StrangeSox

I love the "anyone who wants Walker fired is an idiot because hitting coaches don't do a damned thing" defense.

Anyone but Ozzie!

Republicans: #1 on the Economy!

Hulu Plus on Xbox and PS3!

apparently Fox Business doubled down on the crazy http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-apri...011/longformers

Bow before my dominance of The Democrat Thread with pointless internet arguments! (it's been slow at work)

Nor do I. But reviewing an arbitration decision is still not the same thing as filing a small claims suit in the first place, correct? What's to prevent the majority of companies from inserting clauses banning class action into the agreements? The States have no way to overturn these now, and it's my understanding that a significant percentage of consumer contracts employee these sorts of provisions. More and more employers are adding them as well. Legally, there's nothing to stop every company from inserting 100% enforceable mandatory arbitration and class action bans into every consumer and employment contract. That's the impact of this ruling.

It would probably have to be reviewed by the arbitrator! This could effectively be the end of class action lawsuits, at least until the law is changed.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:47 PM) From reading you quote there, it sounds to me like they have to force you to go to arbitration first. I've said that's fine. I don't see anywhere that says that's the only recourse and that if they're not happy with the arbitration decision they're precluded from filing a suit. The rest of the language deals with issues relating to interpreting the agreement itself, which again, needs to be put through arbitration before proceeding to litigation. The only thing you can file suit for is review of the arbitration decision which is a very narrow review. Arbitrators are not judges. They aren't juries. They're not held to the same standards as courts and don't have to follow the same rules. Their rulings can and often are kept secret. You can be banned from acting as a class. You can be forced to pay very high upfront arbitration fees and be subject to paying legal representation for the other side if you lose. You are signing your rights to litigation away with these agreements. I don't know how anyone is comfortable with that.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:47 PM) That you really can't. Which is why I hate the federal and state mandates/standards of education, and the evaluations of it. The problem there, to me, is you could get really, really, really bad local standards of education. Thinking of Texas recently and how they wanted to completely rewrite history from a heavily conservative point of view and redefine science to more or less include stuff like astronomy, I would be strongly opposed to city or county-level standards and no higher oversight. Granted, that's a State-level board making terrible decisions, but we've seen plenty of similar stuff like Dover, PA.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:46 PM) Then you see an emergence in the very next year, not years down the road. At the sametime, there had to have been some sort of improvement over the kids who flat out didn't care at all. The reality of teaching doesn't happen with convincing kids to learn finally on the last day. There is a drop dead date in the middle, at some unspecific point, where when they aren't getting it, they quit caring about it. Well that was a heavily framed hypothetical, reality will require a ton of signal filtering.

I also have no idea how you'd ever effectively measure that impact in an objective manner

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:36 PM) I can't imagine that teaching can be done with a completely undetectable knowledge time bomb that doesn't explode for years. I don't buy it. There's undoubtedly going to be some signal lag. If you are a fantastic teacher who got a whole group of dead-average kids and got them all really motivated to learn by the end of the year, well, you've been a fantastic teacher, but test-based results aren't going to show the full impact. They may be much better students now, but they haven't had the time to fully exploit what you've given them. Next year's teacher is going to get a group of kids who improved over the last year, but are now eager to get to the top. You won't see that reflected in the evaluation of your abilities, but the next teacher will. I'd like for Balta to provide some references here, but I see no reason to dismiss the claim out-of-hand. edit: effective teaching isn't just a measure of cramming knowledge into someone's head, which is really all a test can give you, but also motivating them to continue to learn, expand, explore and experiment. That impact will not show up instantaneously but will benefit them for the rest of their lives, more than getting a few more kids marginally better at algebra.

^This is assuming that Balta's claim is correct and that the signal can't be detected in a single school year.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:23 PM) You don't need it but once a year. The previous year sets the baseline for each invididual student when they come into the classroom. Being able to set their baseline against every other piece of data that schools have been tracking for decades, such as race, gender, poverty rates, previous test scores, previous grades, etc, you can easily find similar students, and also similar situation teachers and measure them. But this still doesn't address Balta's contention--that you won't see the signal from your personal performance until 2-3 years later, which means you're being evaluated on the [grade level-2] teacher in your school's performance vs the national comparable [grade level-2] teacher performance. You can't measure a signal two years before it appears.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:15 PM) Trends can be measured in miniuta. It is done 24/7 in trading. What is the volume of data? How long would it take to compile a similar volume of data for a single teacher? Remember, you're evaluating individual effectiveness, not overall educational standards effectiveness.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:18 PM) There are millions of kids in this country. As much as I hate the federalization of education, it isn't going away. What's the sampling frequency for a teacher?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:15 PM) Trends can be measured in miniuta. It is done 24/7 in trading. The very nature of the data is different and the trends are measured for different reasons. For teachers, you've got annual or maybe biannual evaluations at best. That's a very small set of data until you get to long time periods (because each child is a sub-set of data, so you really don't have 40 unique points in one set), and any "trend" could be overwhelmed by a single outlier.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:10 PM) As I just demonstrated, no they don't. The other thing that your trading firms and climate sensors have is data. A good teacher in a good school system gives you 20 data points a year. Then you move them around the next year and you get some splitting up of students, and so you wind up with 5-10 students from 1 class moving into other classes. Or, you have a program like the one I was in, where the same group of students stayed togehter for 4 years or so. You just don't get enough students to do the calculation you want to do here and have the results be meaningful. Well, that depends on the grade level, but I'd say it's anywhere from 25 for elementary to 80-100 for middle school and HS. This would be a very, very complex analyses because there are a ton of variables involved here. If you're basing it on future performance, you've got to control for future teachers, changing standards, and movement of teacher, student or both to another school or district. You're also going to have major hurdles whenever there's an educational philosophy/methodology switch, such as going from elementary school to middle school to high school.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 03:06 PM) You don't need 10 years to find out that kind of stuff. Trends emerge right away. You can tell very quickly if the initial returns are worse than peers, when all of the variables are put into consideration. The math isn't that complex at all. These kind of algorithms are located on every single trading firms website with way more variables included. Hell the climate change math is a million times more complex than what I am talking about, yet we have to take that as gospel. Anyways, that brings me back to my preferred option, which is in house administrators making these decisions, and then everyone b****es about how teachers can get fired for "nothing". Its either that or keeping it as impossible as possible to fire teachers, which is what the whole point of fighting progress in evaluations is about anyway. By very definition trends cannot emerge right away. Sample sizes here are small and spread over years and decades

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 02:43 PM) How they improve while they are in your classroom is absolutely fair. Not if the improvement in your classroom is largely a signal from the 3rd grade teacher's ability.

Rent-A-Center v Jackson, which I cited a few pages ago, involves mandatory arbitration that barred the plaintiff from filing any judicial suit; they were required to go to arbitration, even if the arbitration clause itself was at issue. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/09-497.pdf RAC employees were contractually barred from filing suit against RAC. Everything had to go through an arbitrator. Why do we want to hand over our judicial system and our civil rights to mandatory arbitration proceedings that are not held to the same standards and requirements as judicial rulings but contain the same weight of enforcement? This is not a blanket attack on all arbitration; clearly, it has its benefits. But it is an aggressive questioning of the courts' willingness to hand over the rights of consumers and employees to corporations who are free to bar them from their right to judicial litigation.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 29, 2011 -> 02:37 PM) The measure comes against peers, so those ups and downs wouldn't matter. You'd be compared against people in the same boat. But, if Balta's correct, it means your performance is really being judged on what the teacher two or three years ago did, and the teacher a couple years ahead of you is getting judged on your teaching. That doesn't seem right, because you'd never actually be judging the person based on their own performance.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 27, 2011 -> 05:19 PM) We're talking about two things here. Arbitration decisions are legally binding yes, that's true. But in most case arbitration decisions are not the final resolution of the matter. They're more, hey lets talk with this guy and see what he thinks and maybe he'll help us reach a fair settlement. It's more of a neutral parties' recommendation for a resolution of the matter. My point was that these arbitration systems are probably not binding on either party unless they've agreed to that arrangement beforehand. That might well be in the agreement you sign with these companies, I dunno. But they have to leave you the option of also filing a suit in court (before deciding to go to arbitration). My understanding was that a company can't force you to ONLY go through arbitration, with no other recourse. This is the crux of the argument, and I still maintain that your position here is wrong. Companies can and do routinely force customers to agree to mandatory binding arbitration clauses that require them to forfeit their rights to file a suit in the judicial system or be part of a class action. The arbitration decisions are final and enforceable, and while there is opportunity for judicial review, it is a very narrow review and extremely rare for a decision to be changed.

That's the 2011 agreement on their website, not the 2006 agreement, so I don't know what wording has changed. The petition references it in the appendix, but the pdf doesn't include the appendices. It does lead to confusion for me, because every single summary of the case, sans Scalia but including plenty of other lawyers, indicates that AT&T is attempting to compel arbitration under the arbitration agreement. Additionally, it still forces you to forgo your rights to a trial-by-jury and class action, so Scalia's wording is somewhat generous to AT&T's position. It appears that AT&T's arbitration clause was on the more consumer-friendly side but it was still very limiting. And, again, the problem with this ruling isn't just this specific case, it's that it applies to all arbitration clauses and that many of them do prevent access to the courts, either in full or in part. We both keep going back and forth between AT&T's clause and mandatory arbitration clauses in general, which is muddying the waters.