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June 06, 2009 03:59 PM UTC
84 Comments
Ok, here’s one for those of you that are strong labor supporters (I know how those on the right will answer this).
Ok, on the one hand we have support for unions wanting to give workers full protection, pay, benefits, etc. And the teachers union is one of the best at doing this (including pay when measured by the days worked).
On the flip side we have horrible failure rates in our K-12 schools and education determines economic success for our children. So poor schools mean poor children have no way out.
The #2 factor on the success of a child in school is their teacher (#1 is their parents). So bad teachers mean ongoing poverty for many. We have a trade-off here between giving teachers ironclad job protection (and in practice it is ironclad) and giving poor children a road out of poverty.
And no one can argue that under the present system that the worst performing 10% of our teachers need to be replaced. The bell curve alone is proof enough of this.
So what about a law requiring every district to fire 1% of their tenured teachers every year for the next 10 years? And that this law overrides the teacher job protections written into state statue.
I won’t use any of the readily available derogatory terms to describe the thought process evident above, but let’s just point out one or two little bitsy points:
You say: #1 factor in academic failure is parents, #2 is teachers.
Where, pray tell, do you put
–social environment
–low expectations created by generations of racial and ethnic discrimination
–economic dislocation that results in inadequate nutrition and freqeuent relocation (discontinuity of education in this context), among other issues
–the toll on any child of domestic violence (which in many cases has roots in tensions caused by economic crisis)
–a larger societal celebration of violence as the solution to most problems (armed forces equals control, for example, to cite a seemingly unrelated theme from a different recent thread, but actually a theme that is pervasive in the all-important role of entertainment in conveying value sets)
–drugs. Anyone who imagines that drug money doesn’t influence politicians dependent on donations doesn’t understand what’s happening beneath the surface in a society in which money talks, nobody walks.
I suppose it’s entirely the parents’ fault when they don’t convey to their children the importance of academic achievement in order to get a job picking vegetables?
And by all means let’s not mention the popular political will that insists teachers should be among the lowest-paid professions, a policy guaranteed to attract whom? The most talented? The most capable?
The above is just for starters.
Yes there are a lot of additional problems. But that is never a reason to not address the serious problems we can address.
As to teachers being low paid, when you look at the number of days they work out of the year, it actually is comparable to many other jobs requiring a college education. The big difference is teachers get a lot more days off.
whether these two reasons were, in fact, the top two. As for the length of the school year, I presume most students still have to go work on the family farm during the growing season, hence the summer vacation. But regardless of per diem pay, the fact is that teaching pays relatively little per annum.
Lots of people want more vacation days. And I don’t hear a lot of teachers pushing for more school days.
Maybe we should go to year round schools and make teaching a year round job rather than a seasonal one – and have the pay increase to match the increased hours.
I would support that.
…to my question: don’t most teachers get paid on a 12-month schedule? For 9 months of work (according to you)?
My husband is a teacher, and his salary would be somewhere around $550 a week if he worked 52 weeks. He does like the time off, it is very important to him, but be serious. He is paid a pittance, and the parents of the students he teaches constantly try to browbeat him and the other teachers. I have to say I wouldn’t put up with that shit for that amount of money.
How many other people are expected to accept a 12-month payment schedule for work done over 9 months? Sounds like a significant downside (having your employer hold onto your money longer).
…but, assuming they do, teachers are starkly underpaid as compared to the athletes. A shocking and unfair difference in pay between 2 comparable groups, no?
does anyone else get paid evenly over the course of a year for working part of the year.
As to being underpaid, I don’t watch sports so I don’t understand it’s popularity – but the market clearly shows that the American people value atheletes much higher than most any other profession.
…without knowing too much about the need for students to have breaks (developing minds and bodies and all that). Perhaps a series of 2-week breaks throughout the year. I’m sure there are number of models out there.
At root, though, I am deeply skeptical about measures such as those of “No Child Left Behind” that purport to measure the “success” of “education,” which in fact incorporates many other factors, including personality development (self-confidence, for example) not taken into account by “achievement” tests. The nature of “managers”–whether of teachers or business enterprises–is to value measures over which they have control (and control can mean “ability to manipulate” as well as “ability to achieve”).
It’s the manipulation part that I most distrust in areas like teaching and policing, to name two government services where “businessmen” imagine their values should be applied. Hence my ridicule of Belle Curves.
I think kids need time off too. But there have been a number of studies that show the richer a family, the more a kid continues learning over vacation. And outside of math, for upper middle class families, there is almost no difference between the school year and summer. So I think we can have a much more full school year.
And yes measuring success is difficult. It’s difficult in the business world too. We’re trying to measure the impact of our viral marketing efforts so we know which ones to continue – not easy.
But necessary and doable. And measures will be imperfect but as long as they are reasonably good you can act on them, and improve the measures.
You can find better or worse starting pay, mid career pay, and end of career pay, but generally it is solid middle class.
Most teachers have most of the summer off. They can find another income stream. I did, I did construction.
I say that as an ex-teacher and the son of one, who knew what poor pay was years ago. Things have gotten better, part of it due to more education of teachers and resultant higher earnings. Further, many families have both husband and wife teaching.
There are teachers making over $100K doing coaching and other extra curricular things, too.
Whether pay is adequate or not I suspect lies in the eyes of the bank-account-beholder. After all, who the hell needs a ‘Benz when there are plenty of used Olds on the market, or even monthly passes on RTD?
I recall once meeting one of my former HS teachers eating his lunch on a break from his summer construction job while I was going door-to-door selling sets of pots and pans. It was an awkward moment, or seemed so to me.
The much larger problem, we probably agree, is trying to define what we mean by “education,” “success in education,” etc.
A whole range of issues –school dropouts, for example — are laid at the foot of education and educators, when in fact these reflect issues that are far afield from what happens inside the schoolhouse doors. Schools become a convenient football to be kicked about by politicos who recognize a reliable source of nonsense when they see one.
that teachers get, starting at age 55. They enjoy, while they’re working, Thanksgiving days off, Christmas break, spring break, not to mention President’s Day and other holidays that those of us in the private sector do not get off.
And we certainly don’t get pensions like teachers do.
What teachers do very well is lead the league in whining.
I agree with you, David, on the issue of pay. I don’t believe teachers are underpaid. In fact, in many ways, they are overpaid.
Broadly speaking, teaching attracts two kinds of people: (1) Risk-averse, somewhat lazy, but dedicated-to-the-cultivation-of-knowledge intellectuals whose human capital is worth more than teachers earn but who like the deal all-in-all (due to the combination of the non-monetary benefits and the realization of personal satisfaction); and (2) not terribly competent, and also risk-averse, mere college graduates who have only a very limited selection of professions into which they can enter, and fewer still that they can enter with much job security, who go into teaching in large part because it has a low threshold to entry and a lot of job security.
When I become a public interest lawyer in about a year, I may never catch up to my annual salary as a teacher (which was &48,500 my last year, for about 185 official work days, and went up on average about $2,500/year), though I will be working at least 60% more hours, and will have forgone a salary for three years in order to enjoy the privilege (I’m only being half-facitious by characterizing it that way: I really do consider it a privilege, just as I considered being paid to teach a privilege). I will certainly never “catch up” financially to where I would have been, all things considered (eg, the deficit incurred by three years of fairly hard work w/out a salary), if I had remained in education. So much for all lawyers being overpaid, and all teachers being underpaid.
True, dedicated teachers work far longer hours than those formally designated, and there is enormous pressure to do so: Grading papers weekends and evenings, coming in early to prepare lesson plans, and so on. But all professional careers involve that to some degree, and, even calculating those extra hours into the equation, teachers still enjoy an enormous amount of vacation time.
Pay is relevant in one way: Some people with options simply can’t afford to accept the deal, even though it is not an unreasonable one, because they must support a family, and can’t permit themselves the trade-off of fewer hours for less pay. Many talented would-be teachers are lost to that calculation.
One myth about what makes teachers more deserving of higher pay, and makes retention of good teachers difficult, should be resolutely debunked: Good teachers rarely if ever count the challenges of working with kids as a consideration against the profession. Good teachers almost always enjoy their rapport with the kids: The challenges involved are the ones most enjoyed, and drives few talented teachers away. True, it is taxing in a way that many other jobs are not, but the abundant vacation time helps make that emotional drain very bearable. I loved my time with my students, was constantly energized by them, as is the case with most teachers who love being teachers.
What drives excellent teachers out of the profession, for the most part, is that, despite the lip-service to the contrary, teachers are peons, completely at the mercy of hierarchical superiors who decide almost every element of what determines the quality of their professional life, and decide it according to criteria that few excellent teachers find acceptible. Once again, increasing the ability of teachers’ organizational superiors to do that can hardly be expected to improve the quality of education in America.
like every other time you’ve proposed it.
(including pay when measured by the days worked)
Because if a teacher is not physically in front of students, s/he is not working. Right.
The bell curve alone is proof enough of this.
Any time you have two people and some way of assigning them a number, someone’s at the bottom. That’s true even if both are excellent.
For the sake of argument, let’s say district one has 5% of its teachers totally incompetent and worth firing, while district two happens not to have any who are totally incompetent and worth firing. How do you think parents at district two will react to your cunning plan?
And here’s something else, you who posts articles bitching whenever a teacher is actually let go in spite of one student really liking him: don’t you think even by your objective criteria, you’ll still be firing teachers who are really beloved by some number of students?
So how about this? How about any parent with more than two kids be required to give up the worst performing one every five years? Certainly there is a worst one, the bell curve tells you that. And with the overpopulation problem, nobody can argue with the notion that people shouldn’t have that many kids anyway. And five years is enough time to determine who’s performing well or not: if you don’t know your kids by then, you’ll never know them. Studies show parents with more than two kids can’t really take care of them all anyway. Besides, it’s irresponsible NOT to send kids into the mines, with our current fuel issues.
Don’t worry, I’m not posting this to convince you of anything. It’s just for my own entertainment, since no matter what arguments you read, you’ll still be proposing this idea tomorrow, and the next day, etc. etc. forever.
…to identify slow learners, and to “prove” any Preconceived Notion yearning to grow up to be an Idea that might issue forth in the depths of somnolence.
…in case that’s any solace to you!
I was bitterly disappointed by Dave’s promise of a “fun” idea, only to find a tired, unfun dud.
Wow, where is it? I challange you to find a single school in BVSD with no incompetent teachers. My kids went to Mesa, Southern Hills, & Fairview, all 3 of which consistently rank at the very top in the entire state.
And all 3 have incompetent teachers. One daughter had a middle school math teacher who did not know that the Pythagorean Theorem was for right triangles only.
Yes if some districts had no incompetent teachers you would have a point. The sad fact is we have way to many people who should not be teaching – and it is impossible to fire them.
is the analogue of the Pythagorean theorem for non-right triangles. Perhaps your daughter’s middle school teacher was referring to that?
Certainly teachers make mistakes in class frequently. If you’re going to fire someone for messing up the law of cosines once in class, I’d question your definition of “totally incompetent.” And that’s assuming your version of events is trustworthy, which I’m not totally prepared to do.
Now let’s imagine the middle school math teacher who made a mistake in class connected with a young girl who was embarrassed about doing well in math, and convinced her to pursue science instead of intentionally doing badly to impress her shallow classmates. I’d say that’s a pretty good teacher. Perhaps better than someone who gets everything technically correct but sometimes has trouble connecting with the students and explaining things on their level. Which one do you fire?
“That’s easy,” says David before actually thinking about it. “Both! No teacher should ever make a mistake in class, and also every teacher should have a deep emotional connection with every student!”
This individual had no idea what he was talking about in math class. Every other parent I knew with a kid in his class was doing the same thing I was doing – teaching my kid math each night.
After that year they moved him to teach other subjects (where he was quite good). But every student that had him that year that did not have a parent able to tutor was screwed.
It sounds like it wasn’t a problem with the teacher, but a problem with the administration or an inability to recruit a math teacher.
It sounds like the teacher was a good teacher, but had been plugged in to fill a hole where they didn’t know the subject matter.
You have employees, I sure there have been times where you had to call an “all hands on deck” and had people doing jobs they were not well suited for.
The problem with schools is that almost all hiring is done for the school year and they can’t recruit on an ongoing basis. Part of this is practical (stability for the kids) part of this is just convenience, inertia or contract.
from CNN
Ask them about stack ranking. It turns out that even if you are right in saying that large groups of people fall generally on a bell curve, and therefore the bottom 10% can be dispensed with (i don’t necessarily agree, but for arguments sake) you still have two intractable problems:
(1) You can’t tell who is the bottom 10%, for any job that requires individuality, creativity, and intelligence. When people try to rank teachers, no one agrees on the rankings (everyone can agree on a stupendously bad teacher, but that isn’t what you are talking about). Without tenure, the teachers that tend to get fired are the ones who piss people off, and those are often the best teachers. The safe ones keep their heads down, don’t upset anyone, and provide a bland product.
There may be a bottom 10%, but you can’t figure out reliably who they are. Especially when we get to point (2):
(2) As soon as people find out what you are doing (and they do) the gaming starts. At Microsoft, everyone knows that they are being measured against their coworkers. If you help a coworker be successful, they might jump you in the ranking. People start playing politics and sucking up instead of trying to make their department successful. It is alienating to people who want to trust and cooperate with coworkers. The people you keep are skewed toward the workers who like gaming the system, manipulating bosses, and playing a lone hand.
So, unfortunately, if you want to get rid of ineffective people, you have to do the hard work of carefully assessing each one on her own merits. Shortcuts like ranking don’t work and in fact are counterproductive. This is an expensive, time consuming, and unpleasant task, so organizations tend to shirk it.
First off, most people there were very supportive toward their co-workers. And the ones that weren’t were mostly assholes, not people trying to game the system.
Second, I am talking stupendously bad teachers. Because we have a system where a teacher, no matter how bad, cannot be fired, we have built up quite a few that are stupendously bad.
Third, I think you are 100% correct in your last paragraph – you can correctly evaluate teachers, but it’s a very hard job. And something like this would force districts to put in that effort.
is the fact that you (rightly in my opinion) recognize parents as the #1 success factor in school, but then seem to skate over that. This would be like you saying to your business “well, we know that our senior level management are embezzling huge amounts of money, but we’re also losing money because our workers aren’t being very productive, so let’s first off put in some new vending machines to motivate them.”
See what I mean? It doesn’t make sense to concentrate on a secondary problem (even if it is a problem as in your question and my more silly analogy), when you have a root cause issue that will always undercut what you do in the secondary field.
I’m CEO of a company and the number one problem we face is that economy sucks. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about that and so I concentrate on the things we can improve within the company (marketing & sales).
I think schools should work on reaching out to the parents and help them learn how to help their kids. And if done well, a lot can be accomplished there.
exactly. So let’s work on incorporating parents into the education process first, getting them involved with their child’s education process — helping to motivate the kid and keep them on track — and then we can talk about cleaning out teachers. It doesn’t make sense to me to think of correcting a secondary problem before you deal with the root cause. That’s why I wouldn’t support your idea.
One is that it disregards the market signals it would send, and how that would affect the quality of teachers attracted to the profession in the first place. Another is that it ignores the informal and dysfunctional ways in which teachers have far less real job security than would superficially appear to be the case (the attrition rate from the profession as a whole is about 50% in the first 4 years, and that is in large measure the result of the informal imposition of intolerable conditions due to a combination of factors, including the incredible powerlessness of teachers in all matters except formal job-security. Like a professor of mine once said, you don’t really want to win injunctive relief against an employer, because you get to keep a job that is about to become completely unbearable. Similarly, security to keep a job in which you are utterly powerless against administrators motivated almost exclusively by risk-aversion is guaranteed to drive a large fraction of the most competent teachers right out of the profession).
The error that so many make is the assumption that more administrative power to dismiss teachers would result in their dismissing the least competent teachers. Actually, in my experience, it would probably result in their dismissing the most competent teachers. That’s because teaching is a political mine-field, good teaching involves something other than minimizing the risk of stepping on one of the mines, and administrators treasure above all else that the mines are absolutely avoided. Therefore, those sub-optimal teachers whose guiding principle is avoiding the land mines (and they form the majority), are preferred. In economics, it’s called adverse selection mechanisms.
Alan Greenspan admitted not long ago that his error was in assuming that CEOs of financial institutions would make decisions in the best interests of their institutions. A more realistic and precise economic analysis demands the assumption that they will make decisions in their own individual best interests, which would have led to more foresight of the cliff toward which we were careening. The same holds true for education: The assumption that administrators will make decisions based on what is best for education is unwarranted: You must assume that they will make decisions that best serve their own self-interest. We have not yet successfully aligned their self-interest with the mission of education, though some ill-designed attempts have been made to do so. Therefore, empowering administrators is only likely to exacerbate the distortions created by that disalignment. It is no more likely to succeed than empowering teachers to do whatever they choose in the classroom, for very similar reasons.
Don’t make the same mistake Alan Greenspan made. Do a complete analysis, rather than a superficial one.
Education reform requires a realignment of all interests, such that individual parents no longer have incentives to undermine many practices that are necessary to effective education, individual teachers no longer have incentives to pander to those parents, individual administrators and teachers no longer have incentives to maintain a largely empty ritual rather than to implement effective educational practices, and individual students no longer have incentives to devalue the education that has been made available to them. Empowering any one set of actors to distort the outcomes according to their own particular perverse incentives will solve nothing.
is hardly likely to result in weeding out the worst teachers, for starters.
There are only TWO factors which consistently predict educational success, in today’s world.
1) The educational level of the mother.
2) The socio-economic level of the parents.
nada mas, buster.
The mother thing is, I think interesting, it may be recording raw intelligence and not education….I don’t know.
Read Bob Herbert in today’s NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06…
THere is a column which points out that Jews and Asians have educated members far higher than their percentage of the population. Is that what you meant?
I thought that was fascinating. One fact is that both cultures have been literate for thousands of years. Compare that with African-Americans in this country who were enslaved from cultures which were non-literate and a mere 150 years ago could be killed for learning to read and write if still a slave.
I don’t think the column refutes the general principle. I do think it is wise to look at those school systems which consistently turn out educated graduates, independent of socio-economic level or race.
But there are kids who go through school with everything stacked against them, and still graduate from college. And there are kids who have all these advantages and drop out of High School.
My theory on the mom part is that it is still mostly the mom that raises the kids. And so the person who tells them when they get home from school to turn off the TV and do their homework.
And while en-mass you are right it is those two items, there are exceptions – schools in poor neighborhoods who send virtually all their graduates on to college. Through those they have shown that the quality of the teacher can make a gigantic difference.
I had a lot that were petty tyrants. I had a some that were going through the motions. But I also had a number that were quite good.
The big problem I had was that school moved so slowly and was boring. I’d spend ½ hour reading the week’s work in a textbook and then sit in class as the teacher droned on covering something I now already knew – many times better than the teacher.
(Note: never correct a teacher in class – they get really mad. And never never give them the location in the textbook when they tell you that you’re wrong.)
but many of them grow out of it.
The smartest kids at school are going to be much smarter than the smartest teachers (with very rare exceptions). But you’re right that add that to the standard teenage view that they know everything and that’s a dangerous self-image 🙂
but it is important to note that knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing. I frequently have students who are smarter than me, in the sense that they could solve problems faster than me or learn new things faster. But I still know more math than they do, at least right at that moment.
It’s nice to have smart kids in your class, even though they’ll frequently tell you you’re doing it wrong and they all think you’re a complete moron, whether they say so or not, but as a teacher you have to teach everyone. And it’s sometimes tricky to go fast enough to keep the best kids interested, while still explaining it so everyone gets it.
Besides, reading the textbook for half an hour will get you through the homework problems, but it won’t help you understand the stuff. I realized that when I went from learning calculus to teaching it.
When my 20 something was in school the mantra was it doesn’t matter what a student knows: As long as he/she knows how to learn, they can always look it up. As if most kids were going to spontaneously start looking things up about the world around them like a basic framework for science, history, geography, other cultures, etc.
The result was kids whose own grandparents were growing up during the Depression in the 30s who figured that the 30s must be about when the Civil War was taking place. Mind this isn’t a matter of knowing that particular battle took place on a particular specific date. It means you don’t have a clue about the Civil War or that it probably didn’t take place when Gramps was a kid or know anything about what the Depression was about or that it deeply effected people you know very well.
Math existed in a special place where, using a calculator, you could get full credit for getting the wrong answer while showing you used the right method. Don’t ask me how it’s possible to get the wrong answer via the correct procedure with a calculator to protect you from getting things like carrying a number wrong. This attitude made it possible to get As while failing to learn how to use any method to get the accurate answer, while getting Cs with all correct answers.
When proposing to teachers in those days that knowing “how to learn” is great but that our kids should also be using those skills to actually, you know, learn stuff, the reaction was something along the lines that we poor ignorant parents, not being education experts, just didn’t get it. The solution was that they do a better job of ‘splainin it to us poor ignorant souls. They refused to accept that a parent with a perfectly respectable IQ might “get it” and still think “it” was a load of crap.
Don’t know if these ideas, which also included wasting endless class time in self esteem and anti-drug assemblies in grade and middle school, have changed since then. My gut feeling is that what was being taught at the time in the teaching curriculum was a lot of airy fairy theories based on and backed up by nothing factual that, quite predictably, didn’t work so hot.
My kid’s best teachers were practical sorts who tended not treat the latest theories with the blind faith characteristic of religious fanatics.
I think we need to start with looking at what teachers are learning about teaching. How are educators trained in countries where students, you know, graduate knowing basic important stuff about the world and universe they live in, including a basic framework of useful knowledge, lately dismissed by so many educators as unnecessary “content”.
wow, you’re right! You had really easy courses. Or, you’re a speed reader. Or, you’re not telling a true story.
I can read a novel in about 2 hours. I never took a speed reading class, I’ve just always been a very fast reader. And I have very good retention, not photographic memory, but very good retention.
I took advanced classes and went to good (not outstanding) schools. But I found most of what they taught very easy. With the exception of learning a foreign language – Spanish kicked my ass.
One size doesn’t fit all in any area of life, most especially education. Modern schools, on the other hand, are built on an industrial model–factories to roll out “educated” finished products, complete with standardized tests that echo quality tests for, say, cars rolling off the line. A “standard, industrial education” even has defenders on grounds of civil rights–all students get exactly the same instruction, etc., regardless of their preparedness, perceived needs, talents, etc.
Fact is, the very notion of “education” is entirely arbitrary. I have no doubt there are people with advanced degrees who vote for Republicans. Educated? I know companies–well, one at least–that require a B.A. or B.S. for clerks working at the counter (a position dubbed “management training”). Point? Who knows!
Bottom line: there is no “answer” to the “problem” of “education”–or even to what the goal of education ought to be, besides literacy and numeracy. (Speaking of which, when was the last time you were confronted with a practical application for geometry?) On the other hand, seems to me that automatically firing some percentage of teachers each year isn’t likely to serve any purpose.
The present industrial model for schools is a giant part of the problem. There’s a lot we should be doing.
Meanwhile, most schools & teachers are still operating the same way they did 40 years ago.
You seem like a person who wants people innovating and such in his company. How often do you fire people (a certain number every year) and do you fire people who have been there for many years (or just the interns)? You cite your CEO experience as evidence for pretty much all your beliefs, so I’m curious about the extent to which you practice what you preach.
But when someone is not getting the job done, we first work hard to turn them around (that works about 1/3 of the time). If that is not successful, we let them go.
We have to do that to be successful. If we carried those that aren’t getting their job done we would go out of business.
I will not say anything more specific as these are personal issues and as such are confidential.
Obama marks D-Day’s 65th anniversary
Recalling the “unimaginable hell” of D-Day suffering
Really Obama, being in uniform is unimaginable hell? No wonder, you draft dodger!
“The sheer improbability of this victory is part of what makes D-Day so memorable,” Obama said.
No trust in the troops’ abilities to get things done, eh? I guess that’s why you’re surrendering in the war on terror.
This post fulfills your recommended daily allowance of Liz Cheney.
now I have coffee on my keyboard.
before I saw the last line and SXP151.
He can still remember the sound of the bullets hitting the ramp of the landing craft and thinking that when the ramp dropped – there would be nothing to stop those bullets.
He was wounded bad enough 4 times to be back in a field hospital but then back to a rifle company and he served through until they were in Germany. He was in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
He also said that a new Lt. would last 6 weeks tops. He would either be killed before then or if still alive, promoted and that would move him back 100 yards from the line (which raised their life expectance a lot).
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that, in Vietnam, US soldiers shot about 10,000 bullets for every enemy soldier killed.
Standing on the heights overlooking the beach, I imagined it would have been terrifying to have to debark one of those landing craft 65 years ago.
Better to be at Normandy than Anzio, I guess.
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is terrifying. It brings every sensation of the moment right to the viewer. To this day, it’s tough for me to watch. I’ve never served myself, but I’ve known many who have.
WWII was Total War, the last we’ve seen. Everyone had a stake in our victory or defeat. Now, I just don’t feel the investment of those who don’t serve, whose livces aren’t directly affected by the wars. It’s shameful.
My father was at Anzio. Lost his best buddy. Said he was lucky not to have been at Normandy. comparing hell to hell??
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The main source of what I know about WW II came from the “All American” Division Museum. If the 82nd Airborne wasn’t there, it couldn’t have been all that important.
There are 7 drop zones at Fort Bragg: Salerno, Sicily, St. Mere Eglise, Nijmegen, Normandy and Holland. I thought the 7th one was called Anzio Acres, but it turns out that is the name of a housing area on post.
The DZ’s were named for combat jumps.
I thought I’d read that the first unit to hit the beach at Anzio got completely wiped out. I thought they were called Darby’s Rangers. From wikipedia:
This is a little different from my recollection: not on the beach, but in a stealth move to disrupt the German Lines of Communication. Nonetheless, suffering 100% mortality is worse than Normandy, comparing one hell to another.
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I think I know what Barron means, and it didn’t seem to be meant as a slight.
Anzio was a complete snafu. Our troops were pinned down on that beachhead for four months before they broke out.
And yes, Barron, the Rangers were nearly wiped out, but I think it was on a failed breakout attempt after the landing. They ran into a German armored division. Only 6 out of 715 men survived. The landing itself met with little resistance initially. It was the months between January and May when most of the casualties occurred.
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I knew that, in Airborne traditions, something about Anzio was an entire degree of difficulty worse than Normandy.
The word “decimated” obviously means that 10% (deci) of the unit is made casualties. That’s generally the point at which a unit becomes ineffective. Not only does it take 3 or more soldiers to care for and evacuate one wounded comrade, taking another 30 – 40% out of the fight, but 10% looks to a guy in a foxhole like every other guy is going down, and that he’s being overrun, which cripples morale.
I can only imagine the horror, and the untold valor, that happened that day. That’s because, unlike Omaha Beach, Juno and St. Mere Eglise, almost nobody lived to tell about it.
That the Rangers failed has more to do with bad Intelligence, bad leadership and bad luck than anything the individual soldiers did.
I’m sure they were every bit as courageous and selfless as any other American soldiers in battle, but with practically no survivors, individual sacrifices don’t get translated into award citations.
I mean no disrespect to the veterans of Anzio.
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By the way, today’s soldiers face exactly that same fate every day they go out on patrol, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Ever since the creation of MNSTC-I, the group that trains Iraqi Army units, I’ve had this nightmare of all the American officers and NCO’s out on patrol with their Iraqi charges being wiped out in seconds by the very soldiers they equipped and trained.
That’s a big reason why why most infantry vets hate war: its the ground-pounders who pay when the politicians don’t get it right.
We hope that we’re only sent into battle when the outcome is worth our lives.
If you have time, please do something today to voice your concerns over the Iraq war. Send an email or have a discussion with your neighbor. We will not quit Iraq until Obama suffers more political pain for staying than for leaving.
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I guess Eisenhower didn’t either. Why else would have have press release admitting failure?
And Obama is a draft dodger? Wow? Didn’t know there was a draft when he was of military age! Amazing what I’ve missed in the last 30 years. PS, The list of “draft dodger” presidents is long, including Republicans like RR and GWB, effectively draft dodgers.
Come on, sxp151, your comments are really distorted. Outright weird.
RSB seemed to laugh. 🙂
I thought it was not your style.
Maybe I should drink more.
Have you ever read any of SXP’s posts? Didn’t you notice the Liz Cheney line? And something screwy just happened when I posted my first version so apologize if both show up.
Hey, Reagan made patriotic movies to entertain the troopers during W.W. II!
Some who served their country did so in Hollywood.
It occurs to me that the United States has had Three Great Wars:
The Revolution, of course.
The Civil War, also “of course.”
World War II.
The first established the nation, the second preserved it, and the third established the empire–not the intention, but the inadvertent result.
The first two needed no unraveling. The third did, and it has been, and continues to be, a damned messy process.
None of which is to reduce by a single whit the marvel at imagining the feeling of watching those landing craft ramps drop, hearing the silence after the pings of incoming, and the real guts and determination it took to charge forward. Normandy, Anzio, Iwo Jima–the names still take the breath away. (Nor is this meant to belittle or criticize the guts of fighters in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Fucks up there were, fuck ups there will be, as in every other aspect of life.)
Thanks to Rhonda Hackett for providing an informed and informative comparison of the two systems:
Canadian v. American Health Care
The table comparing the two by every relevant statistical measure is remarkable!
Unfortunately, the table didn’t appear in the electronic version, so here it is (with the Canadian stat first and the corresponding U.S. stat second):
life expectancy (years): 8o.4 77.8
infant mortality (/1000) 5.4 6.9
male obesity 17% 32.2%
female obesity 19% 31%
% GDP on health care 10% 17%
% gov. revenue 16.7 18.5
# uninsured 0 48 million
% w/out adequate access 5 40
cancer mortality rate 181.7 197
(per 100,000)
We have the bigger number on just about everything – go USA!
And there is no reason why we couldn’t adopt the positives and make some improvements where the very few negatives are concerned, even though we’d almost all be better off even including the negatives. But we can also have an even better version of the basic system outlined here. Great article to send to all elected officials concerned. What’s not to like about less cost, true universal coverage and better outcomes?
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http://www.gazette.com/article…
Sorry if this was already covered; I didn’t see it.
SSG Dan, after working with the guy for some time, has some admiration for him, I assume. Appreciated what he was doing.
Then there was this one little inconsistency, so Dan took it upon himself to straighten things out, when instead they just unraveled.
Was the guy a nut case, or was the entire Vet community being taken for a ride ?
If the latter, why ?
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The toughest part of all of this is the fact that Rick “F*ckhead” Duncan did do a few good things for Vets. And Hitler built the Autobahn and the Volkswagen.
Does a few good things done with dubious motive outweigh years of fraud and deceit? I don’t think so.
There’s still a lot to be told about this case…and since the Feds are still stacking up the charges on this “hero” I still don’t get to relate the whole tale.
Here’s what I told the Post – it’s one thing to be a fake vet. It’s happened since some guy from Boston said he was the one who capped a British Soldier at Concord. Nothing a society can do will ever prevent people from claiming military service, or exaggerating military service for gain.
But to claim a disability – a crippling, horrible disability that thousands of OIF/OEF vets are struggling with every day – is the vilest, most selfish and evil thing someone could ever do. Even if the “take” at the end of the day is small, it cheapens the struggle these men & women have trying to re-enter society and survive.
I was hoping this article would answer your final question – and in your case, I thought you’d get it. But here’s my best take on it – Vets trust and respect each other. We have the closest of bonds because we have served and sacrificed together, and we have celebrated and mourned together.
When someone says they’re a fellow Vet, we don’t meet that person with suspicion and distrust, we want to bullshit and drink, and we want to swap tales of the best of times and the worst of times.
When Rick “F*ckhead” Duncan met with vets, his story seemed to hold up, and we embraced him as one of us. When the truth came out, it was the worst betrayal possible. He tainted the one thing that all vets have – our community that welcomed all.
Hal Bidlack had the best line in this – “He found he liked a community. He just hadn’t earned the right to be in it.”
No shame in that, this guy did what any good con man does. He researched the mark thoroughly. He worked so that he would be totally convincing in the facade he put before everyone around him. And then he spent time doing nothing but being helpful and a part of the scene, until it was time for him to cash in on his work. His good work with the CVA weren’t done despite his bad intentions, they were done because of them.
Like everyone else who gets taken in by people like Rick Duncan, you didn’t suspect anything because he didn’t give you any reason to, he was that good at playing the role. I don’t know what his end-game was supposed to get him, whether he was living off of “donations” he collected or he had something else in mind. But unlike you, his only goal was to make money out of what he was doing. His background shows that, and everything else was just window dressing.
But most people who are conned don’t do the right thing. They are too embarrassed–afraid they’ll look stupid just for being conned. They’ll keep their mouths shut and stew inside instead of going to the authorities and making sure that the next person down the road doesn’t get conned too.
Dan did the right thing, conned or not. There comes a time when you have to do what’s right against the people who did what’s wrong.
I applaud Dan.
As soon as there was some reason to doubt he started checking into Duncan/Strandlof’s story and then notified the authorities and those involved. That’s how you catch someone like this asshole. I wasn’t putting Dan down, I was just putting out why it would be hard to pick up on this crook in the first place. Guys like that wouldn’t be able to do what they do if they couldn’t be very convincing in the roles they play.
The big problem is that, at least from the info we have available to us, I don’t see him paying any serious legal penalties. But with the FBI involved and the investigation ongoing, who knows what might turn up? I really hate the thought of this guy spending maybe a year at most behind bars and then moving on to start up another scam in another state.
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I thought he was just a wanna-be.
It may be hard for your generation to imagine, Dan, but not that long ago people tended not to mention their vet status. It didn’t really give any kind of edge in the civilian world. In fact, Bill Clinton was admired by some for the deft way he handled his draft board.
Getting inducted, or worse – enlisting – was considered an indication of low intelligence.
Your generation of vets has turned it into something desirable, and us older vets are riding on your coattails.
ColoGeek helped me understand the aspect of this guy being a con man. When I read the newspaper article, I just thought of him as a guy who had big dreams that he failed to realize: a Formula 1 race in Reno. But now I see that there was probably no substance behind the sizzle in that scam, either.
It used to be harder, I think, to fake being a vet. I’ve heard stories of guys telling stories that didn’t quite ring true, and being quickly found out.
If this guy stole his “military record” from blogs and facebook, it seems to me that if he had just been a little more careful he would have gotten away with it.
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One aspect of the recent Ritter vetoes that has gone unmentioned…presumably because the answer is obvious to all but me…is the seeming fact that the legislature has no chance to override the vetoes, having adjourned for the year a few weeks ago. Are there provisions to recall the legislature? How likely is that?
Is all this SOP under the Colorado constitution?
Which the Governor isn’t going to do to override one of his own vetoes.
The Legislature can recall itself, which also isn’t going to happen. According to Article V, Section 7 of the Colorado Constitution,
Do you see two-thirds of each house of the current legislature wanting to re-convene themselves to override a veto, or do you see a bunch of politicians just wishing it would all go away, the sooner the better? (That sounds cynical, I know, but I am a cynic.)
To an unsophisticated person like me, the fact that a nominally Democratic governor waited until well after the legislature had adjourned to veto pro-labor bills passed by the Democratic legislature adds further insult to injury. It’s not clear to me that the legislature could have overriden a veto even if had been in session…but as it is, the sequence gives the appearance of waiting until it really was too late to even try for an override.
WaPo has an interesting article today http://www.washingtonpost.com/… about gubernatorial elections later this year in NJ and VA, and their role as early indicators of the status of the Democratic party and/or chances of a GOP comeback. Not entirely a rosy picture, according to the Post. In that context, Ritter now becomes an even bigger negative on the national stage as well as in the state, being a weak governor to begin with, a quasi-Democrat who has managed to seriously alienate an important wing of his party–the activist wing–and who will surely take the blame, all the blame, if the state shifts back into the reddish-purple section of the spectrum in 2010.
Hard to see any upside here. The real question seems to me to be whether there are “powers that be” in the state Democratic party establishment who can step in and push another candidate? And if so, will they do so in a timely fashion?
Pattern so far has been: incumbents are untouchable, even if they’re unelectable, i.e., let’s stick with the losers. Doesn’t sound like an excerpt from JO’s Formulae for Success.
There isn’t always an insidious motive behind waiting to make a decision.
Colorado also provides for a bill to become law without the Governor’s signature if enough time has passed (30 days I think) after the end of the Legislative session. The Governor can’t “pocket veto” a bill–the Constitution doesn’t allow it.
Last week was “shit or get off the pot” week, which is why there was a flurry of bill signings (and vetoes).
Waiting and allowing a bill to become law without signature is a good way for a meek Governor to avoid expending political capitol on an unpopular bill. That may have also played into the timing–there might have been some indecision there.
If the bill supporters have the 2/3 majorities in both houses to override the vetoes, then they also have the 2/3 of the members who need to petition to convene the special session.
If they don’t, they won’t.
House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, a few days before the end of the session, asked legislators for their preferences for a special session. This is to deal with potential problems that could surface if the June revenue forecast shows the 2008-09 state budget seriously out of whack, and the same for projections in September (for 2009-10).
If the General Assembly wanted to deal with a matter vetoed by the governor, they’d have to pass new legislation in a special session. Once the session is over, they cannot override a veto. They’d have to start over from scratch.
from Fox News we hear that once again an American car has sold more of their model than any foreign car company.