Week 12

Rubber Room

This American Life keeps on getting better and better; This week's program took us through the myriad workings of the public school system to uncover the so-called "rubber room" phenomenon which is an effective prison for "misbehaving" teachers that are employed in public school system.

I have said many times that modernity is broken; this antiquated system with all its institutions can no longer provide any value to students that expect to learn skills useful to them in a connected, globalized, information driven world... It turns out, things are not grand for teachers either. It turns out, .the industrial education system, which is being perceived as a prison for kids for decades, can become a prison for teachers as well. One can laugh at the irony of this and enjoy it with its bare naked display of ineffectiveness, but valuable resources being wasted is no joking matter; especially nowadays when public money is being wasted in bottomless holes, broken banks, financial institutions - daily. Hearing of another crack in the system darkens the mood just that much more.

To summarize: Rubber room is a holding facility that can contain tens, if not hundreds of teachers. There are about half a dozen of these facilities in New York state alone. Rubber room is a building with rooms, with seats in those rooms where punished teachers come in and sit all day. That's all. They sit and do nothing. Meanwhile they keep collecting their salaries as if they are working full-time.

According to reports, a teacher can spent years in this limbo. Maybe he or she was heard swearing (to himself, not necessarily to a student), they get sent here. A teacher does not get along with the superintendent of the school. He gets sent here. Of course there are cases when a teacher did act violently - not necessarily against a student by the way, but seen performing some kind of "acting out" in school. They get sent here.

What we have here is an utter ineffectiveness of education system that is incapable of utilizing human resources. There are about 700 teachers in such rubber rooms who are "doing time" at a given time, that means around 700 people, monthly, get paid for doing nothing.

We must junk this system.

The classroom of the future must be teacher-less, be driven by personal projects and must be peer mentored, self-taught, self-tested. We must go this route because not only this will offer better education for our kids. We must do this because we must. Synchronized teacher-teaches-student-listens paradigm is effectively broken, we cannot find enough qualified teachers to teach a growing population the skills needed to be effective in the new economy.

If we continue to insist on a system that is not working, we will continue to have such horrid places like the rubber room. This Kafkaesque hell hole symbolizes all troubles that are swept under the rug - it is a place where people are made to "disappear" simply because they do not somehow fit in the idealized, perfect "machine". Unfortunately, modern world is full of such dirt-under-the-rug scenarios. If you know where to look, you will see them, and once you do, you are dumbfounded not being able to connect what you hear with your ideas of your "developed" nation. The fact that there are 18 million empty homes in United States was such an eye-opener for me.

We need Architecture 3.0.

The next best thing.

On Math and Models

Below is my comment on a Cafe Hayek post:

The problem isn't with math - it's the models you use to exercise that math with. It's an inability on the part of people who misuse this stuff to now know what they don't know, they let themselves get lost in the comforts of some formula unaware of what it represents. Any model makes simplifications, the modeler must know what tradeoffs s/he made while using the formula in question.

Hayekian world view is mostly about "simulation" - or rather, is best represented through simulation, which is another form of math. Micro actions adding up to a global set of choices is what mathematics can easily represent.

The world is nonlinear, therefore the models have to reflect this. People incorrectly say "math is bad". No dimwit - what is bad is YOUR MODEL, not the math. People try to use linear models to represent nonlinear forces. Being honest about this fact will make our models to be more realistic and they will tell us what we do not know in clearer terms. Even though most nonlinear models are unsolvable, there are things you can infer from them, and that makes them an invaluable tool to evaluate an unknown, uncertain future.

American Way of Life

Another one of my posts on blog Cafe Hayek:

My main argument is this; The world is nonlinear, in all aspects of science we are hitting this boundary, as we ask better questions now and have more data, we are learning how to simplify, approximate and try to provide solutions in this world.

While we improve our analytic skills, it pays (literally in economics) to know what you don't know. In all these cases, the wisdom of the crowd, which itself is a "massive" problem solver, always knows best. It's like you have a concurrent number crunching machine with 300 million nodes (the population of US). That is what classical liberalism is all about. Only this machine can hope to provide a glimpse of the future. Hell, it can decide the future by just voting on it by its wallet.

SO, as our math gets better, perhaps we will know how to allocate resources using some central mechanism. But to think we can do that NOW given the current state of science, especially the dismal state of economics science today, is absolutely ridicolous. So, let the crowd-solver to solve the equation, I say.

Plus, following on Drucker, Toffler's thinking:

The industrial machine is fighting a huge turf war through economy. The giant sucking sound is these people losing big time. They tried to impose a way life, the so-called "American Way Of Life" that posits you own a house in suburbia, must drive a car to get there, and of course, put gas in that car to drive, for which, don't you worry, we will bomb anyone and anything that will stay in the way.

This is no economics. This is power games played IN SPITE OF economics. What was Community Reinvestment Act all about? Where is market there - which was one of the major sources of crisis. FED; another one.

Lots of issues are intertwined here - not all of which is discussed in the "mass" media. I do laugh at the fools though labeling "xyz era is over" pointing to Reaganism and such. They all seem to have forgotten how that era started: Keynes models could NOT predict inflation and unemployment could increase at the same time. Enter Hayek, and we have the last 30 years' growth DESPITE industrial interests who tried to skim off of the growth. Now, they are losing even THAT honey, and they will lose big. With the economy as knowledge based and complex as it is today, NOONE can hope to direct it in some way or another, efficiency in the market is just too great for that, and it will blow in your face. And it did.

Let's hope Obama sees that once he is done with his populist "anger" schtick.