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EDITORIAL
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July 1, 2010
OUR TAKE: Editorial
This week’s question
When mowing the lawn? Do you: A. Do it yourself
C. Pay a neighbor
B. Hire a service
D. Get a family member to do it
Whether you like weather or not, it’s good to know what’s happening class to learn more about the A tornado and an earthwarning signs of the wrath of quake in Michigan in recent bad weather. weeks have made weather big So last month’s publication news. of meteorologist Paul Gross’ Not that weather isn’t a frebook “Extreme Michigan quent topic of conversation in Weather,” should become a this state — you know the old must read for everyone who joke, “Don’t like the weather in lives in the state. Michigan, wait 10 minutes.” Although it has its rainbow But these extreme weather and aurora borealis moments, conditions are downright this book will give you the scary. knowledge necessary to talk I’ve spent more time in the weather intelligently. basement huddled with the And perhaps, save a life, if dogs this spring than I have in you understand the warning all the years I’ve lived here. LISA signs of violent or dangerous Sure, call me a chicken, but ALLMENDINGER conditions. I’ve lived through a tornado The book not only explains and I sat here while half a tree why weather happens, it delves into severe fell on my house during a straight-line storms and tornadoes, and everyone’s wind event. favorite — wind chill, ice and snow. Let’s face it, weather should be imporIn addition, there’s a section on water tant to everyone because a lack of knowland floods, another recent weather event, edge of how to deal with it can severely as well as heat, cold, global warming and injure or even kill you. My interest in weather was the impetus a complete list of climate records for more than 20 cities, including Ann Arbor, for taking the county’s Skywarn Spotter
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Jackson, Detroit, Adrian and Pontiac. Did I mention high winds? He talks about that, too. Plus, he clearly explains the circumstances surrounding the development of these extreme weather conditions, and what to do if you find yourself in one. Of course, he defends those of his ilk, and explains that weather forecasting has improved tremendously during the last century. “In order to forecast weather that will be happening where you are about it (at the Earth’s surface) meteorologists have to analyze temperature, pressure, wind and humidity from the surface to tens of thousands of feet above the ground to determine just how extreme the resulting weather will be,” he writes. Gross, a certified consulting meteorologist, works as a broadcast meteorologist for WDIV-TV in Detroit. If you like weather, you’ll like this book. Lisa Allmendinger can be reached at 1877-995-NEWS (6397) or at lallmendinger@heritage.com. Check out her daily blog at www.A2Journal.com.
Illegal immigration is hurting the country With all due respect to his office, we have to ask, what is President Obama thinking? On second thought, we probably know — politics. The Justice Department last week was reportedly preparing to file a lawsuit against the state of Arizona because of its new illegal immigration crackdown –– this, even before the law takes effect July 29. With all of the problems facing America — from terrorism to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the very shaky economy — the president doesn’t need to create an even bigger mess of the immigration problem. The lawsuit merely complicates what should be a very simple action. Arizona is trying to enforce the illegal immigration laws that are on the books. The federal government should be supporting the state, not wasting valuable tax dollars on a contentious and highly political lawsuit. Justice Department officials are said to be contacting several government agencies to determine the best approach to block the statute. The consensus is that they will challenge Arizona’s authority to establish immigration regulations, arguing that the federal government should do that. It looks like a case of where two different law enforcement agencies are fighting over who has jurisdiction in a bank robbery. While the two agencies are bickering, the bank robber is escaping. It should be more important to catch the robber rather than argue over jurisdiction, and we believe that most law enforcement agencies would opt to catch the criminal first. In the case of the federal government, we would have hoped that the crime — illegally entering the United States — would be more important to deal with than who has jurisdictional authority. We sympathize with Arizona officials, who are inundated with illegal immigrants and the problems associated with them. It’s not just a case of people crossing the border illegally. Many of those intruders are hardened criminals and drug dealers. South Arizona communities are threatened daily by the crimes some of these people are committing. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law that makes it a crime for an immigrant to be in her state without proof of legal residency. Further, it directs law enforcement to stop and question individuals about their immigration status if officers reasonably suspect they are in the country illegally. This simple attempt to establish some order to the chaotic problem of illegal immigration has brought Brewer and Arizona national criticism. The moment she inked the legislation there were demonstrations in Arizona and across the nation protesting and vilifying her. We admire Brewer for her action and we hope she gets more support to stand by this bold move. Illegal immigration is not just an Arizona problem. It’s a national one. Arizona is merely paying attention to a national problem that Congress and the administration have ignored, even though we do have immigration laws. Reports indicate that, conservatively, some 12 million illegal immigrants live throughout the nation. In Arizona alone, there are an estimated 450,000 illegal immigrants. Arizona is more directly affected because of its border with Mexico. Most Americans are not against immigration, if it’s done legally. Legal immigration is what helped build America. Illegal immigration is tearing her down. ––Courtesy of The Oakland Press
FROM THE BLOG EDUCATION MATTERS: By Martha Toth
Should teachers get incentive pay? Editor’s Note: Below is a blog post from June 13 by Heritage Newspapers blogging partner Martha Toth. Read more of what she has to say at www.heritage. com/blogs. Should K-12 teachers be paid according to how well their students learn? This is one of those ideas that sounds like a no-brainer. After all, aren’t other professionals routinely evaluated and compensated in some way that relates to their accomplishments? Why shouldn’t teachers, too, be rated on their effectiveness and paid more when they do a better job? The problem, it seems to me, is how their effectiveness can be fairly evaluated. Looking at student outcomes seems reasonable, but that is not simple. We tend to oversimplify it by judging what children learned on the basis of achievement test scores. Most would agree that absolute score differences (just higher scores) are no measure of teacher effectiveness. Obviously, not all students of the same grade begin the year at the same level or possess the same skills. If we used that measure, everyone would fight to teach only the most gifted and motivated students. So, should we use a growth or value-added model to see whether individual children show a year’s progress in a year? I ran across a very entertaining video in which cognitive psychologist and University of Virginia Professor
Daniel Willlingham describes — in less than three minutes! — six problems (some conceptual, some statistical) with evaluating teachers by comparing student achievement in the fall and in the spring. Among them are biased data when some children move away during the year, the effect of others on how teachers do (such as the help or hindrance of a building administrator), and the effect of peers — is the classroom cohort rowdy or well-behaved? I’ve spent enough time in classrooms to know that sometimes there is a student who seems to suck all the oxygen out of the room, making life difficult for everyone else. I might add that some years (when going through a messy divorce, or when grieving the loss of a child or a spouse) will find a typically great teacher unable to think or function as well as usual. Should she be fired? Are her students permanently harmed? I think of the lessons in compassion and in dealing with difficult people that I and my children learned from such sub-optimal school years — which reminds me of all we learn that is useful in life but not evaluated on tests. A related conceptual problem with using test scores is that they focus on short-term gains. Most of us, in higher education and then in adult life, did not find that only discrete bits of information were important. Broader knowledge and skills — and especially
the abilities to research, evaluate, learn, and apply things on our own — were much more vital to our success. Yet these skills are not evaluated on most tests. Portfolios of student work give a superior picture of student abilities, but they would be very expensive and time-consuming to evaluate in a fair way. If we cannot find the time or money for essays in our achievement tests, then, realistically, we’ll never use portfolios. This hints at the major problem with test results as a measure of student learning. To make massive testing programs at all affordable, we have made them much less valid over the years. Our MEAP writing test, for example, used to require legions of low-paid evaluators. Not only was this very expensive, and so time-consuming that Michigan was penalized by the federal government for being late with the scores (under No Child Left Behind rules), but it proved nearly impossible to get consistent grading from so many evaluators. So, the writing test today involves very little actual writing. You get what you measure, especially if the tests have high stakes, and we are not measuring the complex skills that our children need for life success. Even the gains we do measure can be evanescent, disappearing soon after the tests were scored. Professor of education at California State University, Monterey Bay, Nicholas Meier
(rightly) fears that basing teacher pay on test scores will encourage even more focus on test fodder and test preparation alone, at the expense of more worthwhile endeavors. I recently heard an impassioned speech about education outreach plans for the Yankee Air Museum that involved teaching children forgotten history and engaging them in exciting activities, since schools no longer do. My reaction was a sad acknowledgment that, yes, if it’s not on the MEAP, our teachers don’t have time for it anymore. We trade hundreds of students (and their indispensable funding!) back and forth every year with charters and schools of choice — and those decisions are most likely made on the basis of test scores. The draconian penalties levied by NCLB are base largely on test scores. And now we want to raise the stakes by basing teacher pay and job security on them, too? Meier says this better than I could: “There is an axiom in the social sciences known as Campbell’s Law that says that the higher the stakes on a particular social indicator (e.g., a single test score), the more the use of that indicator corrupts the original intent, as it encourages people to manipulate the system to look good on that indicator regardless of other effects. We see that happening already—retaining students so they take the easier test; pushing kids to disappear from the system. There is the
focus on the kids that show the most promise of moving from one category to the next, while ignoring others. Not to mention the examples of out and out cheating….” So, no, I have little hope that pay for performance will improve public education. There are other ways to evaluate teachers, of course, with classroom observation being a time-honored one. This tends to be more of a good idea than a good practice, though, as it is done too rarely for validity. As a young teacher in my family put it: “Who will be doing my evaluation? Will it be an administrator who has classroom experience? If so, will that be experience in my field or something totally unrelated? Are those responsible for my evaluation familiar with the standards the students are expected to achieve? If not, I would question, seriously, the reliability of their judgment.” When you think about it, there is a good reason many teachers are suspicious and fearful about the performance-based evaluation required by the federal Race to the Top education funding program. If they are unconvinced of the fairness or validity of evaluation by their own administrators, think how much less confident they must be about the judgment of state legislators (who have changed laws to comply with RttT) in this matter. Martha Toth can be reached at mwtoth@gmail.com.
Results from our recent polls When do you start getting interested in the Primary Election? Never: 36 percent July, closer to the election: 23 percent Just days prior to the election: 21 percent After petitions have been filed: 21 percent What qualities do you look for in a political leader? Independent thinker: 55 percent Rapport with ‘regular folks’: 17 percent Experience: 17 percent Agent of change: 10 percent How did you spend Memorial Day? Did nothing in particular: 51 percent Attended community Memorial Day events: 21 percent Attended a family picnic: 20 percent Spent time at the pool or lake: 7 percent What do you do about child care in the summer? Family members: 40 percent Summer camps: 32 percent Daycare facility: 20 percent Babysitters: 8 percent What do you really do when there’s a tornado warning? Cautiously wait and see: 49 percent Take cover in the basement: 31 percent Ignore it: 11 percent Take cover in a room without windows: 8 percent