First, a monopoly enterprise is born thru:

• organic growth of one competitor
• a trust between several competitors
• an outside firm using cash to buy a monopoly position
  government fiat
• a privatization of a governmental function

Standard Oil was created as a trust. China Mobile had originally been a branch of the government in China.

Second the monopoly enterprise acts like a monopoly by:

• Enjoying economies of scale
• Extracts economic profit
• Experiences regulation by the political economic system, which itself requires the monopoly to:
  • flatter existing power-holdings
  • Assist other stakeholders in achieving their objectives
  • Avoid enraging any stakeholder that can kill the monopoly

I’ve previously discussed dangers that monopolies face.

Third, the monopoly enterprise loses monopoly status and capitulates. This can be because of:

• Not understanding the market
• Not being empathetic to other stakeholders

The unpopularity of the term “monopoly” comes from this process of capitulation from a consumer’s perspective.

Following capitulation, the monopoly might be

• Broken up into multiple successor firms
• Reduced to single competitor firm in a market
• Incorporated into the government

At some point in their history, Hudson’s Bay Company and General Motors both operated as monopolies, and all have now been reduced to being single competitors in their respective markets. AT&T used to be a monopoly and was broken up into several successor firms.

Because US schools are terrible, US students do badly on the tests. As shown in the below chart, the US is not in the top ten in either math, science, and reading.

One reason for this is that the US education system is not designed for the US population. As shown in this blog posts, US scores are acceptble if you ignore the poor — that is, “correct” for poverty. Of course, reality does not work that way — you can’t “correct” a population by ignoring it. You serve a population by writing curriculum and hiring teachers that are effective in addressing a population’s needs.

By writing off districts with poor students, US education policy does not only harm poor students — it harms all students in schools that are stressed by the presence of students from poor and low-performing populations.

Solving education does not have to wait till we win the “war on poverty.” The poor and the middle class deserve education too, even if they can’t afford to mortgage their futures to get it.

There will be no evaluation of test quality, barring a PR disaster. Education publishers are dividing the market – i.e. forming a cartel – not competing.

I think the general principle behind this comment is that any organization in a monopoly position is unconcerned with quality. This viewpoint is generally held, and wrong.

Monopolies differ from other competitors in three primary ways:

1. They are able to exploit massive economies of scale
2. They are able to extract an “economic profit” from their business
3. They are regulated by the political-economic system, rather than just by its subset, the economic system

“Economy of scale” refers to the decreasing per-unit costs experienced when a given fixed cost is split over a larger production run. This is a well known concept, and I won’t talk more about it here.

“Economic profit” refers to the difference between the revenues of the firm and the total costs (including opportunity costs) of a firm. Under perfect competition in settled markets, economic profit is impossible, because the presence of economic profits would simply drive more competitors to enter a market until the economic profit returned to zero. That is, if it is worthwhile to be in a market, someone will jump in, making it no longer worthwhile. Because monopolies create barriers to entry into a market, they are able to earn an economic profit in the long-term.

The third point is the most important here. All firms can fail by lack of understanding — that is, thru the economic system — whether they are monopolies or not. Both GM (a monopoly) and Wang Laboratories (not a monopoly) saw their position decline because of terrible product and marketing decisions. While monopolies have a greater buffer and farther to fall (because of their economies of scale and economic profits), sustained stupidity can still do the monopoly in.

Monopolies, however face an additional risk. They can fail by lack of empathy. A monopoly that fails to flatter sources of political power can be broken through political means, regardless of economic realities. The Bell Systems, for example, flouted the ideal of unregulated competition (thus alienating a radicalized political right) at the same time they were a major supporter of hard sciences research and engineering (thus alienating a radicalized political left). Even though AT&T consistently understood the market’s desire for a reliable, predictable, and always-on communication layer undergirding business, AT&T’s monopoly was destroyed due to their lack of empathy.

In the education sector, the monopoly held by teachers front organizations. By failing to provide the services they were supposed to provide — educating the young  — the teachers drove parents into debt, employers into the immigration debate, and States into powerlessness over education policy, teachers displayed a lack of empathy. This unconcern for the well-being of other stakeholders has consequences.

Publishers are as self-interested and greedy as teachers. They also, like teachers, aspire to monopoly bargaining power. But this does not mean that publishers won’t create tests, evaluate tests, or even improve tests.

Ultimately, the correct way to view the publishers v. teachers debate is structural. Teachers are focused primarily in protecting the interests of the teaching labor force, and as such are hostile to techniques that would cause some teachers to lose their jobs or miss out on pay increases. Publishers are focused primarily in protecting the interests of shareholders and management, and are thus indifferent to the quality of teachers or tests.

I’ll take indifferent over hostility any day.

1. Teachers, whose primary interest is diverting school funds from student welfare and to themselves, and
2. Everyone else, who are flabbergasted by the terrible US public education system,

I’m simplifying of course — there are three dimensions of fource and multiple stakeholders, but the American public school teachers as a class have been breathtakingly unconcerned with the needs of others for several generations. Still, understanding that teachers have done nothing to align their interests with other stakeholders (aside from one political party) and act like an abusive monopoly is important to understand the education reform debate.

Unfortunately, these two sides then break down as disagreeing on the issue of testing:

1. Testing should not be used
2. High stakes testing should be used

Teachers oppose testing because they do not want to be accountable for not doing their jobs. This is understandable, but of course dangerous to our nation.

Many education reformers support high stakes testing, because it is easy to politically & logistically easy implement. Unfortunately, testing is invalid to the extent that testing conditions different from desired recall conditions, and if we’re training students to only ‘know’ something in high-stakes pen-and-paper environments, we’re doing them a disservice.

It would be better to fully integrate testing into the curriculum. A personalized device (let’s call it a Skinner Machine, or an iPad) would work with the student to help him understand concepts, show him appropriate & challenging material, and of course continually assess his learning. Low-stakes, continuous, real-world.

Low-stakes and continuous testing would be a form of good testing that would be reliable, standard, valid, and practical. We don’t have them because writing good tests is hard, and teachers are opposed to testing for economic reasons. So as the hard work is getting the testing infrastructure set-up in the first place, high-stakes testing is better than no-testing in the context of the terrible status quo. But good testing — low-stakes and continuous — must be the next step.

That’s how testing should be done.

Federal-Academic Complex

• National Institutes of Health (life-sciences peer-reviewed scientific granting organization in the federal bureaucracy) – 1930
• National Science Foundation (non-life-sciences peer-reviewed scientific granting organization in the federal bureaucracy) – 1950
• Department of Education (arm of federal bureaucracy dedicated to education) – 1980

Teachers Front Organizations

• National Education Association (largest labor union) – 1857
• National Parent Teacher Association (united front group to align interests of parents with teachers) – 1897
• American Federation of Teacher (second largest labor union) – 1916

It is interesting that the oldest pillar of the Federal-Academic Complex is (the NIH, established in 1930) is younger than the youngest pillar of the Teachers Front Organizations (the AFT, established in 1916). Doubtless the many years of monopoly control over education enjoyed by Teachers Front Organizations have contributed to their lack of empathy.

Amazon.com: Amazon Cloud Player, Audible
Apple: iTunes
Microsoft: SkyDrive, Zune

Amazon’s cloud let me continue reading and listening where I left off — but I can’t stream my Amazon CloudPlayer mp3s to my Kindle, and I can’t use the CloudPlayer interface to play my Audible files

Apple’s cloud let me redownload music that I had lost during an old computer crash, but the format was m4p, which is not standard and doesn’t work on players made by other companies

Amazon SkyDrive lets me upload from (But not download too) Windows Photo Gallery. Likewise, Mp3s I buy thru Zune are not automatically placed on SkyDrive.

When I purchase MP3s from Amazon MP3 Store, I download them from Amazon CloudDrive on my other computers to play with Zune. When I buy from Zune, I use the Amazon CloudPlayer upload utility to automatically put them into CloudPlayer, and from there download them to my other PC (which also uses Zune Player).

The network revoloution that is brining us Clouds and media-rich smart devices (phones, tablets, e-readers, etc) is amazing, but I don’t think any vendor has a final solution out yet.

It’s a fun time to be a geek!

The child in the story was not stupid. Indeed, as far as brute facts go, the son was not even ignorance. The child made a natural mistake along the way to develop an understanding of what “living” and “not living” meant.

I say this because I am fascinated by a recent blog post, “The Strange Genesis of ‘Education Reform’- How a Crackpot Theory Became National Policy,” which appeared on Mark Naison’s blog, With a Brooklyn Accent. The first two paragraphs are indicative of the rest of the post:

In future generations, historians are likely to tell the following story. Some time during the early 21St Century, a cross section of the top leadership of American society began to panic. They looked at the growing chasm between the rich and poor, the huge size of the nation’s prison population, the growing gulf in educational achievement between blacks and whites and poor and middle class children and decided something dramatic had to be done to remedy these problems.

But instead of critically examining how these trends reflected twenty years of regressive taxation, a futile “war on drugs,” the deregulation of the financial industry, the breaking of unions and the movement of American companies abroad, America’s leaders decided the primary source of economic inequality could be found in failing schools, bad teachers, and powerful teachers unions.

So much of this beginning is right-on: the understanding of the cross-elite nature of the education reform movement, the deep distress of the political class at the nature of America’s public school, the willingness to take radical measures, and so on.

But the author also thinks the reason for this was a focus on “equality.” While the word equality does come up in the education reform debate, it is a coded word, which means nothing at all like what the author thinks it means.

Within the context of education reform, stakeholders are arranged along three dimensions of force. Employers and parents care about child development; Districts and States care about power; Teachers and publishers care about money. Behind this debate states the federal-academic complex of bureaucrats, researchers, and politicians.

But why in the world would anyone care about “equality”?

The only people who care about “Equality” as an end in itself are those that are weak, and thus are least able to influence the debate.

I suspect people who think “equality” matters in the education reform debate also think “equality” mattered in the civil rights debate. Of course it didn’t, policies weren’t changed out of moral desire. The major civil rights policies (whether rules, laws, or rulings), were made by a cross-section of the elite that supported an interventionist foreign policy and recognized the captive nation of African-Americans provided the only intractible source of nationalist opposition against the Federal government possible in the United States at the time. (For context, the British, French, and Portuguese were being torn apart in the post-war world by the forces of natioanlism, as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires had already been, and the Soviet empire soon would be.)

America wasn’t the first multinational economic and political union — but the Federal Government also didn’t want to be the follow the British Empire into becoming a broken union.

The day of “states rights” as a force capable of starting a revolution were over by the 1940s. The day of nationalism as a force capable of starting a revolution had begun. Men such as Earl Warren helped lead America’s first attempt at breaking a potential sub-nationalism by interning the Japanese.

Men such as Earl Warren helped lead America’s second, smarter, attempt at breaking a potential sub-nationalism by enforcing desegregation. At the same times, patriots (from the Federal perspective) or quislings (from the perspective of would-be black nationalists) such as Martin Luther King were fetted with honors by the elite for their part in this “awakening” moment.

There were other forces at work too, of course, but those forces were provincial, self-interested, and soon to fall back into the noise of everyday political tumult. On a grand scale, the story of the Civil Rights era is a story of the abortion of a internal threat to the Federal government.

In our own day, the national security of the United States is at risk by our terrible public education system. This is because our broken education system means that our critical infrastructure is run by Chinese (and Indians, and Russians, and other foreign nationals).

When “equality” is used in this debate, it is not used to refer to closing the achievement gap between different groups, or any other nicety that would feel good but not flatter major forces. Rather, it is used in the sense that Steve Jobs used it when he said, “Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education” — in other words, nothing at all like addressing economic inequality.

There are other players at work too, provincial and self-interested ones such as teachers or parents, but on a grand scale, the story of Education Reform is the story of an attempt to abort an internal threat to the Federal government.

Let’s hope they — we — succeed.

Dr. Cuban’s points are fair, obvious, well known, and perhaps best said at thus:

• No measure has perfect validity
• The smaller the overlap between what you are measuring, what you are rewarding, and what you want to improve, the worse your reward system will be

In other words, nothing everyone doesn’t already know anyway. I talked at some length about the importance of validity in test design earlier, and I won’t repeat myself here. I will say though that we have to create good tests because teachers as a political class have abandoned the effort to educate young people.

In America, we have established a public monopoly over basic education at the same time we lobotomized the work force, hired below-average teachers, and made it harder to fire teachers by introducing “due process” rules. We all pay the price for this through more expensive mortgages, less jobs, and more outsourcing.

If we had a professional, capable, and effective teacher work-force, where bad teachers could be fired, we might not need to measure their output. But we don’t. We have a teacher work force with a lot of dead weight (and worse, actual cancers) that is failing our country.

If we were serious about creating a professional teacher labor force, we could treat teachers like professionals and evaluate them accordingly. We don’t, though. Thus the need for reliable, standard, valid, and practical tests to measure the achievement of students and the performance of teachers, schools, districts, and states.

For the time being, teachers oppose the introduction of tests, because this would mean that some teachers will lose their jobs. Teachers are in it for the money,  for the working conditions, and for the unaccountability. Unfortunately, as a political class, teachers are also lack empathy and understanding for other stakeholders. It is possible that the hard work to turn around teachers attitudes will succeed. Unless teachers begin caring about the success of their students, reform will come from above, which means establishing measures that are reliable, standard, valid, and practical, and using those to hire, promote, and dismiss teachers.

The Kinect is an advanced 3D motion detection camera. It is sold bot with new Xboxes, as well as an accessory. If you go into Microsoft stores you will see kids playing with Kinect as an advanced Wii — as the ads say, “you are the controller.”

It’s been months since we played a game that way.

What we’ve been doing a lot more, though, is use the voice recognition engine. Because the Kinect for Xbox contains a microphone, and uses Microsoft TellMe (our not-quite-as-cool but released earlier version of Siri) for voice recognition / natural user interface, you can control the Xbox with only voice, using hand-waving as a back-up interface.

Right now I’m listening to music which I got to by saying “Xbox, bing Sufjan Stevens,” saying “Seven Swans” at the list of albums, and then saying “Play Album.” But frankly, the Zune pass (which does the on-demand music streaming) has not been a market success, and Last.fm (which is free and more popular) does not allow you to specifically choose albums to stream. Plus Zune goes on the fritz more than I would like (like now — sigh).

A bigger difference in our life has been increased use of Netflix. My wife and I watched two movies today (Four Rooms and Jackie Brown), and have watched a long list of them recently, including:

• Manhattan Murder Mystery,
• Paranormal Activity 3
• Saidoweizu,
• Drifters,
• Eagle vs Shark,
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
• Good Morning President,
• I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK,
• The Juche Idea,
• Going by the Book
• United Red Army,
• A Beautiful Life,
• Barking Dogs Never Bite,
• Mao’s Last Dancer,
• Castaway on the Moon

My suspicion is that when it comes to chillaxing time, freeing yourself from the formality of the remote makes it easier to start movies. It’s interesting for a technology that I suspect will have the biggest impact in disability & medical fields, & children’s toys, but for us it makes netflix an less stressful option than the cable guide.

• “Credentialism,” and over-focus of degrees, burdens student with extra educational costs.
• “Corporations have abandoned the education and apprenticeship models outsourcing their educational needs”
• The harm this does injures are national security.

Selil’s points are fair, but I feel his post is more an expression of anger at injustice from someone in the system, rather thana disappointe analysis of it.

“Credentialism” is obviously inefficient. Credentialism is also necessary, considering Supreme Court rulings. It would be more efficient to give employees intelligence tests, if you wanted to weed out, say, the bottom third of candidates. But a company can’t do that, because it is racist. If you want a more efficent system that’s kinder to students, allow companies to measure intelligence using tests, and just accept that such tests will prevent a disprortionate number of certain racial minorities from employment in this jobs.

Selil is correct that companies have “outsourced” educational needs to educational institutions (this is part of the breakdown of the American micro-welfare state system, with “jobs for life” and the rest of that post-war consensus stuff). But Selil is wrong that apprecenticeships have been outsourced. Indeed, I would imagine that companies spend more on “apprenticeshpis” (lowered productivity due to ramping-up new workers) than ever in the past.

Selil also worries that our educational system injures our national security. I agree. As I’ve said before, “our broken education system means that our critical infrastructure is run by Chinese (and Indians, and Russians, and other foreign nationals). I hope we can fix it.