I'm not the biggest fan of Cory Booker for his stances on Newark public schools (pro-charter schools, pro-merit pay for teachers tied to testing, friendliness with lobbyists from for-profit education companies), but he hit the right notes and delivered it passionately, albeit a bit heavy-handedly.
I think the West Wing put a good spin on this. The mayor of DC comes in and says he wants a voucher program, because he's desperate to try anything to improve his schools. Some people are tired of supporting institutions that aren't improving. While I love the teacher's union and plan to be a member here in Minnesota in a few years, it needs to change.
Over the last 15 years, the party advocating big changes are on the right. Now, they might be the wrong changes, but for people who are tired of the status quo, the promise of change is alluring.
I definitely agree that more testing is bad and the testing companies are pretty much evil. That said, we do need ways to evaluate success and while I disagree with merit pay, we do need to evaluate teachers. Bad teachers who refuse to improve need to go.
Here's a stat for you, if you took the best 10% of teachers in the US and put them all in schools with majority black children, the achievement gap would disappear in 5 years. The issue would be solved. Failing schools who get just one top-flight teacher see meaningful gains in graduation rates and college acceptance.
Most teachers are never evaluated, or at least not meaningfully. They graduate from college, get put in a classroom and then they retire X years later. They don't go to additional classes to learn new techniques. They don't spend time in other teachers classrooms learning. They don't teach other teachers. A principal might spend an hour in the classroom... each year, but that represents roughly 0.1% of the time spent with students.
I'd love to see the democratic party stand next to teachers and at the same time push them to do more. There are a couple of grad school teaching programs around the country that routinely turn out great teachers, even their worst are far above average. Our schools need to change and the unions have a lot of power over that. I'd like to see them get proactive, instead of just defensive.
Franken seemed a bit flat, and the repartee with Silverman seemed overly-rehearsed, but they accomplished their goal. I enjoyed Silverman's passionate pro-Sanders stumping and her bringing it around to full support for Clinton. I loved her adlib, "Can I just say: To the 'Bernie or Bust' people, you're being ridiculous."
The Sanders folk got full helpings of this kind of patronisation from the DNC and others throughout the entire primary process. Whoever thought that this would be better received because Silverman had been an outspoken Bernie supporter, needs to go soak their head in a bucket until the rest of their dumb ideas wash away. The last thing that the Sanders crowd needed was yet another voice of dismissal.
So I'd say to Silverman right back. "You should know why they're here. And even if the game was rigged from the start, they were far from ridiculous in what they were fighting for."
Her improv wasn't needed, wasn't wanted, and it surely was not funny.
She usually isn't, imho.
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Franken seemed a bit flat, and the repartee with Silverman seemed overly-rehearsed, but they accomplished their goal. I enjoyed Silverman's passionate pro-Sanders stumping and her bringing it around to full support for Clinton. I loved her adlib, "Can I just say: To the 'Bernie or Bust' people, you're being ridiculous."The Sanders folk got full helpings of this kind of patronisation from the DNC and others throughout the entire primary process. Whoever thought that this would be better received because Silverman had been an outspoken Bernie supporter, needs to go soak their head in a bucket until the rest of their dumb ideas wash away. The last thing that the Sanders crowd needed was yet another voice of dismissal.
So I'd say to Silverman right back. "You should know why they're here. And even if the game was rigged from the start, they were far from ridiculous in what they were fighting for."
I don't know, dismissal seems to be working pretty well. Only 10% of them are still holding out.
Regardless, the primary was not "rigged from the start." You guys lost.
All of this just sounds a lot like a bunch of people who can't handle level-headed women criticizing their behavior.
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Franken seemed a bit flat, and the repartee with Silverman seemed overly-rehearsed, but they accomplished their goal. I enjoyed Silverman's passionate pro-Sanders stumping and her bringing it around to full support for Clinton. I loved her adlib, "Can I just say: To the 'Bernie or Bust' people, you're being ridiculous."The Sanders folk got full helpings of this kind of patronisation from the DNC and others throughout the entire primary process. Whoever thought that this would be better received because Silverman had been an outspoken Bernie supporter, needs to go soak their head in a bucket until the rest of their dumb ideas wash away. The last thing that the Sanders crowd needed was yet another voice of dismissal.
So I'd say to Silverman right back. "You should know why they're here. And even if the game was rigged from the start, they were far from ridiculous in what they were fighting for."
Her improv wasn't needed, wasn't wanted, and it surely was not funny.
The Tea-Partiers didn't take over the Republican party in a single push or single decisive battle. They had a strategy, concrete goals, and (more or less) intra-unity; they made incremental progress over several years to get to where they are today.
It's unrealistic for Sanders supporters to expect to take over the Democratic party in a single primary season. They got to see major components of the DNC platform that achieve many of their goals. They've made major incremental progress in an incredibly short amount of time. This is good, very good. But it's tactically stupid to piss and moan that they didn't achieve everything the wanted, no matter how unfeasible or unrealistic, and to burn bridges they'll need down the road. The primary is over, and Sanders lost, without any voter manipulation or fraud. The Sanders supporters can either build on their Very Good first steps of incremental successes, big and small... or they can entrench themselves waiting for a Perfect that will never arrive.
The primary was never a fair fight. We can realize that fairly obvious fact and also recognize that it's over and we need to move on. Just like I can vote for Clinton this November while personally feeling that she will take the Democratic party in the wrong direction.
You aren't exactly wrong, either. And when I say "Sanders didn't have a fair fight", I'm not even necessarily saying anyone deliberately cheated him. Maybe what happened in Arizona rally was just a huge screwup. They're still looking into it. Maybe the so-called money laundering was just really poor management. And I personally believe the media was probably just working off confirmation bias rather than a real conspiracy to push Sanders out.
But those who feel the need to push the "Sanders lost fair and square" argument are in the exact same place as those who push "Sanders was cheated" argument: Wasting time on the wrong issue. Both of our sides are just trying to make ourselves feel better about the primary—Hillary supporters want to believe that their victory was legitimate and Sanders really was just a vocal minority, Sanders supporters want to believe that Sanders could win in an even rumble. It's all just therapy at this point.
Whether or not the primary was fair or balanced or honest is wholly irrelevant and a waste of time. Hillary won. It's time to make sure she wins again, because the alternative is the product of someone saying, "What would happen if Chester Cheetah had a humansona?"
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What did Robert B. Parker say? "No, it wasn't a fair fight. In a fair fight against a guy my size, he would have had a baseball bat."
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I especially think we need to move on from the primary because sticking to it, and sticking to Sanders, is just tearing his movement apart at this point. We need to be pivoting to supporting local elections in his name, not pointlessly filling out ballots for Jill Stein just to "stick it to Hillary".
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That the United States is a democracy is not a lie. A lot of people think that you need to be a direct democracy to be a democracy, but that's simply untrue. The US is a representative democracy, because even in the 18th century, it was well-understood that direct democracy is unworkable for something as large as a medium-sized city.
That's technically true, but strikes me as semantics. In common parlance, there is no distinction. How many people, do you suppose, when asked out of the blue would agree with the statement "in a democracy, the person who gets the most votes wins?" 99%? 100%? Will of the people, and all that?
Yet that isn't how our system works.
It's all about public perception.
The public perception in thinking it should be a fair process may be an inaccurate one, but it is what it is.
If people think someone cheated, technicalities don't matter much.
Edit: Also Johnson doesn't have a 15% chance of success. He's polling at 15%. There's a big difference. He's got approximately 0% chance of actually winning. He'd need to be polling at least 30 to have a noticeable chance and then only if he was pulling heavily from both candidates - just a few points of difference in polling make a huge swing in odds of winning. A 55/45 race is nearly a sure thing, not a 55% chance of the leader winning.Repeating this, because it's an important lesson in election polling and statistics. The proportion of people who support you isn't the same as the chance of you winning the election. At all. Trump and Clinton are polling very close to one another, nationally, but election forecasts and betting markets give Clinton a much better chance of winning than Trump. Johnson is sitting at 0.4% on the betting markets - lower than Sanders. And you can expect that figure to drop as the race progresses.
One wonders what the betting markets' odds were for Trump obtaining the nomination. ;)
Not at the start of the whole mess last year. ;)
I especially think we need to move on from the primary because sticking to it, and sticking to Sanders, is just tearing his movement apart at this point. We need to be pivoting to supporting local elections in his name, not pointlessly filling out ballots for Jill Stein just to "stick it to Hillary".
Thankfully, I'll be able to stop on August 7th. I mean, shiznit, we've got five new recruits that we need to consolidate, a couple dozen contacts from the recent #BlackLivesMatters rallies and trans rights demos, and I'm stuck in New Hampshire Farmer's Markets getting signatures on petitions?!?
Can't wait til all this shiznit is over and I can go back to hanging out on picket lines.
One wonders what the betting markets' odds were for Trump obtaining the nomination. ;)Edit: Also Johnson doesn't have a 15% chance of success. He's polling at 15%. There's a big difference. He's got approximately 0% chance of actually winning. He'd need to be polling at least 30 to have a noticeable chance and then only if he was pulling heavily from both candidates - just a few points of difference in polling make a huge swing in odds of winning. A 55/45 race is nearly a sure thing, not a 55% chance of the leader winning.Repeating this, because it's an important lesson in election polling and statistics. The proportion of people who support you isn't the same as the chance of you winning the election. At all. Trump and Clinton are polling very close to one another, nationally, but election forecasts and betting markets give Clinton a much better chance of winning than Trump. Johnson is sitting at 0.4% on the betting markets - lower than Sanders. And you can expect that figure to drop as the race progresses.
I get that you're trying to make a point, here, but I think you're going to have some trouble with it. Primaries are inherently less stable and harder to predict than the general election. Party identity carries a lot of weight, and history and demographics alone can be used to (fairly reliably) predict how most states will vote in a Presidential general election. Primaries, on the other hand, have no party identity demarcations to distinguish candidates from one another - all Democrats run against all Democrats, and all Republicans run against all Republicans. It's therefore very difficult to predict the outcome early on in the primary process, especially when the field is very full and a strong narrative around a candidate hasn't been established. Primaries are also vulnerable to massive support swings, as voters rally behind new narratives, jump on gaffes as campaign-enders, and shift preference en masse as trailing candidates suspend their campaigns. Swings in general election support are much more muted.
As thejeff notes, as the field consolidated, crowd wisdom clearly indicated Trump as the winner very quickly.
Here's a stat for you, if you took the best 10% of teachers in the US and put them all in schools with majority black children, the achievement gap would disappear in 5 years. The issue would be solved. Failing schools who get just one top-flight teacher see meaningful gains in graduation rates and college acceptance.
I was curious as to how you get a statistic out of a "what if?" scenario.
In fairness, the statistic was just a number to give an idea of roughly how many teachers should be moved. I didn't get the sense it was meant as a firm numerical statement.
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Google searching led me to studies by the Center for American Progress. Don't know if that's his source, but La Principessa, a "highly effective"-rated teacher in an upper middle class public Brooklyn middle school, looked at it, and is throwing a fit about "circular reasoning" and "bullshiznit data".
It's getting kind of heated, I think I'm gonna drop the subject.
Breaking News Flash
Mr. Comrade called. He's stuck in traffic in Connecticut. He got a call from Nancy Donovan who's still in Philadelphia. He reports that she reports that 100ish or so delegates walked out, protesters tried to take the hall, and that both protesters and delegates have been tear gassed by the cops.
If this is not correct, well there's a reason the game is called "telephone."
Except, from what I can see in the historical market data, there really wasn't much swinginess. I guess it depends on when you mean by "as the field consolidated". On a different site that gives a little more control, Trump was clearly one of the main contenders by December. And clearly the leading contender by January. That's by the earliest actual voting. Only a couple spikes after that - one in February where he and Rubio swapped places and one in April where Cruz almost caught up. Other than that a clear lead all through this year. Even while the pundits were still talking up other candidates.
What I mean by swinginess is that candidates experience massive rises and falls in polling and in chances of nomination. This chart demonstrates what I'm talking about. While Trump may have experienced a steady rise, save for a couple of sharp drops, many other candidates bounced all over the place. Look at Walker. Look at Rubio. Look at Jeb Bush. You would never see that level of vacillation in the general election.
Repeats caveat about telephone game. That being said,
Sanders Supporters, Police Protesters Join in Rally Outside DNC
8:20 pm
"An Associated Press photographer witnessed one police officer spraying something at the protesters outside of the AT&T subway station that serves the convention site."
Trump will get the police a good deal on tear gas. A very very good deal....believe him.
Not to dismiss any claims of police abuse, but god that's a bad article.
Yeah, well, it's NBC.
(As the Nancy Donovan reference might indicate, I've been rewatching 30 Rock)
Here's a stat for you, if you took the best 10% of teachers in the US and put them all in schools with majority black children, the achievement gap would disappear in 5 years. The issue would be solved. Failing schools who get just one top-flight teacher see meaningful gains in graduation rates and college acceptance.I was curious as to how you get a statistic out of a "what if?" scenario.
I have it in print form. I'll see if I can dig up an online source that isn't behind a paywall. It was an article in the Economist (a capitalist rag, not really your type).
I got my numbers wrong as well, it was the top 25% of teachers could fix it in 8 years. It's based on the efficacy of teacher performance on student achievement. Teachers that do X well get Y results from students, or rather how much impact those strategies have on students. Basically, these teachers do things that increase student performance, things which have been shown to consistently work and produce results.
There are other factors outside of the school that affect student performance, but the time spent in the classroom is important no matter what and good teachers can maximize the effect of that time.
Of course, part of how that achievement gap would be closed would be because white students would no longer have access to the best teachers, so their performance would also be falling during this period. So part of it is circular, in that if we deny the best students (now) the best teachers, they'll stop being the best students and someone else will become better.
But that in itself says that we need to find ways to make our teachers better. We don't just want to shift around the best, we need to lift up the worst.
Part of the study included identifying top teachers based on test scores, then actually going and observing classes. They didn't all share the exact same techniques, but there were strong trends and commonalities throughout. An interesting thing to note is that these techniques are in common practice in other countries where students regularly test higher than the US. Singapore regularly does well by any measure of education, but there instead of hoping that individual teachers happen upon these techniques, they actually teach them to the new teachers.
One of the major problems is that teachers get thrown to the wolves regularly. Little to no training, no classroom experience, no evaluation and practice. It makes a big difference in retention as well, new teachers that are mentored have a 15% higher retention rate (86% are still teaching at the 5 year mark) than those who receive no mentoring (71% retention at 5 years). Of course, those numbers came from the most recent recession, which probably increased retention (since it was harder to leave for a new job).
I think the teacher's unions could play a big role if they took a more proactive approach to solving issues of training and feedback for their members. If the unions adopted a method of evaluating teachers, then helping train them, they could remove it from the hands of management while strengthening their members as the same time.
Anyways, the article was an interesting read and has led me to some interesting research as I consider where and how to pursue my own training. Here in Minnesota there's a long tradition of requiring classroom time for teaching programs, so it might not be as hard to get good training, but I've got my eye on a program in Chicago that I'm going to research.
Hopefully the post didn't ramble too much, I had more and more ideas to keep going back and modify as I wrote.
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I have it in print form. I'll see if I can dig up an online source that isn't behind a paywall. It was an article in the Economist (a capitalist rag, not really your type).Here's a stat for you, if you took the best 10% of teachers in the US and put them all in schools with majority black children, the achievement gap would disappear in 5 years. The issue would be solved. Failing schools who get just one top-flight teacher see meaningful gains in graduation rates and college acceptance.I was curious as to how you get a statistic out of a "what if?" scenario.
Oh please. I've linked articles from Forbes, Fortune and the Financial Times during my stay in politroll land.
As for the rest of it, La Principessa and I had a big fight that finally ended an hour ago in her telling me how great I am, so there's no way I'm bringing up the subject now.
Hee hee.
As someone whom lives in the state he governed, I was laughing my butt off. It is soo true.
Donald Trump literally just told Russia to hack a former Secretary of State in order to obtain what he hopes is classified information, and promised they'd be rewarded for doing so.
That actually just happened.
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Donald Trump literally just told Russia to hack a former Secretary of State in order to obtain what he hopes is classified information, and promised they'd be rewarded for doing so.
That actually just happened.
If proof could actually be obtained, and this was something being done by a sitting President, it would be beyond Watergate levels of scandal.
But in this case it's being organised by a private citizen who's reputation and cred seem to grow with each offense he commits, so I don't see anything coming out of this.
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Donald Trump literally just told Russia to hack a former Secretary of State in order to obtain what he hopes is classified information, and promised they'd be rewarded for doing so.
That actually just happened.
And yet his numbers won't take a hit. Just goes to show that his supporters don't actually care about little things like the law.
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And yet his numbers won't take a hit. Just goes to show that his supporters don't actually care about little things like the law.Donald Trump literally just told Russia to hack a former Secretary of State in order to obtain what he hopes is classified information, and promised they'd be rewarded for doing so.
That actually just happened.
Yeap, as long as you follow the white nationalist ideology. Everyone else though, needs to be beaten mercilessly by law.
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And yet his numbers won't take a hit. Just goes to show that his supporters don't actually care about little things like the law.Donald Trump literally just told Russia to hack a former Secretary of State in order to obtain what he hopes is classified information, and promised they'd be rewarded for doing so.
That actually just happened.
Or, you know, that some people can recognize an obvious joke.
The fact that the media is presenting an obvious joke like this as a serious proposal is exactly why Trump's supporters don't care what the media says about him.
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Joke or no, it was wrong. If it was a joke, then it was in very poor taste. If it wasn't a joke...
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Or, you know, that some people can recognize an obvious joke.
The fact that the media is presenting an obvious joke like this as a serious proposal is exactly why Trump's supporters don't care what the media says about him.
Oh right...the liberal (yet 100% corporate owned) media did it!
Was it an "obvious joke" when he called illegal immigrants rapists? Is the rampant misogyny also a joke? Or the part where he sure did admire Saddam?
Wake up. The only "obvious joke" is his candidacy.
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And yet his numbers won't take a hit. Just goes to show that his supporters don't actually care about little things like the law.Donald Trump literally just told Russia to hack a former Secretary of State in order to obtain what he hopes is classified information, and promised they'd be rewarded for doing so.
That actually just happened.
Or, you know, that some people can recognize an obvious joke.
The fact that the media is presenting an obvious joke like this as a serious proposal is exactly why Trump's supporters don't care what the media says about him.
It wasn't a joke. Obvious or otherwise. He was serious.
When you start using the same talking points as /r/The_Donald, it's time to reconsider what you're saying.
I love that we're now dealing with the political equivalent of, "It was just a prank, bro!"
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Or, you know, that some people can recognize an obvious joke.
The fact that the media is presenting an obvious joke like this as a serious proposal is exactly why Trump's supporters don't care what the media says about him.
Oh right...the liberal (yet 100% corporate owned) media did it!
Was it an "obvious joke" when he called illegal immigrants rapists? Is the rampant misogyny also a joke? Or the part where he sure did admire Saddam?
Wake up. The only "obvious joke" is his candidacy.
You sure are putting a lot of words in my mouth.
I'm no Trump fan, but every non-issue that people like you elevate to a crisis, just chips away at your credibility when it comes to the actually important things.
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A "joke" that wasn't amusing to anyone concerned about security.
But it was about Hillary Clinton, who's a lying woman (even though, when comparing Ms. Clinton's rankings to those of Mr Trump, that label is as inaccurate as Mr. Trump himself), and a lib'rul besides, so it's fine.
A "joke" that wasn't amusing to anyone concerned about security.
But it was about Hillary Clinton, who's a lying woman (even though, when comparing Ms. Clinton's rankings to those of Mr Trump, that label is as inaccurate as Mr. Trump himself), and a lib'rul besides, so it's fine.
You seem to have concocted an elaborate fantasy about what I said, so I'll leave you alone to rage against your imagination.
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You sure are putting a lot of words in my mouth.
I'm no Trump fan, but every non-issue that people like you elevate to a crisis, just chips away at your credibility when it comes to the actually important things.
Wait...did you just complain about me putting words in your mouth, and then, in the next sentence, claim that "people like me" elevate every non-issue into a crisis?
I think I see the problem. :P
You sure are putting a lot of words in my mouth.
I'm no Trump fan, but every non-issue that people like you elevate to a crisis, just chips away at your credibility when it comes to the actually important things.
Wait...did you just complain about me putting words in your mouth, and then, in the next sentence, claim that "people like me" elevate every non-issue into a crisis?
I think I see the problem. :P
No, I didn't. Read closer.