StrangeSox

The officer in this case has been charged. The lack of charges is what sparked those other incidents. And, like bmags has tried to express, it's just fundamentally a different sort of thing. Random citizen killing a child and then quickly getting charged is not the same thing as a police officer killing someone. Not charging a police officer comes down to policies and decisions by publicly accountable people and institutions.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Nov 24, 2015 -> 01:33 PM) I was speaking a bit in hyperbole earlier when I said the community does NOTHING. Obviously families do. Obviously churches and community groups care. But its not on the same level. There's not the massive outcry. The City isn't mobilizing its police force over a holiday to be on duty with riot gear in their cars for fear of what may happen in response. You know, maybe part of what a lot of communities are getting fed up with are this assumption of criminality that needs to be met with militarized police forces?

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 24, 2015 -> 01:03 PM) OK, less than a dozen, but I think it's going to be hard for one guy to justify shooting when none of the other five did. from the trib: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/b...1124-story.html

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Nov 24, 2015 -> 12:54 PM) How many cops were there? If there were a dozen or more, and only one of them thought to shoot, that looks pretty bad. Going to be hard to argue that he was justified. If there were only a few there, it still could very well not be justified but he at least has a better argument. Six including Van Dyke

The 9 year old's killer is being quickly charged. Nobody is calling this "greatest crime in chicago history." The assumption of "some riot behavior" is pretty terrible. The assumption that there aren't community groups that work to reduce violence is silly (this is the same refrain every time there's a scenario like this--just because you don't look and don't know doesn't mean people aren't out there). The continued lack of understanding why people don't protest over a horrific murder but do when agents of the state kill a member of the community and rarely get charged for it remains pretty amazing.

The inability to understand why people get more upset by violence from the state than some random (though still terrible!) murder is pretty amazing.

Pilots were shot by Syrian rebels on the ground while parachuting to safety, which is a war crime.

White supremacists shoot 5 Black Lives Matter activists protesting Jamar Clark’s killing in Minneapolis

Turkey shot down a Russian fighter that allegedly violated their airspace; Russia claims the jet was in Syria.

The paper you linked above for the math increases (http://users.nber.org/~dynarski/KIPP.pdf) is specifically about KIPP (the "No Excuses" charter) in a Boston suburb and does not compare them to Boston pilot schools. If there are gains, the next question is obviously "why?" followed with "can that be applied more broadly?" For example, part of the "No Excuses" program, which does seem to show positive gains in math and reading testing, are many more hours of instruction a year--how many school districts can support that for all of their schools? Do we want to expand the zero-tolerance punishment policies broadly?

As her own paper stresses in the conclusions section, the scope of their study is actually fairly limited. They have seen the gains with the "No Excuses paradigm," and in particular the biggest gains are from the oversubscribed lottery charters with strong records. Other research on charter schools more broadly find no gains or even worse results, as they also state. The lotteries offer some randomization, but they still don't address the initial targeting/recruitment/marketing and student/family motivation factors that lead to non-randomselection at the very start. There are significant differences in ELL and special needs populations at charters including KIPP schools. I also don't know why you'd claim that charters and pilots have similar LEP rates. My quote above from the article you link explicitly states otherwise: Chicago magnate schools actually outperform charters, and charters are on par with regular CPS schools. Can we at least both agree that the "online charters" for primary and secondary education are an obviously terrible idea and that the data bears this out?

QUOTE (bmags @ Nov 23, 2015 -> 02:52 PM) Welcome to social science. Its very difficult to create perfect studies with live humans, yet these are pretty good representations that in any other topic would be enthusiastically received. "Accept my questionable conclusions about fundamentally changing public education because research is hard" isn't an adequate answer. edit: also, while her academic papers aren't quite so bold, her editorial in the NYT did boldly claim that "[a]ny differences that emerge after the lottery can safely be attributed to charter attendance." If it is very difficult to create perfect studies in social science (it is!), you probably shouldn't make statements like that.

QUOTE (bmags @ Nov 23, 2015 -> 02:31 PM) The problem with you implying improving test scores are their only achievement therefore it must be due to teaching to the test, are the very real gains they are finding in secondary education. I didn't imply that test scores are the only improvement--it's something the article and research usually focuses on, but if anything I'd stress that it's not the only factor. The secondary and post-secondary gains can come right back to the other issues highlighted, though--selection bias and lack of true randomization, only looking at the "best of the best" charter schools, not having nearly as many ELL and special needs students which require far more resources, the CREDO studies actually end up excluding the best public schools, and the broader findings that, when considered on the whole, charter schools don't show improvement over public schools. Some students at some charters do perform better. If there are pedagogical and admin/management differences that really do seem to produce better education, those should be examined and implemented across the board. If the "No Excuses" policies really are the way we want to go and do result in better learning, great, put them in place. There's nothing that says that can only be done by privatizing education.

QUOTE (bmags @ Nov 23, 2015 -> 02:28 PM) From the article: Perhaps only the best charters are popular, and that’s why the lottery studies produce such positive estimates. We can’t use the lottery approach to assess a school that does not have high demand for its seats. In Boston, we used alternative statistical methods to examine the charters that are not oversubscribed. We found smaller but still positive results. A Stanford study examined student performance in 41 cities, and also concluded that their charters outperformed their traditional public schools. A caution: Without randomization, we can’t be as certain these nonlottery studies have eliminated selection bias. The Stanford (CREDO) studies are not without their methodological criticisms.

No, it just kinda hand-waived some of them away in a couple of paragraphs: Her research specifically has not addressed how non-lottery charters perform. It's also based on large, successful charters with oversubscribed lotteries and good archival records. In that regard, it's sort of circular--you'd expect the better charters to be oversubscribed, and if you're looking at just the oversubscribed schools, you'd expect to find the best results. The doesn't comment on the special-needs and ELL issue, but her paper acknowledges it (without commenting on the potential impact, from what I can tell): Lotteries themselves not truly randomized. The only part that is randomized is the selection itself, but everything before (who actually applies and who's encouraged to apply for the lotteries) and after (demotivational factors of not being selected, peer group factors) aren't. Her categorical statement that any differences can be attributed to a single variable, are, frankly, bulls*** (and her own paper doesn't make nearly as strong of a claim). If you follow some of the links to other research including her own, those studies seem to emphasize the "No Excuses" model that some charters follow as the model that has shown the gains. That model, which essentially relies on strict punishment and shame, is not without criticisms even if it can boost test scores. If it is also the magic bullet she believes it to be, it could be implemented in public schools as well. Her own research also points to class size being an important factor--public schools would love to reduce class size if the funding was there.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 23, 2015 -> 12:24 PM) Love that backsplash thingy you have going there. yeah, really cool

so all you did was spray paint it gray?

There're some compounding factors that the article doesn't really address: lottery-based studies aren't truly randomized due to peer effects and motivational factors, whether or not the lottery charters even accept ELL and special-needs students at nearly the same rates as public schools have, whether improved standardized test scores are really the best metric (are the charters basically just doing rote test prep to improve test scores? also a problem in high-stakes testing in public schools!), how well non-lottery charters perform (if a school is popular enough that it must institute a lottery, is it really fair to compare that to the overall public school group?). Additionally, typically the highest-scoring charters have very high attrition rates, meaning the more difficult students are kicked back to the public schools. Her study also focuses on Boston schools, and Massachusetts happens to have some of the tightest charter requirements in the country. In many other states, research shows that charters tend to do no better if not worse than public schools.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Nov 23, 2015 -> 08:33 AM) Yikes, thats usually a reflection on data security policies. Cloud DLP is making it easier to allow this but then you company knows every single thing you save to those drives. If they enabled DropBox or Box they may already be monitoring that stuff. I can use my own personal dropbox on my work computer(s) because I have full admin rights, but we don't have any sort of corporate dropbox. We have google for email etc., and I can use drive through the web app, but for some programs, mainly CAD, it's nice to have a Windows explorer interface. For whatever reason though, they're not allowing that. Oh well, stuck with crappy sharepoint for that I guess.

Having successfully fear-mongered against Mexicans and more recently Muslims, Trump has moved on to retweeting (false) white supremacist attacks on black people: The media, doing it's usual bang-up job of being balanced and objective, has referred to this as "controversial" and "questionable" instead of accurately calling it out as straight-up racist lies. Trump is also seeing a pretty big recovery in the post-Paris attack polls. The only other people who have been trending even slightly upward over the past several weeks are Rubio and Cruz, and combined they still can't match Trump.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Nov 20, 2015 -> 12:51 PM) Google Drive integrates the same. I feel dumb for not having realized this earlier, but it appears that our stupid IT department has disabled this feature anyway. Way to go, guys.

Hadn't heard anything about this case before this post, but apparently cpd offered the family a $5m settlement when they hadn't even filed suit? That doesn't bode well.

There's also lots of factional fighting. AQ is Sunni, specifically the more radical Wahhabiast type. Sort of like Catholic-Protestant wars.

I prefer Dropbox for the integration with Windows

Donald Trump Says He’d ‘Absolutely’ Require Muslims to Register Looks like the Republican front-runners are doubling down on full-blown fascism.