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Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

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Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

LynahFan said:
Exactly. The author wasn't trying to "prove" any sort of causality. He's not arguing that the 100% increase in teachers caused an 8.5% increase in students (or vice versa). He's just reporting (possible -sources would be nice!) facts. It's not even a correlation - just two pieces of data showing changes in two independent parameters over the last 40 years.
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I think the main point is that as much as politicians try to use teachers as a political tool when one side calls for budget cuts saying how many teachers will get fired it wouldn't actually have a negative affect on the students. It certainly points out that there is waste in the system that can be cut even if it doesn't point out exactly where.
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

amherstblackbear said:
Foreign aid is foreign policy. The feel-good stuff is simply the tribute that vice pays to virtue. We're buying support, coopting opposition, etc. We don't always get it right, but it's not an irrational policy.
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Particularly since it's pennies on the dollar of the military budget.

Pound-for-pound we have gotten a much better ROI from the DOS than the DOD.
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

Kepler said:
Particularly since it's pennies on the dollar of the military budget.

Pound-for-pound we have gotten a much better ROI from the DOS than the DOD.
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A lot of DOD stuff is designed to have a short shelf life.
"Millions for defense, sir, but not one cent for tribute!"
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

Complaints about foreign aid are generally playing to an uninformed public who thinks we're shipping enormous amounts of money all over the world, rather than spend it here. Our use of foreign aid is far from perfect, but there's a lot worse waste of taxpayer dollars going on many other places in the federal budget.
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

abb - the point I'm failing to make is that when the number is 100% how much could somebody fluff them up? Sure, he could have picked some point before or after and perhaps the 8.5% to 100% ratio would look a little better...but would that change the point?

It is always fun to watch somebody try to explain why their staff is up 10% when units are only up 4%...and they might have a few logical explanations. I'd say 1 in 5 might have a true business case why that was so.

100:8.5, that doesn't even merit a meeting.

Of course, I'd be responsible if it happened under my supervision. To your point, who takes responsibility for this debacle that will cost each of us more taxes in our lifetime than any bailout, any Madoff, any BP, any mortgage crisis...combined?

This isn't science. I would care why staff was up 10%, there is no reason to care why staff is up 100%...there can be no rational explanation. Causation? How about gross indifference to the amount of money taxpayers are asked to pay along with no need to justify anything other than the next bond or next tax increase? There is the cause (that part is opinion;)).

Ask yourself why the DOE didn't track this type of info, or if they did, why haven't we heard about this for the last 20 years? How did it ever get this bad? $210B a year, every year and that is just salary. While they are spread out, they cumulatively would need buildings, supplies, computers etc. for over 2.5 million people.

Kids are being educated in trailers...ever see the school adminstrators working in a trailer? They cut music teachers that have been there for decades but increase administrative staff by 1 million people. Schools have to share nurses, gym class is a shell of what it used to be, schools can't fund freshman sports anymore, kids have to pay fees to be in the band, on the football team etc. but we have $210B a year for 2.5 million extra people and you want to debate whether the author cherry picked the years?

Like I said, reduce it by 50% and it is "only" $105B every year and we only have pensions and overhead for 1.25 million people. That justifies an indignant article as well in my opinion.
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

amherstblackbear said:
That's just it. Though I find the choice of data points to be convenient for the author's predetermined ends, I'm not really disputing them so much as I'm disputing their usefulness absent other information.
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Okay, but you should check yourself for predetermined ideas, too. You seem pretty emotionally tied to the hypothesis that smaller class size MUST yield better results, so you are categorically rejecting this data that suggests otherwise, saying that there must have been other, more important factors, so a better model is needed.

Being skeptical is a good thing - but when you immediately start ranting about predetermined agendas and fitting analysis to advocacy, that is an entirely different animal than saying, "whoa - that's interesting. I would really be curious to see a more complete study to see if there might be other factors which are suppressing the improved outcomes which I would otherwise have expected given that huge reduction in class size, or if my hypothesis that class size reduction improves test scores is actually incorrect."
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

LynahFan said:
Okay, but you should check yourself for predetermined ideas, too. You seem pretty emotionally tied to the hypothesis that smaller class size MUST yield better results, so you are categorically rejecting this data that suggests otherwise, saying that there must have been other, more important factors, so a better model is needed.

Being skeptical is a good thing - but when you immediately start ranting about predetermined agendas and fitting analysis to advocacy, that is an entirely different animal than saying, "whoa - that's interesting. I would really be curious to see a more complete study to see if there might be other factors which are suppressing the improved outcomes which I would otherwise have expected given that huge reduction in class size, or if my hypothesis that class size reduction improves test scores is actually incorrect."
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That is a very good point. I can see how there might be an "optimal" class size that is larger than people might intuitively expect at first glance, because students don't learn only from their teachers, they also learn from their peers. "Too small" a class might be non-optimal in a variety of different ways upon which I might speculate further.....
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

LynahFan said:
Okay, but you should check yourself for predetermined ideas, too. You seem pretty emotionally tied to the hypothesis that smaller class size MUST yield better results, so you are categorically rejecting this data that suggests otherwise, saying that there must have been other, more important factors, so a better model is needed.

Being skeptical is a good thing - but when you immediately start ranting about predetermined agendas and fitting analysis to advocacy, that is an entirely different animal than saying, "whoa - that's interesting. I would really be curious to see a more complete study to see if there might be other factors which are suppressing the improved outcomes which I would otherwise have expected given that huge reduction in class size, or if my hypothesis that class size reduction improves test scores is actually incorrect."
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FreshFish said:
That is a very good point. I can see how there might be an "optimal" class size that is larger than people might intuitively expect at first glance, because students don't learn only from their teachers, they also learn from their peers. "Too small" a class might be non-optimal in a variety of different ways upon which I might speculate further.....
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Gang

Catholic schools in the 60's routinely had 40+ kids in each class and they seemed to manage OK. From my point of view, there were 4 kids in my class that constantly pushed each other to get the best grades.
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

joecct said:
Catholic schools in the 60's routinely had 40+ kids in each class and they seemed to manage OK. From my point of view, there were 4 kids in my class that constantly pushed each other to get the best grades.
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The same was true in public high school in the 70's with 25-person classes.

In a typical high school class, about a quarter of the kids are on the ball, half are sleep-walking, and a quarter are completely hopeless. Basically, like real life.
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

geezer said:
Mitt Romney's Summer Vacation
"If that jet-ski ride was the candidate's call, his campaign is headed for a Dukakis-like catastrophe."
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Another quote:

If no one warned Mr. Romney of the Kerryesque lobster roast his ride would guarantee, then calls for a campaign upgrade are plausible.

But what if the campaign staff did warn Mr. Romney but were waved off by the candidate himself, confident in his own judgment? If that happened, then neither the second coming of Lee Atwater nor James Carville will save this candidate from blowing himself up eventually with another bad call, such as a Dukakis-like photo of the candidate riding in an Abrams tank in front of the press.
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There is another theory out there, though, and that's that Romney has no intention of winning at all. Being president would be hard work, and there is no indication Romney has ever worked a day in his life. But running for president and losing, particularly on the Adelson and Koch dime, could turn out to be very, very lucrative.
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

Kepler said:
The same was true in public high school in the 70's with 25-person classes.

In a typical high school class, about a quarter of the kids are on the ball, half are sleep-walking, and a quarter are completely hopeless. Basically, like real life.
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Yeah, it was pretty ironic, in our home room (in a school of about 4,000), we had the #1 student and the #1,006 student in our class of 1,006 (that's the number of students, not the year in which I graduated ;))
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

Kepler said:
Another quote:
...Being president would be hard work, and there is no indication Romney has ever worked a day in his life. ...
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Can't you say that of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW prior to 1/20/2009?
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

Kepler said:
there is no indication Romney has ever worked a day in his life.
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Have you forgotten about the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics? Perhaps you didn't realize what a disastrous situation it was before he was asked to be in charge?

He really did perform a minor miracle there. We lived in the area at the time, and the perilous situation of lack of readiness to host the Games was really big local news. Lots of people were legitimately prepared for a huge public relations fiasco before he arrived. The transformation was quickly apparent, all you had to do was look out your car window every time you drove past Park City!

Even if you disdain his success at Harvard Business School and his founding of Bain Capital, you should at least have the decency to acknowledge that yes, in rescuing us from international ridicule, he did us all a nice solid.
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

Kepler said:
There is another theory out there, though, and that's that Romney has no intention of winning at all. Being president would be hard work, and there is no indication Romney has ever worked a day in his life. But running for president and losing, particularly on the Adelson and Koch dime, could turn out to be very, very lucrative.
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hmm. skip all the stress and proceed straight to "highly honored elder statesman." Sadly, I don't doubt it.
 
Re: Elections 2012 -- Kull Wahad!!!

Here's someone who can stop voter fraud:

534986_475080975854763_1626534796_n.jpg
 
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