A Real Endorsement For MetatOGGer

I've been on vacation for a week; no kid, nothing. I have had lot's of time and have watched some movies I hadn't seen and did some mp3 fixing and rearranging. I found a program that helped me a lot. It's called MetatOGGer, and it is incredible.

I have thousands of music files I have accumulated over the years. How I got many of them is a mystery. Remember Napster before the fall?

Anyway, many of the songs are missing information, like the title, artist, or album. Some of the songs simply have question marks instead of information, meaning I have to listen to it to know what the hell song it is!

Well, no more! This little program, MetatOGGer, listens to your music and finds the correct tag information for you. Yes. It listens to your music so you don't have to!

I realize this technology isn't brand new, and I may be late. But man! Load up some questionable files and watch the little bugger discover information about your music library.

It's free, and seems to work great. Oh, and it's French (but it's in English).

No, I am not being paid for this endorsement. I just really like it!

Friday Cartoon Bonus Fun: Good Dog Edition

Friday Cartoon Fun: What's The Rush? Edition

Competition And The Uneven Playing Field

This is how we are going to reform education: make schools compete for money.

The Race to the Top program marks a new federal partnership in education reform with states, districts and unions to accelerate change and boost achievement. Yet the program is also a competition through which states can increase or decrease their odds of winning federal support. For example, states that limit alternative routes to certification for teachers and principals, or cap the number of charter schools, will be at a competitive disadvantage. And states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws.

A Little Ditty...

Bill Gates And His Numbers

Bill Gates Among Top Quartile of Aspiring Wizards

One of Obama's bosses on education is making news noise again, with his corporate-spun notions on how to make the next generation of children the servants of Microsoft. Among his favorite ideas is turning urban education over to the KIPP-inspired brainwashers and prison guards trained in the happy talk pop psychology of CIA advisor, Dr. Martin Seligman, whose mind fix for the poor is viewed as the affordable solution to a social fix that is much too expensive for the richest men in the world to consider. Never mind that these KIPP testing chain gangs have teacher and student attrition rates that make such "schools" entirely unsustainable beyond the boutique model within which they now grind out their test scores while turning poor children into automatons.

Another of Bill's favorite ideas is a pay-per-score plan that rewards good teaching. What is good teaching? Well, good teaching produces good test scores. And what makes good test scores? Well, it's good teaching, of course. As the good professor explained about the origin of turtles, it's turtles, then, all the way down.

. . . .Fixing what is wrong with American learning, Gates said, requires new ways of looking at its problems.

Teachers are rewarded for "seniority and master's degrees," he said, and that is not the best way to ensure educational quality.

Critical in determining whether a student will drop out of high school, he said, is whether he or she connects with a good teacher in the fifth to eighth grades and develops a passion for lifelong learning.

A quality teacher would boost scores by 10 percentage points in a single year, Gates noted. "What that means is that if, in the United States, for two years, our teachers were all top-quartile teachers, the differences between the United States and the very best scores in the world would go away," he said. "We should identify those teachers, we should reward them, we should retain them, we should make sure other teachers learn from them."

The economic-recovery money creates new opportunities for public and private partnerships. . . .

And how would Bill have our teachers crank out the highest test scores in the world? Simple, he would have all teachers improve so that they would produce test scores that would put them in the top quartile of test score producers, i. e., test score producers such that they would be more effective than 75-99% of all teachers. Even for a duplicitous jerk like Bill Gates, this is an astonishing expectation to put on teachers, here or in Timbuktu. Here's why, as patiently explained by Richard Rothstein in Class and Schools . . . (2004):

. . . improving teacher quality so that all teachers rise to the top quintile of effectiveness is a fanciful goal. Policy makers who cite Dr. Sanders [or Bill Gates] do not appreciate how unattainable is a 40 percentile gain--voving teachers from about the 50th percentile in effectiveness to about the 90th [or 87th]. This is more than what researchers call a full standard deviation. In no field can a policy reform reasonably aim for such enormous gain.

And here is an analogy that Rothstein offers to "help think about whether we can possibly recruit or train teachers to be as good as the 90th [or 87th] percentile group:"

In 2000, real median household income in the U.S. was $42,000 a year. The 90th percentile income was $112,000 a year, nearly three times as much. We could imagine radical labor market or macroeconomic policies that might raise typical household incomes up to, say, $45,000 or even $50,000 in a few years. But policies to move the median to $112,000 are unimaginable. Improvement of 40 [or 35] percentile points up a distribution is not a real world aspiration (p. 65).

The value for Gates and the other Oligarchs of such fanciful thinking comes from putting the achievement bar at an unachievable level. In doing so, teachers, students, administrators will never do enough to satisfy the corporate bosses who stand on the sidelines with their junk science, their media scourges, and their big scary threats about China and India and Korea eating our lunch. See NCLB.

If Gates had his way, of course, none of us on this side of the curtain would know enough to peek backstage. That is not the case, however, yet. In fact, you can come out from behind the curtain now, Mr. Gates: your balloon is ready to take you aloft.

Go See A Show In Los Angeles, Or Is That DC?

A well recieved one-man show is ending this weekend in LA DC. Go see it!!

Wednesday Cartoon Fun: If Your Only Tool... Edition

Wednesday Cartoon Fun: Literal Edition

Tuesday Cartoon Fun: He's Gone Edition

"Powerful Market Forces In The Service Of Better Teaching"

Read that title above again. Got it? Market forces will serve education. Of course we all know education costs money, not makes money, right? Oh, unless you're Bill Gates and you want to find a way to make money of someone else's work. Again.

Gates on the Alignment of Common Core Standards, Curriculum, and Testing; the New Education Marketplace

Today, Bill Gates went in front of the National Conference of State Legislators and claimed national standards, merit-pay, high-stakes testing, a common curriculum, and innovation will unlock the "powerful market forces in the service of better teaching." The billionaire tech nut is overly intoxicated after chugging the Chubb and Moe/Milton Friedman competition kool aid, full-on convinced we'd have a better education system with more standardization and competition, fewer teachers, and a hell of a lot more computer time. Absent from his rant is any mention of poverty, the lack of healthcare for millions of children, or the joblessness created by Wall Street style capitalism (which certainly hurts our children). Gates' entire speech is worth reading (available here), but here is one key snippet:

Fortunately, the state-led Common Core State Standards Initiative is developing clear, rigorous common standards that match the best in the world. Last month, 46 Governors and Chief State School Officers made a public commitment to embrace these common standards.

This is encouraging—but identifying common standards is not enough. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these standards.

Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced that $350 million of the stimulus package will be used to create just these kinds of tests—next-generation assessments aligned to the common core.

When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better. Imagine having the people who create electrifying video games applying their intelligence to online tools that pull kids in and make algebra fun.

There can also be—and there should be —online videos of every required course, taught by master teachers, and made available free of charge. These would help train teachers. They would help students who need some review or just want to get ahead. Melinda and I have used online videos when we’ve helped our own kids on some of their school work. They are phenomenal tools that can help every student in the country—if we get the common standards that will encourage people to make them.

If your state doesn’t join the common standards, your kids will be left behind; and if too many states opt out—the country will be left behind. Remember—this is not a debate that China, Korea, and Japan are having. Either our schools will get better—or our economic position will get worse.

My Commemorative Album

I have had this for forty years...

Happy 40th anniversary.

My Summer Garden

Someone will get this when I lose the house...

The Scoop Of Death

I admit, I go to Starbucks frequently enough to have a gripe, though it speaks to a larger societal issue that I may not address.

I like to get a grande-no-whip-mocha. When I order I always say "A grande no whip mocha, please." I then pay and go wait for my drink in the waiting-for-my-drink area. It is here that one can watch the talented barrista concoct the thing.

Inevitably, the whipped cream can comes out, and before I can say it, my no-whip mocha get whipped. Shit.

I am then forced to tell the barrista that I did not want whipped cream, causing the barrista to look at the cup for the telltale marking. No such marking. They then say "no problem" and proceed to take their big-ass spoon and scoop the whipped cream, along with a dollar's worth of coffee, and dump it, topping my mocha with milk.

Now I am upset. Not extremely upset, but upset enough to ask for a new one. I ask because it is a common, lame mistake, and my ask to fuck-it ratio is low, so I feel I am justified.

But they give me the look. Why? Why should I be okay with them scooping some of what I paid for into the garbage, then handing it to me as "fixed"?

Who's with me?

Schools And The Achievement Gap

Here is some research telling us what we already know, but won't seem to acknowledge, at least publicly. We begin to solve the achievement gap problem by addressing poverty, not by shutting down schools, blaming teachers, or putting our faith (and tax $$) in Bill Gates or Eli Broad.

Common sense, people. This is not rocket science...

h/t The Core Knowledge Blog