The Bald Piano Guy is a very clever public school teacher in Great Neck, New York, who posts musical videos on YouTube expressing his views about education and politics, always with a smile. I erred in thinking he was a NYC teacher.
In this video, he has advice for Betsy DeVos:
“Go back to selling Amway/
Teaching really isn’t your thing.”
Parodist and entertainer Randy Rainbow is at his best up iF this video, explaining how a disinfectant will kill the coronavirus, and kill you too!
I have seen many home-made videos about the COVID-19 shutdown of large parts of society, but this one is the absolute best so far!
It’s a British family, Ben and Danielle Marsh and their four children, who live in Kent. They sing “One Day More” from “Les Miserables,” and they are hilarious!
I loved it!
Thanks to Bob Shepherd for supplying a link that works.
Have fun.
Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda join James Corden to give reprises of 22 musicals in 12 minutes.
Now that Trump cannot hold mass pep rallies for his base, he is holding daily press briefings to share his opinions about the coronavirus. He frequently contradicts the government experts because he knows more than they do.
Robert Shepard, polymath extraordinaire, has written his own version of a Trump briefing:
Moronavirus trumpinski orangii Press Briefing and Campaign Rally, Sunday, March 23, 2020
TRUMP (snorts some Adderall and steps to the podium): OK, I wanted to start by saying some people are blaming this thing on Asian Americans. Where would they get that idea? Terrible, just terrible, OK? Don’t do that. Good people, Asians. The Asians love me. They love Donald Trump. We’re going to get through this Chinavirus. We’ll get through this.
This is going to be bad. Really bad. People are going to die. Am I right? Terrible. All those people. That’s why we need to lift the restrictions immediately and go back to work like normal. Can’t let the cure be worse than the disease. We need the economy working. People going to eat in Trump restaurants. Going to Karaoke at Trump private clubs. Staying in Trump hotels. Playing at golf Trump courses. People call me, they say, when you going to open those up again? Everybody agrees. You got people can’t even make reservations. Can’t even go on safari now to kill the last remaining animal of some species. Disgraceful. That’s why–the doctors agree with me–we should open everything up again now. Because this thing is going to spread. Spread like crazy. We open up, it goes away? OK? Chinavirus. I’ll make a decision about this early this coming week, after my new Adderall comes in.
Doctors will agree with me. Because I’m smart. A genius, really. Somebody said the death rate. The death rate from this thing. Is like, what was that? Like point zero zero zero zero zero zero one percent. Right Dr. Birx?
DR. BIRX: Well, it was about 3 percent in China, but we really don’t know.
TRUMP: See? Like I said. Point zero zero zero zero zero zero one percent. Obama ever get numbers like that? So, we lift these restrictions and get back to work. Because that’s what Americans do. They like to work under unsafe conditions for very low pay. And maybe die. So some people can get richer. I know, I’m a construction guy. Chinavirus. This is going to be bad. That’s why I’m making a decision. A decision next week. Open back up. Pick up a Sharpie, draw a circle around the country on a map. No Chinavirus! Two, three days, it’s gone. Magic! It’s like magic, am I right? I know. You’ll thank me.
So, we’re working hard, right now on a package. A stimulus package. No one ever liked Obama’s package. I have the best package. Get the economy humming again. Quickly. Very quickly. Best economy ever. You won’t believe it how quick. Let me tell you the great things. We’re doing great things. The best things, OK?
Steve Munchkin gets 500 billion to give away. It’s like free money, right? To Trump businesses, to members of the great Mar-a-lago resort. You know, to all those who desperately need it. Would you like to say a few words about that, Steve?
STEVE MUNCHKIN (in Lederhosen):
I represent the Oligarch Guild,
The Oligarch Guild, the Oligarch Guild,
And in the name of the Oligarch Guild,
I wish to welcome you to Grifterland.
All citizens are marks in Grifterland.
And the airlines and the cruise industry. They need billions and billions too. And the banks. Other corporations. Because they are sitting on only about a trillion dollars offshore right now. Hard. It’s hit them hard. So we’re going to send checks. Twelve dollars to every poor, hardworking, white, Christian American so they can pay their rent and utilities and feed their children and maybe buy a new car and go on a trip to the Trump International Hotel and Golf Club in Ireland. Because that’s the kind of people we are. We put the American people first. America first, OK? Not like the Fake News Media and the Democrats. Lots of people are going to die. So, we need to open up immediately. Makes sense, right? I have a knack of this kind of thing. I really do. My uncle was like this super genius at MIT. Open back up. Have some Trump steaks. Play a little golf. Maybe go back to the hotel. And speaking of hotel rooms, everything’s going to be golden.
Randy Rainbow sings and acts “The Coronavirus Lament.”
Timely and, as always, funny.
When Arne Duncan was Secretary of Education, he touted the idea that every student should be college ready. There has been considerable debate about which was Arne’s most memorable utterance. Some say it was his claim that Hurricane Katrina “was the best thing that ever happened to the schools of New Orleans,” despite the deaths of over 1,000 people. Others think it was his crack that the reason suburban moms hated Common Core was because it showed that their child was “not as brilliant” as they thought. The Common Core, he believed, was the key to “College and Career” readiness, and it was never to soon to start.
My favorite line is his statement when he visited a New York City public elementary school and said, “I want to be able to look into the eyes of a second-grader and know that he was on track to go to college.” It seemed to me that the typical second grader would have more immediate concerns and dreams (a cowboy? A fireman? An astronaut? A doctor? A prince or princess?).
Our blog poet, SomeDAM Poet, wrote here:
College Ready in Kindergarten
College Ready in Kindergarten
Bachelor’s in First
PhD in Second grade
A life that’s well rehearsed
Today I did something I had never done before.
I went to Coney Island, the fabled beach on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Brooklyn, to watch the Polar Bears Club take their annual New Year’s Day plunge. The Polar Bears have been doing this since 1903.
The weather was pretty good. About 40 degrees, but a strong wind was occasionally gusting, making it seem colder. Thousands of people were there like me as spectators. At least a thousand people were there in bathing suits and zany costumes to take the plunge. There were Vikings, old and young women in bikinis, a group of four people dressed in French costumes like a Marcel Marceau troupe of mimes with painted faces.
I managed to get to the front of the line, so I could get a good view and take pictures. I posted many on Twitter.
It was a riotous, hilarious, joyous experience. People of every race, religion, ethnicity, dressed in funny costumes, having the time of their lives as they prepared to take a plunge into frigid waters. They were accompanied by cheering crowds, smiles, laughter, and a dozen or so drummers beaming out a thump, thump, thump on big steel drums, as waves of scantily clad bathers headed for the Atlantic.
It’s moments like this when I love America, love living in New York City, and feel that all of us are truly brothers and sisters.
A group of scholars collaborated to write a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that studies how teachers affect student height. It is a wonderful and humorous takedown of the Raj Chetty et al thesis that the effects of a single teacher in the early grades may determine a student’s future lifetime earnings, her likelihood graduating from college, live in higher SES neighborhoods, as well as avoid teen pregnancy.
When the Chetty study was announced in 2011, a front-page article in the New York Times said:
WASHINGTON — Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years.
The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, all economists, examines a larger number of students over a longer period of time with more in-depth data than many earlier studies, allowing for a deeper look at how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term.
“That test scores help you get more education, and that more education has an earnings effect — that makes sense to a lot of people,” said Robert H. Meyer, director of the Value-Added Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which studies teacher measurement but was not involved in this study. “This study skips the stages, and shows differences in teachers mean differences in earnings.”
The study, which the economics professors have presented to colleagues in more than a dozen seminars over the past year and plan to submit to a journal, is the largest look yet at the controversial “value-added ratings,” which measure the impact individual teachers have on student test scores. It is likely to influence the roiling national debates about the importance of quality teachers and how best to measure that quality.
Many school districts, including those in Washington and Houston, have begun to use value-added metrics to influence decisions on hiring, pay and even firing….
Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms.
“If you leave a low value-added teacher in your school for 10 years, rather than replacing him with an average teacher, you are hypothetically talking about $2.5 million in lost income,” said Professor Friedman, one of the coauthors…
The authors argue that school districts should use value-added measures in evaluations, and to remove the lowest performers, despite the disruption and uncertainty involved.
“The message is to fire people sooner rather than later,” Professor Friedman said.
Professor Chetty acknowledged, “Of course there are going to be mistakes — teachers who get fired who do not deserve to get fired.” But he said that using value-added scores would lead to fewer mistakes, not more.
President Obama hailed the Chetty study in his 2012 State of the Union address.
Value-added teacher evaluation, that is, basing the evaluation of teachers on the rise or fall of their students’ test scores, was a central feature of Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top when it was unveiled in 2010. States had to agree to adopt it if they wanted to be eligible for Race to the Top funding.
When the Los Angeles Times published a value-added ranking of thousands of teachers, teachers said the rankings were filled with error, but Duncan said those who complained were afraid to learn the truth. In Florida, teacher evaluations may be based on the rise or fall of the scores of students that the teachers had never taught, in subjects they had never taught. (About 70% of teachers do not teach subjects that are tested annually to provide fodder for these ratings.) When this nutty process was challenged inn court by Florida teachers, the judge ruled that the practice might be unfair but it was not unconstitutional.
The fundamental claim of VAM (value-added modeling or measurement) has been repeatedly challenged, most notably by economist Moshe Adler. When put into law, as it was in most states, it was found to be useless, because only tiny percentages of teachers were identified as ineffective, and even the validity of the ratings of that 1-3% was dubious. The use of VAM was frozen by a judge in New Mexico, then tossed out earlier this year by a new Democratic governor. It was banned by a judge in Houston. A large experiment funded by the Gates Foundation intended to demonstrate the value of VAM produced negative results.
Now comes economic research to test the validity of linking teacher evaluation and student height.
Marianne Bitler, Sean Corcoran, Thurston Domina, and Emily Penner wrote:
NBER Working Paper No. 26480
Issued in November 2019
NBER Program(s):Program on Children, Economics of Education Program
Estimates of teacher “value-added” suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using administrative student data from New York City, we apply commonly estimated value-added models to an outcome teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height. We find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and reading achievement, raising obvious questions about validity. Subsequent analysis finds these “effects” are largely spurious variation (noise), rather than bias resulting from sorting on unobserved factors related to achievement. Given the difficulty of differentiating signal from noise in real-world teacher effect estimates, this paper serves as a cautionary tale for their use in practice.
Diane Ravitch's blog 