Quote of the week... McCain edition

Robert S. Bennett, McCain attorney, on McCain's denial of meeting with broadcaster Bud Paxson, and Paxson's claim that it occurred:

"We understood that he [McCain] did not speak directly with him [Paxson]. Now it appears he did speak to him. What is the difference?" (from the Washington Post).

Incentive pay for teachers

Cross-posted at the other home.

One of the big movements in teaching is “incentive pay.” Now, the rules of rewards are simple: be clear on what is needed to get the reward, be sure everybody agrees that the rules are fair, and be sure the reward is aligned to desired behavior.

The Houston Independent School District has a new “incentive pay” system called “ASPIRE.” This system fails on all three counts. The system is somewhat unclear, nobody can agree that the rules are great, and it does not create what (in my opinion) desired behavior should be.

What does one need to do to get money (up to about $8,000) under ASPIRE? The answer, in short form, is (a) get your students to have high test scores and (b) be at a school that makes overall improvement in test scores. However, the way in which the “value added” to each student is calculated is unknown. HISD students take two tests: the Stanford 10 (for all grade levels), which is a waste of a week of instructional time, and the TAKS, which is the state exam (starting in third grade). Somehow, these scores are put into a formula that derives the “value added” for all students—i.e., evaluating a student based on how the student performs year-to-year, and not comparing grade cohorts to the previous cohort.

Now, “value added” is great as a concept, but there are two significant problems. One is that if students score extremely high, it’s hard to have “value added,” since it’s tough to beat expectations. How is that accounted for in the formula? I have no idea, since I haven’t seen it, and neither has my principal. This was a major problem for my school. We typically score very high, in particular because GT students (gifted-talented) have a magnet program at my school. Our percentage passing went from 93% two years ago to 92% last year (these are very high percentages for HISD). Therefore, we ended up in “Quadrant 4,” which in HISD lingo means that we get $150 per teacher in school bonuses—since we didn’t create more “value added.”

The second problem with “value added” is that there are sometimes changes from year-to-year that aren’t accounted for. The specific change I am referring to is the language of instruction. My students are in their first year of taking their tests in English—last year, they took all assessments in Spanish. Therefore, last year their teacher taught them almost all in Spanish, and this year I have to get them speaking English and passing writing, reading and math tests at a fourth-grade level. Obviously, their scores go down in fourth grade compared to third, because their English is not at a fourth-grade level. This is not accounted for by the ASPIRE system, which expects them to improve at the same rate regardless. Therefore, my behavior is negatively impacted. I got no individual bonus because my students didn’t improve their scores over last year’s—for obvious reasons.

So, there are unclear rules, and the rules are unfair as regards the bilingual program and how exactly “value added” is calculated. But do the rules motivate the right behavior, regardless? That depends on what you think the right behavior should be. Generally, what is desired is (a) more campus cooperation and, as a result, (b) higher test scores. The amount of disagreement about the rules and even the concept of ASPIRE means that (a) is grievously undermined. It doesn’t affect the behavior of the teachers at all and it creates a lot of anger when the bonuses are actually distributed. Our campus felt disregarded when we didn’t get a lot of school money, even when schools which are much worse than ours got far more money just for bringing up very low scores. Really, this means that (b) is not impacted. Is (b)—raising test scores—a worthy goal? Well, that’s a long discussion for another time.

What this shows, I think, is that a system which many people think of as “worthy” (the pay is being funded, I am told, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) is really the subject of much disagreement and bitterness. “Incentive pay” as a concept for teachers remains a good idea, in theory. But, of course, there have been many other good theories that fail upon execution.

Friday anthem - Ој, свијетла мајска зоро

"Oj, svijetla majska zoro", or in English, "Oh, bright dawn of May," is the national anthem of Europe's now second-newest independent state, Montenegro. It is also quite catchy. It's existed in several forms since originating as a folk song, but the newest lyrics were adopted when the anthem itself was officially adopted, in 2004. At that time Yugoslavia was dissolved into the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro (which itself dissolved in 2006 after Montenegrins declared independence). The independent Montenegrin principality which existed before World War I used a different anthem.

My favorite Montenegro fact is that the name Montenegro ("Black Mountain") is often translated into other languages literally--English, which uses the Italian name, is an exception. In Montenegrin/Serbian, the name is Crna Gora; in Turkish, Karadağ; in Albanian, Mali i Zi.

There are four verses to the anthem; some of the lines are repeated in a certain pattern, however. For the full lyrics, see the Wikipedia article.

The Economist agrees with me! Kind of

No less an authority than The Economist dislikes Kosovo's flag, too! (see below for image). They have a somewhat specific point for their objection, though: they don't like having "a precise outline of a map," since that makes it hard to reproduce. I suppose the one thing that makes Kosovo's flag distinctively sterile--a lack of symbolism--is the one thing that was necessary, but they could have done better even so.

Cyprus: Republic voters call for more dialogue?

In the Cypriot presidential elections this weekend, current President Tassos Papadopoulos has been eliminated for a three-horse race. Papadopoulos, who has been rather intransigent on reunification talks and torpedoed the Annan Plan, was regarded as the most hard-line of the three candidates running. This is a little surprising insofar as Papadopoulos had shown a modest lead in all the opinion polls. However, the final results were:

Ioannis Casoulides (Democratic Rally), 33.5%
Demetris Christophias (AKEL), 33.3%
Tassos Papadopoulos (Democratic Party), 31.8%

Casoulides is the candidate of the conservative Democratic Rally of former president Glafcos Clerides, who endorsed the Annan Plan for reunification. He is generally seen as the most capable of reaching a negotiated solution. The second round will be held in one week, on February 24.

It's done.

Not "done" as in the sense of "resolved," but "done" as in the sense of "finally occurred," that is. Kosovo declared independence today. Luckily, it appears that the largest war this has set off is the edit war on Wikipedia's Kosovo page, the lead of which has changed approximately 532 times today.

There's still a lot more to resolve--for example, Serbia (and Russia) mildly disagrees with the whole independence thing--but in the spirit of celebration, the Kosovan government started things off by adopting the world's ugliest flag (see below, image from Wikipedia). They managed not only to copy the Bosnian flag, but to make it much, much worse. The Albanians will no doubt continue using the Albanian flag (perhaps the real intention behind adopting a horrible flag, anyway).



Many countries, including some EU countries, won't recognize Kosovo's independence, starting of course with Serbia and opportunistic big-power ally Russia--this means that Kosovo can't join the UN for the foreseeable future due to Russia's Council veto. But EU members who won't recognize independence, generally for self-interested reasons, including Greece and Cyprus (due to the Northern Cyprus separatist issue), Bulgaria (Russian relations, perhaps?), Romania (Russian relations, too, but also maybe solidarity with Moldova over Transnistria?), and Spain (which has its own problems with ethnic separatism).

On the other hand, France (no more Corsica problem), Germany, Britain and Belgium (following its national motto of "ever closer union more secession"), along with the US, are expected to recognize Kosovo's independence in the coming days (of course, Albania will too). On the ground, nothing really will be changing except for the arrival of the UN mission, and the northern part of Kosovo remains under de facto Serb control. However, we can look forward to the country adopting a (horrible?) national anthem, too, as well as of course a constitution, which should be coming in the next few months.