Nobody 746

Sunday, December 7, 2008
Nobody # 746

Nobody Asked Me But:

Michelle Rhee is the chancellor for D.C. Public Schools. She believes that better teachers equal better schools, and the way to get better teachers is to pay for high quality and get rid of low. (By terminating them - but not in the drastic Terminator way.) As a beginning, she has proposed a two-tiered salary schedule. Teachers who surrender their tenure rights can earn, through merit, up to $135,000 per year. Those who don’t stay on the present schedule and max out at about $80,000.

Her MAJOR opponent, of course, is the union, which, as always, clings to tenure and the unified, lock-stepped, seniority based salary schedule as if these two were the only walls separating its members from the horrors of hell, better known as arbitrary and unfair administrators. This is about 25% truth and 75% diversion to allow unions to protect their relevancy, which is fast disappearing. Yes, too many administrators are arbitrary and unfair, but they can be removed along with, or preferably before, “bad” teachers.

If President-elect Obama holds true to his campaign ideals, he is going to have to take sides in this key battle over the correct direction for public education. Which side? I say the middle with a strong lean towards Rhee. Here are my recommendations:

1. Get rid of superfluous and incompetent administrators, and those who are both superfluous and incompetent go first.

2. Make it easier, but not easy, to fire teachers.

3. Require transparency in all actions, including personnel – especially in evaluations. No more closed doors.<<<

This brings us to our question of the week, this for President-elect Obama: Given that the Federal government has a limited role in public education, what can and will you do to make our schools child-centered rather than administrator-and-union-centered?<<<

News item: Esteban Nuñez, the son of former California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, and three other men who were arrested in the fatal stabbing of a college student in San Diego.

Here is the reaction of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a longtime friend of the Nuñez family: "I've known him since he was a little boy. He's a great kid, a good boy.”

Sure he stabs people occasionally, but he has a good heart.<<<

I don’t know about you, but I would feel a lot better about all the war-advocating Neos, if they were on the front line being shot at rather than holed up at a think tank or the offices of some “right” magazine wondering where to go for lunch.<<<

The terrorist attack in Mumbai reminded me once again of the horrors that religion gone bad has imposed on humanity. If Lady Justice weighed the good that religion has done for humankind against the evil, her scale would be so unbalanced towards the latter that she would fall.<<<

And if there was a God, wouldn’t all holiday shoppers be courteous?<<<

As most of you know, Dennis Lehane is the author of “Mystic River,” a great novel that Clint Eastwood made into a great movie and “Gone, Baby, Gone” a very, very good mystery novel also turned into an excellent film. I am reading his newest book, “The Given Day,” a historical novel about the Great Red Scare, as it occurred in Boston after World War I.

From the book:

Did you know, I didn’t, about Greenwood, Oklahoma. It was a black community in Tulsa that was established after the oil boom there. It was middle class, affluent, and its interaction with the rest of Tulsa was a model for peaceful race relations - until hard times turned the lower class whites against them. If you don’t know the rest, I am sure you can guess – a race riot and a massacre of blacks so savage that it sounds like something out of third-world Africa.

No laughing matter. Did you know that American communists were politically opposed to laughter? I didn’t. They saw it as a sentimental disease and, like religion, an opiate to the masses imposed on them by their oppressors. Now that’s funny – in a tragic sort of way.

As you can see, a library could be filled ten thousand times over with the things that I don’t know.

But that just gives me lots to learn.<<<

And speaking of learning, did you read that California is the only state that passes the college affordability test? And then barely, and only because of their vast JC system. What a national disgrace.<<<

Major League baseball owners are so concerned about the current recession that they are meeting next week at the Bellagio in Las Vegas to figure out how best to cut expenses.<<<

Here is a blood-lust political genealogy:

Joe McCarthy begat Richard Nixon who begat Lee Atwater who begat Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Sarah (finally they had a woman) Palin.<<<

ETHICS AND I

Q: I restore pianos. The owner of an empty house gave me a damaged Steinway that had been abandoned. I spent many hours and a lot of money ($2,000) restoring it. A few days ago a woman came to my store in tears with proof that the piano was hers, given away while she was in the hospital. What is my ethical responsibility?

A: Since it is hers, you should give it back. What you lose in dollars you gain back in sense, as in a sense of personal satisfaction.<<<

And continuing on with Harvard’s 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners:

ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating.

MEDICINE PRIZE. Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore) for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.