Have you been looking for a game that combines the fun geography challenge of Traveler IQ with the social responsibility of FreeRice? Look no further. A site called FreePoverty allows you to identify locations on a label-free map while generating ad revenue that donates water to people around the world who need it. Enjoy!

I was doing pretty well at first, but my ignorance of Australian geography turned out to be quite a detriment on the higher levels. Crikey!

This morning, I read an editorial from the New York Times editorial staff in my pajamas. How they got in my pajamas, I don’t know:

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was supposed to create clear, reliable data that told parents how local schools stacked up against schools elsewhere in the nation. It has not worked that way, thanks in part to timidity at the Department of Education, which initially allowed states to phony up even the most basic data on graduation rates. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings took a welcome step in the right direction by issuing new rules for how those rates are calculated.

By the 2012-13 school year, states will have to use the generally accepted way of computing their dropout rate. That means tracking students from the day they enter high school until the day they receive regular diplomas, counting as nongraduates those who leave without the diploma. This method was endorsed three years ago by the National Governors Association, which realized that accurate graduation rates were a vital indicator of how well the schools were doing.

Had the federal government led the way on this issue instead of waiting to see how the wind was blowing the country would already have built a sound data collection system.

Were they waiting to see how the wind was blowing? Or were they simply waiting until they were almost out of office?

Let’s be clear. The Bush administration did not simply “allow” states to falsify their dropout rates; they led the charge. George W. Bush ran in 2000 on the “Houston Miracle” in education, where Superintendent Rod Paige was able to raise test scores and lower dropout rates. Paige became the first Secretary of Education in the Bush White House.

Unfortunately, the “Houston Miracle” turned out to be a scam, which was eventually debunked by, among others, Bill Moyers and 60 Minutes:

All in all, 463 kids left Sharpstown High School that year, for a variety of reasons. The school reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding, them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country.

“That’s how you get to zero dropouts. By assigning codes that say, ‘Well, this student, you know, went to another school. He did this or that.’ And basically, all 463 students disappeared. And the school reported zero dropouts for the year,” says Kimball. “They were not counted as dropouts, so the school had an outstanding record.”

Sharpstown High wasn’t the only “outstanding” school. The Houston school district reported a citywide dropout rate of 1.5 percent. But educators and experts 60 Minutes checked with put Houston’s true dropout rate somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.

“But the teachers didn’t believe it. They knew it was cooking the books. They told me that. Parents told me that,” says Kimball. “The superintendent of schools would make the public believe it was one school. But it is in the system, it is in all of Houston.”

The political ramifications of this should be obvious. The school system is pressured by the politicians to fake the numbers, and the very same politicians get to run on an excellent record of educational reform.

So what happens when the fraud is finally elimated and the statistics start to reflect reality? We’re going to see a massive rise in high school dropout rates. This will not reflect actual high school students dropping out in larger numbers, but rather a change in the way such things are measured. And it’s all set to happen by 2012, when the next president, likely a Democrat, is running for re-election. And the story will be about that president’s dismal record on education, with a chilling statistic about rises in high-school dropout rates during that president’s term.

I agree that the formula needs to be fixed, and the Times is correct that the administration waited too long to do it. But I don’t think the Times editorial goes far enough in outlining the true consequences of the timing, appearing even to praise Spellings for taking this “welcome step in the right direction” which will cost her and her boss a total of nothing, and will likely help the Republican candidate in 2012.

Clay Shirky has a posting well worth reading about the changing nature of how we spend our time. You should really read the whole thing, but I think his point is well summed up by his reaction to a television producer when he was explaining to her how Wikipedia works:

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

The producer still just thought it all a fad, but Shirky would soon have an experience that’s hard to dismiss.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

The thing is that this change in our culture is more than just about our attitudes towards media or technology. Students are going to be coming to school expecting a more self-directed, interactive form of learning than we’ve been giving them. They won’t wait to be given permission to publish their writing or participate in their democracy. We need to make sure that school is a place where they can learn to acquire information more efficiently and express themselves more effectively, not a place where they are stifled in their attempts to do so.

I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

Company retreats and team-building exercises often get a bad rap. I actually have quite a bit of experience doing team-building exercises at retreats, and the most important thing is to create a space where people feel safe. I never do pure “trust” exercises, such as having people fall backwards or the like. I generally start with having participants do activities where they learn new things about one another, and we work our way into role-playing activities that allow us to workshop some of the more common situations that we encounter in our jobs.

It certainly never would have occurred to me to use waterboarding:

PROVO, Utah - No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”

Hudgens is filing a lawsuit, which has brought to light some of the other motivational practices of his supervisor.

Hudgens alleged that if the 10-person sales team went a day without a sale, members had to work the next day standing up; Christopherson took away their chairs. The team leader also threatened to draw a mustache in permanent marker on the face of sales people for ‘negativity,’” Hudgens said. Christopherson kept on his desk a piece of wood, ‘the 2-by-4 of motivation,’ he said.

Make no mistake - this is not about motivation. It’s about power, and the abuse of it.

“We don’t know what he was thinking, but we know that he wasn’t thinking waterboarding, or torture,” Brunt said. Christopherson, suspended for two weeks while the company investigated the incident, is back on the job. The company declined to allow interviews with him or other employees.

I’m glad the guy is filing a lawsuit, but this goes way beyond workplace harrassment. There really needs to be a criminal investigation, and the people involved should be held accountable. This goes not only for the wolf who poured the water on Hudgens, but also for the sheep who were holding him down.

The word of the week is smarter.

That links to the word “smart” but I deliberately chose the comparative form. Here it is in context:

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

Forgetting that the show in question tests knowledge and not intelligence, it may seem at face value to be a very silly question to ask in the first place. I would, however, argue that it is completely nonsensical, based on what we now understand about human intelligence. Making glib statements about who is smarter than whom ignores the wide range of ways that people can be smart.

In 1905, Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, created a diagnostic test to identify students who needed extra help in school. It was the misapplication of this test that led to the highly-flawed concept of IQ. Over the past century, the IQ has been used for purposes that range from merely misguided to downright ugly. For more on that, read The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould.

We really need to get past the idea that intelligence is something that can be ranked in a linear manner. In his landmark 1983 book Frames of Mind, Howard Gardner makes a case for the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, the theory that there are distinct and identifiable areas of intelligence that exist in the human mind, that are “independent of one another, and that … can be fashioned and combined in a multiplicity of adaptive ways by individuals and cultures.” Gardner identifies seven such intelligences, though he allows for the possibility that there may be others, and the conversation surrounding various other possible intelligences continues today. His original seven — Linguistic, Musical, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, and the two personal intelligences commonly referred to as Interpersonal and Intrapersonal — have gained wide acceptance among learning theorists and educators in the field.

And yet, as a system, we still judge student achievement solely from test scores in literacy and math, and cling to IQ as a meaningful measurement of a person’s intelligence.

After everything we’ve learned about the human mind, we should be smarter than that.

By now, you’ve probably seen the “Yes We Can” video, but I found it inspiring and wanted to post it here anyway. Enjoy!

And if you thought that one was inspiring, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet:

I’ve been too busy to blog much lately, and I’m too tired to blog effectively now, but I did want to acknowledge that it was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day today before I went to bed.

I’m actually teaching a unit that involves Dr. King right now. We didn’t have school today, though, so we didn’t work on the unit today. In short, we celebrated Dr. King’s legacy by not studying it.

I’m not complaining or anything, just noting the irony. The kids will study King (and many others) over the next few weeks.

I was far more poignant last year.

Have a good night.

Scott Malia of The Shakespeare Blog poses a question:

While Shakespeare appreciation might be near universal among writers, it begs the question of comparison. Who among today’s writers is what might be considered the twenty first century answer to him?

Malia goes on to make a compelling case for Aaron Sorkin. Look, Shakespeare is so much of a product of time and place, as well as genius, that there never really can be another. However, the same genius can manifest itself distinctly within any particular culture. Virginia Woolf wrote a famous essay about what would have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister with equal gifts to his. Can we imagine a Shakespeare born in our time? What would he do? Who would he be? I posted my own response:

I’m a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin, but I would instead nominate David Mamet. Writing for both stage and screen, Mamet has elevated the art of the dramatist to create a body of work that simulaneously embodies and trandscends his contemporary culture. His use of language has the natural credibility of truth, while at the same time making use of the subtle artifice of poetry. His subject matter ranges from insightful cultural criticism to the basest elements of humanity. If anyone from our time qualifies as today’s Shakespeare, I vote for David Mamet.

Anyone else have an opinion?

Who is today’s Shakespeare?

Yesterday on This Week, George Stephanopoulos cited a “stunning” statistic from the Congressional Budget Office:

From 2003 to 2005, the increase in income for the top one percent exceeded the total income of the bottom twenty percent.

Turn that over in your mind for a moment before we move on to the Question of the Week, which comes to us via the Hoover Institute, a conservative think-tank at Stanford University.

How much does the gap between rich and poor matter? In 1979, for every dollar the poorest fifth of the American population earned, the richest fifth earned nine. By 1997, that gap had increased to fifteen to one. Is this growing income inequality a serious problem? Is the size of the gap between rich and poor less important than the poor’s absolute level of income? In other words, should we focus on reducing the income gap or on fighting poverty?

It’s a fair point. Do rising waters raise all ships? And if so, does it matter if the rich get richer faster than the poor get richer? Or is income inequity really the problem, and a bigger slice of the pie for the rich means less for everyone else? And is it okay to mix ship and pie metaphors when talking about economics? I guess what I’m asking is this:

Does the income gap matter?

My friend DeLisa White is the queen of telling me things I’d rather not know. Usually it leads to me no longer being able to use a particular product or patronize a particular business because they’re - I don’t know - torturing kittens in the rainforest or something. But I trust her, so I paid close attention when she included me in this e-mailing about the writers strike, reprinted here with permission from the author.

(By the way, when I told DeLisa I was going to put her writing online and not pay her for it, she said “Wow, I feel like an official Guild member!”)

Dear Friends,

The studios, networks and producers of The Office made $13.9 million dollars last year on iTunes downloads of the show alone.

Amount the writers, directors, and actors got of that?

Zero percent.

While among the Writers Guild’s 12,000 members there are television writer-producers like Shonda Rhimes, the creator of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,” who take home up to $5 million a year, on the other extreme are junior writers who - if they work at all - make $50,000 or less (just like the rest of Americans.) Furthermore, about 48 percent of West Coast members are unemployed, according to guild statistics, and rely on residuals to do things like, well, eat.

IMHO, I think this is a thoroughly just cause - I support the writers and their creative colleagues completely. I was sick at heart to discover that the shows and movies I’ve downloaded from iTunes did not compensate the people who created them, without whom my joy in them wouldn’t exist. This should have been automatically addressed by producers and studios. It’s egregiously unethical for them not to have done so and that they continue to resist is unconscionable to me.

I have just read and signed the online petition:

“In support of the WGA strike”

hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, the free online petition service, at:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/WGA/

I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider signing yourself.

Very best wishes,

DeLisa

I don’t think I need to belabour the point. After all, the people who come to this site are here because of their adoration and admiration for an individual writer, and his tremendous contribution to our culture and language. But enough about me.

Let’s do what we can to support the writers who have brought so much joy to our lives, and who deserve to benefit from the fruits of their talent and hard work.