From the “sitting in drafts for far too long” folder. I came across this comment a while back in the post script to a book about the American (mis)adventure in Somalia:

“It was a watershed” said one State Department official. “The idea used to be that that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady in on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she’ll say, yes, of course, I pray for it daily. All the things you expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace and she’ll say, “With those murderers and thieves? I’d die first”. People in those countries, Bosnia is a more recent example – don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in those places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continue because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it.”

At the time I mentioned it to someone who has years of experience with the US and OSCE in “those terrible countries”. He said there was more than a grain of truth to it.

I take digs at teachers and teacher pay here from time to time. Of course it is because I care, and I will care more in the future when my child starts school. I think that education is one of the most important things that we should spend money on, and I am all for well paid teachers too. I just want to see the teacher pay linked to their performance. The best teachers should be paid the best.

It’s that little requirement that causes problems though. The teachers maintain that their profession is special, and unlike pretty much everyone else their work cannot be graded. This all would be a bit academic if it weren’t for an interesting bit of analysis carried out by the Los Angeles Times. The used standardized test scores, adjusted for things like income levels and so on, to rate teachers as “least effective”, “less effective”, “average”, “more effective”, or “most effective”.

The data shows how good teachers can improve children’s test scores, and bad ones have negative impacts:

After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10% in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10%. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row.

As the article that tipped me off to all this says, the teachers unions threw a fit at being examined in this way. That’s ironic as someone pointed out:

[E]very week they read student assignments and use their fallible judgment to assign a letter grade, often based on opaque, somewhat arbitrary standards. This process culminates in a report card sent home at the end of every semester. It typically assesses achievement on an A to F scale that presumably doesn’t capture every nuance of student mastery over a subject.

Despite its imperfections, I haven’t many teachers eager to do away with grades, and while I’ve seen a lot of teachers complain about being evaluated based on test scores—a complaint with which I sympathize—I’ve never seen a persuasive defense of “masters degrees earned” or “years worked” as a better metric of quality. Yet teachers unions champion a status quo that relies on these very measures.

I believe the same is true in Ireland.

I will echo what I have said before. Properly test and evaluate teachers. Recognise and pay a premium for the good ones. Intervene to improve the less effective ones. And it they can’t be made more effective then they should not be in front of children. I have bitter memories of dreadful teachers in Maths and French who everyone in the school (staff, pupils and parents) knew were appalling but were left in place to continue to damaging children’s education.

As a final word, take a look at an earlier post on what makes the best education systems in the world.

Right, I have finished updating all my South American photos. Sorry about the small size. They were scanned from 6×4′s a long time ago. I must redo this in a higher res some day.

I made two trips. In 1999 through Peru and Bolivia, and in 2001 through Chile and Peru. I am afraid all the Peruvian photos are together.

Peru, 1999 and 2001:

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Bolivia 1999:

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Chile 2001:

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Following that trip to Italy at the weekend, and our return through Slovenia I can add a new country to my places visited map.

Of 51 European countries, I have now visited 27. I am finally over the half way mark.

Although I am living in Austria, I remain an Irish taxpayer, so I have been following the budget discussions going on back home. Over the weekend there was a report about Social Welfare, Education and Health to take the biggest cuts in the upcoming budget. I didn’t see reaction pieces, but I am sure the opposition wheeled out their usual condemnations of attacks on the most vulnerable, blah blah blah.

I like to base my opinions on data myself, so I have been taking to time to go through the Department of Finance’s own figures. I started with the Estimates of Receipts and Expenditure, and I am in the process of working through the much larger Book of Estimates.

I am still crunching all the numbers, but I thought I would share what I have found so far. First up, receipts and expenditures:

As you can see we are planning to spend around €50Bn this year, but will only take in about €35Bn. And that is before capital spending. So there is a massive hole to be filled there. The targeted cuts for next year are €3Bn which will still leave a huge gap. Next question, where is the money going?

This is a breakdown by government department/organisation. Most people can probably guess who the big spenders are, but did you know what proportion of the overall spending that represents?

Just 4 things account for 74% of all government spending. Personally I didn’t realise how big a chunk of the pie debt funding is (9%). If you look at the other 26% there are some big areas like the Garda Síochana €1.5Bn, Enterprise Trade and Employment €1.1Bn or Contribution to the EU €1.5Bn, but each of them is only 2-3% of the overall budget. Everyone loves beating up the residents of the Dáil for their spending, but the Oireachtas Commission’s budget is €118m or 0.23% of the overall state. If they were working for free the savings wouldn’t make a dent in the €15Bn shortfall.

Having had a first look at the size of the hole to be plugged, and where the money goes today, is it any wonder that “Social welfare, education and health to take biggest hit in Budget”?

Hopefully I will get part 2 of this analysis up in the next few days. I want to break out at a lower level where the money goes and split it into 4 categories:

• Salaries & Pensions – how much goes on civil servants, doctors, teachers, nurses etc.
• Administration – the cost of running all the organs of the state.
• Direct Payments – how much is given to citizens directly as cheques.
• Providing Services – the cost of running schools, hospitals, prisons etc.

I want to see this breakdown, because I am keen to see how much money theoretically could be saved by “efficiency”, versus cutting benefits and government salaries. Watch this space.

For years people have been pushing for funds and resources to be allocated to roll out computers in schools in order to improve education. Quite literally billions have been paid out getting schools wired up. But has that money been well spent?

I have said before that I am not convinced that this is a good idea. For all they hype I had never seen or read any studies that showed putting computers in classrooms actually meant children learned more or better. Back in 2007 my view was:

No one has proven that giving a student a laptop actually helps them to learn. This is the elephant in the room when people come to discuss this stuff. Where are the studies and reports showing that children with laptops have significantly improved results? And they will have to be significantly improved to balance the cost of these devices.

The few reports I found at the time just said kids were “happier” with computers, and were heavily based on subjective and anecdotal evidence.

Now it looks like we are starting to see the results of real studies of the impact of putting computers in classrooms. This story from the New York Times looks at three recent reports. One was on the impact of giving PCs to children from low-income families in Romania. Another looked at what happened to test scores in North Carolina when broadband arrived into the area, and the final one covered a $21m “Technology Immersion” programme from Texas.

What they found in all cases was that the children’s computer skills improved. But the fundamentals of reading, and maths suffered.

“Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.”

The impact was most pronounced in lower income households, possibly because without supervision the kids used the machine for playing games and goofing off. But in none of the cases did they see an improvement in the children’s abilities in other areas.

The Texas study said:

“there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.”

The studies are not definitive, but they should give everyone from educators to politicians who are handing out all this money pause for thought. Without some good evidence that computers are a benefit, then these massive roll out programmes need to be subject to some very detailed scrutiny. In cash strapped times there are better things to be spending money on than state subsidies for the likes of Dell and Intel, especially when the impact on children’s education is negative.

Not that this is all surprising. As the man who wrote the NYT article said:

SCHOOL students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.

This is a map (in time and space) of every recorded nuclear weapon detonation from 1945 to 1998. Although the possible Israeli/South African one from the Vela incident is omitted.

All sorts of scary thoughts occur looking at it. Like, wondering about the US fetish for nuking the south west of their country, and is there any part of western Russia that the Soviets didn’t consider nuking?

I spent Tuesday in Dusseldorf where as you can imagine they had gone football mad, this being before the Spanish knocked them out of the world cup. The pilot on our Air Berlin flight even was promising to get us to Vienna in time for the match. While I was there an Irish colleague who lives in Dusseldorf took me for lunch and I commented on all the German flags. Like an Irish county in the run up to the All-Ireland they were being flown from cars, shops, balconies, office buildings and when I got back to Vienna, from the cockpit window of a Lufthansa plane. Pat told me that this was something that only started with the last world cup. Before that Germans would have been hesitant to fly the flag. For all sorts of reasons they have been uncomfortable with such blatant displays of national pride. I think it is great that they can be more relaxed about it now.

The irony is that we also have the world cup to thank for reclaiming our flag. Before the heady days of the 1988 European championships, or Italia ’90, the tricolor was something flown by government buildings and republicans. Pride in our national team allowed us all to take back the flag and be comfortable waving it in public.

Maybe for this alone I will forgive soccer for being such a lame sport.

Vienna has a wonderful incinerator right in the middle of the 9th district (where we live). As well as handling waste disposal it provides district heating. It looks pretty cool too.

Irish Green Party TDs should take note.