DISQUS

Will, your comments section is the cat's pajamas. Seems like you've managed to collect a fine cross-section of followers who put in the bookmark just before Article 3 and switched off the lamp for the night.

Yes, I also note as the internet's official holder of the Michael Bérubé Honorary Chair of the Department of Being the Son of a Medical CEO™, when a patient has "cancer and heart disease" the doctor does not simultaneously split open his sternum and irradiate him.

Yo mk, I'm not sure it's quite right to call the actual scientific method "results-oriented," and I'm eager in any case to hear how it can be used to "choose the proper size of government." Maybe we can make Mexico the control group for our little study.

Dennis Perrin deserves credit for Black Reagan. I just added the Superjesus.

There is a Rocky Horror Picture Show joke waiting to be made here.

Freddie is right. Discussing the "quality" of educators is mostly an exercise in question begging anyway. Stand By Me aside, teachers with better students are better teachers and those better teachers have better students and around it goes. The truth is that the professional capacities of individual teachers are irrelevant when set against the influence of a student body's broad socioeconomic standing. Poor schools in blighted urban cores are full of excellent, motivated educators and lousy ones, just like schools in Scarsdale. Gladwell entirely misses the point. Ed Deutschlander's selection method in a financial firm has extremely limited utility in conditions of prolonged deep recession. External factors would make qualitative selection of employees based on performance meaningless in those circumstances. The best traders would still lose money. Well, how would you describe the conditions of American public education?

Thanks for the link, brother.