January 20

This weekend has been filled with lots of things about Barack Obama. Even a short piece on why the spell checkers complain about his name. The blog one thinks it should be Ba rack Obadiah. Seems like someone should be able to fix this.

As I listened to a lot of the Obama things I kept running into stories or people talking about what this day meant to them. These stories kept causing a lump in my throat. I realized that the sense of hope in me is very strong. It is really great to feel this way. I am old enough to know that it won't last forever, but damn, it feels good right now.

I know people who hate Obama. I choose to ignore these people. I can do this because they are marginalized right now. I know people who do not feel this sense of hope. These people are sadder to think about. These people are missing something profound that is happening in this country. They may have lots of really good reasons for holding back, but I can't help feeling that they are missing a rare opportunity to believe in something. It may never happen again in my life time.

Today we broadcast the inauguration in the auditorium. My school has a junior high in the building also. The auditorium had 500 kids from 5th to 12th grade. When Joe Biden took the oath they cheered. When Yo Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman were anounced the kids fidgeted, but then listened. When Barack Obama took the oath they went crazy. When he spoke there was not a sound in the auditorium except for applause a few times and boos when he mentioned Bush. I do not think I have ever been in a high school auditorium this quiet or this attentive.

Last week I was in a lab and a black boy was walking by with his pants below his ass. I mentioned to him that Obama had said he didn't want to see this any more. The kid pulled his pants up. I feel a change is happening. I feel different today than I did yesterday. I have hope.

The odor of love.

There seems to be some evidence that people are attracted to members of the opposite sex based on the odor the other person gives off. The person of the opposite sex may give off a smell that signals that there genotype will produce children that are more immune to disease than either person is. This makes a lot of sense from an evolution stand point.

Why we are attracted to a particular member of the opposite sex has always interested me. In some cases there is a clear logic, the other person has money, the other person fits what you think you should have, etc. But often the choice makes little sense. You fall in love and you are not sure why. Falling in love only makes sense if it is seen as necessary for the survival of the species.

This concept has made me reevaluate why people are healthier today then they were 100 years ago. They are healthier. The general consensus has been that there is better nutrition and more immunization. I am sure this is true. But maybe it is not the whole truth. In the civil war soldiers from cities did better than rural soldiers in terms of getting diseases such as dysentery. Dysentery was a huge problem. It weakened whole armies. The argument has always been that city people had better immune systems because they had been exposed to more germs.

What if this is not the whole story. It is possible that the fact that city people have larger choices of mates meant that they were more likely to find someone with a complementary genotype. City folk were breeding healthier kids. I find this appealing because it argues for a wide open mating market. A mating market free from the need to stay within an ethnic, religious or racial group. Maybe bigots produce less healthy kids.

Did George Bush save Social Security?

When you think about it the total crash of the stock market has caused many people to delay retirement. This is exactly what Social Security needed. If no one can afford to retire than the system will save large amounts of money. So, thanks George.

In a few days Barack Obama will be President. This got me thinking about elections. I think that this country basically wants to vote for someone who is not too smart. I think the majority of people are nervous around smart people. This is why George was elected twice. This seems to be part of an American anti-intellectual bias. We want Clint Eastwood or Tommy Lee Jones to be our president.

Obama is not either one of these guys. The only way we can elect someone such as Obama is if he/she has an extra something. Obama is black, Hillary is a woman, Kennedy is a Catholic etc. The winning formula is to round up the people who want a smart leader (even though this is a minority) and add a block that will vote for someone in spite of their being smart (in Obama's case the blacks).

This may reflect the increasing divide in our country. My parents aspired to smartness for their kids. I think a lot of people in our country today are nervous about their kids becoming too smart and moving out of town and rejecting their parents life style. This is sad and needs to be addressed.

Unions

The Republican, after totally mismanaging the economy have decided that it is not their fault it is the unions' fault. The senators screaming the most about the auto bailout are all Republican, they are all from right to work states and most of them have non-union auto plants. It is not enough that their states have subsidized these plants so that Toyata and Mercedes and Honda will have a competitive advantage. They seem to feel that they need to destroy the US auto industry to assure this advantage.

When this happens who will benefit. I imagine the power elite in these states will become rich. The overseas car companies will become rich, and the workers will become poorer. Do these guys realize that if workers keep getting squeezed that no one will be able to afford a car. Then what? As companies become more automated the idea was that workers would share in the increase in productivity. If a worker is 10 times more efficient today than in 1960 than the worker should make more money, this is called sharing the wealth. No one wants to talk about this anymore.

There is still talk of Joel Klein for the department of Education. I saw a great quote in The Times. This guy Fuller said that for Klein “It’s tough love without any love,” a perfect description. Putting someone into the Education department who is as anti-union and anti-teacher as Klein is a very bad idea.

None of this means that unions are perfect. But without them we will be back in the days of the robber barons. If you follow the money you will see this.

I also saw an article in the paper about a doctor who has been one of the main proponents of using psycho-active drugs on kids. This doctor is at Harvard school of medicine. When asked how much the drug companies paid him he said not more than a few hundred thousand dollars. It turns out it was 1.2 million. You have to always follow the money.

Catch 22

I went to see Catch 22 last weekend. The play was not that great. All the lines were taken directly from the book, which meant there were some great lines. It was just that it didn't work as a play. There was a discussion by one of the characters about time passing. He was saying that time passed very quickly when you were having a good time, and slowly when you were not. The conclusion was to have a miserable time if you want to feel like you lived a long time.

Meanwhile there was an old guy (he said he was 107) who sat outside a whore's house in Rome. He gave a whole long speech about why Italy would win the war. His premise was that Italians were bad soldiers and therefore less likely to die. He also talked about welcoming the Germans than later welcoming the Americans. Whoever was in power he would welcome them. He was not trying to change the world. He did not want Italy to become the richest most powerful country in the world. He just wanted to be happy. He thought that that was winning.

This guy was very appealing some how. When I think about myself, I think I am not working that hard. I am teaching a class which I love doing. I am playing with technology with an expectation of whatever I do is great because no one expects much. I have no power. Usually a lack of power comes with a lack of control over your own life. In my case this is not true.

Maybe I should think like this old Roman. Whoever takes over, I should welcome them. Just relax and enjoy myself. I think I keep writing about this. The idea of slowing down and just letting life happen. If only I could sit outside a whore house in Rome drinking wine and giving fatherly advice to the whores.

Chavez

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday he expects the OPEC nation will vote in late February on a constitutional amendment letting him stay in office as long as he keeps winning elections.

"In February, at the end of February, I think we should be ready for the referendum ... on the constitutional amendment," Chavez said during a televised speech.

Chavez, a socialist, lost a similar bid to amend the constitution last year and will have to leave office in 2013 if he loses the upcoming vote.

Thank god I don't live in a country that lets it's elected leader change the constitution to meet their own agenda and desire for power.

Oh wait I live in a city that does this. Never mind.

Another Reason to Hate Republicans

Mitt Romney was on TV the other day. He was talking about the auto companies. (Mitt should know something about them, his dad ran American Motors and was governor or Michigan)( I owned an AMC car when I was young. It got great gas mileage and the front seat went all the way back. A great feature when you were young and into parking with girls.) Mitt feels that GM and the rest should be allowed to go bankrupt. The reason he thinks they should is that it would allow them to get rid of legacy costs. To Mitt legacy costs include real estate and pension costs.

If you live in a town such as Lansing this is going to be awful. What Mitt's plan does is it means that all these people in your community with GM pensions are going to make less. It also means that all of the GM plants that have closed or been torn down in Lansing can be abandoned. GM will not be responsible for paying taxes and probably not responsible for cleaning up the brown fields they have left behind. The net effect of Mitt's plan is to shift many social welfare costs from corporate America to the government. Of course when the government steps in and says that they should help people or local government Mitt will yell "socialism".

I am not sure where Mitt thinks this will all end up. I am sure it will make real estate cheaper, which will be good for people with Mitt's kind of money. It will probably also lower the wages of servants. All in all a win-win for Mitt.

The Civil War

For some reason I have lately become interested in the Civil War. I have read a bunch of books about the revolutionary war over the years but I was never that interested in the Civil War. It seemed something only southerners were interested in. Years ago I had read a book on John Brown by Arthur Penn Warren. I did this after I visited Harper's Ferry. A few months ago I picked up another book at the Strand on John Brown. This one is by David S. Reynolds. This led me to reading some Walt Whitman and then going to a lecture on him at the Tenement Museum where I bought a biography of Whitman.

Yesterday in the Times on line I saw a review of "The Grapes of Wrath". The reason this movie is getting press at this time is that people are drawing parallels between today and The Great Depression. Many commentators are saying that Barack Obama is going to need to be the next FDR. But Obama really understands who he needs to be. Obama is reading about Lincoln not FDR.

What the Republicans have done to this country is create a social situation more like what existed before the Civil War. The levels of rumors and false stories that surrounded John Brown and Abraham Lincoln in the southern press is not that different than listening to Limbaugh and Hannity and reading some of the blogs from the right wing. These people are going nuts with all of the awful things they say are going to happen. Karl Rove and company have created an us vs them mentality in this country. This has led to incidents such as the group of 3rd and 4th graders in Idaho chanting assassinate Obama. Or the white kids beating up a black teenager in Staten Island while chanting Obama. These are similar to the ruffians that existed on the Missouri Kansas border in the 1850's.

Obama is right to think that he needs to lower this type of partisan howling. This country can not thrive as long as this continues. Lincoln was elected on a platform of compromise and inclusion. Unfortunately it didn't work. The south became increasing set in their thinking. Lincoln was unable to change them and eventually this led to a war. Lets hope the politicians in Idaho or Texas or Louisiana decide that it is time to work together before we have a civil war of some sort.

* Limbaugh spell checks OK but not yet Obama.

Friday Stuff

The paper today had an article about how much money the DoE was spending on accountability software. These types of initiatives have a tendency to become their own self fulfilling bureaucracies sucking up huge amounts of money for increasingly less useful results.

I was talking about atomic radius today and a kid asked what the abbreviation "pm" meant when speaking of atomic radius. I did not know the answer but I asked if anyone had access to the internet on their phone. One kid pulled out his Sidekick and looked up pm (it means picometers). I mention this because apparently cell phones have a use. My current school works on a don't ask don't tell policy with almost no bad consequences.

If I want to talk about Bill Clinton I will discover that the name does not get a red line under it. Apparently the spell checker built into Windows XP or Blogger or wherever it is is comfortable with Bill Clinton. If I type in Barack Obama I see red lines under both names. I wonder how long it takes spell checkers to catch up with the world.

I see my old school got its second straight F. This has to do with two things, the moron who used to be principal and the fact that it is a zero tolerance schools. Almost all zero tolerance schools close down within four years of becoming zero tolerance. You could look it up.

Joel Klein for Secretary of Education !

I am not anti Joel Klein. I think he has tried to change a system that is certainly broken. I think in some ways he has focused on the correct thing. Good teachers make a good system. He has failed more than he has succeeded and this is his fault not Randy Weingarten's.

Joel comes from the law world. Big law firms manage large groups of creative people. They are not that different than education. Joel is trying to learn some of the lessons from this world. He supports performance bonuses. Of course performance bonuses in the law world can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, not ten thousand. If he thinks teachers are motivated by ten thousand dollars he is wrong.

In the law world if you really want an employee you wine and dine him/her until you convince him/her to work for you. In the ed. world you offer them a cellophane wrapped "danish" and a bad cup of coffee. You then have them sign a sheet of paper saying they were there so that you can get your money back for the snacks. Finally you tell the applicant you want to hire them but first there are a few hundred hoops they have to jump through. In the end you don't hire the black kid from Columbia University who grew up in a single parent household. Instead you hire the guy with the thick accent who hates American kids but has all the right credentials because he took the test so many times he had memorized all the questions.

Ultimately what hurt Joel Klein is that he became fixated on being able to develop a quantifiable way to measure teacher performance. Joel has spent millions of dollars creating computer systems to do this. I am not really against these types of systems. I think that they often give you a good view of what is happening in a big organization. But, when you use these types of systems as your main evaluation tool you just create a group of managers who are good at manipulating the system. You also become tempted to cheat the system yourself to show how wonderful you are doing.

The feds finally proposed a plan that says all states must determine graduation statistics based on how many kids enter 9th grade vs how many graduate 12th grade in 4 or 5 years. Isn't it amazing that this was not the way it was always done.

Elementary Mis-Education

I am a high school science teacher. My ability to teach science is based to some extent on how much math kids know when they come to me. I also need kids who can read and analyze word problems. I think this is important work because I believe that we need to create a population with the ability to read and analyze complex issues. If we don't we risk creating an electorate that believes that Saddam Hussein attacked the World Trade Center.

Last week my wife went to a staff development day on math for 3rd grade teachers. The word problem was:

If Jane has 24 feet of fence and she wants to build an enclosure for her dogs what are the dimensions of a rectangle she can build with the largest amount of square feet.

The teachers not only could not do this problem, but when my wife said that two sides had to add up to 12 they couldn't follow why that was true. This means that these teachers are not smart enough to teach 3rd grade students. The reason they are not smart enough is that the education schools allowed them through. How can some one get a college degree and not be able to solve this problem by some method. My method might be very sophisticate. But these teachers should have some approach to solving this problem.

The nice thing about a depression is that it gives us the opportunity to recruit smart people to education. It is vital that we do this. We can not have kids coming through elementary school without learning any math or science. We can not afford this.

Is it a new day?

It is Wednesday and I can't help feel that it is a new world. I have to say though that even though 40% of my students think he will not be alive 4 years from now no one seems to want to talk about it on television. My students are not alone in feeling this way. "Yes we can" until someone takes it away from you.

I received this email today from someone I know.

Comments from an Irish-American friend in Chicago:


They started rounding up the white women this morning for “reeducational meetings”. Initially there were calls of death to whitey but first they want to make sure they nationalize the malt liquor industry as well as pork rinds and chitterlins. Once the basic supplies are ensured who knows what will happen.

I am vaguely beginning to feel what it must mean to be a Jew.

Surprisingly no looting or riots yet

This type of anger existed when Kennedy was president. People cheered in a country club outside Dallas when they announced Kennedy was dead. We have made it past race but not hate. People hate Obama in very extreme ways. They make race jokes, but I think they hate the concept of government being for people.

I really want to believe in happy endings. Maybe we have one.

Killing Trees

One of my favorite magazines at this time is Atlantic. I usually read almost all of the articles. This included a very long article this month by Andrew Sullivan on blogging. Of course I would never had read an article this long if the author had written it on his blog. Sullivan correctly states that blogs are meant to be short.

One of the gadgets I have lusted after is an electronic book reader (either a Kindle or a Sony reader, though I think the Sony reader has real advantages). The reason I want this gadget is that it seems cool to carry one around with a lot of books and magazines. In addition I wouldn't have to keep building book shelves. I also would do my part for ecology, not just the trees but also the trucks delivering books, the oil used in ink and the ability to get a book immediately.

Aside from the money the reason I don't get an e book reader is that if I check the last 6 books I have read to see if they are available as e books I usually find at best 1 book is available and usually none are. E books have not caught up with my reading habits. (I like to think this is because I am too smart for the e book world, but actually even some of my pop books don't show up.)

Today I was on the bus reading The Atlantic and thinking about reading this magazine on my ebook reader. I could do this. Then I realized that this would cause a large problem. My house is filled with half read magazines. Most of them have one or two articles that I intend to read. I feel guilty about not reading them, but after about six months I will go through the house and throw away all of the magazines I have not gotten too. A few weeks ago I threw away all of the July and August Magazines in my house. By doing this I no longer feel guilty about not getting to that amazing article on "The neurological implications of the sex drive in flat worms". If I had a Kindle I could save these magazines for ever. It is only a small amount of memory in the Kindle, but it is a large amount of guilt in my wetware.

I'm Not Dead Yet!

When I started writing this blog I was sitting in the "Rubber Room" with 8 hours to kill each day. I thought it would pass an hour by, but then I discovered that writing is actually difficult. It some times took hours to write. This year I have been teaching a class so I have had less time. In addition working with kids has made me happier so I don't have as many grouchy things to say. Grouchy is always easier to write than hope.

Today I have hope because I think that there are huge numbers of people in the world who are going to feel a weight lifted from them after Obama wins. It is John Kennedy all over again world wide. Of course 40% of the kids in my school feel he will not be alive 4 years from now. But hope causes a lot of things to change, even before legislation catches up with it.

My sister voted early in Florida. Early voting means that you take a paper ballot an fill out the circles next to who you are voting for. You do this at a table surrounded by curtains so that your ballot is secret. You then take it over to another machine where a poll worker helps you feed it into the scanner. Of course at this point the poll worker gets to look at your ballot. When my sister said that she did not fell that this was right the poll worker said that she should be proud of who she voted for and not want to hide it. Gee, voting irregularities in Florida, who would have thought this would happen.

Dunkin Donuts

Hear in New York City we now have a new law that says that restaurants need to post calorie contents on their menus. It would seem to be another example of big brother saving us from ourselves, but the law doesn't tell us what to buy.

Every day I go into Dunkin Donuts and buy a medium black coffee. It is a wonderful experience because everyone there knows me so all I have to do is get to the front of the line, grunt and stick out my two dollars and I get my coffee. My kind of morning communications. Occasionally if I am feeling sorry for myself I will buy a donut. I always feel guilty about this because I am a little chubby. (Actually the Wii fitness says I am obese.) Sometimes I will decide to be healthier and instead of the donut I will get an oatmeal raisin cookie or a poppy seed bagel. (Always poppy seed because of the opium) One of my favorite donuts is a Boston Cream. This is a delightful mixture of gently fried dough injected with a yellow gooey substance and than dipped in chocolate. It is so good it must be evil.

So, I went into Dunkin Donuts, and there on the rack of donuts and other goodies behind the counter is a label with the name of the item and the number of calories:
Boston Cream 280; Poppy Seed Bagel 370; Oatmeal Raisin cookie 470. Wow! Who would have thought that being bad had less calories than being good.

One Less Vote for Obama

My daughter is going to vote for Barack Obama. Her vote used to count because she lived in Michigan. Everyone wanted her vote. Now she is moving to Massachusetts, no one wants her vote. Both Obama and McCain assume that Massachusetts will go for Obama, and because of the way the electoral college works, this means that Obama will get all of the votes in that state. He doesn't care if he wins by 10 votes or 10 million votes.

The reason the electoral college comes into the news is that it is possible to win the election and lose the popular vote. This happened in 2000 and it was awful. But this is not the worse evil of the electoral college. The worst part of it is that it distorts the campaign. Because of where the swing states are, you will hear a lot about NAFTA and immigration in this election. You will not hear about some of the issues that those of us in New York and Boston care about. The kind of issues that might get Obama 10% more of our votes. He doesn't care about that 10%. This means that we end up with a lot of issues that seem important, but are not as important as they appear.

One of the reasons we can't come up with sensible immigration reform is that the presidential candidates need to pander to the swing state. What if my vote counted and my daughters vote counted. I think that the debate would be seriously changed.

There may be a reason to keep some of the electoral college, but at the very least states should be giving out electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote. When you ask many politicians about this they seem to agree, but they do not protest enough about it. They don't because they are afraid of the difficulty and cost of running a national campaign. They like being able to pick states and figure out how to pitch to them. It's what makes the pros the pros. It is what makes the pundits the pundits. No one wants to lose this edge. No one really seems to care about the inherent distortion to the American political system caused by the electoral college. Those of us in the safely blues states should be mad. Those people in the safely Red states should be mad. We are disenfranchised.

After I wrote this I did some research and found that some states have passed legislation that says all of the state's electoral votes will go to the candidate with the highest popular vote. This legislation only takes effect if enough states also pass similar legislation. An interesting end around.

Principals Riot

Douglas Avella was removed from his classroom at Intermediate School 318 after students handed in blank standardized exams to protest high-stakes tests last week.

This was the lead for a story on Saturday. What happened was that this teacher may have been involved in getting kids to protest a practice test. Here is Thursday's story.

More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday's three-hour practice exam for next month's statewide social studies test.

Instead, the students handed in blank exams.

Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education.

"We've had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year," Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. "They don't even count toward our grades. The school system's just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams."

There are a couple of things you should notice about the original article. First the teacher was not accused of leading a boycott of a real test just one of the many practice tests that schools think is a good idea, because they believe practice tests up test scores. Second virtually the entire class participated. No one can do this if there is not a clear grievance on the part of these students.

What we have is a teacher who does this amazing thing, he teaches kids how to find their voice. His reward is that he is quickly removed from the school and sent to the rubber room. Apparently he is considered a danger to students. But of course he is not a danger to students he is a danger to a principal. Is there even a pretense any more of the rubber room as anything other that a political gulag.

Today I heard a story of another principal sending the chapter chair and the UFT delegates to the rubber room on the same day. Another obvious political move. When I first started in the system this type of thing did not happen. People in the rubber room were usually pretty crazy, or had done something bad. I remember defending a teacher when I was chapter chair who was crazy, but who was never sent to the rubber room. The rubber room was small. I think that the local superintendents were hesitant to send people there. This acted as a restraint. Something has changed, and I am not sure what. I am guessing that the chancellor has been pushing this tool and that principals have been trying to prove to their bosses that they are tough. Sending people to the rubber room is a good way to prove how tough you are in today's environment.

The UFT is upset about the chapter chair and delegates being sent to the rubber room. When most of the teachers were sent their the UFT didn't care, but now they care. They have put themselves into this position now they need to suffer the consequences.

When I first joined the UFT it was an organization that was dominated by one party, but that had some dissidents on the executive board. The UFT is as undemocratic as the DoE so it drove them craze that dissidents were on the board. In a move that would make Joel Klein proud the UFT changed its constitution to make it virtually impossible for anyone to win an election to the board except the approved slates.

The problem the UFT has with the rubber room is that it thinks the same as the DoE. An organization built on power politics and undemocratic principals finds it hard to fight these same principals in the DoE. They are hoisted by their own petard.

Joe Stalin where are you now

I appreciate some really well thought out comments on my last post. It has kept me thinking about the issue. When Stalin ran Russia he just killed people he didn't like or people who got in his way. After he died the leadership became more subtle. Instead of death they sentenced people to Gulags or another great Soviet institution the mental institute. If you disagreed with the leadership, you must be crazy. This approach to justice is one of the major things that separates the Soviets from the United States.

When this country was founded the leaders realized that people in power inevitably used their power to suppress dissent. This is why they created Habeas Corpus and the right to a speedy trial. In the United States you can not be held in jail for two or three months without being formally charged. If you give leaders the ability to do this you create a create temptation for leaders to say someone did something but not really charge them. With out the right to a speedy trial it becomes too easy for powerful leaders to keep someone out of the public debate indefinitely. No matter how much Bush-Cheney may argue that we are in a crisis and should suspend these rights most Americans realize that this is a dangerous thing to do.

Somehow when it comes to labor law we forget the constitution. The parallels are inescapable. The chancellor says we are in a crisis, he needs to suspend Habeas Corpus. He then gives principals almost unlimited power to send people to a gulag. Once there the prisoners are not charged in a timely manner and when they are charged they are not given a speedy trial. The justification for this is protecting the students and empowering principals to rid themselves of bad teachers.

The result of course is almost identical to the result of all other dictatorships. This power is used to rid the system of people who challenge the leaders or threaten the power of a leader. It is sometimes used to get rid of bad people but it is also used to get rid of good people who are a threat. This is a failure of some leaders, but more importantly it is a failure of a system with no constitutional guarantees. The drafters of the constitution knew that men would use power badly if not restrained by law.

All the News That's Fit to Print

Lately the rubber room has become a hot news story. The big part of the story has been over the amount of money being spent to pay teachers who are not doing anything. Everyone is finally admitting that it is a broken system. Joel Klein feels the union is causing this problem, the UFT feels it is Klein and the principals who are using the system to get rid of people they can't get rid of legally. The Daily News seems to feel that most of the people in the rubber room are guilty so they should be gotten rid of. No one reports on how many people in the rubber room are ultimately found innocent. If they did there would probably be a bunch of statements to the effect that so few people are guilty because of UFT trickery and a bad contract that makes it impossible to get rid of bad people.

In general politicians blame evil lawyers for their own shortcomings. If police can't convict someone it is the defense lawyers fault. If corporations are forced to pay large claims for injured people, it is the lawyers fault. If doctors are convicted of malpractice, it is the lawyers fault. Of course cops plant evidence to quickly close cases, innocent people are sentenced to the death penalty, corporations hide bad things about their products to increase profits and almost no doctor is ever removed for being incompetent. Yet it is all the lawyers fault that these people are held accountable.

Government has deep pockets and can therefore often wins just because it can outlast individuals. It often doesn't matter that a person is found innocent if they are financially or psychologically devastated by defending them self. Teachers appear to be screened from the financial part because they have the UFT to defend them. Unless the UFT does a bad job.

The reason that the rubber room is in the news is that there are a group of people who have decided to sue the UFT for not defending them. These same people have reached out to NPR and have helped create a documentary about the rubber room. This is ultimately the only power that people have against government or large unions.

The part that no one seems to want to talk about is the decision to devote so little resources to solving the issues around the rubber room teachers. It takes months before you are even charged and then it takes months or years before a trial is even set. While you are waiting you go through a series of grievance steps that are a joke and that I would suggest should be eliminated except they do give you an opportunity to get out of the room for a day.

Most rubber room cases could be solved quickly if someone would actually investigate. No one is suggesting that teachers who endanger kids should be in a classroom, but in many cases this is not the issue. The first woman I met in the rubber room had been accused of falsifying a doctors note. This did not endanger kids and should not have been a reason to remove her from a classroom. On the surface this would seem to be a pretty easy case to investigate. You call the doctor and find out if the note was forged. If he/she says it wasn't the case is over. This took eighteen months to solve. In all of that time this teacher was kept out of the classroom. And yet it is the teacher that is blamed not the systemic failure of the DoE to resolve cases quickly.

I am outraged by the waste of money that is used to support the rubber room. But I know who is to blame, the Klein-Weingarten deal that created the absurd system now in place. Lets hold the people who created this system responsible for this waste of money.

Black like Me

A few years ago there was a controversial study of heart patients that seemed to indicate that the type of medicine suitable for white patients was different than what was suitable for blacks. Specifically, beta blockers did not work well in many patients with black skin. This disturbed a lot of people. The idea of race based medicine seemed contrary to a lot of what we knew about genetics. In particular the extremely small differences between people based on skin color. No one was comfortable with this.

The other day there was a report that they discovered a genetic variation in people of African descent that accounted for this difference. It was not because of their skin color. It was because of some evolutionary quirk that gave people with this variation a better chance of surviving in Africa. This has always been the argument for why sickle cell exists in people of African descent.

The thing is, this genetic variation exists in only forty percent of people with black skin, and it exists in two percent of people with white skin. Skin color turns out to be predictor but not a perfect predictor. If you were trying to help people with heart problems you could use skin color and play the odds, or you could do a genetic test and really help someone. Don't forget two percent of whites also have this genetic variation. Those white folks are getting short changed if doctors are using skin color to predict who should take take beta blockers.

When you read a lot of education research you see a lot of discussion about why black students don't do as well as white kids. If you are using skin color to make decisions about students you are being lazy and creating a false system. There is no way that the small genetic variation that accounts for skin coloring accounts for intellectual variation.

Educators need to start figuring out what is going on with actual students and stop playing the odds. The odds are bad policy in medicine and in education. It hurts way to many people.