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Showing posts from September, 2010

"Three Things About Islam" youtube video

This post is about the Quran, specifically a viral youtube video about how "evil" the Quran is. I am a christian, not a muslim. Since I am not a religious scholar, I probably misunderstand some things about every religion. What follows is my opinion. -------------------------------- There are a billion and a half muslims in the world; maybe you are a muslim, maybe not. regardless of what you or I think of their book, most muslims are not terrorists, and are not trying to take over our government or create sharia law. So our options, as a society, are 1. fight against all muslims and their religion or 2. figure out a way to stop killing each other I think most Muslims and Christians -- and others as well -- prefer option 2. Whoever made that video obviously thinks the Quran is evil. Well, even if this were true, what is your solution? Should we fight a war against all 1.57 billion people who call themselves muslim (ignoring that fact that almost all of them live normal

Value-Added Modeling is not sufficient.

re: the la times sensationalist expose' series on value-added modeling of LAUSD teacher "effectiveness" this is a report by eva baker, linda darling-hammond, and many others. necessary context for those newspaper articles. http://epi.3cdn.net/b9667271ee6c154195_t9m6iij8k.pdf "Nonetheless, there is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value-added modeling are employed. - "For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who wer