{"id":5776,"date":"2012-02-24T23:35:52","date_gmt":"2012-02-25T07:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/?p=5776"},"modified":"2012-02-24T23:35:52","modified_gmt":"2012-02-25T07:35:52","slug":"education-the-alamo-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/education-the-alamo-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Education; the Alamo; Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

View 714 Friday, February 24, 2012<\/p>\n

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Dr. Pournelle —<\/p>\n

A reminder of this day in history:<\/p>\n

Written 24 February 1836, Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo)<\/p>\n

\u201cTo the People of Texas & All Americans in the World:<\/font><\/p>\n

Fellow citizens & compatriots\u2014I am besieged, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna\u2014I have sustained a continual Bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken\u2014I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch\u2014The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country\u2014Victory or Death.<\/font><\/p>\n

William Barret Travis<\/font><\/p>\n

Lt. Col. comdt<\/font><\/p>\n

P.S. The Lord is on our side\u2014When the enemy appeared in sight we had not three bushels of corn\u2014We have since found in deserted houses 80 or 90 bushels & got into the walls 20 or 30 head of Beeves.<\/font><\/p>\n

Travis\u201d<\/p>\n

It still gives me chills to read it.<\/p>\n

Pieter<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thermopylae had its messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none.<\/p>\n

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Bill Gates has an education article<\/a> \u201cShaming teachers is wrong solution for school performance\u201d that\u2019s worth your attention. The Gates Foundation has found that in most schools, if you eliminate the worst 10% of the teachers \u2013 don\u2019t bother to replace them, just get them out of there \u2013 you greatly improve the efficiency and performance of the school. They don\u2019t go into details, but speculation is easy. Good teachers who break their hearts trying cannot be much encouraged when they see they are evaluated and paid exactly the same as time-servers and incompetents and frauds none of whom can be fired. None of this is in the article, which is in reaction to publishing the \u201cperformance\u201d statistics of individual teachers, and is a powerful critique of the evaluation methods in use today.<\/p>\n

Gates says that good teaching is a missionary activity. He\u2019s probably tight, too. As for the current situation:<\/p>\n

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I am a strong proponent of measuring teachers\u2019 effectiveness, and my foundation works with many schools to help make sure that such evaluations improve the overall quality of teaching. But publicly ranking teachers by name will not help them get better at their jobs or improve student learning. On the contrary, it will make it a lot harder to implement teacher evaluation systems that work. <\/p>\n

In most public schools today, teachers are simply rated \u201csatisfactory\u201d or \u201cunsatisfactory,\u201d and evaluations consist of having the principal observe a class for a few minutes a couple of times each year. Because we are just beginning to understand what makes a teacher effective, the vast majority of teachers are rated \u201csatisfactory.\u201d Few get specific feedback or training to help them improve. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The rest of the essay is worth reading. <\/p>\n

The problem is the unions which exist to protect incompetent teachers. The unions will oppose any form of teacher performance evaluation, and insist on seniority and credentialism as the only measures for teacher evaluation. That is clearly wrong.<\/p>\n

One should always take Gates seriously, and I agree that publishing teacher evaluation scores is probably not a good idea; but I fear that his views will be used by the unions and \u201cprofessional teacher associations\u201d as an argument for doing nothing, changing nothing, and studying the problem while our public schools fail, and expensive private schools solidify the class distinctions in America so that only the rich get a good education.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s happening now. In many places the primary family goal is to get the kids out of the public schools. Into Catholic schools, private schools, Lutheran schools \u2013 anywhere but in the public schools. Of course in Los Angeles that\u2019s particularly important. It happens that I live quite close to one of the best public grade school in LAUSD. It was almost wrecked some years ago in the bussing era, but it has recovered and people now buy houses in my neighborhood in order to make their children eligible. That\u2019s shameful.<\/p>\n

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Afghanistan is exploding because prisoners were sending notes to each other in copies of the Koran, and the guards burned the books. <\/p>\n

The only thing that has ever united the Afghan tribes has been the presence of armed foreigners on their soil. So has it been since Alexander the Great, and so is it now. <\/p>\n

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I\u2019m still recovering from what officially isn\u2019t flu but certainly lays you out like flu. Actually I had pneumonia once and this has taken longer to clear up. I haven\u2019t had much energy, and what little I have has gone into errands and household maintenance. Apologies. I\u2019m dancing as fast as I can.<\/p>\n

While I was clearing some stuff out I came across a copy of our 1980 technology novel OATH OF FEALTY, and began to read. I got trapped. It\u2019s a very good story and a lot more complex than it looks at first. It was written on an S-100 system with Electric Pencil, long before the computer revolution took off, so one would expect it to be primitive, but it\u2019s not. It doesn\u2019t of course have the Internet, but there\u2019s something about as good; and our projections of some of the consequences of advances in computers were pretty good. We missed some of the implications of wireless so sometimes characters have to plug into a wired network, but we even had some wireless advances. It really holds up well. If you haven\u2019t read Oath of Fealty, the paperback edition is available<\/a>, and there\u2019s a Kindle edition<\/a>. It was a best seller in its time, and it\u2019s still very readable.<\/p>\n

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View 714 Friday, February 24, 2012 Dr. Pournelle — A reminder of this day in history: Written 24 February 1836, Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) \u201cTo the People of Texas & All Americans in the World: Fellow citizens & compatriots\u2014I am besieged, by a thousand or more of \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-view"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}