Martin G. Evans's Blog

Mistakes, Mistakes, and more Mistakes

Martin Evans — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:12:33 EDT

1. The Uighurs should be released into the US; the 6 in Albania should also be brought to the US

2. We need a truth commission

3. The torture lawyers should be prosecuted.

4. Single payer healthcarfe should be on the table.

Why on earth have you become so unwilling to confront our problems?

Thoughts on the Bailout Published in Cambridge Chronicle

Martin Evans — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:32:27 EST

An Alternative Bailout Focused on the Home Owners:

http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x1588596263/Guest-commentary-A-different-kind-of-bailout

The Decision Process

http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x1261530519/Guest-commentary-Bailout-should-focus-on-towns-cities-facing-budget-crisis

Flip Flop

Martin Evans — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:24:23 EDT

I am disappointd that Sen Obama intends to vote for the revised FISA bill.

Giving TeleComs a "get out of jail free" card is not warranted.

It is one more terrible example of allowing the Nuremberg defense : I was just following order.

Unconscionable!

Executive Compensation

Martin Evans — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:06:18 EST

One way Barrack can segue around one of Edward's populist appeals is to suggest a corporate best practice that requires that:

1. If a CEO gets a performance based bonus, all employees of the comany should receive a bonus

2. The bonuses for CEO and every other employee should be the same percent of annual income.

3. Differentials will be taken care of theough base salary differentials and the differntials from the same % translating into quite differnt amounts of money.

Check here for a fuller rationale

Don't blame the underlings

Martin Evans — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:55:05 EST

The Boston Globe reports (Dec 13: A11) that Barack "slams employee mishap."

As a supporter of Barack Obama and student of leadership for over forty years, I know that dumping on a subordinate publicly is not the action of an effective leader.

True leaders remember Harry Truman's dictum -- the buck stops here. So my advice, take responsibility for the errors of your campaign.

Barack is wrong on the vote for war.

Martin Evans — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 20:58:35 EDT

Today's speech was terrific except when he issued blame for those who voted for the Iraq war.

He fails to appreciate the truly accurate answer of Joseph Biden and others: the legislators did not vote for war; they voted to give the President the option of going to war.

You see at that time, it was a vote designed to give the President leverage in calling Iraq to account before the United Nations. It exemplified realpolitik at its best.

It is hard to remember the sequence of events from 2001 to the beginning of the war on March 20th 2003. Up until November 2002 (that is until the President had the support of the Senate and House of Representatives through the vote) the Iraqis refused to allow UN inspectors to undertake inspections for Weapons of Mass Destruction on Iraqi territory. By the end of November, inspections under the direction of Hans Blix were under way. The vote to grant the President war powers had achieved its purpose, the Iraq regime was being called to account for its actions.

We have forgotten too that Hans Blix called on the US and Britain to give his inspectors the "hard intelligence" that they claimed to possess so that his inspectors could go to check out that information on the ground. The failure of the US and Britain to do so should have roused our suspicions that all was not well with the intelligence -- its invalidity has been amply demonstrated in the past years.

Where we went wrong -- the Senate, and the House, and the country, and all of us -- was the failure to recognize the importance of the inspector's reports in mid February 2003 that there was no evidence of WMD in Iraq, so that we were in no immanent danger from Iraq. That should have led to a re-evaluation of the war power resolution and its potential repeal based on the changed situation. We failed to do so and we are reaping the tragic consequences today.

But we who have attacked President Bush for his failure to understand the nuance in the situation, should have made sure that we recognized the nuance implicit in the vote for the war option and should be educating our country about the realpolitik aspects of that vote, not sneering at those who are trying to explain their actions with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

Merit Pay for Teachers is a Bad Idea

Martin Evans — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:46:49 EDT

Why incentives for Teachers are a bad idea.

Teaching is an act of creation: the creation of a new, richer, improved cognitive structure in the mind of the pupil. This can occur through increasing the amount of information stored in that mind (such as learning the batting averages of a baseball player); it can occur through the generation of new connections among the pieces of information stored (like developing an understanding of the physics of the curve ball through a consideration of spin, velocity, and air conditions); most dramatically, it can occur through a radical reorganization of the pattern of connections (through understand how baseball is “not only a game” but is indelibly seared into the self identity of New Yorkers and Bostonians).

Creativity in teaching is all about this process. The teacher needs to focus, in a series of one on one or one on many interactions, on the way in which her/his students learn. Unless the teacher focuses on this process, it will be hard for the teacher to adjust the teaching style to match the varied learning styles of the students.

Financial incentives will disrupt this focus in two ways: incentives are given for irrelevant behaviors; incentives reduce the intrinsic motivation of the joy of teaching.

What will incentives be given for? We now live in a world with teacher incentives: incentives for special training, incentives for higher degrees. This leads teachers into the pursuit of credentials, not, except incidentally, into better teaching. What then would be the criteria for “effective teaching?” There are two relatively simple criteria that might be used: Both are flawed. The first is to have students rate the teacher’s effectiveness, but this tends to develop into a popularity contest with teachers abandoning their professional responsibilities to do what most pleases the students. There is some evidence that higher ratings are associated with grading leniency, at least for average teachers. Another flaw is that teachers are judged relative to their peers. That is student’s mean ratings are anchored to the average level of teacher performance in the school. Even in a school with a superior level of teaching, a quarter of the teachers will be stigmatized as being in the bottom 25%. Similarly in a truly awful school, there will be teachers in the top 10% even if these would be at the bottom of the heap if they taught in a better school.

The second criterion is to look at test scores, or at graduation rates, or at college placement. Although it can be argued that these are reasonable criteria that demonstrate the fruits of learning, good teaching is only one of the factors that lead to success. The quality of the intake is more critical, hence Harvard’s success. It is very difficult to control these factors to obtain an accurate assessment of the teacher’s contribution to the success of their students.

A third criterion would be to look at the improvement in students over time. The problem here is that teachers will focus on those students in the middle of the pack who have both the capacity to improve and room to improve. They will be less likely to focus on those at the bottom of the class who may have difficulty learning, nor those at the top of the class who don’t need the teacher’s attention to each a relatively high standard of performance.

It is hard to see how incentives for teachers will do anything to enhance the activity of teaching. Incentives are the anticipated outcomes for successfully reaching some level of performance; as such they focus attention on the outcome rather than on the process of reaching that outcome. Moreover they reduce or inhibit the intrinsic value of the work process. Students who work with incentivised teachers become means to ends rather than ends in themselves. The teacher worries about the student’s grades or the test scores result rather than on whether the student has learned anything.

Incentives for teachers are an idea whose time should not come.

Link to my Main Blog

Martin Evans — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:45:26 EDT

<a href="http://martingevans.blogspot.com/">Idle Thoughts</a>