The Republican Thread

[StrangeSox]

As I said before, it's not just taking it away, it's the reason behind it. It's a bulls*** mentality that kids all need to be given things equally, despite what they've done to earn it.

 

But the problem is that you've completely fabricated that mentality here. Until you can somehow reconcile "still giving the exact same kids the exact same honors and awards" with "everyone gets an honor/award!", this point makes zero sense. Only those who worked hard to earn the honors will get the honors. The honors requirements weren't loosened to allow more people in.

[Soxbadger]

It's just a parenting style/philosophy that you can see in the news and that i've already experienced personally in the 2 years with my son, that jive pretty closely with political ideology. Maybe not perfectly, but close. And yes, there are horrible parents/parenting styles on both sides.

 

And I disagree with the bolded. Pat the s*** out of everyone's back if you're doing something right. It makes zero sense to devalue someone's achievement just to make someone else feel better about themselves. Maybe some of the kids getting those honors were one of the dumb/apathetic/lazy kids and they worked to get those honors. "And now you've taken it away from them. What are they supposed to think now? Yeah, trying was fun but it didn't get me anywhere. What's the point?" That's a pretty dumb policy.

 

I dont understand how their achievements are being devalued if they dont get a special award show. They are still on honor roll or whatever, thats still the achievement right?

 

Didnt get you anywhere?

 

Since when is a fake achievement in middle school getting anywhere?

 

Let me tell you how my school system worked (super liberal area by the way). It was extremely cutthroat, in 1st grade they were already segregating kids by how smart they were. By JR high they had picked the top 25 students (about 10% of the class) and put them in a special class where they were taught at a faster pace. So when we went to HS we were started off on a different level, thus it meant no one from my JR High who wasn't one of those 25 could ever become valedictorian.

 

Did I need a special awards dinners and all of that nonsense? Of course not. I was already in the preferred treated status, I got special treatment every day, the last thing anyone needed was for the regular kids to told more publicly that they were not on our level.

 

What does that prove? Your kid isnt a brilliant freak, therefore he doesnt get an award?

 

The brilliant kids get recognized every day, they really just dont need more adulation.

Edited May 22, 2014 by Soxbadger

[StrangeSox]

The motivation is THE problem here. How many times do I have to repeat that?

 

Enough times until you can link "exact same awards to the exact same people" with "everyone is equal! awards for everybody!"

[Soxbadger]

Its just completely glossing over the fact that the most brilliant kids already get all of the advantages in school, thus they dont need a purely fictitious award.

 

Thats my point.

[Jenksismyhero]

But the problem is that you've completely fabricated that mentality here. Until you can somehow reconcile "still giving the exact same kids the exact same honors and awards" with "everyone gets an honor/award!", this point makes zero sense. Only those who worked hard to earn the honors will get the honors. The honors requirements weren't loosened to allow more people in.

 

No I haven't. The mentality is evident in their admission that they were ending a tradition due to concerns of exclusion.

 

And you keep equating the results. They're not the same, nor should we assume they'd be the same in this scenario given the administration's apparent concerns. For the 15th time, go back to the Olympics example. Do you think Olympians would be happy not having a medal ceremony after the event? Do you think they'd rather go through the ceremony individually or as a big collective group during the closing ceremonies? There's a value in having your own special recognition, even if at the end of the day you still get the award.

 

[StrangeSox]

Olympic medal ceremonies aren't closed-door events where only athletes and their families are in attendance and non-winners aren't invited. Plus they sort of do have big collective group honorings in the openings and closing ceremonies. And in that case, you'd still have the individual medal ceremonies, they'd just all be at once which would make for boring TV. As far as I'm aware, these students were still being individually recognized for their accomplishments.

 

But we should really stop equating literally the best athlete in the world at a particular sport with middle school honors, lol. Pumping up some middle school honors to this sort of level is right along the same lines of "everyone's a winner!"

Edited May 22, 2014 by StrangeSox

[EvilMonkey]

Its just completely glossing over the fact that the most brilliant kids already get all of the advantages in school, thus they dont need a purely fictitious award.

 

Thats my point.

Yup. They get all the advantages of the star QB or basketball player.

[Jenksismyhero]

I dont understand how their achievements are being devalued if they dont get a special award show. They are still on honor roll or whatever, thats still the achievement right?

 

Didnt get you anywhere?

 

Since when is a fake achievement in middle school getting anywhere?

 

Let me tell you how my school system worked (super liberal area by the way). It was extremely cutthroat, in 1st grade they were already segregating kids by how smart they were. By JR high they had picked the top 25 students (about 10% of the class) and put them in a special class where they were taught at a faster pace. So when we went to HS we were started off on a different level, thus it meant no one from my JR High who wasn't one of those 25 could ever become valedictorian.

 

Did I need a special awards dinners and all of that nonsense? Of course not. I was already in the preferred treated status, I got special treatment every day, the last thing anyone needed was for the regular kids to told more publicly that they were not on our level.

 

What does that prove? Your kid isnt a brilliant freak, therefore he doesnt get an award?

 

The brilliant kids get recognized every day, they really just dont need more adulation.

 

Again, at the end of the day, I don't disagree that losing some awards night is a huge deal. It means little in the grand scheme. The issue here is a school admn being concerned and acting for the wrong reasons. Being concerned that underachieving kids are being excluded and that we should change tradition in response to that is a terribly stupid policy. Belittling accomplishment, despite how silly or unimportant it may seem, is wrong.

 

[Jenksismyhero]

Olympic medal ceremonies aren't closed-door events where only athletes and their families are in attendance and non-winners aren't invited. Plus they sort of do have big collective group honorings in the openings and closing ceremonies. And in that case, you'd still have the individual medal ceremonies, they'd just all be at once which would make for boring TV. As far as I'm aware, these students were still being individually recognized for their accomplishments.

 

But we should really stop equating literally the best athlete in the world at a particular sport with middle school honors, lol. Pumping up some middle school honors to this sort of level is right along the same lines of "everyone's a winner!"

 

Yeah because i'm literally equating the two. Jesus. I'm done.

[Soxbadger]

Again, at the end of the day, I don't disagree that losing some awards night is a huge deal. It means little in the grand scheme. The issue here is a school admn being concerned and acting for the wrong reasons. Being concerned that underachieving kids are being excluded and that we should change tradition in response to that is a terribly stupid policy. Belittling accomplishment, despite how silly or unimportant it may seem, is wrong.

 

Sometimes we get the right result for the wrong reason.

 

Schools are full of idiots, Im not going to argue about "Why" something happened, if the end result is a good result. I am going to thank my lucky stars that a bunch of idiot school admins got something right for a change.

 

I thought caring about motivations was a liberal trait?

[Balta1701]

Again, at the end of the day, I don't disagree that losing some awards night is a huge deal. It means little in the grand scheme. The issue here is a school admn being concerned and acting for the wrong reasons. Being concerned that underachieving kids are being excluded and that we should change tradition in response to that is a terribly stupid policy. Belittling accomplishment, despite how silly or unimportant it may seem, is wrong.

And again I remain impressed with the amount of hyperbole necessary just to get to that word. A perfect example of how this is just using something silly to make a point about a caricature of people you disagree wtih.

[Jenksismyhero]

And again I remain impressed with the amount of hyperbole necessary just to get to that word. A perfect example of how this is just using something silly to make a point about a caricature of people you disagree wtih.

 

Keep ignoring the admissions made by the admn Balta, the actual words they used. Whatever helps you stick to that narrative of yours.

[Balta1701]

Keep ignoring the admissions made by the admn Balta, the actual words they used. Whatever helps you stick to that narrative of yours.

I don't see the word "liberals" or "democrats" or anything similar in that statement. He does, however, cite the phrase "members of the school community" as having complained.

[Jake]

It's not that giving or seeking recognition are wholly bad, but when they are the whole point, it's probably bad. We don't require everyone go to school because it sucks and we want to make sure everyone had the same bad experience we had. We do it in hopes that they can find a lifelong love of learning, which can manifest itself in a variety of ways. School and achievement in school should have intrinsic benefits; if it doesn't, it will often be a waste. This isn't to say that rewarding excellence is a bad thing - it's just a bad thing when it's the only thing.

 

Talking about why we perceive some "carrot-and-stick" incentives to be more like bribery, political scientist Michael Sandel says we suspect the material motive "crowds out other, better motives." This is what I'm talking about: crowding out better motives for achievement. There are all kinds of studies that show how swinging this balance too strongly towards incentives, especially material or financial incentives, will make everything temporary. Think about the myriad programs that pay kids for doing well in school:

 

In a broad-ranging, multi-million dollar experiment on this subject, almost no positive effects were observed. In programs that ranged from:

-Paying fourth graders $25 and seventh graders $50 for scoring well on standardized tests in NYC.

-Paying middle schoolers for attendance, behavior, and timely work in Washington DC. It was possible to earn $100 every two weeks. Average student took home $532.85.

-Paid ninth graders in Chicago $50 per A, $35 per B, $20 per C. One kid won just under $2,000.

-Paid second graders $2 for each book they read using quizzes to ensure honesty.

 

At the end, the researchers had almost zero positive effects to report. And trust me, when you've been entrusted to design a study that costs this much money, you feel pressure to spin it positively. There wasn't much positive to say. The first three cities listed above had no near-zero effects and nothing that reached statistical significance. In Dallas, they observed a modest but statistically significant effect on those who could speak English and a just as significant negative impact on non-native speakers.

 

In wondering why things turned out this way, the researchers had this to say:

 

If students know that they will be rewarded for an exam that takes place in five weeks, they cannot commit to daily reading, paying attention in class, and doing homework even if they know it will eventually increase their achievement. Technically, students should calculate the net present value of future rewards and defer other near-term rewards of lesser value. Extensive research has shown that this is not the case in many economic applications (Laibson, 1997).

 

In other words, the promise of future reward is a good motivator (they noted LOTS of enthusiasm for the prospect of making money) but bad at producing results.

 

Here's another, targeted more specifically at teachers. Your students do better than expected, you get bonuses. BIG bonuses. In a highly impoverished, majority-minority district in Nashville, teachers could earn between $5000-$15000 for ranking highly in what's called "value-added" scores; basically, it compares the students' year-to-year changes on standardized tests in the past to the change with the teacher in question (statewide changes are incorporated to rule out potential external factors relating to test design or issues affecting huge swaths of people). Just for participating, each teacher was given $750 each year they ran the program. They also looked at two other programs that used smaller bonuses and different motivation models.

 

They found that these bonuses had no statistically significant effect on:

-hours worked

-collegiality with co-workers

-teaching practices

-actual test scores

 

The researchers' suggestion:

Given our findings and the previous literature that finds weak effect of performance pay for teachers, policymakers might favor other reforms. For instance, compensation tied to career lattice and other professional growth and goals or compensation for work in challenging schools might be alternatives to bonus-based compensation reform. If bonus-based policy is pursued, policymakers need to recognize this lack of evidence.

 

In this monograph, 3 years and $50 million in school-based incentives in NYC produced the following results:

-no effects on student achievement in any grade level

-no effects on school progress report scores that focused on the educational environment rather than scores

-in the vast majority of districts, educators preferred and voted for equal bonuses to all faculty rather than differentiating by classroom

-it did not affect educator practices, morale, or motivation

 

Here's an example where financial incentives work and the reason why they worked is absolutely key. In Texas, they've been running an incentive program for students to score well on AP exams. It has worked in a lot of different ways - scores are up on AP tests and SATs, more people are participating in the AP program, and more people are going to and graduating from college. This is in comparison to similar schools that haven't implemented these programs.

 

The anecdotal evidence suggests that the APIP gave teachers the impetus to increase AP course enrollment, guidance counselors the incentive to advertise and inform students of the AP program’s benefits, and students the incentives to take them. Guidance counselors claim that the alignment of school, student, and teacher incentives had a strong effect on the culture and attitudes of both students and educators, which in turn led to improved student outcomes. The empirical tests suggest that the APIP was working through some mechanism other than students and teachers reacting directly to the monetary incentives in a “carrot and stick” manner. The body of evidence is more consistent with explanations put forth by guidance counselors, such as changes in peer norms and teacher norms, increased emphasis on AP courses, and increased information given to students on the benefits to taking AP courses.

 

This is exemplified by the fact that increasing the financial incentive had no effect on outcomes. Nobody is acting like an economic rational chooser, but rather the incentive became secondary. The reason the program worked is because the schools responded by changing the norms. Going after achievement became cool. One commentator said about this study and the program said "the money had an expressive effect" instead of an instrumental one. They quote a student who says the money "was a great extra." They basically forgot there was money involved because nobody focused on it.

 

Think of that experiment alongside others like this one and this one that demonstrate how putting troubled students in great schools vastly increases their achievement in myriad ways, from scores to future earnings. Nobody was adding a special incentive, they just were in a culture where the normal thing to do was learn.

 

Here's another walk of life where incentives backfire - health. Take smoking. There have been apparently successful programs that pay people to quit smoking. But...the most optimistic study found that 90% of those who took incentives and quit were back to smoking within 6 months of the end of the incentives. In this case, the incentives do better than nothing, but still...not very much. This meta-study found no long-term beneficial effect in incentivizing weight loss. Per usual, even when a benefit is observed, it goes away as soon as the incentives do.

 

Anyway, you get the point I'm trying to make. We send kids to school trying to help them become the best people they can be. Some will head into the real world of employment, where there are lots of incentives. Of course, we also know from research that "incentive" usually turns to "status quo" after not very long. So, unless we can promise people ever-increasing incentives in the world of work, we have to equip them to intrinsically enjoy life. And not just enjoy life, but improve themselves and their communities for that same, intrinsic benefit. You can see in the example of teachers that they had become so conditioned to the intrinsic benefits of their work that not even relatively large financial incentives could change the way they did things.

 

You can imagine all kinds of professions and life paths where you just can't expect a carrot and stick - your choice is to be sad and do everything out of obligation, or you can do it just for the joy of doing it and enjoy whatever else comes along as a side benefit. If you focus academic achievement on incentives, even if it works at all during the formal education, we have likely completely eroded the students' relationship with learning to the extent that they'll never do it voluntarily.

 

Why did I write such a long post? There weren't any incentives - heck, Soxtalk isn't even one of those message boards with karma or reputation points. I just like to learn, help others learn, and talk about things that matter in as substantive a manner as I can. So I'm not too worried about how this school recognizes their achievers. They deserve recognition in some way, certainly. But I'm more worried about whether they've been bestowed the attitude that the recognition was the only reason for doing it.

[Jake]

I'd also mention that things like degrees and certifications serve the recipient little in and of themselves - they are more oriented towards the rest of the society, so that they can recognize qualifications. The learning and accumen is for the recipient, the degree/diploma/etc is for everyone else

[EvilMonkey]

So Google, they of the constantly changing logo, has just the plain, regular logo for today. They change it for Arbor day, Einstein's birthday, labor day, but not memorial day? Are they afraid of offending someone in another country? Or do they do that on purpose so people will talk about it?

[StrangeSox]

fwiw I think they've skipped their "doodle" on memorial day in the past. No idea why, but I'm pretty sure they do a 4th of July one. The google pages are country specific, anyway (google.com is US, google.co.uk, google.ca etc.)

[Balta1701]

fwiw I think they've skipped their "doodle" on memorial day in the past. No idea why, but I'm pretty sure they do a 4th of July one. The google pages are country specific, anyway (google.com is US, google.co.uk, google.ca etc.)

From Googling it appears that this is a regular comment, I found similar questions asked about 2011-2014, with notes that they've done Veterans Day, July 4th, etc. I'm sure they have some reason for doing so given that setup.

[mr_genius]

the GOP is gonna take the Senate soon. Then it begins....

 

[Soxfest]

GOP wanting to take money from Post Office and use to put into highway fund. This makes no sense at all, Post Office gets no tax dollars nothing but a short term shell game.

[cabiness42]

GOP wanting to take money from Post Office and use to put into highway fund. This makes no sense at all, Post Office gets no tax dollars nothing but a short term shell game.

 

I'm all for more tax dollars for highways, but if they're going to cut post office funding than at least cut service back to five days.

[EvilMonkey]

I'm all for more tax dollars for highways, but if they're going to cut post office funding than at least cut service back to five days.

Wow, that would be like eliminating the caboose from trains. Unions will have a s***fit!

[Texsox]

The Texas GOP platform includes "Reparative Therapy" for gays and a GOP candidate in Oklahoma wouldn't have a problem with a little Old Testament stoning. How will this play out nationally? Is this a good strategy for the GOP?

 

Obviously of the GOP fringe groups I wish the Log Cabin Republicans were more influential than the Tea Party. I believe that either party pushing further to the extreme is bad for the country. I'd like to see both parties rushing to grab the middle ground instead of moving the other way.

[Soxfest]

I'm all for more tax dollars for highways, but if they're going to cut post office funding than at least cut service back to five days.

Government does not fund in any way the Post Office it gets no taxpayer money, Post Office revenue is all from sales of postage. This is a stupid idea that takes from Peter to pay Paul. GOP hell bent on trying to privatize the Post Office.

Edited June 12, 2014 by Soxfest

[cabiness42]

Government does not fund in any way the Post Office it gets no taxpayer money, Post Office revenue is all from sales of postage. This is a stupid idea that takes from Peter to pay Paul. GOP hell bent on trying to privatize the Post Office.

 

USPS does not get money directly from the government, but the government pays retired employee pension and health benefits, so there is government support.