this increases student learning significantly (no sources, sorry). This is similar to the idea that if President Obama/Congress really wanted to conserve gasoline, they would lower the national speed limit back down to 55 miles per hour. This would be easy, cheap, and nearly immediate. You see, at speeds higher than about 40 miles per hour, the fuel efficiency decreases proportionally to the square of the velocity. Very, VERY roughly speaking, if you double your speed, you should expect only one quarter (rather than one half) of your original fuel efficiency.

Both of these options are disruptive to people's daily lives, though, and I do not think that the government (Republican nor Democrat) has enough guts to do either one of these.

While I am talking about fuel economy, here are a couple of things to remember: it is much, much smarter to switch from an inefficient car (an SUV, for instance) to a mildly efficient car (a Camry) than it is to switch from an efficient car (a Corolla) to an ultra efficient car (a Prius). This is because there are weird arithmetic things going on with the units. If you have an SUV that gets 10 mpg (a simple example), it will use 10 gallons in 100 miles. If you were to double the efficiency to 20 mpg, you would use only 5 gallons in the same 100 miles, for a savings of 5 gallons of gas.

On the other hand, if you double the efficiency again to 40 mpg, you would use 2.5 gallons of gas, a savings of 2.5 gallons over the 20 mpg car. So upgrading from 10 mpg to 20 mpg saves 5 gallons/100 miles, but upgrading from 20 mpg to 40 mpg only saves 2.5 gallons/100 miles. Every little bit helps, but some things help more than others. So, please, trade your SUV in for a sedan.


On anger: I am currently less mad at the bailed-out banks, and more mad at George Will.

This American Life, the most trust source for...well, anything, did another story on the financial state of the country. They basically said that the outrage directed at the banks for not using the bail-out money for lending is misplaced. The root problem, they say, is that banks do not have enough money to pay out to people if they want to take their money out of the bank. This is bad. The bail-out money helps stabilize them by providing them with enough money so that their assets match their liabilities. Lending out that money would make the problem even worse, since their assets would decrease further and their liabilities would increase.

My decrease in anger toward the banks is met with increased anger toward George Will. Now, Will has been one of my favorite three conservative pundits for some time, along with Pat Buchanan and David Brooks (top four, if you think that John McLaughlin is still conservative). I like that he can clearly write about a different perspective, and I find that he makes me consider ideas that I hadn't thought of before. I am mad, though, because it looks like he might have a history of playing fast and loose with the facts. Mano's posting summarizes this well, and was the reason I initially thought of this (although I had been reading a decent amount about the global warming lie recently).

posted by Dirk Awesome @ 9:24 AM