July 2008 Archives

I wrote this in response to David Brook's Op-Ed in the New York Times titled: The Biggest Issue

David's article is talking about education, which is actually my number one issue in this campaign. The problem is that both sides are wrong.

Without further ado, here is my letter to David:

You're not the first person to notice the dramatic fall off in our educational prowess starting in 1970. The problem though is that all of the pundits and studies are just wrong. Additionally, all of the proposed solutions are wrong as well.

Let's use NCLB as an example.

NCLB was really all about going back to teaching phonics in public schools. Phonics being the concept that there's an alphabet of letters, those letters form sounds, those sounds form words. Phonics being the method of choice for teachers for the past 3,000 years, it was supplanted in the classrooms starting about 1970 after Noam Chomsky (yes, that Noam Chomsky) proposed a new method, "whole language". The problem with "whole language" is that it just doesn't work.

Now if you read the NCLB legislation, you'll never, ever see the word phonics. The legislation doesn't mandate any particular teaching method. What it mandates is that if you want to use a new teaching method, you have to see if it works first. (Something that was never done with "whole language", or no one would be using it now). It was actually, a really well crafted piece of legislation, and Bush and Kennedy deserve numerous kudos for it.

Unfortunately, it doesn't fix the real problem in education, and in fact, it reinforces the real problem with education. The real problem with education I call either the "remoteness problem", or, if I'm feeling snarky that day, the "PhD problem". That is, the real problem with education in this country is that the people making the curriculum decisions in this country are 5-10 steps removed for the classroom. They may have PhD's, but they're asking the wrong question.

It doesn't matter whether "phonics" or "whole language" is a better method of reading instruction for most children. What teachers actually need to decide is which method of reading instruction is best for each child, and then make that decision 30 times. If phonics works better for 90% of the children, that means a typical classroom has 3 kids where it won't work for them.

Education, like many things in life, works better when run from the bottom up, and the problem with NCLB, the Democrat's proposals or the Republican's proposals is that they are reinforcing a top down approach where the bureaucracy dictates materials and methods to the teachers. Materials and methods that will never work for all of the students in their classrooms.

This has been happening since the 1970's in education. Even districts which give their teachers discretionary funds to spend on classroom materials never indexed them for inflation; at this point the budget a teacher has to spend on additional materials is a joke. Meanwhile, most private schools give teachers much, much larger budgets for materials and involve them directly in the purchasing process. In some cases, they are the purchasing process.

If we really want to get 100% of children reading in this country, the solution is simple. We need to give the teachers back control of their own curriculum. This solution to this problem is easy in this day and age: Setup a website exactly like amazon.com, but limited to educational materials. (Amazon or Barnes & Noble could do this very easily.) Instead of spending the enormous amounts of money a typical school district spends on PhD's, junkets to educational seminars in Hawaii, and textbooks based on the latest educational fad, divide up the money by classroom and deposit it directly to the website as gift certificates.

Let the teachers choose and review the text books on their own. What you'll find is that teachers won't buy just one set of books. What they'll buy is different materials to reach different students. Maybe they'll buy 30 phonics books to start the school year, but you'll find them buying 3 whole language books to reach the students who aren't quite getting it later on that same year, and 3 more advanced books to keep their more advanced students stimulated.

They'll also be ruthless and frank in their reviews of the materials. Once this is setup, it becomes trivial for a parent or service organization like Rotary to contribute additional funds, and knowing that the money contributed will go directly into the classroom, I think you'll find they will do so in record amounts. Even students in a poor neighborhood, if their child isn't learning, will find themselves motivated to contribute so that the teacher can buy their child additional materials.

Even as little as $25 given to a teacher by a parent for them to spend on books for your child could save this country thousands of dollars as the child wends their way through the educational system. So I would expect many, many corporate matching programs. Even small businesses could get in the act, offering to match funds donated by parents. Education is easily fixable, and America is uniquely poised to once again have the greatest educational system in the world. We merely have to go back to trusting our teachers.

Bottom line, giving a specific number (like say, 16) in a war is just foolish.

Today, The Miami Herald reports of mounting pressure on Barack Obama from Cuban exiles over two campaign advisers tied to the Elian Gonzalez fiasco, Eric Holder and Greg Craig:

Greg Craig, a foreign policy advisor, represented Elian's father in the custody battle that ended with the boy being sent back to Cuba. Eric Holder, a member of Obama's vice presidential search committee, served as deputy attorney general when the federal agents seized the boy from his Miami relatives. His mother died at sea in the rafting trip to Miami.

Obama is Scrooge!

LikeTelevision Embed Movies and TV Shows

Obama has become the Boy in the Bubble. Fake Interviews, he only speaks with a teleprompter.

What does Obama’s campaign staff think he might get infected with? Reality?

Even though I think Obama is a lot better then Kerry, his position on the war really bothers me.

In a nutshell, Obama thinks that we never should have gone into Iraq; therefore we should pull out as soon as possible.

Fair enough. Despite the fact that Iraq had stockpiled 500 tons of Uranium, and that even Hans Blix found some weird shit in Iraq, I think even President Bush wishes he'd done things differently. Even if he still decided that we needed to go into Iraq, there are plenty of things we should have done differently.

But there's no Presidential Time Machine in the basement of the White House. If Obama is elected, he's going to have to deal with things as they are, not how he'd like them to be.

Obama is a lawyer. Lawyers seem to believe that the way to get things done is to talk about doing things. As near as I can tell, he has never had any real project management responsibilities except perhaps his experience as a community organizer. Even then, at most, he managed 14 people and its not clear that he managed any major projects during that period.

So he doesn't get something that I, as a middle manager, know instinctively. Schedules Slip.

Why 16 months? Why not 17? 18? 15?. I've tried to figure out where that number comes from and the best I've gotten is that Obama talked to one of his military advisers who said:

Well, if everything goes according to plan, we could be out in 16 months.

Let me say that again with the appropriate emphasis.

Well, if everything goes according to plan, we could be out in 16 months.

The problem with that statement is that nothing ever goes according to plan, especially in a friggin' war. If one of these $2.8 million Stryker's breaks down on the way out of Iraq, does that become 16 months and 1 day? Or will Obama just leave them there to rot? I have to say that if he does that, I'd like a refund on my income taxes paid over my entire life, because if the government is going to waste my money like that, fuck 'em.

Ok, so let's say that if a Stryker breaks down, that we delay 1 day.

Now we're at 24 months, realistically. Because never, in the history of the world, has anything ever gone according to plan. Trucks are going to break down, tires are going to go flat, the list of little things that won't go according to plan goes on and on. You have to make things not going according to plan, part of the plan. Think that's a paradox? Well, welcome to project management.

Even worse, I can tell you from my project management experience that when I say 24 months, that's only if you realize that the schedule will slip. If you're deluded enough to think that God and the Universe actually thinks that by saying 16 over and over and over again, that somehow, magically you'll hit your original schedule date, it will take 32 months.

That's right, if you hold to a schedule beyond all semblance of reason, things take even longer. Its only if you're lucky that it will take twice as long. That's the second paradox of project management.

Back when I was a consultant, a customer hired me to fix a problem that had been plaguing them for a year. I fixed it in a month. When they asked me how I was able to accomplish this "miracle". I told them:

You've been trying to do 1 month of work in 2 weeks. Your team is perfectly capable, but they've been trying to patch around the problem instead of fixing it. When I signed on, I told you it would take a month, and you didn't like it, but after a year of pain you said ok. So I went and fixed it, and it took a month.

The customer admitted that their own team had told them it would take a month to fix it a year prior, but they told them "that's too long, you have to do it in 2 weeks". So they spent a year being "2 weeks away".

If we try to pull out of Iraq in 16 months when we realistically need 17, 18 or 24 months, we'll be there longer then we would if we set a realistic deadline.

Of course, this isn't a project its a war, which means if we aren't realistic, we might have a third Iraq war. Or we might be there forever.

The thing that bothers me the most about Obama is that he doesn't realize what he doesn't know, and he definitely doesn't realize what his advisors don't know. Someone obviously pulled this 16 month number out of their ass, and Obama has continually avoided any attempt to learn better. Additionally, his campaign is so afraid of any question that's off the reservation that they keep him sequestered. Soldiers? Can't talk to them. Foreign Media? We'll provide flyers in German, but no foreign media to ask questions. Does it seem weird to anyone else that his own campaign doesn't trust Obama to talk?

Meanwhile, he stubbornly sticks to this "I was right in 2002".

A stopped clock is right twice/day. Him claiming he was right as a Illinois State Senator doesn't impress me. What might impress me is if he explained how he reached that decision. We don't give Top Secret briefings to state senators. What information did he use to base his decision on? Whatever was published in the Chicago Tribune? His Psychic Powers? Did he read Hans Blix's report? Scary stuff in there. Did he read the Duelfer report? Scary stuff in there as well.

I've read everything I could get my hands on before and after we went into Iraq and I have to say, I'm glad I wasn't President, because it was a tough call. The media likes to make it sound black and white, but it's not that simple. Saddam was both stupid and evil. There are plenty of stupid world leaders, and plenty of evil world leaders, but stupid and evil was a deadly combination.

(If you want to argue with me about this issue, I have one word: Camelpox. If you don't know what that means, you don't know enough to argue with me about this.)

But I don't get the sense that Obama has done anything beyond read the newspaper about Iraq. Everything I've heard Obama say about Iraq seems less informed than me. I'm just a concerned citizen trying to understand a difficult issue, not a full time politician. Obama should be more informed than me about this issue, not less.

Now that Obama is the Democratic nominee, he can get Top-Secret briefings from the government. He can get other briefings in his job as a Senator. Has he done so? No.

In essence, Obama seems to be relying not on the facts on the ground, or the information he has access to if he just asks. Obama seems to have used his psychic powers 6 years ago to make his decision on Iraq, and he's surrounded himself with advisors who agree with him. He's studiously avoided talking to anyone who might tell him otherwise.

Eisenhower famously told Kennedy that only the difficult problems would end up on his desk. Easy problems get solved long before they reach the desk of the President. As President, Obama will have to make decisions not based on what his psychic powers told him 6 years ago, but on the reality today.

I hope he comes to realize this.

Meanwhile, if Obama isn't using his top secret briefing could I have it? Because I would love to truly, truly understand the last 7 years of history.

I had a weird thought today.

Ok, so lets say Obama gets elected. Let's say he implements some political pandering nonsense like say, a windfall profits tax to punish those evil oil companies, for well, making money.

So Silicon Valley has a conniption, because most software companies make something like 65% profit. If this so called windfall profits tax was too broad, you could just bulldoze Silicon Valley. So they make an exemption for technology companies.

So Exxon buys Microsoft so they can avoid the tax.